Putting a Spin on It in Blog Content Writing for Business

Business blog posts are multi-purpose tools. One use of corporate blog content writing is putting your own “spin” on any messages the public might be receiving about your industry – or about you – from competitors or critics. Blogs are a way for business owners to exercise control over any negative perceptions and a tool for correcting any inaccurate press statements.

In this year’s highly charged political climate, of course, “spin” is something we’ve come to expect.  In fact, we’re subjected to an overload of “spin”, which might be the reason we feel such distrust about politicians’ messages. Since, as a corporate blogging trainer, I help business owners and professional practitioners craft their messages, it’s important that what we convey  to their clients and customers (and to the online searchers who are their prospects) goes towards alleviating mistrust and creating confidence, not eroding it..

Remember, I teach in corporate blogging training sessions, a blog is not an ad. You’re providing information with a particular “slant” or “twist” that showcases your expertise in your field or the special qualities of your product.

A joke from China illustrates “spin” at its most exaggerated:

  A chess player who thought highly of his own skill once lost
                        three games in a row.  The next day, a friend asked him how
                        the games had turned out. “I didn’t win the first game,” the
                        chess player replied, “and my opponent didn’t lose the second.”
                        “As for the third game, I asked him to agree to draw, but he
                        wouldn’t.”  

How do you exercise journalistic control through business blogging? It’s a matter of timing. Even the best-designed websites are rarely flexible enough to allow day-to-day, even hour-by-hour updating. With blog posts, businesses have the ability to put out the news about themselves – now, and with their own slant on it!

And (to put a professional ghost blogger’s “spin” on that) many business owners with little time to manage social media and to create content, can, through hiring a blogging professional, be assured of presenting their own perspective on events.

Kyle Lacy explains that it's actually not possible to control the way people choose to interpret your message. But by remaining alert and involved, you can exercise damage control by taking the conversation offline with individual customers and by directly confronting whatever is happening.

Blogging for business, of course, has an important corollary benefit when it comes to controlling the message: material that is both recent and frequently posted is more likely to be indexed by search engines and help the business "get found"!