ireland's new wave not blogging or using syndication
i'm heading along to goodbody's summit 2006, a showcase of software and biotech firms, that takes place in the four seasons, dublin on wednesday. in advance i had a quick scoot around the websites of the presenting companies as listed on goodbody's site. as well as familiarising myself with what the firms do i also looked for any signs of blogging, use of rss and whether or not they even posted regular news releases to their site (damien mulley carried out a similar exercise last year with the deloitte fast 50 list)
the results. only one firm, innerworkings, which creates learning and performance monitoring tools for developers, blogs and uses rss. propylon's cto sean mcgrath is a regular blogger but i didn't discover that from their corporate site. even worse - half of the 18 presenting companies either don't have a news section on their site or it's hopelessly out of date.
no doubt entrepeneurs in start-ups will say they just don't have time to blog or create content for their websites. but i would have thought blogging was a highly efficient way to position yourself as an expert in the sector that you are trying to sell your products into. would be very interested to hear the experience of innerworkings and what value their blogging has delivered to the company. this highly unscientific survey of mine also shows that while the el paso times furore may have featured on 5-7 Live this evening, blogging is still far from going mainstream in our fair land.
I'm wondering whether in this field as in others the corporate bods need some recognisable role models. I have a hunch that we need some more CEO or VP type bloggers who are not American and not from US companies before people in Australia, for example, and maybe Ireland, will see that as a smart thing to do. At present I'm using the Ducati CEO blog as an example and it's an easy one to talk to because it's a v professional look, he has clear idea of what he's doing and he has great comments from customers - blog.ducati.com
Posted by: Des Walsh | April 06, 2006 at 02:40 AM
des, thanks for the feedback. innerworkings could be that start-up role model in ireland. wasn't aware of the ducati blog and i like the fact that he goes to the trouble of making it bi-lingual.
Posted by: John Collins | April 06, 2006 at 09:46 AM
There are a couple of Irish tech C-level execs blogging.
Annrai O'Toole over at Cape Clear has a blog (http://www.capeclear.com/annrai). I think some of the Iona execs have blogs and as mentioned in the post Sean McGrath has one.
As with all things in Ireland it'll probably take us a little longer to catch up/on.
[Of course I should mention that Cape Clear was offering RSS feeds from its press room back in 2002 :-)))]
Tom
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It never ceases to amaze me that blogs, with their ability to punch waaaaay beyond their weight in terms of influence are not more widely deployed here.
This is a debate I have had over and over guys and you are correct it will take a couple of corporate big names blogging before this takes off.
Tom kudos for getting rss out in 2002 from Cape Clear but, tbh, until non-tech companies start doing it, it will still be seen as techie.
Posted by: Tom Raftery | May 05, 2006 at 10:32 AM
tom, agree totally that it is still seen as a techie thing. my bigger fear with the rise of myspace, bebo etc, is that businesses will look on it as a teen technology which will delay the adoption in the same way that happened with texting (which only really took off in business in the last year)
Posted by: John Collins | May 08, 2006 at 12:44 PM