Do we have a word for reacting negatively to someone but not trusting your reaction, and then getting stuck in this oscillation of dislike that doesn’t know whether to attach itself to you or to that someone? That’s pretty much my kneejerk reaction to Gerry McGovern’s column on The Advantages and Disadvantages of Blogging.

I agree with much of the article. I think he gets the advantages of corporate blogging right. He says that the old idea of PR as conveying a message doesn’t work on the Web which is a democracy of voices. Cool. I disagree with him on most of what he points to as disadvantages of blogging. But, my negative reaction went beyond a simple disagreement I found myself annoyed. Not a lot but still unreasonably.

So, I poked around just a little more and found a good and a bad reason for my reaction.

The bad reason is that he’s marketing himself as a consultant a zillion times better than I do. (Since I’m a marketing consultant, this is not just ironic, it’s a sign of my incompetence. But let’s not point that out.) He’s got the quotes from happy customers right up front. He gives you permission to republish his article so long as you include a link that says “Gerry McGovern is a web content management author and consultant.” He’s got the “McGovern Scorecard” that benchmarks your site “against best practice.” I have learned that I react negatively to people who promote theselves overtly, and, knowing that about myself, I try to keep it from poisoning my feelings. I mean, I also have a kneejerk reaction against people who wear too much cologne, but you can’t let that distract you from the rest of the person.

The reasonable reason has something to do with what he actually says. We have an honest disagreement about the following:

Organizations are not democracies. The Web makes many organizations look like disorganizations, with multiple tones and opinions. Contrary to what some might think, the average customer prefers it if the organization they are about to purchase from is at least somewhat coherent.

Sure, organizations aren’t democracies, but the alternative isn’t that they look incoherent. IMO, the multiple voices found in corporate blogs make organizations look human. Ok, so we disagree. Good.

But the disagreement goes deeper. Here’s the opening paragraph of the blurb for his book, Content Critical,:

Content Critical will change the way you think about the World Wide Web. It is built upon a simple but profound insight: The Web is a medium for publishing content.

And later:

Content Critical talks about a website as a publication, because that is the primary function of a website. Yes, it’s a different kind of publication. It’s more interactive and transaction-driven than traditional publications, but it’s still a publication. Like all publications it’s a place where people come to be informed about stuff.

Because Gerry thinks of the Web as a publishing medium — not as a conversation, which I still think is the best way to think of it — his book (based on the first chapter, available on his site) is about how to build good content, edit it, winnow out what is unworthy of seeing daylight, and maintaining your site. All useful stuff.

But, if that’s all your company is doing, you’ve missed the big point. You’re a Web narcissist who thinks that you are the center of your product’s universe, that you are the valued source of the bestest and truest information about your product, that your customers actually want to listen to you prattle on rather than dish the dirt with one another. Dish the dirt about you, by the way.

Ok, so I get to ride my ol’ high horse for a paragraph, acting as if my thinking is more advanced than Gerry’s. How fun. Of course, I’m talking to bloggy readers, not to marketing managers at big, traditional corporations. And, by and large, what I’ve seen of Gerry’s writings pulls his clients in (what I consider to be) the right direction. Much of what I disagree with is like what I might say if I ever let reality influence me.

So, I’m at war with my feelings, an unpleasant brew of resentment and smugness. I feel like I’m back being an academic where the only currency is being right and showing everyone else is wrong and not as advanced in their thinking. The result in academics is that the people whose thinking is closest to yours become your most dangerous enemy.

So, when you come down to it, I can’t find a single reason to hold on to any of my negative reaction. Yet, no matter how much I reason, my knees still jerk.

Sometimes it sucks being a human.

Thanks to Vergil Iliescu for the link.

Categories: Uncategorized dw