On the leading edge?

According to a recent article on blogging, around 5% of small businesses produce blogs. That seems incredibly low, but then again blogging isn't a relevant application for many types of businesses. It is, however, a perfect fit for Advisen, and the feedback on my blog has proven this.

Advisen offers information and analytic tools for commercial insurance professionals. Much of what we license to our subscribers is unique to Advisen. We publish price indices and other findings from our data and have a team of research professionals whose reports on trends in the market are applauded by leaders in the insurance industry.

Back in 2004, as soon as then-NY State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced an investigation into how brokers get paid by underwriters, Advisen immediately launched a blog to pull together source material, commentary and any information we could gather. We used this information to assess the impact on the industry and reported on it in Front Page News, our daily e-mail newsletter (found here). We ran surveys of risk managers to get their feelings. We were widely sourced in national papers when they covered the story.

It was a huge success in terms of creating awareness and building a larger brand footprint in our target market. We're about to launch another Advisen blog and I'm excited about it. I expect that the number of small businesses using blogging is much more than 5%, but if it's still that low, here's to being on the leading edge.