Stowe Boyd

Spolsky Blogicide Note Has Great Advice, And Bad

Embedded in a deeply ambivalent post in which he announces the end of his blogging, Joel Spolsky distills great advice from Kathy Sierra on the topic of… blogging… which he is quitting to grow his business. Hmm.

Well, first, let’s look at the advice from the incomparable Sierra, as channeled by Spolsky:

Let’s Take This Offline

So, what’s the formula for a blog that actually generates leads, sales, and business success? I didn’t even understand it myself until last year at the Business of Software conference, when one of the speakers, a well-known game developer and author named Kathy Sierra, blew me away with an incredibly simple idea that explains why my blog successfully promoted my company while so many other blogging founders foundered.

To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you’re using a blog to promote a business, that blog can’t be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it’s hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.

So, for example, if you’re selling a clever attachment to a camera that diffuses harsh flash light, don’t talk about the technical features or about your holiday sale (10 percent off!). Make a list of 10 tips for being a better photographer.

If you’re opening a restaurant, don’t blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You’ll attract foodies who don’t care about your restaurant yet.

If you make superior, single-source chocolate, don’t write about that great trip you took to the Dominican Republic to source cocoa beans. That’s all about you. Instead, write the definitive article about making chocolate-covered strawberries. For the next 10 years, whenever a gourmand or a baker searches Google for a recipe on how to make chocolate-covered strawberries, he or she will find your post. Helping your users make awesome chocolate-based confections is likely to attract readers who might buy fancy chocolate, and that’s the point of a successful blog. Writing about trips to the Dominican Republic is going to attract only people who might want to travel to the Dominican Republic. Unless you’re selling that, you shouldn’t be blogging about it.

But then, if you are successful at attracting foodies, or camera afficianados, or programmers, invest ten years and then quit?

I am at ten years and counting too. I started blogging in 1999, and with only a few hiccups along the way, have kept at it ever since. It is certainly not for everyone, and Spolsky is right when he says that most corporate blogs stink.

Writing is very hard, and writing well is incomparably hard. It is unlike other business challenges or work. It’s not like writing emails, or planning, or hiring, or selling. And it has the negative characteristic of demanding a great deal of time. And it is a largely solitary pursuit that takes you away from others, like most forms of creativity. (See The Costs Of Being A Creative.)

I am betting that Spolsky has simply run out of time. His company has grown to 30+, and he is imbedded in nearly every process of the business, I bet, every product line. I don’t know him, but it sounds like he has thrown himself into a plan to aggressively dedicate himself to the business, and to perhaps emulate the secrecy of Steve Jobs and Apple in the future.

He is after a different sort of role for himself, the CEO of a much bigger, more closed company.

I think he is chasing the past, though. That there is a place for a CEO to continue to chase a bigger, more open dream, like Tim O’Reilly and Craig Newmark have done.

Stowe Boyd

Alex Payne of Twitter has apparently stopped blogging too (accroding to Matthew Ingram), after a flap arising from comments he made there about features the company is experimenting might cause people to stop using third party applications. So, Twitter, never a very open company, is getting darker as it grows in importance. Another company emulating Apple? Does great design and huge impact necessitate monolithic secrecy?