In Writing For Business, Avoid Business Blogging Boomerangs

Psychology Today Magazine cautions readers against love boomerangs, sweet moves that too often, give you the "flipside of your best intentions".

One "sweet move" consists of promises you make to a significant other, promises of lifelong love and commitment.  The problem – "People who have the most positive relationship feelings make bigger promises…but are not any better at keeping them."  Recommendation: Make small, concrete, doable promises, and then keep those.

I think the same advice might be relevant in corporate blogging training, where sound advice to blog content writers would consist of a caution against using blog posts to make overblown claims about the company, the products, or the services. Instead, an SEO marketing blog might focus on offering useful, actionable information in each blog post. The old rule "Under- promise, over-deliver" is certainly applicable in corporate blogging for business.

A second "sweet move" is discreetly avoiding introducing your partner to your attractive, flirty, friends. Removing temptation from a lover’s life, researchers found, makes him or her more likely to cheat! As a content writer in Indianapolis, I’ve seen the blogger equivalent of "removing temptation" in failing to properly attribute phrases or concepts used in business blog writing to their proper source.  A blog content writer might, for example, avoid inserting links to websites he/she considers "temptations" that might lure a customer to a competitor. Needless to say, that "cagey" strategy will more than likely come back to "bite" the jealous blog writer’s company.

The third "sweet move" is offering to split child care duties down the middle with a partner. "When couples attempt to pitch in identically, their parenting styles often clash and actually damage the family dynamic."  Psychology Today quotes researcher Sarah Shoppe-Sullivan: "Co-parenting takes negotiation and communication."

Corporate blogging for business, whether the company is using a business blogging service or having employees do the writing for business, takes negotiation and communication as well.  Although having different styles of writing and highlighting different aspects of the business can each add variety and interest to the corporate blog writing, in corporate blogging training sessions, I recommend building the blog around central themes or "leitmotifs" that remain consistent over time.

But over my years as a freelance blog writer, I realize, I’ve seen many companies launch a blog marketing strategy with "sweet moves", starting out with great expectations, but poor implementation, only to reap the "flipside of their best intentions". In corporate blog writing, as in love, it’s important to avoid the boomerang effect!