Today I participated in a wonderful introductory webinar for some of our CIO and IT director customers. My role was to talk broadly about what is happening in the blogosphere. Part of my task was to identify the do’s and don’ts of blogging. I put together a list of about a dozen, borrowing from other blogger’s suggestions, and adding a few of my own. I re-ordered them at the last minute and gave “passion” here a higher ranking. Passion is sticky in the blogosphere, so it has a lot of benefits to readers and bloggers alike.
To exemplify passion, I need to point to my good-friend-whom-I’ve-never-met-in-the-blogosphere, Luis Suarez who has just completed a seven part unpacking and analysis of the the McAfee-Davenport debate. The effort took Luis several days to publish; he released each “chapter” separately over the period of about a week while he was traveling from his home in Spain to NY for a conference. Luis’ passion is knowledge management, collaboration, social media, and enterprise 2.0 among other things related to these general areas.
Luis ends his seven-part article with this:
I couldn’t have agreed more with that statement as perhaps one of the most representative ones that describes not only Enterprise 2.0, but the entire movement behind Web 2.0 as well. With it, things have gotten a whole lot more exciting and interesting, because, for the first time in many years, knowledge workers have got the opportunity to have a voice, an opinion, and share it with everyone else collaborating with others, exchanging knowledge, improve their social capital skills and their subject matter expertise and, as a result of that process, innovate at a higher rather than in the recent past. And all of that dealing with their own passion for whatever the topic!
That is why, to me, Enterprise 2.0 is not only revolutionalising the Enterprise, but also our own ways of life, because, after all, social computing is a philosophy, a way of life you breathe and learn to nurture, that inspires constant change that you rather embrace … or not. And at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, it would be a matter of choice to adopt it or not. And that choice is yours. And yours alone. So it would be up to you (And not higher up in the management chain), whether you would want to change your organisation or not, whether you would want to change your life or not. And if I were you, I would not wait for others to tell you about it… Make it happen!
Make it happen now!
Now I know not all bloggers are passionate, but I think passion is a pre-requisite to good blogging. Luis is a great blogger and has a strong readership and following. I know all bloggers don’t express themselves with gusto and emotion, but beneath the surface of their writing is a driving passion and basic hunger to communicate and connect. When I look at the folks I’m proud to list on my blogroll, it’s the one unifying trace of blogger DNA that links me to all of them, and every other committed blogger in the hood. Like a wise English poet, well songwriter, once said, “Passion is no ordinary word.” (Graham Parker.)
AHhhhh… the secret sauce. I will, but you can find most of them in Paul Gillin’s book.
This was great. Please share your OTHER insights on blogging.
Goodness! Thanks much, Susan, for the link love and for the kind words. It is greatly appreciated to see how that passion is much appreciated. In the past, I have been talking several times about how strong I feel about being passionate in your blog to help get the message across and throughout all of that time I still believe that it is one of the main key success factors that differentiate a good blogger from a great one. It’s got to be contagious. You want people to keep talking about the stuff you write about and there is nothing like passion to get this going.
I am pretty sure that I would have given up on my blogging if I were sharing information about stuff I am not passionate about. Over time it would die out eventually and would not come back. It is that same passion that helps you get through your blogging in those difficult days where you are not sure what to blog about or where you are going to make the time for blogging. So I am glad to read I am not the only one who thinks along the same way, even if that would mean as well that sometimes other folks might think it may be a bit too much passion. Although I do not think you can ever get tired of it, can you?
When we firstly decided to blog, we have already prepared our self to put a lot of attention to our own blog. . If we blogging with passionate, then no doubt that we can keep our own blog from dying. Nice post. The passion does matter. 😀