To Blog or Not to Blog. That is the title of an article I wrote for the winter 2011 edition of Valve magazine. Being a blogger, you might expect my answer to be yes–and you’d be correct. I gave it an emphatic yes. Here’s my brief rationale for this affirmative position:
Most of your wisdom is trapped in the inboxes of other people, never to be seen by a wider circle. This wider circle not only benefits others, it benefits you because it builds your thought leadership.
In the article, I reference a Seth Godin & Tom Peters on blogging YouTube video with a quote from “management guru” Tom Peters:
No single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging.
To me, that’s pretty powerful.
If either Tom Peters’ statement or mine has swayed you, then I offer some suggestions on how to proceed, either with an external blog, or one inside your company’s firewall. If external, the challenges are more in gaining approval. If internal, it’s finding a friend in IT or going into DIY mode and asking for forgiveness later. Ultimately, you have to know your organization’s culture to understand the risks to this approach.
Toward the close of the article, I offer tips on what to post about, blogging frequency, and the importance of persistence. Thought leadership does not happen in a day, but rather occurs over months and years of persistent expertise sharing.
If you’ve ever considered being a blogger, give the article a read, and let me know what points you’d add or things I didn’t but should have addressed.
