The Diary of a Business

Blog, blog, blog, everywhere a blog. You can’t surf to any corporate website without immediately seeing a big, ol’ link to the company blog, filled to brimming with article after article, fresh content generated every single day for years on end. Did companies have this much to say before the development of the blogosphere? Did they sit, silently yearning for an appropriate venue in which to display their stifled creative acumen? I have a hard time believing that to be the case.

Having worked for several companies, some very large, I know how difficult it has been for the marketing department to fill two sides of an 8-1/2″ x 11″ sheet of paper once a month for the company newsletter. So where did this glut of creative energy come from now that a blog is a thing?

I blame Google. And Bing. And every other search engine out there, because they have made it known that “content is king.” Generate content, content, content and search engines will eat it up. The content doesn’t have to be good–Google wouldn’t know it to see it–it just has to be consistent and voluminous, with the proper proporation of desired keywords, and it will help propel your site up the list, which is the end goal. Be at the top of the list. Be the first thing people see and write whatever you have to to get there.

Now, I’m sure Google is doing their darnedest to create the best possible experience for all parties involved, but try as they might, it’s still a flawed paradigm. While constant content isn’t the only consideration taken into account when ranking sites, it’s big enough of a factor that it has become a must-have element if you want to compete in the Googlescape. So, whether or not a company has anything to say, they must say something, resulting in a yammering, bloated Internet stuffed with meaningless drivel, generating an endless wall of words that add up to little more than the random hoots and howls of an untended insane asylum.

Imagine if, in the 1980s, in order to have your company listed in the Yellow Pages, you had to actively engage in espionage and warfare against every possible competitor, known and unknown, just to keep your phone number from vanishing. That is the Internet and we call it blogging.

All that rant, yet here we are. Is 13 Guys Named Ed guilty of the same mandatory blogging? Well… admittedly, yeah. Kinda. And here comes the mandatory wordsmithing where I talk myself out of a pickle.

See, we gotta do this thing. It is an absolutely essential portion of a business website. There’s simply no way around it. However… just because it’s an obligation, it doesn’t mean we have to take the robotic smile-and-nod approach while cranking the keyword conveyor belt and writing love letters to Googlebot. We don’t have to. It is very difficult to avoid, though.

I grew up in, and continue to grow up in a culture of corporate spin and big, bright, gleaming smile billboards serving as company image enhancement, where everything is awesome and harmless all the time. It’s the only company-style communication I’ve ever known, so now that I have a company, and I have to communicate through it, I automatically turn to the same conventions I’ve always held in contempt; hollow, disingenuous, inoffensive, fake-smiley, glassy-eyed crap. I’ve been wringing my hands for days, worrying about how I was going to generate harmless, meaningless fodder. It is a very difficult zeitgeist to bust. But I’m gonna try.

So, here’s the best I can offer: we gotta do this thing, but we promise not to talk to our readership like fragile idiot children. We promise that when we pump our white noise into the Internet, we will do it with tender, loving care. And we promise that our mandatory chatter will be mandatory chatter of the highest calibur.

This we do hereby swear.

Because we love you.