If you’ve been following the conversation here, you know that this blog focuses on marketing – and a lot of different flavors therein.  We’ve been writing for nine weeks now and with the end of a quarter and beginning of a US holiday weekend, it seems like a good point for a process check.

We had a low-key launch in April and a few key blogs noticed, including BW’s Blogspotting, Church of the Customer, and Media Guerrilla.  Thanks for the mentions and to everyone who’s subscribed to the feed or email.  We’ve been meeting on a regular basis to discuss bloggable topics and post a team viewpoint (led by a single analyst).  We’ve also been posting occasionally when we find something interesting to discuss.

There are a few things we’ve noticed along the way that aren’t publicly transparent:

  • While our posts aren’t generating a lot of comments or trackbacks, we do receive a lot of email and phone calls after posting on a topic.  For example, I got great tips about the brand monitoring wave that’s currently in progress – but there was only one comment on the post. 
  • Team blog meetings have helped to cross-pollinate knowledge and broaden our insight into other marketing disciplines.  For example, I’m no marketing automation expert, but Elana is, so it’s great to hear about brand issues from a left-brain context.
  • Blogging isn’t the easiest thing to do when a big portion of your regular job is to write anyway.  They’re related, but our written research takes a much different tone and structure than blogging.  Not a bad thing, just different styles for different channels and purposes.  For more on blogging issues, see the MarketingProfs blog.

So are some open questions to you:  what do you like?  What do you think needs improvement?  What would you like to see more coverage of?  Is there something about our approach that dampens an active dialogue?

What it means:  we are enjoying the conversation, even if it’s of a public/private nature.  Based on your feedback, we’d like to improve things to make the conversations more useful to you and other readers.  Our assumption is that by increasing the discussion level around issues, everybody benefits.

The syndicated research model doesn’t easily allow for discussion, but the blog platform does – it would be great to have all those great minds we’re engaging with (past, present, and future) sharing their knowledge here.

So let’s hear it!  What’s your analysis for these analysts?