I'd always heard that great executives should always alocate 1-2 hours per day to read an get informed. The reality, is that like many, I was always TOO busy... But now there's NO excuse! You can now download NewsGator that runs in your Outlook 2003 - so if you aren't too busy for e-mails you can't be too busy for blogs. It's actually like tapping into the brains of all the people that could answer all your queries, all your fears and in the meantime you'll stumble across great ideas and sometimes quite inspiring stuff.

Blogging really kicks off when you start to interact with your consumers. We moved our web pages for Paradise Garage to the blog format and we jumped from 250 unique visits to over 1000 but the greatest move only started to take effect today as we replied to our first comments and not very favorable at that - but they were actually very tuned in. They should be - they are straight from our customers!

It's the beginning but it's all about gaining their trust and we've sat for hours looking at a comment wondering whether to remove it - once we had some basic rules - applied to life - opinios are fine, personal attacks not - it was easy. I was VERY surprised however to see these stats on the post in eMarketer.com titled "Executives Not Quite Hot to Blog".

Sellers took us through Intel’s evolving marketing strategy and gave his personal insights into experiential marketing. Like most marketers present, he too focused not on the “one shot” event but on an experiential strategy that takes events into the realm of emotional connectivity.

A large hurdle, and one that I was fascinated to hear, was how do you communicate or market a product as boring as transistors? It’s not a product you can go and buy and worse of all it’s in someone else’s product. So how can you market a product that your consumer cannot interact with? This was the start of Intel’s strategy to market their innovation.

"The essence of strategy is choosing what NOT to do."

Michael Porter