Happy Blanniversary

Today is this blog’s first anniversary - 255 posts, 18,835 visits (heavily weighted towards the last few months) and 231 subscribers.

It’s been a lot of work, but I’ve enjoyed the experience and have experienced a few direct / more indirect benefits:

• Reinforcing my personal brand and establishing a sizeable footprint on the internet
• Helping me develop my network with lots of interesting people including quite a few partners and several potential clients
• Leading to speaking opportunities (directly) and consulting projects (indirectly).

But a more important reason I've been making this investment is that I love doing it.  And that's largely because it helps me get my own thinking straight (and have these thoughts challenged and validated by readers through your comments).

Interestingly, these were some of the main benefts raised at this year's Enterprise 2.0 conference:

• "A blog is a personal knowledge management system. That’s your initial audience. From that it grows to people who share your interest.
• Blogging disciplines you to collect thoughts and write them down.
• It develops an initial level of trust before you actually meet a person. Because you’re judged first on the words you write.
• A blog lets you prove your expertise. Claiming expertise without it today can be difficult."

Or as Chris Anderson notes: "Blogging is a way to make yourself smarter".

Then, there is the buzz of helping readers develop greater own understanding of HCM, and maybe having an impact on a personal basis too (I've had a couple of really motivating off-line emails noting changes a couple of readers have made partly as a result of this blog).

So I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my posts, and also last month, guest posts from Josh Bersin, Erik Samdahl / Jay Jamrog and Nick Jefferson - there should be a few more of these (all provided by other people operating in HCM or aligned spheres and who / whose work I admire) coming up this month too.

Do stay in touch with this blog / subscribe to my feed.  And do comment too – agree with me or not, it’s always very good to hear from you.

And please check out my other blog, The New Social Business (I’ve just posted there on a very interesting event I spoke at this morning).