IT@Cork
Posted on November 29, 2006
Filed Under What's New, Commercial Trends |
Just heard Marc Canter of broadband mechanics talking here at @IT@Cork which is a bit of deja vu because I heard him in Amsterdam a couple of months back. Marc’s a big advocate of blogging as a corporate marketing vehicle and of People’s Markets.
I sense dangers here. There is an assumption that blogging costs nothing, or a lot less thanregular PR and marketing and I think that’s palpably untrue. If I’m a CEO and I’m blogging I have to ask why do I have so much spare time and how do I account for my time, what are the opportunity costs.
That’s not to say don’t do it - but the real blogging enthusiast out there couples blogging to open source and to free…. and to virtue. It ain’t necessarily so. I find blogging gets in the way of other things I should be doing and I’m really debating its value to me. I’d sy the best advice is look at the cost, get a tangible sense of the benefit, then give it a try.
Apart from that there ahve been some fascinating talks here not least that by Jeff Nolan of Teqlo. These guys are really worth following if you want to know where new business models are going - and how to price services. I hope IT@Cork publishes the slides!
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7 Responses to “IT@Cork”
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Hey Haydn, glad you enjoyed the day. We will be publishing the slides and also we will be podcasting the talks on the it@cork blog over the coming weeks.
You raise an interesting point on the amount of time blogging takes. People who sell blogging as a cheap solution are doing it a disservice. Blogging does take time but, I fundamentally believe that the benefits of blogging far outweigh the (mainly opportunity) costs.
I take your point tom, it’s a might be though and wel lworth making a stab at defining the costs.
[…] Haydn was at the conference too and blogged about Marc Canter and Jeff Nolan. Read his post because he has something interesting to say about the cost of blogging. I remember him scribbling furiously throughout while I grappled with iPhoto and uploaded images to my blog! (Nice to meet you finally Haydn!) […]
Haydn,
Its a very valid point. As I see it, using a blog for marketing or as a business communications tool means that it needs to be done well and the message has to be sensitive to your organisation and to your customers. That takes time and therefore cost and it has to produce a result.
I’m at too early a stage to judge how effective blogging will be to my business but so far I’ve found that it generates an underlying buzz that can’t be achieved any other way.
I think you have to fence blogging. That means you have to box in the amount of time you allocate to reading newsfeeds as well as responding with your own comments and your own posts.
I find it difficult to engage–really engage–with the spirit and flow of mainstream bloggers if I spend less than two hours a day swimming in the world live web. But there are weeks that I can walk away from it all and not miss the flow. It’s all in the way you manage your flow.
However, if you’re getting a net energy drain from blogging or from reading blogs, you have to back off the whole medium or seriously evaluate the spaces you’re viewing. I trim and refocus my reading based on mood and need. I pull my stuff largely through aggregators, not from actually visiting sites.
What I read on a Monday is radically different from the blog flow I get on a Friday. And you won’t catch me refreshing a someone’s blog page just to make sure I didn’t miss anything a few hours before.
Anyway, my time here is up. Time for more tiling.
Bernie,
I hope you’ve copyrighted the phrase, “net energy drain”. That was almost worth getting out of bed for today!
I’m still at the stage where I need a regular blogging fix but, if time is really tight, I’ll always at least do a daily check on twentymajor. Just to make sure the world is still spinning.
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