St. Paul Pioneer Press Business Section
June 27, 2003
Blogging for Business by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Ray Cox the businessman and Ray Cox the politician are one and the same, but for "blog" purposes, Cox is two separate personalities.

Ray Cox of Northfield Construction Co. offers a weblog (or "blog" in common usage) — one of those proliferating personal online journals with spontaneous, ever-changing entries — on the company's home page, http://northfieldconstruction.net.

State Rep. Ray Cox, R-Northfield, created a second blog at http://raycox.net to reach his political constituency. Cox is apparently the first state legislator and one of the first U.S. elected officials to launch a blog on a campaign site.

More blogs like Cox's are coming, said Griff Wigley, a Northfield Web entrepreneur who has made a budding business of prodding business owners, politicians and other unlikely suspects into "blogging." Cox is one of Wigley's clients.

Wigley is at the cusp of a recent push to broaden blogging beyond the usual tech geeks, Net-based activists and other Web-savvy types for whom weblogs are old hat.

"Blogging is going commercial," Andrew Eklund, chief executive of the Minneapolis-based Ciceron Webmarketing firm, said last week in an e-mail newsletter.

"Most corporate Web sites are still annoyingly dull," Eklund said. "Essentially, most are outdated repositories of unkempt content (without a) compelling voice. A blog can help change that."

Business sites typically are the work of hired Web hands who craft slick yet uninspired content that is updated sporadically, if ever. Frequent, spontaneous commentary by a company's leaders is hardly what visitors anticipate.

But Cox and his staff offer detailed, colorful updates on their building projects along with tidbits about firm employees and Cox's own family, such as his daughter Marja, recently home from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

Companies such as software maker Macromedia now encourage employees to set up public weblogs to provide information on the company's products. Travel site biznettravel.com uses a blog to post links to the latest travel-related news, complete with snarky commentary.

Scott Neal, Eden Prairie city manager, is another of Wigley's clients. Neal's blog at http://edenprairieweblogs.org/html/scott_neal.html brims with firework-safety tips, new-business announcements, staff commendations and, yes, items on Neal's own family.

"I've been away from The Blog for a couple of days," Neal recently wrote by way of apology to his online readers. "During the past week, my oldest kid graduated from high school this weekend and my wife had an emergency gall bladder removal surgery. Other priorities. But now I'm back, and talking about liquor issues again."

Wigley, whose Wigley & Associates consulting firm specializes in facilitating Web-based forums and other forms of online interaction, said this new kind of blogging remains in its infancy. "Business is waking up to blogging, but there's nothing out there in a big way."

He aims to help change that. Wigley-assisted local businesses with blogs now include an English-style pub, an Indian restaurant, an athletic club, a motorcycle dealership and a tattoo-and-body-piercing parlor. See a complete list at www.wigleyandassociates.com.

Wigley gives his clients technical assistance in getting their blogs Web-published, along with gentle coaching until they figure out blog-writing conventions.

"Virtually all had dead Web sites that are now being updated frequently without any technical person getting involved," he said. "They're speaking with a voice of authenticity you don't find on brochure-type sites with canned language."