Bloggers and content managers often learn from and post about their own mistakes. But what about customer mistakes? Should you post about them?

In the 1968 comedy The Odd Couple, Jack Lemmon plays Felix Ungar. At a dinner party, he mentions that he writes the news for TV. Doe-eyed neighbor Cecily Pigeon replies, “That sounds like a fascinating profession. Tell me, where do you get your ideas about what to write?”

Boirrrrrr.

When you’re building out your company’s blog, where will you get ideas for content?

Mistakes — especially the ones you’ve made — are rich material. You can weave a post around a mistake and turn it into valuable content. Give it a title like “4 Ways to Avoid…” or “13 Things Not to Do When You’re…” Your readers will enjoy and learn from these lists, and chime in with comments.

But will they respect you in the morning?

Suppose you decide to post on mistakes that your customers have made. What do you do when you know that your customers are in the audience, and when they may recognize themselves in the post? Will they leave you a snarky comment? Will they Facebook-fire you? Worse yet, will they fire you on your own blog?

Writer Helen Popkin once summarized the balance between the temptation to post and the urge to stay alive:

Never post anything you wouldn’t say to your mom, boss and significant other…And thanks to Twitter further eroding the wall between your big mouth and a moment required to download some good sense, the internet is now empowered to get you fired faster than ever.

Still, you’re convinced that it’s a good story, and so you decide to post on it. You can try to anonymize it the way Henry Miller did with the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in Tropic of Cancer. But if your customers are in your audience, they’ll recognize themselves. And if you’re describing a mistake they don’t even know they made, you’ll be in double the trouble.

“That won’t happen to me.”

Maybe you think that your customers won’t ever subscribe to your blog or find out what you’re posting. Or maybe you think you’re indispensable, so even if they do read your post, they’ll just slap you on the back and let bygones be, as they buy more of your goods and services.

Prudent bloggers think twice about that.

Joel Spolsky ran a blog called “Joel on Software,” which has a long, broad following among software developers. When Joel announced he would cease posting to the blog, he gave this as one of his reasons:

We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them.

Blogging about customer mistakes

So you want to keep putting out content, and you want to write (nicely) about customer mistakes. Plus, you want your customers to read your blog. How do you reconcile all of those?

1. Don’t post the mistake as a rant. The lesson you’re trying to impart will dissolve in the vitriol and you’ll have two problems: an insulted customer and an alienated following.
2. When you describe the mistake, describe the solution. If the company hasn’t gotten to the solution yet, WAIT to post until there’s more closure to the story. It will make for a better lesson anyway.
3. Don’t name names. Your readers want to see similarities between the business situation you’re describing and their own situation. They want to think, “How did those people deal with it?” If you focus on telling that story, then readers won’t care whether the company was Amazon or a hot dog stand.

And if my customers are reading this, I promise I’m not posting about you.

photo credit: Jeffrey Beall (CC2.0)