Wigley and Associates

In my book outline, I list the advantages of a small business blog. Here are two new ones.

Speed
Humans have been able to travel a thousand miles since the whenever it was that we began walking upright. But a thousand miles in two hours? Big impact culturally and economically. Web publishing has been around since the mid 90s but it typically took specialized knowledge and pricey software tools to get content up on a website. Blogging changed that for millions of people. Sit down at any web-connected computer in the world and you can publish whatever’s on your mind within seconds of composing it. Any phone can be used to blog an audio commentary within seconds of hanging up. Any camera-equipped cell phone can be used to blog a photo within seconds of snapping it. And multi-function PDAs like the Treo 600 can do all three: audio, photos, and text.

One idea at a time
A weblog makes it possible to publish one small idea or chunk of infomation at a time. A magazine article, a newspaper column, a paper for a journal, a newsletter — all typically require more comprehensive, flushed-out treatment of an idea, opinion, event. A blog has no such expectation and since each blog posting has its own URL, it actually encourages smaller, single idea posts which then can easily be linked to by site visitors who have their own blogs. I first heard these from Anil Dash, Vice President of Business Development at SixApart when we served on a business blogging panel together for Ad-Tech conference in NYC last fall titled Blogging for Business: Using Weblogs for Marketing and Nano-Publishing. SixApart is the developer of the Movable Type and Typepad blogging platforms.

A couple of weeks ago, the Northfield Enterprise Center held a Marketing for Success seminar. Elizabeth Child, marketing communications and PR consultant, encouraged everyone to use a 30 second “elevator pitch” while mingling with one another during the social hour prior to her presentation.

I’ve done this with another one of my businesses but realized that I hadn’t yet with my weblog work.

So I jotted some notes in my PDA that day but hadn’t done anything with them till this morning when I got a note from a colleague, Jim “Coach” Earley, that he’d posted to his new Trailblazer Coaching Weblog. He invited me to try out the Comment feature of the blog by saying something “… that clarifies what you do.”

My elevator pitch draft came to mind and so I posted it there… and figured it would be good to post it here as well.

“I help small business owners make better use of their websites by showing them how a weblog can bring a voice of authenticity to it. I then coach them in the art of blogging, including using it for ’strategic storytelling’ about their products, services, clients, employees, partners, and community.”

Let me know if you’ve got feedback on how well this captures or misses the essence of what small business blogging is about.

In today’s Star Tribune South section:

Northfield’s top cop, citizens meet online

I moderated the discussion via the Northfield.org ISSUES discussion list, using a software tool called Mailman which is available free to those clients who use Tiger Technologies for their website hosting. See TigerTech’s Mailman page for more info.

I’m hoping to get back on track with the book this week after a lengthy period in which I’ve just been focusing on the day-to-day work with my blogging clients. On Wednesday, I’m meeting with a friend and colleague, Randy Jennings (aka Randoph Jennings), a fellow Northfielder with book publishing experience. He and his family recently returned from a two-year stint in Thailand. His wife, Mary Griep, is Associate Professor of Art at St. Olaf. He had been Director of Corporate Foundation Relations at St. Olaf prior to their trip but his publishing experience goes back to his days at Graywolf Press. There seems to a trend where authors have made the transition from a weblog to a self-published ebook to an Amazon-distributed ebook to a self-published print book to a book deal with an established print publisher. I’m hoping to learn more about this process with Randy and engage him somehow in helping me getting Small Business Blogging out the door. USA Weekend ran a piece yesterday titled Can’t get published? Then just do it yourself but the article didn’t include about the earlier stages of weblogs and ebooks. I Googled the terms “self-publishing” weblogs and found a site called Knowledge Download where, among other things, the founder has a Blog for eBook Self-Publishers. It’s not quite a real weblog because individual posts can’t be linked to but his May 5 post on self-publishing is interesting:

His link to Ochman’s ezine won’t bring up the edition as it’s now in the pay-archives but you can get an idea from the overview on Fern Reiss’ book The Publishing Game: Publish a Book in 30 Days.

A Northfield, MN cancer survivors group, Northfield Survivors, has a new website with a weblog.

Look for Sue Mieska and colleagues to begin blogging Real Soon Now.

This morning I blogged an update on my book, Small Business Blogging.

I’m hoping to get back on track with it after I meet this week with Randolph Jennings (aka Randy Jennings), a friend and colleague with book publishing experience.

Once I get a draft of the book finished, my plan is to distribute it to all my blogging clients and ask them for feedback, of course.

But I really want them to experiment putting the draft of the book to practical use to see if it can help them improve their blogging skills and habits. Stay tuned.

If you want to pay us via credit card, you can now do so via PayPal, linked from the Contact Us page.

If you need a similar feature on your web site, let us know.

We launched the new Citistates Group homepage today, a three-column layout.

It features a main weblog in the middle, with “feeds” from two other associates’ weblogs automatically imported into the right-hand column.

Citistates will likely soon take the additional step of importing one or more syndicated newsfeeds into the lower left column.

This same weblog feed strategy is now being used on the Northfield.org home page, lower right side, where civic blogs hosted by the organization are being automatically imported.

Google deployed (without warning) a new version of Blogger today. It has a new interface and some new features, the most important being weblog comments. See their announcement and explanations.

Six Apart is in the final stages of releasing Movable Type 3.0.

If you’re a client of Wigley and Associates and have questions about either of these developments, Contact Us.