I started blogging several months ago, primarily because of the buzz around blogging and my desire to learn more about the technology. I had already started following some blogs and after getting feedback from others, I decided to give it a try. After a few weeks, I was hooked. People still ask me why I blog so I figured I would take the opportunity to spell it out and talk about some of the positive results I’ve seen so far. Here goes:
1. As we grow our business here at Excedent, I believe it is important that I communicate my thoughts and ideas to those around me, including my management team, my employees, our customers, vendors and those that might do business with us at some point in the future. I also encourage my family, friends and peers to read along as well.
Blogging gives me time to organize my thoughts, put them online and allow others to read them as they please. In addition to providing these different groups with my thoughts, it ends up saving me a lot of time because I don’t have to repeat myself to multiple people, in multiple emails, etc. And, it allows people to choose to read my blog – I don’t have to risk annoying people by sending out emails every time I have something to publish.
2. I see a bright future for RSS and blogging. I think RSS is going to change the way that the media communicates to their audiences and I also believe it gives those outside the media circles the opportunity to communicate their thoughts to a broader audience. For example, I subscribe to several blogs that I read on a daily basis. About half of them are content feeds from traditional media sources, but the other half are from CEOs and industry executives. I learn a lot from both.
3. As the CEO of an email hosting company, I foresee the convergence of RSS and email on many different fronts. I believe that RSS solves a lot of problems that email is faced with today, spam being one of them. I believe that over time, we’ll see RSS and email converge and using the technology as much as possible helps me to gain an understanding of where the future is heading.
4. While I try not to use my blog simply as a marketing vehicle for my company, it does give me an opportunity to publish some exciting news and announcements about the business and some of our accomplishments.
5. One other thing to note… after starting my personal blog, I immediately realized the impact blogging can have inside of our business. For example, not only do some of my employees read my blog, but we’ve also started a blog internally. This is a secure, password protected blog, but it allows our management team to communicate all types of information throughout the company. Product updates, pricing changes, general announcements, etc.
Then employees can post comments and interact. It’s a great way to communicate internally and it gives everyone a reference to go back to if they need to look up some information. Our blog is actually becoming an internal knowledgebase for our employees and the feedback so far has been great.
So, in terms of what I’ve gotten from it… well, again, it gives me the opportunity to organize my thoughts and communicate them to all of the different parties I mentioned above, all at once. It helps me to build myself and my company as industry experts and leaders, which is important in helping us to achieve of our lofty goals. Several people have found my blog – for example, I have made several contacts simply from them contacting me after finding my blog.
In fact, in the last month, I have interviewed two people that read my blog and then contacted me about job openings at Excedent. We’re going to hire at least one of them. I encourage my sales people to use my blog to send it around to prospective customers that want to learn more about our company, our direction and our leaders.
We’ve been raising capital lately and I’ve sent my blog out to potential investors that want to learn more about me and the company. Perhaps more than anything, my blog helps me to build credibility as the CEO of a young company and helps to drive my thoughts and ideas into the world of people that want to learn about them.
There is a lot happening on the Internet these days. As I’ve mentioned before, it feels like 1999 again with all of the startups launching, all of the M&A; activity taking place, and all of the big boys launching something new and cool every other day. With all of this type of stuff going on combined…
It’s no surprise to anyone in our industry that the email hosting world is a competitive place. I’ve mentioned before how competitive of a space it is, how the big boys can overshadow the market, and reasons why I believe we can survive (and win) with such thriving competition. But now, things are moving faster than even…
I’ve needed a new car for a while. But I’d been putting it off, mainly because I didn’t want to deal with the hassles (or at least the perceived hassles) of buying a new car. I’m not one to “talk about” buying things. In fact, I’m probably one of the most spontaneous buyers I know….
After my blog map posting this morning, several people have asked me how I was able to stick HTML in a Typepad TypeList. We’ve tried this several times before and were never successful until we brought in one of our top hackers this morning. Knowing that we shouldn’t need a hacker to help stick HTML…
RSS and blogging are two of the most-hyped buzz words in technology right now. Even if you’re someone like my mom, you’ve most likely heard of the terms “blog” and “blogger” even if you don’t know where or why. To put all of the buzz and hysteria to the side for a minute, I wanted…
I recently started following a new blog authored by Guy Kawasaki, one of the more famous venture capitalists and author of several books on starting companies. Today he’s got a great post called Hindsights, which is a speech he gives to graduating high schools and colleges. The speech reflects back on the last 32 years of his life (he’s…
