Interview with Stuart Mudie from Blethers.com

I did an interview in Paris a couple of days ago with Stuart Mudie, a Scot working in the French capital. Stuart is a communications specialist who has a blog called Blethers.com. He had some useful advice for for would-be small business bloggers. Here are some extracts from the interview.

JH        Stuart, how did you come to start your blog?

SM      I started in September 2001. I'd been in France for half a year or something like that and my jobs have always been related to writing and things like that, you know, writing's always been something I do and I wanted to do some personal writing and I'd been reading blogs for maybe 6 months before that so I thought I'll give it a try. It wasn't at all business-related in the beginning. It was my friends and family who live all around the world, to let them know what's going on with my life. I still do that but I do more articles and things like that, a bit longer and I talk about more business topics than I did in the past.

JH        Do you have any idea who reads it?

SM      Well, I don't have a big readership in terms of numbers. I get maybe about 3 or 4 thousand visits a month or something like that. About a hundred a day or something like that.

JH        Is that a satisfactory level of readership?

SM      Well, if two or three people read it I'm happy. It's not so much the quantity. Maybe I have a group of a dozen people who read it every day and I get feedback from them.

JH        What do you feel about the level of feedback you get. Do you wish you had more?

SM      Of course. I think if you ask anyone that question the answer would be "yes, I'd like more" because you're not just talking into thin air. No, you're talking to get some feedback but I'm happy enough with the feedback I get already.

JH        You seem to post around four or five messages a week. Is that a target you've set yourself?

SM      No, it's completely random. It depends what's happening in my real life. Sometimes if I have free time I can do two or three a day and other times I can go two or three days without posting anything and the length varies as well. It just depends how much free time I have. I don't have any target.

JH        And what inspires you to blog?

SM      For the more personal things, of course, it's just things that are going on in my life, my opinions on matters, it could be things that are happening in the world and, I haven't done it for a while, but I used to do quite a lot of political stuff. Otherwise it's things I've found on blogs, so I'm responding to other people's blogs.

JH        Do you spend a lot of time reading other blogs?

SM      I do read a lot of other blogs. I don't leave lots of comments and it's not with the aim of pushing traffic to my site but if I do do it, I've seen it does bring a lot of visitors as well.

JH        Do you read other blogs just for pleasure?

SM      I'm looking for material for my own blog. I read a lot of PR and Communications blogs as well because that's the sector I work in, so just to keep up with what's going on in the industry.

JH        Do you have a blogging philosophy?

SM      I don't really have any specific philosophy. The only philosophy is be truthful in what you write, be true to yourself, speak in an authentic voice. Doesn't have to be long, doesn't have to be short, doesn't have to be this, that or the other. I don't have any rules.

JH        How would you describe your own blogging voice?

SM      I do think you should have strong opinions to have an effective blog. I do sometimes write opinionated pieces but other times I just link to somewhere, something interesting I've seen.

JH        Is blogging hard work for you?

SM      No, not at all. It's fun.

JH        How do you see your blog developing in the future?

SM      One thing I'm considering is making it slightly more professional and more related to my professional work but I'm not sure if that's something I'm going to do or not. It might be that Blethers features more work-related content or it might be that my Stuart Mudie site starts having a blog as well.

JH        Have you ever thought of extending your activities to blog consultancy?

SM      I do it unofficially at the moment for friends. In my job as a communications specialist blogs may well play a part but I don't think blogs are anything unique. It would just be part of the whole communications arsenal. Will blogs play a part in my professional life? I'd be surprised if they don't since they're a marketing tool that all companies should be using.

JH        You think most companies should have a blog, then?

SM      I think in the next few years companies will start more and more to use blogs but it'll just be an integral part of their site. It won't be here's our website and here's our blog.

JH        What qualities are required to be a successful blogger?

SM      Stick with it is the main thing. Don't blog for a month like mad then give up. And don't be sporadic in your posting. Don't write screeds of stuff for a week and not go back to it for a month because people expect it to be regular. They'd rather have short posts.

JH        How much time would you say you devote to your blog?

SM      When I'm writing posts maybe about half an hour or so and there's thinking about what to write as well. I'm sure I'd be thinking about these things anyway because even before I had a blog I read a lot on the web, so it's not really additional work there.

JH        Do you see any particular benefits or limitations of blogs as a marketing medium?

SM      The positive potential of blogs is for marketing is for big companies it makes them more human. You have the feeling there's a real person behind there because it gets back to what I was saying about having an authentic voice. So you're not dealing with some faceless corporation but there's real people in there and especially when companies are not afraid to talk honestly about their products and say 'Well, this wasn't great.' It's not the usual PR spin on things. It's good that technical people blog as well as people in the marketing divisions. All that is multiplied by a hundred when it applies to small companies. In small companies what you're selling more than anything else when it's something like what I do is the human side. So if I have a blog then people can know me before I even start working with them so when I walk into the first meeting they already have an idea about who's going to turn up and what this person can do and a little bit about their personality and things. So half the work's already done, if you like.

JH        How important is your blog to you?

SM      I couldn't imagine not having it now. So, very important. I couldn't imagine stopping doing it.

JH        Thank you very much Stuart.