In my opinion, blogging and book writing go hand-in-hand. All it takes to bridge the gap from blog to book is a bit more forethought, discipline, and structure, and of course a publisher, and BOOM! you’ve got a book. Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. My experience co-authoring a book (The Art of SEO) was nothing like that. But still, it’s nice to romanticize the process — simply assemble your blog posts into a cohesive structure and send it off to a publisher. What could be simpler?

More often than not the author’s blog is an afterthought. The book came first. Then the blog came second as the book’s marketing vehicle, a complement/supplement. I’m not knocking it, but it’s great to see a high-quality blog turn into a high-quality book.

As both an author and a blogger, I can really appreciate when a blogger succeeds in transforming their blog into a book. It’s inspiring. One of my favorites is PostSecret, which was turned into a whole series of books. More prototypical examples of blog-to-book projects are The Long Tail (blog / book) and The Search (blog / book). Both are excellent blogs, and excellent books. Sometimes Twitter feeds turn into books too, like S*it My Dad Says. That’s some funny stuff. Now it looks like CEO blogger Steve Spangler is coming out with a book too. His is called Naked Eggs and Flying Potatoes. A curious title. In actuality I think his book is more of an amalgamation of his video content than his blog posts, but nonetheless the finished book looks impressive. Congrats Steve!

Folks often ask me if I’m going to write another book. My answer: I doubt it. It’s too painful (like birthing a baby, though, as a man, I can’t truly appreciate the pain of childbirth), and it pays less than minimum wage if you work out the numbers. Folks will then chime in with “Yeah, and why bother with a physical book anyways when everybody’s migrating online!” That I don’t agree with. There are a very large group of holdouts — me included — who still prefer the feel of printed books, who enjoy the experience of curling up with a good book rather than a laptop or ebook reader. And yes I own an iPad, but I don’t read books on it. And I don’t plan to anytime soon. Call me a Luddite.

Clip-n-Seal is an innovative consumer product, a plastic rod and clamp device, in various sizes, that seals bags securely. The company behind it has embraced blogs whole-heartedly. Not only do they maintain their own blog, under the News section of the site, which is a mix of customer news, marketing initiatives, PR coverage and other miscellaneous customer information, but they also have embraced blogs as a marketing outlet. Notably, they were one of the first advertisers for Blogstakes, a sweepstake program that drafts other bloggers in its promotions, which, they attest, was very successful for them in raising their awareness around the Net and lifting their Google rank.

In a recent post, founder D.L. Byron describes what it’s like to get BoingBoinged (we can only imagine).

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Bar and restaurant blog.

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You can’t get a lot more CPG than milk. Well going hog wild, as it were, this environmentally conscious organic dairy has no less than five “Blog ‘Cow’munities!” (their pathetic joke, not mine):

• Strong Women Daily News
  The latest news and insights from our Strong Women partners

• The Bovine Bugle
  Daily moos from the Howmars Organic Dairy Farm

• The Dairy Planet
  Daily ways we try to nurture and sustain the environment

• The Daily Scoop
  Moos from inside the Yogurt Works

• Creating Healthy Kids
  Daily updates from our Menu for Change healthy food in schools program

UPDATE: On June 7, the company put out this press release, calling attention to their blog initiative, quoting yours truly as an expert in the space.

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Gary Leff

Good travel industry blog from a business that focuses on frequent flyer mileage services:

Founded in 1986, Frequent Flyer Services has created a unique niche for itself within the travel industry as a company that conceives, develops and markets products and services exclusively for the frequent traveler. Its focus and distinctive competency lie in the area of frequent traveler programs.

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Utterly brilliant example of a business blog from a somewhat surprising source: Microsoft. Brilliant in terms of philosophy (well thought out) and execution. Here is a post that lays out the The Channel 9 Doctrine, and here is the "What the…" schpiel in the left-column of every page:

Channel 9 started as a personal story from one of us about fear of flying. Lenn realized after years of dealing with it, that it was actually a fear of the unknown. The fear was conquered through learning. The more transparency into what it took to fly a plane, the more the fear went away. Lenn got to know pilots who flew planes everyday, and every time he flew he turned on Channel 9 on the in-flight audio system to listen in to the cockpit.

We think developers need their own Channel 9, a way to listen in to the cockpit at Microsoft, an opportunity to learn how we fly, a chance to get to know our pilots. Five of us in Redmond are crazy enough to think we just might learn something from getting to know each other. Were we wrong? Time will tell.

Join in, and have a look inside our cockpit and help us fly the plane.

Welcome to Channel 9.

One of the most innovative features of the blog is the use of video clips of developers interviewing each other. You know it’s the real deal when these not-exactly telegenic gentleman (I haven’t seen any women yet) cite a Star Trek movie as informing their programming considerations. Serious geeks, in addition to the video blog posts, the site comes complete with a moblog and a wiki.

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Mena Trott

Publishers of the popular Movable Type and TypePad blog publishing tools, Six Apart maintains several customer service blogs, including:

• SixApart’s homepage for general company news.
• Mena’s Corner, from Six Apart’s president and co-founder Mena Trott, “is our outlet for updates about Six Apart and the weblogging space through our perspective. It is, an attempt, to show the inner workings of a start-up and let the outside world understand the challenges we face and achievements we accomplish.”
• Everything TypePad, for product and customer service announcements about the company’s hosted solution, TypePad (which is what we use to produce BusinessBlogConsulting.com).
• Movable Type’s homepage is also a weblog with product annoucments and customer service news for that product.
• Mena.Typepad.com, company president Mena Trott’s personal blog
• Ben.Stupidfool.org, Six Apart’s CTO, co-founder and Mena’s husband and high school sweetheart (awwww) Ben Trott’s blog, which it looks like he doesn’t update lately.

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It’s disappointing that Blogger.com, the guys who basically invented blogs (now owned by Google), don’t showcase the potential of business blogs more prominently with their own service, but they do update Status.Blogger.com sporadically, pertaining to system status issues, and Blogger.com’s homepage is itself a blog, though it likewise appears to be updated only once or twice a month. On the other hand, several folks on Blogger’s management maintain their own blogs, including Evan Williams, Jason Shellon and Biz Stone.

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Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee whose role is customer "evangelist," regularly posts a dozen or two entries a day, often into the wee hours, on subjects ranging from business travel, blog culture and general tech trends, but it’s mostly all Microsoft, all the time. No question, Scoble takes to the medium like a fish to water, speaking his mind and engendering large and loyal following. A poster child for how to do business blogging right, both as a thought leader and customer servant.

One post is a useful one for all our readers, The Corporate Weblog Manifesto.

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Edmonton radio station’s community calendar. This is a perfect example of a business blog — many radio stations could copy this model.

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Another great example of a small organization using a weblog to keep the site dynamic and useful.

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