Because of the heat that is generated over partisan political blogs, it’s real easy to mistake all blogging as serving primarily the function of stirring up emotions and initiatiating public action on issues. However, I can tell you about the real-world of blogging for business–minus any and all partisan political controversy.
In 2001, I created one of the first blogs coming out of Washington, DC. My work was one of the earliest examples of what today is called Web 2.0, but it was not even called a blog at all because that term was not widely used in those days. Back in 2001, I wanted and needed the benefits of what we now know as blogging software when I created a website called “Message Center” for the well-known Washington, DC nonprofit association for older Americans, AARP. See how it looked here:
The AARP Message Center website was a business site that blogged in continuous operation from December 2001 through February 2006 when management changes at the organization established other priorities and this Web 2.0 effort was not considered important to the organization’s employees. My blogging efforts were pioneering in the sense that few organizations in the early 2000s had yet discovered how to use the Internet for their own, internal business reasons.
I persuaded AARP management to recognize the need to inform AARP employees about what AARP was saying in its public communications. Employees across all 50 states and in the six different U.S. time zones needed to be “on the same page,” so to speak, when it came to how AARP communicated its opinions on important public policy issues such as Social Security, Medicare prescription drugs, older drivers, grief and loss, grandparenting, and so forth. The management at that time followed my guidance to use the Internet and blogging software to help AARP employees stay “on message” no matter what time zone they happened to work in.
I chose to use blogging software for the AARP Message Center website because that particular software–which was “new” in the early 2000s–enabled AARP to make frequent (sometimes daily!) postings on Web pages in reverse chronological order with links to summaries, digests and full text. This use of technology was essential since AARP is large and decentralized, with staffed offices located in over 60 locations in all five of the U.S. time zones, including Alaska and Hawaii. I decided in the early 2000s that using blogging software online was the most practical way to share up-to-the-minute documents and details will all employees from coast to coast.
Initially, I conceived of computer code to do what today’s blogging software does and I worked with a technical advisor at a Web host to develop customized software for the AARP Message Center site. Eventually, the availability of off-the-shelf blogging software increased in the 2000s, and I chose wisely not to reinvent the wheel and made the switch to PMachine, which is now known as ExpressionEngine. The website that you are now visiting is powered by ExpressionEngine. Another product I used to power the AARP Message Center at one point was WordPress, which is free of charge.
The AARP Message Center blog (regardless of the software that powered the site) provided extreme flexibility in the continuous sharing of knowledge, approved language and documents with thousands of employees over the Internet at a cost savings and time savings compared to using traditional, low-tech alternatives such as mailing hard copies through the U.S. Postal Service. This practical, everyday business use of blogging certainly is not ”sexy” like today’s sizzling commentaries in partisan political blogs.
And that’s my point. Blogging need not be perceived as “sexy” or “hot” when it comes to your everyday business needs. In fact, I demonstrated vividly with this blogging effort in the early 2000s a very important fact: Strip away the fanfare and splash and your organization can nonetheless derive many tangible cost-saving and time-saving benefits by choosing to use blogging software to interact with a decentralized target audience such as employees, business partners, stakeholders, existing customers, and potential customers. My Web 2.0 work at AARP won me three consecutive years recognition in the Washington, DC market for the 2003, 2004, and 2005 APEX Awards.
(Web Guru Woody Goulart wrote this commentary & analysis and originally posted it on AmericanBlogging.com not long ago.)
