Customer Reviews

Business Blogs: A Practical Guide

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

this book is light on content. It covers the obvious benefits of business blogs but nothing worth the price and the hype.

If you want to know about the nuts and bolts of blogging, but are tired of tekkie talk and advertorial hype, this is an excellent read. The material is practical, useful and, perhaps most importantly, accessable. The book contains quite a lot of information for enhancing a blog and getting the most out of it, both as a communication and a KM tool. The authors also profile a wide spectrum of bloggers, which is as entertaining as it is useful.

In my experience, the best business books are written bottom-up rather than top-down. That is, they start with careful, thorough data sets and build frameworks and conclusions on top of them, rather than concocting a few half-baked but catchy ideas and then selectively finding the data that support them.

"In Business Blogs: A Practical Guide" my friend Bill Ives and his co-author Amanda Watlington have produced an exemplar of the former. This resource encompasses 70 different blogs published by an extremely wide variety of people well beyond the usual "digerati" suspects (including, for example, a small wine retailer in Oklahoma). And, both Bill and Amanda have the breadth of experience to survey this data set and interpret it helpfully. Besides being prolific bloggers themselves, they are well-qualified by prior experience on both the practical and theoretical aspects to comment on different aspects of blogging: why to write, what to write, how to publish.

If you are tired of hype on this important new medium, and want practical advice well-grounded in both data and theory from people qualified to give it, this is probably the best book on the subject yet published. Be forewarned, however; though the writing is crisp and clear, this is not a novel that will pull you along. Rather, it's best read with a bookmark in the table of contents, skimmed at first and then consumed in small chunks. Three kinds of readers especially will find this book useful. Business principals considering how to communicate better, both outside but also within their businesses will find good answers for "What blogging model is best for me, and what techniques and best practices should I employ to make the most of my efforts?" Analysts and other researchers of this new medium will find a pre-assembled data set and a sophisticated yet straightforward exposition of how it all works. Finally, business readers of all stripes (both new to blogs as well as experienced readers) will find this a highly efficient way to filter existing and potential blogs, and be more efficient in consuming what they let through.

(The authors include a CD with the 70 cases of successful bloggers, with over 300 pages of useful examples and lessons learned to go with the guide book.)

This book provides a good introduction to the purpose, creation, care, and feeding of a business blog. The writing is clear and the explanations make sense so you come away with a good understanding of the subject. The case studies add both credibility to the authors' assertions and provide good real-world examples of the value of blogs to a business. We used the book in setting up our company's blog and the book gave us some good ideas that gave our blog a wider applicability. Recommended.

This is a comprehensive introduction and how-to for business bloggers. It has lots of examples, with ideas learned from a diverse collection of case studies. Also at the end of each chapter there's a useful "Key Concepts" summary that pulls out the important points of the chapter.

If you are considering setting up a blog for your business or have one and want to make it better, more useful and more effective, check out this valuable resource.

Bill Ives, who formerly ran Accenture's knowledge management and portals practice, and marketing consultant Amanda Watlington have just released Business Blogging: A Practical Guide. Not surprisingly, given Bill's background, it is an extremely pragmatic guide for businesses looking at the applications of blogging. I strongly recommend it for any organization that is considering implementing blogging, either externally for profile-building or customer relationships, or internally for knowledge management and collaboration. The heart of the book is its 70 case studies of bloggers and their experiences, including individuals, consultants, large companies, and not-for-profit, encompassing an extremely diverse range of objectives and design parameters. Every organization should at least consider how they might apply blogs. For those in this situation this book should be considered on a par on quality and value with the ultra-expense reports from the tech analysts - just with a lot lower sticker-price!