Blog To Say Hello

I’m always talking about what a good idea it is to use blogs for busting myths.  Myth-busting makes for engaging content, plus it offers the chance to showcase your knowledge and professional expertise.  So long as you use myth busting in your corporate blog to actually showcase (as opposed to showing off, or "showing up" your readers’ lack of knowledge), I highly recommend the strategy.

A favorite myth-busting read of mine is The Book of General Ignorance.  One wonderful chapter is about the word "hello", which we all assume is the word used to answer the phone ever since the phone was invented.  Not true, I learned. Alexander Graham Bell used the nautical "Ahoy!" to answer the phone, while early telephone operators used to ask "Are you there?"  In fact, the word "hello" wasn’t used as a greeting even for in-person encounters until Thomas Edison started to tinker with the phone while inventing the phonograph.

Edison discovered that the word "halloo", which was used to call hounds, could be heard from further away than most other sounds.  Eventually, Edison’s frequent repetition of "halloo" into his primitive phonograph spread to co-workers and from there became common usage.

Halloo, bloggers for business! Just as that word was used to call attention (originally of hounds and ferrymen), the function of each business blog post is to call online readers’ attention to a particular aspect of your business.

Working diligently in his Menlo Park laboratory, Thomas Edison discovered that, when he shouted "Halloo!" into the phonograph, a steel point was created on the telegraph paper. When he ran the paper back over that steel point, the machine responded "Halloo!".

As a professional ghost blogger and blog trainer, that’s a "point" I want to emphasize: What makes a business blog work is the response it elicits.  As bloggers, we need to lead off by putting our message onto the "telegraph paper" (the Web). What has to happen next, though, is that we "hear" our online readers saying "Halloo!" in return, commenting on our blog posts, and responding to our Calls to Action.