I'd Rather Be Writing » corporate blogging

Why Is Corporate Blogging So Hard?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:12:01 +0000

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 my wheels on full throttle for hours and only have 1 or 2 posts all week — not really interesting ones — to show for it. Why is that?

One difference is knowledge. On my professional blog, I already have the knowledge I need to write the post. I can pull from my own experience, or from books I’m reading, techniques I’m trying, documentation I’m writing, etc., as I craft a post. I have ideas brewing in my head all day, and in the back of my mind I’m always thinking of the next post.

On the corporate blog, though, I can’t always pull from my own experience. I don’t know the details of what I should write, because I’m not the subject matter expert. I have to track down the experts, and then ask them the right questions. I have to hunt around for the story; I have to locate the information.

In addition to gathering information from external sources, on the corporate blog I also have to stay away from controversy. Every story ends positively. I can’t go for the jugular, so to speak, and enter controversial territory with an open-mind like I can on an independent blog. Instead, the end is usually written from the beginning. Things turn out well for the company.

Another problem with corporate blogs is the lack of voice. Is there really an “I”? Or is it a fake “I”? If there is no true “I” behind the posts, how can the blog ever move beyond marketing material and corporate communications? And if there is an “I”, do I no longer represent the company or organization that I’m writing on behalf of (because I am myself now)? How do I both represent myself and my employer?

Most importantly, why don’t the words just flow? Is it because they aren’t my words? Is the perspective just not my perspective? Are the points I make not not the points I would make? Can such a writing situation ever be successful?

An Attempt and New Effort

After reflecting on why corporate blogging is sometimes so hard, I decided to go about it as if I were writing a post on my own blog. I remembered a discussion I had with a colleague about the difficulty of getting volunteers to produce work. This turns out to be one of the central questions in working with a volunteer community and is an inherent obstacle in nearly every open source effort. I decided to focus on this somewhat controversial issue and write about it.

In thinking about this issue, instead of brainstorming privately, as I would do on my personal blog, I decided to brainstorm collectively. After all, I have 5,000 people in my organization. I can call them all and get various viewpoints. Most of them are just sitting at their desks, in their cubes.

I made a few phone calls. Some weren’t there; others were. They had a lot to say. Suddenly the whole topic started to come alive. I collected viewpoints here and there, and broadened my initial understanding of the topic.

This led to a small epiphany: Whereas on my personal blog, I mainly do the research myself, either by reading or thinking, in a corporate setting I have access to dozens of subject matter experts who can point me in the direction of all kinds of interesting ideas. Perhaps corporate blogging, then, is a bit easier?

By doing about an hour’s worth of research, I had all the information I needed to draft the article. At this point, it became easy. I knew how to structure the information, to divide it with subheadings. I knew just the right length for paragraphs and for the article as a whole. I knew how to weave in other voices, perspectives, and links. All this came natural since I approached it in the same way as a personal blog post.

Do I have any strong personal opinions in the article? Am I putting forward any controversial perspectives? Not really. But I think those dangers are less likely to happen with the community topics I’m writing about, and so they’re not an issue. I might have used “I” and drawn upon personal experiences if appropriate, but it didn’t fit this topic. Yet the article still aligns with what I myself would say.

If you would like to read a draft of the article I wrote (which is still in progress), you can view it here.

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Image from Flickr

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Technical Writing – Making Resolutions for the New Year

Tom Johnson — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 06:35:05 +0000

As 2011 approaches, Lynda at WritingAssist.com encourages technical writers to make technical writing resolutions for the new year:

A new year means you get the chance to do things over, to do things better. Whether you’ve been happy with your technical writing team or you think things should improve, it’s time to look back on the past year to see what needs to improve and what needs to be removed from your company for the year ahead. (Technical Writing – Making Resolutions for the New Year)

A few of her recommendations were on the conservative side, in my opinion. Update your software, modernize your style guide. Nevertheless, this got me thinking about new directions I’ll take in 2011. I’ve been moving in some of these directions for a while. Here are the top 10 technical writing resolutions I have for 2011.

