It's also vitally important to know what not to say.
I keep my ear close to the ground. Have to, in my line of work - I write mainly for corporate clients in highly specialized fields, so I have to keep up with events and know a little about a lot. I also cross paths with interesting stories from time to time.
Over September, folks in the know were treated to the rapidly unraveling saga of one Casey Serin, a 24-year-old kid in Sacramento who quit his web design job in January 2006 to become a real estate mogul. Over the course of nine months, Casey managed to secure millions of dollars in high interest mortgages on eight houses in four states, figuring to "flip" the properties (buy, fix up, sell quickly at profit before the loan turns ugly). Then the market turned hard, and now he's stuck with a half dozen properties he can't move. He's paying about $20,000 in monthly mortgage payments.
So what's a young and desperate flipper to do?
Casey started a blog. Until Sunday, it could be found at www.iamfacingforeclosure.com. Today it was replaced with a single page message titled "What I did was Stupid!". Very appropriate, considering what he wrote in his blog.
Like the fact that he secured the loans based on a fictitious stated income, using whatever numbers would make the loan happen. Like the fact that he claimed owner occupancy on the houses to get lower interest rates, even though he had no intention to live in the houses. Casey went on, for weeks, at length, about how he never meant to do anything wrong and that everyone in the business does it and that surely this isn't THAT big of a deal. Wouldn't someone (please) like to buy a house?
Blog entries included passages such as:
"Most of the time my mortgage brokers would just go ahead and fill in the income amount without asking. In fact I like it when they insist on filling out the whole application for me. I just sign it. This way I am not worried about what figures to use.
Looking over the application at final signing I sometimes take a peek to see what income we ended up stating. It was always higher then what I was really making."
More than one person - including several anonymously-posting attorneys - left comments pointing out that what Casey did (and was openly admitting to) was this little thing called "fraud", a federal felony, punishable by jail time. One such attorney went so far as to say that lenders might be persuaded to not press charges with extenuating circumstances - but that by publicly spelling out his story in such detail on his blog, all hope for that was probably now ruined. Casey replied that he knew he'd made mistakes, but that he'd learned the value of relationships and open honesty, and so that's why he was blogging about his experience - to embrace the New Media that soothes all transgressions. Surely if he was really, really sorry, and sincerely offered contrition to the blogging community, the real world would forgive his mistakes and this nightmare would be soon over.
Word spread fast about Casey The Fraudulent Flipper. Let's just say, considering how many people are being hurt in the current real estate market, there wasn't much forgiveness to go around. Casey was publicly stunned by the hostility his little New Journalism project received.
So Casey took the blog down today. It took him a month, media attention, a local talk radio interview, a blizzard of angry emails and probably a long overdue chat with a criminal defense attorney, but he finally figured it out. Apparently, he's got a pretty good shot now of doing jail time, and the blog may well have nailed shut his coffin. Worse yet, Google has cached several of the site pages - even taking the website down doesn't take his confessions out of public view.
Thinking about starting a blog for your business? Think about Casey.
Over the last year or two, blogs have been hyped ridiculously as a supposed threat to mainstream journalism, as a venue of open honesty with customers, and as a cost-effective way to establish a digital relationship with complete strangers. I've seen at least one startup business (disastrously) hang its entire marketing strategy on a failed dream of "blogger buzz". Another one I know is currently headed in that direction, having bought into the "blogs have changed everything" mythology.
Like I keep saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Blogs can be very useful marketing tools, but if you plan to launch one for your business, please don't be stupid about it. Don't put anything on the Internet that you can't take back, that shouldn't be made public. Don't think that somehow reality has suspended itself because you're taking part in the "New Journalism". Don't think that conversational opinion is the same as hard, useful reporting. Don't assume that blogging is just a cheap way for the world to fall in love with you. Don't launch without a rational game plan and some sort of exit strategy.
Oh - and if you owe millions of dollars and have committed serious crimes, it's probably not a smart idea to blog about it.
Rob