I want to thank those of you who have already taken the AgWired survey. I’m hoping to have at least a hundred of them filled out by the first of October, so please take just a few moments (3 minutes at most) to fill it out. I know a lot of you do surveys of your customers and various audiences and know how important this is. I will greatly appreciate your support in this project.

I thought I’d share another comment from one of the surveys already filled out:

“It’s difficult to tell if you ever cover anything because you think it’s newsworthy for agriculture and ag communications, or if you are only covering things because you have sponsors paying you to do it. Most of your posts appear to be directly related to your sponsors. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, but some transparency about who your sponsors are would be helpful.”

Very good point. I know I’ve probably been guilty of not making it obvious in every post I’ve done. However, if I have a sponsor for event coverage my policy is to place a sponsor company logo/tagline in each post. I can’t think of a way to be more transparent. Otherwise I post items solely because I think you might find them interesting. To date, I’ve had no direct website advertising support (only because I haven’t solicited it – that’s about to change).

Having said that, my company has done a lot of project work for most of the major agribusiness companies and agencies in the country. We have our AgNewsWire.AgWired.com service for example that produces and distributes text and talking news releases and publishes them on a highly search engine optimized website. We are hired for photography and audio production services and will often write about an event that we’re attending while conducting these services for a client. Name a company or ag group and we’ve probably done some type of work for them. A lot of these projects have helped finance my AgWired habit which attracted over 10,000 unique visitors last month.

I really appreciate comments like this one and you can be sure that I’ll do my best to take them to heart as I continue to publish the only weblog devoted to agricultural marketing.