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Does Your Blog Post Command or Report?

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remote control
There are two aspects to any communication, explains Elizabeth J. Natalle in Teaching Interpersonal Communication. The report aspects conveys information, while the command aspect refers to the relationship between the communicants. The command aspect sets a tone, which might be focused on:

  • this is how I see myself…
  • this is how I see you…
  • this is how I see you seeing me…

Natalle contrasts two statements about driving a car to make her point:

  1. “It is important to release the clutch gradually and smoothly.”
  2. “Just let the clutch go, and it will ruin the transmission in no time.”

One interesting perspective on the work we do as professional bloggers is that we are interpreters, translating clients’ corporate message into people-to-people terms, trying to find exactly the right tone. That first statement about the clutch would be purely informational, for example, with no connection being formed between the reader and the business owner or practitioner. On the other hand the second statement takes a “how to” tone, a tone that can be very useful in blog marketing.

Crystal Gouldey of AWeber Communications names five different “tones” to consider when planning a blog:

  • The formal, professional tone
  • The casual tone
  • The professional-but-friendly tone
  • The sales pitch tone
  • The friendly sales pitch toneConsistency is important, Gouldey thinks. “It will be very confusing for subscribers if you talk to them one way and the next week you talk to them in a different way,” Gouldey says.

’T aint necessarily so, I teach. For one thing, a company blog can have different contributors, each of whom might have a different styles of presenting information. But even with a single author, the use of different tones can lend variety and interest.  The only exceptions would be the “sales pitch” tones, probably better left out of the blog mix.

Does your blog post command or report? Your business blog can do both!

 

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Go Ahead – Blog About Your Misplaced Oscars

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Winning an Oscar is a big deal, but still old news; losing your Oscar – now that makes for more attention-catching copy. I think that’s the appeal of the Mental Floss Magazine story about ten award-winning movie stars who actually misplaced the statuettes they’d been so excited to win in the first place.

“Owning a little gold guy is such a rarity that you’d think their owners would be a little more careful with them.” Apparently, that’s not the case:

  • Olympia Dukakis’s Moonstruck Oscar was stolen from her home.
  • “I don’t know what happened to the Oscar they gave me for On the Waterfront,” Marlon Brando wrote in his autobiography. “Somewhere in the passage of time it disappeared.”
  • Colin Firth nearly left his new trophy for “The King’s Speech” on a toilet tank the very night he received it.
  • Matt Damon and Ben Affleck took home Oscars for writing Good Will Hunting in 1998, but in the confusion of a flood in his apartment while he was out of town, Damon isn’t sure where his award went.
  • Whoopi Goldberg sent her Ghost Best Supporting Actress Oscar back to the Academy to have it cleaned and detailed. The Academy then sent the Oscar on to R.S. Owens Co. of Chicago, the company that manufactures the trophies. When it arrived in the Windy City, however, the package was empty.

So how does all this apply to blog marketing for a business or professional practice?  It brings out a point every business owner, professional, and freelance business blogger ought to keep in mind: Writing about past failures is important.

True stories about mistakes and struggles are very humanizing, adding to the trust readers place in the people behind the business or practice. What tends to happen is the stories of failure create feelings of empathy and admiration for the entrepreneurs or professional practitioners who overcame the effects of their own errors.

Blogging about mistakes has another potential positive effect: it can turn out to help with customer relations and damage control.  When  complaints and concerns are recognized and dealt with “in front of other people” (in blog posts), it gives the “apology” or the “remediation measure” more weight. In fact, in corporate blogging training sessions, I remind Indianapolis blog writers to “hunt” for stories of struggle and mistakes made in the early years of a business or practice!

Go ahead – blog about your misplaced Oscars!

 

 

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Did-You-Know Blogging for Business

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Book of the Bizarre
The Egyptians wore eye shadow to prevent blindness, and lipstick to keep the soul from leaving the body through the breath, Varla Ventura informs readers in The Book of the Bizarre.

What a great lead-in that sentence might make for a blog on the website of a beauty salon, cosmetologist, cosmetic surgeon, or even an ophthalmologist, I couldn’t help thinking. And Ventura’s book offers 300 pages’ worth of just such fascinating tidbit fodder!

I think the reason I’ve always liked “tidbit blogs”, just one of the dozens of blog “genres” we writers can use to lend variety to our posts, is that they put the blogger and the reader on the same side of the presentation. In other words, in a typical marketing blog the business owner or practitioner is presenting something to the reader, trying to forge a connection and engage interest (and, over time, convert lookers to buyers, of course).

