Is this really blogging?

The best business blogs are those that have a personal feel to them where you get to know the person or people behind the posts.  Some good examples that I regularly read are A VC, The Obvious? andBuzzMachine.  I trust the authors of those blogs and feel they believe in what they write.

I'm sure ghost writing services for blogs have been around as long as blogs have existed and no doubt do a lot to help with the SEO of corporate web sites.  However, in the long term I think it will become a zero-sum game as content is created purely to get more Google juice and not to express the thoughts and reflections of the people really running the business.  Emotional connections with an author and, by extension, their company will ultimately have more value than another cynical top ten list of this or that.

Comments

[Steve Hearsum]

I share your view that blogs where the personality of the author comes through tend to be more engaging, and that is arguably no surprise given the way in which we make meaning relationally and seek to establish some sense of the person writing and what we might have in common.

However, the is a potentially (huge) issue with creating emotional connections with bloggers and in turn the company/brand they represent. If by emotional connection, you mean rapport/liking/friendship or anything remotely like that, then the expectations that sets up in the minds of customers/clients are different to those which exist if the relationship is kept 'professional'.

Dan Arialy has written about this in some detail in his book Predictably Irrational, the gist of his argument being that brands that attempt to be 'friends' with their customers and then suddenly switch to professional/impersonal mode e.g. when faced with complaints, or say refusing credit when a bank etc, lose significant brand loyalty/trust. And it takes considerably longer to rebuild that trust once lost.

Good blog by the way.

Steve

[Martin De Saulles]

thanks, Steve - I think that's a good point about the dangers of brands being friends one minute and impersonal the next. Perhaps corporate blogging does not really scale as there are too many touch points for large companies where messages can get confused. I'm going to check out Dan Arialy's book.

[Steve Hearsum]

I think it can scale, providing the organisation in question surface both their own intention and intentionality, plus are honest with themselves about the type of relationship they wish to have with their customers. My sense is that 'relationality', if there is such a thing, is often assumed to be both obvious and somehow not important in business, when actually it is the fulcrum around which all human interaction revolves.

It's a good book - accessible with good jumping off points into the research behind it.