Use wikis rather than traditional HATS to author help content.
Give users quick reference guides rather than long printed guides.
Include more visuals, especially concept diagrams, in my help content.
Master Adobe Illustrator and increase my understanding of visual techniques.
Read more of my RSS feeds online and use them as a way to generate ideas for posts.
Start negotiating with project managers using an official user education plan rather than informal agreements.
Implement an official workflow of post-release documentation efforts based on user feedback, bugs, questions, and other unforeseen situations.
Solidify our team with standard approaches and processes as well as build unity through proximity.
Contribute to corporate blogging efforts for IT site.
Interact with community through forum, feedback, and other participation channels; stay abreast of needs and questions.

These aren’t so much resolutions as directions I’m heading.

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My STC Summit Blogging Presentation Is Free

Tom Johnson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:30:16 +0000

As you know, the sessions at the STC Summit in Atlanta last year were recorded. My blogging presentation, Introduction to Blogging: A New Technical Communicator Role, is the only recorded session you can listen to for free. It’s labeled as the “Featured session – free of charge.”

I didn’t even realize this until someone tweeted it this afternoon. I figure it means one of two things — either my presentation was so lame they couldn’t fathom actually charging for it. Or it was so cool they decided to use it to try to get people to buy the entire recorded Summit package. Either way, it’s a good hour and a half discussion of blogging. I talk about how “writing a product blog can help you connect and communicate with your users while simultaneously helping them move up to a more advanced level of product knowledge.”

To view the audio synced with PowerPoint, click the View button at the link above. To download the MP3, click the drop-down arrow in the upper-left and choose Downloads. To include this in my iTunes podcast feed, I also included the MP3 file here.

My blogging presentation at STC Atlanta

By the way, I’ve been listening to other recorded Summit sessions. There’s a ton of informative content available. Of course recorded presentations aren’t always as engaging as a podcast recording, especially when someone is clicking through 200+ slides and answering audience questions (that you can’t hear), but still, by and large the content is highly worthwhile. If it’s available to you, definitely listen to it. I’ve already listened to about 7-8 sessions. Just 80 more to go.

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Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging: #1 Being Fake

Tom Johnson — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:45:41 +0000

I’ve decided to write a series of posts about what I consider to be the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging (because sins always seem more interesting than virtues). Basically, I’m preparing for some presentations on blogging, and I’m hoping to get some scrutiny and feedback on these ideas. I plan to cover each one of the sins in depth with separate posts over the course of the next two weeks. My version of the seven deadly sins of blogging are as follows: being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive.

Fake Hurts the Currency of the Blogosphere

If there’s one advantage blogs have over other media, such as television, magazines, and even newspapers, it’s trust, because bloggers aren’t supposed to be fake. Bloggers are usually independent voices, without financial motives or agendas. The blogger is somewhat of a free-roaming analyst, at liberty to write about any topic, from any perspective, without any obligation to corporate requirements. With such freedom, the independent blogger automatically has a certain degree of reader trust.

This sense of trust is key to the blog’s appeal. In a guest post on Problogger, Tony Hung says trust is “the only real currency in the blogosophere.” Hung explains,

At the end of the day, trust is the only real currency in the blogosphere, and people who read blogs have the expectation that they’re getting at the truth — in whatever form the truth is to them. And because there is the presumption of truth, readers will often react in an intense fashion to being manipulated, hoodwinked, and otherwise bamboozled.

In other words, the strong card that bloggers hold is a sense of trust with readers, which comes from their display of candid honesty. Readers react strongly when they find out a blogger is bamboozling them. For example, a few years ago, Edelman PR created a blog for Wal-Mart called Wal-Marting Across America that consisted of a couple supposedly traveling across America in an RV checking out all the Wal-Marts along the way and writing about their experiences. When someone discovered that Wal-Mart was paying their expenses and sponsoring the trip, readers were furious because the blog was fake.

Sharing and Trust

Not being fake is the first step in getting currency with your blog. To move in the opposite direction of fake, though, you have to share of yourself. It almost seems that the more open and sharing you are, the more powerful your posts become. For example, Stephen Fry, a writer, actor, and film director in the UK, recently wrote a semi-confessional post in which he explains how he loathes seeing some of his quotes on book jackets. Apparently one line of praise from Fry on Twitter alone can dramatically boost book sales, putting the book near the top of Amazon’s charts. When Fry tweets, he writes “completely from the heart,” one journalist explains.

