Blogging Both Sides of the Story

“There are two sides to every story,” my grandmother Sadie was fond of reminding us. So what about, in blogging to promote a business or a professional practice, presenting both of those sides?

As a corporate blogging trainer, I’m always considering different ways of communicating with online readers.  Basically, I think of myself and my writers at Say It For You as offering a sort of matchmaking service that helps our clients “meet strangers” and hopefully convert at least some of them into friends and customers.

In order to do that, though, we must incorporate one important ingredient – opinion. Taking a stance, I’ve found, is what gives a blog post some “zip”. Being an influencer rather than winning a popularity contest, as Doug Karr puts it, means gaining the chance to build real relationships.

That is such an important point for all freelance blog writers and business owners to keep in mind – reveal your opinion. . Whether it’s business-to-business or business to consumer blog writing, the blog content itself needs to use opinion to clarify what differentiates that business, that professional practice, or that organization from its peers.

Today, though, I came across a piece in Businessweek that added a whole new dimension to my thinking about “opinion-piece” blog posts.  In answering the question “How important are the physical spaces in which people work?” one expert, Jim Harter answered, “One thing that stuck out to me the most in the research we’ve done is that people want a space they can call their own… If you build a workplace space where there’s noise and it gets distracting, that can relate to disengagement.”

A second workplace analyst disagreed. Tom Eich’s take was that “Private offices can become horrible hiding places…They need personal storage, but they actually really want that team space.”

In blogging for business, I’m now wondering, why not present both sides of an issue, allowing for the merits of each.? In other words, make clear that this business or professional practice has chosen to carry on in a certain way, but that there were other options. Let readers come to their own conclusions about which approach is more in tune with their needs and opinions. Of course, that’s precisely what they’ll do, anyway!