PR-Squared
I particularly like PR-squared. The author shows a colloquial attitude more than a formal one and this makes it easier to read in some ways. I'm surprised when I see these smug little new-english phrases like "li'l" or "marketing jedi." It feels like a geeky blog about Public Relations and I think that's fantastic. I was also surprised he was putting information from competitors on their and openly considering the ideas of junior staff. It feels like a balanced blog by someone very interested in PR: Todd Defren. He is an employee at Shift but the blog is less about shift and more about him and his personality shines through. It makes me more inclined to trust him and consider SHIFT a strong and interesting company.
http://www.pr-squared.com/
Duct-Tape Marketing
I have received the podcast from this blog many times and have not found it greatly useful. This has been because most of the content just wasn't interesting or it wasn't presented in an exciting way. The Blog has cut out a lot of the extra content and offers the meat of the information. To promote a book there are a series of stories about how people improved referrals. It was interesting, concise, and well-written. Which is very different from the unscripted slow moving interviews I recall from the podcast. I will probably cancel my podcast from them en lieu of the blog. It might be that more of the authors personality comes out in the blog as he seems more excited about what he is discussing in the blog.
http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/
Enguage
In stark contrast to the previous two, the Engauge blog has many authors. In fact the same author doesn't do two articles on the front page. They all are interesting people, but it makes it feel more like an RSS feed of an aggregate site than a blog. Even with the layout just being white with dark grey text and little else it still somehow manages to feel disorganized. This one is off putting to me visually. That being said I already have looked more into a few of the things mentioned on the site and strongly supportive of the point made about not ruining mobile phones with advertising. I appreciated that they took that approach rather than discretely being a proponent of a new area to spam people.
http://blog.engauge.com/
All in all they were very interesting. I'm still not exactly sure where the content comes from, the Merry-go-round of the Engauge page offers authors more time to write an effective article, while the ones that have just one author have to regularly update or risk losing readers. There are advantages and disadvantages to both and from a business standpoint it can subtly give your business a reputation for instance my now positive view of SHIFT and ROSETTA; two companies I had previously never heard of. On the other hand a business can be shot in the foot by their employee's words as well, POWERED feels like it does very little and is very bad at a lot of things. This may be different from a general business standpoint but it makes me less inclined to look at them in a positive light. Engauges blog also makes me question their design skills. So putting your strongest effort into any blog that may represent your company is very important because sometimes its the first someone sees of it.
