What are you going to say?

I talked a little bit before about what small business owners should say when they blog. But you know that Tolstoy quote about happy families? “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Small business blogging is kind of the flip side of that: The things you should write about will vary according to you and your business, but the things that you shouldn’t write about are pretty similar.

Most of the blogging best practices truisms for regular folk apply to business bloggers, only more so: Don’t steal content (instead, excerpt and link to the source, and add original thoughts). Don’t be a sockpuppet (posting comments to your own blog using fake names, to make yourself look better). Don’t post while you’re angry or chemically altered.

Looking to business-specific advice, a good primer is the article, “Corporate Blogging: Pitfalls and Guidelines” (it’s all over the place on the Web). It’s geared towards larger companies that need employee blogging policies, though — it’s hard to pull off the good old employee disclaimer (e.g. “I don’t speak for my employer”) when you’re the employer.

A few more business-specific blogging truisms:

* Don’t post trade secrets — yours, or anyone elses.

* Don’t talk trash about your competitors. Just tell the truth about yourself.

That’s the easy stuff. Then things start getting interesting.

Talking About Your Customers — Should You?

What’s your business about? Your customers. That’s where the interesting interactions happen. So how can you talk about your business without talking about your customers? You can’t… but what you can do is avoid violating their privacy (and just as important, their expectations of privacy).

There are some explicit red lines you must not cross. For example, if you’re in the medical field, you can’t reveal Protected Health Information (outlined in HIPAA) — it’s basically stuff you can use to identify specific people: names, full-face photos, etc.

However, there’s a thriving medblogging community out there (including nurses, pharmacists, and yes, even doctors), and they manage to stay out of trouble by anonymizing data, and applying good judgment.

But removing personally identifying information is just one part of it. No matter how much the lingo changes, talking about a patient is still different than talking about a customer. The next part goes to intent and expectations. Say you post an anonymized “dumb customer” story. If you’re posting the story for the sole purpose of mockery, not education, will your other customers think, “What are they going to say about me?”

A good gut-check guideline when writing about a customer (even an anonymized one) is, “How would I feel if the person I’m writing about knew I was writing about them?” Call it sensitivity or self-censorship, but I know it helps temper my own acid pen.

Or flip it around, and let people know you’re going to write about them (”You mind if I mention this in my blog?”); they can express any preferences, they might enjoy the recognition, and they might help you get some word of mouth.

So maybe you leave out customer mockery and tawdry gossip. What’s that leave? Plenty: Trends you’re seeing among customers; challenges and solutions; lessons you’ve learned; customer success stories; and advice of all sorts.

Have you run into problems with your small business blog? How do you blog about your customer interactions? Leave a comment (but only if you feel like it).