The Problem with Blogs

Blogs have become the anchor of social media, presenting information in a quick, scannable fashion for several years now. Just about everyone has read a blog and many subscribe to them.

The problem with blogs, however, is that they’ve trained people to look for magic answers.

A magic answer is a quick solution to a goal you’re trying to achieve. It could be to generate new marketing leads, solve a software problem, make a purchasing decision, and so forth. We rummage through blogs to find the magic answer and then we move on.

Blogs make the search for the magic answer easy. Since blogs are just about everywhere and written about every topic you could think of, their quick summary format makes it easy to seek out answers.

This is a problem in a couple of ways. The first is that searching for a magic answer doesn’t do anything for you. It’s not the right goal. There usually is no quick fix to a complex problem you’re trying to solve. I see this problem with marketing, social media, sales, and other business blogs. People are trying to find a magic answer there when they can’t. If you want to increase sales leads, for example, a blog is not going to give you the answer despite how it might present itself. It’s a fool’s errand. A blog should only serve as a starting point, not an answer.

The second problem is that people are constantly satisficing. Whatever solution or answer seems the most satisfactory and sufficient is the one chosen. But an issue like increasing sales leads cannot be satisficed. It must be optimized. And optimization comes through intensive research and discovery. Unfortunately, blogs do not really make themselves open to this kind of decision making.

The point is, people should stop relying on blogs for their only means of research. This may seem obvious to some, but I think it’s a big problem. And information providers who blog can help information seekers by serving as a conduit to other expert content throughout the social media realm. The good thing is that social media is making this easier and information is beginning to flow.