Let's Stop Talking About Blogs and Start Talking About Articles
A year ago at this time, many and perhaps most people in the recruiting world were buzzing about blogs. Kennedy Information highlighted recruiting bloggers at their Las Vegas recruiting conference then followed up with a "blogger's corner" at their New York conference. Jobster bought Recruiting.com then invested even more heavily in Web 2.0 by adding social networking features to Jobster, partnering with Facebook, and more. CollegeRecruiter.com built on our involvement by hiring a full-time content manager and created eight blogs for our staff, career counselors, candidates, employers, admissions counselors, financial aid experts, resume writers, and more. So are we any further? Unfortunately, no.
I believe that those of us involved in the recruiting blogosphere made a serious strategic error somewhere along the way by focusing on the features rather than the benefits of blogs. We fell in love with the ease of posting content, both to our own sites as entries and the sites of others as comments. We loved the connections that we were forging, both in the real and virtual worlds. But we forgot that we are not our target audience. Employers and candidates are our target audience and I have no doubt that the vast majority of those could care less whether an article that they're reading on Jobster, CollegeRecruiter.com, Recruiting.com, or any other site is posted to the site through an HTML page created in Frontpage, a PHP page created in Homesite, an ASP page created in Dreamweaver, or a blog page created in Movable Type.
When visitors run searches on Yahoo, Google, or the search engines on our sites, they're looking for answers. They don't care whether those answers are contained in articles posted as traditional web pages or as blog pages. They just want the answers. But we've focused too much for too long on blogs as if they're somehow different. Folks, they're not. They're easier ways to post web pages but there's nothing that they do that is inherently different than what you can do with traditionally posted web pages other than allowing you do those things faster and easier. Sure there's tremendous benefit to the publisher from that efficiency, but there's none to the visitor. They don't care whether it took you 30 minutes to code a page or three. They just care about the quality of the content.
Let's stop focusing on "blogs" as if they're somehow different from other web pages and start focusing on the content that appears on those pages. Let's stop encouraging recruiters to "blog" and instead encourage them to regularly post employment-related articles to their sites and sites such as Jobster, CollegeRecruiter.com, and Recruiting.com that accept and even welcome articles from third parties. Blogging software is great, but what makes it great is that it allows us to focus on the content by not having to focus on the technology. So let's do just that.
Right on Steven, I think that's why we're using a CMS instead of blogging software on LatPro at http://www.latpro.com/cms/ - we're admittedly way behind you where content is concerned but about to apply our energies there.