Be Persistent - Or Not
The summer of 2000 I started my first corporate blog. A few weeks later I went to Cannes in France for vacation. 3-4 times per week I left the beautiful beach to go to an internet café. Before travelling to the Riviera I had prepared posts and saved them at a server I could reach from everywhere. I continued to publish to the joy of all my readers. Well, to some of them. I guess I had about 20 readers. Most of them on vacation too...
Looking back that was overambitious. But that kind of persistence was effective in the long run. The audience grew into thousands. So I wouldn't recommend any other strategy: Be persistent.
And here comes the "Or not". This year I wont follow my own advice and example. I'm just going to relax. The prerogative of a small business owner, I guess. Please don't ask me to explain this logically ;-)
Some interesting summer reading:
Bloggers Suffer Burnout: Relevant in a business perspective too. See Martin Lessards comment to Discussing Blogs With Sceptics, on the risk of blogs consuming time bloggers could use in a more profitable way.
What is it going to take for (corporate) blogging to become a job skill?, Heather at Microsoft asked a couple of weeks ago. The next question, I think, is "How will bloggers be rewarded?". Gerry McGovern, speaking about web content in general, has for a long time argued that reward is necessary for content contributors. Will the happy days of enthusiastic bloggers spending nights publishing end? Or is that enthusiasm a basic condition for blogging? We all know that the corporate Webs started with geeks in the basement, and look what has happened...
Global PR Blog Week 1.0: I have already referred to this event. It looks promising and it would have been fun to participate if it hadn't been in the middle of the summer.
The Wisdom of Blogs: "If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's 'collective intelligence' will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally." Blogger are a wise crowd, Blogger.com claims.
I'll start posting again end of July/beginning of August. I'm not totally disconnected so you can contact me if you like. Have a great summer.
