So I kept blogging for years. Even after we moved to Texas, I kept it up, because it was a cheap and easy way to stay in touch with friends and family – and I wanted to avoid being nagged! But in 2012, I stopped – because I had exceeded the number of posts and images allowed by the platform at the time. I was annoyed, to say the least. But 2012 was the year I left corporate life to become an entrepreneur, so I was a little distracted anyhow. Running a new business left little time for personal blogging. Since then, as a marketing consultant, I’ve had to pay attention to dozens of corporate blogs. I’ve read posts, written posts, edited posts, commented on posts, and shared posts. And I’ve noticed something. I’ve never heard of a corporation getting nagging comments when they don’t publish a post.
And I think I’ve found one of the reasons why. As most of you know, since about 2006, I’ve been a technology marketer. I’ve worked on many parts of the IT ecosystem – servers, storage, networking, services, appliances, companies, foundations, alliances, software, cloud, containers, composable infrastructure, DevOps, I can’t keep up with it all. And I’ve seen so many corporate blogs that don’t matter as much as they could. Why is that?
Because many great posts need to be written by people close to the action. What do I mean by that? My blog was a digest of my experiences. I wrote about weather, travel, work, kids, and other first-hand experiences. When my daughter got sick or we traveled to Rome — I knew exactly what I was talking about. I was there, I did it, I felt the consequences. And my readers knew that – and cared.
If you didn’t know already — most corporate blog posts are second hand experiences. They’re written by someone who’s being told what happened – an agency writer or a marketing manager. This is well intentioned, of course. It’s easy to let a marketing manager do the writing. They’re trained to write, they’re able to see the big picture, and they’re paid to publish. But there’s a flaw in this. They’re great at the big picture. They can talk about market trends, challenges, technology opportunities, and product features until their keyboards wear out. In many companies, they’re not responsible for fixing customer issues or addressing bugs in the code. They’re not engineers, or solutions architects. They’re marketing managers – and sometimes, if you’re looking for a post that’s a first-hand experience – the marketing manager isn’t the best person to write it.
Something gets lost. And readers notice – and care a little less.
That’s why, for the past few months, I’ve been working with a leading cloud technology company, helping their front-line, hands-on people become successful bloggers.