Kris Hoet blogs at 'Cross The Breeze, #17 on the September 2007 M20 list. He is currently the EMEA Marketing Manager for Microsoft in Belgium and blogs about interactive, technology and a host of related topics.
Here's more on Kris:
* How long have you been blogging?
Since October 2005.
* How did you first hear about blogs?
I’ve always been interested in using new technology/media in marketing and for years I’ve been surfing the web discovering new things and typically sending a whole bunch of links to colleagues for stuff they had to see (thank you del.icio.us for fixing that). That’s how blogs entered my life I guess.
* Why did you decide to start blogging?
I wanted to understand it a lot better. Reading blogs just didn’t seem to be enough to really figure out what was going on, what impact it can/could really have. So I looked for a good platform that would allow me easily set this up (and free) and probably started shortly after on Wordpress.com. Although this initially was supposed to be like a 3 month trial (yeah I know, sounds silly but that’s the truth) to figure it out, I got into it quickly and [never stopped].
* What process, if any, did you work through from a corporate perspective?
Nothing really. I uploaded my blog to the Community website (which is optional) and signed up for the internal blogger alias (optional as well) and that’s it. The Community website might get you some traffic and can help customers to find information (although that last one is less relevant with my blog as I don’t talk about tech aspects of our products) and the alias is good when you want to ask a question to some of the other bloggers at Microsoft (there are about 4.500 of them, but not all on the alias). And I added a disclaimer of some sorts stating the blog represents my opinion, the usual I guess.
* What are your most and least favorite aspects of blogging?
- Most favorite aspects are the experiences you have because of the blog, always new things happen. The people I’ve met through blogging and the conversations I’ve had (both on the blog as via other channels) were beyond what I expected at first. The blog also turned out to be a great digital archive, something I always missed when sending out interesting stuff over email the years before.
- The least favorite parts are probably the comment spam (although Akismet works quite well to fight it) and the splogs stealing your content. In the beginning I didn’t like the daily rhythm you’re trying to get yourself onto for blogging, but once you give up on that you see it works fine without that posting stress.
* What would you change with 20/20 hindsight?
Not much really. I wouldn’t have written my first posts, not because they’re wrong but because they were a lot less on topic at that time… more random things I got interested in, but then again they were a good learning as well.
* What three blogs have you gained the most insight from in the past month?
Tough question. I’m following around 300 blogs and there are many that I enjoy reading. Some really good ones among them are:
Gapingvoid : I use at least one of Hugh’s many cartoons in almost every presentation I give
Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog: because it groups a bit of the best of some bloggers I like reading and follow individually as well (David Armano, Guy Kawasaki, …)
Marketing Profs Daily Fix: same like before, some interesting people together in one place, thanks to Ann
* Anything else?
Let’s say I really got the hang of the whole blogging thing as I started 2 other blogs during the course of the last few months, both on very different topics. In I Blog Mustang I wanted to look at ways to get myself that precious classic Mustang I always wanted (in a bit of a fun way hopefully) and in Little Book of Travel I hope to gather good stories & rants from frequent travelers to be read by frequent travelers. So no tips, brilliant holidays or anything… anything else you can send my way. Forgive me for the shameless self promotion ;)
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