CT Biz Blogs

While I did write briefly about how to subscribe to a blog, I didn’t really touch on why you should be reading blogs.

You should be reading blogs for several business reasons: to see what others in your field are saying; to see how other businesses are using blogs; and to keep tabs on what is being said about you, your company, and your products.

In the Cluetrain Manifesto, the authors state that “markets are conversations.” And blogging is one way to start a conversation with your clients and customers, present and prospective. But if you’re new to blogs, you may not realize that there’s a conversation going on already.

The best thing to do is to participate in the conversation. But at the very least, you should be listening to the conversation. In some fields the conversation is more advanced than others, but in just about every field it is going on at some level. People are talking about their work, or their fields, or their experiences as a customer. And it may be your company they’re talking about. You need to know what’s being said.

One well-known example in the blogging world is that of the lock company Kryptonite,(link is to a blog post) and the storm that erupted over the discovery that its popular bicycle lock could be picked with a Bic pen. The resounding silence from the company made it look clueless and inept.

The way to keep track of the conversation is through searches and RSS (webfeeds). With feeds, you can create a search and then subscribe to it with a feed reader, so that any new mentions will automatically come to your attention. The specialized blog search engine Technorati is one place to find conversations, and you can build a “watch list” of all the terms you want. Google also now has a blog search. For example, I have a subscription in my online feed reader, Bloglines, to the Google blog search on CTBizBlogs. There isn’t a lot of conversation going on yet, since this is still a new blog, but I’m ready!