Practicing Social Nearness Through Blogging
“Let’s face it. For most of us, business blogging is hard,” admits Mark Pridham of Canada-based the pridhamgroup.com. “Coming up with new ideas, doing the research, and then doing the actual writing are all big pieces of it. It takes time, patience, strategy, consistency and perseverance,” Pridham adds.
With social media being all about social connection, we’re certainly living though a strange time, a time when it’s all about social distancing. No easy solutions here, but perhaps, as blog content writers, we can heed the reminder offered by John Sharp, MD offers in Harvard Health Publishing
Avoid unintentionally practicing emotional distancing.
Amen, I want to say. After thirteen years of interviewing business owners and practitioners and creating blog marketing content for them, I think Sharp’s statement is true all the time, not only during this unprecedented self isolation period. A few years ago, in a Science News article, editor Nancy Shute put it this way: “The fear of solutions may be greater than the fear of impacts. Being bombarded with facts can make people dig in even more. People tend to seek out evidence that supports their own world view. In short, emotion trumps fact.”
In her book In This Together, business writer Nancy D. O’Reilly describes strengths that help women succeed in business, including these three:
- Emotional intelligence (the capacity to notice, manage, and express emotions)
- Empathy (the ability to understand other people’s feelings)
- Compassion (sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress and a desire to alleviate it)
It’s always true that, in blogging for business, face-to-screen is the closest blog content writers come to their prospects. And, yes, even in B2B situations, emotion-based blog marketing can be effective. Remember, behind every decision, there is always a person, a being with feelings.
Always, but especially now, we must use content to create connections with our audience, which will make them feel a) supported and b) receptive to our message. As writers, we must present the business or practice as very personal rather than transactional.
More than ever before, it’s important for readers to sense there there are real-life humans behind the scenes providing the information, the products, the services. If ever there was a time to focus on being authentic and practicing emotional nearness, it’s now.
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