Introduction
We decided the time was right as a company to join the blog community.
For a while, we resisted: partly because the blogosphere seemed too obvious. After all, our flagship product was an RSS reader, and it could come across as cheap to try to provide perhaps fabricated insight into a community where you were arguably doing it only for commercial gain. Fortunately reality struck us squarely in the noggin: Its OK to blog for commercial gain. :) I mean, who isn’t blogging for commercial gain?
For us, though, it had to be more than than. For us, the tipping point was being at a place in the company history where we felt that commercial gain could also be projected into value for our customers, our partners and the tiny corner of the blogosphere that we occupy. Virtual Reach has been around for almost two years now, and we have customers, and we have partners. The blogosphere is obvious.
So, here’s why I’m doing Virtual Speach:
- The blogosphere is filled with people and organizations that are important to us as a company. Our customers, our partners, our competitors and potential investors. Its like a big party that we were looking in on from the outside. And everybody was having fun. We felt left out. We wanted to mingle.
- Maybe I can add some compelling insight, and thus value, into the community. After all, Virtual Reach is a company that is in the thick of it. We do RSS and Web2.0-ish kind of stuff (more on this in future posts) for mobile devices.
- This blog is a nice place to provide content for our customers. I’ll continually post links to cool and interesting content that I think our customers could find interesting and valuable.
- People who are tracking Virtual Reach as a company will be interested to see what we’re doing. Press Releases don’t project where you’re going, they only showcase where you’ve been. A blog is different (not better) - the time is right for us to have that casual conversation with everybody. Customers, partners, investors and competitors can now peek into our window a bit to see what’s going on.
Virtual Speach is a casual and conversational corporate voice for Virtual Reach. We’re committed to doing it right too. Comments will be on. We will not censor criticism of the company (note: although we reserve the right to censor profanity or objectionable content [subnote: not that we EXPECT profane responses]), we will only respond to it. We invite people to participate in the history of our company.
I’m not a rookie blogger, I’ve done specialty blogs in the past. I know the commitment it takes to do a blog right. I’m committed to keeping this blog flowing. I’m committed to making it relevant and insightful. I’m committed to do spell-checks on every post. The time is right.
In any case, the "awkward first blog post" is now out of the way. On to regularly scheduled programming.