Frequently Asked Questions about Blogging

If we start a company blog, when can we expect a return on our investment?

The principal investment for blogs is a significant amount of employee time. The concern arises especially during the first year, when the audience may be small.

Note that we use the adverbs “gradually” and “eventually” repeatedly when discussing the benefits of corporate blogging; we’re not talking about a quick fix.

Some business activities that produce no quickly identifiable return on investment are universally considered to be valuable — press releases, Web site, corporate brochure, industry conferences, charitable contributions, and community service, for example.

Why not just have a video blog?

Quite a few people ask about having video blogs instead of "regular" blogs. Maybe video blogging seems easier because it doesn’t involve writing.

if you’re going to have a video blog that looks professional, the human and technological commitment is considerable, much more than for a written blog.

We suggest that you select at least five corporate or professional video blogs that you feel are helpful to the sponsoring organization, and view them two or three times a week for a year. Before that year is over, you’ll know whether a video blog is right for your company, and you’ll have plenty of ideas.

Anyone with a camera can start getting some experience by shooting video interviews with product developers, consultants, whomever you've got. Go for interesting content and respectable production values.

Then upload your videos to YouTube and send links to yours friends and colleagues. Ask them for constructive evaluations of and suggestions for your videos.

The bottom line: yes, think about a video blog, but not until you have proven to yourselves that you can establish and maintain a “regular” blog for at least a year.

What is RSS? What is Podcasting?

RSS — Really Simple Syndication — an Internet technology which allows you not just to link to a Web page, but to subscribe to it — you can be automatically notified every time that Web page (or certain parts of it) change. The notification is not by email, but you use a “feed reader” to see what’s new.

Because this is becoming so important, the new Internet Explorer 7 has a built-in feed reader; see our article "Using the IE 7 Feed Reader" which we posted on July 20, 2006.

The evolution of accessing information on the Web has so far had three stages:

• Surfing (1994)

• Searching (1998)

• Subscribing (21st Century)

Podcasting is audio content that is delivered via an RSS feed presenting a downloadable or streaming file (often mp3). It’s similar to RSS.

Like RSS, podcasting means that the user has immediate access to syndicated Web site content. But podcasting means that the content is an audio file instead of something you can read on your computer monitor.

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Allied Internet Productions, Inc.
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