There are risks in blogging. The risk of being fired is evident from several examples. There’s also been talk about the possibility of legal actions against bloggers that say too much publicly (in relation to for example disclosure rules).
So this means that corporate bloggers must be risk seekers? Not necessarily. We might just be overconfident in our own abilities.
In Ego Makes Entrepreneurs? BusinessWeek interviews researcher Brian Wu about the behavioral patterns of entrepreneurs. His research focuses on the narrow definition of “entrepreneur”, that is the business side of entrepreneurship. But an entrepreneur doesn’t need to start a company. We find entrepreneurs all around us. They come up with new ideas at the office, they coach their kids’ fotball teams, they are constantly trying to brake barriers and find new ways of doing things.
If you agree with this broader definition of “entrepreneur” you’ll probably find Wu’s conclusions relevant to understand business blogging. What’s a blogger if not an entrepreneur seeking new ways of communicating?
“While conventional wisdom assumes entrepreneurs have great risk tolerance compared to the rest of us, in controlled experiments that tracked attitudes to risk, we consistently found that they aren’t really that different.”
“Entrepreneurs, like everybody else, hate uncontrollable risks, but on the other hand, they’re overconfident in their own abilities — they think they can control their abilities in a random drawing of people.”
“…if there’s a high degree of ability uncertainty, we will see a sufficient amount of entrants because their overconfidence compensates for the uncontrollable risks.”
Fredrik Wacka is the author and founder of the popular CorporateBlogging.Info blog which is a guide to business and corporate blogging.
Visit Fredrik Wacka’s blog: CorporateBlogging.Info.
