In a week, I will have the privilege of addressing the Founders Forum SIG to talk about “Blogging for Company Founders”. The session can apparently only be attended by a maximum of 25 CEOs or founders of startup companies, on a FCFS basis. I therefore hope to have a very interactive session, and only plan to have a very brief presentation to jump in questions and issues of the audience as quickly as possible.
One of the things I want to cover at some point during the conversation is what kind of great, and bad, examples, have been seen out there in terms of founder blogs, and I would really like to go beyond the social media “pure plays”: Mena Trott, Caterina Fake, Matt Mullenweg, Dave Sifry, Scott Rafer, Loic Le Meur,… who have all been blogging for a long (and sometimes long long) time and might have started/joined their current venture because of their blogging. They sort of come with the territory, and are expected.
I am therefore interested in hearing from you guys about startup founders outside the pure social media space whose blog has attracted your attention, and has helped establish the visibility and credibility of the company in a space that is not particularly blogging/RSS savvy.
I would also like to hear about this segmentation of tech startup blogs, in which I see four major facets (even though the first two could be combined):
- the PR blog: mostly used to communicate around the product(s) and services offered by the company, it features new functionality, tips, service announcements (booh, we’ve crashed or we’re having a massage),… and is a “disaster recovery” channel (i.e it is one of the elements used to deal with major PR issues).
I would expect any startup that launches nowadays to have a PR blog, available at blog.domainname.com (?). - the community blog is an extension of the PR blog, it helps animating the user community, and features examples of the usage of the products. Good examples of a community blog are the Flickr Blog, or BlogPulse Highlights.
- the reference blog: aggregates and editorializes news and links related to the industry in which the startup is operating, it can become a preferred source of information if the point of view is not completely one sided (otherwise it becomes a “PR blog”). A couple reference blogs I subscribe to are Findory’s Greg Linden, who covers search, blogging and RSS aggregation, and WhizSpark’s Peter Caputa who covers the Web 2.0 space and entrepreneurship as it relates to his startup.
- the authoritative blog: mostly contain original pieces describing personal thoughts or experiences of the founder(s), and therefore provide a unique point of view on an industry or a market. One example is Jotspot’s Joe Kraus.
I actually used the word facets because a comprehensive blog will cover all three aspects, and I would nominate SocialText’s Ross Mayfield as one of the best examples. But once again, I am looking too much at the blogs I read for my own practice, and would love to hear about great blogs that are not related to social media or Web 2.0 per se.
As I did for the Venture Capital session I led at Bar Camp, I will post the presentation and summarize our discussion shortly after the event.
Thanks in advance for your input!Please list those blogs in the comments of this post, or send me an email: jeff [dot] clavier [at] gmail [dot] com.
