Comments on: Some Answers & More Questions

By: Hal O'Brien

Hal O'Brien — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 09:24:00 +0000

"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).

By: Dave Coustan

Dave Coustan — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 15:41:00 +0000

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.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 22:31:00 +0000

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.