I recently attended the Social Media Breakfast Toledo meeting on the morning of Friday, June 5th. The Social Media Breakfast is a national group. The local Toledo group holds monthly events that consist of 45 minutes of networking time, a half hour talk, and fifteen minutes of Q & A. The topic for this particular day was the "Do's and Dont's of Business Blogging" by Dave Rigotti.
I have to admit that I expected a lot from this session since it does require a payment of $15 to attend. I think that is a lot to pay for a half hour talk, especially when I am used to attending excellent programming conferences for free. Even though I expected a lot, I was a little skeptical. I'm always skeptical with "social media" events. I knew that the networking would be worth the price of admission though and I was right as I met some great people (@mikebrice, @scottradcliff, @8thLopez, @7son75, @kfish29).
After the talk by Dave Rigotti was over, my suspicions were correct, I was afraid. The talk was good, well prepared, and well presented. My issue was with the content. The content was accurate and very clear but my issue was that it was focused on the HOW of blogging instead of the WHY. I thought that the audience would of benefited more from a talk on the why rather then the how. The how can be found on the internet within a few hours of some searches.
At one point, someone asked, "If my company started blogging, what should I expect my ROI to be?". It was at this point that I was sure some of the audience members did not grasp why blogging was important and could of benefited more from a talk on why you should be blogging. Dave answered this question well but it was very political in my opinion. I don't think that got the point across to the person that asked the question. That person needed to be told that hustle gives you return on investment. Don't expect more customers cause you put out a 300 word blog post one afternoon. You need to put a lot of work into the post, create great content, and listen to the feedback and respond to your audience. I think that there should of been at least 10 minutes of time spent to answer that question. The answer should not of been "it depends".
I feel a lot of companies, especially local companies, do not get the reason why they blog. I think they just do it because they see their competitors doing it. Dave gave some great case studies of blogs that work. He gave the examples of Freshbooks and 37 Signals, both of which I have been following for a long time. His points about why these companies have great blogs was a little misleading in my opinion though. He gave examples about layout and other extraneous reasons on why the blog is great. The only reason I follow their blogs is not because of their layout, or anything else on their physical site (I just get their content via RSS). I follow them because of their content. They have excellent content which showcases their beliefs and their work. Dave did touch a bit on their content but I think it should of been the focus of the case studies. Your content showcases your company beliefs, what is important to you, and what type of customers you want to serve. If you agree with your vendor views, you will likely turn into customers.
I hope that the SMB Toledo gives us attendees a little more advanced topics for future events for our money. I think this event was well prepared for but I feel it was a starter topic and I was expecting something more advanced. I would like to see more opinionated topics covered. I would like to hear from people who have strong opinions on various topics. I find the opinioned talks are a lot more engaging, even if I don't agree with the speakers.
Dave will be joining Microsoft on the Bing team in the near future. With the recent success that the Bing search engine has been having, I look forward to hearing what he has to say about Microsoft and the service in the future. It's going to be hard work when you are a competitor to Google.
