Be who you are

Got my ‘monthly ezine for communications professionals’ from the British Association of Communicators in Business this morning and the first article I clicked was ‘Need to establish some blogging guidelines?’ It wasn’t so much an article as a paragraph referring readers to the guidelines IBM has now made public for its employees who blog. www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

Nice definition of a blog in this article: 'A blog is a tool individuals can use to share their insights, express their opinions, and communicate within the context of a globally distributed conversation.' It's that globally distributed part I like about this definition. As I track my readers, I can't help but get excited when I see my blog has 'penetrated' another country. Who's reading me in Mexico and the Netherlands? I don't know, but hello and welcome!

I also really liked the discussion of personal responsibility (number three in the article) and this advice: 'Speak in the first person. Use your own voice; bring your own personality to the forefront; say what is on your mind.' The only thing I'd add to this excellent list is the caveat, 'Beware of blogging before you've had coffee - both your thinking and typing skills may well be impaired.' All right, that's me being facetious. There probably are a couple of things I'd add to a list of guidelines for employees who blog, based on my experience with a public relations agency and as a manager in the corporate communications department of a former client:

Be wary of your own motivation when blogging about your employer;

and

Don't get too specific, either in what you say about the company for which you work or in the depth of your exploration of a subject.

Both these guidelines need a little explanation.

Be wary of your own motivation when blogging about your employer

Some people aren't very happy with their employers and are frustrated because they don't see the change they desire happening, no matter how long they wait or how often they express their opinions. Not to be unkind or disrespectful, but I am not going to tell you how to load fuel into a nuclear reactor. Please don't try to tell me how (or when!) to write a press release. Unless you're on the senior management team of an organization (and sometimes not even then), you don't really know all the factors in play regarding decisions the company is making and challenges it's facing. And if the CEO and/or the corporate communications department were to tell you absolutely everything, not only would they not get anything done, they'd probably be arrested for some sort of securities violation. Being micro managed isn't a lot of fun and the CEO doesn't do it to you. Return the favour, will ya?

Don't get too specific, either in what you say about the company for which you work or in the depth of your exploration of a subject.

In other words, don’t go on and on and on, and don’t overrate the fascination of your readers with your subject matter. Chances are that if you have to spend four paragraphs explaining why the poor performance of this widget is costing the company time and money and your invention would work much better (even though you’ve already shown the plans to your boss and he really wasn’t interested, nor was your boss’s boss), you’re being too ‘granular.’ Now, repeat after me: the tree is part of the forest. The tree is part of the forest. The tree is part of the forest.

Here’s the link for the CiB web site if you want to subscribe to the ezine yourself: www.cib.uk.com/

On a more personal note: Happy Valentine’s Day to all. This is the 17^th anniversary of my father’s death, and it is the first year I will be able to visit his gravesite. Not sure if I’m going to go today or not as the weather is looking extremely iffy. It has always struck me as so appropriate that the man who taught me most of what I know about how to be a kind, loving, and compassionate person should have died on Valentine’s Day. One of the things I loved most about my father was the fact that he was truly incapable of driving by someone who needed help without offering to help them (I mean this in both the literal and the figurative senses). To focus on the literal though: in the days before cars became a lot more reliable (and before cell phones were invented), they used to break down by the side of the road a lot more often than they do now. We had one car that perversely broke down in the middle of the one 23-mile stretch of road between Ottawa and the lake where there was nothing - nada - zip - almost every weekend. My father never saw a motorist in distress without stopping and offering to help change a tire, give someone a lift to the gas station, or offer to call for a tow from the next town. If ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ isn’t the bedrock and cornerstone of a sweet and loving nature I don’t know what is. Proof that the golden rule works? I still remember the woman at the farm somewhere within a 45-mile radius of Ottawa who made us scones with homemade jam and tea and gave us the recipe for scones while we waited for our car to be fixed.