Prowessblog attended the first European Women Business Blogging conference in Leicester last week. Organised by NLab at De Montfort Uni, speakers were great: Meg Pickard from Guardian Online spoke eloquently about the development of blogging in the UK and her own blog experiences. Eileen Brown from Microsoft talked about MS’s rationale for encouraging staff to blog – mostly about humanising the organisation – and Jory des Jardins from the US, one of BlogHer’s founders gave an interesting insight into how blogging has developed in the States. Apparently adults are spending an average 36.4% of their ‘media time’ online now – yet only 5% of the total advertising spend is allocated to online activity. All fascinating stuff and delegates seemed genuinely interested in prowessblog’s mission to use the blog to raise policy issues around female entrepreneurship.
Eileen from Microsoft had ‘10 Lessons’ for good blogging which I’ll repeat here – don’t necessarily agree with them all but useful tips all the same. Prowessblog is going to be in San Francisco for the next 8 days (the Prowess study trip) and will try to post some live US news when it’s there.
10 Lessons of Blogging:
- blog frequently (easier said than done)
- answer every comment (don’t agree with this one)
- don’t sell (ideas?)
- Link, Link, Link (must expand blogroll)
- be authentic
- traffic isn’t the goal (interesting one)
- expect criticism – be humble
- don’t blog when down/happy/drunk (wise words)
- blog smart (Microsoft’s blogging policy apparently)
- never delete a post………………….
June 29, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I’d be interested to hear what the goals of blogging are if not to share ideas and somehow drive traffic. Maybe it is the case of quality over quantity, but I would think that planting ideas and starting conversations is a key goal – and one cannot do that if one speaks and few listen. Congrats, BTW, to PROWESS and Jackie for blogging in the first place! May this blog soon be joined by many others in many nations speaking and sharing views on women’s enterprise development (perhaps my own included).