Matthew Oliphant from BusinessLogs talks about companies who specify blogging as a core skill when hiring, in particularly The Robot Co-Op who have posted job vacancies on their blog.

I don’t think this is really that surprising a development. Blogs are a great window onto someone’s life and thought processes and it’s inevitable that they’ll increasingly be used as a tool for both people looking for jobs and companies seeking new employees. Blogs are, after all, just logical extensions of the traditional website jobs page and the online portfolio/CV.

Oliphant also points to Heather Leigh who asks, What is it going to take for (corporate) blogging to become a job skill? Heather outlines a number of key skills which she thinks contribute towards success as a blogger:

– An ability to gauge relevance
– Strong written communications skills
– An ability to filter for appropriateness
– Original opinions or an ability to contribute original thoughts to existing discussions
– Diplomacy skills

I agree with all of these points, but I think there are other barriers that need to be overcome before corporates accept blogging as a desirable skill, and they have little to do with what it takes to be a good blogger.

Getting buy-in
Good blogging, the sort of blogging that gives your company a good reputation, takes time. Anyone who is experienced in writing original posts understands this, but new bloggers may not and managers who haven’t ever blogged almost certainly will not. The blogger and manager need to be committed to the blog – the blogger in order to actually blog, the manager in order to provide the support required to blog.

The Invisible Work Problem
Much of our modern work ethic is based around the visibility of our tasks. We have open plan offices, public calendars, meetings, milestones, expectations. There is a need to be seen to be Doing Stuff. That’s why slacking off at work is easy if you’re pretending to actually work, but work that makes you look like you’re not working can create difficulties if managers and colleagues immediately assume the worst.

Blogging takes a lot of reading and thinking. These are non-visible activities, but they are essential to a good blog. If you can’t spent two hours just reading without raising suspicions, then your blog is going to suffer. Much of this is down to trust – you need your manager and your colleagues to trust that you’re getting on with stuff even if you look like you’re not. Surfing the net and reading RSS feeds are seen by many as skiving activities, but they are meat and drink to the blogger.

Clarifying the lines
What can and can’t you blog? This question needs to be answered very, very clearly in the blogger’s head. Mostly, one would hope that employees understand what they can and can’t talk about publicly, but that doesn’t stop people being fired for blogging. (Ostensibly, at least – we usually only get half the story when bloggers are fired, and that half is possibly the least rational of the two.) Clarity on this issue is essential – it’s not about trying to neuter the blog with a list of dos and don’ts, but of attempting to ensure that PR snafus never arise.

Prioritisation
How important is the blog to the company? Where does it sit within the blogger’s other responsibilities? Should they be blogging regularly or only when they have a light work load? How much of their time should they spend blogging?

Again, this comes back to issues of management buy-in, trust and time. Tacking a blog on to someone’s existing responsibilities without considering the impact of the additional work is only going to make life difficult for the blogger and will result in a poor blog. Expectations need to be set and managed. Again, clarity is important.

There are other issues to the acceptance of blogging as a core skill in business, but management and blogger alike must take into account these sorts of practical considerations in order for the bloggers to have the opportunity to blog well. It goes without saying that there is still a lot of suspicion about blogging in the business world, so attending to the practical and proving that you’ve thought these things through can go a long way towards helping overcome those barriers of unfamiliarity.

Phew!

At Corante, to the degree that we can be said to direct our various contributors at all, we certainly aren’t going to exhort them to produce more entries in the name of more entries alone — even if that technique naturally dupes the gullible. We are searching for a different path to influence the communities and markets we are involved in: true expertise and deep insight. And we may get talky at times too, but it won’t be for its own sake, or to pull the wool over people’s eyes.

Horst Prillinger explains trackbacks, and discusses when you should and should not trackback. This is something I’ve been thinking about lately too.

Horst’s first point is that you should not ping if your post does not have anything to do with the post you’re pinging, which is good common sense. He also advocates that you don’t trackback if you do nothing more than link to a post without adding to the conversation somehow.

My response to that second point is that some software automatically pings – i.e. if I link to you in a linklog style post, the software will ping you anyway. The software doesn’t differentiate between post styles, it just sees a link, derives a trackback uri and pings. I may be able to tell it not to, but I’ll probably forget.

I can see why Horst feels that a trackback from that sort of post is not worthwhile, as linklogs aren’t really adding to the conversation per se. But you do get some useful information from that sort of ping – it brings to your attention bloggers who are reading you and with whom you may have something in common.

That may seem like a very author-centric reason for accepting this sort of ping, but readers may also derive value from being able to follow the link trail to other blogs which, even though they don’t pass comment may also point to related posts that do.

There’s another circumstance where the value of trackbacks are debatable, and that’s when someone pings even though they are not quoting a post directly, but just talking about the same subject.

