The Haunting Of Company Blogs

My name is Graham and I’m a ghost blogger.

Neville Hobson (follow him on Twitter) wrote a post yesterday about ghost writing blogs. I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion that “it’s a terrible idea”. I also believe that, when it comes to disclosing the fact that a blog is being written by ‘other hands’, the very thing that makes blogging unique is rendered useless.

There is possibly nothing that underlines the difference between a press release and a blog post more than the expectation of authenticity. We know that a press release has been written by someone paid by the company to present news in a particular way. A press release is successful when its target audience can use the contents to create other content: top-down dissemination of information. A blog post, on the other hand, is more like a step forward in a relationship. A single post may elicit no responses or trigger much of anything at all. But the accumulation of posts over time presents a unique voice and allows trust to grow.

When we discuss blogging with our clients and when we create a blogging strategy for them, we emphasise the need for transparency. We tell them it’s more important to be genuine than grammatically perfect, more important to sound human than to toe the corporate line at all costs.

And yet, for many of our early clients, I ended up writing blog posts. I’ve even ghost tweeted. (The shame, the shame.)

Why? It came down to cash and confidence. We were offering services that were not widely understood (even by us) and we wanted to make them seem more inclusive. We built the blog so we thought we may as well populate it with content, too. Clients, like many people, were often nervous about presenting themselves to the web via the written word and we weren’t confident enough of the principles (and our bank balance) to offer a “you write the blog or don’t have one one” ultimatum.

Those days are in the past. The bank balance may not be a lot healthier but we know that ghosting blogs does not pay – in any way. However well crafted the writing, however spot on the subject matter, in the end the lack of genuine tone seeps through and you’re left with a series of posts that resemble a true voice in the way that semaphore conveys emotion. It’s also bloody hard gearing up to write posts about things that don’t rock your boat in any way.

I don’t ghost blog posts now.

This post was written and conceived by Graham Stewart. Honest.