Or: Breaking the Curse of the Corporate Perfectionist
I knew I would struggle when I started blogging a few years ago. I blame my years of journalism work. Sentences had to be carefully crafted, and words chosen carefully. My first editor at BusinessWeek told me, “Magazine real estate is precious. Use it wisely.”
Now we live in a new world that is no longer shaped by printing presses and information scarcity. Yet everyday I see companies that make these mistakes: they want to launch the perfect blog, create the polished video, craft the right message.
They often find out the hard way that this is not what blogging and social media is about. It’s more about conveying compelling ideas and connecting with audiences in authentic ways, not just writing beautiful prose or top-down marketing approaches.
Speed is more critical too. There’s not enough time to go through two rounds of approvals on every blog. Slick videos are meanwhile seen as advertising–they don’t ring true.
The new style–conversational, open, engaging, and fluid–just doesn’t mix with traditional marketing and communications. Think oil and water.
It’s not easy to break old habits–the curse of the corporate perfectionist–and I’m still working on it. To help, I’ve adapted a different “just good enough” approach the last year.
Just good enough (JGE) is both a mindset and operating strategy, a lense through which to view my world.
Let me clarify: this is not an excuse to get out of work or get sloppy (warning to my kids: take note). It’s a way of refocusing and balancing quality and related issues against the needs of the new social media world.
The following seven “habits” apply to blogs, but the concept cuts across social media and beyond:
1) Don’t try to cover too much. Don’t try to boil the ocean–focus on a specific theme/topic. This can be very narrow. I read social media bloggers like Louis Gray, Steve Rubel and Chris Brogan. They may veer into other areas but mainly they stick to what they know. Their writing may not match a top business magazine but their cutting edge content and conversational style more than makes up for it.
2) Don’t worry about being the most beautiful: Blogs aren’t a beauty contest, and some of the most successful platforms will make your head swim. The Drudge Report is basically just dozens of headlines and a few pics, with little thought given to graphics.
The Huffington Post is a media circus, packed with graphics–rotating story heads, screaming headlines, dancing bears. Both draw millions of viewers. I’m not advocating an intentionally bad design (my partner is a veteran graphic designer and would shoot me) but you don’t need to go overboard with graphics.
3) Learn to write fast–and often. The founder of BoingBoing said when he first started the blog in 2000, he’d left for a week only to return and find a big traffic increase. The reason: the guy pinch hitting for him was blogging 20 times a day vs once a day for him. It wasn’t exactly Hemingway, but good enough–and readers loved it..
Another example: TechCrunch would never be mistaken for Fortune or BusinessWeek but they churn out the copy– 13 posts for a recent day (June 1). Most are short, punchy, opinionated, industry focused (“Google Upgrades Custom Search Box on Blogger”)–and very well read.
4) Keep it simple: Break your ideas down to the simplest form, and make it easy for your readers to understand. Limiting your number of key points will give you focus and help you communicate more clearly.
5) Write short (if you want). Many marketers still think in terms of long articles or white papers. Think again. Look at Seth Godin, who takes one quick ideas and briefly expands upon it with a link or two. Back on my (ION) site, one of my most popular blogs was a brief piece on five powerful Twitter search engines.
6) Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Let your bloggers write in their own voices–if they screw up, you can fix it later (your readers will let you know). On a larger scale, companies that try social media experiments and fail will actually advance faster than those that sit on the sidelines for too long (“fail faster” is the new mantra).
Walmart, for one, has come back from several social media marketing debacles to start getting some traction by last year with its “Check Out” blog, according to consultant Charlene Li.
7) Listen, converse, and connect. Quit working so hard to push ideas down the readers’ throats and back off the hard messaging. Trying providing quality information in a human voice, listening and engaging with your audiences; chances are, they’ll come to you.
JGE can apply to other areas of your life, such as presentations. Highly polished professional speakers can dazzle a crowd. Yet when I attended the recent Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco recently, I was impressed with the speakers–not because of their slick speaking style, but because of their powerful content and the way they connected with their audiences. (See Lessons of the Inbound Marketing Summit).
You might be able to get even more done, and do it better, by “doing less,” according to the blog Zen Habits. This blogger talks about focusing your efforts across your work. A recent posting boiled it down to:
1) Setting one “big goal” at a time.
2) Limiting to no more than three projects.
3) Prioritizing the three most important tasks each day.
