George Mason University’s Business Alliance is hosting "Blog This! The Good, the Bad, and Why It All Matters" this Thursday at their SmartTalk Breakfast in Tysons Corner, Virginia (near Washington, DC).

The program features Pete Snyder, New Media Strategies, Marshall Manson, Edelman, and Richard Shenkman, Editor, George Mason University History News Network, all nationally known interactive media experts.

IAOC members and guests are invited to attend this breakfast at the reduced Business Alliance member rate (simply type IAOC in the “guest of” box when registering online).

Don Dunnington
IAOC President

As I mentioned in a post on PowderandBulk.com, I was at the Powder Show exactly 10 years ago, introducing K-Tron International's first website (we now have about a dozen and the number keeps growing). Believe it or not, crowds gathered in our booth to see the Powder Show's first-ever demonstration of a website. I ran the demo from a CD because there was no broadband available then.

I'd say blogging for most businesses is at about the same point the World Wide Web was 10 years ago. It remains to be seen if business, especially small to mid-sized companies, will find the resources to enter the blogosphere to the extent they have embraced the web. I suspect that community sites like PowderandBulk.com, may become the preferred medium for most companies. Unlike the industrial "web malls" that had a brief but spectacular rise and fall, blogging communities will likely start slow and grow over time. They offer companies the opportunity to blog without the time and financial commitments, and legal risks, of hosting their own blogs. That may appeal to a broad range of companies.

Don Dunnington
IAOC President

I relish the opportunity to speak about blogging to a business audience, where nearly everyone—if not the whole room—is skeptical about the benefits of blogging for business. Now that the old media has discovered the new media, I find business managers and technical workers are at last curious, but still they remain skeptics and that makes for interesting discussions (if you give them a chance to talk as much as listen).

The challenge in breaking through their skepticism is explaining the value of "conversation" as it applies to blogging. While professional communicators, especially those already involved in producing content for websites, quickly comprehended and appreciate all the nuances of the online conversation, these are soft values that are hard for business people to accept on faith. And even if they grant that online conversations would be nice to have, they still have a hard time putting a value on it that would justify the resources required.

So last Wednesday I tried a different approach to the usual PowerPoint tour of blogs for beginners. In a session titled The Business Case for RSS and Blogs for Engineers and Managers in Industrial Companies at the Powder and Bulk Conference and Exposition ("The Powder Show") in Chicago, I turned off the PowerPoint, stepped out from behind the podium, and entered into a conversation with the audience.

I can't say that as a result anyone signed up on the spot to become a guest blogger on Joe Talyor's PowderandBulk.com weblog. But it felt like a success as measured by the active engagement of the audience during the talk, and feedback I received following the talk. I'd recommend you try it the next time you need to explain the blogosphere's "conversations" to a group of non-bloggers.

Don Dunnington
IAOC President