Category Archives: Blogging

Falling off the fence

I’ve written a couple of blogs for different organisations this month. They all had one thing in common;  they wanted to give their opinion on something relevant to their industry or area of expertise without offending or alienating customers and service users. Which isn’t that simple, because it’s very easy to offend when you critique. Not because you’re being aggressive, but because others may be defensive.

To really withdraw from this risk, you need to sit on the fence. In this position, you can balance the view from both fields. Which is fine when you want to produce bland copy that helps people explore both sides of a coin. But, when you’re looking for something attention-grabbing, sitting on the fence – as the saying goes – gives you splinters.  Personally, I don’t get on with opinion ‘from the fence’.  Not just because I don’t want to spend my evening removing splinters, but because I don’t trust it.

So, what do you do? You take a clear position. Here are the benefits:

Feedback

I was asked yesterday what the theme of my blog is. I thought I’d share my answer: I don’t have a theme. I write about things that interest me in the hope that you might:

a. Find it interesting
b. Discover how I write
c. Discover something new
d. Laugh

That’s it really. I’ll write about copywriting only if I think I’ve got something useful to share with you. Otherwise, you’ll see all sorts of comment from design and photography to innovation and (cough) dancing.

I’ll be making the comment function a little easier soon, but in the mean time, keep emailing me.

What’s the (second) Big Idea?

Early flying machine I Antique Scientific Illustrations
I’ve been reading a few blogs by fairly well-lit individuals in the business and marketing world. Some appear to conjure up new concepts on a regular basis. Quite aside from how exhausting this must be, it made me think about whether it’s actually possible to come up with more than one Big Idea.

One or two of my subscriptions include the blogs of successful business gurus, considered experts who are watched by a certain sector of Corporate plc for the next big thing – this on the basis that they’ve already delivered one widely adopted Big Idea. But are subsequent pearls of wisdom original new ideas of value and reason for contact, or just the same story set in a different scene?