Australian bloggers are a good crowd!

The Australian Blogging Conference was excellent and well worth attending. A few people have already blogged about some of the sessions and no doubt there’ll be more posts over the next few days. Peter Black, did a great job organising the conference and has said that he will do a round up of the coverage on the conference blog so that’s going to be a good resource to get notes from individual sessions.

So, I thought I’d just cover the business blogging session as it was one that I particularly enjoyed and also one of the most relevant to this blog.

The discussion was led by Nick Hodge, Joanne Jacobs and Des Walsh. They did an excellent job and there were some excellent comments from the participants as well.

The agenda was centered around these questions

* Can businesses afford not to blog?
* How do you measure Return on Investment?
* Should the CEO blog?
* Should PR and/or Legal vet all blogs?
* How do you find enough to write about?
* How do you handle negative comments?
* Blogging Codes of Conduct

In addition to these specific questions we got into some discussion on the overlap between personal and business blogging and the requirements for some degree of self censorship or self editing as an employee or a business owner. Nick Hodge had a few things to say on this topic as he blogs for Microsoft and combines personal and work related information on his blog. Microsoft has a blogging policy but there is also a degree of peer review amongst Microsoft employees who blog. As much as bloggers aim to be as transparent and honest as possible there is also the undeniable need to protect business interests and individual livelihoods. This results in some degree of self editing although it’s also fair to say that enlightened businesses encourage active and honest debate. It’s in their interests to do so as well.

Business Blogging Policies

Businesses need a blogging policy even if the organisation themselves don’t have a blog. This sounds counter intuitive but it makes sense for a couple of reasons. Employees could be blogging and talking about work related topics. Also other people may blog about your company and there needs to be some policy on responding when appropriate.

What concerns do businesses have when considering whether to have a blog?

Joanne Jacobs had some feedback on this as she consults to businesses in Australia on blogging. One of the biggest concerns she hears voiced is how to manage comments. Apparently businesses often like the idea of blogging but don’t like the idea of comments. Joanne made the point that a blog without comments is just a website.

Conferences are always about the people

Finally, I just want to add that I met some great people and had some really interesting and fun conversations. There are already a couple of arrangements being made for meetups and I have every intention at this stage of attending the next conference. The location hasn’t been decided yet. It will probably be Sydney or Melbourne although I read somewhere that Duncan Riley is pushing for WA.