The Blog as Dinner Table Conversation

I come from a fam­ily of 6 girls. When we sat around the din­ner table, we had to raise our hands if we wanted to say some­thing — not because we were repressed, but because we were almost irrepressible!

After a day of school and play, we were all bust­ing with news, feel­ings, opin­ions and plans.

What a clever dad. His unwrit­ten rules pre­vented chaos. They also gave Les­ley, the com­par­a­tively shy one, her chance to talk.

• Rule 1: Take turns.
• Rule 2: Don’t be mean.
• Rule 3: Lis­ten to others.
• Rule 4: Don’t hog more than your share of the time available.

Unrolling The Conversation Online

You can see where I’m going with this…

All copy­writ­ing is part of a con­ver­sa­tion, espe­cially on a blog. Even if you never get a sin­gle response, you are still speak­ing to read­ers. Smart copy­writ­ers are always, always aware of the effect they’re hav­ing on readers.

Strangely, Dad’s 4 sim­ple rules for talk­ing to my daugh­ters work rather well on a cor­po­rate or mar­ket­ing blog.

Rule 1: Take turns.

That’s what Michel is doing right here and now, invit­ing more guest con­trib­u­tors while he’s extra busy. Guest con­tri­bu­tions are also a great idea for other rea­sons: a change of voice, new per­spec­tives, alter­na­tive ideas, a sense of community.

Try it too when you are suf­fer­ing from Blog Guilt. (“Oh no, I for­got to write a blog entry!”)

Rule 2: Don't be mean.

Strong opin­ions are great. But if the over­all tone of a mar­ket­ing blog is mean-​​spirited and neg­a­tive, many read­ers will be turned off. Aim for a pos­i­tive, upbeat gen­eral tone. That means your occa­sional neg­a­tive post­ing will be all the more pow­er­ful, and pro­voke debate.

Rule 3: Listen to others.

That’s one of the glo­ries of the blog: other peo­ple can post com­ments. The big bonus: you can lis­ten! Get­ting feed­back is one of the prime goals of many mar­ket­ing and cor­po­rate blogs.

For exam­ple, they learn what cus­tomers really think about a prod­uct. Then they can choose whether to incor­po­rate some of those ideas when redeveloping.

But how do you get more than the stan­dard 1% of your read­ers actively involved?

Try actu­ally invit­ing them. Make it clear that you don’t know it all, or you may be wrong, or you need more infor­ma­tion. Or take an unpop­u­lar stance. Or pick a topic that’s hot this very minute on the Web 2.0 cir­cuit. Then ask for feed­back because you really need it, not as a gimmick.

Read­ing other blogs — and quot­ing them — is also lis­ten­ing to others.

Other peo­ple are a pri­mary source for your blog con­tent. Blog­gers self-​​sealed in a world of their own are rare. A non-​​listening blog­ger is barely a blog­ger at all.

Rule 4: Don't hog more than your share of the time available.

Time is a big issue for blog-​​readers. They’re cer­tainly not twid­dling their thumbs, wait­ing for your next post­ing. Heaps are fiendishly busy at work, and yours is cer­tainly not the only blog they read. (My friend Mary checks over 100 RSS feeds daily.)

Blog entries can be any length: long is fine, pro­vided there’s no bur­ble. How­ever, to save your read­ers time, write a head­line that’s con­cen­trated, inter­est­ing, and long enough to be unique. Then get to the point in the first sentence.

That’s only cour­te­ous. Read­ers can instantly recog­nise whether they have already read the post, and whether they want to.

Where did you first learn about communication?

I could say that every­thing I know about com­mu­ni­ca­tion, I learned around the fam­ily din­ner table.

I know you’re into life­long learn­ing, or you wouldn’t be read­ing this. But I won­der whether you also acquired some fun­da­men­tal rules of com­mu­ni­ca­tion early in life… And if so, what were those rules?

And where did you learn them?

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