Getting Personal On Your Business Blog - Part 2
Warning: this post contains personal information and a photo from family archives.
The picture above is of my paternal grandfather and grandmother. How this picture from the first part of the 20th century belongs in such a 21st century context as a blog about business and blogging is simply this: I am inspired by their strength and hardiness, evident in the photo, to not give up when doing business online becomes challenging and I am inspired by their understanding of how, in online business, for all its capacity for warp speed, some things still take time.
My father’s parents both had a pretty tough start in life, with no special favours, in tough times, and my grandfather, as a horsebreaker (yes, that was the term in those days), a sometime shop owner and a dairy farmer in the days before milking machines, worked hard all his life to provide for his family. My grandmother was a classic countrywoman, and I have an abiding image of her, standing at a wood stove on a hot Australian summer Sunday, in advanced years, presiding over the roast dinner that was the standard Sunday fare in those days, and allowing no one to take over her role.
What does that have to do with business blogging? Well, how about this for example? I hear from other blogging consultants that clients sometimes (usually?) want instant, monetized results from their blogging and do not want to hear that it might take six to twelve months (or longer) to build the traffic and readership that turns into measurable business. And that in turn reminds me of Stephen Covey’s admonition that business needs to respect the values of the farm:
“Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm — to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut.”
(Thanks to Google and Angela, saved me about an hour looking for my copy of Covey’s book and then for the quote).
To provide just one segue from that farming analogy, say a prospective client was thinking of hiring me as a blogging consultant and read this blog post, they would understand before even speaking with me that I would be likely to be counselling them a) not to expect instant results and b) to have to work for results. And my hunch is that the picture of my very down to earth grandparents and the information I have provided about how they inspire me would get the message across better than my just saying that the client should not expect instant results.
So some personal information can help prospective clients to understand our values and our interests and may help them to gain a sense of who we are and whether, on the balance of probabilities and all other things being equal, as the lawyers say, we can be trusted. And I do believe that the observation is well founded that people like to do business with people they know and trust.
In short, I believe that some personal information on a business blog can be quite appropriate. A useful test might be, could this help my business or hurt my business?
Tags: Blogging, Covey, personal-informationRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Branding, General, Marketing, Policy, Risk Management, Social Media
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