Marketing Roadmaps

Passion

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Passion.

If you really want to "get" this social media "stuff," you have to have it. Not just understand it. You truly have to believe.

And that’s why it is so hard for so many. Because education, corporate America, keeping up with the Joneses. Whatever. Often destroys our ability to believe. And our passion.

In a post today about blogger relations, David Wescott reiterated three principles that I firmly believe in. Blogger relations is all about Respect, Relationships and Relevance. He also mentioned passion, and some of the things I’ve written about it here (thanks David).

In brief, if your product or service doesn’t mesh with something a blogger is passionate about, don’t send the pitch. Really. Not to belabor the point, but that’s why pitches to moms about cleaning products fall flat.

Reality check:  the paid actresses on TV commercials are NOT real. Moms are not passionate about cleaning the house, laundry or how fresh the bathroom smells. It’s not that we don’t care. But passion. For Mr. Clean? For Mr. Brawny? No.

Not too long ago, a marketing blogger friend told me about a whole new class of blogs springing up that are optimized for keywords. Companies building blogs for SEO.  No other reason.

Blecch. That’s as bad as press releases about crap I don’t care about with no cover note.

And it is also doomed to failure. Because keywords don’t have passion.

People do.

And if you haven’t already figured this out, let me be the first to tell you. It isn’t HTML or RSS or OPML or JAVA or AJAX or any of the myriad other tech acronyms we can throw in the soup that make all this social media work. And I mean really work. Sure, they provide the technology that lets us have these communications.

But what really powers social media?

It’s people. And their passions.

Find yours.

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Comments

  1. I don’t see why you cannot have passion and keywords.

    Passion is more important than the keywords.

    Maybe that’s the criteria for picking the corporate blogger, the person who is the most passionate. It certainly makes the blog more interesting to read.

  2. John, Thanks for the comment.

    I have no problem with optimizing a blog for search engines, although I prefer “organic optimization” — ie the blog topic is so aligned with customer needs that it “self-optimizes.”

    My concern is with the idea of companies developing blogs with the *sole* purpose of SEO. Web sites written for optimization, as opposed to real communication with the customer, always read a bit odd to me. It can only be worse on a blog, which is by definition a more personal form of communication.

    Is it okay to try to use certain keywords in a blog post? Sure, as long as it isn’t forced. Once it is….

    You can have keywords with passion, and the blog will probably be fine. Keywords without it? I stand by my previous editorial comment. Blecch.

  4. Is it just me, or does bucketing and over-analyzing infrastructure without embracing the novelty and organic nature of social media – kill the buzz, destroy the passion, and take much of the fun and therefor creativity out of social media (and many other new media for that matter)?

  5. Jon, it’s not just you 🙂 Analysis without passion is buzzkill. You also have to know what to measure, and if you don’t get in it (social media) it’s hard to get it.