Grounded In Reality

The hardest thing in life is to make time for the things you want to do.

I have two daughters, and I do everything in my power to be home with them for dinner as many nights a week as humanly possible. But sometimes, I have to travel for work and can’t be home. Sometimes, my wife and I have a charity or something we are involved in and can’t be home.

Such is life in the big city, but I do the best I can.

Blogging is like dinner with my girls - you need to commit to it and stick with it as much as you can on a daily basis.

“There are going to be days where you don’t have time to blog.”  I dont think that’s a fair excuse.  The way the blogosphere is set-up, you can blog from your PDA or mobile phone. So as you sit on the plane waiting to take off or on the train on the way home, you can find two minutes to jot down a few notes to keep your page up-to-date.

Now, while you might be able to get away with the lack of blogging on a personal site, if you have a corporate or company blog, you most certainly cannot slack off.

Perfect example of what can happen when you do slack off is Jeffery Chodorow’s blog. Chodorow is a restauranteur who was getting a bad rap in his mind from the New York food critics and took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to speak his peace and announce his blog, chod-o-blog.

When it came out on February 21st, his blog was off and running. He had 157 comments on his first post. That’s a pretty good start by any standards. One week later he updated with a new post:

I apologize for the delay in posting my new blog entry. This has been an overwhelming week given the reaction to the NY Times ad and dealing with all of the subsequent press inquiries.I will be updating the blog shortly.

Since that note, he posted twice on March 1 and once on March 13, with only 17 comments total in those posts.

Chodorow spent a lot of money on the ad in the New York Times, then he was off to a rousing start blogging and had viewers. But because he hasn’t really posted in a timely basis, it’s going to be very hard for him to recapture that mass audience and buzz that he had.

In many situations, blogs are a one-man show, and it’s more difficult than having a group blog like we do with our Digital Media team here in this space. Problem is the masses don’t care. You can’t do blogging half way, it just won’t work. If you want to reach an audience and keep them, you have to commit to giving them a few minutes of your time on a regular basis. In my mind, that means a minimum of three times a week. It doesn’t have to be a novel, but more novel ideas and thoughts.

In the end, I take the time to have dinner with my family, and it’s something my children will do with their children someday. If you think about it, don’t we and our clients want our consumers and customers to pass our messages and thoughts to their kids and sell their products or brands? 

In this day and age, you do this at the ‘digital dinner table.’  It’s worth a few minutes a couple of times a week…