New Comm Biz

I’d like to ask your forgiveness while I re-use an overused analogy here.

If your only marketing objective is to drive awareness of your message then why do you drive people to a site?

This is like going to a cocktail party and trying to get a girl to come back to your place for small talk.

If there’s no conversion, no purchase, no download, then why do you care if someone comes to your site to get that message. I would argue in many cases it would be better if they didn’t have to come to your site to find the message.

When I asked Steve Rubel why he decided not to keep both his Life Stream and his blog his initial response was because Google penalizes you for duplicate content.

I was kind of surprised that was his reason. I haven’t worried about duplicate content or SEO in general for my blog in almost a year. The only two “stats” I really care about are RSS subscriber numbers (because I don’t think RSS is dead) and comments, be they comments on the blog, Twitter, FriendFeed or somewhere else. (BTW if you haven’t please feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.)

Other than my own name I don’t care anymore what key words I rank highest for. If this site were trying to sell something, or run advertising then I’d care.

I care more about people reading my next post then I do about who read my last post.

And I don’t really care if they do that here or somewhere else.

And if Google’s not smart enough to tell the difference between good content re-purposed on a good site, versus good content scraped on a spam site then that’s their problem not mine.

My personal take is that I want my content all over the place. That’s why you’ll see this post on my life stream, on my blog and on the Thinkers and Doers blog. My blog is the main source, it’s why I wrote it but it’s also relevant to those other sites. You’ll also see this post on Social Media Today and My Venture Pad. Plus if you or your company is a subscriber to Lexis Nexis, Thomas Reuters or you have a Kindle, you can find my blog which is syndicated through Newstex.

If that penalizes me in Google then so be it.

Image via my Flickr Stream

This post was originally posted on New Comm Biz

In fact for a view into the total fragmentation of this one post I’ve embeded the FriendFeed search for this post. You’ll also see many of the tweets and RT’s in the Disqus comments.

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