Blogging and Professionalism: It Goes Both Ways

As a blogger, it can be very frustrating to work with a company that doesn’t reply to your emails in a timely manner, doesn’t lay out the all the requirements ahead of time, sponsors prizes then doesn’t send them out, or sadly I’ve even heard at least twice of companies making degrading remarks about bloggers.  All things to make a blogger unhappy.  But let me ask you this, If you were to make a mistake with a blog post.  Say, you forgot to add one of the keywords requested.  Maybe you missed the deadline by a day because of an issue in the family.  Perhaps you sent an email to the company and it went to the trash folder and they never got it.  You know you sent it but they never got it.  Would you appreciate a rep to fly off the handle and say “I asked you to put this keyword in there and you didn’t! Very unprofessional!” or “The deadline was yesterday you can forget about us every working with you again!”  Of course not.  You’d hope they would email you privately and approach it more professionally like “You did a great job with your post but if you could please add _____ keyword to it as outlined in the email, we’d appreciate it”  or “I saw that you didn’t make the deadline, I appreciate your email, but could you please let me know why the deadline was missed?”

All better approaches than flying off the handle right?  People are human and life happens.  But let’s turn this around.  I really want to use an example of something I saw today.  I will not list names or companies but I think as bloggers that want to call themselves professional really need to think about they way they come off to companies as well.  Also if anyone posts the company’s name the comment will be deleted.

I was working with a company who was also working with a number of other bloggesr too (as most do on a project).  The email was a mass reminder about a deadline.  All participants emails were not hidden. Because I was in the list, I saw replies for other bloggers coming. I was actually embarrassed for some of them, as a blogger. Even though I did not write them, it gives a bad rep to other bloggers as well.  They were very short with the rep calling them out as unprofessional, rude, and some not evening explaining why they were so upset to the rep.  Not sure if they realized that they’re emails were also being seen by others on the list. We have to realize that some start up companies are new to this too in working with bloggers or even internet marketing in general.  Yes they made a mistake but there are other ways to approach it than sending a short scathing email to the rep. Guess what that email just did?  It just turned them off from working with bloggers.  It just turned them off from the sender’s blog.  Why?  Because the reply was unprofessional.  Because they didn’t know that what they did was wrong and instead of bloggers helping them to be able to work with bloggers the best way, they were just told , in so many words, “we don’t want to work with you”.  

We are all human. With some patience and understanding a lot of things can go smoother in life, not just blogging.  I know I made (and continue to make) plenty of mistakes with blogging. Things change all the time.  My blog is a work in progress, but it’s a labor of love. 

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