Blog Guilt?
Ok, this is a response to Heathers’ blog post in response to her post on blog guilt. So be sure to read that before this post. I’m just posting it here and doing a trackback because it gets off topic a fair bit in places. And is probably too long as a blog comment.
It may well be because blogs are personal, you want to tell people that you’ve been away when they ask… “Hey, what happened? How come I haven’t seen any new posts from you in [x] days?”…
It’s just like if you goto lunch at a certain place everyday and then for some reason you decide to go somewhere else and then you get bored and go back to the regular place. The people there will ask, “hey, how are you? Where have you been…” etc, etc… And you’ll usually give them something like, “oh yeah, was on holidays”, or “i’ve been quite busy”.
I think that when you blog, you have a closer more personal relationship with the blog reader, because they are hearing your voice. It’s not a PR voice from a big corporation. It’s some person who has feelings and as such, post topics which have feelings in them.
You may well publish articles online, and it is all nice and fine to have the articles very well polished and professional. But an individual will only read those articles on a “need to read” basis.
Blogs on the other hand, an individual may read them because they feel what that individual has to say is 1) beneficial to them (in one way or another… informative/) 2) maintain a link with that particular individual.
So, blogs are personal. But what about the “corporate blogs”? Surely they can’t be too personal right? I think they shouldn’t be too personal. However, I believe you can’t have one without the other. Going too personal would be bad as it loses the purpose of a “corporate blog”, and too corporate could mean readership drop off rather quickly. And not to mention means you’re likely to be sticking to the topic and nothing else. The blogs I subscribe to and enjoy reading have a mix of both. It allows me to meet the individual and understand them more than I would without meeting them.
Let me pose this question: Would you relate better to a human being, or robot?