Web 2.0 Uncovered – Blogs

You are reading a blog right now, potentially if you read this blog you may read many other blogs, but do you have a blog of your own? Over on our CPA Congress blog, my colleague Alex Dalidakis discussed how blogging about your CPA Congress experience could prove to be a valuable exercise. I’d like to talk about a few other reasons to consider creating your own blog.

The blog is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool, it can be used in many different ways to achieve many different outcomes, below are a few of my favourites.

News feed / marketing tool

A blog provides you with a simple means of providing news to your clients and colleagues. The CPA Congress blog is an example of a blog being used as a news feed. Throughout the life of CPA Congress 2008 the blog will provide delegates with the latest information about CPA Congress and related events and activities. Providing news of your latest accomplishments and projects can also become a valuable marketing tool.

Learning space

There are two main ways a blog can be used as a learning tool, to learn from yourself and to learn from others. I believe the most powerful learning occurs when the two come together. I have a blog which I use to record my thoughts, challenges and things I find interesting about my work. Simply going through the process of thinking through an issue and constructing a post often leads me to inspiration I may not have found. I’m fortunate enough that there are a few very smart people who occasionally read my blog, the insight they provide through their comments and suggestions have provided ideas and resources which regularly help me to be more effective in my work.

Work log

How often have you got to the end of the month and felt like you have been incredibly busy but could not describe what you were actually doing? Taking ten minutes a couple of times a week to jot down what you have been up to can provide you with a couple of benefits. Firstly, you have a record of work that you have been doing that you can refer back to, and secondly you have a record of your work that your colleagues, staff or clients can refer back to. In this post CPA Congress presenter Keith De La Rue talks about the importance of capturing stories. Capturing and publishing stories of work, challenges, problems and solutions may open doors for collaboration that may have otherwise gone unopened.

These are just three reasons to blog, my main advice is give it a try. Start by recording a few thoughts, if you are keen to build a network around your blog comment on blogs about topics similar to yours (Google Blog Search is a good place to start looking for blogs). I started blogging after hearing several people talk about how much they had learned from the discussions they had participated in through their blogs. After blogging for 6 months I couldn’t agree more, the trick is to give it a try, be persistent and experiment. You may not realise the benefit in the first week but after 3 months you may well look at blogging in a completely different light.

Mick Leyden
CPA Australia