So it has been a little more than a week now since I have been blogging here and I still don’t know quite what to make of it. I do have some thoughts I want to share though, since it may be very helpful for those of you who are getting ready to step up and become a Blogger for your agency and/or on behalf of a client.

For starters, it is a lot harder blogging for someone else than it is for yourself. It is particularly hard to try to come up with new material every day and even harder to do so without the aid of an editor. It is not really hard because of the demands being put on me by others - quite the contrary actually - it is really hard because of the imagined demands I put on myself. Because of the questions I ask myself about the appropriateness of what I have to say and whether it will fit the needs of the people organizing this excellent event. Because of a concern that my friends at Fleishman Hillard deserve the best and because I want to give them even more. Because of the censoring I do on my own voice from a fear that what I want to share with you may not be well received. Because I want to help you learn about this great future for the communications industry that I see and which you will help to develop.

Of course, there are many other personal and professional reasons why it feels so hard, but most of all, it is hard Blogging for someone else because I still feel alone when I am writing. Blogging is supposed to really be a conversation, but in the beginning of any blog, it is a monologue with very few people participating in the discussion.

I was speaking with my friend Greg Narain of Live Journal’s publicized statistics show this to be true. Out of 10.1 million accounts on their service, only 1.2 million have updated their blogs in the past 30 days. About 12% in the past month, 7.4% in the last week and only 2.6% in the last 24 hours.

It would seem that most people are like me and are often too busy with work work to find the time to blog.

In all honesty, I did not ask the question why too deeply - I was more concerned with how some people out there could be promoting 30 million blogs when most of them are inactive. But Greg was very clear - “how much do you enjoy talking to yourself?” Without some sense of a connection with the people who may be reading what we write - without a feedback loop on whether or not what we have to say holds any value for anyone other than ourself, it is very hard to find the motivation to continue writing. The feedback could come from comments left on the blog, or from meeting the real people who read it and speaking with them directly. It could even happen by noticing in the statistics that more live humans actually visited the site than Web Spiders.

Personally, I kept blogging for the last year because I have been trying to become known for what I know - I am striving to establish my reputation, which is why I don’t wear a mask and choose to show my real self. I have been trying to build the brand called Chris actively for the first time in my life and I know that Blogs are one path to that end. It is an unfiltered connection between me and you - my words are not masked or edited by someone else. It is a slow and rough haul, but in the end it is worth it - I have made so many friends from my Blogging it is nearly impossible to count. And now, finally, with this blog, I am actually making money at it instead of just writing for myself and in support of my ideas for how to make the world a better place.

My Blog statistics show a very light readership overall - around 30 Feedburner subscribers and around 20 views for each post within the first 24 hours or so (before I shifted my blogging to here and to the BrainJams site). But, some of my older articles, like this one on “The Rise of Amateur Conferences” which was cited by Wikipedia, continues to get page views (15 last month). it has staying power, and for this reason, it motivates me to stay and continue my pontifications, even if no one is commenting, or no one, not even the people I am working with, have anything to say about what I am writing today.

It would be quite different if I were the Chief Blogging Officer for a large corporation with lots of customers, or if I were already a published celebrity writer, but going from relative unknown to a basic level of awareness is quite a hard path on one’s own. So when my friend and BrainJams PR volunteer Jerry Cashman told me that the editors and writers he is speaking to know of our non-profit’s work, and know of me through my blog, I was somewhat taken aback. I have no idea how they could know me and I had no idea that I had even generated some basic awareness at this point, despite my efforts to do so. I have not really talked to them and I certainly don’t know them (except for a few I call friends).

So my biggest insight on Blogging for someone else is a reinforcement of a core value I hold, and a follow-on to my post yesterday on Authenticity and Transparency. Keep it real, do it for the right reasons and all will be ok in the end - even if it sometimes feels like you are just talking to myself - because you never know who might be reading…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, Authenticity, Statistics