Wigley and Associates

In the September 04 issue of Priority Magazine, I’m interviewed for their Ask the Experts column on What in the World is a Blog? (And a tip-of-the-blog bat to Inga Beyer with Corridor Business Journal in Iowa City, IA for the alert on the article’s appearance.)

Another newer approach is to create a so-called Weblog, a portion of your existing Web site where you can easily add information related to your business. “A Weblog is a piece of technology on your Web site that allows you to update the site without using a webmaster,” says Griff Wigley, Wigley & Associates (www.smallbusinessblogging.com), Northfield, Minn. Wigley, who helps small companies develop Weblogs, says that blogging is becoming increasingly popular among small-business owners. “They use it to talk in their own words about their employees, customers and products.”

Minnesota Public Radio: Campaigning on the Web is becoming standard procedure

August 17, 2004
State Rep. Ray Cox, R-Northfield, and his DFL challenger David Bly, have remarkably similar Web sites. Both prominently feature blogs (short for Web log, an online diary of sorts) in which they discuss their campaigning and political philosophies. And both sites were designed by Griff Wigley, a Northfield online entrepreneur.

“I approached Ray Cox two years ago when he was elected,” Wigley recalled. “I approached him first on his construction company site and said, ‘Your site sucks.’”

Once the business site was updated, Wigley convinced Cox that he needed a Web site for his political activities as well. The result was a new Web site where the first-term representative discusses his ideas and, these days, his campaign.

Bly’s site does much the same.

Unlike campaign sites whose content doesn’t seem to change much, Wigley said blogs allow a candidate to be heard.

“My mantra is that a Weblog can really be a voice of authenticity,” Wigley said.

Both sites also feature an easy way for visitors to donate money to the campaign.

The two candidates’ blogs are part of a larger effort at online civic engagement in Northfield. Wigley also is behind Northfield.org, a community-based blog, and even helps the city’s police chief run a blog.

I’ve added links to this excerpt. Some, but not all, were included in a sidebar to the article on the MPR web site.

MarketingProfs has a new article by BL Ochman titled Ten Companies That Missed Great Blog Opportunities.

It doesn’t matter whether companies are big or small — many are missing opportunities to integrate blogs into the marketing mix. The following are 10 examples of sites, campaigns and companies that are crying out for blogs. With blogs, they could have a dialog with customers, sell product, and also have some fun.

More blog coverage of Eden Prairie’s bloggers, City Manager Scott Neal and Police Chief Dan Carlson. This time it’s Toby Bloomberg’s Diva Markeing weblog, in a post titled Blogs…All About People.

Yesterday I had the privilege of exchanging several eMails with Scott Neal, the City Manager for Eden Prairie, MN. Scott has to be one of the most innovative city managers in the country� he’s been writing a public official blog for Eden Prairie since March 2003. Oh and the Chief of Police, Dan Carlson, blogs also. I loved both Scott’s and Chief Carlson�s blogs. Might sound a bit strange, but I felt a happy connection with this town in Minnesota that I discovered through its blogs.

I’d like to occasionally highlight recent blog posts that illustrate some key aspects of my upcoming book. They’ll likely take the form of email feedback that I’ve given to the blog authors. Eden Praire, MN Police Chief Dan Carlson had a post this week titled More Unsung Heroes about some of his administrative employees. In that post, he wrote:

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Eden Prairie Police Reserve Unit as some unsung heros of the EPPD. Well, there’s lots of folks around here who don’t get the recognition they deserve and I’m going to try and give them some exposure. Today I want you to meet the EPPD Records Unit. I caught up with them this morning at their AM briefing and caught them working on a group project.

I wrote to him:

Dan, An often overlooked key ingredient to a post like this is it’s currency. It’s a compelling blog post because it’s almost real-time. You could do this sort of employee affirmation in a monthly newsletter and it would be fine. You could do even blog this a month later, minus the sentence “I caught up with them this morning at their AM briefing and caught them working on a group project.” But the fact that you posted this to your blog shortly after noon and you’d just visited them earlier that day makes it a more compelling story for the reader. [Cool. This just happened! The chief's blog is almost a window to his world.] So your quick blog post, with the photo, was right on target. You also did more than just affirm these people. You educated the public on the importance of their work re: accuracy. People are more receptive to absorbing little educational lessons like this when there are real people in the story. You might want to consider adding to the storytelling a bit next time… tell about a time when the accuracy or lack of it in the records dept of your dept (or another dept) was the decisive factor in a criminal case, eg, “Two years ago we had a case here in EP where a guy was charged… ” etc.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The blog busters: “Mighty corporations ignore the whispers on web diaries at their peril. Sean Hargrave reports on how the big brands are logging on to save face”

They were once seen as the preserve of the geek, but nowadays personal opinion and diary pages – weblogs or ‘blogs’ – are so powerful that huge corporations are taking an interest. The sites that started as observational home pages for enthusiasts have become so powerful that they are starting a new industry of blog monitoring in which media companies scour the net to advise brands on how their name is being talked about online, away from the traditional newspaper and broadcast media sites.

Blogging for Business: “With readers flocking to their Web postings, execs are finding blogs useful for plugging not just their products but their points of view.”

An interesting piece on how executives of large corporations and other organizations are discovering the advantages of a weblog.

The business world’s posting pioneers say blogging helps them network, boost sales, and even lobby — at a fraction of the cost of traditional media. “There’s no fundamental difference between giving a keynote speech in Shanghai in front of 30,000 people and doing a blog read by several million people,” Schwartz says. A wider audience isn’t the only potential advantage a blog offers over a speech. A writer can tailor his message to a particular audience on a moment’s notice. Blogs also give execs a chance to tell their side of the story without interference from the media or analysts.

In July’s Eden Prairie Sun Current:

Police chief starts weblog
Eden Prairie Police Chief Dan Carlson has joined in one of the World Wide Web’s latest crazes � the weblog. Carlson’s weblog entered cyberspace in early June on the city’s Web site, joining City Manager Scott Neal as Eden Prairie city department heads who “blog” to their constituencies… Neal’s blog has covered topics such as clean air politics, rising waters and pollution concerns at Riley Lake. He said he started his blog in March 2003 after the idea was suggested to him by Griff Wigley, a former colleague in Northfield, Minn., where Neal had been city administrator before coming to Eden Prairie in 2002.