Blogging Must Be SO Over
I encountered an article last week that indicates, merely by its source, that blogging may no longer be hip and “cutting edge”. It’s from The Journal of Accountancy, a monthly publication of the American Institute of CPAs, which I encountered on a bleak day when the Journal provided the only bathroom reading material. Entitled Would You, Could You,Should You Blog?, it attempts to explain the blogging phenomenon to CPAs and to suggest that accounting firms could benefit from a combination of internal and external blogs. Whenever the accounting profession gets it on with technology, I can’t help but envision an elephant trying to tapdance, so I was interested in what the house organ would say about blogging.
The article gets off to an unpromising start by asserting that blogs “gained credibility during the 2004 presidential campaign when three Minneapolis attorneys used their Power Line blog to disprove (emp added) CBS news reports about George W. Bush’s military service.” That’s giving them a lot more credit than they earned, as they did nothing to establish that CBS’ assertions weren’t true, just that their documentation was faulty. Nonetheless, I suspended my disbelief and read on.
In my blogger’s myopia, I hadn’t considered blogging as a viable tool for businesses beyond a technologically adept bastion like Microsoft. So many of my clients, for instance, have their admins print out their inbound emails, and type their dictated outbounds. The article makes a convincing case for blogs as a sort of knowledge microwave, a way for technicians like tax experts to quickly reach clients and, more to the point, potential clients with tidbits of information without having to formalize an article for the monthly newsletter, or to engage their web designers to add a page to the firm’s website.
The article led me to consider, with a bit of a shudder, what my life would have been like if blogs had been in use when I was in public accounting. I can see it as an engine of spectacular self-immolation, and I would have been a leading candidate. Even without an abetting technology, I gained a reputation for off -the-wall memoes, and, for April Fool’s day once, I wrote a send-up of the firm newsletter that should have put me on the short list for a post-tax-season ride out the ejection tube. Unbeknownst to me, however, my office was planning to split off from the parent firm, and the partners behind the split were delighted with the parody. In a way, it immunized me for a short while.
In responsible hands, however, it appears that some accountants are successfully dipping their toes into blogging. There are several tax-oriented blogs for public consumption, and some firms are using blogs for project management and knowledge management (”k-blogs”):
Blogs make it easy to document projects so that all team members are better informed. Knowledge blogs also can serve as a venue to help telecommuting employees stay more involved or (I love this one) for departing employees to leave knowledge behind.
I can just see this mechanism for automating those cheery, frozen-smile exit interviews. Just don’t let the url outside the firewall.
