Do you need a style guide for your bloggers?

Posted on 29. Aug, 2008 by Roy in Business

You have a blog and you can write whatever you want – there is no one to stop you. However, if you want to be a successful blogger, you must prove your authenticity as well as uniformity in content selection and presentation. Just think about a newspaper – it has a predefined set of guidelines as far as publishing is concerned. It is a different issue that general people (readers) do not know about those guidelines, but these guidelines actually influence the brand of that newspaper.Do you have a predefined publishing guideline attached to your blog! Perhaps it is time to think about one if you are a serious publisher and have different bloggers to write for your blog.

Why this is important?

Ever blogger have his or her own writing style – specific choices of subjects (ok, there may be thousands of different topics in the list but it is a list after all) that they write about (just think about your tags and categories). They have certain stand points for or against some issues (if you are a serious blogger, you got to have a voice). If you follow it closely, you will easily identify a pattern – something that you may call your style sheet or style-guide.

Come on, I am not suggesting you to publish the style sheet in your blog. But if you are publishing a multi blogger unit – you can think about having a wiki based style guide for your bloggers. This would definitely help you maintain a common pattern in your blog. And more importantly, you can easily communicate with your bloggers about what you want from them.

Just think about blogs that accept guest post. They publish some primary guidelines for the guest bloggers – but here you are accepting the bloggers to come up with his or her identity. A style sheet or a style guide may be an extended version of these guidelines where the blogger would also write according to the stance of the blog on certain issues.

- Especially if your blog has grown into something like Mashable or YouMOZ or something that publishes user generated content.

There would be a lot of issues against this point like:

It may kill the essence of blogging – personal style. (But what is the basic difference between a newspaper and a multi blogger unit?)

It may kill democracy. (Don’t you have a personal blog to show off democracy?)

etc…..

What do you think?