As we work through the current series on Promoting Your Blog with Social Networking Sites, it is important that we pause for a moment and remember that ultimately business is about people and not about stats.
Business blogging is no different.
Show Me The Money
I’ve had discussions in the past with folks who subscribe to the conventional wisdom that Business is about money. That thinking misses the mark.
People ultimately control the money.
You build relationships with clients and customers, who are ultimately real people – even when the clients are businesses – and the money will follow in a solid stream.
You try to short circuit that reality and your income flow will be less certain and less steady.
Symptoms or Problem
Our culture is one that elevates things we can quantify and measure. It makes sense to focus on things like cash flow, return on investment, page views and number of comments.
These things are all easily measurable and therefore are easier to analyze, make adjustments for and improve.
But ultimately we end up with the same problem we see in modern medicine. We approach our businesses like doctors approach patients by treating the symptoms instead of the underlying problems.
Doctors often prescribe medication based on the symptoms of the patient but usually don’t ever address the problems that initially caused the symptoms in the first place.
The problem with applying this approach to our businesses (and our business blogging) is that it is short sighted. I believe it misses the mark.
The Challenge
The challenge is that relationships with people are often difficult and messy. It is much more appealing to us to break things down into formulas and procedures.
That way we can measure our progress accurately and feel a sense of accomplishment as the numbers grown in a positive direction.
People on the other hand are fickle. Quite frankly dealing with folks can be a bit of a pain.
But just because something is more difficult shouldn’t mean that we set it aside, especially if it will ultimately produce better results.
Strive for Balance
The ideal place to be is where we have a balance between our quantifiable measurables and our emphasis on the value of people and our relationships with them.
Those things we can measure are indicators of the health of our business. The amount of traffic we see on our blog is an indicator of how successful our blog is.
Should we measure the measurables? Absolutely.
But let’s not loose sight of the fact that it is the people behind the traffic which will ultimately make or break our success. If we don’t value them they won’t value us in the end.
No matter what we do to drive traffic to our sites, what social networking tools we plug into, if we leave out the personal component we will have missed the mark and lost out on our greatest potential for success.
