Forward
The blogosphere can be a lot of fun if you have the right approach. However, if you don't understand its nuances, it can be harsh and threatening. This guide is written for people who work for vendors and write blogs. Independent bloggers should also read it just in case they end up working for a vendor someday and find themselves with new, unexpected circumstances.
Chapter One: Thicken Your skin
One of the reasons people start blogging is that they like to feel important and relevant. Blogging gives them a sense of accomplishment. When their mother asks what they did that day, they can say: "I wrote a heart-felt, objective blog about technical minutiae". That is of course, unless they happen to be blogging for a vendor. In that case, they are better off telling mom that they are an Internet Security engineer and that she wouldn't understand even if you could find words for it.
Vendor blogging is not about pride because hostile bloggers will damage it when they can. The best way to protect your pride as a vendor blogger is to have none. If there is nothing to injure, it doesn't hurt so much. The best thing to do when you start vendor blogging is to engage teenage children at a shopping mall and start asking them stupid questions about things like cell phone etiquette and rap music. When you feel like you can't take another insult, make sure to ask "Is that all you've got, punk?" You'll be glad you did later as a full-fledged vendor blogger.
With your ego sufficiently trampled, you will have the proper perspective to vendor blog in earnest.
Chapter Two: Look good
Chapter Three: Get lots of help
Everybody thinks they know something about blogging. How hard can it be - right? Co-workers, including management come up with all kinds of suggestions of things that would make unbelievably good blog posts. The trick is that people with bad blog ideas will seek you out and the people with good blog ideas hide from you when they see you coming. You may need to adopt Machiavellian techniques for getting what you need.
Rest assured, you will need help as a vendor blogger. Some bloggers suffer from writers block and others have too many other things going on to write new blog material. Vendor bloggers often need help arguing against a really bad idea from a really important person and sometimes they lose those arguments and need to subjugate their egos and write a bad blog. In such cases, the smaller the ego, the better. When that happens, the best approach is to seek help from others and turn the bad blog into a group project. Even though readers will think it came from your own addled brains, internally you can still garner major props for team building.
You may find yourself defending the flag when competitive bloggers attack it with flamethrowers. Co-workers can help you respond in several ways such as strapping you to a gurney until you cool down or sitting with you while you count to 10,000. Sometimes you may only need encouragement and re-assurance that your own flamethrowers are bigger and hotter than theirs. Sometimes you might need the assistance of competitive analysts who may be able to keep you from making outrageous claims about your own products. Naw, making outrageous claims about your own products is the stuff of legend and wins you a preferred seating at corporate functions.
Chapter Four: Find ways to not travel
Chapter Five: Dumb it down
The people with the best perspective for a vendor blog are the people in product development and product management. The problem is that they tend to use terms that are difficult to understand and have to be translated to industry-standard 10th grade English. Its unclear how the 10th grade level became the standard, but you might as well go along with the convention because it makes it much easier for the dropouts writing competitive blogs to know when you've insulted them.
Sophisticated vendor blogging is rarely successful. Pictures, animations and videos might add an air of sophistication to the blog, but make sure they don't remind people of a documentary or educational film. Better to keep people awake talking about nothing than to put them asleep droning on about some detail that they can't remember.
Chapter Six: Just joking
Chapter Seven: Apologize not
One of the biggest differences between standard blogging etiquette and vendor blogging etiquette (if you can call it that) is how you perform the mea culpa. As a non-vendor blogger, you want to be careful not to offend people and create an unwanted shitstorm. Its not much fun to be dragged through the mud in public for bad behavior. It's much, much worse to be threatened by some whacko who is stalking you or by a combatant of some anarchist, militant organization.
Think of vendor blogging as a battle royale of sorts - a cage match of verbal abuse. Would a luchador apologize after delivering a pile driver to his unconscious opponent? Of course not! So why would a vendor apologize to a competitive blogger after pointing out the ridiculous argument they made in a piece of shill writing?
As a vendor blogger engaged in online discussions with other vendor bloggers, it is bad form to apologize about anything, unless you use the apology to continue to insult. For example, am apology that saves face could be something like this: "Sorry to have depicted your argument as sheep droppings previously, because it was actually much more like the diarrhea from a a llama"
The only reason for a vendor blogger to apologize is for screwing up online and embarrassing your company and its products. (Remember the blogger has no ego left to damage). In that case, you may need to apologize to fellow employees and stockholders for besmirching the reputation of the fine organization you represent and the products/services that that generate the revenue stream that everyone so heavily depends on.
Appendix: Bloggers for hire
Special considerations need to be made for bloggers who are not employees of a company, but are paid to blog on their behalf. The hired gunslinger is sometimes likened to a prostitute, which some would say is unfair to prostitutes, but there is nothing wrong with providing a biased opinion and being paid for it - even if the idea is to appear as objective as possible. In contrast, there is something decidedly rotten about a non-vendor blogger proclaiming themselves as a customer advocate when they are being paid by vendors.
Gunslingers need to have a long-lasting resistance to insults because non-vendor bloggers sometimes take offense to the gunslinger making what appears to be easy money and launch scathing attacks that can last many months. An attack from a non-vendor blogger accusing you of being a shill is always much more difficult to deal with than an attack from a vendor blogger, who is an obvious shill themselves.
The gunslinger has to be impartial because their tenure is tenuous. That instability means they can't afford to trash a competitor too much because they could end up being their next source of revenue. This, behavior disappoints their current boss, who wants the gunslinger to be more lethal than a mercenary can afford to be.
Ex-vendor bloggers that find themselves in a mercenary position blogging for hire need to be careful to avoid using insults that they may have been saving for months. It's your own fault that you didn't use them when you had the chance.
