Simon is a hands-on software architect who works within 
[Twitter] simonbrown: wondering whether Adobe's commercial approach to Flex Builder will limit adoption of Flex ... which will be a shame, because I quite like it
[Coding the Architecture] As mentioned before, we were speakers at, and community sponsors of the Software Architect 2008 conference (3rd-5th June 2008, London). This is the first dedicated software architecture conference that I've been to and the majority of the ...
Blogs as PR
Using blogs as a public relations channel
In How to spend your marketing and ad budget, Kathy offers suggestions for alternative ways to spend your advertising budget. As somebody that promotes blogs and blogging, both internally and externally, a few suggestions really shout out to me as being spot on.
- Instead of print ads, get some training articles out there : This is something that I'm a big fan of and it's part of our culture at Evolution. It's down to thought-leadership, although rather than *tell* somebody we're good, we *show* them. ;-)
- Instead of hiring a PR agent, get blogs for employees and/or users : This is a great idea and, provided you have satisfied and enthusiastic employees/users, you're on to a winner here since promotion will come from within. If you don't, at least you'll realise that you need to fix some stuff!
- Instead of spreading compelling yet fake stories, tell the real story and make sure it's good : Kind of ties back nicely to the previous point, but if you don't have a good story internally, how do you expect to promote that externally?
I think that blogs are a fantastic (perhaps underused?) PR channel, but this raises some interesting questions. What sort of information would you want to divulge and how much is too much?
Re: Blogs as PR
Yes blogs seem all the rage but does business know what to do with them and will they just restrict and exploit them to make them unbelivable and just plain spam, left to the average joe they will grow with a purpose and good products and beliefs and most of all good people will surface for us all to enjoy and prospure form. I could only jump on th eband wagon for my site scootertronics to bring the savings of scooters to everyone and have become stuck on how to promote as informative or just plain sales as large companies are and plan on doing. I want to know if you care to let me know.
Re: Blogs as PR
It should also be noted that blogs are used to promote yourself and your company but not to directly "advertise" your industry. People are so tired of these advertisements. They want the "real" thing. So in blogging, it should appear to be real and useful. Becoming a blogger means you always have to write topics that are useful and beneficial to your readers. This will do the "promotional" tasks you wanted because readers know that you mean serious job and that you and the company you work for are very service-oriented as reflected in your blogs.
