If you’ve visited smays.com more than once, it was because of something you read here. Some idea that I expressed or someone else expressed and to which I linked. Frankly, there’s nothing else to do on this blog but read what I have written or pointed to.
Our company just spent a few sheckels (I have no idea how many) on some new brochures for one of our new business units. They look terrific. And the copy is pretty well written. But –if we believe Seth Godin– nobody is going to read them:
The thing you must remember about just about every corporate or organizational brochure is this: People won’t read it. I didn’t say it wasn’t important. I just said it wasn’t going to get read. People will consider its heft. They might glance at the photos. They will certainly notice the layout. And, if you’re lucky, they’ll read a few captions or testimonials.
He’s right of course. And we all know this because we don’t read the brochures that others hand or send to us. We put them in drawer or file until the next “clean up” day and then we haul them down to the dumpster. So why do we spend the time and money? Because we need something that tells people about our company/product/service and a nice brochure can be farmed out and done once and everyone stays “on message” by reading or handing out The Brochure.
The best brochure is stillborn. Dead at birth. A good business (or personal) blog, on the other hand, is a living thing. It grows and changes and reacts and responds to the world around you. I happen to believe this is equally true of “brochure websites.” That’s why good blogs get so much more traffic than static, change-once-a-month websites.
Anybody with a copy of PageMaker and a color printer can make a brochure. Some nice photos…a cool font…a clever logo…we’re done. Blogs are never done.
But I’m betting your customers –current and prospective– are more interested in the idea you have today than the ones you had six months ago that made it into The Brochure.
Update: It took just a few hours for Andrew to demonstrate that there are times when a nice brochure or flyer is the way to go. In this instance, he’s developing a piece of property and he needs a way to show people where it’s located and what the site will look like once it’s complete. Today’s Lesson: Not everything is a blog (and I must not be so quick to generalize).
But I love to play the game. Hated Little League…loved playing Indian Ball in the field in front of our house. Hated varsity basketball…loved pick-up games at the park. We had teams but they were temporary. We’d play a couple of games and then switch up sides. If the game was too one-sided, we’d adjust the teams to get a closer game. It was about having a good game, see? Not which team won.
A couple of months ago I posted on the idea that blogging might be the best way to cover some events. Andy Vance (Buckeye Ag Radio Network) makes the case nicely with his recent posts from the Ohio FFA Convention. Check out his posts on May 5 and 6. Sounds like he had some wifi and was blogging away in real time.
Twenty years of DOS and Windows has conditioned me to expect new things to be difficult. As I fired up the Mac in preparation for this evening’s attempt to have a video chat with Bass, I was mentally girding myself for a long, frustrating evening. Bass was already online and waiting for me so the first thing I saw was a little window asking me if I would accept a video chat? Uh, yeah, sure. And there was Bass, in all of his video glory (video).