How to Get Started

The "rule of three" is the idea that people like things that come in threes. It's a good rule of thumb in writing - blogging is primarily writing - so the rule of three works well for it. Here are my three ground rules for blogging:

1. Know why you're blogging. There are lots of reasons to blog. Peter Siegel, CIO at the University of Illinois, blogs to get input on potential technology directions. Will Weider, CIO at Affinity Health System and Ministry Health Care, blogs both to argue the conventional wisdom about IT in health-care and to boost his profile. When Philip Windley was CIO of the State of Utah for 18 months between 2001 and 2002, he blogged to improve communications with his far-flung staff.

Good reasons all. Other reasons to blog:

• To establish your company, and yourself, as a thought leader on a subject

• Because you like to write

• To demystify your department

• To organize projects or topics without the clutter of e-mail

About the only bad reason to blog: "Don't blog because it sounds cool," says Debbie Weil, an online marketing and blogging consultant, and author of the upcoming The Corporate Blogging Book. She says an effective blog will have a clear focus.

2. Know your reader. No one wants to blog in a void. So you need to know who you would like to have read your blog, and why.

You might want to blog for your IT staff. Both Siegel and Weider decided to blog publicly instead of behind the company firewall to get extra input on their ideas.

On the other hand, if you're writing to explain the mysteries of IT to the rest of the company, you might want to keep your blog behind the firewall. Your tone and topics can be less guarded that way. And the posts your blog receives will tend to be less rancorous because corporate bloggers are more likely to post under their own names. This keeps posts from getting unruly. In a public blog, a C-level executive may want to review posts, if only to keep out spam.

Blogs also can be written by more than one person. Six Apart's Dash tells me that while everyone at his company has his or her own internal blog, these individual blogs are becoming less important. Instead, blogs are being organized around specific topics or even specific development projects, with multiple contributors. This makes sense to me.

3. Know the drill. You may be reluctant to blog because of the time commitment. Look at this comment from Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, a publisher and conference producer: "Blogging is migrating towards this whole attention economy vein. It's people who are effectively working on deadline to be the first to notice something. It really has become a very specialized job that you have to devote full time to. I can't afford to do that, so I blog on things that matter to me. And sometimes I don't do it for two weeks."

Tim posts regularly on his public blog, the O'Reilly Radar. But he has four other contributors to ease the pressure on him. Numerous blog watchers told me it's OK to post occasionally, as long as you're up front about your likely frequency.

The main reason blogging is a time-sink is there's no ghost-writing allowed. Witness George Clooney's objection to a post presented by Arianna Huffington as having been written by him - Huffington says she had assembled a "sample" post that was approved by Clooney's publicist.

Here's how they do it at IBM: "The first thing we tell execs is they've got to be authentic," says Christopher Barger, the blogging and podcasting communications lead at IBM. "You're not writing a white paper" or selling the company message. "But don't put stuff in your blog that you wouldn't put in an e-mail or say at a client dinner," he advises.

These strictures make it obvious to me why only one senior-level executive at IBM blogs, and that's idea fiend Irving Wladawsky-Berger. He posts about twice a week, often based on his speeches or his business experiences (such as when he realized he couldn't read his own blog while in China). Wladawsky-Berger's job is to look for new innovations and market trends, so blogging creates a dialogue for him with readers and can effectively be a feedback mechanism for his ideas.

I'll let you in on a little secret Debbie Weil told me: It's best for C-level executives to blog for a few weeks in the privacy of their own computer, to see if they even have time for a post a week. You might try that, perhaps even cutting and pasting something you wrote in an e-mail to practise writing in an informal voice. You could also send a couple of potential blog entries to people you trust, to see if they think the tone works. But know that once you're live, you probably won't be able to test out your entries before posting them.

Next, I'll talk about how not to end up as front-page news for all the wrong reasons.