John Linton
A combination of two 'events' caused me to think about the value of blogs generally and this one particularly. The events were a comment in an email I received yesterday that I gave away too much information about Exetel in this blog that would benefit 'competitors' to the detriment of Exetel (based on something we had been discussing) and the fact that this is my 800th consecutive daily musing/rant - which is far longer than the original year I had intended to write for to win the bet I made when I was first introduced to the value of a 'CEO' writing a daily blog about the business he is involved in.
Over that time I have read a number of articles (in English, US, Canadian and German publications) on the pros and cons of writing a regular business blog and the overwhelming view has been that it is a good idea but that the demands of doing so are beyond the abilities and time available to any senior business executive and that none of the authors of the various articles could find examples of any senior executive of any reasonable sized company who had actually written a blog at all. Their conclusions were that the logistics/time/travel constraints were too great for any senior executive to write a regular blog at a greater frequency than fortnightly and they could find no actual examples of that in the research they did in writing their articles.
I always find such articles surprising because the reason I started writing a blog was the analysis and recommendations published in two US academic journals which both, in very different ways, made a very strong argument for the overall value to a business of a 'CEO' sharing his business and other thoughts on a regular basis via a blog. Both articles made the point that the more frequent the blog entries were made the greater overall value to the company and both articles made the point that a daily blog would be the most beneficial and listed their reasons for reaching that conclusion. I never printed those articles and via mishaps to the notebooks and data sticks I have used over the past two years I no longer have the references to them.
What I do have is over two years of personal experience of writing a daily blog and those experiences have emphatically proven what those two articles stated without a shadow of a doubt. In pure commercial terms Exetel is better off by over $A1,000,000 EACH YEAR in terms of better pricing we have obtained from or via suppliers who read this blog. We have also added products and services to what we offer that we would never have done without the direct contacts we have received from people who have read something I wrote and then got in touch with us. In pure dollar terms this particular blog has repaid the time it takes to write it at a rate of approximately $A2,500 per hour. And that is just using actual offers that can be discretely and pretty exactly valued.
There is no real way of quantifying the value of the, literally thousands, of other suggestions and observations that have been made over the past 2+ years but over 500 individuals have written to me saying they signed up for an Exetel service (either for themselves or their employer) because they read something that impressed them in the blog. Similarly it has been a very useful way of communicating with Exetel customers about general aspects of Exetel's business and the data communications marketplaces generally. Over 10,000 individual customers have sent me comments and/or suggestions over the time the blog has been published.
So I think I am in a sensible position to state, based on real 'evidence' that a business blog very definitely benefits a business - I don't believe there is a shadow of a doubt about that statement.
The question then only becomes how much effort does it take to write a blog each day - to that question there can be no answer because, of course, it totally depends on the individual that sets out to do it. My own experiences are that it takes an average of 30 - 40 minutes each day to think up a 'topic' and then write 800 - 1,000 words on that topic. I do it, usually, first thing in the morning after reading the data communications media from the US, UK and Australia which almost always generates a 'topic' or at least a rant. I do this at home over a cup of something before leaving for the office and when I'm away I do it in the late afternoons because of time differences and the effect of jet lag in the mornings. While it can be regarded as a discipline it isn't really - it just uses time that would otherwise be 'wasted'.
I don't know how much longer I will write a daily blog because I am conscious that there is only a limited amount of things one person has to share in terms of business and its associated vagaries. I have managed to date by making no pretensions about any value or insight my ramblings might provide but just to adhere to the title of the blog - my thoughts at any given time about Exetel and what is involved in keeping a small business 'alive'.