Autumn Marathon

Letting It All Hang Out

Had an interesting discussion about blogging today with two colleagues at a non-profit organization I advise.  We have been talking for months about launching a blog to extend the corporate brand, as a way to learn more about the particular field, and to generally advance the our company’s mission. The idea is that a number of specialists would post articles relevant to the field and our organization’s contributions to it.   Some group blogs work ok, the O’Reilly Radar comes to mind, but more often than not company blogs are essentially announcements or press releases posted on a blogging platform. This can be useful, but it’s not particularly fun to read.  

It has also been very hard to get our specialists to commit to blogging on a regular basis.  So I suggested to my colleagues that we pick up a theme that one of them has been using in her personal blog. The theme is about the experience of working in her first non-profit and it happens to be extremely compelling to read.  Her response was that she was not comfortable publicly sharing the information she has been blogging privately.  The response was a conversation-stopper: it was absolutely reasonable to take that position.  Our other colleague added that it might make the organization look unprofessional to publicize details about the fledgling operation.  Later in the day, during my evening run, I started to think about blogs I most enjoy reading.  I realized that every one, including several about rather serious and technical subjects, all project the author’s very personal perspective. Compare for example, Fred Wilson’s popular blog A VC, which is both substantive and personal with Union Square Ventures corporate blog.  Lots of interesting stuff appears in the corporate blog, but “A VC” is the wildly popular one and one that I look at as soon as new posts appear. The interesting bloggers are not afraid to let their whole personality hang out - often allowing themselves to be depicted in non-flattering ways.  This willingness to overshare is a big part of the charm of blogging, though it sometimes crosses a line of decency and normal privacy.  It certainly takes courage to make that leap.