Book Review: Blogging to Drive Business

Many thanks to Pearson Education for sending me two recent books about blogging for review. The first of these is Blogging to Drive Business by Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt. It seems that Eric has written the more business and strategy-​​centric chapters, and Rebecca the more prac­tical inform­a­tion about blogging.

This is a slim volume – 162 pages which includes a lot of pictures, in the form of grey­scale screen­grabs. It cur­rently costs just £7.99 on Amazon UK, though it’s £15.99 if you buy it in a shop. The book is aimed at both senior exec­ut­ives thinking about what a company’s strategy ought to be for a blog and those tasked with managing the exe­cu­tion. It would also be useful for sole-​​owners and small busi­nesses looking to expand their online offering, though the text assumes that you’re part of a larger organisation.

It’s well-​​written and contains lots of examples. Unusually for a book about the Internet, it’s also pretty-​​much up-​​to-​​date, appearing to have been finished late last Autumn. The case-​​studies, while uni­formly North American, are mainly fresh and the authors aren’t afraid of cri­ti­cising com­panies and organ­isa­tions whose blogging strategies seem to have gone awry. The inform­a­tion and advice it gives is sound and prac­tical and is careful to remain focused on meeting business object­ives like more sales, better customer rela­tions and reduced support costs.

So an overall recom­mend­a­tion from me, if you are inter­ested in the idea of having a blog for your business but are not entirely sure why or how to start. But I do have a caveat…

The book is trying to do two things at once: provide a stra­tegic dir­ec­tion and man­age­ment inform­a­tion for cor­porate blogging and give a prac­tical guide to choosing plat­forms, deciding policies and creating content. It’s already really thin, so this means that it doesn’t provide much detail on any par­tic­ular aspect. For example, it talks about some of the pros and cons between dif­ferent plat­forms such as Moveable Type and WordPress, and hosted solu­tions such as WordPress.com, blogger and typepad. But since it can only spend 50 words on any par­tic­ular platform, and there’s a redundant half-​​page picture of each of these, you’re left with ‘there are lots of dif­ferent plat­forms, each of which have some advant­ages’ as the overall message. There’s also some mis­in­form­a­tion in this section, such as: “[because it owns the platform] Google place[s] Blogger blogs higher in Google search results.” See, for example, Andy Beard coun­tering this. The sections on business strategy are sim­il­arly starved of detail or any the­or­et­ical under­pin­ning for some of the asser­tions made.

In fairness, most business books are a bit like this: thin. They aim to give exec­ut­ives enough inform­a­tion to make some reas­on­able decisions, but not so much that they get bogged down in the minutiae or put off by the bulk. IMHO, though, readers would have been better served by choosing between two books: one for exec­ut­ives about strategy and one for the person managing the blog.

To give you an overview, this is my two-​​minute version of the book:

Ch1: blogs are a rising media force and they can bring cus­tomers and poten­tial cus­tomers to your website. Also good for search.

Ch2: get people to read your blog through integ­rated mar­keting, tools like RSS, other social media plat­forms and by providing useful inform­a­tion and good service.

Ch3: there are lots of dif­ferent types of blog – so choose one that best serves your business. It might end up being a tumble-​​log or podcast, for example.

Ch4: be useful to your readers and responsive to comments. Take comments on board and deal with cri­ti­cism fairly and calmly.

Ch5: use your business’ expertise to find topics to write about. And why you might want an internal blog for staff as well.

Ch6: get people who are enthu­si­astic about the subject matter to do the content. This will probably involve the Marketing depart­ment, but also others like R&D and freel­an­cers. Make it sound authentic.

Ch7: get eyeballs [sic] for your blog with good writing and content, a readable design, SEO and con­ven­tional mar­keting techniques.

Ch8: getting mul­ti­media content onto your blog isn’t that hard. You can use other people’s – if you get per­mis­sion or it’s CC licensed – or you can create your own. [This chapter is one that par­tic­u­larly suffers from the word limits: making a podcast – get audacity – open source music here – put it up on iTunes.]

Ch9: get ready for the future by using semantic features and maybe mash-​​ups. Oh, and mobile. Oops — we’ve run out of words.

The second book is Tris Hussey’s Create Your Own Blog. It’s a bit thicker, so expect that review in a week or so.

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