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Steve Jobs and Pixar Illustrate an Important Principle of Blogging

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My realtor friend Steve Rupp sent me a piece with the following story about Steve Jobs….

After purchasing computer manufacturer Pixar, Jobs relocated the company to an abandoned factory, re-organizing the physical structure with offices and workspaces around a large, central atrium. Under this new (at the time) very unusual arrangement, the mailboxes, meeting room, cafeteria, coffee bar, and gift shop were all in the center of the space. The underlying principle? “When people run into each other and make eye contact, things happen.” Of course, electronic messages could have been sent throughout the Pixar building in a millisecond, Jobs realized, but the community context of the message is the part that would help people understand each other and work together.

Could Jobs have avoided restructuring the entire complex of buildings, relying on mandatory periodic meetings or even informal periodic staff get-togethers to accomplish his goal of employees “running into each other”? Perhaps, but that “eye contact”, “context-sharing” and cross-pollination of ideas, Jobs understood, needed to happen frequently in order to be meaningful.

At Say It For You, after years of being involved in all aspects of corporate blog writing and blogging training, one irony I’ve found is that business owners who “show up” with new content on their websites are rare. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate, with most blogs abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. That sense of community Steve Jobs was after in the redesign of the Pixar facility? You might say the first job of a blog content writer is to help a business or a professional practice “get its frequency on”. What the blog does is get the business owners and practitioners into the “atrium” to “run into” their readers!

Good things happen in the blog frequency “atrium” for business owners who make blogging part of their routine as part of an overall business marketing strategy, with blog posts providing a steady stream of “sound bites” – little bits of different, interesting, and helpful content.

Steve Jobs building design was meant to encourage employees to “hang out” with each other in the Pixar atrium area whenever their schedules allowed, with no regular times posted. Over the years, blogtyrant.com relates, various studies have analyzed data to find out the best time to publish a blog post. Most often, though, we find that the issue is less that of choosing the optimal posting time and more about finding the time to create content to post in the first place!

Our mission, then as blog content writers, is to create an “atrium” where business owners and practitioners can share ideas with readers.

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Connecting the Dots in Your Blog

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A persuasive bio has to ”connect the dots” between your employment history and the reason you’ve chosen to do what you do, Diane Wingerter, the Career Strategist™, explains in her book, Hunting2Hired. Most professional bios don’t do anything of the sort, she points out, instead offering a long bullet-pointed list of employers followed by a “loves-tennis-and-walking-her-dog” shallow glimpse of the person behind the bio. Answer the question, Diane advises, “If you were no longer in this career, what would you miss about it?”

At Say it For You, there’s a similar question we ask business or practice owners whom we are helping start a blog: “If you had only ten words to explain why you have chosen to do what you do, what would those ten words be?” When you blog, you verbalize the positive aspects of your business in a way that people can understand. But, just as when you’re creating a bio, you’re explaining “who you are” and what kind of mark you’re trying to make in your industry or profession.

Prospective employers are “buyers”, Diane wants job candidates to understand, and connecting the dots for employers means using the narrative of your bio to connect your experience with the value you have to bring to the new company. A Persuasive Bio is based on the understanding that people are driven by desire first, and only later by knowledge. Similarly, blog content writers must never forget that buyers care about benefits, not features. Each “claim” a content writer puts into a corporate blog needs to be followed with a “which means that…” narrative.

The Career Strategist™ offers another tip to job seekers that is something blog content writers need to keep in mind: Don’t use tentative language, she advises, such as “could”, “might”, or “perhaps”. (If you’re not sure, why would you expect a prospective employer – or prospective customer – to be?) For us as content writers, one big goal of the writing we do for our business owner and professional practitioner clients is positioning them as experts in the eyes of their clients and of online searchers. As Renee Quinn advises in IPwatchdog.com, “Be confident in your knowledge”.

Whether composing a bio or blogging for business, it’s important to connect the dots. For each point you make, imagine the employer – or the blog visitor – asking “So what? What’s in it for me?”

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A Recommended List of Reading Genres for Better Business Blogging

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“Reading fiction, it seems, could be a way to break old habits and unlock more effective, empathetic marketing,” Carina Rampell of the Content Marketing Institute observes, quoting William Faulkner. (Good news for me; since the pandemic stay-at-home thing began, I’ve worked my way through some 18 different novels!)

Like all writers, marketers have a lot to gain from exposure to literature, Rampell continues. “Marketing is all about empathy and storytelling, and great stories are proven to make us more empathetic.”’ But not all reading – and not all stories, she cautions, are the same, and “some genres are more effective than others in helping you “improve your marketing chops”.

