Blogging Is Hard

Guest blog by Lee Distad

Earlier this year, I did some work for a client on the marketing text and general layout for his company's new Web site. I'm no Web designer, but I know a thing or two about compelling words, and search engine optimization. While going over the content pages for the site, one of the things on his wish list was a company blog.

However, I started asking questions, such as: was he, the President, going to blog regularly? Was his CFO? How about the Project Managers or Sales Designers? The bottom-line question was, who at the company was going to take ownership of the blog page and regularly post up-to-date content on it?

In reality, my client recognized that no one at his mid-sized commercial installation company would realistically find the time to post musings on the blog page that were both frequent and intelligent. Like a lot of well-meaning company blogs, it would end up moribund, and not add to the overall mission of the Web site, which is to motivate potential customers to pick up the phone and speak with a salesman.

That's the thing about blogs: they seek to create immediacy and a connection between the writer and the reader that simply doesn't happen with either marketing text or straight-up news reporting. Blogging the opinions and experiences of the writer are something that the reader can relate to, even if they choose to disagree.

In addition to the requirement of creating some immediacy with the reader, the other cardinal rule of blogging is frequent updates. That's where lots of company blogs fall down, for one reason or another. Oftentimes, people are too busy working to take the time to blog regularly, and that's when the company blog ends up being a dead site.

I'll admit that in the last year, my own blog (LINK: http://www.leedistad.com) has devolved into a link farm that interested readers can follow to other sites where my paid work has been posted. There are only so many hours in the day, and the bottom line is that I'll work on the projects that pay before I get around to blogging on my own site where the ad revenue is, to be honest, coffee money.

Another impediment to corporate blogging is the need for propriety. Before he axed his blog, the billionaire financier Carl Icahn complained that he couldn't really write about what he wanted to because his army of lawyers used to vet every word, and mercilessly cut with broad strokes everything that could be interpreted as being either libelous or violating SEC regulations. As a result, it was kind of a futile endeavor. No one wants to read a blog that posts nothing but carefully crafted press releases which don't actually say anything.

One of the fun things about both reading and contributing to Marketnews.ca is the lively, active blog in the sidebar. It's a chance for CE trade journalists to step outside the third-person, and share our opinions about current happenings in CE and technology in a way that's a little more lively, and possibly even controversial than just reporting straight-up on the Who, What, Where, Why and How of the news. I always enjoy contributing to GadgetTalk when asked. I only hope that readers enjoy reading as much as I and the rest of the team enjoy writing it.