Does your baloney have a first name? How about a second name or even a picture? While Oscar Mayer started the cute kids singing about their brand in 1965, I’m still amazed that most blogs today just say Admin or the company name for the author.
Without a name for the author, whatever you post is suspect as 
some copy and paste job or soulless big company message. Put yourself in your customers shoes. Would you really trust or believe anything from some nameless and faceless article?
You know who writes that newspaper article or book, because you’ve grown to trust and like the author. Your leaders should be building brand awareness and employees ought to get credit for their work. If you’re behind the curve and don’t know the relevance for search engines today, check out Google Authorship or Klout.
I’ve heard all of the reasons for not having a real author’s name:
- A company writes that stuff for us
- Employees change and I don’t want to give credit
- I might offend someone
- I don’t have time to be an author
There is no aspect of business that you can ignore. If you don’t believe, understand, or even like the stuff that’s being written about your company, then I wouldn’t put your name on it either. When business leaders won’t even put their name on some advice or recognize the ideas of others, why should prospects think there is any value?
Sure, putting a name with that blog post makes it serious. Your mother could read it, so you can’t be an anonymous turd anymore or put your name on some mindless drivel to spam the Internet. Don’t use a fake pen name either. If there isn’t a verifiable person with that name, then you might as well sign each post “Batman”. Finally, if you don’t have time to market, then soon you’ll have plenty of time when you are out of business.
You hear stuff that often makes me cringe like “new customers don’t know how good your products and services are, they just know how well you market”. When you put your name with a blog post, customers get a sense of real personality and understanding. The best advice I’ve ever heard about blogging is simply to answer customer questions. Doing both of those things helps others and is rewarding to you, without slick sales or manipulation.
My baloney has a first name, last name, and a picture. See About Virtual CIO or Kevin Fream on LinkedIn. As always, thank you for reading.