In this month’s installment of my series of business blogging articles for Chief Marketer, I look at the new Britannica Blog — a blog from a knowledge-based brand that’s been around since 1768 — but one that’s plenty capable of learning the latest blogging tricks.

In this case, Brittanica’s wide-ranging blog includes some posts clearly designed to provoke engagement — challenging their readers with intellectually charged posts on controversial topics.

Some deride it as “linkbaiting” — the practice of deliberately baiting readers with controversial posts — but the term carries a negative connotation that doesn’t apply, at least not in this instance. Still, the UK Guardian had this to say:

And as Britannica standard-bearer bloggers proceeded to press every hot button of internet culture - Google, Wikipedia, copyright, even hoary complaints about the youth of today - it turned into an impressive demonstration of the contradictions of putting a style in the service of a contrary cause. Like fighting for peace, this was flaming for scholarliness.

True or not, you can’t deny the effectiveness of a traffic-building strategy that generates mentions in other leading online media, especially if you can avoid the negative aspects of controversial posts.

Avoiding the Downside of Linkbaiting

One downside of linkbaiting is that conversations often spiral downward into a morass of petty name-calling, but Britannica’s blog short-circuits that tendency with blog guidelines that prohibit personal attacks, testy language, etc.

It’s a good example of putting blog editorial standards in place before discovering you need them — an excellent idea for any business blog. Spelling out the limits of behavior in any business-related forum is an often-overlooked step, though a critical one, and Britannica sets out their mission right in the sidebar:

Britannica Blog is a place for smart, lively conversations about a broad range of topics. Art, science, history, current events – it’s all grist for the mill. We’ve given our writers encouragement and a lot of freedom, so the opinions here are theirs, not the company’s. Please jump in and add your own thoughts.

Off and Running

The Britannica Blog boasts an extremely wide range of topics (everything from pop culture to quantum physics — and pretty much everything in between) and a blue-ribbon list of intellectual heavy hitters.

The range of this blog is enormous, which could prove both a benefit and a hindrance, especially given the proliferation of narrow-focus blogs.

In the final analysis, there’s nothing wrong with challenging content, and Britannica clearly isn’t trying to simply irritate readers into responding via obnoxious posts. What they have accomplished is simple; they’ve drawn attention to themselves, done so in a way guaranteed to attract visitors, yet avoided the traditional downsides of the strategy.

(You can read my Chief Marketer article here (it’s longer and significantly differently from this post)).

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