CT Biz Blogs

This is a continuation of the thread I started with yesterday’s post: The risks of blogging.

One concern that people have about blogging is that, with your words out there on the internet, and forever enshrined in Google’s memory banks, what you say can come back to haunt you.

Here’s my take on that:

First, that works both ways. If you make a mistake, it may be a public one, especially if you don’t follow up wisely when it’s pointed out. Then people will come out of the woodwork to watch you self-destruct. But you also have a public record of all the smart things you said. You are building a portfolio, a relationship, a body of work, in a sense. In my opinion, the people who really have to worry about this problem are those who don’t have anything to say, have something to hide, or are just more of the “same old, same old.”

Maybe you see that something you wrote is being twisted and used against you, that’s when having a blog is a great strategy. If someone takes a quote out of context, or takes a cheap shot at you, you can write about it. You can point to the post and show how your opponent is giving out false information. One reason that Mark Cuban started his BlogMaverick personal weblog is because he was tired of having his words filtered through reporters or misquoted, or of having 2 hours of interview cut to 500 words. (Source: I Want Media: One Question, as quoted in Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright (great book!).

Blogging is a great way to give your side of any misunderstandings.

There’s no way you can control what negative things people may say about you, whether you’re blogging or not. As any professional writer can tell you, people will take your words and run them through their internal filters. Even in the best of circumstances, what comes out is different from what you wrote. The only way to avoid that is to not do anything, not strive for anything, not be anything.

What you can control is how you react to those issues. And blogging is one more tool to use to counter negatives, when done in the right way.

If someone were to take something I wrote in my blog, twist it, and try to use it against me, I would use it as an opportunity to show how sadly mistaken that person was (not by anything negative I said, but just by pointing out the facts.) “When so-and-so claimed that my blog says “blah, blah, blah,” she was right. It does say that in my blog. But what she didn’t tell you is that I was quoting so-and-so. Read it for yourselves.” Or something like that.

The trick is to not to let your anger, frustration, or hurt show. That can be hard, but it’s much better in the long run, than indulging that all-too-human desire for revenge and total verbal annihilation of the evildoer.

I came across two examples in blogs recently that demonstrated how not to respond. These have been simplified a bit, in the interests of not boring you with the details or adding to the flames.

Bad example #1: In this case, a blogger who writes about technology hired a designer (who also has a blog) to redesign the blog. Someone else gave a few design suggestions in the blog’s comments. The tech blogger replied that he liked the suggestions a lot and would probably use some of them. Apparently this was the last straw for the blogging designer, who had had several good ideas passed over. So she resigned publicly, in the tech blogger’s comments, and on her blog. It was entertaining for the rest of us, but I don’t see any good coming of this. It made everyone concerned look a bit childish.

Bad example #2: In another case, a very vocal and blunt woman blogger wrote her take on some comments made by yet another tech blogger (they’re everywhere). In the post, she also took a pot-shot at another woman blogger who had written a post in support of the tech blogger. Apparently these two women have crossed (s)words before, and the second blogger left an equally snide comment on the first woman’s blog, which only inflamed her even more. Snippy words were exchanged, and, although I did enjoy the controversy (cheap thrills), my main thought was how I’d lost some respect for the second woman, whom I had greatly admired up to that point.

That’s now not to do it. There are good ways to handle to this possible risk. Tomorrow I’ll give you my unofficial (IANAPM) risk management response.