At this point, blogging, in one form or another is the dominant literary medium of my generation. It’s difficult to get a clear number but if you include micro-blogs, the number is well over 200 million very active participants.
Its appeal is easy to appreciate; nothing stands between a writer and their readers. The
politicking associated with getting published is avoidable because nothing but the content’s quality can inhibit readership. Like the Internet has done for many professionals, barriers to entry have been broken down for many writers. Despite this, I had a hard time viewing blogs as anything more than social media fodder, stealing readers and writers away from what I considered more noble pursuits. I was defensive because I saw the blog as an incursive force against my beloved novel.
What I didn’t consider was that I was comparing two different things that share a similarity. The existential threat I associated with blogs was about as real as the threat NBA teams pose to middle school basketball teams. This is an imperfect analogy but my point is that just because they both have words doesn’t mean they’re competing for the same eyes.
The fact is that if you want to say something you’ve got to start somewhere, and today you either blog or you don’t get heard.
It’s kind of like that story everyone has been telling since Pete Seeger died Monday.
As one of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival, Seeger was a defender of the folk genre, so naturally he lost it when Bob Dylan defied custom by playing an electric guitar that weekend. Until his death, Seeger unabashedly recounted his search backstage for an axe to cut Dylan’s sound in the middle of a set. I’m not sure why he thought an axe would be lying around backstage at a folk festival, or why he didn’t just unplug him, but the point is that his most memorable contribution to pop culture lore was an inability to evolve with changing times. I never wanted to be that guy.
Here I am, one (dreaded) math class away from a degree in professional writing and six months into an internship at WordWrite. The experience has been great and I’ve developed an appreciation and admiration for the art of blogging. From a marketing perspective blogging is indispensible; it drives traffic to your website, establishes you as a thought leader and engages you with prospective clients, among other things. These are all well documented but what’s most appreciable is the sheer inventiveness necessary for blogging on a consistent basis.
At the core of the agency is a desire to tell the great, untold stories of clients. The beauty of the WordWrite blog is that it serves as a mirror and a window. Sharing the work done on behalf of clients becomes a shared story between the agency and its clients. It’s a way to simultaneously appreciate what they’ve accomplished together and chart the future. This candor cuts through the clutter of the Internet and sets the agency apart. The team specializes in everything from crisis communications to media outreach but the constant drumbeat is reaching out to potential eyes and ears through the blog.
The importance of this exercise is immediately apparent on the WordWrite website. All of the WordWriters (even the intern) are expected to contribute to crafting the company’s ‘face’. Blogs create relationships with their readers and cultivate a dialogue with those interested in the ideas. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a journalist, strategic communications professional or a musician, blogging provides a great feedback mechanism that is necessary for refining whatever you do. To make a long story short, you can blog, or be the guy running around back stage looking for an axe.
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Joe Ducar is a public relations intern for WordWrite Communications.
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