Steve Newson posted a thought provoking article yesterday examining the return on investment for blogging. He linked to a post on markoos out and about where a software vendor found a post about its software and engaged in a very customer-friendly discussion via the comments. Steve’s point is that a large part of the return on investment for blogging is the goodwill generated thereby.

Even though there was not a perfect resolution to the problem discussed in the above example, the fact is that a software vendor set up a process to monitor blogs for posts about its product and came to the customer to try to be helpful. Think about that for a second. Instant goodwill.

I think Steve has hit the nail on the head. Amy Gahran feels the same way about Craig Newmark’s blog responses. Part of the reason I love Technorati so much is because Dave Sifry threw me the 99 yard pass when I had some (now resolved) indexing problems last year. This sort of goodwill is a win-win. The customer (and other customers and potential customers who read the exchange) feels genuinely important and the company builds goodwill, which translates to referrals, postive press and, most importantly, customer loyalty.

It’s not just Steve, Amy and me who are wowed by this sort of pro-active response. It’s everyone who reads these conversations and others like them. That kind of goodwill is a very good return on investment.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, the PC Doctor, posted a question today. He asked if blogging has become the new Solitaire, keeping workers pre-occupied at work and possibly driving down productivity, the way businesses feared computer Solitaire would when everyone got a desktop computer back in the nineties.

Ah, that first office computer…

I remember the first computer I got at my office downtown (not to be confused with my office at home, from where I write this). We were running what was probably the second or third newest version of DOS (that trend continues to this day). About all we could do was send emails (from some long-forgotten DOS-based interface) and use whatever the second or third newest version of WordPerfect was. If there were any games to be had back then, we didn’t know about it.

Some of us did figure out how to access other peoples’ email though, and I actually caused a fictional meeting to occur between two of my friends. I sent an email from each to the other asking to meet at a designated time and place about “an exciting new project.” Each one thought the other asked for the meeting and here’s the incredible part: they had the meeting and never figured out that it was bogus. They just started talking about all sorts of stuff and never got around to the “exciting new project.” That was almost as funny as the stuff some guys did back when we first got (and immediately hacked) voicemail. In the interest of CYA, let me note that I told both our IT department, who had asked me to fool around with the program to see if it was secure, and the two attendees about the joke; no one was offended and we all laughed about it.

We eventually got some two or three year old version of Windows and I remember that our IT folks went to great lengths to remove all the games. I really appreciated that when I was stuck on planes and in airports for hours and hours back in my traveling days.

Much later, we finally got access to the great big ol’ internet and, I guess because they knew we could find worse on the web, they actually left the games on our computers.

Did a ton of people play computer Solitaire then? Probably, but here’s the thing. There are two kinds of Solitaire players: those who play it for a while because it’s new and then lose interest (I went through that with Minesweeper back in the day) and those who become semi-addicted and play it all the time, either to avoid work or out of boredom, etc. The first group of people are not going to let it interfere with getting their work done. The second group would find some other diversion if the game was not available.

So is it the new Solitaire?

My observations from walking down the halls at my office lead me to believe that the new Solitaire is comprised of the same sort of things people did before blogs: computer dating services, online home listings, chat programs (for those who have figured out a way around my firm’s firewall) and a collection of flash-based online games (including, of course, Solitaire). Then there’s all the online newspapers, fantasy football pages and other online content. It may be different in other offices, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone reading or writing a blog at my office.

For most people, these diversions don’t interfere with their work in any material adverse way. For others, they do. But, again, if it wasn’t this it would be something else.

What about the Web 2.0 companies?

One of Adrian’s points is that all these people at work who are typing away at their computers doing what looks like work, but is actually surfing, taging, reading and writing on web sites like Technorati, Flickr, Bloglines, Delicious, Engadget, et. al, are creating mad value for these Web 2.0 companies at the expense of the companies who are paying their salaries. I’m certain this happens, but I don’t think it’s happening more with these companies that it did previously with Yahoo, Google and The New York times. It’s the same time wasting- only with cooler stuff.

Meet the new Solitaire…

So while I don’t know for sure, I suspect that, to paraphrase The Who, the new Solitaire is the same as the old Solitaire.

Gaping Void has a list of the Top 10 Reasons Why No One Reads Your Blog.

This is funny stuff, even if I am guilty of at least 5 of them (and that’s by my count).

Tom Reynolds posted a thoughtful comment to my New Years Day rumination on the difficulty of building a new blog. His questions and suggestions got me thinking about this issue some more.

He asked what I would consider a marker of success. Certainly not making money, as the primary point in my “closed blogosphere” series of posts is that the perceived possibility of making money is the root of the problem. As I mentioned in my follow up post, I think blogging to make money is sort of like playing hoops to get to the NBA- it takes the fun out of it and ultimately leads to disappointment. Yes there are NBA players (Jason Calacanis being, I suppose, the Kobe of blogging), but there aren’t many NBA players and there aren’t many million dollar blogs. A new blogger has about the same chance of getting rich like Jason as my son does playing for the Lakers one day.

Cyndi Lauper was right: money changes everything. Newsome’s Rule: add the prospect of money to any equation and things get very complicated.

My marker of success is getting the opportunity to participate in the discussion. It’s not about who the discussion is with- it’s the fact that a discussion is taking place via cross-blog conversations. Otherwise, a blog starts to feel like a neighborhood newspaper left to decompose in the yard.

It’s about the interaction that I believe make blogs the natural evolution of the internet message board and newsgroup.

Tom suggests that bloggers should develop their own network of similar blogs to develop cross-conversations with. I think that is a great idea and have used that as one of my approaches in developing Newsome.Org. The list of blogs that I consider part of my virtual watercooler grows every day. Hopefully, I get added to their lists as well. Before you know it, you can get some inter-blog momentum. And that is both fun and rewarding.

The thing I really began to understand when thinking about some of the things Tom said is that you have to grow your blog one reader at a time. It’s a hard, uphill climb. But if an independent blogger can, in fact, get to the top of the mountain, that’s the only to do it.

Tom said he added Newsome.Org to his reading list. And that’s a great compliment in and of itself. If someone somewhere is interested in what you have to say, can you ask for anything more?