I’ve been a blog bore for a few years and helped 10 or 12 friends get started blogging. Some were/are very good at it but none have run with the ball like Chuck Zimmerman at AgWired.com. I used to work with Chuck and his wife Cindy until they left and started their own consulting business a while back. Anyone interested in agriculture marketing should (does?) make AgWired.com their first stop. He’s making Old Media publications like AgriMarketing look… old. If you want to see how to do this blog thing right, click over to AgWired.com. From this point on, Chuck gives me tips on blogging.
Category Archives: Business & Marketing
Jonathan Schwartz on executive blogging
Jonathan Schwartz –president and COO of Sun Microsystems– on executive blogging:
“If you want to be a leader, I can’t see surviving without a blog. It’s as important as having an e-mail account and a mobile phone. It doesn’t count if you delegate the task of maintaining your blog to someone on your staff.”
Schwartz says that too often, communicating with employees and business partners is like a game of telephone. You speak to a group of people close to you, and they speak to their teams, and so on and so on. With a blog, “you hop through 12 layers of management to get directly to someone in New Zealand.” It also opens up a channel for receiving feedback and ideas from that employee in New Zealand.” [Fast Company]
I have been (gently) lobbying the COO of our company to consider blogging. He’s a smart and funny guy (neither necessary for blogging) and would be very good at it. But it is a bit like having a puppy. A lot of work and sometimes messy.
One second commercial
Catering to the ever dwindling attention span and capitalizing on its name, One Second breath freshener has placed a one second commercial during every commercial break on every TV station in Belgium yesterday. I think the blipverts on Network 23 were 5 seconds.
“High-speed commercials condensed into a few seconds that prevent channel changing and embed themselves in viewer’s minds. Sometimes they cause the heads of viewers to explode.”
Ad dollars moving online
“This year the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of Americas three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, predicts Advertising Age. It will, says the trade magazine, represent a watershed moment in the evolution of the internet as an advertising medium. A 30-second prime-time TV ad was once considered the most effectiveand the most expensiveform of advertising. But that was before the internet got going.”
— Economist.com on an article in this week’s Advertising Age. More of the same at Yahoo!
Business Week: “Blogs Will Change Your Business”
I haven’t seen it, but Doc says it’s the cover story (May 2, 2005) in Business Week. In Blogs Will Change Your Business, Stephen Baker and Heather Green offer this warning: “Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.”
There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. Let’s assume that 99.9% are off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.
While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.
The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.
Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.
The dot-com era was powered by companies — complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and — that’s right — no bubble.
A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like — you guessed it — blogs.
We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m getting a thin spot on the top of my head from people patting and smiling when I talk about blogs. I’ve bookmarked the new blog at Business Week Online(Blogspotting.net).