One of the things about business blogging that has a tendency to surprise corporate people who are used to a world of control, of polite and professional interaction, of carefully managed interaction, executive “handlers”, and planned messaging: bloggers can be a pretty merciless bunch.
Ask anyone who has been involved in the blogosphere for any length of time and you’ll hear stories about a few words taken out of context, a single sentence out of a 650 word essay that is misinterpreted and then takes on a life of its own.
Not that this sort of thing doesn’t happen with corporate communications anyway, but once your words are online, easily quoted and efficiently disseminated, they’re also quite easily misquoted.
If you’re getting ready to start blogging, make sure you’re also ready to have people say bad things about you outside of your sphere of influence.
This facet of business blogging isn’t always apparent because most of the business blog community itself has a good professional ethic and while they’ll disagree with corporate positions, they tend not to take potshots at the bloggers.
But cast your net more widely and you’ll find that the bloggers outside the mainstream or the bloggers that don’t consider themselves “business” bloggers are happy to take potshots, often in your own comment stream, but just as often on their own weblogs where the best you can do is add your own comment in response to what they say or, perhaps, to just ignore it.
However it happens, and whatever response you decide to utilize, do recognize that the more your company becomes visible online, the more you’ll find that you’re written about — for better and worse — online too.
And my advice? Roll with it. Focus on the positive. Write good content and stay on message, on your message.
This is sort of a trackback about the session you and scoble did yesterday and is posted at http://www.controlscaddy.com/A55A69/bccaddyblog.nsf/plinks/CBYE-6FEUCU
“Cathleen Moore, who has covered Lotusphere for InfoWorld over the years, is covering the Blog Business Summit this week in San Francisco. Luckily she got to stay home for this event. In addition to covering Microsoft taking it upon themselves to rename RSS Feeds to Web Feeds in the beta of Internet Explorer (IE) 7, she covered yesterday’s session by Scoble and Dave Taylor that covered how to drive traffic to your blog. The answer she covered was, at least to me, obvious. Participate in other peoples blogs to drive traffic to your own site. But that may not always practical without a focused effort…”
Unless you verify every little detail of your sentence structure and ideas, there will be some despicable person that will pick it apart and take it completely out of context for no other reason than to pick a fight.
The #1 rule in Murphy’s law of posting is “If it can be taken out of context, it will.”
Some people claim this is part of human nature, but I disagree. I think it’s part of a troublemakers nature……
I encourage pot shots, directed at myself, and at everyone else.
Not comment spam, trolling, baiting, or abuse, but real live livid vivid COMPLAINTS and Criticism is desperately needed.
The rough and tumble world of the blogosphere is not for pampered sissies who played sports where no score is taken so there are no losers.
Companies need to hear the complaints of consumers. When the corporate losers outsource customer service, we shall insource bitching.
We are the battle scarred insourcers, hating every bone in their rotten bodies, the corporate scum.
We hate, hate, hate, and love every stinking minute of it.
March on harsh commenters. I beat the martial drum for you.