I'd Rather Be Writing » transparency

The Most Important Stories … Aren’t the Ones I’m Writing

Tom Johnson — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 20:53:43 +0000

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. Email is the only way to reach a lot of people. People aren’t subscribing to RSS anymore. On my own blog, I can’t seem to go beyond 3,500 subscribers on my site. I feel I’ve hit the ceiling. Probably because RSS subscriptions just end up being a bunch of random noise after a while.

My colleague said, yeah, and blogging is dead.

This caught me a little by surprise, since he knows I’m a blogger. Why do you think so? I asked.

He quickly distinguished between professional blogs and personal blogs, and said he was referring to personal blogs. Very few personal bloggers can command large audiences, he said. Dooce is one of them. We couldn’t think of many more.

I didn’t think much of this conversation until later in the evening, talking with my kids. For some reason I started telling my six-year-old some stories about different experiences I’ve had in life. Then we started talking about the past, and how her older sister was eight months old when 9/11 happened (we were in New York). I told her the story of how I got my job in Egypt, after waiting two and a half months after the interview. I told her the story of drug dealers shooting into our house in Florida, and why we came to Utah. I told her the story of how I miraculously fixed the lawnmower last week, and how I unscrewed an impossible drain. She looked at me with both curiosity and seriousness. She hadn’t heard many of these stories before.

And then it hit me. I haven’t written the most important stories of my life. This blog, this professional blog, only tells one kind of story. It tells the story of my professional life, of my thoughts surrounding my career and all the issues involved in it.

As long as you have the same career, you share some commonality with me and may find the content relevant. But there’s a certain sadness about this blog and all professional blogs, as they distract from the time we might spend telling stories that matter more in our lives.

I do have a personal blog, but it doesn’t receive the attention and care of my professional blog. My writing is sloppy and unstructured, almost stream of conscious. It’s hard to find motivation, for some reason, to write the real stories of my life.

Partly, I see so many tangible rewards for a professional blog. Immediate praise and engagement, career leverage, networking, career advancement, professional reputation — all of this increases with each good post on my professional blog.

With the personal blog, there isn’t the same reward. A reward exists for sure, but it’s a different kind of reward. It’s the same reward you receive for keeping a personal journal.

For now, I am resigned in having two blogs. One is my more historical, unadvertised blog where I write the personal stories of my life. The other, this blog, is where I explore topics related to technical writing.

Regardless of the blog, I will always try to write the real stories.

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Trust and Transparency: Leadership Day at the STC Summit #stc10

Tom Johnson — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:33:31 +0000

Paul Pehrson and I sat down after Leadership Day at the STC Summit to talk about some of the strategies the board is taking to address the issue of trust. This is the first in a series of videocasts that I’ll be posting at the Summit.

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Secrecy versus openness in communication

Tom Johnson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:25:40 +0000

Secrecy versus openness in communication. Gerry McGovern makes an interesting comparison between Apple and Microsoft when it comes to secrecy and transparency. Although many people love Apple and find their applications simple to use, they are not a very transparent company at all. They maintain absolute secrecy until the day of release. Not so with Microsoft.

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Blogging, Podcasting, and Screencasting: Eight Characteristics to Attract Devoted Followers [Part I]

Tom Johnson — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:44:45 +0000

Download MP3
Length: 50 min.

This podcast is a recording of the Blogging, Podcasting, and Screencasting presentation that I gave to the TransAlpine conference in Vienna in June 2009. In the presentation, I explore what well-known bloggers, podcasters, and screencasters do to inspire readers to become devoted followers rather than just casual subscribers.

Devoted followers stay updated with each new post, podcast, or screencast, eagerly awaiting the next new one. They’re intimately familiar with your content and either comment regularly or regularly return to your site. In contrast, casual subscribers may check out the site from time to time (if they even remember the title), but they feel no loyalty to the blogger/podcaster/screencaster. Months could pass without an update and they wouldn’t notice.

Rather than explore blogs, podcasts, and screencasts as separate media with their own unique characteristics, I group them together and explore eight common characteristics that make blogs/podcasts/screencasts successful: relevance, story, appropriate revealing, voice, readability, visibility, interaction, and regularity.

If you want to follow the PowerPoint, view it here. It’s not sync’ed with the audio, so you just have to guess where I am (but the PowerPoint is mostly visual anyway, since that’s my PowerPoint style). Also, because of the length (90 minutes overall), I divided the podcast into two parts. This is part 1.