In contrast, when I’m sharing that tidbit about Egyptians believing lipstick kept the soul from leaving the body, it’s as if I’m “on the same side of the table” with the reader, with both of us experiencing wonder at how religions have evolved over thousands of years and how customs change. (Well, it feels that way to me, anyhow…)

The function of tidbits in business blogs is to serve as “triggers” or jumping-off-points for blog posts about any subject.  In corporate marketing blogs, tidbits help:

  • educate blog readers
  • debunk myths
  • showcase the business owners’ expertise
  • demonstrate business owners’ perspective

    We blog writers, I’m convinced, need never run out of ideas if we just keep a file (or, as I do, collect books the likes of The Book of the Bizarre) of “did-you-know” tidbits!

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Not-So-Palatable Blog Topics

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non-palatable
“Fury or eternal apathy. These are the two feelings you’ll evoke from your reader if you dare dip your foot on these not-so-palatable topics,” writes Eunice David of Adhere. And what are those terrible taboo topics when it comes to blog content writing for business?

  • political topics
  • religious talk
  • highly contentious topics
  • redundant topics
  • capitalizing on tragic events
  • self-promotional posts

Let’s talk a bit about that political topic taboo thing. “Choosing a politically charged topic for your business blog pretty much equates to planting a virtual time bomb,” says David. “Your business blog would be a sitting duck for pundits who won’t hesitate to fire back and dent your credibility.” But taking a stance, I’ve found, is what gives a blog post some “zip”. And after all, doesn’t being a thought leader involve stating your own thoughts on the matter under discussion?

Sure it does. Whether it’s business-to-business or business to consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use owners’ opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers. But where politics is not directly related to the business or practice, I agree that it’s best not to dip your foot – or your content – into the political arena.

In essence, the same guideline applies when it comes to religion. Assuming your target audience is not a particular religious community, nor is the product or service you’re marketing to them religious in nature, it’s best to stay focused on the topic at hand.

In terms of capitalizing on tragic events, AT&T’s attempt to capitalize on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (encouraging social media audiences to take pictures on their phones of the scarred New York city skyline) turned out to be a disaster, points out mic.com. “There is no useful connection between remembering a tragedy and shilling their product.”

Ford did a better job using a tragedy, mic.com adds, by posting a respectful thank you to the first responders of the Boston Bombing, without mentioning any Ford products.

Blatant self-promotion doesn’t work any better for blogs than it would at a party. Blogs are advertorials, if anything, and that means finding the right balance between story and sale. Sure, when people go online to search for information and click on different blogs or on different websites, they’re aware of the fact that the providers of the information are out to do business.  But as long as the material is valuable and relevant for the searchers, they’re perfectly fine with knowing there’s someone who wants them for a client or customer.  The secret of successful business blogging, I found, is just that – not coming on too strong, staying in “softly, softly” mode.

Since, in writing business blog content, you’re out to elicit neither fury nor apathy, a healthy respect for the negative power of non-palatable topics is in order.

 

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Why Brains and Blogs Love Lists

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Ten Blank business diagram bullet liet illustration“There’s little that our brains crave more than effortlessly acquired data,” Maria Konnikova remarks ruefully in the New Yorker magazine, by way of explaining the reasons people love lists. Lists spatially organize information, helping create an easy reading experience, Konnikova explains, “in which the mental heavy lifting of conceptualization, categorization, and analysis is completed well in advance of actual consumption.” The point of using numbered lists, I explain to blog content writers, is to demonstrate ways in which your product or service is different, and to provide valuable information that engages readers, helping them see you as a go-to guy or gal to solve their problem or fill their need. There’s apparently psychological science behind the fact that the numbered list technique has been a staple for s magazine covers for as long as I can remember. I always sensed lists and bullet points in general would make a good fit for blogs, and by most accounts, search engines “like” them as well. Jay Sondemers of Forbes defines high quality content as being:

  • easy to read
  • suitable for scanning and skimming

As far back as 1968, neuroscientist Walter Kintsch pointed out that lists facilitate both immediate understanding and later recall. Then in 2011, psychologists Messner and Wanke concluded that we feel better when the amount of conscious work we have to do in order to process information is reduced. “Within the context of a Web page or Facebook stream,” Konnikova says, a list is the easy pick, in part because it promises a definite ending. Back in 2013, I devoted a Say It For You blog post to the topic of numbered lists, noting seven different men’s magazine covers sporting list-based titles, including “50 Great Escapes” and “6 Longest New Drivers”. Just the other day, a single news stand at my local CVS pharmacy carried four magazines with numbers-based headline teasers: (Indianapolis Diner)       13 Gourmet meals (Mountain Escapes)       62 Glorious Getaway Ideas (Entertainment )             50 Song Movies, & TV Shows Guaranteed to Bring You Joy (Time)                           240 Reasons to Celebrate America “In the current media environment, a list is perfectly designed for our brains,” concludes Konnikova.  “We are drawn to it intuitively, we process it more efficiently, and we retain it with little effort.” And that’s just fine, she concludes, with the caveat that such a fast-food information diet is necessarily limited in content and nuance. Limitations notwithstanding – brains and blogs love lists!

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