Do You Share Your Knowledge?
(www.businessandblogging.com) One thing that holds many small businesses back from business blogging is the fear that they will give away valuable proprietary knowledge and therefore harm their business.
The truth is, most of the time, sharing knowledge on a business blog does not harm business. In fact, the general information that you share on your blog is already probably already available online.
If your customers and potential customers don’t get the information from you, then where will they get it. Answer: probably from your competitor.
Let me illustrate this concept of sharing with a recent experience from my own life.
Last week a neighbor knocked on our door late one afternoon and asked if he could borrow some gasoline for his lawn mower. (No, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. Where I live, we are already mowing our lawns.)
Now, we keep a spare can of gasoline in the garage. Rather than sharing, however, my first impulse was to hoard the gasoline and turn the neighbor away.
My husband, on the other hand, demonstrated true Web 2.0 thinking in his willingness to share gasoline. He said to me, “give him the whole can.”
Still worrying, I said, “What if we don’t ever get the gasoline can back. We’ll need gasoline later this week for our own mower.”
In the true spirit of sharing my husband said, “I’m not even worried about that, but if we don’t get it back, no harm done.”
Sure enough, about 9:00 p.m. that evening we heard someone knocking on the door. It was the neighbor again, returning the gasoline can. He thanked me for it again.
By sharing, we built up some good will in the neighborhood and that neighbor is much more likely to help us if we should need it.
I think that business blogging works somewhat the same way.
Image Source: www.sxc.hu
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POSTED IN: Small Business
3 opinions for Do You Share Your Knowledge?
Pablo Barrientos
Apr 3, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I totally agree with this article. It is always better for web users to consume our information instead of from our competitors.
Laura Spencer
Apr 4, 2008 at 5:44 am
Thanks Pablo. Many businesses think that if they don’t share something, it won’t become known. That’s not the case.
Blogging, Sharing, Creativity, and Collaboration
Apr 17, 2008 at 7:27 am
[…] the beginning of the month, I posted here about the importance of sharing information on your business blog. The post dealt mainly with the fear that some businesses have about sharing information, and how […]
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