Earlier this year I was on a panel at the annual meeting of a bunch of PR associations in St. Louis. The hotel ball room was packed so when I got up to do my little bit, I snapped a photo. It’s been my masthead image for the last week or so. Imagine my delight to find a link and a reference on Dave Winer’s Scripting News (the blog I check first every day). The first place I ever saw this use of a masthead image was on Scripting News and I proudly appropriated the idea for smays.com. The notion that Dave Winer visited my little corner of cyberspace is just too cool for school.
Category Archives: Blogging
Learfield Blog
Last month we set up a blog for company news (new hires, expansion, etc.). An experiment as much as anything. And our CEO said he might post from time to time. His latest deals with doing the right thing. At one level it’s shop talk but he’s basically saying that in the early days of our company we did something that wasn’t in the best interest of our customers (affiliates and advertisers). He uses the example to illustrate a core value of our company. Do the right thing, even if it costs you some money.
In previous posts, I’ve expressed some doubts about whether corporations can blog. It’s just hard to find someone with the courage to speak with the honesty and openess that characterizes blogs. Okay, it’s a little easier to say what you think if you own the company. But I believe this post says a lot about our company and the people leading it.
You could take all of our brochures and news releases and stack them to the ceiling…and they don’t say as much about who we are and what we believe as Clyde’s simple blog post. Our employees can read that. Our business partners can read it. Our customers can read it. The world can read it. And they will “hear” the honesty and sincerety in Clyde’s words. This is corporate blogging at its best.
Dave Winer: Why should your company be blogging?
“Asking why you should use blogs is like asking why you should answer the phone. It might be a customer, a developer who wants to use your services, or a reporter who wants to write about the company. Your competitors answer the phone, so you should too.” — Dave Winer’s
Posted by Clyde
It’s a little too early to say that our company is blogging (corporately). But there’s a teensy, weensy spark that could become a flame. Clyde Lear –our CEO/President/Founder and All Around Good Guy– has dipped his toe in the blog pond. Several us always thought he’d be a natural and today’s post would seem to confirm that. For reasons known only to him, he asked a few employees at random what they were reading and posted the results. Why do I think this is worth a mention?
No news release. Nothing about our company’s growth. Just a little nugget about the people that make up our company. He didn’t ask the senior management staff what they were reading. He walked down the hall and asked the folks in the cubes. Clyde was once a journalist and has always been a good writer. I hope he becomes a regular blogger. He’ll have interesting and important things to say.
Dave Winer on blogging
Dave Winer’s simple explanation of blogging and OPML:
First, create a new weblog on one of the free services, like Blogger or MSN Spaces. It takes about five minutes, and is about as hard as creating an email address on Yahoo or Hotmail, and represents less of a commitment. Then make your first post, something like Hello There, or Testing 1-2-3. Once you’ve verified that it works, you can stop there.
Then someday, when you’re in the shower or lying in bed in the morning and get an idea that you wish you could tell everyone, remember that you have a blog, and go to the computer, and write it up and publish it. That actually feels pretty good, even if you think no one will read it, because you got it off your chest.
Then in a few days Google will probably visit your site and index the post, and then when someone searches for that subject, your page will come up, and maybe you’ll pass that idea on to someone who can use it, or meet someone who agrees, or someone who disagrees. And that’s blogging, and that’s all it is.
As for OPML:
Did you ever have an idea you wanted to post on your blog that didn’t seem big enough to be an essay? An idea that could be expressed in a sentence, or less, but still deserved to get out there? In writing school they teach that less is better. If you can say something in three words instead of twenty, say it in three. It communicates better. Well, none of the existing blogging tools can do little sentence or phrase-size blog posts.