Some Answers & More Questions

By on June 25, 2006 in Tech

Doc gives his thoughts about my blogger conference post and makes some good points.

I suspect that some of the unconference approaches will eventually bleed over to the nontech business world. It’s not really the unconference approach that I have a hard time seeing in the nontech world, as much as it is the focus on blogging as a widely accepted business tool.

Doc echoes the point made by one of my Commenters that it’s not blogging as the business, it’s blogging as a part of a business- the idea that blogging can add value as an additional business tool.

I totally get that with respect to some industries. Certainly journalism (look at all the newspapers that have already embraced blogging to one extent or another), marketing, PR (Steve Rubel is the walking, talking embodiment of that), etc.

What I’m still not buying is blogging as a tool for traditional businesses that sell traditional products and services. The people who manage these companies are going to have to cover a lot of ground to get from content blockers that don’t let you visit ESPN to employees blogging on the clock. Not to mention all the corporate policies about what is and isn’t fair game for blogging about that would have to be written and enforced. And then there are all the labor and lawyer problems that would arise if an employee got disciplined or fired for unacceptable content, etc.

In sum, most businesses don’t trust their employees enough to allow them to blog.

Which means (and I’d love to hear Steve‘s thoughts on this) that even if a traditional business has a blog, it will likely be written by a trusted insider and carefully designed to promote the company line. It would end up being nothing more than an alternate form of a company brochure and press release page. It would look like a blog, but it wouldn’t really be one.

Is that better than no blog at all? I don’t think so, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe blogging as a corporate self-promotion tool is perfectly OK.

Maybe I’m still missing something.

What do you think?

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  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/18033425480526774251 Seth Finkelstein

    Ah, but now you are arguing over the size of the blog-evangelism market, rather than about its existence.Indeed, it’s probably much smaller than many in it would wish it to be. Certainly minuscule compared, e.g. to the “Get rich in stocks” business (with which it shares certain unhealthy similarities …)That’s why some of the evangelism is so frantic, because the heights of hype are needed to inflate even tiny bubbles.

  • http://blogs.earthlink.net/ Dave Coustan

    I blog for EarthLink. For now, we don’t have our employees blog individually, but it’s something we talk and think about all of the time. In the meantime, I act as both the daily writer and the editor for Earthling, and I spend much of my time like an internal journalist learning as much as I can about everything we have going on and writing about it. It’s a little different from either model you describe (either a company pr blog or allowing all employees to blog).I think I agree with your point that it’s great for some businesses but blogging may not be such a needed tool for all businesses. But I don’t think it’s as simple as traditional companies not trusting their employees to blog (although that’s one of the issues). The Naked Conversations way of looking at it is that open communication with the public is both good for all parties and ultimately unavoidable. But many traditional companies will do perfectly fine having information flowing through one pipeline, and in an orchestrated and controlled manner. If my Gas provider doesn’t blog, it’s really not going to make me go pick another one. The controlled pipeline model didn’t just go away when some companies started blogging. It may be broken for some industries but it works fine in others. I don’t think there’s one answer for every company. In structure, culture, identity, and ethos, some companies are probably well-suited to a more open information environment and some probably aren’t. I don’t think there’s any sort of endgame that says the first companies in each industry to create a mature blogging environment win.On the other hand, I do think that most all companies would be well-served to think about providing some sort of regular and high-quality online content, even if it’s not in the totally transparent blog style but uses blog technologies and tools. In that arena, there aren’t as many risks and if the content is truly good and useful, you reap some of the same benefits with readers.I wish I had gone to Bloggercon. It’s been useful reading various perspectives on it.

  • http://libertango.livejournal.com/ Hal O’Brien

    “In sum, most businesses don’t trust their employees enough to allow them to blog.”Which is why genuinely creative and thoughtful people don’t work for “most companies.”If a company doesn’t trust its employees, how on earth can it trust its customers? If a company can’t be bothered to trust me — either as an employee or as a customer (let alone as a potential stockholder) — why on earth should I take the risk of trusting them?It’s precisely for those reasons that I’m making more and more of my purchasing decisions on the basis of the total transparency of the company I’m considering buying from. It’s the prudent thing to do, and the most effective way to prevent being ripped off.I don’t think I’m alone in this.So, it’s going to take a while for the untrustworthy companies to fail… But I’m naively optimistic enough to think they will fail (and have been known to short certain stocks on that basis, profitably).