Jul
26
Jul
17
One year later: weblogs work, but . . .
Weblogs Work is now part of Big in Japan! It took us a year to determined that weblogs do in fact work, but they are simply one social media tool a business or agency should consider. As a result we have decided to consolidate the Big in Japan and Weblogs Work brand into one with a renewed focus on helping businesses and agencies build turnkey social media programs by providing a broad spectrum of social tools including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, forums and feeds. Don’t worry, the Weblogs Work weblog won’t go away, it will continue to provide a place for the Big in Japan team to blog about social media. Can you believe it has been a year?
On April 12, 2005 I wrote the first Weblogs Work post titled, “Business Blogs the next big thing (that is already here)!” In July we began offering ‘blog consulting’ services to small companies. We also started having our programmers build various tools for our consultancy to effectively host shared and dedicated, single and multi-user blogs. Soon our clients got larger and our projects more complicated. Our programmers started building even more customized tools like elfURL, PodServe, FrankenFeed, InstantFeed and SocialMail. We even created a brand for our social tool effort called Big in Japan.
Almost ninety days ago it became obvious we had a choice to make. We could build an agency and expand our social media consulting practice or we could change our focus to exploit what we were already uniquely positioned to provide. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan are both brands owned by Spur (the holding company I manage). Spur also owns an IT support brand called Architel. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan had been stealing resources (data center space, servers, programmers and engineers) from the very start and it became clear we were very good at building, customizing, managing and supporting various social tools. Very few companies had the experience and resources to do what we were doing on a daily basis.
Just before the 4th of July we bit the bullet and decided to refocus our offering to provide agencies and brand managers enterprise class social tools complete with hosting, management and day-to-day support. Here is an example of our most popular offerings:
- Social Media 101 – A two-day fire starting event for your company. Our trainers will show you how social media tools will change your business through a hands-on training event for up-to 20 employees per event. Includes 12 months of hosted/managed/supported weblog, wiki and podcast services.
- Managed WordPress – Offering a multi-server WordPress implementation allowing for separation of presentation and database functionality. Supporting up-to 512 unique weblogs on two servers. Nightly backups and statistics included.
- Managed PmWiki – Offering a highly secure wiki implementation allowing for up-to 256 unique wikis on a single server. Nightly backups and statistics included.
- White Label PodServe – Offering a unique integrated podcast and telephony tool for your business.
Want to learn more? You can reach me directly at 1+214.550.2003 or just send me an email. We look forward to hearing from you!
Jul
12
Rocket Boom = BayWatch?
BayWatch was able remain on the air during three decades (80’s, 90’s and 00’s) and throughout that period the female talent lasted an average of two years (Hasselhoff was the only one to make it through the entire series). The ratings would increase each time someone new was added and they will start to dip over time. Each actress who left found their career a little better than it was before the series. The concept of the show was fairly silly, but it worked for some reason.
Obviously Rocket Boom is no BayWatch, but I think the analogy is valid. I never spent much time watching Rocket Boom despite the fact that it is automatically loaded in my video iPod. I did watch a few episodes on a flight from Bangalore, India to London (I was desperate). I had not had a chance to see another episode since, but soon after the termination/resignation of Amanda Congdon and her replacement by MTV VJ Joanne Colan I decided to check out it out again. Joanne was funny, smart and good looking. I most likely won’t watch again until Andrew Baron hires another replacement, but I suspect Rocket Boom will continue and I am sure Amanda will find that her career is just a little better for working on Rocket Boom…
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