Join the SharePoint Blogging Revolution!
Bloggers Unite! Not a blogger? Start now, you *CAN'T* afford *NOT* to. Meaning please start sooner than later, there is an ROI (Return on Investment) as I'll demostrate. We all suffer as a result of you not blogging. Seriously.
Let me start with, some excuses I hear from people about why they don't blog... they don't have time, they don't have anything to say, nothing unique to add. I'll address all this, but I do now believe you can't afford not to blog. No matter what role you have or who you think you are. You will contribute to society by blogging. Without further ado. My list.
1. If you're reading blogs and finding value, you have value to contribute. Even a voice that brings out the blogs that are of value and worth reading and why is useful. This organic linking helps. I do sometimes get annoyed when I follow a link to simply follow another link, but then again, that link will help increase the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and ranking.
2. Ever felt like your mails are repetitve or you get the same questions? People will often search for results before they send emails, if not, they should and by responding with a URL maybe they will start looking on your blog before they email you. I started blogging by simply copying and pasting emails into blog posts for mails I was drafting up to send out. I spent a little extra time polishing it, but not the time it would take to do the email twice. I now save a ton of time by simply pointing people to the posts and a huge unknown amount of time from people that get the answer without emailing me or contacting me in other ways. In what would have been in an internal only email now benefits the world for years to come.... bonus!
3. Not enough time? Copy and Paste, existing mails or messages, just like I mentioned. It's not tough, but it does benefit.
4. I don't want to give away my valuable IP, that's the value of my company. To this I have to say, Come ON! If what you would put on a blog is all there is to you, then I feel sorry for you. What can be consumed from a consultants or trainers blog will only *increase* business. If you don't want to share your tools or services, then sure I understand you have tools, but if you put samples together of your work, you will get more business. Believe me. A blog adds more credibility to a consultant or trainer than any thing else. Let me repeat, a blog speaks thousands of words about a person. Imagine you're going to an interview and your future employer reads your blog, it will impress them if you've put some effort into it. If you're a consultant or trainer, that experience repeats itself over and over and over.
5. If you're an IT sitting in a small or medium shop, let me speak to you. What is missing most from the blogosphere is errors and how to troubleshoot them. That sincerely is the gold mine that is completely untapped. It's cool that Bill Baer has been sharing errors and how to troubleshoot them, but imagine getting this across all IT guys and all environments. Now that would ROCK! Even if we got 10% of IT Pro's sharing their monitoring best practices, workarounds for backup solutions, perf tunning tips and techniques, etc...
6. Have your voice be heard! Blogs are the end of the tail. Web 2.0, Long tails, and web collaboration are only powerful when the Nth person is sharing their best practices, lessons learned, etc... If everyone is simply pointing to the same set of bloggers or if it's all just SharePoint MVPs that are sharing their experiences, there are voices that are missing and content we won't have like I mentioned before. The power of search will expose it and we'll ALL benefit from it. You can make a difference. People will read your blog and say, hey I'm like him, maybe I should blog. YES you should! Let's start something here. Let's see if we can get this crowd to have a voice. I would really really love to see a revolution happen.
7. Blogging on the Internet is better than doing your team documentation sitting on your team site on your intranet. Why? Feedback, social networking, and comments. You can and will get real people with real experiences telling you what has worked for them and how they've learned from your posts. I started this blog a year ago Today. Happy anniversary! 130 posts later I feel like this content is something to be proud of. I meet people all over the world that tell me they benefit from it. A year and a half ago I would have told you I'm not much of a writer and that one of my weaknesses is doing tech documentation. I'm not sure I could convince any of you of that now. Blogging opened me up and it could do the same for you. It didn't take that long before I realized that sharing my experiences was of benefit. If you have started a blog and haven't gotten comments or feedback, I'll do a post in a few on how to get it submitted to the main search engines and a few tips on SEO.
8. We can change the world and we'll all be better as a result. Not only will your voice be heard, it will be heard loud and clear and you will make a difference. One voice does change the world every day. I was in a meeting with a WSS PM not long ago, he said, I was searching for info on the web on password resets to see what people were saying and I read your post. He said he couldn't find much, but was asking how hard it was. Did he read your blog? He could have if it was out there. The SharePoint PMs, the GMs, and VP all search the blogs for the voices out there. Blog posts get passed around every day and changes in the product are made by feedback in blogs. Guaranteed! In fact I'd say Analysts and Press listen to blogs and read blogs in addition to hear customers and make valuation and decisions based on them. Serious decisions. Stop for a minute. If the world was bigger than SharePoint tech in SharePoint Land, you'd realize that the car you drive, the books you read, the house you live in all result from searches on the internet. Sure some come from tools and trusted sites, but as your habits of what you read gravitate to trusted blogs, you'll notice your attitudes are impacted by those you trust. If I read a blog about a builder being unreliable and over charging such as TSA homes in Duvall, I wouldn't have used them. I wouldn't be dealing with the aftermath of a builder that has habitually gone over in costs and was sloppy in their dealings with the county. It would have saved me some major heart ache and loss of sleep and who knows what else. Others did have problems with him, but none of them blogged and even the service that was setup to gather this type of data didn't have any data on him. The BBB (better business folks). Have I tried to put a file there. Too much beauracracy. Blogs... none.
9. Don't be a copy cat. There are enough blogs that simply point to others, please add a bit of text when linking to a blog. Even if you say, hey this post on XYZ was cool because it made me cry. That's fine. I see ping backs and I want to know what people thought. It truly does make me smile when someone says. Awesome article on XYZ. Joel did it again. It's very cool to see that.
10. So making your voice heard will change the product, it will also help your brother and your brother will help you. We'll all be better as a result. So let's unite to build this utopian blogosphere where we share our tips, tricks, lessons learned, and share our dirty laundry. Don't be afraid to put up an error log with your commentary. I know I'm not the only one who has copied in a line of text from an error with quotes around it hoping someone posted it either in a newsgroup or on a blog, and if you're really lucky you'll hit a KB, but there won't be a KB for every error, but we can have thoughts and commentary on every error quite quickly if we simply share it when we're troubleshooting an issue. Share your issue with the world. That may sound strange, but if Product support is trying to find out how common an issue is and there are 100 posts talking about it, I can nearly Guarantee they will jump. In fact it likely won't take 100, it may only take 10 with a few loud voices. Blogs do come across loud and clear.
Thanks for listening to this voice. I hope it's coming across and I hope you seriously consider joinging the blogosphere. It is worth your time, there is return on investment at an individual level, and you can and will make a different when you invest your time. For me, my time investment has returned more than 100 fold. Let's find out together how much value is in your blogging...
<Update> Get started... by creating a blog and submitting it to the popular search engines.</update>
