Braiding Humanity into your Business Blog

Over the past two years a significant portion of my life has gone into counseling business people on blog-related matters. It is increasingly clear that one of the most difficult components of a successful business blog remains how to move from the dreadful marketing language of Corpspeak into the more human first-person present narrative.

Of the scores of people I've talked with and coached on this subject, my two most successful former pupils are Riya's Munjal Shah and Roam4Free's Pat Phelan. Munjal started a photo recognition company at a time when many parents were still fearful of posting their children's pictures online and in public. So, Munjal named his site "Recognizing Deven," after his then 18-month-old son. Munjal's brilliance has been the ability to be absolutely candid, while knowing wisely what should and should not be shared with readers. Shortly after the launch of the blog in a company also named for a partner's daughter, the issue, for the most part, disappeared from debate. Munjal has since used his blog to successfully change his company's position.

Pat Phelan has been blogging for six months, even though he has had no product to offer to customers. That will happen before year end, and like Munjal's Riya launch it will occur without the time and expense of traditional marketing efforts. Why?  Because Pat has built street creds with an entire community of people interested in the new low-cost telephony services now coming to market. Most analysts, executives and company insiders know Pat through his blog and they trust him as a credible source of insight, information and candor.  As a streetwise, Irishman, he would never call himself a "thought leader," but that is what he has become. If his Roam4Free product  really reduced the cost of international phone calling by over 90% as it is supposed to do, and it isn't too complicated to use, then I would wager it will do quite well in the marketplace and other companies will want to leverage both his credibility and market position by allying themselves with him.

Trust me that Munjal and Pat are very different dudes.  Munjal is polished and Standford educated. He is a sequential entrepreneur and knows how to work the venture community.  Pat is a former Thai chef, who writes about his struggle as a recovering alcoholic. He has never created a PowerPoint presentation.

But when it comes to blogging, the two have a great deal in common.  Here's what they both know and practice:

1. Tell a story. Don't make a blog a marketing document. 

Both these guys are good spinners of non-fiction yarns.  They are comfortable to using their own words to tell stories. Their narratives often are about people other than themselves and they simply become narrators, or occasionally, reporters.

2. Blogs yield to products.

Despite the loyalty built through their blogs, but know they cannot transcend the blemish of crappy products. Munjal has written of the agony of the product not performing as planned, of the marketplace positioning the product differently than we marketing consultants had advised. The humility he showed feels real. Both Pat and Munjal know that people are loyal to people, but they spend money on products and services.  If the ones your company have to offer, suck, or do not live up to company claims, your blog could be the best on earth, but your company will still be doomed.

3. Give to your readers.

Robert Scoble is the grandmaster of this. Back when he was at Microsoft, he gained a great deal of credibility lamenting over his Mac envy or by blurting out once that the CEO's actions made him ashamed to be a Microsoft employee. The real important part was that Microsoft simultaneously gained credibility by allowing him to do this. Back when Scoble was a sales clerk in a camera store, he sometimes sent customers to the competition.  The payback was that he'd lose the sale, but gain customer's trust.

I recently started consulting a client who was surprised that in our first meeting, I cited Debbie Weil,  who wrote The Corporate Blogging Book, which many people feel most directly competes with Naked Conversations. Debbie says, "corporations don't blog.  People blog." I envy her wisdom and wish I had authored the line. By telling clients and now, you readers what she said, I may be helping Debby, but more important, I helped my client and you readers. I would be lying if I said I would prefer you buy her book over ours, but that needs to be your choice, not mine. More than that, Iwish to be perceived as a though leader in the area of social media and I cannot do that by just talking about my product. Such selfishness can and should hurt my standing as a community leader because generosity is required to lead.

4.Braid yourself into your business.

In face-to-face meetings, at conferences and over lunches, we salt our business conversations with personal information and anecdotes. 

For readers of this blog, there's posts about a new grandson, a trip to the Italian Coast and the horror of leaving computers at airline security. But overall it is about business blogging, and more recently about global communities and social networking.

I need to braid anecdotes into my blog to show there is a real person over here and that some of my experiences just might be like some of your experiences. But essentially, people come here to read about blogging, social networking, online communities and hopefully, my next product--a book called Global Neighborhoods.

This braiding of personal and business is often the most difficult part of what I teach new business bloggers, but it seems to me essential that readers understand there is a real human in there or your blog will just be an other mediocre example of corpspeak.

This involves a delicate balance. It takes a while to master, but once you do, it's like riding a bicycle.

Suppose you are a CEO who enjoys music.  In a post, you might mention that during a a recent business meeting, you missed a point because you were tripping out on a jazz riff you had heard that morning on your MP3 player.  That makes you human. Something like that has happened to a great many of us. That would make a good quick blog because it shows a real person doing one of those little things that makes us human.

5. Get back to business.

If the same CEO kept talking about music in post after post, then I would lose interest  In braiding into your blog, do not forget your central strand.

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