You might think that a critic with such literary power would feel nothing but satisfaction and pleasure at helping promote the books he loves. And to a certain extent Fry does. But in this post, Fry also shares another side of his feelings. He jokes with his literary agent that he will make a public confession that he hasn’t read any of the books for which he supplied quotes:

The plan, as I told my agent, was to make this confession as a way of getting publishers off my back. It may sound ungracious, but I get asked so many times a week to read book and supply quotes for them that I’m getting a bit fed up. Not because I don’t like reading, nor because I don’t like being sent books, though mostly of course, I am sent proof copies rather than the finished article. No, what I’m fed up with (and it is my contention that I am SO not alone in this) is seeing my name on the fronts, backs and flaps of books saying things like “a beautifully paced, unforgettable thriller”, “a magnificent feat of imagination”, “a delicately realised and vividly felt journey through memory and desire”, etc etc. Yuckety, yuckety, yuck. Pukety, pukety puke. (“Don’t Quote Me“)

The more you’re open, transparent, and sharing on your blog, like in this post from Fry, where he shares his real thoughts, which may be a little surprising or startling to some, the more trust you engender with your readers. We love Fry even more because of this post (and consequently, I’m guessing he’ll be in even more demand for book quotes).

For another example of a post that shares personal information with influence, read this mind-blowing post from the always fascinating Penelope Trunk: How to Decide How Much to Reveal About Yourself. She shares so much it nearly crosses boundaries, but the effect? Nearly 350 comments on the post from engaged readers.

Insurmountable Challenges from Corporate Bloggers

Independent bloggers may find that trust and personal sharing come easy. But corporate bloggers who write about their company’s products or services have nearly insurmountable challenges when it comes to trust. A corporate blogger struggles against the “used car salesman situation”: no matter what the salesman says, you really don’t trust him. If he praises a car on his lot and recommends that you buy it because it’s a great deal, uhm, yeah, you don’t believe that because the salesman’s agenda is obvious — he wants to sell you a car. There’s no trust.

Corporate bloggers have the same problem. As a reader, you may not believe the blogger because of the obvious agenda. But it’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. If corporate bloggers praise their company’s products or services, we don’t believe the blogger. If corporate bloggers disparage the products or services, we perhaps believe the blogger, but this may be damaging to the company’s product or service. And most likely the CEO won’t allow negativity posts. However you look at it, trust is an issue that permeates corporate blogs.

According to research from Forrester on corporate blogging, Josh Bernoff says that “only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say they trust them.” And those same 16% pretty much trust everything. Because of this distrust with corporate bloggers, Josh concludes:

If you blog, your goal should be to create a blog about which people say “I like that – I don’t think of it as a company blog.” For the most part, that’s a hurdle you need to jump to gain their trust. I don’t mean to hide who is writing the blog. I mean it has to be more about your customers than it is about you. Blogs exclusively about companies and products are what I think generate these low trust ratings. So don’t do a blog like that.

Kathy Sierra also recommends a similar strategy: “With a few exceptions, the worst mistake a ‘business blog’ can make is to blog about the business.”

Essentially, the strategy of the corporate blogger, then, should not be to focus on promoting his or her own company’s products or services so much, because the blogger has no trust with these topics. The agenda is too obvious, and the blogger lacks currency. But neither should the blogger completely dismiss the topics either, because then the blog ceases to be relevant to readers (sin #2).

Instead, according to Bernoff, the corporate blogger should focus on the company’s customers, their problems, their successes, their questions, and perspectives. As corporate bloggers shift focus away from a marketing mindset, they will begin to develop relationships with their readers, and those readers may start to feel trust.

Bernoff says Rubbermaid’s blog does a good example of focusing on the customer more than Rubbermaid. However, I’m not really into Rubbermaid, as adventurous as organization can be. A more relevant example in tech comm is Techsmith’s Visual Lounge blog. Once a week, they showcase videos created by people who use Camtasia Studio. By focusing on user videos, they aren’t so much shining the spotlight on themselves as much as their customers. Not all the posts have this focus, though. That’s okay, because although user problems and solutions are intriguing, a blog can also succeed by establishing relevance with readers.

Palimpsest from Sarah O’Keefe and The Content Pool from Alan Porter are also written by “corporate bloggers.” But with each of these blogs, I don’t think of them as company blogs. I think of them as blogs written by industry experts. This is partly because their posts rarely promote their company’s products and services.

In the spirit of transparency, you should know that TechSmith, O’Keefe, and Porter all advertise in the sidebar of my blog. And I’m presenting at a conference sponsored by WebWorks. Does that conflict of interest perhaps remove some of the currency of my recommendations? In a way, yes — even though what I’ve said is perfectly true.

