John Linton
........what has writing a daily blog achieved?
1,008 days ago I sat in a London restaurant with an old colleague from my time at IBM and shared our experiences over the many, many years since we had last met. Over the previous 12 months we had exchanged a few emails about organising a get together with some of the more memorable people we had shared those formative 10 years or so of our respective business lives with but, apart from those few words, had not communicated with each other for the better part of 30 years. We had a memorable meal (not hard to do in London) and trawled over our various experiences since we last met. He had been far more successful than I had having joined the then virtually unknown Sony Corporation from IBM and stayed there for the remainder of his working life until our meeting having continued to become more and more successful in that now gigantic company over the years.
One of the things that came up in conversation was the use of 'blogging' by businesses. I had vaguely heard the word but was unfamiliar with what it actually was or what relevance it had to business of any size. He related his personal experiences and those of the very senior executives in his and other large organisations and I became intrigued by the concept. A day or so after the lunch he sent me two longish articles from two American university magazines outlining detailed studies in to the use of blogging in business. I called him to thank him for the information and said I was so impressed that I was thinking of writing a blog when I got back to Australia. He cautioned me with the results of various 'senior' executives he knew who had the same enthusiasm but barely wrote half a dozen entries before giving it up. I didn't lose my enthusiasm and, probably spurred by my innate competitiveness, said I would do it daily for a year and we agreed a bet of a bottle of wine of my choice to a bottle of Scotch of his choice if I could actually do that. (we also agreed on a price limit).
Having won that bet well over 18 months ago I have continued to write a daily blog because all of the benefits to Exetel that the magazine articles said would accrue have done exactly that in exactly the ways the authors of those articles said they would. The discipline to write 600 plus words on average each morning (or other time if you are travelling in countries with different time zones) has never been an issue (though Annette may well disagree) and as I have never aspired to write anything other than what I am thinking about at the time the lack of 'subject matter' has also seldom been an issue. Over the past two and a half or so years I have learned to write towards specific 'agendas' which was heavily recommended by both articles and something I may have intuitively done anyway.
I have been very grateful for the very large number of people who have written very positively to me since July 2007 and I found those comments very encouraging. I always wondered why there was a much larger number of 'people' who wrote to me so negatively, some in unbelievably abusive terms. Why, if they disliked what I wrote, did they bother to read it in the first place - let alone reading it day after day? I put it down to the rapidly failing mental health of so many people who live in this country who, for one reason or another, are allowed to live too much of their lives without adequate supervision or sedation.
Why did I, contrary to all advice, now decide to ask non-Exetel users to make a donation to Exetel's wild life projects as a condition of reading whatever may, or may not, be written in the future? The simple answer is because our wildlife needs as much money as concerned people can find to have any chance of arresting its catastrophic decline and I figured that some of the people who read this blog because they get some benefit from the information I share wouldn't mind paying a small amount for continuing to receive that benefit. I also figured that it would significantly reduce/eliminate the lunatics who write me their crazed missives.
For those Exetel customers who contribute the majority of readers as far as I can tell, I will continue to try and write about the changes, vicissitudes and other issues that confront people foolish enough to want to make a small, but positive, difference to the Australian communications industry and how they deal with the constant failures in which such attempts almost always result.
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