What is a Blog, and Why Should I Have One? (Part One); Transcribed from The Entrepreneur Magazine EBiz Radio Show, 4/04/05
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Chris: Welcome to the Entrepreneur Magazine E-Biz radio show. What exactly is a blog and why is everybody talking about them these days? Well, most people know that the term actually stands for weblog, but that doesn’t really tell us all that much, yet blogs are taking the internet by storm. We here at Worldwide Brands are blogging and it works well for our business. It can for yours too no matter what you’re selling or doing on the net. Today Brian Clarke, president of GMD Studios, is with us to talk about blogs.
Chris: Brian, welcome to the show and please tell us as if you were talking to someone who has no idea at all exactly what a blog is.
Brian: Hey, well thanks Chris. I guess there are two ways you could think about blogs. One way would be from the technology point of view where a blog is really a content management system that makes it easy for anyone who doesn’t know anything about HTML to publish whatever thoughts happen to enter their mind on a moment-to-moment basis. Now, taken as a whole, what this means is that there are a lot of people publishing a lot of things that no one is really interested in reading, but there are also some really bright people who have really bright thoughts who normally wouldn’t have had a media platform by which people could have discovered those thoughts. So when people get excited about blogs, they tend to be talking about those interesting thoughts that people have. Whereas, when people are detracting blogs, they tend to be talking about the sort of inane, personal, “I’m talking to five or six of my friends” level of blogs.
Rob: Right. It’s kind of hard to separate the blog from the content.
Brian: Exactly.
Rob: Right Brian.
Brian: So, that’s what makes blogs sort of interesting, especially after the last election because many of the issues that became major play in network news were really stories that were kept alive in a grass roots sort of sense as individuals with no real press credentials or with any particular media outlet having assigned them the work, decided to take on stories and research, and in the process other people discovered what they discovered and eventually journalism discovered what they discovered. And, so your finding there’s this new sort of balance between how journalists discover stories and how bloggers write about issues in a way that attracts those journalists.
Chris: Okay, so Brian, say I had no idea what I was doing and never heard of blogging before, but I wanted to try it, what would I do to set up a blog. How would I go about doing that for my website or my business, whatever I’m doing, or just for personal use?
Brian: Yeah, you know, probably the easiest way for people to get started and start playing around with it would be to use one of the free commercial services like blogger.com…
Chris: Okay.
Brian: …or blogspot.com which are kind of like Geocities home pages or back in the “everyone should have a little homepage era” of the internet…
Rob: /Chris: Right, Mm-Hm.
Brian: …that they’re free, they’re not particularly broad-functioned, but they give you everything you need to be able to get started and experiment with sort of finding your voice. And, I think that’s the biggest thing that people go through as they start blogging, is you find yourself not writing in the voice of the press release or the mission statement, but writing in something that sounds a lot more like the way two people would talk at a conference or the way you would have a telephone conversation with a customer. It’s a much more sort of human voice that, especially on the internet, builds real loyalty for a brand that allows themselves the informalness to speak that way.
Chris: Right. There are so many levels here because what you’re talking about, in speaking informally and also disseminating information, one of the things that we tell people here at Worldwide Brands that’s very important, for example if you’re selling products on the internet or selling information on the internet, is you need to get some legitimacy built up for yourself. You need to get out there and let people know about who you are and give them free information that teaches them things that they can use so they understand that you know what you’re doing, and blogging is a great way to do that, right?
Brian: Absolutely. I can give you a customer support example that actually is for another blogging solution, if you get a little more advanced and want to have a blog that’s sitting on your website, maybe a listener already has a small e-commerce website and they’re thinking, “how do I integrate this kind of thinking into that website?” There are software packages like Movable Type which is at movabletype.org, but they also maintain a blog that tells you what bugs they’re finding, what new features they’re working on, seeks feedback from the people who are using the software on how they should develop it in the future. So, they’re even using their own tool as a way to communicate with customer base in a way that’s far more intimate and regular than say just a monthly email newsletter.
Chris: Right. We put out a weekly newsletter, but we still have a blog, actually with Movable Type and through Revenues which is something developed with you and some partners, is that correct?
Brian: Absolutely, yeah. Revenues is a great example where we’ve taken a number of different CEOs and marketers who are thinking about marketing, especially from a performance marketing end, and given them a platform to be able to think about the news of the day and the announcements of other companies and envision what the future should be for marketing partitioners. And, each of those people blog from their own perspective and their own sort of unique view on the industry because of their company, but when taken as a whole, 40 bloggers doing that starts to look a lot like a news site.
Chris: Yes.
Rob: Right.
Brian: A lot of readers of the site come to it because you get, not just links to the news that’s happening, but commentary, a sort of analysis of what might be spin and what might be wishful thinking and what might be real innovation that everyone should pay attention to.
Rob: And you guys were really innovative with the same type of concept with Indywire, correct, in the independent film industry?
Brian: We just love the whole idea that there’s a really thin line between a reader and a writer…
Rob: Right.
Brian: …and really all the way since 1997/1998, this idea of community publishing, publishing that’s done by a group rather than by an individual or hierarchy, is something that we’ve been excited about. And, I look now at what happens in blogs and you’ve got 5 million people doing that and together they publish something that’s occasionally brilliant, frequently benign, and also inane, but the mixture of all of that is as real the texture of every conversation we have in life. Some are very interesting, some are about, you know, if you were to look today you would see that everyone’s blogging about the news of the day, which includes a lot of the stuff you saw on CNN this morning. So, you find it sort of reflects current culture and reflects current thought, but is totally entrepreneurial groundbreaking opportunity.
Chris: It is. And Brian Clarke, president of GMD Studios, thanks for being here.
Brian: My pleasure.
Chris: Check out GMD’s website for more information at GMDstudios.com. Next more about blogs and what they can do for your e-business with Anthony Perry of blogads.com when the Entrepreneur Magazine E-Biz Show continues on wsradio.com, the worldwide leader in internet talk.
To Read more Transcripts, or Listen to the Audio Archives of this Radio Show on your computer, and to find the Entrepreneur Magazine EBiz Show Radio Resource Center, please go to www.EBizShow.com
