This blog is by Eric, a member of our support team here at Junction Networks.
We've All Been There
We’ve all been there: Having a pleasant work-related conversation with marketing about testing a new API product when the bomb drops: “P.S. We could use a blog from you in the near future. J” Post pended with a smiley face. Your heart freezes. You break out in a cold sweat. Marketing wants you to write something, preferably something brilliant and engaging and community building that will offer grand insight into the pitch and yaw of your company and its role in the larger community, and they want it by the end of the week. Before that request, the message was in Arial; but now it’s in Hell-vecta, the font used to prod people into producing additional work. Other uses of Hell-vecta: Team Building Exercises, Internal Company Newsletters, Documentation, Presentations, and Affidavits stating in no uncertain terms did you or anyone at your company knowingly operate a sweat shop making branded tchotkes for your company’s ITEXPO booth. “It was the blog of times, it was the Twitter of times.”
Suggested Tactics for Avoiding a Blog Post
Here are some delaying tactics:
- Research. “I really want to ensure that I’m bringing the absolute best to our blog by ensuring that I’ve read all the currently documentation on our sphere specific RFCs. Just think of how foolish we’d appear if our white paper made reference to obsolete ISOs.” You’ll probably be told to not worry about it, but then your perfect response to anything along the lines of “You’re taking this too seriously” are to fume and say, “If my name is on the post, it must be perfect.”
- Do your job. Procrastinating the writing of a blog post is a wonderful way to hunker down and actually get your backlog cleared. “I’d love to write up the blog post; but, I’m in the middle of some intense QA on our staging server, and I would hate to break the rhythm.”
- Do Someone Else’s Job. No matter what your company does, there is always someone who needs a hand with some back-burnered project. Find that person. Help them. You’ll gain an ally, and you can probably turn the dread gaze of marketing to that hapless individual. “I offered a hand to __________’s project, so I’m a bit tied up. However, I think I’ve freed him enough to write a post about what it is s/he’s actually working on for the company,”
- Obfuscation. Exquisite Corpse is a game invented by the Surrealists. In this game, members would collaboratively write by having one person commit something to paper, obscuring all but the most recent sentence, then passing that paper on to the next participant. Then, when the paper had been filled with the writing of incomprehensible absinthe-drunk Parisian artists, the “story” would be read aloud to the amusement of people who obviously did not have Farmville at their disposal. You can resurrect this concept by grabbing a sentence each from random tech blogs and submitting it to marketing to read. Ask them to edit it for comprehension, as you’d hate to go over the heads of your customers. The imminent confusion as the hapless marketer attempts to parse “your” writing will make certain you’re in the clear.
- Proxy Refusal. Offer to help if you can get your boss to give you some time to work on the blog post. Your immediate supervisor will find time for you to help marketing in the planning schedule sometime before the sun goes nova, making page hits the least of anyone’s worries.
- Lie. Claim you already submitted a blog post to someone else in marketing but you haven’t heard back. When questioned to whom this was sent, become evasive, treating marketing as a monolithic omnipotent entity.
- Reversal. Demand in writing topics to discuss. Explore the minutia of any topic to the degree where the marketing department could probably write the blog post without you.
- Take a sick day. Do this every day of deadline. Research WebMD for hideous crippling conditions that will net you sympathy and an extension on your post. Do this every day you reasonably can. Spend the sick day clearing out your DVR.
In a final and desperate bid, you can just write the damn thing and send it off to Marketing for approval. If you’re smart, like I am, you’ll never get asked to write another blog post ever again. [Note from Marketing: Eric will be asked to write a blog again next month.]