Joel Spolsky, one of the biggest names in software development blogging, has written a column for Inc. wherein he announces that he's giving up blogging. In his valedictory statement, he talks about how blogging companies aren't doing it right, and that while his business, Fog Creek Software, reaped benefits from his blog, he can't bring himself to recommend it to others because he thinks the value proposition just isn't there.
I've read Spolsky for a long time, and his blog posts have powered a lot of big discussions within the software development community. His writings on interviewing form the basis of our department's own candidate screening process. I count myself as one of his admirers, both for his ability to make good points and build a successful business, but this latest essay left me both agreeing and disagreeing.
Where He Gets it Right Spolsky asserts that a lot of businesses get it wrong with respect to blogging, making the blog about the company's culture and internal activities rather than the customer's needs. In a misguided rush to "humanize" the company's image, marketing teams use their blogs as self-promotional life streams that mimic individual social media.
Citing remarks by game developer Kathy Sierra as inspiration, he says it's wrong to make the blog all about your company. Quoting Spolsky's column (emphasis mine):
If you make superior, single-source chocolate, don't write about that great trip you took to the Dominican Republic to source cocoa beans. That's all about you. Instead, write the definitive article about making chocolate-covered strawberries. For the next 10 years, whenever a gourmand or a baker searches Google for a recipe on how to make chocolate-covered strawberries, he or she will find your post. Helping your users make awesome chocolate-based confections is likely to attract readers who might buy fancy chocolate, and that's the point of a successful blog. Writing about trips to the Dominican Republic is going to attract only people who might want to travel to the Dominican Republic. Unless you're selling that, you shouldn't be blogging about it.
Long before there was Compendium, Spolsky was leveraging his blog in a way that Compendium advocates -- using the blog as stream of relevant, targeted content that persists over time and draws potential customers in to your product.
In retrospect, Joel on Software was essentially a small, perfectly targeted magazine for programmers with a certain pragmatic philosophy toward software development. It was also free advertising for my company, but the advertising actually looked a lot more like editorial content than anything else...
Once I had built an audience among programmers, enough of them turned into customers that I was able to get my bootstrapped company off the ground. The audience was so precisely defined that products we tried to make that weren't specifically for programmers pretty much flopped.
Where He Gets it Wrong In the latter part of his column, Spolsky is skeptical of blogging's effectiveness for growing your business. He cites the time requirements of building a good blog and a series of corporate counterexamples that he says show that you can achieve marketing success without blogging.
This is where I start to disagree. He lists three of the big net successes -- Twitter, Facebook, and Google, all of which he says have horrible blogs, and Apple, which has virtually no blogging presence.
Holding up services that cost nothing to use doesn't make a strong case. These are things that people could try out for themselves and quickly decide whether they would stick with them.
When dollars and cents are involved, people will look around and do research before opening their wallets. They will depend on the advice of trusted friends. They will use search to locate possible solution providers. A blog which speaks to the potential customer's concerns goes a long way toward building that trust.
Apple is certainly an outlier. It's been around a long time, longer than the mainstream adoption of the net. It's customers tend to be fiercely loyal, and the rock-star status of Steve Jobs allows the company to get away with closedness moreso than the average business. The secretive nature of new product development fuels the mystique. You can't get away with this as easily if you're a new company with nary a reputation.
After reading this essay, I can't help but feel that Spolsky is throwing a baby out with the bathwater by abandoning blogging. Early on in the essay he writes that when the responsibility of blogging is distributed throughout the organization, the program runs out of steam from infrequent updates.
However, we know from our own experiences that when there is a program owner who oversees team motivation, momentum can be sustained over time. It also helps when the authors get fresh feedback over how their efforts contribute to the bottom line. Yes, it takes time, but it's probably not nearly as much as Spolsky envisions. You just have to hire people who are smart and get things done, something that he has written a time or two about. :-)
Today is an exciting day here at Compendium for me. We meet with the Engineering Team who is responsible for making Compendium's powerful blogging software --- simple blogging software. 
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