Blog is Not a Pretty Word

While we can safely say that business blogs have not only arrived, they’re here to stay, that doesn’t mean there are still not a number of good reasons why someone might not want – or be able – to establish a presence in the blogosphere.

Indeed, even if you’re comfortable expressing yourself so openly to so many – think transparency (which, by the way, should be listed among every organization’s set of values, right up there with integrity, accountability, etc.) – there are still a few impediments to overcome (what I would call The Immutable Three T’s) if you want to be a bona fide blogger…

The Immutable Three T’s of Blogging

1) Time – Most blogs take at least a few hours a week to write and maintain, the best among them much longer.

2) Talent – As a blogger, you’re not writing the great American novel, but you are putting words to computer screen over the course of a long, indefinite period of time. To build and hold an audience, you need to have the gift of gab and be part essayist, journalist, critic and commentator.

3) Topic – To write a successful blog, you need to be as prolific as you are informed, repeatedly producing fresh, new content that your readers will find interesting and worthwhile.

There’s another barrier to blogging, however, one that’s more a matter of perception than reality, but that’s just the same causing many prospective bloggers to give pause before writing even a single post.

Blog is not a pretty word.

Yes, it may have won top honors as Merriam-Webster’s most looked-up word in 2004, but you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in English to know that blog is an odd-looking word with a pejorative – albeit undeserved – connotation.

Blog sounds like blob, which is defined as “an indistinct, shapeless form,” a “splotch” or a “dribble,” not exactly something you want to come to mind if your language is otherwise the lexicon of business, if your world is one in which customers are targeted and profits tallied.

Blog is short for Web log, and is stereotypically associated with those cathartic, online diaries kept by moody, meandering teenagers (despite the rapid proliferation of business blogs of all kinds, most of which are being written by some of the heaviest hitters in their fields of endeavor).

No, the word, blog, just doesn’t do justice to the power and popularity of this self-publishing platform as it relates to the corporate world.

Blog as a word makes it easier for the naysayers and the highfalutin to dismiss blogging as a fad not to be taken seriously, as a pastime better left at home than practiced at the office.

Ouch….

There is the possibility, however, that we won’t have this word to kick around forever, that a blog will be called something entirely different in the not-too-distant future, something that resonates more with the traditional majority, something that speaks more to the value of this new communications model and mindset.

As business blogging expert, Debbie Weil, says on her own blog, BlogWrite for CEOs: “For the many who aren’t immersed in the blogosphere, the word is nasty. And negative. And makes them wary of this whole blogging thing.”

To read more of what Debbie has to say about the word, blog, and its future, click here.

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