Number 7 in a series, Business Blog FAQs, culled from my business blog consulting practice.
Your Blog Is Not an Annual Report or a Sales Brochure
Corporate blogging is a new way to communicate. As such, it calls for a different kind of writing style, a fact that unfortunately escapes many corporate bloggers. Here are nine stylistic errors you would be wise to avoid.
- Writing in the third person. A blog post should read like a letter to a friend, colleague, or peer. It’s not an essay or a report.
- Heavily self promotional. Every post doesn’t have to be a proclamation of your expertise and capabilities.
Customers don’t care all that much about you or your business: they care about themselves and their business. With that in mind, keep the focus on customers and their problems. - Large text blocks. An essay mentality leads to complex thoughts and long paragraphs. Unfortunately, few take the time to read a long paragraph online and your insights will go unnoticed.
- No questions or reader interaction. A blog post needn’t be a completed thought. There’s nothing wrong with asking questions, seeking advice, soliciting feedback. Many people read blogs just as much for the conversation as the post itself. By taking advantage of your blog’s conversational capacity, you build a devoted community that can in turn help you build your business.
- Boring, stiff prose. Blogging is a far less formal medium than other types of business communication.
Liven it up. Express an original thought and use plain English instead of corporate jargon and adspeak. Be provocative. Tell a joke. Admit doubt or blunder or failure. The effect of all this is that you humanize yourself and your company. Come to grips with the fact that people want to do business with real people, not corporate facades. A blog is how you tap into that fundamental desire. - Too many ideas in one post. We all have a tendency to tell our whole story every time we have the platform. Problem is, people can’t remember more than one or two points, so our information dumps essential convey nothing. Far better to post on one point and one point only, sharply and persuasively. If you have 10 things to say on the subject, write 10 posts.
- No clear audience. Corporate blogs can be aimed at clients, peers, the media, the public, employees, or a combination. Combining is where it gets tricky. If one post speaks to employees and the next speaks to peers, folks are going to have trouble figuring out whether they should become a regular reader. And, since people are overwhelmed with things to read, doubt generally leads to departure.
- Poor headlines and subheads. This is a topic I must come back to again and again because it is so darned important. Headers and subheads are the first thing readers read and often the only thing that determines whether they will read a post or ever visit your blog again. Headers and subheads also play an important role in search engine optimization, a fact that is often and amazingly overlooked. You must spend a great deal of time crafting headlines to have any hope of attracting search traffic and loyal readers.
- Burying the lead. In many respects, blogging is like newspaper journalism.
A news story gives you the main point right away. Why? Because if you’re skimming through a newspaper you’re going to get extremely annoyed if you have to sift through several paragraphs to find out who won the game, whether the bill passed, or how many people were killed in the earthquake. But how many times have you read a blog post half way or three-quarters through and still don’t know what the blogger is driving at? Don’t be discourteous to your readers – tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. It’s really that simple.
Over to You
What writing and style techniques do you find appealing or unappealing in a corporate blog?
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Thanks for these great reminders, Brad! It’s so easy to overlook them sometimes. Personally, I have to be especially careful to avoid number 9, Burying the Lead. I sometimes tend to write a bit of a lengthy “preamble” to a post if I don’t watch out. Haven’t really done it lately but have certainly been guilty of it in the past.
I do try to use descriptive and/or enticing headings/subheads to not only make my posts scannable but also to draw the reader into the sections that are relevant to him/her. For example, in my recent Age of Conversation 3 post, I used a call to action in all but one heading. In fact, even my post title/headline is a call to action in that post. I don’t use call-to-action headlines/headings nearly often enough, though. They’re a great way to make a post more immediate and compelling.
Brad, this is a very useful and usable list of your expertise.
I have large corporate clients that struggle with blogging. It’s very hard for them to break out of the ‘one-way’ information booth approach. And once the blog is live, they tend to think that it will look after itself.
I have just sent the link to this post to two of my more receptive blogging clients, and will follow-through later today when I phone them.
Thanks, again for the great material.
Best, Robin
Jeanne – Putting a call to action in the headline: great words of wisdom! That is something I need to work on as well.
Robin, I can relate to what you’re going through. If your business clients aren’t reading blogs and getting familiar with the medium, it’s pretty hard for them to develop a blogging mentality. They fall back on old, familiar, comfortable communication styles. They should trust you because you are in the medium.
Great points, Brad. Most business blogs do look stuffy and sterile. Where’s the human voice? People are looking for human connection. Well, this is a valuable summation of useful ideas to get them going.
Hi Jan, I always encourage clients to put a human face on their blog(s). It’s important for readers to relate to a specific person; at least that seems to be the widely held preference.
Brad,
Not having read a great deal of corporate blogs in my time, I am not really in a great position to comment about corporate blogs as such.
Nevertheless, I would have thought that pretty much all of your points would represent sound guidelines with regard to pretty much any type of blogging – corporate blogging included.
What really bugs me about some of the few corporate blogs that I have read is the tendency, related to your second point, to post advertisements rather than genuine discussions. There is a time and a place for advertising, and the blogosphere is not it, and whilst there is absolutely no harm whatsoever in slipping in a mention of something good which your company is doing or how your company’s products or services might be appropriate for a particular situation, the focus should be on valuable discussion from the viewpoint of the reader.
Blog posts are not advertisements.
(a thought: do you think it would be an effective strategy to write a genuinely informative discussion and slip in ads relation to aspects of the company’s offering which are relevant to the discussion at hand in the sidebar? Do many companies do this?)
Hi Andrew, You’ve put your finger on one of the most important and trickiest parts of conducting a business blog – the fine line between blatant, off-putting and legitimate self promotion.
It is a fine line. On the one hand, I think readers of a business blog expect the business to promote itself: it is, after all, a business blog. However, readers also expect information they can use, ideas, insights, and open conversation. Self promotion in the absence of these other things is what I think causes irritation.
The approach you suggest makes perfect sense (as just about all your ideas do). I think there are companies do take this approach, though I can’t think of any specific examples at the moment. I wouldn’t refer to it as “slipping” anything in, though. I’m not a purist, I guess: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with advertising and promotion – it just can’t be obnoxious. Blogging and social media in general requires a softer, more balanced communication style.