So Forrester says consumers don’t trust corporate blogs (Time to Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas). Although it saddens me, it doesn’t surprise me. At all!
As Debbie Weil (author of the The Corporate Blogging Book) rightly notes, a lot of this is down to ”too many corporate blogs being written in corporate speak”.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently and was complaining that too many web writers forget to be human yesterday.
Corporate blogs need to quit the cheese
As social media matures, corporates have got to ditch the cheese. Readers spot advertising fluff a mile away – even if it’s written in the form of a blog post.If you’re a business blogger, you’ve got to speak to your audience as a human. You wouldn’t appreciate it if you stepped into a local store and the salesperson hit you with corporate speak.
You’re more inclined to buy or listen to what sales staff have to say if they speak to you as a person, rather than churning out corporate jargon.
Blogging changed the way we write on the Net. Twitter (and other microblogging services) are changing it even more.
We aren’t writing anymore. We’re speaking in text.
If business bloggers are going to start winning over audiences, they have to put the user at the forefront and start communicating in ways that people listen.
< h3 >Time for a new corporate blogging voice Plugging your sales pitch or corporate message into your website isn’t working. Nowadays you have to be more like the village shop keeper who cared about customers, forty or fifty years ago. Talk to people:
- be engaging
- establish trust
- don’t oversell
- be enthusiastic, not pushy
- and be polite and helpful.
Then, only then, will your blog cease to reverberate with the corporate claptrap customers are so wary of.
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