Business Blogging, as with Other Business Activities, Needs Persistence
At a business breakfast I attended last Wednesday, the speaker was a legend of Australian business, Bob Ansett, who as his website says built Budget Rent a Car from scratch to a multimillion dollar enterprise. And in the process he became famous in Australia as a business innovator. Knowing of him and something of his story, I’d been looking forward to the event and was not disappointed. I took pages of notes.
Of the many gems of anecdote and advice for businesspeople, one I noted in particular was about the importance of persistence once you introduce something into your business. The example was that for years, at the end of every month he wrote a letter, personally addressed, to every member of staff, and had it sent to their home address. This clearly made a big impression and former employees would remark to him that after they left Budget they would wonder what was missing in their new job and one day would realise that it was that they didn’t get a personal note every month from their new boss.
His footnote comment on this was that if you start something like that, you have to keep on doing it.
As is true in blogging for business.
In one of his series of information+commentary-loaded posts from the Web 2.0 conference just completed, Tris Hussey reports on comments by Jeanette Gibson of Cisco on how that company uses blogging. The paragraph that caught my attention as the Web 2.0 correlate of Bob Ansett’s approach to monthly letters to staff was:
Jeanette has made, perhaps, the most important point here. A blog is a time commitment. If you start, you need to blog regularly. If you can’t do it alone, get a team. If you’re a CEO, set expectations on what posting frequency to expect. Jim Turner and I see this so often. Businesses who would like to blog, but just didn’t realize that you just have to keep doing it!
And then keep on doing it.
As Darren Rowse, who is not short of readers, said over a year ago:
It takes time - It may not be what you want to hear, but it unless you’re a genius, extremely lucky or have an amazing new idea, it takes time to build a readership. So settle in for the long haul and muscle up some patience.
Not peculiar to blogging. As Bob Ansett’s comment shows, it’s just business.
Tags: BlogWorld-Expo, Bob-Ansett, business-blogging, Cisco, Jeanette-Gibson, persistence, Tris-Hussey, Web 2.0Related Stories
POSTED IN: Corporate, General, Policy, Small Business
1 opinion for Business Blogging, as with Other Business Activities, Needs Persistence
Tris Hussey
Apr 21, 2007 at 9:12 am
Thanks for the link Des. I don’t know how many blogs I’ve seen…including some of my own…where they start like gangbusters, but then fizzle out when reality sets in.
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