Jane of All Trades, Blogging About One?

by Guest Blogger, Lena West, Chief of Social Media Strategy at xynoMedia

Every now and again, I'm asked a question I think would benefit my audience as a whole. The question below is one that I get quite often so, here's hoping my answer helps other "janes of all trades" out there!

Q. My company offers a LOT of services and as a result is confused about what to blog about.  We're essentially a one-stop-shop for businesses that need web and graphic design services. We would like to start a blog, but we only want to blog about a few of the services we offer, not all our services. We don't want to confuse our potential readers, but at the same time, we are very interested in blogging about our different areas of expertise. However, we don't want our readers to think that the topics we blog about are our ONLY areas of expertise. My question for you is: Do you have a suggestion on how we can dive deep in our focused core competencies, talk about them while not confusing our readers AND let people know that we do more than just the two or three things we talk about on the blog?

A. The good news is: in this economy generalists are winning.

What I would suggest is:

1. You've simply gotta figure out how to talk about your services without using jargon. I own a company that consults in the social space and I checked out basically in the second paragraph of what you wrote below.

"We believe our breadth of experience dismantles fragmentation while facilitating better communication and expertise with holistic access to technical resources."

Say whaaaattt??

[NOTE: This person's question was a LOT longer than appears here and this quote was taken from a part of their question that they used to describe themselves. Needless to say, it was a confusing, jargon-laced description.]

2. You also can stand to do some work on why being a one-stop benefits your customers. Try to come up with a list of at least 50 things. This will help you with the subtle positioning that needs to happen in a good blog.

3. A blog with various topics - as long as it has a combining theme...in your case, better overall graphic design (or whatever you feel it is) - is actually more interesting. You should make sure that you have at least one category for each of your core competencies. This way, if someone is only interested in what your firm has to say about user experience, they can click on that category and only get that information.

4. Play with the tagline of your blog. Something like:

"Getting Graphic: Thoughts and musings on User Experience Design, Project Management + all things in between."

That might work. Wordsmith it and play with it. That will immediately give people an idea that this blog is not just about one thing and this group isn't stuffy and doesn't take their brand much too seriously. You certainly want to be serious about your brand, but being too grave is crappy and
boring.

5. Come up with your editorial calendar WAY before you start posting. This way you're apt to see synergies (whooo...talk about jargon!) with your other marketing efforts before they happen and you can play them up or downplay them according to how you want them to appear/be received. This also ensures that you/your team are not ever staring at a blank screen wondering what the heck to write about. You can select themes for each month, etc. An editorial calendar is not written in stone, you can always pre-empt yourself if another topic or marketing opportunity comes along. The main thing is
organization, organization, organization - especially if this is going to be a multi-author blog.

6. Oh, and build your blog with WordPress.

Hope this helps you Janes of all trades to stop drumming up excuses, get started with social media and give yourself the flexible structure that you need to succeed.

Rock out with your blog out!

Comments

[Lena L. West]

@Kathe:

I'm glad this was helpful for you. An editorial calendar is key! It saves so much time and energy and really keeps you organized.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

[Kathe Kline]

Lena,

This is great information. I'm going to have to come up with an editorial calendar. Normally I just blog about what's on my mind at the time, but I can see how this will help. At least if I have an idea of what I could talk about in advance, it will give me a place to start.

Kathe
www.californiabusinessresource.com

[Lena L. West]

@Yvonne:

I'm certainly not going to get into a back and forth WordPress versus Typepad scenario, but I'm an Open Source woman. I like to be in control of my web experience and WordPress allows for that. Not to mention that by virtue of it being an open source tool, there are more people who are experts at WordPress and that drives the cost of labor to a respectable level.

Additionally, most plugins and widgets are built for WordPress, which makes it easier to make your blog/website work for you AND it makes it easier to participate in the conversation. The more tools you have that make life easier, the more apt you are to participate.

And, if you found the back-end of WordPress to be clunky, it's probably because your developer didn't know how to make basic mods to improve your experience. That's not WordPress' fault.

Typepad is way too restrictive for me. Don't fence me in.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

[Yvonne DiVita]

Good advice, Lena. Except for the Wordpress part. We're Typepad users and swear by it. Every wordpress blog I've ever used has been clunky and hard to manage. Probably not wordpress's fault as much as it's the folks who implemented the tool.

With Typepad, you get what you pay for. An easy to use, simple content management system that doesn't need a lot of programming background.

Suffice it to say - if I had to choose, out of all the blog platforms out there, typepad and wordpress are the top two... but typepad wins hands down at my office.