This blog serves as the primary conduit for White Whale’s interactions with the public. Although we do occasionally create what might be called “news” (Southwestern University Site Launches! New Designer Hired! etc.) the majority of the dynamic content we create can’t really be called news. The things we post on this blog are more like cultural dispatches from inside White Whale: notes on ongoing projects, thoughts on new technologies and how they affect our practice, etc.
Of course the writing we do in this blog is important to us from a marketing perspective— it’s the only “marketing” of the company that we currently do. If you’re reading this, and if you are neither a WW employee or my mom, then you’re part of that process. If you work for a university, we like to think maybe someday you’ll consider hiring us for one of your Web projects. If you’re already a client, then we hope reading our blog will help you get to know us better, and increase your engagement to our collaboration.
But that’s not why we write on the blog. We write on the blog because we’re geeks, and because we have lots of ideas that we bat back and forth around the office, and once in a while one of them gets batted out to the public.
What this means for us is that writing on the blog is a kind of balancing act. We really do not want our blog to come off as a “corporate blog”— if it were, nobody would read it. Nobody expects the Chrysler blog to criticize the auto industry bailout; it’s a corporate blog, of course it’s going to reinforce the party line. We don’t want to create a steady stream of posts about how wonderful we are. At the same time, this isn’t the sort of blog where we’re going to spout off about every tech-related thought that crosses our minds. I think that putting the tabs above the address bar in Safari 4 is a fantastic idea, a long-overdue UI improvement, and a Google Chrome ripoff, but I don’t need to clog the airwaves with that observation. Instead, all of us at White Whale share the tendency to make our posts simply epic— filled with bons mots, interesting insights, nice turns of phrase, and a neat conclusion that illuminates something we’ve done worth sharing. (Of course, this post is no exception.)
These two poles— “OMG safari 4 is a total Chrome ripoff” and “Here’s a story about the way White Whale does things…” characterize the well-known microblogging and what you might call macroblogging. (People use that term already, of course, but without much focus.) Of course the top tool for microblogging is Twitter (where you better believe they’ve got something to say about that tab bar), but Facebook status updates are obviously a kind of microblogging, as are IM status messages.
Our new client relationships are leading us deeper into this world. For example, we’ve just met David Silver, a USF media studies professor with a well-trafficked blog and a busy Twitter account, and we’re hopeful his students will eventually collaborate with us to some degree on the design and content of USF’s new site. Through David we have learned about “thick” and “thin” tweets: simply put, some tweets convey only one bit of information (”I enjoyed LOST last night”) where others convey multiple layers of information (”here’s a link to some photos from our trip to Uruguay, and let us know if you like them”). Our clients at Lewis & Clark twitter too, as does Southwestern’s News Office, as of a week or two ago.
Now, because we don’t have dedicated marketing staff— and never will— we can only develop the content that we have time to create. So if blogging is the main way we reach people, how should we do it— over Twitter? In blog posts like this one? Or shorter, chattier posts, Daring Fireball-style?
The fact is, we don’t know. When the muse strikes, there’s no time to decide whether our thoughts are best expressed as thick tweets or thin tweets or chatty posts or lengthy, digressive posts like this one. But what we do know, I guess, is that if anything unites the people who make up this company, it’s a commitment to the art and discipline of the written word. So in the end I suppose we’ll always wind up erring on the side of verbosity, even if it means we post on the blog less.
And in the meantime, my Facebook status is constantly out of date, but I guess that’s the way it goes.
And by the way, we do all have Twitter accounts, if you’d like to follow me, Donald, Alex or Tonya.
(Update: Corrected a typo in Donald’s Twitter page. If you wondered why a White Whale employee was so bizarrely concerned with whether Guitar Hero is better than Rock Band: that was detto, not dtetto, which is Donald’s actual Twitter handle.)
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