The $110,000 USD corporate blogging solution

Claude Benard on Les Explorers writes that he is amazed that a social media agency is offering a $110,000 USD blogging platform (as reported on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog).

The original blog describes that the $110,000 USD includes:

• Measurement
• Web design
• Hosting
• Strategy recommendations

Lets try to take this apart and fathom out where this money has gone….. and then compare it to what I spend to run this blog.

The expensive way – pricing for a corporate blog
[Assume web professional rate of 200 USD per hour - which is a standard US agency rate for corporate projects. Prices, unless stated, are annual]

• Commercial version of Movable Type  – $1,000 USD
• Web hosting – Dedicated single server hosting with firewall? – $6,000 USD
• DBA IT support (check backups, etc) – $12,000 USD
• Strategy workshop - 4 man day workshop - $6,400 USD
• Initial web design & HTML layer – 5 templates @ 1 day per template – $8,000 USD
• Writer – 0.5 FTE - $30,000 USD
• Measurement – (finger in air) – $24,000 USD
• Quarterly strategic review – 2 man days every 3 months – $12,800 USD
• Legal retainer – $12,000 USD

Total – $112,200 USD

My way for my less than perfect blog

• Open source software – Wordpress.org – FREE
• Web hosting - 20 GBP per month (40 USD) – so 500 USD per year
• DBA IT support (in house) – full backup every 12 hours – In house DBA (uncosted!)
• Strategy workshop – er….  
• Initial web design & HTML layer – 2 days – In house (uncosted!)
• Writer – Me – cost a bottle of wine a week (uncosted!)
• Measurement – Combination of Google keyword tracker RSS / Feedburner / Netvibes - Free
• Legal retainer – None (please don’t sue me!)

Total – $500 USD
Yes I should probably charge my own time into my costs above….. assume 1 hour a day if you want to do the calculation yourself. Of course, how you value me, I will leave as an exercise for you!

Conclusion
This kind of reminds me when I was working for a hotel distribution company a few years ago. There was me – I was happy working out how to undertake cost effective developments that met business requirements – however an alternative view was normally put by a colleague - and the alternative view was a “belt and braces”, well engineered, industrial strength solution costing considerably more. I wasn’t really experienced enough to realise, at the time, how damaging this disconnect in approach was hurting the development decisions that we were making in that business. Mainly we went for the industrial developments and lost considerable agility in the process.

I still take the cost effective, highly agile, path whenever I can but that does often mean that I rely on myself a bit much – which brings its own pressures (yes I write this all myself – no ghost writers here!)

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