You'd think this question would already be answered at a blogging conference. But it hasn't.
After I got over the thrill yesterday of rubbing shoulders with the blogging glitterati (OK, I lied; I haven't gotten over it yet), I realized there was a lot of stuff to tease through here.
The title of the conference, ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies, suggests we're going to address the notion of blogs as business tools. Attack it straight on and come away with some clearly defined how-to's and why's and where it's already happening so everyone can go back to their office and add “blogging” to their online marketing strategy.
Turns out it's more complicated than that.
Here are just a few of the issues that came up yesterday:
- Where is the intersection between blogging and journalism? (that's a big question)
- Technically, blogging is just a self-publishing tool; as a phenomenon it's much more than that. But what exactly?
- How do you measure the ROI of a business (as opposed to personal) blog? Do you need to?
- If it's a business blog, doesn't it need to be edited for fear of the blogger saying something damaging to the company?
- If you edit a Web log, is it no longer a blog?