Sergey Brin, Please Update Your Blog
// October 28th, 2008 // Social Media
I often meet with clients to discuss their options regarding social media usage, early adoption and sometimes just to chat about something they heard about and wanted to delve deeper on. Typically the conversation moves toward “Should I blog?”.
My answer is typically contingent on the brand, their consumers and more importantly; the person asking the question.
While everyone lately is touting the notion that blogging is a MUST for any brand, this is not always the case. It’s easy to say that everyone needs to get on board with social media, but the sad truth is that not everybody is ready for it. Transparency is not necessarily a weapon of choice for all brands… Particularly those without a ready and willing PR department who can help tackle all of the tough questions. There are many companies out there that just aren’t ready to answer questions like “why is your service so slow?”
All that said, blogging is an extremely important tool as part of your PR/Marketing mix but be prepared to answer your audience and more importantly, have something to say about your brand that brings your consumers closer to the core idea of what your brand is all about. Do you have a green initiative worth mentioning to the public despite a largely presumed notion that you only produce gas guzzlers? Have you recently launched a new R&D lab in house that might prove contrary to the public’s opinion that your company is stuck in the late 90’s? Blogging is an easy way to mention these kinds of events/developments without having to send out press releases or launch microsites… But I digress.
The point of this blog was actually to talk about Sergey Brin and his blog “too”. Launched in September 2008, Sergey’s blog was ambitious with three posts in 24 hours… And then nothing. This would seem somewhat pathetic, but it’s actually quite common. The notion of having a blog to talk about just about anything is pretty cool when you think about the internet’s real intent before all the bells and whistles of Flash and “AJAX” apps became the “keep up with the joneses” norm. All we really want to do is put our message out there for everyone to read, and blogs are the simplest way of doing that, in fact, it’s what I’m doing right now. I put this blog up in about an hour and I’ve pushed it through a bit of an evolutionary process over the past few months, but all in all it’s simple technology that allows me to get my message out to you.
Sergey’s lack of contribution to his own blog is fairly mainstream when compared to the general public; however, he is not the general public. I still have his blog subscribed to on my RSS aggregator and have yet to see anything pop up on it. It would be nice to know a little bit more about the way Brin thinks, but I guess I’ll just have to read Google Press Releases like I was doing before.
