Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Everyone Must Blog Everything, Forever and Ever, Amen

This week's think piece at Booksquare, "Why Publishers Should Blog," does a good job of presenting the positive aspects of blogging for publishing organizations. But there are people out there -- like Jason Pinter, for example -- who could speak to the negative aspects.

Not me, though. Been there, done that. Got the T-shirt. That's all the dead past.

But there always is a negative side, and it's important to think about those possible negative aspects first. Whether you're the publishing company opening things up, or the employee encouraged to "convey excitement and information" without talking "the way you talk about books in your catalog," think about what can go wrong, and what you'll do if it does. Because, in this world, it always does go wrong.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I think you might have missed one aspect of what I was saying. The real key to entering the overall conversation is to change the tone of information. Six months ago, I was down on publishers blogging because, well, I didn't they'd be good at it. As I've been in discussions with various individuals (verbally and across blogs), I've come to believe that if it requires using the actual term "blog" to help naturalize the language, then so be it.

"I was partially joking when I titled this post, but realize that while blogging isn’t a necessity, the type of writing that makes good blogs so enticing is exactly the type of writing publishers can use to convey excitement and information about their books to potential customers. If “blogging” can help you throw off the corporate chains and lead to a more natural, casual, exciting discussion about your books, then call it blogging."

And yeah, stuff goes wrong. Stuff always goes wrong. The good news is there are success stories out there to balance some of the crazier failures (my personal favorite is the Dell Computer fiasco).

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