Almost as a followup to my earlier post about “Web 2.0″ comes another angle. I don’t personally know Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, the co-authors of “Groundswell”, a book that claims to help big companies determine what Web 2.0 strategies are right for them. They were at yesterday’s Web 2.0 Expo, pitching their book. 

Nor have I read their book, but I have browsed through some of their ideas on their own blogs. Josh Bernoff has been quoted as saying,

An important first step is to understand the cost and benefit of harnessing these new technologies. For instance, the first-year cost of starting an executive blog for a Fortune 500 company is about $285,000. Executives must be trained how to blog, and it must be vetted by lawyers and Web Designers, and that costs money.

Excuse me? $285,000 U.S. Dollars?!? Where did this guy pull that figure from? Sadly, some naive business people are buying this book and are actually taking the content to heart! The book is hard bound and comes in a sickeningly bright green and yellow cover, available for $19.77 at Amazon. But don’t stare at the cover too long, because I think there is some kind of subliminal advertising built in to those swirling circles. 

Here is what I think blogging is all about. Communication. Nothing more, and nothing less. It’s more modern, it’s instantaneous, and it can be informative, educational, and even funny. But it is still just another form of communication. I can just imagine some big CEO, trying to figure out what to write in their business blog each day, surrounded by a team of attorneys and a webmaster with a really BIG grin on his or her face.

The problem is that too many people are looking at blogging as a means of getting into your head and making you buy something. It is degenerating into just another marketing tool. Fussing over every word we write, just so we can include well thought out key words. Purposely misspelling the names of our competitors, just to get those extra search engine hits on Google directing links back to our own site.

So for the record, if any business people out there truly believes that they have to spend $285,000 in order to have a successful blog, please contact me via my blog and I guarantee that I can do this for them and it will cost much less. I’ll even make your blog pretty for you. I’ll take the responsibility of coming up with your daily posts with a minimal amount of your time and assistance, and I will even bend my own moral scruples and include keywords and search engine optimization techniques if you so desire. But please, keep those lawyers a safe distance from me. I don’t write well with someone reading over my shoulder.