11/08/2004

New blogs at Deseret Book

Deseret Book is starting to host a couple of blogs; John Bytheway and Michael Mclean. It looks like they might begin to offer more as well. I've written a note to Matthew McBride (their contact for the Internet Division) and Jeanne Crippen (their Marketing Division contact). Here's what I wrote:

Matthew,
I love the fact that Deseret Book is making a leap into blogging. I think
you've made some good decisions in having Michael McLean and John Bytheway
as your first two bloggers. I'm anxious to see who else ends up blogging
for you. I have a couple of concerns though:

1) Bloggers for hire don't seem to have the voice or the passion that
most bloggers do. I'll be anxious to see how this works out. For
example, neither of Michael nor John has posted any replies to the
comments on their blog entries -- blogs work best when they are a vehicle
for conversations.

2) You don't provide an rss feed for the blogs. this makes them almost
useless for me. I use an aggragator to browse blogs I'm interested in,
then jump to the blog to read the entries that catch my attention. I
think you'll find that this will become the way almost everyone reads
blogs -- please don't paint yourself out of that picture.

There are a number of interesting, strongly written LDS blogs out
there. I hope to see good things from Deseret Book's bloggers as well.

-pate

4 comments:

William said...

pate:

Great comments. I'm glad you posted them on the DB blogs.

Dave said...

These DB blogs are "corporate blogs," tools for a corporation or organization to advance their goals. For DB, that goal is selling books. Weblog technology might be used, but the whole exercise seems like an entirely different activity than what happens with personal blogs, whatever the topical focus of the personal blog. In that sense, a group blog like T&S or Bcc is a "personal blog" as the principals are blogging for themselves, giving their own opinions, rather representing a corporation or organization.

gnupate said...

William,
thanks for noticing ...

Dave,
you're right. They are doing this as a commercial marketing tool. I don't think that means that they wouldn't benefit from looking at personal blogs to see what they can learn.

For example, in my first point, I talked about the lack of interaction in the blogs. I think that being able to engage the bloggers would certainly draw more eyes to the site, leading to more advertising impressions.

My second point might be a harder sell, since people using RSS won't generate advertising impressions on first contact. I think that they'd reach a larger audience though, and some of the rss readers will click through to the site. This smaller slice of a larger pie would still be better for Deseret Book.

-pate

Anonymous said...

As per your request, there are now RSS feeds available for the Deseret Book blogs. They should be linked directly from Mormon Life sometime today or tomorrow, but the URLs are:

JOHN BYTHEWAY:
http://deseretbook.com/mormon-life/blogs/rss?blog_id=1

MICHAEL MCLEAN:
http://deseretbook.com/mormon-life/blogs/rss?blog_id=2

Regards,

Michael A. Cleverly
mcleverl@deseretbook.com