I would add:
4) Being satisfied with doing a good job and moving on.
Sure, there are times when you need the very best and “just good enough” is not good enough. But in most cases you don’t need to have the very best blog or website, no more than you need to take the very best walk in the park or see the very best sunset.
Settle for less, and do more. Give yourself a break. The next project will always be waiting.
Hi Mark, I like your thoughts–and agree that bloggers need to update often. It’s tough, I often want to keep my best work at the top of my landing page. As long as you can come up with consistently good material you are okay following this strategy–it helps SEO, gives you more chances to promote each article across social media, and each time you write there is a chance of it going viral.
On the other side someone like Tim Ferriss would say, put your effort into one good post, that absolutley crushes the competition–this way you are not going viral “by chance” you really put all your eggs in one basket…
Not sure what is best, maybe a combination of the two?
“Settle for less, and do more. Give yourself a break. The next project will always be waiting.”
Very true. It takes lots of patience to learn that, I’ve found…..
Mark,
I love this post. You nicely capture the struggle my agency and our clients go through as we rethink what content means in the read/write era. We used to torture ourselves for months to produce the perfect e-book, now we try to articulate the same thoughts through a dozen blog posts (and a hundred tweets). Content is moving from occasional to ongoing, and from crafted to conversational. It is an adjustment for us all, but quite freeing once you start to figure it out..
This is so on target it hurts.
(I read this twice before posting – some habits are hard to break!)
3) Learn to write fast–and often. The founder of BoingBoing said when he first started the blog in 2000, he’d left for a week only to return and find a big traffic increase. The reason: the guy pinch hitting for him was blogging 20 times a day vs once a day for him. It wasn’t exactly Hemingway, but good enough–and readers loved it..
This is so key. I try and write a post every single day…your posts do get better btw for those perfectionists worried about the repercussions of something like this…
“Fail faster” is an excellent mantra. Failing is the fastest way to success because that means you’re actually out there doing it, trying to reach your goals. Also, I completely agree with “just good enough.” We are our own worst critics and we will never fully be satisfied with our work. But we need to learn to let our work be good enough. It gets easier each time.
Thanks for all the great comments. I actually expected more negative criticism (part of the perfectionist ego) so this was a nice surprise. For Matt: it’s whatever works for you,but combination of the two (short, consistent posts and longer, meatier piece you can heavily market) would be ideal if you can pull it off. I did leave out one important link near the end, after the number #7 paragraph. Lessons of the Inbound Marketing Summit: http://ioncorporation.com/blog/?p=989
I totally agree, Mark, in keeping things short. I personally abandon blog posts that are just too long. If I wanted to read an essay, I would.
I think i need to study and get my letter of authenticity, and start writing 20 or more posts on my Blog per day.
Ham i up to it, sure.
Mark,it’s nice to flash back again to the IMS and all the great ideas we heard there.
I think that in our ever more inter-connected world that your JGE concept is key to remaining on top of things. Because it’s not just projects, voice mails and emails now, but Tweets, Facebook updates, blog comments and who knows what else that we have to be consistently keeping up with and I’m definitely with you in that the only solution is JGE. Thanks for the reminder!
Great post, it showed me exactly what I need to integrate, sometimes we just loose ourselves on the branches and waiting for perfection we loose the train of life. Thank you so very much for this! Hope I can reciprocate one day.
Damn! So absolutely right. And so hard to learn!
I really enjoyed reading your post. Doing less is a big theme for me right now and the effect of (not) doing it has been tremendous on both my personal life and also on the outcome of my work. How many nights have I spent without sleep to make a graphic just a little better without the client even asking for it… No more! It’s not worth it in many cases. The point is to know when to stop. You pointed this out very nicely.
As somebody who’s about to start a new marketing blog, your advice couldn’t have been more timely. I’ve found that the biggest impediment for me is in focusing my content instead of taking it twelve different directions. I’m going to post the Einstein quote above my computer that says “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Thanks for the advice.
Mark,
Great post. I used to preach the value of mediocrity, but I realized that people who didn’t know me could easily misunderstand. It didn’t do much for my brand to be a mediocrity advocate.
My blog is a good example though. I am much more interested in the content than I am in spending my time fiddling with the look. When I see a great looking blog it’s hard not to be envious of their design talent. Then, I remind myself, it’s not what my blog is about.
I’m gonna link to this post for my clients who blog – great advice and very true.