Finnegan Begin Again

There’s a silly song some of us used to sing in years gone by:

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan
He had whiskers on his chinnegan
They fell out and then grew in again
Poor old Michael Finnegan
Begin again.

And I suspect my quoting just that first verse will for some readers today mean the rest of the verses will come back to distract them at some time during the day.

It seemed as good a way as any to introduce this short post on new beginnings – hopefully not as futile as the new beginnings in the Finnegan Begin Again song. The post is my contribution to a theme day on new beginnings/graduation, in collaboration with my colleagues on the b5media Business Channel.

We live in an age of new beginnings. People are re-inventing themselves at various points in their lives and businesses need to re-invent themselves and their products and services, to meet the rapid changes in their technological, social, political and business environments.

For small business especially, the availability of blogging technology is a terrific boon for this age of rapid re-invention.

With any of a number of readily available, extremely economical blogging platforms, I can decide today to create a new online presence for my business or part of my business and have the site up the same day. If I want special designs or functionality and don’t have those skills inhouse it will take longer, but can still be very rapid.

In a workshop earlier this year with a group of franchisees, I was able to demonstrate how easy it is to set up a blog. That was using the fully hosted service, BlogHarbor, without requiring any skills other than to follow the online instructions, point, click and fill in the boxes. From memory, it took under ten minutes from go to whoa, certainly less than fifteen minutes, to be up and running and have a couple of lines of a demo blog post published.

Of course, for establishing a business blog more systematically, there is more involved, including working out how the blog fits with the company’s mission and strategic goals. And if I wanted to set up, say, a WordPress blog on my own server, it would take me a bit longer than fifteen minutes: I would also have to engage a bit more knowledge of how web sites are set up, but I would still not need to be a techie.

The basic point here is that the technology – and the cost of technology – need no longer be obstacles to establishing a professional, businesslike presence online.

When it’s time to begin again, any of us can just log on and cut ourselves a new blog.