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Blogging: A New Role for Technical Communicators

Tom Johnson — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:19:47 +0000

The online transition to web 2.0, with its proliferation of blogs, wikis, podcasts, tweets, and other user-generated content, has posed a question for the state of help content. Should help material concern itself with web 2.0? Do users want to interact and contribute to help content in the same way they contribute and interact with web content? What is the technical writer’s role in relation to new media?

Although it may be early to tell, surely some keeping up with web trends is in order. As such, technical writers have somewhat of a new role to play (or at least to reconcile) in the realm of web 2.0. Of the various new media technologies writers could enter, perhaps none fits so well as the blog, since it consists mainly of writing.

A blog is merely journal-like content that readers can comment on and subscribe to through RSS. Whether marketed as a “blog” or not, the format of the blog is fairly pervasive. At least six types of blogs can be found online:

Personal blogs often detail thoughts and stories from regular people about their lives. Example: Whataboutmomblog.com.
Professional blogs are the same as personal blogs but focus
on a professional niche. Example: Gryphon-mountain.net.
Internal blogs provide a focal point for teams to discuss and share ideas without worrying about public scrutiny or exposure. Example: SharePoint blogs.
Group blogs provide a platform for a group of individuals to share their thoughts. Usually contributors take turns posting. Example: Sciptorium.com/palimpsest.
Corporate blogs present a single voice to a company, often commenting on news, issues, and products related to the company. Corporate blogs can also be group blogs. Example: Author-it.com/blog
Product blogs provide information about releases, enhancements, development, and other news related to a specific product or set of products. Example: VisualLounge.techsmith.com

The purpose of each blog may be different, but the overall goal is roughly the same: to connect and interact with readers on a more personal level.

Who should blog?

Many times companies designate their marketing departments as the gatekeepers of the blog and relegate technical writers to the realm of procedural, how-to information only. This practice, however, devalues the knowledge and writing abilities of technical communicators.

In the first place, many technical communicators have strong writing backgrounds and often aspire to write novels and pursue other literary endeavors. They usually turn to technical writing as a means of financial sustenance only. For these individuals, the blog format can provide a paradise for their creative side. It can be a format that provides a needed break from procedural writing and gives them the variety they need for a more creatively fulfilling career.

Secondly, technical writers are free from the marketing/business speak that permeates marketing writers. Intimately familiar with the company’s products, technical writers can provide tips, tricks, and other informative insights that many marketing writers aren’t aware of, and they can write it in an honest language void of hype. More informative content written in a refreshingly honest voice better aligns with the purposes for which most people use the Internet: to research, to learn.

Breaking into blogging

Despite the good fit technical communicators have for blogging, it’s still often a struggle to get into the blogging scene. The blog is often a low-value medium for a company. Technical writers may not receive any billable time allocated to write for the blog. Surely spending an entire day on a blog post rather than help material will raise concerns with your manager.

Given a list of priorities, the blog may always be near the bottom of the list. New blogs may need to prove their worth before receiving the proper valuation from corporate CEOs. And technical writers will also have to prove their writing abilities before being taken seriously as contributors or managers of a company blog.

Rewards of blogging

Whatever obstacles you must climb over to get into the blogging scene, the rewards may surprise you. Blogs provide a channel of communication with your users that often didn’t exist before. Blogs give users an opportunity to provide feedback and suggestions, to connect with project teams and other company leaders. This increased communication can lead to better products, more customer loyalty, and increased communication among your own project team members.

Technical writers involved in blogging may find themselves as the comfortable go-to persons for the products they write about — mainly because the result of good blogging is trust. Good writing engenders reader confidence. Readers who feel comfortable with your voice and style will seek you out. They will see your name in the byline and see you as a potential contact. Your voice has become friendly to them, someone they feel they know.

The feedback users provide to you can empower you with valuable knowledge for your project team. If you tap in to a lot of user feedback, project managers will recognize you as a key player in design considerations and prototype reviews.

High-powered visibility

In addition to engendering trust, blogs make your product or company highly visible. If you crank out search-engine-optimized posts on a regular basis, the several hundred posts you accrue in a year can lead to significant returns with Internet search engines. Some companies may pay thousands of dollars for high ranking placement in search engine results, without realizing that blog posts with the right keywords will do more to land them these results than anything else.

