Some Additional Benefits of Blogging

Here at Atomic Object we have a strong culture of sharing the benefits of our success with each other – in many ways far more generously than is common in our industry. Of course, coupled to these rewards is an equally emphasized sense of responsibilities – not the least of these is our commitment to the value and success of our blog.

It’s no revelation that Atomic’s success, like any service company, is highly dependent on its ability to continuously generate a stream of client engagements. This blog is a large part of our marketing effort and to this end each employee is tasked with making regular contributions.

It occurs to me, however, that both the company and the employees are gaining several secondary benefits from these efforts:

Cultivating a sense of teamwork

By sharing this commitment across the entire company, each person knows they are not alone in this drive to fuel our marketing efforts. It is not uncommon to see people working together on a post – whether assisting with proof reading, helping cultivate a blog idea, or even coauthoring a post. Although we do a lot of team-of-two software development, more reasons to work together can only be a good thing.

Encouraging cross-disciplinary skills

Here at Atomic, most of us consider ourselves generalists. We try not to focus on one single domain or discipline, but rather to apply our terrific knowledge of top-quality software development skills across a wide range of platforms, languages, and environments. I view my participation in blogging as yet another way to express and practice my interest and passion for this profession. In addition to this, exercising your brain – especially in ways unrelated to your normal, daily activities – has been shown to be beneficial in many ways.

Increased return on our creativity

We are mostly a team of makers. The love of experimentation and implementation of new ideas is part of what makes us great. Our ability to invent new and better ways of solving problems allows us to continually increase the value we provide to our clients. Writing about our successes (and failures) provides another channel for putting our development efforts to productive use.

Bettering the community

We take our role as stewards seriously and we apply those responsibilities as broadly as possible. Discovering an inventive use for an old tool, inventing novel and productive development processes and designing a better way for a web app to communicate with users are very cool things to get paid to do, but we would be doing a disservice to our craft and industry by not sharing these things with others. Blogging about the great things we do is just one of the ways that we act as good citizens in the innovation services industry.

I have listened to and participated in discussions regarding the true worth of Atomic Object’s blogging efforts. And while there is little doubt about the marketing value we receive in our commitment to the blog, some of these other ideas are not always so easy to remember.

Would the additional benefits I’ve mentioned here make you think differently about your own blogging habits? I’d love to hear about your experiences and ideas in the comments.

Scott Miller (23 Posts)