Quid Pro Quo Indeed, Mr. Godin
April 27th, 2010 by pierreloicAfter reading Seth Godin’s latest post, Quid pro quo (santa math), I feel compelled to react.
In his blog post Seth Godin advocates that blogging makes no sense economically because it defies the basic logic of trade: this for that. There is no such exchange in blogging. In his words:
I think it’s more like Santa math. Santa flies around the world, giving stuff away, and for what? He earns gratitude, trust and friendship, that’s what. Sure, one day he might decide to license his image or try to sell you something. But right here, right now, gratitude, trust and friendship are plenty. Especially if you enjoy doing what you’re doing. Quid, no quo.
So, Seth’s advice is: go ahead and blog but don’t expect to get anything back.
In my humble opinion, Mr. Godin is dead wrong on this. This is a gross generalization of a very rich media that can be used for so many different purposes that inferring where bloggers see value in their activity (i.e. selling their products or services) is very limiting. Many people blog, participate in forums, tweet to build communities, share knowledge, assert an expertise, or many other value-creating reasons.
Now, if we limit the activity of blogging to those indeed interested in boosting their sales, Seth Godin is right that drawing a correlation between a blog post and sales leads is not an easy thing to do, though I’d argue not impossible at all, as Hubspot‘s success has proven. They even coined the term inbound marketing to describe this activity. And here is the real quid pro quo (read misunderstanding): in this respect, blogs are marketing tools, not sales tools, and the ROI of blogging in such case has to use marketing metrics to assess success.
Not to point out the obvious, but this is exactly how Seth Godin himself very skillfully uses his blog…Go figure…
Tags: blogging, hubspot, seth godin, social media ROI
