In Other Words - SAS Senior VP and CMO Jim Davis talks about business, analytics and technology

I’d like to thank everyone who commented on my last post, “Is blogging a waste of my time?” I really appreciate the responses. It wasn’t just a ploy to get comments. I really am trying to figure out if this is worthwhile, and your comments helped my thinking.

First of all, you told me this blog is not a waste of my time. That’s good to know. As I said in the last post, time is hard to come by these days and I don’t like to waste it.

Michael Harvey expressed a concern that I hear from a lot of people. How do you find the time to filter out all the noise and get to the useful information? That’s a challenge for everyone. If you have tips for how you use social media effectively to get useful business information, please share them in the comments.

Chris McCann made an interesting point: You get responses if you ask questions. That’s clearly true, but it can sometimes be harder than it sounds. Writing a conversational post that encourages feedback means more than just tacking, “What do you think?” at the end. I’ll work on that. If you know bloggers who do that well, share that in the comments, too.

I found it interesting that our CIO, Suzanne Gordon, encouraged me to keep posting even if it meant posting less often, and to forget about Twitter. That of course flies in the face of conventional social media wisdom, but it also shows that the real world doesn’t always match what the experts preach.

By the way, my Twitter account is still dormant and I still haven’t found the time to jump into it. I can’t even keep up with my email.

Several people suggested I make this blog more personal, and I appreciate that suggestion. My first thought was that I never intended to turn this into a personal journal. (Chris Starke made it clear he doesn’t care what I have for dinner.) But I suppose the whole point of this blog is to put a personal face on my professional life at SAS, and I will think about ways to make that happen. You’ve given me good suggestions already for how to do that. Feel free to keep them coming.

For one, look for some of my photographs on this blog. Now I need to figure out how to post directly here from my iPhone.

Thank you again. We’ve been looking at the traffic for this blog and there’s no question that readership is trending in a positive direction. However, I do enjoy the feedback and want to continue to ensure I’m hitting the mark.

I welcome thoughts, feedback and criticism on a regular basis.

I started this blog about four months ago. It’s been both energizing and vexing. It’s energizing because I like the mental break that I get from putting things on hold and thinking in a different way about what I’m doing and what SAS is doing.

It’s vexing because it takes time, and time is hard to come by. Plus I still haven’t gotten to that place where blogging is natural to me. I was talking about this with Dave Thomas, our social media manager. Dave and I both love photography, which is really a passion for me. We were discussing the fact that when you’re taking pictures regularly, you see things in photographic ways. The more you do it, the more you see.

Dave assures me it’s the same with blogging. The more you do it, the more ideas come to you. He wrote about it in a post called “Developing your social media muscle.”

People seem to be reading this blog and the volume has been steadily increasing. I get a lot of feedback through non-social media avenues. People call me up to talk about a post, or stop me in the hallway. I’ve had conversations in airports with people who read this blog.

But I find it interesting there aren’t a lot of comments. I wonder if that’s the way the blog world is going. As blogs become more popular and more mainstream, are people consuming but don’t feel compelled to respond?

In my own experience following more bloggers I’ve seen how much there is out there and how hard it is to find what really makes a difference for you, and find the time to read it. I’m also trying to get involved with Twitter but I keep finding myself feeling too busy to get started. I just need to do it and trust that when I do it’s going to flow.

I get the feeling that in a year or two the act of blogging as we (or at least I) do it will seem ancient. We’ll probably be onto something else, but I don’t know what that is. The devices coming out from Apple and RIM and Nokia will change the game. Will Apple’s upcoming tablet have the same impact that the iPod did, and the iPhone? I think we’ll be seeing more and more disruptive technologies.

I guess I’m wondering what my social media muscle should look like at this point. What do you think? Am I off base? Am I boring? I’ve tried from the start to avoid turning this blog into a platform for SAS messages.

What can I share about what SAS is doing and what I do that would be interesting and useful for you?