No Straw MenEnlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, set up only to be confuted summarily.

Should Your Organization Start a Blog?

Published on GovLoop, August 24, 2009; TechRepublican, August 24, 2009; and K Street Cafe, August 25, 2009.

Everyone these days wants a blog. Blogs are known to be the most frequently updated—and thus most visited—facet of Web sites, and often form the crux of an organization’s online impact. Few, however, realize just how time-consuming and difficult blogging is.

Indeed, running a blogging consists not only in penning posts, but also in corralling them from colleagues and possibly guest contributors, editing them, and promoting them—not to mention moderating and responding to comments. As such, when considering a group blog for your organization, the following questions may facilitate a decision.

1. How many people on your staff can write well? Poor prose is a big turnoff, and crafting snappy paragraphs is a lot harder than banging out 140 characters apiece on Twitter. Put another way, anyone can swing a baseball bat; very few can hit pitches.

2. Do these people know how to write for the Web? Richard Posner and Gary Becker are two highly esteemed and well-published professors at the University of Chicago. But their joint blog—bogged down with long paragraphs and utterly devoid of links, pictures and blockquotes—is a textbook example of why online writing demands more than copying and pasting its offline counterpart.

3. Will managers give these people sufficient time to blog? Securing buy-in at the leadership level is critical. Otherwise, blogging will be treated as a distraction from “real work.”

4. Can these people each commit to X posts per month? One of the biggest reasons for failure in the blogosphere is infrequent posting. To be sure, a solid weekly post can be just as good as daily content, but unless you’re Sergey Brin, you’ll never build an audience by blogging sporadically.

5. Is there a blogger (either on staff or whom you can hire) who can serve as the editor? Not only do editors edit—correcting grammar, adding hyperlinks and pictures where appropriate, suggesting broader themes—and solicit content, they’re also responsible for the blog’s direction, consistency, and visibility. A blog without an editor is like a ship without a captain.*

6. Will the blog’s editor have the connections and standing throughout the organization to request and obtain content? If your editor is off site or lacks the respect of her peers, her ability to do her job will be compromised.

7. Will every post require approval by the C suite? If an executive or lawyer must vet everything, then a blog is more trouble than it’s worth.

On the other hand, a second set of eyes on anything for publication always is healthy—but within reason. The Cato Institute, which each day assigns a different staffer to approve each post, has found a happy medium between paranoia and prescience.

8. What niche will the blog exploit? In other words, why will people want to read it? If the niche is already occupied, how will your blog be better?

For these reasons, many blogs are stillborn. As with any project, a blog needs a strategic plan and ample resources. If you start with these boxes checked, the results can well repay the effort.

Related: Should Blogs Be Independent of or Integrated in Their Host Organization’s Web Site?

* Addendum (9/5/2009): The secret to the success of the many blogs on nytimes.com? Editors.

Blog Posts Are the New Press Releases

Published on K Street Cafe, July 7, 2009, and TechRepublican, July 8, 2009.

The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.

And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.

Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf—not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.

Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.

When you visit Google’s online “press center,” the first thing listed is not press releases. It’s blog posts. If you think this is accidental, think again.

The press release is dead. Long live the press release.

Addendum (9/29/2009): Google recently celebrated its 11th birthday. To honor the occasion, the Next Web dug up Google’s first release, dated June 7, 1999.

The Value of Blogging

Since I started blogging, I read more thoroughly. Not necessarily because I read with an eye toward how I can blog the given text, but because if I do, I need to be more familiar with it than I would be for a conversation over dinner.

Take, for instance, my posts about the Valerie Plame affair, specifically, whether Plame was undercover when Novak outed her. Before I became a blogger, I would have known the gist of the story—that Plame worked for the C.I.A.—but probably would have lacked sufficient knowledge to form a sold answer. Now, because blogging, like studying for a test, forces you to focus and to understand, I can credibly contribute to the discussion.

To put it another way, blogging sharpens the mind. As the New York Times observed in an editorial today, what bloggers call “fisking,” or dissecting another’s argument, is “a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in.”

Indeed, since democracy thrives on an informed and engaged populace, blogs enhance democracy.

Addendum: As Ana Marie Cox, the blogger formerly known as Wonkette, recently put it, “Blogs in general have democratized the debate about politics.”

Addendum: Jessica Cutler, aka the Washingtonienne, agrees: “Everyone should have a blog. It’s the most democratic thing ever.”