Birds Do It, Bees Do It – Hire A Ghost Blogger, I Mean!

If you decide to hire a professional ghost blogger or ghost Twitterer, you’ll be in prestigious company.  A recent New York Times piece informed readers that Britney Spears is advertising for someone to create content for her Twitter and Facebook accounts.  Politician Ron Paul’s way ahead of Britney, with staffers Tweeting and blogging away.    Rappers Kanye West and 50 Cent each use ghostwriters to keep up their blogs and Tweets, and no less a personage than President Obama employs a social networking team. Ghosts are in vogue!

"In its short history," relates the Times, "micro-blogging Twitter has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians, and businesses."  However, explains reporter Noam Cohen, "Someone has to do all that writing."

A professional ghost blogger myself, I’m always on the alert for what others in my field are blogging – and for whom.  Guy Kawasaki, a new media consultant with a big following, has this to say about the two employees who post updates for him while he’s onstage addressing conference audiences: "For 99.9% of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over.  For a tenth of a percent, it is a marketing tool."

By contrast, for every one of my Say It For You business clients, blogs are marketing tools, and, believe me, "cats rolling over" have no place in the content of their blog posts…

The simple fact is, very few business owners can take the time to post relevant, new material on their business blogs with enough consistency to improve search engine rankings.  Recruiting  the right professional ghost blogger to join their marketing team is business owners’ way to reach potential customers and clients. To be sure, 140-character "Tweets" might be easier to manage, but search remains the fastest growing marketing tool of all social media, according to Chris Baggott’s Guide To Blogging, and Twitter is not designed to drive traffic to corporate websites.

A year ago, when debate was raging about whether Kanye West was writing his own blogs or whether a ghost blogger was the power behind the blogs, I commented: "It’s a matter of ‘So there you have it!’  Blogging works to drive traffic. Period."

Got ghosts?