Welcome to our new and improved blog platform! We pride ourselves on our internal experimentation, in that our Marketing department is our R&D lab. In hindsight, our previous blog platform was a bit of a failed experiment. But, we try to fail forward, so, after watching our homegrown platform steadily lose ground to the mainstream platforms, we’ve made the switch to WordPress.

Why WordPress? We did a quick assessment of what features and capabilities we felt were most important. We surveyed various Bulldog bloggers about what they used and what they liked. Oddly, we didn’t have any TypePad users. Our HR Manager has been on Blogger for the past year. I used Blogger initially but have switched to WordPress in the past six months (and love it) for both my professional and personal blogs. And, one of our campaign managers has been a WordPress user for aeons. It was a fairly quick decision, and it’s been a fairly smooth transition.

One of the challenges we faced was getting the posts from our legacy platform into WordPress. This required a bit of SQL crunching by our IT guys, but they knocked it out quickly and with few questions. We then discovered that our old system was frequently lured into using the dreaded <font> tag, depending on how the blog author composed his/her post. That required another round of SQL edits, followed by a quick manual inspection of legacy posts. But, all in all, the switch has gone fairly smoothly.

Now, having prattled on about the technology thus far in this post, I need to point out that we actually spent a lot more time and energy coming to terms with our blogging strategy than we did fretting over the underlying technology. We read and debated Geoff Livingston’s book, now is gone. We started more actively sharing the marketing blogs that we found most interesting (several of them are listed in our Blogroll) with each other. We have had a steady stream of “Friday Morning Live” speakers who have discussed their experiences and perspectives on social media in general and blogging in particular. We’ve argued about whether “blogs by committee” can really work (they obviously can, as Southwest Airlines has demonstrated, but I was one of the skeptics; in the end, we decided that we’d try to clarify our blog’s purpose internally, and then give it a go).

One key decision we made is that we would include an Operation Dogfood category on the blog. The other categories may get reevaluated over time as we roll along, but I’m reasonably certain that that one will stay. “Operation Dogfood” is our term for what I described at the beginning of this post — we are our own R&D Lab. We have a lot of ideas. They all sound good (well…most of them sound good), but the only way to know whether they really work is to try them out and analyze the results. Sometimes they work out, and sometimes they don’t. And, sometimes, when they don’t, it seems obvious as to why — the clarity of hindsight! Our experience to date with Bullblog has very much been an Operation Dogfood experiment. What we learned? There’s no benefit (and quite a bit of detriment) in reinventing the wheel on the technology front. And, as many, many social media dabblers are finding out, talking about, and locking in on — it’s not really about the technology at the end of the day.

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