

You don’t have time to maintain your blog - jbkring
http://blog.scripted.com/staff/scripted-weekly/

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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

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rbucks
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.

~~~
alanctgardner2
I can see this being useful in some circumstance, but I think the kinds of
people who read HN value blog posts that aren't considered a chore. If you're
offloading blog posts on someone junior, they're not going to be very
interesting. At best they're meta analysis of what other, more invested
writers have already said.

You're basically distilling a blog post down into a premise and high quality
writing. A lot of what makes technical, corporate blogging effective is
content and honesty, which are much harder to outsource.

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jbkring
Totally agree. Which is why I wrote this post myself. I can only hope that my
approach to the pain point felt 'honest', and that the content of my post was
HN-worthy. We are absolutely not saying that you should outsource your entire
social media presence. What we are saying is that consistency over time
matters. If I wrote a post like this every day, Scripted would never ship
another feature again. So I don't. I write a post like this every couple of
weeks. But if we only posted every couple of weeks, a prospective client might
show up to our blog, see that we hadn't posted anything recently, and think "I
wonder whether they'll be as lackadaisical about customer service as they are
about their blog". So we fill the gaps in our 'technical, corporate blog' with
simple but engaging outsourced content. We allow you to 'set it and forget
it', so that you only have to think about your blog when some crazy new topic
pops into your head, and you can't control the urge to fervently hammer away
at your typewriter.

~~~
alanctgardner2
I definitely understand that blogs can be ignored in favour of shipping. But I
think a service like this would make me write to my blog even less, because it
wouldn't feel urgent. Someone else has got it, and even if I write something
brilliant, it'll get pushed off the front page in a couple days.

What would be more interesting to me is a proofing service where the content
is entirely the actual owner's, but the voice and style are tuned by a
professional writer. This would smooth out some idiosyncrasies (for better or
worse) and make a corporate blog more approachable for customers, without
compromising on quality. I imagine most people let their blog posts ferment
for a few days, maybe weeks, before releasing them. Outsourcing the polishing
and reflecting period would speed things up without cheapening the whole
thing.

Having a small, paid audience of writers who also have a technical background
to assess posts before they go out would be another way to take it.

Regardless, I suspect you guys will still kill it because there is a need for
this in places where they would normally hire an intern to write the blog.
Good luck!

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ricardobeat
Outsource your blog today! Curated top trending topics, SEO optimized, ready
to go viral and customized to your audience.

This is the kind of crap I wish would disappear from the web. At least Google
is trying to do it's part. I also think a company blog is not the place for
this kind of arbitrage, I see it often on random companies websites and it
shows: instead of engaging the audience, the post listing looks like a pyramid
marketing scheme.

~~~
noelwelsh
Authenticity is very ill-defined (just ask any hipster). What makes an
authentic company blog in your mind? Does it have to written by an employee of
the company? What if it the company is entirely outsourced (except for the
owners, obviously)? Does that mean the owners must write it? What if the
owners aren't any good at writing? Can they not hire someone to do this job
for them? Let's say we're talking about a software company, and all
development is outsourced. Is the product now inauthentic? If not, what's the
difference between a blog and the product?

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scott_meade
One type of authenticity speaks to origin an item. Whether it be a painting,
writing, or any other work, when a work's origin is in doubt, it can be said
to be lacking authenticity. The inauthentic part of ghostwriting is that the
name of the author on the content is not the person who created the content.

~~~
noelwelsh
There is no requirement that the authors aren't credited. To quote another
comment in this thread by someone from Scripted

    
    
      Yup. Which is why many of our clients give byline to our writers!
    

I agree that if the author isn't credited the setup is a bit dubious.

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spindritf
Ghost writers for blogs.

