The Laws of Blogging

FIRST LAW:
It’s not who you are, it’s what you say.

Today, all printing presses are created equal. And everyone owns one. Which
means that a good idea on a little blog has a very good chance of spreading. In fact,
an idea from outside the mainstream might have an even better chance of
spreading.

Now, few people treat ideas from outside the mainstream as immediately suspect.
In fact, there are many people who give these ideas more credence, not less.
Bloggers are no longer outsiders.
But there are millions of blogs. Which means that having a blog does not
automatically mean you are powerful.Nobody, it seems, reads a lousy blog for very long. Even lousy posts don’t get read.
Take a look at the comment count on some very popular blogs. They can vary by
300% to 10,000%. That’s because the good ideas spread and the not-so-good just
sit there.

SECOND LAW:
Actually, it doesn’t matter what you say,
it matters who you are

What I just said in the first law? That’s not really true. It used to be, of course,
but not any more. At the beginning, it didn’t matter who you were, because blogs
didn’t have subscribers or people who believed in them or trusted them or were
committed to them. Now, though, things are different.

So bear with me for a moment, while I retrench and retract. The bloggers with a following get both the benefit of the doubt and a far bigger
megaphone. Because they reach more people, they’re likely to have their words
echoed more quickly. And one thing we’ve learned from the blogosphere (yes,
it’s really called that) is that ideas that echo, get echoed. In other words, a meme
(that’s webtalk for an idea that spreads) will get picked up merely because
everyone else is talking about it. And so the bloggers who have earned the asset of a following are more likely to
spread spreadable ideas, which of course further reinforces their position at the
top of the pyramid.

For a while.

Because if those bloggers get lazy or stupid or selfish, their audience will flee.

They will flee far faster than they fled CBS. It won’t take years. Sometimes it
only takes a month or two. A blogger discovers that many of her readers have
taken her off their RSS readers—because she posts too often and it is too hard to
keep up with her. Or because she’s getting selfish and self-promotional. Boom.
They’re gone and they don’t come back.

And, yes, the first two laws conflict. But no, they don’t. Because the stickiness and
the power are different than they used to be.

THIRD LAW: WITH and FOR, not AT or TO

Social media, blogging especially, is social. Not antiseptic or anonymous or
corporate.

This means that the writing skills you and your organization have honed aren’t
going to help you very much. When you write at your audience, or even to your
audience, you’ve made it really clear that you think that they are the other, and
you think that they are yours.

It is not your audience, of course. The audience belongs to itself. And if you talk as
if they are not like you, then it’s awfully difficult to keep up your position of
power. The subterfuge of omniscience is way easier to do on television, where you
have makeup and the editing room. It’s easy to do on radio, because you have an
FCC license and they don’t. But it’s hard to do on a blog, because your audience
(“they”) has one too!
The best blogs start conversations, they don’t control them.


Remember the most important rule of all: I’m busy. So if you weird me out or
confuse me or disrespect me, I’m out of here.

FOURTH LAW:
On the Internet, Everybody Knows You’re a Dog

You may believe that all blogs are the same, and you may
believe that as a blogger you are anonymous. I’m not buying it.

Surfers notice which service your blog is hosted on. We notice your Skype handle
and the font you use on your blog or your home page. We notice everything
when we need to.
How many times have you left a web page before you even bothered to read a
sentence? You wouldn’t let a doctor with a pierced tongue do heart surgery on you, and you’re not going to believe what you read on a blog that looks like a cat
threw up on it.
This means that faking it online is actually more difficult than doing it in the real
world.

The three kinds of Blogs

THREE KINDS OF BLOGS
Yes, I know there are two kinds of people in the world—those that believe that
there are two kinds of people and those that don’t. But there really and truly are
three kinds of blogs.

CAT BLOGS are blogs for and by and about the person blogging. A cat blog is about
your cat and your dating travails and your boss and whatever you feel like sharing
in your public diary. The vast majority of people with a cat blog don’t need or want
strangers to read it.

If you’ve got a cat blog, you should embrace that fact and stop wondering where all
your traffic is. Alas, this ebook is almost completely useless to you. You already
have what you want!

BOSS BLOGS are blogs used to communicate to a defined circle of people. A boss
blog is a fantastic communications tool. I used one when I produced the fourth-
grade musical. It made it easy for me to keep the parents who cared about our
project up to date... and it gave them an easy-to-follow archive of what had already
happened.

If you don’t have a boss blog for most of your projects and activities, I think you
should think about giving it a try. Boss bloggers don’t need this ebook either, because you already know who should be reading your blog and you have the
means to contact and motivate this audience to join you.

The third kind of blog is the kind most people imagine when they talk about blogs.
These are blogs like instapundit and Scoblelizer and Joi Ito’s. Some of these blogs
are for individuals (call them citizen journalists or op-ed pages) and others are for
organizations trying to share their ideas and agendas. These are the blogs that are
changing the face of marketing, journalism and the spread of ideas. I want to call
these VIRAL BLOGS.

They’re viral blogs because the goal of the blog is to spread ideas. The blogger is
investing time and energy in order to get her ideas out there. Why? Lots of
reasons—to get consulting work, to change the outcome of an election, to find
new customers for a business or to make it easier for existing customers to feel
good about staying.
If you’re writing for strangers, that means you’re building a viral blog. The first
principle is to make your entries shorter.

Use images and tone and design and interface to make your point. Teach people
gradually.

On the other hand, if you’re writing for colleagues, you’ve got a boss blog. That
means you can make your entries more robust.

Be specific. Be clear. Be intellectually rigorous and leave no wiggle room.