As a professional blogger, I see a lot of different blogs, both small business and corporate. Some are good, some are terrible. Some are informative and engaging, some are daily commercials, some are stilted and formal. I can spot the blogs written by people who are passionate about their work, knowledgeable about their field, or exploring new knowledge.
I can also spot the ones that are written by marketing professionals, committees, and the legal department.
Blogging tends to make corporate types a little nervous
It’s not that I have anything against marketers (I’ve been one for over 16 years). And I don’t have anything against lawyers. (Committees, on the other hand. . .)
The problem is blogging has a different writing style, a different flow. In blogging, you don’t worry about being technically accurate, covering every contingency, option, variation, divergence, modification, and refinement, you just have to be right.
But the blogs I see by marketers, lawyers, and committees don’t have that spark. Everything is written like a legal brief, or it uses all the proper product/service names, instead of what customers actually call it. Or it has that lowest common denominator feel of the committee, where every phrase is scrutinized, and meetings are filled with statements like “should we say ‘rediscover’ or ‘redefine?’” and then discussed heatedly for 30 minutes. (“Why can’t we say ‘rediscover or redefine?’” “But what about people who have not discovered or defined it in the first place?”)
Marketing Copywriting and Legal Writing Are Not Good Blog Writing
Blogging is informal. It’s written like people speak. It has punch, emotion, spark, verve. Sentences start with “and.” Or appear incomplete. While grammar is (and should be) used, people are a little more loose with some of the grammar rules. That’s not to say a blogger gets to write like an illiterate scribbler. But rather, they don’t need to march in lockstep with the grammar rules our 7th grade teacher drummed into us.
A good blog has to capture the attention of the person reading it. It has to be well-written and interesting. Too often, corporate blogs are stiff, formal, and uninteresting. They’re literary yawn-fests that seem to want to drive away readers, not bring them in.
I recently read a pro athlete’s blog that was hosted on his team’s website. And I could tell right away — see how I just started that sentence with ‘and?’ — that he didn’t write it. Or at least he didn’t have the final edit. That’s because the author or editor didn’t use team nicknames, and they made sure to include sponsor names.
“We’ve been working hard at the Sheinhardt Wig Company Indianapolis Beagles Practice Facility all week, and are looking forward to facing the Cincinnati Rough Riders on Sunday at 4:00 p.m.”
BLEAH! The only people who refer to anything by their sponsors’ names are marketers and race car drivers. The only people who refer to a team by their full name in an informal setting are marketers. Given that this particular athlete is not known for his eloquence, I could only assume this had been edited heavily, and not just for grammar.
While I’m not a big fan of misspelled words, poor grammar, and text speak, I do think writers should be given their own voice, and not edited to sound like some marketer’s idea of what they think it should be.
Basically, if you want to be a successful blogger, you need to learn to write like a real person. Loosen up the tie, disband the committee, unclench, and start to write like a real person. When you have an urge to fix something to as required by the marketing copy user’s guide, kill it.
Learn to write how people talk, and you’ll start to figure out how people read. And then they’ll start reading what you have to say.
Photo: St. Stev (Flickr)
About the Author: Erik Deckers
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: blog writing, blogging, Business Blogging Content, corporate blog writing, corporate blogging
Posted in Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Marketing, Writing | View Comments
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
We write a lot of product blogs for our clients. No matter what size, shape, color, or price of the product, we’ve written several hundred blog product posts.
But for all the hundreds of posts we’ve written, there’s only one reason we do it: to win search.
Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware has long beat the “blogging wins search” drum. (And while I don’t agree about his “myth of the reader” — I believe you should try to get and keep regular, returning readers — he makes a great point about winning search.)
A product blog post is one of the easiest things to write. It’s just 200 – 300 words describing a particular product with a link back to the original catalog entry or product description. Each post equals a backlink back to your website, and the more backlinks you have to your website, the better you rank in a search.
Should I Keep My Blog Inside My Website, or Have a Separate Blog?
We’re fans of keeping a blog and a website together, but there’s no harm in keeping the two separate. After all, the search engines recognize it as a separate website that links back to your original one. However, you’re better off putting your blog on your static website and use internal backlinks to go from the blog to the static pages.
