Should you be Business Blogging?

Daily Blog Tips

Sometimes I stumble across an interesting article that works for Vistage and TEC Chairs, Speakers, Trusted Advisers, and Members. This might be one of those articles. Is Blogging for everyone? Could your business, consulting, speaking, services, and products benefit from launching a blog?

This a little bit of a “devil’s advocate” post. Everyone is jumping on the blogging bandwagon. Should you join in the parade? Should you wait? Is Blogging NOT an effective strategy for your business? This article on Daily Blog Tips summarized many of the key points related to determining if your company should be blogging or whether it might turn into an exercise in futility?

I liked the way the author laid out a set of criteria or a checklist to determine if you should launch a business blog? There are obviously many benefits from having a business blog – one of the major questions is whether you have the time, patience, and resources to devote to launching a business blog.

There’s a common opinion that your businesses should blog. And that’s true – a lot of them should, but that doesn’t mean you should blog just to blog. Many businesses do the blog thing wrong, and apply it for the wrong reasons. This can create productivity gaps and areas where resources are allocated improperly. Blogging shouldn’t be done just to blog – there should be a clear focus, goals, and actionable metrics applied to it. It shouldn’t be done just because people do it – for the same reasons that Facebook and Twitter accounts shouldn’t be created because you heard “social media’s good”.

To read the full article on Daily Blog Tips, click the link below:

Why Your Business Should – And Shouldn’t – Have A Blog

Barry Deutsch

What are those little buttons at the bottom of each Post?

Social Media Buttons to Share Outstanding Information

Social Media Buttons for Sharing Information

At the bottom of each blog post are a series of little icons that enable you to share various blog posts that you’ve found particularly useful. Brad, our expert guest bloggers, and I all appreciate your sharing our content with other folks in the Vistage Community when you read something you thought worthy of sharing.

At a fundamental level – that’s the way blogging and social media works. Someone writes a blog post or shares something interesting they found on the Web that has a few good take-away points, you like it, and share it with your friends, associates, acquaintances, the Members of your Group, other Vistage Chairs, your favorite Speakers and Trusted Advisors.

So, what are these buttons?

Delicious: Delicious is a popular on-line bookmarking site. You can store all your bookmarks here and you can share all your bookmarks with those looking for similar content. Posting your bookmarks on subject matter expert areas is one of the strategies to personally brand YOU. See my list of bookmarks on Delicious as an example. You have be logged into your Delicious Account to post bookmarks.

Facebook: You can share a valuable blog post with your contacts on Facebook. Once you click the button, you’ll have an opportunity to enter the post into your news feed on Facebook. Obviously, you have to be logged into your Facebook account for this to work.

Digg: Digg is similar to Delicious as one of the most popular bookmark sharing sites on the Internet. The content that Digg and Delicious have accumulated is exceptional. One of the key places I do my research now in addition to Google is to go to Digg and Delicious to see how others have voted on various websites and blog postings.

Email: This button will allow you to forward the link of a blog article you found interesting to someone in your email address book. The system picks up whatever email program is your default – such as Outlook.

Google Bookmarks: This allows you to save interesting articles you find so that you can refer back to them at a later point. For example, if you read the blog postings of one of the feeds on this portal site, you might want to bookmark a particularly interesting blog post.

Twitter: Twitter is all the rage on the Internet. It is a micro-blogging platform where you can send 140 character mini-messages to those following you. For example, I have almost 7,000 people following me on Twitter around two different categories – executive job search and hiring talent. Many of those individuals join our LinkedIn Discussion Group, download our free materials, and purchase our products/services. Approximately 10% of our web site traffic comes from Twitter.

It’s a viral environment where people who like what you have to say repost to their network. It’s another form of personal branding and differentiation. You should have a Twitter Account. You can look at my profile and see one of my lists of  Vistage Community Members using Twitter.

The primary way Twitter gets used is to make a statement/ask a question, repost the tweet someone else wrote (called retweeting), and post a link to something you found useful.

LinkedIn: This button will allow you to repost the blog article to any of the LinkedIn Groups you participate in. It automatically creates an entry in the news feed of the group. You can select the specific group you would like to post the news item (blog post) into to share with other members of the various LinkedIn Discussion Groups.