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Converting Readers from Casual Subscribers to Devoted Followers

Tom Johnson — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:36:58 +0000

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Length: 14 min.

At the STC Summit, I ran into someone from Australia who follows my wife’s blog fairly regularly and had even brought gifts for her and the kids. It made me reflect on blog subscribers, and how you convert readers from being occasional readers to devoted fans.

In this podcast, Kirsty Taylor talks about what she finds appealing about Seagull Fountain (my wife’s blog) and other blogs she follows. Kirsty explains that, for her, blogs become powerful when they speak to her heart, make her reflect, and reveal authentically from the blogger’s life in an appropriate way. We also talk about transparency, authenticity, the use of pseudonyms, the portrayal of reality, and the importance of making personal connections.

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InDesignSecrets » Blog Archive » Eliminating YDB (Yucky Discolored Box) Syndrome

Tom Johnson — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:54:29 +0000

InDesignSecrets » Blog Archive » Eliminating YDB (Yucky Discolored Box) Syndrome. If you ever put transparent images over colored backgrounds in Indesign, you need to apply this tweak to avoid discoloration issues around your image.

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Podcast — Blogging for Technical Communicators Webinar (Part 2)

Tom Johnson — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:02:45 +0000

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Length: 40 min.

This is the second half of the Blogging for Technical Communicators webinar that I gave to the STC-Rocky Mountain chapter on February 19, 2009.

Here’s the accompanying PowerPoint visual.

Note: Make sure you listen to Part 1 first. Otherwise you’ll come into this podcast in media res.

Topics covered in this half of the podcast include the following:

How Your Audience Consumes Blog Information
Key Elements of Blog Appeal: Story, Voice, Transparency, Honesty
Making the 652 Posts Findable on Your Blog
Comments — and What to Do With Them
What Happens to You When You Blog
Questions Everyone Asks About WordPress

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Author-it Launches a Blog — An Interview About the Who, Why, and How

Tom Johnson — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:53:26 +0000

Author-it launched a blog today. You can view it at http://author-it.com/blog.

Author-it joins the blogosphere with a stylish new WordPress blog

I had a sneak peek of the blog about a week ago and contacted Kathy Howes for an interview about it. The questions I asked her are below.

Why did you decide to start a corporate blog?

We see blogging as an essential part of an organization’s content strategy, and a great opportunity to directly interact with our clients at many different levels.

What hopes do you have for the blog?

We hope to use it in a number of ways, but our key goals are to communicate our very unique company culture, to build on thought leadership, to assist in educating and informing on key content management issues, and to get honest feedback on current and new products.

We also see this as a very real opportunity to connect on a much more personal level with our client base. We hope to see some real dialogue and feedback going on that will assist us in ensuring our solutions continue to reflect the needs of our clients.

What reservations did you have about blogging that caused you to wait so long to start one?

We were concerned as to how we allocate resource and ensure the topics covered would continue to be interesting and thought provoking for visitors to the blog. We had also heard numerous stories of corporate blogs that failed, and wanted to ensure we got it as right as possible! This meant researching successful, and not so successful, corporate blogs, and reaching out to industry bloggers and champions for advice and feedback. Their assistance here was invaluable.

We also engaged with staff, particularly those who blog regularly on a personal level, to ensure we had ongoing resource and commitment. We have been amazed at how positive the feedback has been and we have staff already preparing material for the coming months.

How will you handle potentially negative comments below posts?

I hope we will see it as an opportunity to learn how to do things better, or perhaps even as a vehicle for potential future changes or enhancements. It will be a learning curve for us, but this is the great thing about two way dialogue, you get the real story. To be honest, we are more concerned about the spam and thinly veiled competitor postings than genuine but negative comments.

Who will be writing your posts?

A wide range of employees will be writing posts, from the CEO and President of the company right through to front line client services staff. We will also be inviting guests or industry specialists to blog for us on different subjects.

How will you ensure your content is actually interesting and not a rehash of marketing material?

Yes, this is always a challenge, especially for a marketer. I guess at the end of the day it is about remembering that we are all very busy, with far too much to read and do during our typical work day, and time is precious. However, our clients or prospects come to our blog for a number of reasons, and we need to try to ensure we cover this off without simply becoming a micro website plugging our products.

For us the challenge will be informing without turning it into a sales or marketing pitch, and ensuring we stimulate feedback and engage dialogue. We will in many cases be focusing on personal experience and ideas which should take us away from the traditional sales/marketing path.

