Business Blogging to the Tune of a Single Powerful Idea

 What do architectural monuments have to do with blog content writing for business?  A lot, I learned from an article by Paul Goldberger in Vanity Fair.

Two of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s granddaughters and noted architect Frank Gehry have very different ideas, it seems, about the best way to design a Washington, D.C. memorial to Ike.

As a corporate blogging trainer, I was very interested in the question posed by Goldberger:

                     Does the government have the right to build a memorial to
                           anyone’s grandfather that is not to the heirs’ taste?

Of course, when it comes to professional ghost bloggers, the answer to a parallel question would be an emphatic “No!”   After all, ghost bloggers are “professionals who work hard to deliver the company voice and value through their writing,” as social media maven Jason Falls explains. 

The emphasis, though, has to be on the company voice. Indianapolis blog writers, I teach, must be able to “hear double”, picking up on not only what clients want to say, but on each client’s unique style of expression.  The goal, I explain to new Say It For You clients, either business owners or professional practitioners, is to speak YOUR message, in YOUR voice, to YOUR potential customers.  “A good ghost blogger, I like to add, should be neither seen nor heard.”

According to author Paul Goldenberger, architect Frank Gehry works very hard not to impose his own “voice” on the assignment, instead talking to client, colleagues, and friends to gain insights before creating the design for any monument. In similar fashion, those of us who provide business blogging services must interact with our clients, their employees, their web administrators, and their customers, to achieve the right “feel” for their SEO marketing blog.

“For all that the war over the Eisenhower Memorial has been cast as a battle between modernism and traditional design,” posits Goldenberg, “it’s really not that at all. The greatest memorials, whatever their architectural style, have conveyed a single, powerful idea with absolute clarity.”

Here, too, there’s a lesson for corporate blog writing. Smaller and lighter in scale, much more flexible than the more permanent content on the typical corporate website, blogs should focus on one idea per post.That could include busting one myth, offering one testimonial from a user, describing one special application for your product, citing one common problem your product or service helps solved, or relating facts about one new development in your industry.

Blog posts tend to be more effective when they focus on a single, powerful idea!