A Day In The (blog) Life
Posted by Paul Woodhouse at January 20th, 2005
The Beatles wittered on about there being four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. I can assure you that the I-90 sliproad into downtown Cleveland alone manages to tip the scales at four thousand and one. Blimey, the roads are bad round here. Cleveland also manages to shame my neck of the woods with its blogging network. If I’m being honest, it probably puts the whole of the UK to shame.
Valdis Kreb’s and George Nemeth’s network map of N.E. Ohio blogs, not potholes round Cleveland.
This morning I got up with the sparrows and headed over to a Blogging for Profits seminar thing and really rather enjoyed myself. About fifty businessmen from N.E. Ohio braved the lake effect snow conditions to listen to a rather esteemed panel of bloggers talk about business blogging. These fellas had to pay – I just popped along for the sheer hell of it and is also why I didn’t steal any of their bagels.
The panel consisted of Steve Rucisnki of SMBCEO, George Nemeth of Brewed Fresh Daily, Eric Olsen of Blogcritics, Barbara Payne of Blog for Business, Denise Polverine, Editor in Chief at Cleveland.com, Valdis Krebs who provided a great networking map of all the blogs round Cleveland and was moderated by Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends. (You can read a bit more about the background to the event here).
It was all very standard fare, with talk of the whys, whats and hows of business blogging in general for the uninitiated. I did find what Cleveland.com was trying to do with blogs most interesting. But, what do you expect when you have Jeff Jarvis as their overlord.
From the moment Jim Cookinham, the President of NEOSA – the organisation responsible for hosting the event – introduced himself, I felt right at home. Granted, I think I bored the two Craines journalists rigid with my blog evangelism at 7.30am. If an American actually finishes your anecdote with ‘interesting’, or ‘that’s funny’, it means that it was neither remotely interesting, or the slightest bit amusing. I also have to say that remarking it was nice that some ‘old media’ had turned up so early wasn’t received in the manner it was delivered.
Essentially, I was there to see how these sessions work and to meet Anita Campbell and George Nemeth. I’d been rather excited ever since I read about the session on George’s blog and it was marvellous to chat to them. I really could’ve spent all day yabbering. Or at least another couple of hours as my wife was just round the corner and didn’t finish her class until later.
There were a few audible groans when Eric Olsen mentioned that he’s been known to blog for ten hours a day and when Barbara Payne claimed that blogging can be damned hard work. But, I realised I might have gone native when George cited my attendance as an example of the network effect of blogging. For some strange reason this elicited a round of applause and I found myself joining in like some tasered seal. I suppose that’s the downside of blogging whilst watching the morning re-runs of Family Feud and The Price is Right.
At least this outing allowed me to do a spot of evangelising with a gentleman who was looking to start a company blog. Hopefully I answered some of the questions he might’ve had, but there was one particular question during the session relating to the old ROI chestnut that I wish I’d been able to answer. So, if that gentleman, or anybody elso for that matter has any questions they’d like to ask me, or just pick my brains, by all means get in touch. I really do love talking about this business blogging thing and will gladly meet up with anybody who’s interested.
All you have to do is put lunch on your business expenses account!
(I realise I’ve basically said that I’ll blog for food – oh well).
If I’m being honest, Peter, I think I actually started the round of applause just to direct attention away from the fact that I’d turned a rather bright shade of red.
It beats having to stick your hand up!
You caught us on a good weather day! In my opinion the roads were fine it was the drivers that were awful. Glad you could attend, it was an interesting audience. As for the ROI question, ROI on a relationship tool, hmmmmm. How is ROI on a marriage measured, how about while dating? Interesting question though.
I fully agree that when you’re talking about customer relationships that they can’t really be measured. I’m not a fan of having to do it by any stretch of the imagination. However, I can provide evidence of how utilising a blog has improved my search engine rankings for the two company sites and consequently I see an improvement in unique visitors, bookmarks and enquiries.
I don’t really like the direct market approach of having to measure ROI from conception to completion via every click, but I think that there’s a weakness within business blogging thus far in that it dismisses ROI out of hand. Yes, there’s nothing better to cultivate relationships with customers, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a measurable return.
This is the first time I’ve used a blog – how does it work?