FollowThe truth is that I’ve been thinking more about blogging than actually blogging. Maybe it’s the word: blog. Blog is a portmanteau of the words web and log; a combination of morphemes that lacks seriousness in my opinion. Blogging doesn’t sound like a thing I want to happen to me let alone something I would put my mind to accomplishing. The consensus is that blogging is an important endeavor for the modern business person. But blogging sounds a lot like flogging, and I can’t shake the overall sense of punishment that lingers when I hear it.
“Blogs are the new business cards…” is a phrase I keep hearing. I know where I stand with the classic business card. I decide between ivory and eggshell; navy blue or black, and move on with my life. Blogging is far more involved than the traditional self-promotion of handing out business cards. They even invented verbs to describe new marketing strategies. Unfortunately for those of us who were born before the internet, words like blog and tweet may sound juvenile. Tweeting conjures a mental image of doing “The Chicken Dance” with four year olds. How can something called tweeting be crucial to my marketing platform?
After listening to Michael Niemann discuss his own hesitation at joining the world of blogging my interest in figuring out how to overcome my own reluctance got kicked up a notch. Turns out that blogging and tweeting are almost a job in themselves. Professional bloggers take the job seriously. According to Greg Digneo’s blog post titled 5 Lessons Steve Jobs Could Teach You About Creating a Popular Blog, blogs should “make a dent in your niche” with “zippy” but simply presented content.
Digneo also urges bloggers to follow Jobs’s advice to Stanford graduates to “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” Basically, a serious blogger will go out on a limb and allow some of the sloppiness that accompanies raw curiosity to be public on the internet. I don’t agree with Digneo on this. I think that everything I make public should be my best effort. I have nothing against curiosity or taking a risk with an idea, but I feel that if I post on a blog or tweet something to the world – I want it to at least be free of spelling errors.
