For years now the search engine posse has been pushing the idea that we should all publish lots of data and get people reading our blogs and social networking pages and everything else we deem important to push upon an unsuspecting world.
Turns out we're wrong.
Turns out that even though we've been pushing these methods of marketing, they're only good for one thing - increasing your Google rankings.
You see, it doesn't matter how many blogs you write, the people that matter don't care.
They don't care about you, me or anything else.
They still read the newspaper and watch the news; they're not reading blogs.
That leaves us in a bit of a quandary - what's the point of blogging if nobody is going to read them? Well, there's still some point to it I suppose, but it's not for people - it's for search engines.
Search engines love blogs because they're rich with content and keywords.
If anything is going to tell a robot what it is you do, it's going to be a well-written blog chock full of keywords, hefty meta tags and bolded important words.
But when the search engines find them, will users be kind enough to even read them? It seems blogs are great for causing revolutions.
They're brilliant at getting information across to the masses and amongst the world of the geek, they're a fantastic read.
People like Tim Ferris and Ben Goldacre do wonders with their publishing platforms of choice, but they're serving a particular niche, a need for information from people who really want it.
As passive information (i.
e.
stuff that people actually go out and seek) they're wonderful, but in the world of business they are not so useful.
Businessmen are far too busy and from what I've seen, they don't care for blogs - in fact, they don't even know what one is.
I've now stood in front of over 500 people this year and asked the simple question "does anyone know what a blog is?".
I've had about ten people say they are absolutely sure what one is, but none of them would admit to reading them regularly.
Nobody got any of their business information from a blog, in fact very few people read an industry web site with any regularity.
It's depressing.
Or it's an opportunity...
For us in the search engine industry there is a gaping hole that needs filling, and it's a simple one - knowledge.
The businessman armed with the knowledge to go out and read blogs is ready to get ahead of the competition.
It's a simple idea really, but the more information a company has, the better chance they're got of beating those around them and so we have an angle with which to sell our services.
Train yourself, train your staff and learn how to use blogs, websites and social media and you can suddenly gain an advantage.
Moreover, we can start telling people that blogs are useful again.