Today sat on a panel with Phil and Charley talking about blogging. There were about 100 people from two organizations (with lots of letters). 
Basically there were two groups; pr people and marketing people. Of them about 10 were blogging, about 12 wanted to start a corporate blog and another 12 a personal blog. A good start. Phil has a great page talking about this.
The key message was being honest and speaking with a human voice. There was some confusion about knowing if it was correct to start a corporate blog. My point being if your company was interested in packaging and promoting a product and selling it to consumers, you shouldn't blog. If you were interested in establishing a relationship with your customers and building loyalty between you and them, then yes, start a blog. It's a great tool.
Another question about taking *so* much time blogging when you have other things to do. Turns out this individual spends 1 1/2 hours doing email every day. And some of it is informational in content. That time could be spent blogging with greater leverage.
And finally Phil right away set up some tags for the group.
The way I view it, blogging is a never ending cocktail party on the Internet with the most interesting people you will ever meet.
Did somebody say cocktail? Hey, I'm there! That'll be a 'tooni, extra dry please.
It's not only a cocktail party - it's one of the really good ones, with all kinds of people, and large amounts of terrific "food" (for thought). You can even pick your own music!
And, blogging certainly beats slogging. The old ways of expanding one's network - Sloggin' through gigantic trade shows and sloggin' (sigh) through yet another flat rubber chicken networking dinner.
(Of course, one should also get away from the computer and out of the house for real in-person connections.)
Posted by: Mary Schmidt | 19 May 2006 at 02:02 PM