It's Okay To Screw Up! A Case Study

Okay, so we’ve been saying over and over that lots of companies are afraid of blogging, but they don’t need to be: It’s safe to get started!

But we should talk a little bit about why they’re afraid. The truth is, corporate communications are so controlled these days, even in the smallest companies, that making a mistake seems like the worst thing that can possibly happen.

Well, take it from us: A mistake ain’t the worst thing that can happen. We’ve made mistakes a bunch of times over the past few years that we’ve been talking to bloggers, but the only ones that have had a lasting impact were when we didn’t communicate enough. Blogging is all about iterating, and that doesn’t just go for your blog’s design or whether you accept comments — it goes for the content of your blog itself.

A Case Study

So, we’ll give you an example of how we recently screwed up while blogging. Egads! We posted something that wasn’t incorrect or misleading — it was worse. It was out of date. Bloggers love to get excited about flashy new stuff, and we posted old news, potentially looking silly in the process. And then, we undid the mistake by removing the post, without even being transparent about it. We even edit our posts. Shocking.

Here’s how it happened, in case you’d like to make a blogging mistake yourself. It turns out that the world doesn’t end if you do.

1. A simple request. We have a bunch of internal blogs that we use for project tracking and internal conversations, just like you’d expect. One of our talented and attractive engineers asked if anyone had a copy of Boing Boing’s five year archive of posts, wanting to use the data file for some tests.
2. A simple misunderstanding. Thinking one of our favorite blogs was celebrating a major milestone, I figured I’d give the Boing Boing team a shout-out on the Movable Type News blog and show them some love. We’re all about blogging, so the post was whipped together and live just a short while later. There was some internal back-and-forth about the tone of the post (“Is this too smart-ass?” “No, people already know we’re sarcastic.” “Are you being sarcastic?”) and then it was on our site.
3. A mistake is spotted. The same talented and attractive engineer pointed out that he was just making a request, and that the post in question was actually from early last year. D’oh! We simply forgot to look at the date of the linked post. So we all took a minute to slap our foreheads. In our haste to celebrate the Boing Boing crew, we’d let our enthusiasm outstrip our literacy skills.
4. We took down the post! Some people are going to complain about this, but the post just seemed silly being so out of date and inappropriate. It was a Friday afternoon, most bloggers aren’t paying super close attention at that point. So we just unpublished the post. No redaction, no big deal. It just went away. And nobody complained.. If you know bloggers, you know the high-profile ones love to complain. But sometimes they have better things to do on a Friday night than fuss about your blog post disappearing.

Now, we’re not advocating this course of action for everyone. Usually it’s more appropriate to update a post with additional information than to remove it. And you certainly always want to review your blog posts for factual accuracy before you publish them. But sometimes mistakes happen, and it’s not a giant problem, it’s just a silly slip-up.

The truth is, talking to an audience is hard. Just like public speaking in front of a crowd, the idea of making a mistake in front of the whole Internet can be intimidating. If you’re rushed for time, distracted, or stressed, you can easily end up with a post that’s confusing, or just clunky. But the stakes aren’t that high: You can always just post again and make your lame post scroll down the page.

Consider this not so much a mea culpa as a get-out-of-blog-jail-free card. You’re entitled to one free mistake every once in a while on your blog. We’ll try to keep ours to a minimum, but you can feel free to use us as an example if somebody tries to tell you bloggers are an unforgiving bunch.