What If You Wrote A Blog Post, And No One Read It?What If You Wrote A Blog Post, And No One Read It?

Before you launch a blog effort, consider this: People might not listen.

Just ask Unica, vendor of enterprise marketing management software. About a year ago, the company launched a blog called the Marketers' Consortium, chock-full of ideas and steady updates, plus insights from marketing-guru guest writers. Initially, the blog was aimed at a select group of about 2,000 high-level marketing professionals but was later opened up for others to participate.

The blog got about 1,000 hits per month, leading the company to eventually decide it wasn't worth keeping the forum going, given the time and effort its people spent writing carefully crafted blog posts. Unica will instead refocus on direct contact with customers and users, such as its in-person forums and user events. "If you're going to make a trade-off on where you put your resources, for us it made better sense for us to spend an hour building relationships by talking to customers versus spending an hour blogging," says Carol Wolicki, Unica's senior director of communications. Business-to-business online forums are probably more difficult than business-to-consumer social interactions, given the smaller audiences and time constraints of the top-tier decision-makers they aim for.

Unica hasn't written off blogs forever, Wolicki says. But if the company tries again, it will focus on one topic--such as Web analytics, which was one of the most popular subjects on Marketers' Consortium--rather than a broad subject matter.

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