Microsoft’s Betsy Aoki and Eileen Brown gave an excellent Chalk’n’Talk session that was well attended and enjoyed a moderate amount of interaction. This session was preceeded by Betsy’s session about MS IT Microsoft’s Blogging Engine – Construction and Delivery, blogged about here.
Being a Chalk’n’Talk, slide content was limited and was required merely to spark discussion.
Here are some of the things we discussed, with my notes underneath:
What’s a Blog/Why Blog?
Inside/Outside Reach
Customers talk back
Blogs are a great way for your customer to talk to you – but make sure that you don’t become their personal support specialist!
Remember no “Flogs”
This made me chuckle: the guys over at http://www.falafelsoft.com/ use flogs instead of blogs!
Present yourself as resource and aggregator
How do blogs differ from forums/newsgroups/chats?
I’m not sure if we discussed this to completion, I’ll need to check the audio. However, for me, I blog because:
- RSS/Atom feed creation is free.
- RSS/Atom provides an easy subscription mechanism for my readers
- I can access my blog from anywhere, as TechEd’s wireless connectivity demonstrated
- no FTP is required, which means I could blog from behind a firewall
- it [the blog] pushes content out
- content keywords add Google fodder that promotes ranking and facilitates easier searching
- content can be short and focussed
- there’s much less noise than nntp
Does blog platform matter: yes and no
Consider small audiences and Steve Ballmer: who do YOU want to reach?
“Leverage the power of the small audience”, Betsy Aoki – good quote: you may only have 20 folks reading your blog, but if they are your 20 best customers…
What to Post
Consider “ego searches,” post longevity
X-casting and alternative delivery mechanisms
Link generosity and becoming a human Aggregator
Corporate credibility
This topic reminded me of this and this.
Fighting comment spam
Gaining readers: promotion/tagging/search discoverability
Eileen noted that a simple spelling mistake in one of her posts resulted in a huge number of hits.
Spiders and Bugs
An audio recording of this session can be found here: http://podcasts.msmobiles.com/?p=73 .
Further information:
IT learns to tune out blogging’s white noise
Blogcasts: Coming soon to a computer near you
Microsoft uses blogs to reach out to IT community
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