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You don’t have time to maintain your blog

blog.scripted.com

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Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#4

Post by alanctgardner2 »

This seems like a disingenuous service. For any company, the goal of having a corporate blog is to demonstrate your employees' knowledge and present interesting problems you've encountered. There are two outcomes I see from outsourcing blog posts:

1) interesting content which isn't directly relevant to your business. They write a good blog, but it's always going to be an arm's length from your real business. Either you mislead users about where the content comes from, or you're up front and people realize that he blog, while good, doesn't really reflect your business.

2) the company doesn't really have bloggers for niche enough specialties to be interesting. You end up with a broad, lookalike blog that could have been written by anybody. This stops customers from engaging with your company.

The correct answer is what New Relic does with The Daily WTF; sponsor an established or up and coming blogger. Make the relationship clear. Users will appreciate your funding interesting content, while understanding that you didn't create it. If you align the audience of the blog with your customer base, I think you could get the same effect without the middleman.

Edit: this definitely seems to fall into category two. Their example posts are overly broad and not very engaging. Lots of link-baity, list-format titles which will drive eyeballs, but ultimately have poor conversion. I'd be interested in any case studies that prove me wrong, thugh

Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#5

Post by natep »

From the blog post and main screen, I have no idea what this service is selling. Is it promising to aggregate blogs/tweets/FB posts of a certain topic and deliver them to you on a weekly basis? Is it promising to prompt you weekly along the lines of "you promised you'd write about ___ today!"? Is it promising to find ghost writers for the topics you specify, and have them churn out content on a weekly schedule?

Once I've specified weekly blog posts from topics I have in mind, the next form makes it pretty clear that the service will find people to write your blog for you, which sounds pretty skeevy. I don't know how you would detect a Scripted blog post, but I'd rather not see them on HN. If someone's writing is good enough to make it to HN, it should do so under the author's own brand. Just my opinion.

Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#7

Post by jbkring »

natep wrote: post #5

From the blog post and main screen, I have no idea what this service is selling. Is it promising to aggregate blogs/tweets/FB posts of a certain topic and deliver them to you on a weekly basis? Is it promising to prompt you weekly along the lines of "you promised you'd write about ___ today!"? Is it promising to find ghost writers for the topics you specify, and have them churn out content on a weekly schedule? Once…

Hey Nate. Agreed, you definitely need a bit of context regarding what exactly Scripted does in order to understand this feature. The assumption was that if someone navigated their way to our weekly offering, they probably did so after grasping the basics of our business. But by announcing this as a standalone, I can see how we introduced tons of confusion. Sorry! For what it's worth, we have many clients that give byline to their writers, and a couple of them are HN regulars!

Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#9

Post by rbucks »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #4

This seems like a disingenuous service. For any company, the goal of having a corporate blog is to demonstrate your employees' knowledge and present interesting problems you've encountered. There are two outcomes I see from outsourcing blog posts: 1) interesting content which isn't directly relevant to your business. They write a good blog, but it's always going to be an arm's length from your real business. Either y…

Valid points, but what Scripted does is not much different than hiring a blogger intern. To keep the content genuine, our clients have to be engaged. We simply promote them from writer to editor. Scripted helps businesses take the time spent from idea to publishing down from hours to minutes.
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