But if you want to boost your search engine rankings even further, create a second blog where you publish your blog posts, and keep it separate from your regular corporate blog where you’re publishing your authority posts, credibility posts, issues posts, and educational posts. This way you can improve search and find first time visitors with one blog, and gain returning readers with the other.
About the Author: Erik Deckers
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: Chris Baggott, compendium blogware, corporate blogging, product blogging
Posted in Blog ROI, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Ghost Writing, Marketing, ProBlogService, Writing | View Comments
Why Corporations Shouldn’t Moderate Their Blog Comments
One of the biggest concerns we hear about from corporations is “if we have a blog, people will be allowed to comment, and they could say bad things about us.”
Exactly. That’s what you want.
This concern, more than anything, seems to keep the corporate lawyers up at night, and is the number one reason why blogs and social media ventures are killed before they ever start. (Don’t worry, I won’t turn this into a rant on why lawyers shouldn’t be allowed to make marketing decisions. But they shouldn’t. Ever.)
Mitch Joel said in his blog, Six Pixels of Separation:
Basically, if you don’t want your blog to blow, you want that two-way conversation with people. You get that by allowing comments on your blog, and never, ever moderating them, including the negative stuff. You want people to air their complaints, express their frustrations, and say why they disagree with stuff you do. If you block comments, you come off looking bad.
(NOTE: It’s important to point out that negative comments do not include abusive, vulgar, mean, racist, sexist, or derogatory comments. You can get rid of those all you want.)
1. It lets you deal with customer service problems. If someone is unhappy with your product or service, you want them to air that complaint on your website, because it lets you fix the problem publicly. People who visit your site and see the complaint get to see what you did to fix it. You look like a caring company, and it improves your standing in future customers’ eyes.
2. It reduces the number of comments made in other places. Most people only have so much time and energy to devote to a complaint. They’ll post a few comments in different places before moving on to the rest of their day. Make sure one of those comments is your site, not another site you didn’t discover. Then, you get to fix the problem, as per #1
Comcast was so opposed to allowing customers to interact with them that NPR radio host Bob Garfield created ComcastMustDie.com, an angry blog and website that let customers post all sorts of complaints about the cable giant. It wasn’t until thousands of people piled on complaints and the site got all sorts of media attention, that Comcast finally realized they had a problem. If only they had started a blog and fixed a problem (as in item 1), Garfield would never have gotten so angry that he started his own anti-Comcast movement.
3. It encourages conversation with your customers and fans. Social media is no longer about the broadcast one-to-many model of communication. It’s a two-way conversation. I’ve had several conversations with customer service people in my day-to-day dealings with other people. The companies I liked best were the ones whose customer service people had conversations with me. The ones I didn’t were the ones who tried to avoid speaking with their customers at all.
4. It humanizes the corporation. Right now, corporations are often seen as faceless automatons or inflexible martinets who won’t post directions to the bathroom without a ten-page review from Legal. But a blog with comments will make your company seem like real people. Remember, people buy from people they like. They get angry with people they can’t talk to. Do you want people to buy from you or be angry with you? If they’re angry with you, you could be on the wrong end of someone like Bob Garfield.
5. If you don’t, you could get hit by the Streisand Effect. That’s what happens when you censor or remove information, and it gets widely publicized. The Church of Scientology saw it happen when a leaked Tom Cruise video hit the Internet. The first sites were threatened by the church to remove it or else, but other sites already had it in place. Soon, hundreds and thousands of sites were showing the video. Too many for the church to keep up with, so they gave up, after giving it more traction than the video ever would have gotten on its own. The moral is: if you censor blogs or moderate or edit comments of people who disagree with you, you’ll end up creating a bigger monster.
If you want to make your blog work for you, enable your comments. If you want to be seen as yet-another uncaring, unfeeling, faceless corporation whose latest problems will be revealed at YourCompanyMustDie.com, by all means shut off your comments.
Your customers will still be talking about you. You just won’t know about it.
Erik is the VP of Operations & Creative Services for Pro Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He has written humor newspaper columns, business articles, radio and stage plays, and is currently working on a novel. He helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is writing two other books on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks on blogging and social media.
Tags: blogging, comment moderation, comments, corporate blogging
Posted in Blogging, Social Media | View Comments