Michael Wurzer The NY Times writes today about blogging in Blogging’s A Low-Cost, High-Return Marketing Tool. I won’t say the article is great but it’s a decent introduction to business blogging and its pros and cons. I definitely agree that blogging won’t work for every business. In fact, were it not for the controversies surrounding MLS these days, I wonder if the FBS Blog would be interesting at all.
I’ve been thinking lately that the FBS Blog has been more of a one-trick pony than I would like, so focused on real estate data standards and MLS regionalization to the exclusion of other possibly interesting topics. I really like the idea of developing conversations with our customers, but our experience with the FBS Blog so far is that those conversations don’t occur quite as easily out in the open. So, we’re working on developing support systems internally to our MLS to allow more private conversations within the MLS and among our users, which really will be an extension of blogging. This is a definite priority for us in 2008, because we fundamentally believe that customer service is the new marketing.