Although most companies struggle to make their information visible on Google, at times companies want to do just the opposite: hide information about their company. However, if companies hide the controversial information, they give power to competitors or other groups to control the conversation about the topic. This dilemma seems like a darned-if-you-do, darned-if-you-don’t situation. Continue Reading »
Tag Archives: Blogging
Survey about Technical Writers and Blogging Activities
Jan 22, 2012 update: For results of the survey, see this post: Graduate Research Findings on Technical Communication and Blogging. A graduate student is collecting information about technical writers and blogging. For more information, see her explanation below and then take the survey (it’s short): My name is Michelle, and I am a first-year Master’s Continue Reading »
Blog Versus Web Log: Back to Origins
I was talking to a colleague today about blogs. He said he’s starting a blog and wants to use it as a professional journal, to write about what he’s learning. Our discussion made me reflect on my blog. I’ve used this blog for a lot of different purposes, it seems. Somewhere in this shuffle, I Continue Reading »
Building Trust in a Corporate Blog
The following is a guest post by Larry Kunz, a consultant with Systems Documentation, Inc. (SDI) Global Solutions. Writing a professional blog—whether you do it under your own name as Tom does, or under a company’s banner as I do—is about building a brand. By brand I mean the personality that you want to project. Continue Reading »
Three Solutions to the Corporate Blogging Paradox
Corporate blogs suffer from an almost insurmountable paradox: you can write something interesting to readers, but it will make your company uncomfortable. You can write something that will make your company comfortable, but it won’t be interesting to readers. The corporate blogger has a difficult decision to face. Do you want to gain an audience, Continue Reading »
The Most Important Stories … Aren’t the Ones I’m Writing
I was talking with a colleague the other day about how to increase the number of hits per article on our organization’s technology website. We get about 800 hits per article, which isn’t much given the potential audience. To increase hits, I said we need to send these articles to all users via a newsletter. Continue Reading »
Why Is Corporate Blogging So Hard?
I’m not sure entirely why, but corporate blogging can be quite difficult. On my professional blog, I can post several times a week in the spare moments of my days, sitting down for 30 minutes here or an hour there and have some substantial content to show for it. But at work, I can spin Continue Reading »
Post-Publishing Word Count Can Be Three Times as Long
Recently I’ve been playing more of a blogger role at my job, doing more user awareness than user education. This will only increase during the coming months, and if I do a good job, I might finally show the importance of this neglected role. Part of the reason we’re doing more user awareness is because Continue Reading »
Content Curation versus Content Creation
Scott Abel has a good post on content curation strategies. He writes, In order to develop an active and engaged audience, you have to publish as much interesting and informative content as possible — as often as possible! He notes how tweets and blog posts are short-lived, so you have to keep publishing all the Continue Reading »
Technology vs. Content, or Why Teaching WordPress Is Frustrating
Over the past several years, I’ve trained a lot of people on WordPress, through individual one-on-one training, seminars, workshops, and conference events. Most of the people who want to learn WordPress have plans for blogging. They think blogging requires you to understand the technology before they can jump in. But the technology is easy — Continue Reading »