Baldness can teach us something about blogging?
You might be surprised!
My mission with this blog is to responsibly use its influence for good for educational outreach to help people learn about stem cells.
Can this blog make a difference? Does it have any influence?
It seems so.
Blogging is a lot more powerful than I ever imagined when I started this blog a few years ago.
Even a single blog can have a big influence on people’s perspectives on things across the globe.
What do I mean?
A good example comes paradoxically enough from this blog related to stem cells and the persistent, passionate drive of people to fight baldness.
Kérastase densifique is an expensive and potentially lucrative product from L’Oreal that is claimed to treat baldness via stem cells. Does it work? Is it safe? I don’t know.
A Google search for kérastase densifique yields about 50,000-100,000 web hits on any given day.
The #1 hit from this Google search for kérastase densifique is my piece on this product, a blog post that has been read more than 3,700 times in just over a couple weeks (see graph above). The current trend, based on past experience with other posts, would suggest that my post on this L’Oreal product will end up with tens of thousands of readers over time. While that is a very successful post in terms of readership, those stats make it clear that this blog is no HuffPost.
But apparently it doesn’t have to be anything close to a HuffPost to nonetheless have a strong influence.
I tried to be fair and balanced in that L’Oreal baldness piece. I do have some concerns that I included in the piece about the L’Oreal product. In this way I hope to educate readers not just about this particular product, but more broadly about stem cell treatments and other issues.
Perhaps far more remarkable than the kérastase densifique search results is the fact that a Google search for the much more generic term baldness treatment yields about 6 million results and at #3 is my blog piece. I realized this about the baldness treatment Google search results via a very cool, powerful tool available from Google called Webmaster Tools that provides detailed information on what brings readers to one’s website.
It seems amazing to me that a significant fraction of people interested in not only this L’Oreal stem cell baldness treatment, but also baldness treatments more globally are presented with my blog post near the top on Google.
It’s not just L’Oreal or baldness or stem cells, but really for any company out there, blogs are increasingly important. They have powerful sway over public opinion on companies and their products.
As I said above and other times over the years, my objective with this blog is to help people become informed about stem cells (including both legit and questionable stem cell treatments) through educational outreach. It’s exciting that this blog has become a powerful tool to achieve that goal.
As a fellow bald person, I can understand the interest in this topic, especially among those who are younger and haven’t come to terms with hairlessness. However, the simple act of reading something does not necessarily lead to a change in behavior or thought. Confirmation bias is very important in whether information actually results in changes. Studies of newspaper editorials also show, for example, that they do little to actually change behavior on any kind of signficant scale. The most likely instruments of change are trusted friends or colleagues. That said, if a topic is new to a reader, the likelihood that a particular article will lead to change is much higher. Does that mean that Paul and I should throw up our hands in defeat? Absolutely not. We will just change the titles of our blogs to include the word “windmills.”