I had a trackback like that a while ago and initially I was rather miffed. I’d followed the link back to the referring blog, but there was no link to my blog there at all. In retrospect, I think my annoyance was down to my ego – here was someone implying they had mentioned me and they hadn’t.

On balance, this sort of trackback is no less useful than any other sort. It is, after all, extending the conversation and that is what trackbacks and comments are all about.

Mark over at Weblog Tools Collection asks How many posts are too many posts? and compares a selection of blogs with different posting frequencies. He doesn’t really come to a conclusion, other than that it depends quite a bit on post length and type.

For me, it also depends on how much time I have to catch up with updated blogs and how much I enjoy reading that particular writer. When time is short, I prefer blogs that don’t update too often and avoid those that do, simply because seeing too many unread posts in my aggregator can be a bit overwhelming. Instead of thinking “Cool! Lots to read!” I think “I’m never going to get through that lot in time” and so I never start on the backlog.

But let’s turn the question on its head and ask not “How many are posts are too many”, but “How many are not enough?” Given enough time, I would be posting on Strange Attractor at least once a day, preferably more, but as you may have noticed if you are a regular visitor either here or to Chocolate and Vodka, lately I haven’t had enough time.

I have a tendency towards writing longer, more considered posts with the occasional short linklog style post, and wherever possible I like to add to the conversation rather than just repeat what others are saying. Sometimes, of course, someone else has said it all so succinctly that all I can do is point to their post and say “Look at this!”.

However, although it seems like a bit of a cop out to convert to linklog style, to be a really good linklog you have to do a lot of reading and, as we have already established, time is short. So it seems that I’m stuck either way. Essayist or linklog, blogging takes time and lack of time means that I am posting a lot less here than I had originally hoped.

Mark also asks another question: “Is there such a thing as too much bloggage in a day?”

A couple of months ago, I would have said “No, there can never be too much bloggage” but now I have four blogs on the go and another in the pipeline I am understanding the nature of the overblogged. Don’t get me wrong, I love my blogs, but they’re like little kittens – fun to play with but very demanding. Where other people struggle with their work/life balance, I’m struggling with my work/blog balance, (having given up on the whole having a life thing a long time ago).

I was thinking this morning that I need to rearrange my life a bit to enable more quality blogging time, but then I realised that I’ve already cut out TV, I am barely on IRC anymore and I have pretty much stopped reading magazines (I have a huge stack of unread issues of New Scientist and Scientific American staring balefully at me from a shelf at this very moment). Other than cutting out sleeping and eating, I really can’t see that I have any ‘spare time’ to turn over to more blogging.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this. Firstly, I need to hope that you, my readers, prefer infrequent posts to hourly updates. Secondly, this issue of balance is a far bigger problem for business bloggers who are blogging at and for work – starting a business blog is a potentially time-consuming commitment, and that needs to be worked into the plan right from the start.

About a week ago, Complete Tosh drew my attention to Real‘s ill-conceived Freedom of Music Choice blog. Intended to make Real’s RealNetwork online music shop look good by slagging off Apple’s iPod, iTunes and their proprietary music format, it includes such gems as:

Consumers are getting a raw deal with the status quo in digital music, which limits healthy, open competition that drives down prices and encourages innovation. Stand up for your right to Freedom of Music Choice!

And:

RealNetworks has launched the “Freedom of Music Choice” campaign to help consumers break the chains that tie their music devices to proprietary music downloads. We’re here to inform AND motivate.

Unsurprisingly, Freedom of Music Choice rapidly fell foul of Real’s own customers’ long memories. As Neil McIntosh says:

Someone should have told Real – hell, they should have known: pick a fight with Apple, and hoards of Mac lovers will pile in to support the company. All the harder if your own company has an utterly shitty record when it comes to looking after its own customers.

Well, now it seems that Warner Brothers Records have succumbed of the same brand of idiotic thinking that holds sway at Real.

According to the New York Times, earlier this month “Warners became the first major record label to ask MP3 blogs to play its music” when it emailed an MP3 by new band The Secret Machines out to a select group of around eight bloggers.

Initially, one might think that was a savvy move on Warners’ part. Get the bloggers on side, easily reach online audiences and give out the message that Warners understand the value of downloading.

Of course, it didn’t work out like that. The bloggers were understandably suspicious and wary of being seen as a publicity conduit for a major label, so in the end only one blog, Music For Robots, posted the MP3. That’s when it went from an idea that could go either way to a Rather Bad Idea (TM).

Comments. Some say that blogs should not have comments, but without comments we wouldn’t get to enjoy the fawning stupidity of Warners staff pretending to be punters (punctuation/spelling as per original):

This track is amazing!! Thanks for letting us listen to it!! I never heard these guys before, but theyre awesome. I went to their website and you can listen to a lot of ther other stuff, very cool andvery good!

