Briefs for Blog Posts and Blog Posts as Briefs

Leafing through the Harvard Business Review Special Issue on digital intelligence, I noticed a very helpful formatting detail – in the corner of each first page of an article, there was a box titled “Idea in Brief”. There were three bullet points for each article summary:

• the problem
• the root cause
• the solution

The magazine editors explain that they’ve provided those summaries to “help busy leaders quickly absorb and apply the concepts”.

That little “grid” is made-to-order for business blogging! People are online searching for answers to questions they have or for solutions for dilemmas they’re facing.  But my experience has shown me that defining a problem, even when offering statistics about that problem, isn’t enough to galvanize prospects into action. But showing you not only understand the root causes of a problem, but have experience providing solutions to very that problem can help drive the marketing process forward. Still, searchers are unlikely to follow you into a “deep subject dive” unless they can anticipate that a “solution” to their problem will be forthcoming. For that reason, a “brief-in-a-box” is actually a visual could prove highly useful in longer content blog posts.

In corporate blogging for business, it’s important to offer enough information in each post to convincingly cover the one key theme of the post. At the same time, it can be very effective to compose a long, comprehensive article and then turn that material into several different blog posts relating to that one issue or problem. Ways to accomplish this vary:

– busting one common myth or misconception relative to the problem
– describing one possible solution to the problem
– updating readers on one new piece of research of one new industry development
– offering a unique opinion or slant on best practices

Inserting “Ideas in Brief” in blog posts is a great idea, but in a way, blog posts themselves are a form of “ideas in brief”!