This ancient Chinese proverb transcends time with the concept of “continuous learning.” While most accounting professionals might grinch a bit about required continuing education, most of us value an educational environment that offers insight to complement our knowledge or add something completely new.

Today, with the always-on Web environment, we’re learning in ways our parents, grandparents and even wise Asian men never dreamed of, with more choices than ever before. For example, widgets feed headlines directly to the desktop. RSS feeds deliver the news you want, when you want it.

Blogs – one of the still-new learning tools for the accounting profession that might seem “old school” to techies – is one of the most valuable, low-cost ways to enhance our knowledge. Never more than a mouse-click way, blogs constantly demonstrate the power of one person’s opinion to sway our thoughts, broaden our minds and provide a value-add to our business environment.

If you never considered writing your own blog – now is the perfect time! Many firms will want to consider a strategy that might support the mission and vision of the firm, while other practitioners simply want to begin expressing their views. Whichever way you want go, a blog is a great learning tool for the author and his or her audience.

Getting Started

People debate who actually invented WebBlogs – or “blog” – but there is one thing undebatable. While blogging is a phenomena in many industries, interestingly enough, in the accounting profession, the number of bloggers are hard to determine, mainly because there are so few. Yet, blogging with video is one of the best ways to share information among teams and provide a means to get your “brand” across in a marketplace.

If this is the case, why is it that so few of us use alternative techniques such as blogging to communicate internally or externally?

First, let’s start with the basics of what a blog is and how any accounting professional can get started with blogging. If you want to create a public blog, there are many online, free sites to help set one up. Google provides a platform called Blogger, while Microsoft provides Windows Live Spaces to host blogs. Other platforms include TypePad, Movable Type and other offerings from SixApart.com and Community Server from Telligent. You can even blog using the Microsoft’s SharePoint platform.

For most business blogging, free sites such as blogger.com and Live Spaces are not used because they are not robust enough and do not have many of the bells and whistles a business blogger would want. As a result, a more professional blog can be obtained using professional blogging platforms built by companies who can become a partner with you, rather than the free blogging platforms. A simple Google search will render companies such as these. If you want to see what the process of blogging is like, and whether you see value in it, you may wish to play around with a free site before committing yourself to a more expensive blogging platform.

In its simplest form, a blog is an easy-to-maintain Web site that publishes in date or chronological order. Posts are done either directly on the Web site or through a blog writing platform. A process called Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is used to publish the blog posts to the web. Readers of the blog can then read the postings online or in a reader. These readers are called RSS readers and include, for example, NewsGator, that pull the posts into Microsoft Outlook or onto a Web page. You can even use dashboards programs such as Google Desktop and pull in the posts right on to your desktop.

Once the platform is chosen, next comes selecting the topic of what to blog about. Most experts in the blogging medium recommend one important thing: Blog about what you care about. Be passionate about the topic. Blogging is, at its heart, a personal writing medium, similar to diary or journal writing when you were a child. If you decide to blog about something that you have no interest in whatsoever, your writing and your blogging will reflect that. Write from the heart.

Keep in mind that blogging – while not journalism – has those in the blog industry that treat it similarly. You gain credibility if you speak authoritatively and are accurate. While it’s not necessary for a blogger to conform to a journalism ethics creed, you should write in a manner that is respectful to you. Blogging can be a means to provide credibility and authority to what you do professionally, so having a moral code when writing helps this process. If you later find out you are wrong, say so. Acknowledge the misinformation and correct the posting. If you obtained information from someone else, indicate your source. For many of us in the accounting profession, using the AICPA code of ethics as a guideline means we won’t cross the line of releasing information that should not be released until we are given the authority from our clients or employers to do so.

Perhaps the blog should not be a personal blog, but a business one with multiple authors? Even with a joint blogging site, identifying each author will allow the personal view to be seen.

Develop a Strategy

There are two ways to position a business blog: internal or external. If you prepare an internal blogging site for your company, the location of the blog will reside on your network only and probably will include information that is more inclusive to the company with potentially sensitive business information key to your firm or business. You can use the internal site as a means to communicate key information to your team members.  This type of blogging is very specific and has a specific purpose.

Another way to position a blog is externally. If a blog is a public blog, you need to be aware of the role it will have. Setting boundaries of how you will present yourself, your work and your opinions is key. Will it be a business blogging site where you represent your business? Will it be a personal site where you pontificate your views but don’t necessarily relate it to your business?

Want to see examples of blogs in the accounting community? Check out Greg Price’s blog, the K2 Enterprises team blog on AccountingWeb and Brian Tankersley’s blog. My own blog primarily concentrates on Microsoft Small Business Server’s technology, on which I run my business.

Podcasts

One of the other still-new high-tech learning tools is the Podcast. This is an excellent medium to present topics with information generated for internal or external audiences. Podcasts are audio broadcasts that can be listened to on the Internet – you do not need an iPod to listen to a podcast, although you can download the program to an iPod or any MP3 player. Once the audio stream is recorded, the program can be uploaded to a podcast sharing site such as iTunes.

Several sites make it easy to record and share audio, including Blogtalkradio.com and Podomatic.com, the host site for AICPA’s Top Technology Initiatives’ podcasts. These audio recordings are easy to listen to on your computer, as well as being able to download them to your MP3 player.

Now consider a strategy for implementing a Podcast within your business. Think in terms of how blogging and podcasting can work inside your business to train your employees on how to improve the use of your current technology, and how you might use blogging and podcasting to better provide services to your clients and customers.

In this day and age of people learning in new ways and in new locations, consider adding blogging and podcasting to your methods of learning. Make knowledge sharing in your firm fun and easy to share with others. You might be surprised at how much using these mediums can add to the learning resources of your firm.

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