What kind of transparency will you have with your blog content? Will you be open about what you’re working on, the challenges you’re facing, how your company works, and so on? For example, Adobe won’t tell you what they’re working on until they actually release it. Other companies, such as Madcap, won’t tell you how many employees they have. Every company has a degree of transparency they allow. To what extent will your blog give readers a glimpse behind the scenes at Author-it?

That is an interesting question. I guess part of our intention is to ensure clients, or potential clients, know when we have exciting or innovative products coming out and we will be talking about these as soon as they are ready to go into beta. We don’t generally talk about them earlier purely in case development schedules change.

As far as challenges go, we will include those that are relevant, such as current market conditions, or changes in government for example. One of the purposes of the blog is to open up our company culture and values, so we will be reasonably open about how our company operates and who we are. However, like Madcap, we do not typically reveal details such as our company size, or specific employee details.

My Recommended Training for Corporate Bloggers: Live with a Mommy Blogger

Tom Johnson — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:48:37 +0000

If you’re starting a corporate blog, you’d be well off with a little mommy blogger training to break you in. After living with a mommy blogger, you’ll more naturally embrace transparency, skip any attempts at censorship, and become accustomed to the occasional distorted portrayal of what you say and do. These are all principles I’ve honestly learned to love from Jane.

Jane: the mommy blogger who trained me

Jane is the mommy blogger who has trained me. In case you’re unfamiliar with this term — “mommy blogger” — it refers to mothers who blog, with a focus sometimes including family, feminine topics, or simply anything really. Jane’s blog is http://whataboutmomblog.com. By following it you can discover a lot of personal details about my life.

This idea scares my brother-in-law, who doesn’t want his wife exposing personal details about him online. I used to be that way, too. I remember at one point asking Jane (notice that I call her Jane rather than “my wife”; Jane is a respectful name for a person, whereas “my wife” contextualizes her identity only in reference to me) to remove a paragraph from one of her posts that went over the privacy edge, in my opinion. She altered the paragraph a bit, but then added a footnote twice the size of the original paragraph. The footnote enlarged the issue even further.

Asking her to edit her writing with the purpose of protecting my privacy equated to censorship in Jane’s mind and only inflamed her more. After this experience, I learned to stop trying to change what others write about me, even if I disagree with them or if it embarrasses me.

For example, last week I made a stupid comment about not thinking I should have to change a diaper. As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew they were fodder for Jane’s blog, and that I could not take them back, no matter how hard I tried. I could have reacted with a long comment below her post, explaining the circumstances of the situation, the emotionally driven build-up, my side of the story, but instead I did nothing. I’ve learned that going as silent as a lamb to the slaughter is the best way to handle these situations.

Corporate bloggers, listen up. When you embrace transparency and write with an honest voice, at times people will take jabs at you. They will quote you — sometimes out of context. They may portray you in ways that make you cringe. Don’t go ballistic. Allow people to have the views they do, without letting your stomach twist into knots. It all passes like water under a bridge anyway.

Sometimes my in-laws take pity on me and say, in reference to Jane’s latest post, “Poor Tom …” They feel sorry that I often catch the sharp end of the narrative. But I don’t feel sorry. I feel lucky. How many husbands out there get a glimpse inside the inner thoughts and emotions of their companion? Our communication has increased ten-fold because of Jane’s mommy blog.

I also think blogging is a smart move for full-time mothers. Blogs provide an escape from the emotional stresses of full-time parenting. They allow mothers to express themselves in articulate ways, to interact with other adults, to use their intellectual faculties. In a way, blogs are a coping mechanism for what might otherwise be a limiting home life.

One detail I appreciate with Jane’s blog is her use of pseudonyms. The pseudonym adds a slight fictional construct between what I read and the real me. On her blog I read about Dick and Jane and Sally and Susan and Spot. I remember that her perspective may not always match reality — protagonist Dick or heroine Jane are mental representations of people and events seen from Jane’s point of view.

I’ve mostly been exploring the negative side of privacy. Actually, most of Jane’s posts put me in a positive light. I assume this is why she stays married to me. To think that I occupy such a prominent position in her life that I would appear regularly in her posts is flattering to me. It makes me feel important. Whether I’m the hero or the villain in her posts, or even just a quiet bystander, the fact that I’m present (or that Dick is present) has the same good effect on me.

Overall, if your wife ever turns to mommy blogging, or if your husband becomes a “daddy blogger” (I assume there’s such a thing), embrace transparency, enjoy the glimpse into your spouse’s world. Whatever you do, never suggest an edit that changes her perception. Remember that you’re one of the lucky ones.