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"Stop Talking to Yourself: Tips to Better Corporate Blogging"

Posted by Chris Lynn on November 03, 2008 at 05:03 PM PDT

2 comments, Latest by karen snyder

Many corporate blogs fail because they forget two things:

A blog is not a traditional news publication. It didn't spring from the ether. It's a conversation.

A blogger is not a journalist. Journalists report facts. Bloggers connect and share.

So many corporate blogs make the mistake of trying to become a newsletter or an online news site. They are strict and regimented. Even worse, they are self-contained, only read and relevant to those within the company. No surprise, they don't get a lot of traffic and no one links back.

Why? Cause they are talking to themselves. It's like someone shut them in a room and they are just chatting away. Yes, some of what is said is good, but who's gonna hear it?

You have to remember that conversations have two parts: listening and participating.

"We monitor what's being said on other blogs. That's how we figure out what to write in posts."

BAD! To continue the room analogy even further, what you are doing is holding a glass to the wall, listening to the neighbor and then talking to yourself.

I'm not saying it's bad to just lurk--what's bad is to lurk and write. If you want to be a member of the blogosphere, however, you have to engage with it. That means that you should reply and respond to the posts you read. If you don't want to write a comment everytime, that's fine. Just link back to that post on your blog when you write something based on another idea you read.

You'll start to become a member of the community. You start finding ideas out in the wild. You identify conversations, share them with your readers, and add your own idea to keep the conversation going. Then *you* will become a faciliator of conversation. You start to feel like a moderator--finding key points, asking relevant questions, and steering the conversation towards things you feel the audience will want to hear.

Eureka! You are a blogger, weaving the best of the web into something beautiful. You are a poet, telling stories of....data centers, micro-processors and networking solutions.

My name is Chris, and I will be your moderator.

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2 Comments

Nov 04, 2008 at 03:42 PM EST

By eNumerys Global

Although I do agree from a Marketing persepective, it's better to have a conversation than talk to yourself, Blogs or 'web-logs' started out over a decade back as 'logs' or online journal entries sans any conversational aspect. Cheers!

karen snyder's headshot

Nov 14, 2008 at 01:12 PM EST

By karen snyder

This is good advice. Unfortunately, bloggers at enterprise companies face paranoid legal counselors and PR people who prefer to sweep controversy under the rug and pretend it isn't happening. It's an ongoing struggle, but we ("we" being the crusaders for more openness) will eventually prevail. I hope. Soon ; ) I've written about this on my blog "Tales From the Social Media Front Line" http://karensnyd.blogspot.com