Some thoughts about blogging

Chase's Chase Marketing and Bob Kruhm's North Carolina Construction News blogs are their own responsibility -- but are easy to set up and maintain through the blogger.com system.

Bob Kruhm, associate publisher of Charlotte Construction News and Triad/Triangle Construction News, has started his own blog North Carolina Construction news at Northcarolinaconstructionnews.blogspot.com. He is the third person closely connected to our business to blog. Chase, in St. Catharines, On, has been publishing Chase Marketing, for several months. And of course you are reading this blog.

Without much experience or technical knowledge in blogging, Bob asked me for assistance last week in setting up his blog. Initially, I sighed. The last thing I want to do is to oversee and co-ordinate individual postings from everyone in this organization. Then I discovered some of the magical capacities of the Google-owned Blogger.com system. With it, you can set up multiple blogs, and then assign different people and posting rights for each blog.

While Chase operates his own blogger.com account, we decided at our regular weekly staff meeting that a special blog for the Readers Choice' Awards (in Ontario) would be helpful. So I set up a blog title for that initiative -- but here, the challenge is the maintaining and updating of this blog requires more capacity than simply posting blog entries. So I discovered I could also control 'administrative rights' that give me the option to give additional powers in layout, design, and co-ordination -- and I granted these to Chase for the new blog, which is still under construction.

These resources are intriguing and useful for businesses such as ours which encourage a high degree of individual responsibility and thinking among employees and contractors. By opening and overseeing the blogs centrally, you can maintain a good sense of what is going on while allowing enough freedom and independence for your team to express their own thoughts. I haven't worried about the suffix .blogger.com for branding -- while Google's system allows you to restructure things and host your blog on your own domain, the branding significance of the .blogger.com designation is minor, at least in our industry.

As for Bob and Chase's own blogs, they express their own thoughts, imagination, and perspectives -- I neither edit, nor even suggest, what they write about.