Business Blogging: A practical guide: Book review

Bill Ives and Amanda Watlington, the authors of Business Blogs: A Practical Guide were kind enough to send me a free copy of their book which was released in May. The reason I got the book free and not you my dear reader, is because Bill interviewed me for the book with some great questions. Questions like: when and why did you start blogging? How has it met your objectives? Have your objectives evolved? What have been the challenges you faced and how did you overcome them? What is you main source of content? How do you benefit from other blogs? What are your favorites and why? What advice do you have for other bloggers? Bill is a KM, Blog and Portal consultant (was head of Accenture's KM practice in the US earlier) and therefore his questioning was incisive and brought out fundamental issues that have driven my blogging.


You want to know my answers? Go ahead, read the book ;-) !

The book is broken up into two parts, the first part is about the nuts and bolts of blogging right down to explain the blog layout to a total newbie, then expands the focus to what's the blogging hype about, whether businesses should blog, syncing a blogging strategy with other organizational strategies like PR, marketing, legal. I think it is this part that adds more to the mainstream business executive, than other books in the pipeline like Naked Conversations. It also deals with internal blogs in organizations.

The second part of the book is a listing of all the business bloggers Bill and Amanda talked to and just tells their blogging story. This blog is listed on pages 99-101 in the cases section sandwiched between Ashley Friedlein and Tim Jarrett's cases. :-)