Of course, no one would have known that the comments weren’t from real punters if a) they hadn’t been so out of step with the rest of the comments and b) they hadn’t posted from the Warners IP address, identifiable as the same one from which the original email was sent.

Ah, IP addresses will always let the unwary spoofer down.

This is the sort of thing that makes me want to bang my head against a brick wall until the nasty voices stop. Really, guys, it’s so very, very simple. But here are a few pointers for the terminally hard of thinking:

1. Bloggers are independent people (usually). That means they think for themselves and don’t like being put on a lead. You can send a press release to a blogger, but you can’t make him blog.
2. Blogs are authentic (usually). That means that bloggers won’t post something because you asked them to, it has to be something they believe in. In order to get a blogger to blog, you have to give them something worth blogging about.
3. Bloggers are individuals (usually). On the whole, bloggers don’t do things en masse. Send a press release to a N bloggers, particularly bloggers with similar genre blogs, and you can expect to find that N-1 (or maybe N) won’t post it.
4. Bloggers are awkward buggers (usually). If you want to get on the right side of the blogosphere, treat bloggers with respect. Build relationships up over time. Earn your trust.
5. Don’t try to manipulate us. I don’t care how many meetings you sit in each week or how many besuited minions you control, you don’t control us. Not only will we fact check your ass, we will check your IP address too, and any other scraps of information that might give you away.

To paraphrase Mark Willett of Music for Robots, this is the blogosphere, not an AOL chat room.

Remember Tamagotchi? The little keyfob-dwelling virtual pet that you had to feed and care for in order for it to ‘survive’?

Blogs are Tamagotchi. If you don’t feed them, they die. If you don’t clear up their crap – comment spam, for example – they die. They’re more fun when there are other bloggers to play with, just like the new IR connected Tamagotchi are allegedly more fun because your little virtual pet can now interact with other little virtual pets.

But, like Tamagotchi, if your blog pet dies, nothing really bad happens. There’s no body to dispose of, no crying children to whom you have to explain that little Ginger went away and isn’t coming back, no real repercussions at all. And, like Tamagotchi, even if your blog does starve to death, it’s easily enough resurrected.

Let’s face it, a business blog could die and it probably wouldn’t have a fatal impact on the business. It wouldn’t be good PR, but I doubt that you’d be there six months later explaining to the receivers how failing to post to your blog destroyed your customer base.

Like a Tamagotchi, keeping a blog healthy requires time and effort. The question is, how much?

One important aspect is how your business blog fits in with the rest of your work. If your blog is a priority, then that makes it easier to judge how much of your time should be spent working on it. If your is just tacked on to other responsibilities then you are forced to blog shorter posts because you simply don’t have time for anything else.

Another influence on time spent blogging is what sort of blog you are keeping, and what you are intending to achieve with it. A basic linklog takes a lot less time to maintain than a collection of informed posts, but in terms of communicating your key messages it’s not going to be as effective because all you are doing is pointing to other people’s work rather than explaining your own stance to your readers. Conversely, blog of long essay-like posts which explore wider themes and crystallise out original thoughts is bound to take more time than a linklog but will communicate something of your experience and opinions to your audience, thus telling them something valuable about you and your business.

Also to be considered are the simple mechanics of writing. It is easy to underestimate the amount of time that writing can take. The actual putting of fingertips to keyboard is just end of a process that can involve a lot of reading, research and thinking. That last step, the thinking, can be a particularly thorny when working in a world where ‘work’ is expected to be an externalised, visible process.

Often thinking requires quietude, physical exercise or doing some non-cerebral task. The shower, for example, is a great place for a good think, but opportunities to take a quick shower in the workplace are, well, limited. This is one of the problems that arises when the creative clashes with the corporate – the way that the creative mind functions is often at odds with the work ethic, not to mention environment, of many companies.

Then comes probably the most important factor – the personality of the blogger and their perception of their blog. Some people are naturally more verbose, but if they are seen as spending too much time on their blog, conflict will ensue. Equally, if the bloggers sees the blog as something that deserves their best work, that will also result in more time spent blogging. After all, who wants to put their worst work on display?

Tamagotchi die when neglected, but you can’t get away with just randomly feeding your virtual pet and hoping for the best. It takes care. You have to learn when your Tamagotchi needs food, when it needs to sleep, when it wakes up.

Blogs are the same, you have to figure out the boundaries of your comfort zone – how often to post, what to post, what style, how that fits in with your job and the rest of your life. Failing to find out where you’re comfortable will almost certainly result in a decreased desire to post, neglect of your blog and ultimately, its untimely death.

And we wouldn’t want that, would we?