The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. Dave maintains three weblogs, The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, focused on business and industry analysis, the eponymous Ask Dave Taylor devoted to tech and business Q&A and The Attachment Parenting Blog, discussing topics of interest to parents. Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

Podcast: How do you avoid the common pitfalls of hiring blog consultants?

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Durk Price for his popular podcast on a subject that should be of great interest to anyone in the blog business space: how do you integrate a consultant, and specifically a content producing consultant, into your business blog? There are lots of horror stories about companies like Wal-Mart, Panasonic and Sony that have tripped over themselves for not being sufficiently transparent about their blogging efforts, but does that mean de facto that you can't hire people to help produce the content on your blog? Of course not. And that's what we discussed.

Here's a link to the audio file: Durk and Dave Talk about Blog Consulting [mp3]

Durk also produced a transcript of the podcast and I'm including some excerpts below, along with a link to the entire entry...

Enjoy, and do let us know your response to what we discuss. I think you'll find it fun and informative both.

the following are (slightly edited) excerpts of the full podcast transcript...

Dave Taylor: The first thing is that it strikes me that there are two facets to this [question of hiring bloggers to produce content for your site] because there’s the side of how do you market your service.

Durk Price: Yes.

Dave Taylor: And then, there’s the side of what are your recommendations to a client in terms of how it’s disclosed what your relationship is with their organization.

Dave Taylor: ... the point being that if you play, or I guess if you label yourself as a commodity provider, then you’re defining your market as a commodity market and then it just goes to the lowest bidder.

Durk Price: Yeah.

Dave Taylor: I mean, if you’re just looking for 50 words strung together in a semi-coherent form twice a week, boy, you can get that for 3 bucks from some guy in India.

Durk Price: Yeah, absolutely.

Dave Taylor: You know, but they’re not going to be doing the market research. They’re not going to maybe have a Masters in English. They’re not going to go in interview industry leading figures.

All of those sort of things that you can do are the kind of things that (a) ratchet up your price but (b) make your positioning a little more tricky. And so, it strikes me that, you know, it might be something where you want to be like a strategic online media content consultant or something like that.

Like to read instead of listening? Then please check out the transcript of Durk and Dave's podcast. If you prefer to just listen to our amusing and informative discussion -- which I certainly recommend -- please turn up your speakers and click here for the streaming MP3 file.

Posted by Dave Taylor at March 1, 2007 9:29 AM

Comments

Great, it's my birthday and Scoble basically calls me a moron and now Taylor is calling my company White Trash!

I think I will run and figure out if Social Marketers for hire is available!

The bad thing is Dave is I agree with your thoughts. My clients are the people that want inexpensive. If they didn't want inexpensive they would be doing it in house or themselves. Wal-Mart is not going to come to me and tell me they need a strategic marketing content consultant. Wally's Florist Shop that has himself and his wife working at his shop and wants to enter into social marketing and heard that maybe having a blog might increase his findability, and might be better to have his message delivered, is not going to call Edelman to get a some high powered name. He will however talk to a guy that does a business called Bloggers For Hire.

As to disclosure. When I hire a temporary employee to do my bookkeeping, do I need to disclose that she is from company ABC doing my books? No she calls up and say I'm Joan Smith from Bloggers For Hire and I and sending you and invoice. She is representing my company, but she is an outsourced person. I'm not a bookkeeper, she is, but do I need to disclose her involvement?

Posted by: Jim Turner on March 1, 2007 5:10 PM

Jim, first off, happy birthday!!

You raise an excellent point in that value is directly related to the elasticity and budget of your target customer niche. Tom Peters doesn't do speeches for $25, but the nervous 22yo first-year entrepreneur doesn't command $80,000 for his speeches either. Both have their place, just as Toastmasters and the National Speakers Association have their respective places too.

Posted by: Dave Taylor on March 1, 2007 5:36 PM

Ouch...

Let me know when I can eat at the big kids table.

...just make sure you get my URL right next time. ;)

Posted by: Jim Turner on March 1, 2007 5:51 PM

Jim dear,
As your first posting had words spelled incorrectly, and some grammar mistakes, I would avoid hiring you just based on that. Save your energy for providing exactly what is needed in blogging -- good copywriting that is grammtically correct. Your blast of Dave brings you no new business.

Posted by: Buc on March 2, 2007 4:57 PM

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