Wigley and Associates

Blogs Will Change Your Business: Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later

The second paragraph of the piece:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)

For an excellent critique of the BW story, see BlogAds founder Henry Copeland’s post Business Week predicts corporate takeover of blogs.

Village on the Cannon is a condominium development for seniors in downtown Northfield, Minnesota.

We’ve been revamping their website and last week, helped them launch their news and events weblog.

Kari Sobeck, Nathan Woodworth, and Colleen Petters are the blog authors.

Village on the Cannon (VOC) is one of two senior housing developments by Collegeville Communities, a company of the Collegeville Development Group. The other is University Village Winona. We’ve begun work on revamping that site, as well as the Collegeville Communities site.

We’ve begun revamping the website for The Kuyper Group, a realtor serving the Northfield, Rice County, and southern Twin Cities area.

We’ve included a weblog on their homepage. Look for blog posts from Bob Kuyper and Kate Kuyper real soon now.
The Kuyper Group also uses the domain names northfieldrealestate.com and ricecountyrealestate.com. Those domain names point to the main site, though that might change in the near future.

The New Voices project at the Univ. of Maryland’s School of Journalism (J-Lab) has a feature on Northfield.org this month titled From Town Blog to Town Hall by Nathan Alderman.

“The Civic Blogosphere Project is one of the first efforts by a community news site to actively recruit and train public officials as bloggers.”

On Monday, April 11th, I’ll be on the The Entrepreneur Hour Radio Show on WBZT 1230 AM out of South Florida with my clients, Leif and Deb Knecht of Knecht’s Nurseries and Landscaping.

The show is hosted by Suzanne Mulvehill, MBA and president of Profit Strategies, Inc.

They stream the radio show live and archive it for later listening, too. The show airs at 11:00 am CT.

Here’s a link to photo I took of Leif and Deb with a customer at the recent Northfield Home and Garden Show.

Blogger has been having troubles since early afternoon yesterday.

But I see they just posted the fix on Blogger Status:

“If you are experiencing problems loading Blogger.com, please try clearing the cookies in your browser.”

It worked for me.

Susannah Gardner’s new book is out: Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies, “… a book for business professionals looking for advice and solutions for business blogging.”

I found her weblog companion to the book via a weblog by Hugh at gapingvoid. UK Councillor Andrew Brown pointed me to a recent post there about fake blogs - pure marketing meltdown denial — which I’ve not heard much about.

I must admit, my eyes tend to glaze over when the talk turns to business blogging that’s heavy on the PR/marketing. But these two blogs and the book might have the right approach. I’ve ordered the book.

I’ve helped author Mike Tikkanen launch a weblog for his new book Invisible Children.

BBC: Google to start ‘video blogging’

Forbes.com: How Videoblogs Will Change Newsgathering

New York Times: Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings

Client Len Witt has begun experimenting with vlogs on his PJNet.org site. See his March 30 post.

I’m waiting for Serious Magic to release their $100 Vlog It!, “The World’s First Video Blogging Software.”

Jeffrey Hill works at the Normandy Business School in Le Havre, France. He’s also pursuing an online MBA and has chosen weblogs as his dissertation topic, “…more specifically, I’m hoping to investigate the attitudes, perceptions, practices and motivations of business bloggers.”

He interviewed me last month and has the text of the interview, Interview with Griff Wigley, blogging coach up on his weblog which he calls The Voice of the Blog. It’s actually a pretty darn good interview transcript about small business blogging. Rereading it today reminded me that I’m behind on my own business blogging. Oops.

See Jeffrey’s other interviews, including the one with my client Ray Cox, owner of Northfield Construction Company.