John Linton
........some thoughts on the value, or otherwise, of this strange activity.
While I was in the UK in July of last year I caught up with a very old acquaintance that I had worked with for the best part of ten years in the late 1960s and through most of the 1970s. He was trying to put together a 're-union' with some of the people with whom we had mutually shared many of the best years of our young professional lives and had got my contact details from someone who knew of my involvement with Exetel.
He had gone on to much bigger and better and infinitely more responsible things in Japan and then the USA but he remembered the 'good old days' in IBM just as I do and, I would think, a fair number of other people who shared those always interesting and sometimes amazing times.
During our inter changes over several days, during which we found time to discuss a wide variety of 'historic' and current topics he mentioned the "power" of writing blogs in commercial environments and how he wished he could devote enough time to doing it and also persuade various other people within his international organisation to do the same. He shared with me some very interesting statistics about how a regular and 'basically informative' blog can, and almost invariably does, positively affect many aspects of a commercial organisations performance and, as his analysis showed, actually increased sales and internal morale among other key benefits.
I had barely heard of 'blogging' at that time in more than a cursory understanding that it's use was increasing. I was intrigued about what he had said and even more intrigued at what the research he sent me subsequently pointed out. So without ever having written a word in 'blog', nor having any idea about how to go about it, I thanked him for the information and said that when I returned to Australia I would write a daily blog. He laughed and said that the number of people who could write a weekly business blog of any relevance for more than a month could be counted on the fingers of two hands and he didn't know of anyone who had attempted to write a blog more often than that in, or outside, business.
My response was that I couldn't see a problem in doing that at all and I would do it for a year to prove out the research claims; to which he replied he would bet me a case of wine of my choice against a single bottle of Scotch of his choice that I couldn't do that. We quickly settled the rules that I would commence within a week of getting back to Australia and I would be allowed to miss 10 single days over the year to allow for long distance travelling and sheer communications impossibilities and each entry must be relevant to Exetel's business and be an average of 500 words.
Today is my 300th consecutive blog and winning the bet is in sight with the slight problem that I'm going to take a holiday in early July for a month and both the 'demands' of my holiday 'traveling companion' and some of the very remote areas we will be visiting will pose a serious threat to the very end of this endeavour (but not remotely as serious as me attempting to defer or dumb down the trip itself).
Last week I received a request to provide some information to a person who was about to give an address to IT professionals on the value of blogs in a professional environment, an edited version to protect the enquirer's name and occupation appears below:
"Hi John,
I've been reading your blog for some time, and thought it would be great to share some of your thoughts about the blog with other people working in IT. I'm speaking to a gathering of professionals about blogging later this month.I'm staggered you find the time, and the will to post so regularly, and in such depth.
It seems there's a huge number of programmers, business people, Web devs, database admins, server experts etc. who could be doing the same as you, and posting interesting regular blogs, but mightn't know why they should bother. It might help to get some perspective from someone who's doing it:
- What specific benefits do you get from your blog? Money? Business contacts? Product ideas? Is it just to share ideas?
- Can you give me a specific example?
- What importance do you think blogs by programmers, managers, technical experts (IT pros), will have in the future?
- Do you think yourself and other high profile bloggers are influencing decisions by IT companies, or influencing public opinion? How do you think this will change over time?
I hope you don't mind me being so upfront. I thought it'd be a great opportunity to get some opinion and advice to share with other business people. Hopefully you can share some comments in a reply to this email if you have the time."
I replied in as much detail as I could and I really hope that he does manage to open the eyes of other people to the value of blogging just as an acquaintance from my long past opened my eyes some 10 months ago. I can now say with the actual knowledge of having done it that a daily blog actually does produce the results claimed in the research I read getting on for a year ago now.
(to those kind people who have written to me publicly and privately with words of encouragement over the past 299 ramblings - thank you for showing an interest and your comments have given me a lot of assistance - and more often than some cynics might think - some really good ideas which have helped Exetel).