Cleveland Rocks
In the history of North-South style debates, there’s no getting around the fact that lovers of A are likely to be haters of B. It’s as true when we’re talking about Macs vs. PCs and it’s true when we’re talking about Cleveland vs. Cincinnati. But is it true when we’re talking about our many choices for blogging?
TypePad will be going live with their new platform tomorrow. Rather than touting their strong positioning among professional bloggers they are going for a broader market for with their “Simply Better” marketing. The problem is, when you’re trying to steal the competition’s mojo simply saying so, doesn’t in fact make it so. Better is subjective. One can’t prove “better.” Faster, more effective – those are selling points. But better? I’ll be the judge of that, Mr. This image is taken from their new home page:
Simply Better?
If I were TypePad, I would have focused on the benefits that are less touchy-feely and not worry so much about upstarts such as Posterous and Tumblr which focus on ease of use, style and whose main points of differentiation are demonstrably touchy-feely. Whereas TypePad’s promise of being better is simply lip service, Tumblr and Posterous actually look different from your average blog and as such are likely to attract people who are looking for a better than usual solution.
What TypePad has that it’s old competitors (blogger, wordpress) don’t is cache among people who really want to make a business from their content. Of the top 100 blogs, only wordpress can claim to power more blogs than TypePad. For that reason, it seems strange to me that they would not highlight their most prominent bloggers and the fact that they are working their hardest to optimize blogs hosted on their platform optimized for search.
Still, the fact remains that the blogging market is fragmented. There is no clear market leader. In the same way that Google dominates search, the same cannot be said for blogging platforms. There is no single dominant platform. The opportunity here for TypePad is to truly differentiate itself and congeal a particular market. I contest it’s the “I’m serious about my content and will treat it as a business” market. The others are all clamoring for “I’m a social beast and my blog is my online identity” market which, to me, seems dangerously fickle. What’s to stop a Tumblr blogger from jumping on the next fashionable blogging platform? Nothing. What’s stopping a business from migrating to a new platform? Cold hard facts. Search Engine Optimization is the big differentiator in that market and as such, should be emphasized over fashionable and fact-less claims.
Simple and easy. Those are the fighting words for the Tumblr and Posterous camp. WordPress claims open source and relentless feature innovation. Blogger claims google. What does TypePad stand for? Rather plant a flag in the fertile lands of business blogging, latent love-hate passions of long-time, dedicated business bloggers, TypePad is opting for a world of hurt.