Blogs And Snowflakes Are One-Of-A-Kind

The other day, while I was making a presentation about business blogging at a meeting of the Sertoma Club of Carmel, Indiana, I was asked a question that brought me up short:

“So, when blogging for business, do you just keep using the same material and maybe change one or two words each time?”

(Though a bit taken aback, I realized I’d been often been asked this question, just in a different version. Business owners setting out on a blogging strategy are typically concerned they’ll “run out of things to say”.)

It occurs to me that the answer to both these versions of the question might be    
”snowflakes”. 

Yes, snowflakes.  How can it be that no two snowflakes are identical? After all, according to The Book of Totally Useless Information, a rough estimate of the numbers of snowflakes that have fallen on earth is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0000!

A snowflake needs a nucleus around which to form, explains author Don Vorhees. Usually that’s a speck of dust, sea salt, or other particle. Water vapor accumulates and freezes on the airborne particles, which are blown about as they fall towards Earth, gathering more water droplets all the way. No two specks of dust are truly identical, and the conditions of temperature and moisture are different each time; those minor changes are enough to make all snowflakes different.

The “nucleus” around which business blog posts are formed is their topic, the expertise and products that business offers. The key words and phrases around that topic are what bring readers to the blog posts. But, even though the overall topic is the same, there is endless variety that can be used to make each blog post special. (The technique I’m demonstrating here is metaphor – making an unusual comparison – in this case between snowflakes and blogs.)

As I brought out in my earlier blog post “Blogs Can Have Split Personalities”, a company’s blog can reflect different aspects of the business and the different personalities of its owners and of selected customers (through testimonials and anecdotes).

So, whether you plan to do your own business blog writing or collaborate with a professional ghost blogger like me, the content will be a way of continually thinking through your own business knowledge and business beliefs.  The blog will reflect your unique view about your industry, about the news, about the country, even about – snowflakes!