[extropy-chat] It's A Blog World After All

[Erik Starck]

Topic: the change of the media landscape.

Key quotes: "If my credibility goes down," says Scoble, "then what do I 
have?"
and
"But that informal transparency is precisely why many companies' embrace 
of blogs is at best uneasy. [...] "[Companies] are not going to be able 
to stuff it back into the box," says Greg Lloyd, CEO of Traction, a 
business-oriented blog software company."

Question: When will we see the first blog from inside the white house?

--
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/81/blog.html

Robert Scoble may well be one of the most powerful people in Redmond 
right now. "The Scobleizer," as he's known to his daily readers, writes 
a Web log, or blog, posting comments on topics that range from the 
world's largest pistachio factory to how cheap it is to eat in Shanghai. 
Mostly, though, he writes about Microsoft. On January 27, 14 of the 31 
posts he made between midnight and the time he went to bed, sometime 
after 3:41 a.m., were about the software giant or its products. But the 
Scobleizer is no ordinary Windows-obsessed blog jockey. He is, in fact, 
a Microsoft employee. He's a "technical evangelist," to be precise, 
whose job includes communicating with customers on the Web. One way he 
does this is by writing blogs. He gets feedback from tech-savvy readers 
on how to improve Microsoft products, and at times, he's even mildly 
critical of his employer. After Microsoft threatened a teen who 
registered MikeRoweSoft.com, Scoble wrote this: "It's unfortunate that 
we went after a 17-year-old named 'Mike Rowe,' though. I'm sorry that 
happened to you Mike."

What's this? Humility from the House of Gates? That's life in the blog 
world, where one whiff of PR or marketing spin will instantly mark you 
as phony. "If my credibility goes down," says Scoble, "then what do I 
have?" Though he's just one of hundreds of employee bloggers at the 
software giant, Scoble is by far the most widely read. More than 850 
blogs and 1,300 sites link to him, putting him right up there with 
Howard Dean's Blog for America at its height. And he's aware of his 
power: "I know I'm playing with dynamite," Scoble says.

Dynamite, indeed. The burgeoning blog world--1.6 million keyboard 
tappers at last count--is making big inroads into corporate culture. 
 From tech companies like Microsoft (which says it "respects and 
supports" blogs like Scoble's) and IBM to decidedly nontech outfits like 
Dr. Pepper, companies are starting to use blogging both as a medium to 
market products and monitor brands and as an internal 
knowledge-management tool. To meet corporate demand, both UserLand and 
Six Apart, makers of popular blog software programs, are coming out with 
enterprise-level products later this year.

Corporate America is jumping onto the blogwagon for many of the same 
reasons all those journalists, brooding teenagers, and presidential 
campaigners are already on board. Unlike email and instant messaging, 
blogs let employees post comments that can be seen by many and mined for 
information at a later date, and internal blogs aren't overwhelmed by 
spam. And unlike most corporate intranets, they're a bottoms-up approach 
to communication. "With blogs, you gain more, you hear more, you 
understand where things are going more," says Halley Suitt, who wrote a 
fictional case study on corporations and blogging for the /Harvard 
Business Review/ . "Even better, you understand them faster."

At Verizon, Paul Perry, a director in the company's eServices division, 
started a blog to keep up with news about competitors. Using a news 
aggregator, a popular blog-world tool that grabs and assembles 
syndicated "feeds" of content from Web sites and other blogs, people in 
his group can quickly post news they find on those feeds to the internal 
blog. DaimlerChrysler employs Web log software at a few of its U.S. 
plants; managers discuss problems and keep a record of their solutions. 
And American Airlines, where only 20% of the company's highly mobile 
workforce has corporate email, is considering blogs as a way to give 
employees more channels to management.

The Hartford Financial Services Group is already finding success using 
blogs in one of its mobile groups. A team of 40 field technology 
managers, who serve as links between The Hartford's network of insurance 
agents and the home office, set up a blog in August. They use it to 
share information about e-commerce features and solutions to technology 
problems. Before, email and voice mail sufficed, but email threads would 
die, and there was no way to search past shared information. "We don't 
get a chance to talk with each other as often as we'd like," says Steve 
Grebner, one of The Hartford's field managers, who thinks of the blog a 
little like a town square. "To me, it's like there's 14--or 40--brains 
out there, and you might as well tap into that knowledge base."