 

Rampell lists advantages we content writers can gain from reading:
  • Reading poetry teaches us clarity and precision.
  • Reading the classics teaches us compelling storytelling structure, building tension to pull an audience along to a satisfying resolution.
  • Reading helps us get away from our subject or product expertise and unlock our creativity.

One of the principles I stress at Say It For You is that, in order to create a valuable ongoing blog for your business, it’s going to take equal parts reading and writing.  I’m often asked when I train business owners and employees or newbie blog content writers for hire is this: Where do you get ideas for blog posts? My answer is – everywhere!  But that doesn’t mean the ideas are going to jump right onto your page. At least half the time that goes into creating a blog post is reading/research/thinking time! The lesson I try hardest to impart in corporate blogging training sessions is: “The more you know, the more you can blog about”.  Business content writing in blogs is the result of a lot of reading and listening on the part of the blogger.

 

The Rampell article discusses the value we blog content marketers can gain by reading and classical novels. A genre I can add to her list is one that, on the surface, seems the very antithesis of the “fresh” content we aim for in blog writing – historical fiction.

The insight I gained? Material doesn’t need to be “new” in order to be “fresh”. Readers may already know some or all of the information you’re presenting in your business blog, but they need your help putting that information in perspective.  In fact, that’s where blogging for business tends to be at its finest, helping searchers with more than just finding information, but helping them understand its meaning and significance.
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What If You Saw Only Half the Blog?

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Ticket revenue covers just half of what it costs to produce world-class professional theatre at the Indiana Repertory Theatre, theatergoers learn while scanning the program booklet. So???

As John Pullinger puts it in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, “statistics provides a special kind of understanding that enables well-informed decisions. As citizens and consumers we are faced with an array of choices. Statistics can help us to choose well.” But the first choice that people make when presented with a statistic, is whether to take any action at all. From a blog marketing point of view, that IRT statistic in and of itself was a nonstarter. In other words, as a theatre patron, I didn’t feel moved to do anything relating to the funding shortfall. On the other hand, that question – “What if you saw only half the play?” Now, that had “punch” enough to make me reach into my pocket.

“Research shows that people are persuaded to take action or change their minds when you speak to both their heads and their hearts”, says Dr. Stephanie Evergreen, author of Presenting Data Effectively: Communicating Your Finds for Maximum Impact. Numbers give us quantifiable information, but when it comes to communicating how things will actually impact our real lives, some form of humanizing or grounding the data is often effective, Barnard Marr explains in Forbes.

Citing statistics is, without doubt, one tactic blog content writers can use to capture readers’ attention.  But my experience at Say It For You has shown me that statistics, even the startling sort, aren’t enough to create positive results for any marketing blog. What statistics can do is assure readers they are not alone in their need for solutions, plus assure them they’ve come to the right place for help. Still, the “so what? Will need to be addressed.X

It’s simply not good enough to just throw out a statistic demonstrating a need. In corporate blog writing, it needs to be about them, the readers. That means the “because” needs to be presented in terms of advantage to the reader for following any call to action. What if you only saw half the play?

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Powerful Paragraphs and Sentences in Blogging for Business

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“Construct your paragraphs with a good eye as well as a good mind,” advises Richard Anderson in Powerful Writing Skills.  What does that mean? Consider how the paragraph looks on the page – would it be more appealing to the eye to divide it into two paragraphs?

Anderson’s reasoning includes the following considerations:

  • Enormous blocks of print implant an image of difficulty in readers’ minds.
  • Bunches of short paragraphs can be distracting.

The compromise: vary the length of your paragraphs without making the breaks seem forced. Generally speaking, Anderson points out, “the shorter the paragraphs and the fewer the number of ideas contained in them, the easier they are to read.

In writing good sentences, be yourself, using clear, honest, natural words on paper, Anderson tells writers. He recommends writers choose:

  • nouns over adjectives
  • verbs over adverbs
  • plain verbs over fancy ones
  • specific words over general ones
  • short sentences over long ones
  • personal over non-personal

But, if all your sentences are approximately the same length, Anderson warns, you’re putting    your reader to sleep; vary the length as a subtle way to keep readers awake.

Another way to bore readers is using clichés (overused phrases). They numb readers’ senses, he warns, and they are often too general and vague. “Allow the meaning of your message to choose your words rather than the other way around,” Anderson suggests.

Strunk and White sum up the concept in their own book, The Elements of Style: For the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts, a sentence should contain no unnecessary words.

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