Barry Deutsch

Graphic courtesy of DavidZimm

Are You A Vistage Blogger

Calling All Vistage Bloggers

Calling All Vistage Bloggers

Calling all Vistage Bloggers

Are you a Vistage Blogger that would like to be featured in our Vistage Leadership Community Portal.

We have assembled a listing of all the known Vistage Bloggers (Chairs, Members, Speakers, and Trusted Advisors). We’ve tried our best through Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to identify all those in the Vistage Community who are actively blogging. (We define active blogging as writing at least one blog post every week).

We may have missed a few folks in this process. If so, we apologize – no oversight intended.

Would you like to be featured in our directory on this site. We’ll show the last 5 blog postings in your feed to the visitors on this site.

Our combined monthly volume of visitors to our various Web content properties is now in excess of 25,000 visitors. We cross-promote between these various blogs and all of our content is promoted and reinforced through guest blogging, ezine articles, and our weekly Internet Radio Show Broadcast, not to mention exposure to over 100,000 CEOs and Presidents on LinkedIn on a daily basis.

Not only are we seeking Vistage Community Members who might like to have their blog featured on this consolidated portal site for the Vistage Community, but we are also seeking guest bloggers who might like to write an occassional article aimed at one of the subject areas on this portal – including hiring, retention, culture, employee engagement, leadership, sales management, and social media. We are seeking those who have the ability to provide best practices aimed at the entrepreneurial-middle market company.

If you’re interested in having your blog featured and/or would like to be a guest blogger, please send us a note using the contact form on this website OR you can find me in the Vistage Directory.

Barry Deutsch

Welcome to the Vistage Leadership Community Blog for Best Practices

Welcome to the Vistage Leadership Community Portal

Welcome to the Vistage Leadership Community Portal


Welcome to the Vistage Leadership Community Portal

Welcome to our first blog post for the Vistage Leadership Community Blog on how to LEVERAGE the success of your people to build an exceptional organization. We’ll explore subjects including leadership, management, hiring and retaining top talent, sales management, culture and employee satisfaction/engagement.

In addition, we’ll also take the hottest area right now – social media and social networking – and share best practices in how to build and expand your business, including networking, customer satisfaction, marketing, sales, business development, engaging employees, and recruiting. This is an area of great confusion and frustration for many Vistage Chairs, Members, Speakers, and Trusted Advisors.

Leadership Portal

This leadership portal represents an extension of the work of Barry Deutsch and Brad Remillard’s decade plus interaction with Vistage Members, Chairs, Speakers and TAs. In that journey, we’ve collected a wealth of information and best practices we would like to share with the Vistage Community.

  • We’ll review some of the very best articles from exceptional bloggers on the Internet you should be aware of as you go forward in developing and building your business.
  • We’ll feature some of the very best Vistage Resources as guest bloggers, especially other speakers, chairs, members, and Trusted Advisors who have volunteered to share their expert knowledge on leadership topics focused on Vistage Community.
  • We’ll share information on this portal from our other Internet Properties, including our Blogs and LinkedIn Discussion Groups.
  • Finally, we’ll provide the feed for ALL the Vistage Community Bloggers (assuming you’ve told me you’re blogging).

We hope you find the information in this blog valuable and practical as you develop and build your groups.

Feel free to post a comment, offer a suggestion, raise a question for our experts.

Barry Deutsch

P.S.: Here are the LinkedIn Discussion Groups you might be interested in joining to participate in a more in-depth discussion:

Hire and Retain Top Talent

Leadership and Management Best Practices

Executive and Managerial Job Search

Vistage Chair ONLY Discussion Group for Leveraging Social Media and Networking

Vistage Member ONLY Discussion Group for Leveraging Social Media and Networking

Vistage Speaker/TA ONLY Discussion Group for Leveraging Social Media and Networking

While you’re here, grab the feed on the sidebar so that you can stay on top of new posts, tools, and ideas when they appear on this blog – either through a feed reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines – or by email. By subscribing to the feed, you don’t have to remember to keep coming back to the blog to stay current. We’ll also feed new postings on this portal into our LinkedIn Discussion Groups for Leadership Best Practices, Vistage Members on Leveraging Social Media, and Vistage Speakers/Trusted Advisors on Leveraging Social Media.