Mum went out one night last week (how dare she!!!) to a talk by the Market Research Society that she is a member of. The topic was “Blogs and Market Research”. Hmmmm 2 topics that mum seems to care about… almost as much as dog sports like agility with me… almost. So what did she learn and why does she think it is worth sharing on our little blog?
Well the speaker was a lady by the name of Joanne Jacobs who is a digital media strategist. She started off her presentation with a bit of the history of blogging. The initial idea was a Web Log and that the early stages of blogging were an online diary…. as a self proclaimed geek she was very open about it being a way for geeks to write down their thoughts. She talked about Live Journal as the platform on which she started and well the name Live Journal makes sense from that perspective.
So it is interesting then how blogs have evolved and there is a spectrum that covers depth in writing, audience engagement and ultimately reason why people (or dogs) choose to blog. There are academic blogs that involve in depth research on a topic, get few views but those that do read thoroughly and provide detailed comments and return debate. Other blogs might give a topline Top 3 on a topic of high interest. They get high visits and maybe some quick comments showing much higher reach but a bit less engagement.
Neither is right or wrong… It just is but it lead us to ask why?
For us the blog is a way to collect what we are learning. It didn’t start off that way. It started off as stories about me in this crazy house (1 of my 1st post Hallowoof) was far more in this story style. And we still do the occasional post like this as something funny happens (usually involving the Toddler or one of the neighbourhood cats… And I usually come off 2nd best). But as we have got more and more into Agility and other dog sports this blog has become a place for us to record both what we learn and our progress. It is the same with Marketing Monday too (this is us learning about blogging). It is why we have set up the blog with lots of pages and links back to posts as we like to go back and reference them. It works for us and it is pretty cool if it helps others too. And that will be our mantra going forward… Our way to capture what we learn and if it helps others that is cool too.
So if you blog… Why did you start blogging?
A blog that we enjoy reading as it really is the original journal style is Em at LifeiLuminated and her agility stories. Reading how Em is analyzing her dogs and training often provides nuggets that we then go and explore further. It doesn’t need to be a list of 3 things to be actionable and we actually prefer pulling our own insights from a piece.
Happy Monday and happy blogging.
Bodhi
1st World Dog 