Isn't the whole reason for reading a blog, instead of some other publication
on a similar topic, to get insights from (apparent) blog author?

~~~
jbkring
Yup. Which is why many of our clients give byline to our writers!

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jabbernotty
Not to be down on the service, but I have to do some nitpicking.

There is a difference between "checkout" and "check out". "checkout" is not a
verb, but a thingamajig. "the checkout page". "to check out" is a verb.

The first proper word on the blog seems incorrect. That doesn't inspire
confidence. There are a few more problems with the text such as (preposition)
words that appear missing, for example.

~~~
jbkring
Thanks! Fixed the "check out" issue. I don't see the other problems, but such
is the nature of copy-editing your own writing.

~~~
hippo33
Actually, those are correct. "a couple writers" and "a couple of writers" are
both grammatically correct.

"its completion" -> "it's completion" is just wrong. "It is completion" is not
the intent of the sentence.

~~~
jabbernotty
You are certainly right about the "its". I have an annoying habit of
incorrectly correcting people.

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noelwelsh
I have a long long list of blog posts I haven't got around to writing.
Creating the skeleton is easy, but filling in the details is time consuming. I
can see a use for this service to get someone else to do that. I don't really
see a big deal with this, so long as everyone involved is credited.

~~~
hippo33
I'm in the same boat. I've tried using Dragon, because talking is easier than
writing for me. But then, I end up with a lot of umms and uhs and unstructured
posts. Copywriting is super important, very difficult for non-writers, and
time-consuming (for non-writers)

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kiba
Hmm, it makes me think twice about corporate blogs in general if they're not
written from the horse's mouth. Credibility of all corporate blogs are
undermined just by this post from a service.

Also, it is hard to see if they use ghost writers or not. Which, makes me even
more skeptical.

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netmau5
I like the concept although I always hesitate to use ghost writers. If you
really want my business, you have to show me the money. Demonstrate the
expertise in your writers, their engagement (comments), their impact/retention
(uniques/views), and their ability to write deeply interesting content.

What I saw was a collection of random, poorly-formatted writing samples,
disorganized testimonials, and vague pricing details. Normally I'd just keep
to myself and move along, but this is a service my company would potentially
use in certain areas. So I think it would be a huge improvement if the site
were focused on convincing me, as the owner and someone with irrational
concern for our image, how you'll make us bigger/better/faster/stronger.

~~~
jbkring
This is very good feedback. We're actually working on some Machine-Learning
technology that takes all of Wikipedia's content, builds a topic model, and
applies it to the 10k pieces of content that we've written over the past
couple months. It will allow us to rank writers by their expertise in very
granular fields (so for instance we'll be able to tell you who our best
"outdoor recreational equipment" writer is). We'll provide a deeper
explanation of this technology in a (hopefully less controversial) blog post
in the next couple of weeks.

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anonymouz
You might want to ask one of your copyeditors to have another look at your
website.

On the Features page: "We'll take some basic information about what _you_
field you're in and what you need written."

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zobzu
here my tl;dr: if you don't want to write a blog, but instead want to be well-
known because of your blog, then don't write one.

Don't do stuff for the wrong reasons.

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chasing
Hey, can you guys provide a list of your clients so I know which blogs to
avoid?

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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.

~~~
jbkring
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!

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pkamb
No BS: what's the price of the 'basic' plan?

~~~
rbucks
Price isn't shown because it depends on level of account support and job
customization. We try not to run package deals for less than $500/mo.

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mnicole
Is this solely for people that know the topics your writers are writing on
thoroughly enough that they don't approve something that is potentially
harmful to their brand? What happens in the event that the audience is largely
put off by the post or if the author is wrong about the topic they're writing
on but the client was none-the-wiser to it at approval?

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baconhigh
I thought this was going to be about actually maintaining a blog - Upgrades
etc.

I am Disappoint.

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miggitymac
seems interesting and as though you could get a freelance writer to get to
know your brand better instead of hiring a staff writer.

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mnemonicsloth
No list of satisfied customers?

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philip1209
Is this like blogmutt?

