Three Years Ago
Building online communities does not happen overnight. I started building one in October of 2002 for my fraternal group in Ukrainian Scouting. We used YahooGroups to help facilitate communication and information sharing. Pretty active little group, but closed to the public.
In mid-2005, while employed at SES AMERICOM in Princeton, our new CEO’s plan included starting a blog. I didn’t think we needed it, but with help from Mike Ford, I soon came around and became the chief blogger and promoter. I also had responsibilty for keeping our external Web sites current (SES AMERICOM, AGS, REDiSat Network, IP-PRIME, ABN and HD-PRIME), so I was the natural choice. What a great experience it was working with the team at EchoDitto, Joe Trippi and Matt Gross.
Here I am, still editing this blog but no longer employed by Americom. Since we went live in early March of 2006, this blog has logged more than 196,000 visits and 322,000 page views. Not bad for a B2B blog in the satcom business (so they tell me). Besides ILS (who I advised), nobody in our community has built a real blog. Now Intelsat seems to be coming around with their blog, introduced this week.
So far, the posts have been strictly business and one way in nature. Hope they stay active and find their voice online. And let’s see how long it takes for my comment to be published — if ever.
Blogging is good for you. Go on.
