Betsy Aoki
Blogging: The Unsayable Said
Biography
Betsy Aoki is the Microsoft community program manager
responsible for the blogs.msdn.com site and the ongoing rejuvenation of
Gotdotnet.com. An award-winning MFA poet and former Seattle Times columnist,
she is known for having founded the Seattle chapter of Webgrrls, the first Seattle chapter of Linuxchix, and the first Web pm hire for seattletimes.com.
Position Paper
Microsoft currently doesn’t tell its bloggers where to blog
or what to blog about, beyond the usual employee handbook responsibilities and
the addendum: “Blog Smart.”
So far, it’s worked. Why?
I submit that with a few bozo exceptions found in any
organization, any company with the right culture can tell their people “Blog
Smart” and have the same results. (Any company that has the culture around
“Smart” and a history of confrontation and self-expression, that is.) There are
cultural shaming behaviors at Microsoft around acting stupid—particularly by
being not technical enough, not being precise/buttoned up, or putting yourself
in a position where you can easily be upended. Blogs.msdn.com is not a
conglomerate conversation of robots spouting data: there is always passion, and
metaphor, sometimes stupidity, and occasional poetry. And it’s the same on the
inside—the bloggers’ email list inside Microsoft is boisterous and collegial,
with emails that reach the height of eloquence, analytical middle tones and the
deep tones of chest-beating.
Donald Hall, noted American poet, wrote a classic essay to
define poetry as “the Unsayable Said.” It was that tension between words and
their sounds, the emotions no one dares voice with clarity, those expressions
of being human—that create the vibrancy of good poetry. Yet forcing words,
which will never capture the living experience, to still capture the living
experience, is also the work of a good blogger. Just as the code on a page
isn’t the same thing as the application running on your desktop, a blog post is
not likely to capture the living experience of being at a company, or even
necessarily best represent the technical point. Yet, to push back the dark and
bring out the voices of both the blogger and his or her listeners, corporate
blogging has to step up and play against the tension of screwing up, saying it
wrong, embarrassing the blogger, embarrassing the company. Corporate blogs in
their own way need to be pleasurable writings—not the forced politeness of a
press release, but the chewable morsels of a day in the life of a tester at
Microsoft.
Unlike poetry, the dialogue between the reader’s mind and the
author can come immediately, without politeness or editing. You will know right
away when you aren’t “Blogging Smart.” Yet, if you take no risks—if you don’t
work against the tension of what seems “unsayable for a company like Microsoft”
then your blog won’t have any life. All you have to do is look at Robert
Scoble, one of Microsoft’s best-known bloggers, to see how this tension is
played out and with results that make Microsoft all the better for it. The fact
that he’s had to apologize a few times makes it even more human, even more so
the unsayable said.
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