[thelist] Web Biz

[David Kaufman]

Christian Heilmann <codepo8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/22/05, alan herrell - the head lemur <headlemur at lemurzone.com>
> ...why would a business client need a blog?
> Blogs are there to publish daily, if not hourly content, and unless
> the client is a news agency, there is not much need for that. So, no,
> I never got approached with that request. On the other hand, projects
> below £20k are not done here anyways.

Some businesses with high-profile leaders are doing the CEO blog thing.
They're not blogging the way normal people blog, though.  They use it
more of a PR tool.

Some examples:

GoDaddy's founder and president, Bob Parsons blogs (ar
http://bobparsons.com) about everything from general business topics,
and GoDaddy 's business directions to self-indulgent personal musings
such as the origins of "Dirty Words" in the English language.  As a
customer who reads their newsletter, I get sucked into it all the
time... :-)

Of course, just about everyone from the Founder and the writers on down
to the janitor at O'Reilly & Associates (oh, I mean O'Reilly Media,
Inc.) tend to like mad dogs at http://www.oreillynet.com/weblogs/


Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows/OpenSRS has blog, but it's by no means the 
front page of the Tucows site... I don't even think it's mentioned 
anywhere on the site though we, their customers, are reminded of it 
regularly via links to it on their mailing lists.  And of course, Tucows 
has the other agenda: the sell blogging software... 
http://enoss.blogware.com/

I'm not sure if Business Blogging has been good for business, but it
probably doesn't hurt.  An interesting article by Dan Bricklin (from
2002!) http://danbricklin.com/log/businessblogging.htm sums it up
nicely:

  "It is important to understand that the purpose of a blog is
  not always to get the largest and widest readership possible. The
  purpose is usually to communicate with interested individuals. Even
  in business, the number of those individuals may be very few, but
  the impact of the communications can have economic impact far beyond
  its cost. For example, for a business selling high-ticket items or
  services, one sale can make up for the time cost of a whole year of
  frequent blogging."

-dave