What You Won't Hear From Us

We’re travelling all over the U.S. to talk about the opportunity of business blogging in the most appropriate way: face to face. Now, if you’re like us, you’re probably either skeptical of events that are run by a software company (who wants to spend a few hours hearing a sales pitch?) or you’re burned out on ceaseless hype. (If you didn’t already know about business blogs, you wouldn’t be reading this.)

So, to help make it easier for you to take time out of your busy schedule to join us, we’ve created a list of the Top Ten Things You Won’t Hear At The Six Apart Business Blogging Seminar.

1. “It’s a revolution!” Ugh. Nothing’s more grating than someone repeating over and over that blogging is a revolution. For some companies, maybe it is. But mostly, it’s just another communication tool in your arsenal, and we want to show you how to make the best use of it. Hype only distracts from the good, hard part: seeing results.
2. “Let me read you these bullet points…” We’ve all suffered through seminars or tutorials where someone reads a PowerPoint presentation as the audience struggles to stay awake. There might be some slides used to illustrate points, but we’re bloggers — we believe in educating through conversations.
3. Tired crap about bloggers getting Dan Rather fired. Yeah, yeah, it was a great triumph against the doddering mainstream media. It’s also very 2004. We want to get more media companies blogging, along with everyone else. So we’re not going to be trotting out these tired old examples to illustrate our points.
4. “Markets are conversations!” Hey, we love the ideas behind the Cluetrain Manifesto as much as anybody, but if you’re responsible for helping a company communicate better, you already know this stuff in your gut. Instead, you’ll get practical details about how to enable useful conversations with a blog.
5. “Buy Movable Type and TypePad now!” Look, we’re proud that the tools we’ve created help lots of businesses get started blogging. And sure, we’ll point out examples of customers using our platforms to power their blogs. But we’re not selling used cars — we don’t need to shout about our technology.
6. “Ajax!” We love asynchronous javascript and XML, as well as the design patterns the technology enables. That’s because we’re nerds. Unless somebody wants a recommendation on something to clean a sink with, ajax isn’t going to come up.
7. “Web 2.0!” Same story as Ajax. Love the idea, but there’s already a conference for that kind of stuff. The technology changes are minor compared to the business goals that we’re focused on.
8. “RSS will kill email.” Chris Pirillo said this a few years ago, and maybe he still even believes it. We’re thinking the existing base of email users make up an audience of a billion or two that your blog should be reaching.
9. “Isn’t Mena cute?” Hey, we love our co-founders. But we’re not holding a bunch of seminars all over the country just so we can talk about our own company. We’d rather talk about yours.
10. “You can quit your day job!” Sure, there’s maybe a few hundred people in the world who’ve been able to quit their jobs and blog full-time. But we like our day jobs, and just want to use blogs to be better at doing them. We figure you’re probably the same way.

Okay, so if that’s the list of things we’re not going to be talking about, what are we covering? The things you actually need: How to get your boss or team to sign off on doing a blog in the first place. What to do if you deploy blogs and some people don’t want to post on them. How to choose a consultant to help you deploy your blogs. Strategy for coming up with content, or encouraging your team to be smart about what they post.

And lots, lots more. Of course, there’s only one way to really find out what goes on at our Business Blogging Seminars: Sign up.