Today I had to review a book that I read over the weekend at my company’s blog. And I have ended up feeling quite conflicted about it. I’m not going to be doing another review of it here for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’ve already done so and I don’t have the attention span to write another one. The other (main) reason is that the likelihood of someone surfing to my site needing a book on turnaround companies is slim to none. So, if you really want to read the review, it can be found here.
But there were some things that I did want to talk about that I couldn’t in that review. The review had to be positive for the book, so it was. I only mentioned the good things about the book… but I feel a little cheated as a book blogger that my two sentences about the way the book was written were completely vetoed. Shouldn’t I be truthful to the blog readers? Don’t we owe them the truth about a book, aren’t we somewhat obligated to let them know what they’re getting into? How honest are we really supposed to be in our reviews?
Not to say this was a bad book – it had so much useful information in it, and would be such a good asset for someone who is doing a turnaround for a company… but it was self-published, and that was obvious. (I’m sure there are a lot of good self-published books out there, but most of the experiences I’ve heard of haven’t been positive, and most deal with the quality of writing.) The writing itself wasn’t bad in this case, but if the book had been edited, it would’ve made the whole thing flow so much better. There were areas where the book really wasn’t grammatically right, and it was distracting from the information in the book. And I couldn’t mention that for a few reasons (that I’m not going to get into).
I guess I’m just a little conflicted about how much of the truth we should be conveying to people. It comes out more in issues like this, because blogging about books is something that I do for fun, and something I may be doing more of for work…
What do you think?
I think there’s a big difference between writing anything as something you’re doing as part of your hobby and something you write as part of your job. From the sounds of it, you wrote an honest review, including your criticisms, and then it was focus-grouped into something that better reflected the company’s vision. I call this ‘making it bluer’ because that was the first think I had at my job that got focus grouped to death.
I don’t think that people necessarily expect complete honesty when faced with a corporate blog. They know that stuff will be made as bluer as it needs to be, according to someone higher up the chain who doesn’t always understand the nature of the medium that the product’s going to live on top of. They’re expecting content which reflects that company’s vision, and regardless of the medium, they need to spread a specific message.
So I wouldn’t fret. You gots to get the bling somehow.
shannon
March 25th, 2009 at 5:03 am