Ensight – Jeremy Wright

This is a response to Jonathan Schwartz, someone I respect quite a lot I should add.

His post this morning read:

My view, it’s not a blogger that makes a blog effective. It’s authenticity. Everything else is just along for the ride.

I’m only responding here because there have been several other bloggers that have picked up on this, and obviously this is causing either some confusion or angst (or neither, of course). I even had one blogger chide me for where I put my $ sign. I’m French Canadian. When I’m blogging as me I can put it where I grew up with it living.

So, to get back to my response… I agree completely with Jonathan (and did when he wrote his piece). This isn’t about the blogger. Which is why the most important part of this auction is helping companies find out if blogging works for them – the most important part isn’t the content production.

The number of times I’ve heard “shouldn’t company employees be the ones blogging?” is a bit unnerving.

Each time I’ve repeated “of course”. Because in an ideal world they should be. This auction is really, in my mind, 3 things:

1. Cheap consulting – what are blogs, how do they work, what software package should be used, what should be included, etc.
2. Cheap teaching – showing companies how to blog by setting an example. Most of this will be done in conjunction with internal teams / marketing departments / etc with the goal of passing this off to someone who is qualified and comfortable being “the blogger” at the company.
3. Cheap writing – as part of the “show and go” strategy, companies are getting roughly 100 entries for a fairly minor cost. Somewhere around 30,000 words I’d expect. This is there because without this, the first two feel like “I’ll tell you how to do this”, which isn’t incredibly useful if blogging is new to companies.

This is a new market, a new industry and sometimes very confusing. New things can be scary. When I teach kids to play musical instruments, I do the following:

1. Teach them basic theory
2. Show them the theory in practice
3. Let them try it out
4. Rinse and repeat

That’s my strategy for teaching companies to blog, until I hear of a better way than “let the tech / marketing guys figure it out”.

Hopefully that brings a little bit of clarity to this, though I have a heck of a lot more to say on this experience – but I’ll wait until it’s over to say it.