Susannah Gardner's Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies


This should simply be entitled "Business Blogging Basics for Dummies"

Disclaimer: Although we've never met I should mention that Susannah was invited and has accepted the invite to be on my panel at BlogHer, $$ and Sense.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear from the beginning: Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies is an extremely helpful and thorough book about blogging. [I am not a Dummies reader, so perhaps this is how well-done each of the Dummies books are.] She covers admirably and very clearly everything about setting up a blog and getting the most from it from a technical perspective. She also covers ethics, writing guidelines, what not to do...all important subjects...very well. If this book were called Business Blogging Basics for Dummies, it would be extremely accurate (and well-titled.)

She offers numerous handy suggestions, tips, tricks, suggested vendors etc. I have already implemented some of Gardner's suggestions and found a new, better site meter based on recommendations in this book. I'm going to go find an iTunes Now Playing plug-in because she brought it to my attention. The next time I launch a blog I just may try one of the software tools she suggest. (Even though I already use four different tools, I'm always looking for the one that will do everything...and let me do it with minimum hair-pulling.) And I think I have a great place to start to explore adding audioblogging to my blogs, based on her section on that.

While Gardner is careful not to fall into the same generalizing style that many people writing about blogs do, she occasionally does make statements that gave me pause. Gardner is certainly more open about acknowledging that nearly anyone in any function may be a good blogger for your business...from a CEO to an outside contractor. But she also makes the single-most oft-repeated, unsupported statement I see out there in blog-land...that marketing folks don't make good bloggers. (See more on my thoughts about this generalization here.) The other repeated generalization I can't agree with is that savvy bloggers tend to use independent blogging software, as opposed to Blogger, Typepad and the like. Yes, savvy techie bloggers probably do. But plenty of savvy and popular bloggers who aren't all about being technical use the hosted software tools happily. I personally never judge a person's blog the moment I land on it depending on what software tool they happen to use. I care far more about what they have to say.

I dogeared many pages of this book and plan to use it as a reference as I continue to try to improve both the style and the functionality of my various blogs. So, although it's marketed as a Dummies book, and I consider myself well-versed on much of the blogging territory covered, Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies was still a worthwhile purchase for me! (And I didn't really expect it to be...I bought it mostly because I wanted to get to know Susannah's work a bit.)

I do have one caveat: this is not, according to my definition, a book about marketing. There is nothing in this book about the principles of marketing and how to apply them to your business to decide on actionable marketing goals, and then how to execute some of those goals with a blog as your channel or tool. There are only 2 pages in this book where potential goals for a blog are listed. Only about 10 pages of the 300 page book are devoted to actual examples of real live companies using blogs as a buzz marketing tool. And all of those pages come way too early. In other words, the examples come before someone new to blogging reading this book would really get them. This is why I suggest a different title would have been more apropos. A quibble, I admit.

Buy Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies at Amazon.com




Posted: Sat - July 9, 2005 at 11:53 AM       EmailFeedback

©