Blogging Out the Meaning.

Posted on April 19, 2007
Filed Under Business Management |

How do you explore new themes, and expand concepts into familiar and coherent terms that readers can grasp immediately, and do all this on the run, in short, deadline-driven bursts? How do you write an essay in a blog?

The CEO of a client wants to include an occasional piece under his byline in a blog we’re writing for his company. His message is one that we’ve been unable to tackle directly, because it issues a challenge to his own customers and prospects. This is in a business-to-business space.

His challenge involves the tender subject of how the management and executive layers of today’s corporation can embrace change proactively, without blowing their company apart.

This is a delicate matter: as you know it requires tremendous skill to run any organization well.

My task this week has been to explore this concept and try to find the language to describe it, as well as the examples of management tools that exist in this area, and also the writings of other commentators that support the points I want to make.

The challenge is to make this exploration in the course of meeting daily deadlines, and in the format of blog posts. I’ve taken the lead writing this week to try to thrash it out.

~

Previously, one would write two or three thousand words, as a company brochure say, or as an essay on some theme. You’d take maybe ten days over it, rewriting at least three times, polishing and double-checking references.

Eventually, through that torture known as the writing process, the right words would have been brought to the surface, in terms that tied the pieces together in accurate relationships. It would cost around a dollar per word.

The blog has a different set of wheels. Each daily post is maybe 700 words, including direct quotes and links totaling 200-300 words. The writing doesn’t get reworked, beyond a little tidying up as it goes into publication. The gap between the headline and the final theme that comes across can be a stretch. And the cost is around thirty cents per original word.

But over about five or six posts, I think, enough of the words will have been created that capture the concepts, and float them into the air, raw but exposed finally, in a loosely corralled group.

From here, afterwards, it becomes possible to select, and recombine, and rewrite these elements into tighter, punchier messages, such as a CEO would be expected to think in and communicate.

~

So what we’re seeing when we read our industry blogs is the output of something similar to both daily journalism and authoring in installments. Deadlines are acute. References to other authors blessedly on-topic are used to help make the case. A “distributed” form of commentary is taking place - this means: over time, across the network, between different actors.

Eventually what happens with installments, as we know, is they become revealed as chapters, and get bound into a book. Eventually with certain blogs, their authors come at last to have all the words out on the table to expound upon their particular subject. The authors become well known for their point of view, their expertise. And they become increasingly fluent and prolific in their area.

These authors, we find, sometimes publish two or three thousand words that they’ve spent probably ten days on. These particular pieces get picked up by commentators across the Web, and extensively referenced. These pieces commonly prove to endure for years as staple source material, both for others and for their author. Needless to say the value per word is somewhat better than thirty cents.

~

So. I was trying to make some better sense of blogs for you. I hope this helps you read your way across the Web, discerning the differences in the quality of materials arrayed. I hope you run into some of my words sometime - preferably the pricier ones.

-Ross Hunter

Comments

Leave a Reply