The agenda of Professional blogs

Jon Udell provides some insight into why professionals blog.

But every serious professional blog has an agenda. Reasons to invest time and effort in writing a blog can incude:

• To promote yourself, your company, or (typically) both at the same time.
• To influence the thinking of people inside and outside your organization.
• To communicate directly with customers.
• To advertise aspects of your internal process that are not proprietary, and that can benefit from the collaborative energy that a blog can attract.

The blog network is a kind of engine for processing all of these agendas. Think about how science is driven by publication and citation indexing. Blogs, and the aggregators that track them, make publication and citation indexing a realtime 24×7 process. The blog universe is a literal marketplace of ideas, an economy whose currency is the hyperlink.

Blogs and InfoWorld

A well-written blog shows that the author has considerale expertise in their field. People intersted in the subject matter will flock to the site, improving the visiblty of both the author and their company. I’d guess that more people learned of NEC’s Tablet PC from Robert Scoble’s blog than from any official NEC marketing channel.

Scoble, Mark Pilgrim, and Anil Dash all landed jobs because of their weblogs. (I on the other hand am still waiting…)

So why blog as a professional? You will increase your potential market and show the depth and breadth or your expertise. If you were going to hire a person or firm, would you choose the one with fluffy marketing copy that says they know what they are doing, or hundreds of pages of content that proves it?