CT Biz Blogs

Ok, I lied.

Blogging IS new to a lot of people, but the thing it’s for — communication — that’s not new.

And if you’re hesitating trying out blogging because you’re nervous about this new thing, don’t be. Many of the same rules apply for blogging as do for any form of communication. They’re just ramped up a notch by the “enabling” blogging software.

Today I offer you two examples of communication, one bad and one good.

The bad example is actually a non-blogging one, but the mistakes here can also be made via blogging, so take heed.

I happened to be listening to my local NPR (National Public Radio) station the other day. Michele Norris was doing an interview of Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly, relating to Fidel Castro’s recent operation and Raul Castro’s provisional powers.

I’m not a political blogger, so I’ll make this brief. The key here is, before the interview, I was taking the Cuban announcements at face value. Afterwards, I became deeply suspicious — all based on the hostile, evading way this guy answered Norris’s questions.

You can hear the Norris-Alarcon interview on NPR, if you want. Here’s a quick summary:

Norris: When will the Cuban people hear from Raul Castro?

Alarcon: That’s our business.

Norris: When will the Cuban people hear from Raul Castro?

Alarcon: We are not in the business of entertaining the news media.

Norris: I’m not asking about news media, I’m asking: when will the Cuban people hear from Raul Castro?

Alarcon: When he so wishes.

This was just plain bad. So don’t do the equivalent online either. Just use common sense, folks.

Now for the good example, please turn your attention to Dreamhost, a web hosting company which hosts this blog.

They have been having a lot of problems lately — intermittent downtime, servers acting up, power loss at their site.

So what did they do? They wrote a blog post about the problems and admitted which ones were their fault. Here’s what Josh has to say:

Here I’ll try and go into as much detail as possible about what happened, why, and the steps we’re taking to stop this sort of thing from ever happening again. I can’t excuse what happened, just apologize and hopefully elucidate.

Ironically, all the recent disasters stem somewhat from us attempting to take some proactive steps to head off any sort of future power outages like the kind we experienced last year.

Note his use of humor, honesty, and a great collection of pictures of disasters.

Note also the comments. Here’s one from Eric:

June and July being the first months I really started depending on Dreamhost (ShareTheTruth launched!), I was seriously considering leaving as well.Your honesty inspires my confidence in you. I’m happy to stick around and will continue to recommend you to others.

Thank you!

Now that’s just plain good customer relations. Blogging enables it, but it’s fueled by common sense and customer focus.

See how easy it can be?