So do blogs hold the key to seamless sharing of collective corporate 
intelligence, the holy grail of knowledge management? Web log software 
is cheaper to install and maintain than many knowledge-sharing programs, 
and it's extremely simple to use. Knowledge software often requires 
employees to take both an extra step and extra time to record what they 
know, and to fit their knowledge into a database of inflexible 
categories. Internal blogs are more integrated into a worker's regular 
daily communications. IBM began blogging in December, and by February, 
some 500 employees in more than 30 countries were using it to discuss 
software development projects and business strategies. And while blogs' 
inherently open, anarchic nature may be unsettling, Mike Wing, IBM's 
vice president of intranet strategy, believes their simplicity and 
informality could give them an edge. "It may be an easy, comfortable 
medium for people to be given permission to publish what they feel like 
publishing," he says.

But that informal transparency is precisely why many companies' embrace 
of blogs is at best uneasy. Internally, blogs have the potential to let 
employees who wouldn't otherwise be seen as authorities have a voice 
with a lot of impact. "[Companies] are not going to be able to stuff it 
back into the box," says Greg Lloyd, CEO of Traction, a 
business-oriented blog software company. Externally, the fears are even 
greater. Letting employees speak directly to customers requires a huge 
amount of trust. A loose cannon might reveal corporate secrets, give out 
the wrong message, or even open up the company to legal trouble.

Despite those worries, no new medium can go for long without being 
turned into a marketing channel. Got a message to get out or a product 
to promote? The blog world is populated by folks who thrive on racing to 
be first to post news and getting others to link to, or "blogroll," 
them. They're naturally the opinionated, hyperconnected influencers 
marketers crave. Jonathan Carson, president and CEO of BuzzMetrics, a 
New York-based firm that mines message boards, listservs, and blogs to 
see what's being said about companies, says his clients ignored blogs 
nine months ago. Today, more than half specifically ask whether his 
monitoring includes the blogosphere. "If companies focus in on what's 
going on in the blog world, it's an amazing leading indicator on what's 
going to break in the real world," he says.

That's why some businesses are going straight to bloggers for buzz. 
Random House's Crown Publishing sends books to bloggers for review. 
Nokia sent a small group of bloggers its 3650 model camera phone to take 
for a whirl. To help companies find bloggers who fit their target, 
Internet marketing firm Richards Interactive has even started 
ProjectBlog.com, a database of bloggers who've completed demographic 
surveys.

In an episode that shows both the promise and peril of a corporate 
embrace of blogging, Richards helped Dr. Pepper/Seven Up run a 
blogcentric campaign last spring for its new milk-based drink, Raging 
Cow. It started a blog for the cow--"the cow had his own site," says 
director of corporate communications Mike Martin (who's a little fuzzy 
on bovine anatomy). Then it screened hundreds of young bloggers to find 
a suitable group to help promote the drink. Dr. Pepper flew the five 
winners and their parents to Dallas to try the product and gave them 
several hundred dollars in Amazon gift certificates.

While Martin says the campaign was a success, it provoked an angry 
backlash in the blog world, where the relationship between the company 
and the blogs was seen as crassly commercial and poorly disclosed. "A 
case of crude corporate cluelessness," wrote one widely read pundit and 
law professor. Todd Copilevitz, director of interactive strategy at 
Richards, admits the company should have had the bloggers repeat 
disclosures more often.

Other companies are finding their visits to the blogosphere less 
bruising. Tiny 10e20, a Web design firm in Brooklyn, recently began 
requiring employees to post updates on their progress to a blog twice a 
day. Within the first six weeks, 10 projects were turned in early. 
Having a central repository for information helped--but so did the added 
scrutiny that came from letting everyone see how a project was 
progressing. Software maker Macromedia, one of the first companies to 
adopt blogs for customer service, saved tens of thousands of dollars in 
call-center support when it released a crop of new products for software 
developers in 2002. A trusted group of employees started blogs to answer 
users' questions, and the blogs have grown into online communities that 
give Macromedia valuable customer feedback.

At Microsoft, Scoble sees his blog as a way to put a gentler face on the 
often-reviled software giant. Is it working? The Scobleizer has 
detractors who think he's just a shill. But a comment from "thad," who 
began reading the blog before Scoble became a Microsoft employee, is 
revealing: "Really liked a lot of your ideas. Then you were assimilated 
and I came to see how you'd change. But something else happened. You 
turned me on to XP and I liked it. It is almost enjoyable to work on. . 
. . you have changed my views on the big evil company."

Jena McGregor (jmcgregor at fastcompany.com 
<mailto:jmcgregor at fastcompany.com> ) is Fast Company's associate editor.