Well, so it begins.  What?  I meant.... so begins the blogging at FireStream.  Unless you have been completely out of touch the last few years, you're likely to have at least heard the term "blogging".  What we struggled with here is whether or not we would have enough interesting things to say to make blogging of any interest.  We think ultimately you'll end up being the judge of that, but for many reasons we decided it was time to begin the blogging.

Here are the main 2 reasons we decided to start blogging:

- Internally, we get a tremendous amount of value by reading other blogs (like Techcrunch).  In turn, we hope to be able to share some of the things that we have learned that are specific to petroleum retailing and wholesaling.  Traditional forms of news (newspapers, newsletters, nightly news, etc) are all slowing fading and being replaced by on-line content.... much of which comes in the form of blogs.  We find ourselves repeating discussions with prospects, new customers and old customers alike.  Discussions like.... backup integrity, separation of duties, credit management, security policy, pricing, proper use of technology, what it takes to support a technology implementation just to name a few.  Those discussions are valuable and we thought by sharing those things here, we could reach a broader audience and promote more discussion.

- Blogging gives our site (and yours) live and changing content.  The benefit of live and refreshed content is that it brings visitors back to your site AND it also creates hooks into your site that potentially raise your rankings in search engines.  (more on that in the future)

Should you consider blogging at your company?  Good question.... there are some great answers to that question on Google.com.  If you are blogging for personal reasons, there are some great tools out there to facilitate personal blogging, but blogging for your company really should be tied to your website.  If your website doesn't support blogging, please feel free to e-mail us and we'd be happy to discuss what's needed to get started.

Happy Reading,

Glenn