Too Busy To Blog?

"They told me how busy they were, and how they had no time and no inclination to mess around with blogs (whatever they were). Out of two classes of 50-60 participants each, I got fewer than 15 total blog URLs."

--Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee

In his blog, Professor McAfee is reporting on the reaction of his students (owners and presidents of companies enrolled in a Harvard executive education program) to his assignment to create a blog. As the quote above says, the reason more did not complete the asssignment is because they thought it was too big a distraction. The reason he gave the assignment in fact was to show how easy ("trivial") setting up a blog is -- a point, Professor McAfee says, some of the "smart students" got.

I would suggest that setting up the blog isn't what's hard. What's hard is making a blog that has value to readers. For many execs, maintaining a blog is just too much work. As an "information product," the "cost to serve" may be too high to be profitable. A physical analogy is when an online luggage vendor like eBags.com goes into the shoe business. With shoes, there's a lot of customization required (a higher cost to serve), which defeats the efficiencies implied by online marketing. I talked about this in a previous post.

As the information content of online offerings grows, these offerings tend to become more highly differentiated, and more expensive to support. Blogs are the perfect example. Executives are indeed smart to take into account the total cost of a venture, not just the startup costs. And a lot of those costs are measured in the mental resources of the company's key executives.