I ran across this over the holiday and it helped me evaluate my blogging in 2006. How many of these don’ts are you doing?
From Customer Evangelists, and writtern for small business bloggers…but relevant to just about everyone else too, don’t you think?
1. Do not have someone else write your blog. Write it yourself.
2. Blogs should not be managed by the PR department or ad agency. Blogs are best when they’re authentic, which may include run-on sentences, detailed analysis or critical opinions. Typically, those qualities run counter to the sensibilities of traditional public relations.
3. Do not have a thin skin. Comments to your posts may bite or sting, especially while other people watch. But a strong benefit of blogs: unwarranted criticism often causes other customers often to spring to your defense. Trust-based relationships emanate from taking the bad with the good.
4. Do not let your blog go unattended for weeks at a time. Focus on several posts per week, even if they’re just a few paragraphs.
5. Do not make your blog a branding exercise of self- centeredness. If you endlessly promote yourself and your services, no one will care.
We’re unpacking today. Not much to offer here until everything’s where it belongs and we sleep off our “vacation”.
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Number 4….number 4 is the hardest for me, because I just don’t have that much to say!!!!
Welcome back Shaun,
We’re STILL unpacking! A never ending thing it seems! It’ll get done as we need clothes.
Since I don’t blog (just reply to yours) the tips above sound good, but probably won’t be put into place in my own blogosphere.
Beth
Yeah, I have the same problem Cali Amy does—#4. I think my fear is that writing just to write will produce a lot of bland chit-chat.
But then again, as a blog reader I love it when my favorite bloggers post lots of new entries, so it’s sort of silly to expect others to be able to produce new content when I can’t seem to do that very often.
No New Year’s resolution, but maybe I’ll try to blog a little more consistently this year.
#2 – I usually have my PR department write my blog entries…perhaps I should start writing them myself?
Yea yea. You have to use your imagination a little to make these applicable, Kat.
Like, of course you don’t have a PR department but you do have a part of your brain that does the same thing don’t you? Well, I do. Or you have those friends who’ll do that for you – not the writing, but the thinking like a PR department on your behalf.
There’s a fine line between conscience or accountability and flat out being scared into being boring.
A friend of mine, a smart well-meaning friend who works in PR, once told me if I were a politician I’d drive my handlers crazy. Well, good, I thought. I don’t want to be as wooden as Gore or have my words coated in a bitten-lip thin veneer of false sympathy like Clinton, or the rehearsed machismo of Bush Jr. All great men in many regards, but authenticity is not what any of us thinks of – is it – when we see someone so obviously filtered by their handlers.
Conviction and creativity are dangerous things. They should fell that way without actually poking an eye out don’t you think?
My inner PR department likes to slip behind the keyboard some days and write something that wouldn’t upset or confuse a single solitary person. But then it falls asleep, bored by it’s own pabulum, and the real me gets to take over. Muhahaaaaa
I’m sure Derek Webb would have liked it if I had a PR department or at least a PR portion of my brain.
Sometimes I think I NEED a PR department.
I recently wrote a post about feminist Linda Hirshman and her acertation that it’s wrong for women to leave the “workforce” to stay home with their kids.
Frankly, I was pretty ticked off my the original article I read and wrote a very lively post. I reread and edited it many times but even my final version was commented on by my sweet husband who recommended I make a couple more “edits.”
It’s hard to walk the line between being real and being kind or even not being controversial just for controversy’s sake.
I wasn’t trying to be anything when I wrote that post about the Derek Webb download, but it sure did light a fire and I’m not sure it was for the best. I don’t know…
Maybe I’ll just hire a PR department and make sure they throw in some run on sentences and typos.
So does that mean I get to stop writing your blog, Shaun?
No, you’ve been demoted is all. To “contributor.” I get to wear the “editor and chief” lapel pen now.
Sweet. CZs and aluminum.