Calgary Inc. Magazine
06/01/2007
News Release
Critical Mass' Scott Weisbrod is so engrossed with the delicate dance between company image and customer perceptions that he spends 15 to 90 minutes each day scouring the web for marketing and advertising news to inspire his postings for Experience Planner (scottweisbrod.com), the blog he launched in 2006. Weisbrod moved from his native Toronto to Calgary last year to take a job as a senior information architect at Critical Mass, where he works with multimillion-dollar clients such as Mercedes-Benz and Citibank. Three years ago, his first foray into blogging was intended to replace a weekly industry news e-mail to Toronto coworkers and North American associates. But Weisbrod discovered the newsletter's broad subject matter was difficult to manage in a blog. He learned that one of the ways to keep a blog from becoming irrelevant is to focus on a theme. "When I honed in on that theme, it made a lot easier to see things that were in the news or in other blogs that I'd been reading which fit into that theme, so I could grab onto those topics and write a larger post about it," says Weisbrod, who averages 3,000 unique visits per month to his blog and has 500 subscribers to his RSS feed.
Weisbrod's not afraid to blog on uber brands such as Starbucks or Nicke. Each posting is carefully engineered to muster engagement from readers and frequently snowballs into a constructive forum for corrective, yet polite criticism. "The most rewarding thing about blogging so far is realizing that however small it is, there actually is an engaged readership out there for you if you have a really clear topic and voice that you're writing in. People respond to that," he says.
