The Role of the Blog in the Consulting 2.0 world

There is a very interesting article here by Jakob Nielsen on the type of article a "Professional" information working blogger should write - and coming down in favour of longer, more in depth posts. His argument is essentially that:

It's almost impossible to fight the Internet: you're up against millions of people who are willing to work for free. But you have to do so, because if you work within the prevailing Web paradigm you're letting the search engines take 98% of your content's value. That's okay if you're not in the content business. Our pistachio site doesn't mind that it's not making money off its recipe for delicious pistachio ice cream. Just as long as it sells nuts.

If you're an expert who wants to live from adding to the world's knowledge, you must go beyond the mainstream Web model of single page visits driven by search traffic. It's easy enough to build a website that freeloaders will use, but that shouldn't be your approach. You must change the game and create content that's so valuable that business users are willing to pay for it.

You should also focus on material that lower-ranked content contributors can't easily create in their spare time.

Both of these needs are met when you produce in-depth content.

This is an interesting thought, ie the blog should produce the sort of content a user will pay for. The question for us is, if you do that, why put it in a blog for free? The key here is to understand what the role of the blog is - to be a marketing tool for the nuts you sell, or a direct revenue earning tool. Anyway, he goes on to note:

In-depth content that takes much longer to create is beyond the abilities of the lesser experts. A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours doesn't add up to Shakespeare. They'll actually create a thousand low-to-medium-quality postings that aren't integrated and that don't give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic -- even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs.

Thorough content's added value can rise above the threshold where customers become willing to be separated from their money. This is the true measure of a sustainable business.

You have to identify opportunities with a non-linear utility function: where paying customers assign more than 10 times higher value to something that costs 10 times as much to produce.

It's a debate we have with ourselves and with other "Consulting" bloggers in the UK in our space - what is the best approach to demonstrating your capability - longer thoughtpieces, or bite size chunks. To be fair, he is clear about his purpose:

I recently served as a "consultant's consultant," advising a world leader in his field on what to do about his website. In particular, this expert asked me whether he should start a weblog. I said no.

You probably already know my own Internet strategy, so it might not surprise you that I recommended that he should instead invest his time in writing thorough articles that he published on a regular schedule. Given limited time, this means not spending the effort to post numerous short comments on ongoing blogosphere discussions.

We've also had similar conversations in the past with various people such as Stowe Boyd on this very subject - our Internet Strategy. The conclusion - it depends on where you are coming from, and when. We are not Gurus, we don't get a stream of people knocking on our door giving us work will-he nill-he (yet...we live in hope ;), so we still need marketing capability. Part of that is good old face to face networking, but we envisioned the blog as being primarily on the marketing / PR side (insofar as we envisaged it had a "business" role at all - initially it was an experiment that seemed interesting and fun to do) , that indirectly (hopefully) brought work to us, rather than a direct revenue earner. We also thought it would be a great way to have a conversation with people in our space and learn new things.

Here's why - lets look at the consulting output we do for example to look at economic return on time invested

- At the highest return, maybe several tens of thousands of pounds, is the crafted study, sometimes with a report, specific to the client's circumstances. This is a one off piece of work typically, and confidentiality means much of it cannot be re-used.

- Next is the topic report, typically a few thousand pounds at most, on a specific area of expertise based on our work (we tend to write about what we actually have done - online advertising for example). Sure, one sells a number of copies of the report, but (as yet) it doesn't hit the consulting numbers...though over time, with enough report out there, we hope to see a recurring revenue stream of sorts

- After that comes the "essay", or thoughtpiece - typically for a seminar or somesuch, and we will charge several hundred pounds for that.

All these are basically limited access...we make the money by not giving it out for free. This is what puts bread on table, roof over head etc etc....

(We also build technology, like this, but that's another story for another time)

After that there are the papers, typically we like these to be published in respected journals with good access, and payment is nominal...a few hundred pounds tops. Then there are the occasional papers we do....for example the one on Podcasting that is now a chapter in the Mobile Web 2.0 book. That got us a very nice Indian meal

But it takes several days to write a good paper, and as can be seen above, the economic return is sub-marginal - unless you see it as a marketing exercise.

And then there is this blog - Broadstuff.

Now, there is a debate - and we have had it in spades - about whether the role of the blog is to get clients, get exposure, or get profitable.

Ideally all three of course....

But the key question is about time put in. To make any decent money from a blog you have to work full time, and the probability of great success is quite low.

However, from the above you will realise we make more money from our other work. We write this blog on our marginal time...eating breakfast at the desk, last thing at night, over a cup of tea in the day. If we are unloaded on client work, the economics say it is better to write a report and sell it for several thousand pounds, rather than write another blog post.

And its also to do with lifecycle......Read/Write web took 3 years to get to current size, its only in the last 9 months that its been full time. We are only 9 months old, so still some way to go. Clearly, if 18 months down the line we have a blog running at 20,000 visitors a day then we will make different decisions.

But, the other big, big thing we decided though, is that it had to be fun to blog - fun means passion and quality for free, and makes you look at it as a pleasure, not a chore - and that means (for us anyway) that the blog is about the quick take, the wider licence, a dash of irreverence, i.e. its about writing sketches. Pen pictures rather than a full work of art. Besides, our view is that if you write about stuff you know about you should be able to add value, even in bite sized chunks.

A blog is therefore a sketchpad, not an easel....and Twitter - microblogging - is just doodling therefore

Have we won any work from it - yes, indirectly - the main thing the blog has done so far is allowed us to meet and have conversations with interesting people all over the world, increasing our understanding, and that in turn has led to recommendations.

Nonetheless, Jakob does make 2 good points to ponder:

(i) What are you doing to add 10x value on your blog
(ii) For a niche blog, its not quantity of readers, its quality you need.

These are good points to ponder 9 months into starting Broadstuff.

So, it probably is worth putting a bit more meat into the blog every so often, move it up from a sketch to a bit more of a sketchpad - a linked set of sketches, plus the occasional killer slide from our work, and longer post taking things to another level of depth - maybe work in progress from our articles or summaries of our shorter presentations.

However, we are often bound by NDA agreements etc about our work...its very rare we can shout about it, so it is a fine line to tread between adding serious value and giving away client confidentiality. Still, the McKinsey Quarterly has walked the line very successfully for years, so it should be possible

And there is a sound business reason for that, so we can even justify it - as Stowe pointed out, it is a totally different conversation when the client is selecting you because of work they have read and already internalised.

But...it still has to be fun!

Right....and thats thoughts enough for one night....

(postscript...I did a bit of tidying up over morning coffee too)