Is "Blog" Too Informal for Business?
I’ve always felt that the word “blog” is a little too informal for a company website. I’ve preferred “Articles”. It sounds more serious, perhaps even a little more academic.
Other companies choose “Insights”, “News”, “Journal” or even “Letters”. Presumably, some share my reservations about the word “blog”.
But is there actually anything wrong with it?
Where did the word come from?
The word blog originated in the 1990s as a shortened form of weblog. Early blogs were often personal journals, recording someone’s experiences, interests and opinions.
Perhaps that explains why the term still feels informal.
The word is now widely used by technology companies. Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Stripe and Cloudflare all explicitly call their publications blogs.
But its use is not confined to the technology industry. The British Museum has a blog. So does the International Monetary Fund. Even the UK government maintains a directory of blogs.
Clearly, serious organisations are comfortable using the term.
I’ve found it helpful to think of a company blog, rather than simply a blog. Those two words help me move away from the original idea of a personal online diary. A company blog is a place for a business to publish articles, offer insights into its thinking, and share news about important company developments.
What about the alternatives?
Articles has always been my favourite. It brings to mind academic journals and published papers, with their associations of careful research, considered arguments and quality writing.
Insights reflects both the ideas a company shares and what readers learn about its people and thinking.
News is appropriate for announcements and important company developments.
Journal suggests a continuing record of ideas and experiences, with a literary or academic character.
Letters has a long tradition in investment management. Once posted to investors, fund managers’ periodic letters are now often published on company websites.
Each is a reasonable choice, depending on what a company wants to communicate.
Blog, however, has one considerable advantage. Almost everyone understands exactly what it means.
Naming our own service
At Megargy, we built a simple publishing system for our own websites. We then decided to generalise that system so other companies could use it.
That raised a naming question.
We could call it Megargy Articles Service, Megargy Insights Service or Megargy News Service. But each suggests a particular kind of content rather than a general service for publishing a company’s writing.
Internally, we had been calling it Megargy Blog Service. It seemed the obvious choice, even though I still had reservations about the word “blog”.
But while writing this article, I realised that adding “Company” would make all the difference.
Megargy Company Blog Service.
The name makes the intended purpose clear, distinguishing it from the personal blogs I had always associated with the term. It also retains the simplicity of a name that almost everyone understands.
A distinction worth making
The name of the service need not determine the name of the publication.
Customers can choose to call their publications “Articles”, “Insights”, “News”, “Journal”, “Letters” or simply “Blog”, depending on what they publish and how they want to present themselves.
We may even use “Insights” on the Babylon website, providing another example of how the same publishing service can support different names.
Writing this article has changed my own thinking. I had already become comfortable with the expression “company blog”, but hadn’t considered using it to name our service.
Writing does more than communicate what we’ve already decided. It helps us organise our ideas, sharpen our thinking and sometimes reach conclusions we hadn’t expected.
So I’ve arrived at two decisions I hadn’t expected: to rename the “Articles” section of our website simply “Blog”, and to name our publishing service Megargy Company Blog Service.
Perhaps “blog” isn’t too informal for business after all.