Search engine optimization is not a technique for Internet search engines only. In private organizations so large that one department doesn’t know what the other departments do, search engine optimization of Intranet content can be equally beneficial. The posts that live only behind the firewall are still subject to the hundreds of keyword searches company employees make every day.

Starting from ground zero

If you’re like most technical communicators, you may find yourself at a place without any blog at all. Getting a blog started can be an almost impossible task, depending on the size, scope, and audience for your blog. Infrastructure limitations often carve strict requirements about the technologies you can use.

If your infrastructure team supports only Oracle and SQL databases, you can forget about WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, all of which use PHP and MySQL. Other platforms, such SharePoint 2007 or Roller Blogger, may work for your needs, but the easy blog platforms of the web will remain a distant dream.

Not only will you face technology challenges starting a blog, but also challenges of content, because no company CEO will feel comfortable with controversial, transparently written content that doesn’t cast the company in the perfect light. Nor will CEOs welcome with open arms a comments section that angry, upset readers use as space for their complaints.

Especially if you’re in the opening negotiations with senior leaders to implement a blog, you may find yourself stuck between two equally unappealing alternatives: on the one hand, the senior leaders may shoot down and tightly restrict blog content that is too transparent and open. On the other hand, readers who sense nothing more than a marketing brochure online will not come back to your site with any sustained and anticipated interest.

Nevertheless, if you can somehow peel back the corporate curtain and tell an appealing, safe story about products and processes, writing in first person, with an honest voice, employing the language of the web and sharing insights and observations on a personal level, your writing will eventually break through the cracks, like a plant finding its way through the sidewalk to the sun.

Making blog content findable

As soon as you get your blog going, and you accrue not just 20 or 30 posts but hundreds of posts, you will face one of the main frustrations with blogging: making your content findable. Those 700 posts you’ve already written will seem buried and non-existent except for the last ten on the home page. For many readers, the last ten posts on your home page are the entirety of your blog.

In order to not lose your old posts, you have to make them findable — both through search engines and related posts. Making your content findable through search engines largely stems from good search engine optimization (SEO) of your content. This usually involves inserting keywords in your title and first few paragraphs. SEO techniques may be at odds with your narrative technique and literary style, so this is a constant tradeoff you have to consider. Some WordPress plugins allow you to manipulate your title tags, making a special title that only search engines see, but not readers.

Categories, date-based archives, tag clouds, and other groupings are largely ignored (except maybe a top ten list). But if you can provide a list of related posts beneath your new posts (related by keyword matches), these related posts will provide a tunnel for readers to find your old content. Lorelle Van Fossen at http://lorelle.wordpress.com is the consummate example of one who includes related posts at the end of each new post. Each new post on her site links to about a dozen back posts, amazingly all somewhat related (this is one benefit of keeping a narrow focus to your blog).

Taking into account the reader’s context

As with help topics, you have to remember that a good number of readers (more than half) find you out of the blue, with no idea who you are, what you’ve written previously, what prompted your article, or whether you have any credentials to write about your topic.

Because of this disoriented context, you must make it clear what the site’s focus is. Include an About page, a site tagline or purpose statement, information about yourself, and a contact button. Never make assumptions in your posts that assume readers understand opinions or perspectives you’ve expressed in earlier posts.

Most importantly, because readers may not have more than a few minutes to explore your site, you must make it easy for them to subscribe. Their initial foray on your actual site may be short-lived, but they will return time and again to their inbox, feedreader, and Twitter. By providing at least three types of subscription options – RSS feed, e-mail delivery, and Twitter (and iTunes if applicable), you can increase the likelihood of keeping your readers hooked to your content.

As you gain more subscribers, your site will gather more visits, your posts will receive more comments, and the whole endeavor will feel more significant and worthwhile. It will no longer be a blog that no one reads. You’ll be a writer with influence.

Conclusion

Despite whatever SEO techniques or political battles or headaches you must overcome to find time to blog, keep in mind — above all else — that blogging is writing. And if you’re like most technical writers I know, writing is a release. It’s a creative endeavor you find enjoyable. Don’t be afraid to be personal. Focus on stories. Let your literary hair down and inject a little style into your prose. If a post gets killed because it reveals too much, or doesn’t quite maintain the corporate voice, you know you’re on the right track.