Blogs and Wikis - The novel

//TL;DR (too long; didn't read)

1.     BLOGS

a)     Buffer App / Social – good blog, interesting themes, worth checking out if you are interested in marketing on social media

b)    Finnair – a lot of changes needed, uniformity above all, a lot of potential though

2.     SUCCESFUL BLOGGER

·   Colour Me! / Indiedays

-          short blogs, lots of colorful pictures, active poster, answers to every comment, amazing personality and really, really, really cute!

-          most marketing from indiedays.com main page, a little bit product placement from time to time (reviews and gifts)

-          money most likely comes from Indiedays Oy’s marketing profits since she is one of the 25 “star bloggers”

3.     WIKIPEDIA

·   Apple Watch

-          mostly information about the specs

-          both good and the bad reviews mentioned

-          lots of sources, mostly apple, also Wall Street Journal, BBC News, blogs etc.

·   Wikipedia as a whole

-          I don’t think it’s a reliable source

-          it has good points though

-          decides whether or not a thing is “real”

End of TL;DR\\

It has been a crazy couple of weeks and regardless of my best effort I just didn’t have time to write this blog before. Mostly because it was extremely difficult to find the blogs I could write about! I wanted to find Finnish blogs but I was surprised to find that not that many Finnish companies use blogs. Or at least Google didn’t show them in the first 10 pages which is pretty much the same as not existing.

1.     a)

So finally I decided to settle on an American blog. Buffer is an app that allows you to schedule posts to most of the biggest social media sites. The company’s blog https://blog.bufferapp.com/ has different categories for different kinds of posts (social, transparency, engineering and happiness is coming soon). Because there are several people that are writing the posts, it allows the company to have all those different categories and still write several posts a week and answer all the comments. The only thing missing is the possibility to further explore the different topics. You can search with a search word, but the key words are not visible when reading the blog so you have to know what you want to read about.

However, I don’t necessarily find this to be a big issue. The headlines are written in a large font and they’re accompanied by matching photos so you will quickly see what the post is about. There is also the beginning of the blog post so you can read a bit and find out whether or not you want to read the whole article. And most of the posts are interesting anyway so it doesn’t really matter which one you choose.

I concentrated only on the social category. That part of the blog focuses mostly on social media and how to use it. Their own description is “Thoughts on sharing, creating, analyzing and converting with social media.” Some of the most interesting headlines are “This is Your Brain on Emojis. Here’s How to Use Them in Your Marketing”, “Increase Engagement and Authenticity with Video Streaming in Social” and “What 5$ Per Day Will Buy You on Facebook Ads”. I think with this kind of posts they are trying to bring more value to the consumers using their app. With this blog they can attract the readers and then try to get them to visit the other parts of the blog which are mostly about Buffer as a company and a work place and news on what they are doing with their app.

The whole blog is very visitor friendly and active and promotes themselves without being too in your face about it.

1.     b)

As a “bad example” I chose Finnair’s blog http://blog.finnair.com/. It is not a bad blog really. The blog looks nice, the content is OK, there are four subcategories for the posts and a homepage where you can find all of them. It actually sounds like a pretty good blog, right? Well, it really could be! However, it doesn’t really matter if they have the subcategories or not. The amount of time between posts is ridiculous! Most of the time it is about a month, but it can be as long as two. And to make the situation even worse, there are several different people writing the blogs.

Until October 2013 they had about 3 posts per month but they lacked uniformity even then. The blog doesn’t really have one distinctive genre of topics and that’s why it is really hard to figure out what they are trying to achieve with it.

I think that the blog could be a lot better if they just figured that out. They should really streamline the blog and revive the posting schedule. The categories now are “On Land”, “On Air”, “In the Destination” and “In Finnair”. Reading through the posts I found a lot of the articles were written almost like a diary and that is what people relate to. I think they could change the categories to something like news/notifications (if there are problems with the planes/airport or something news-worthy like this article about Tapio Wirkkala’s 100th birthday http://blog.finnair.com/2015/06/02/yhdessa-46-vuotta/ ) helpful info (information about how to act on a plane, how to pack), behind the scenes (personal stories) and destinations. Then all of the posts would have some kind of a distinct theme and the posts would have more uniformity.

Also I would only choose a couple of people to be responsible for most of the blog posts and personal section could be the place where other people could share their little stories. With only a couple of people in charge, there would also be more uniformity with how the writers are shown (whether there is a name or a photo) and if and what key words they are using. With these changes and a bit more marketing I could totally see the blog gaining a lot more popularity!

2.      

The successful blog I chose is Colour me! http://colourme.indiedays.com/ which is part of the Indiedays blogging site and one of its 25 star blogs. I think the blog is so succesful because the owner Juulia is such an amazing person. She is colourful (orange hair and bright clothes) and bubbly but knows not to always sugar cote the reality. She also keeps her posts short and sprinkles them with lots of photos so the reader doesn’t lose their interest at any point.

I can’t really estimate how much money she makes because she doesn’t really have any ads on her blog. The only ad I did see was on top of the page and it only showed itself once or twice in the time of about 30 refreshes/page changes. About as rarely I saw an ad that was to another blogger’s post on the site. In contrast to this the Indiedays’ main page has a lot of ads. This leads me to think that the bloggers get most of their income from Indiedays’ marketing profits. There is also a little bit of product placement in the blogs. The bloggers get stuff for reviewing or sometimes just as gifts. But I don’t know how much they actually get money for that kind of advertising.

I wrote to her and asked why she started blogging and why she continues today. This is her reply:

3.      

For my Wikipedia article I chose Apple Watch by Apple Inc. The article concentrates mostly on the device’s specs and doesn’t really have any words that would sound like they are trying to market the device. The section that talked about the reviews the product has had also mentioned both the positive and the negative opinions.

Since I was told by teachers early on in my studies (3-4th grade) that Wikipedia isn’t an acceptable source for reports and presentations I have never really counted it as a truly reliable source. I use it to find the first summary of a thing I don’t know about but try to find other sources to back up the information.

There is also a humongous difference between the English and Finnish articles. Whereas I feel I can almost trust the English articles, the Finnish ones are more often than not completely off. One of the best examples I have is Turun NMKY which according to Wikipedia is only a basketball team. In reality Turun NMKY is an organization that has a wide variety of activities ranging from different kinds of sports to music to youth activities to charity/support.

I think one of the main reasons why Wikipedia isn’t considered as a reliable source is that anyone can write and alter the articles. It is a social media at its core. But I think that it is also one of the main reasons why it could be a reliable source. Anyone can find the mistakes and ask for sources, more accurate info or remove things completely if they are not correct. The sources must be indicated and they can be found on the bottom of the article and in the history tab you can always see what changes have been made and who have made them.

Wikipedia is slowly gaining respect but I think it can’t ever be a truly acceptable site to use as an only source. It just has too much of a possibility for human-based errors and prejudices. However, Wikipedia has a place next to Google as being the entity that decides whether a thing is “real” or not. If it can’t be found on google and/or it doesn’t have a Wikipedia article dedicated to it, it doesn’t exist.

If you read the whole thing.... My god, don't you have better things to do? :DD

Just kidding, I raise my imaginary hat to you in respect! :D You're a champion!

-Viivi