These past few weeks have seen an incredible focus on corporate blogging in the mainstream press, culminating in the May 2nd cover story of BusinessWeek, “Blogs will change your business”. (Given the topic is in part about the immediacy of press via blogging, and is coordinated with their (faux?) blog, the irony of a weekly magazine publishing their May 2nd edition more than a week before that date is not lost on me.) The print-based press is jostling for position in a world where blogs provide news and analysis ahead of them, and many are struggling with subscription models for news. Hugh MacLeod’s recent post about Les Blogs conference this week in Paris was spot on:
There a was session there where journalists were asking a lot of questions. I came away thinking, “Dinosaurs don’t like meteors”.
Although the dinosaur/meteor analogy may prove to be overly dramatic — TV was supposed to kill print media, remember? — plenty of others are also tolling the death knell for print.
More interesting blog fodder, however, is about blogging as a corporate marketing tool, especially for small businesses: we can make a serious marketing impact by blogging about our unique abilities, that is, the work that we love to do and that we do best. I quote an earlier gaping void post:
As a marketing tool, my gut instinct tells me that with blogs, the more expensive, molecular, “niche” and/or “bespoke” your product is, the better.
Although Hugh runs a Savile Row bespoke tailoring firm and I do strategic IT planning and architecture, his comment rings true for me: I deal with technologies and concepts (BPM, EA, BI/BAM) that are still considered niche in many of the large players in my target market (financial services); everything that I do for a customer is bespoke, because I fill in the gaps between the technology and their specific business. And in order to maintain visibility as an expert and an evangelist while keeping committments to my paid customers, I need to do this on my own publication schedule. What better place to do that than a blog?
Consider this my calling card.