Improve Your Blog (1 of 5)
We reviewed dozens of firms’ blogs and hundreds of individual posts in 2011 to provide a short list each week. Some blog posts were fantastic. A few were truly terrible. Most were in the middle. In reviewing those posts, we came up with five ideas for any asset manager to consider – whether introducing a new blog or refreshing the current process. First, inject personality.
Idea #1 – Injecting personality into a blog is not a new idea. Too many blogs are monotone, often with indistinguishable writers. To defend that set-up, two typical questions are:
Isn’t a singular voice for our organization the best approach? Not necessarily. Of course each firm wants to represent collectively well. That isn’t at odds with each writer being slightly different. Asset managers represent themselves well (in writing) by being thorough, relevant, timely and specific. Each blog writer at a firm can do those things well and be different.
Why does personality matter? Blog posts are first scanned and then read. Personality matters; as the potential reader scans – the title, the date, maybe a sentence or two – she may pick up on the author. And if it’s an author that’s been interesting or compelling in the past, then that may be enough to move her from scanning to reading.
Two ways to share personality are:
- Framing Each Author – It’s valuable to convey an author’s expertise (e.g., certain asset classes, geographies, vehicles, or strategies) and interests (e.g., coffee, college football, beer, travel, etc.). This is a case where you want each author to be “in the box.”
- Personal Tidbits/Hobbies – Returning visitors may look forward to certain relating tidbits. Adding something from the blog writer’s life can make the impersonal interaction of reading a blog (two people with computing devices with no human interactions forthcoming) seem more human. Sue Thompson does that nicely in this recent post.
We’ll share the other four ideas in the upcoming weeks.