We Are Smarter Than Me: How the Wisdom of Crowds Can Help Businesses Succeed – Knowledge@Wharton Annotated
The newly formed Corporate Blog Council is getting slammed in the blogosphere this week. The council is a self-described “professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging.” It includes some very large companies, although overall membership is small and skewed toward tech and media firms.
The blogosphere has been fairly merciless. Dave Taylor remarks, “My translation: ‘we’re all clueless, but don’t want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of ‘marketing 2.0’, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.’”
Scoble is skeptical, too: “I’ve done enough speaking to enough corporations now that if they don’t get why they should be talking with their customers already I don’t get how hanging out at yet another boring industry conference is going to help them to get it,” he says, pointedly.
Brian Solis says the focus on blogs shows that corporations still don’t get the concept of conversation. He asks if we’re also going to have a Viral Media Council, and a Conversation Council.
Marketing Pilgrim counts comments and finds that blogs run by the council members perform pretty dismally. She and several others point out that comments are disabled on the Blog Council’s site and that the council used a conventional press release to announce its existence.
Commenters are piling on, mostly trashing the whole Blog Council idea.
I hope the people that put their companies’ names on this initiative won’t be scared off by the thrashing they’re getting in the blogosphere. To veterans of the polite and deferential world of traditional corporate communications, this trash talk sounds juvenile and hateful, but it is really just the way people express their opinions in this medium. Conversations here are raw, blunt and sometimes offensive, but they are always genuine. You need a thick skin to play, but if you don’t take it personally, you can learn a lot.
Having worked with major corporations for many years, I’m inclined to be more generous to the Blog Council. Yes, everything the bloggers cited above have said is true, but the fact that these companies are taking action of any kind (and scheduling an event for next month, apparently) is significant. It probably took months just to get to the announcement phase.
Critics will say that that’s the problem: corporations have to water down and approve everything and that’s why they don’t get social media. That’s also true, but these companies have worked this way for a very long time. The fact that the world has changed around them in the last four years doesn’t mean they can respond in that timeframe. There are plenty of people within these companies advocating conversation marketing and meaningful change. They are being heard, but it takes a long time for voices to work their way up the hierarchy at big companies. And the people who head those companies are the least likely to understand what’s going on out there.
If the Blog Council is smart, it’ll ignore the tone and listen to the message. The blogosphere is delivering some important early feedback on the whole idea of the Blog Council. The members should listen, adjust and move incrementally forward. Bloggers can be quite blunt, but they can also be very forgiving. If the council demonstrates that it’s really serious about this venture, then the tone will turn supportive with remarkable speed.
This week in the the Tech PR War Stories podcast, David Strom and I discuss negativity in the blogosphere. The risk of blogger attacks is one of the biggest reasons companies avoid social media, but we argue that fears are overblown. Sure, you need a thick skin to invite customer feedback. But companies with good products and happy customers aren’t likely to be hurt by one bad seed.
Learn more at TechPRWarStories.com.
Laura Fitton is a Twitter master, and she gave me a whole new perspective on this service, which I had initially dismissed as silly when I saw it last March.
Laura (twitter.com/pistachio) is an independent consultant whose two very young children create some lifestyle choices. Basically, she has to work mostly from home. Twitter has been her business network and support group. Without really trying, she has collected an entourage of nearly 900 followers, and that has led to business, speaking invitations and personal relationships.
Laura Twitters constantly, describing professional and life experiences in 140-character bursts. She supplements her text posts with videos from Seesmic.com, an instant video messaging service that’s still in test phase. It’s a type of journaling called moblogging (mobile blogging) and it has an appeal all its own.
For active mobloggers (Twitter is the preferred medium) blogs are a collection of short bursts that spark mini-conversations. The structured thesis of the type that you’re reading now doesn’t fit this model. Blog entries are a sequence of miniature thoughts and observations, each expressed in the charmingly succinct language of a space-limited medium. People cover hour-long conference keynote speeches as a sequence of Twitter messages. There’s even an emerging style of Twitter language that prompts the greatest possible response. I can’t say I understand it, but it’s a great topic for a follow-up article.
Back to Laura. The other day, she was pondering what to make for breakfast. She Twittered “pancakes or waffles?” to her followers and within two minutes had 10 responses. Today she recorded me talking about my proposal for how Starbucks should be the next great media power (e-mail me for more on this). She posted the video using Seesmic and, within 20 minutes, had a half-dozen comments. Conventional bloggers should be so lucky.
I spent the lunch hour today at a table full of Twitter enthusiasts. It struck me that they are exhilarated by the idea of making connections. To them, Twitter is a lifeline to people they’d never otherwise meet or stay in contact with, and that serendipity is one of the service’s principal attractions.
The chance to find out information provided by those connections is another appeal. One Twitterer proposed that the service is actually a corollary to daily newspapers. In the same sense that newspapers provide guided discovery to information identified by editors, moblogs offer discovery of information identified by trusted sources of any kind. The two approaches fulfill a similar need. They just do it in different ways.
The Potential of Enterprise 2.0 – Six Lessons for Success – Trends in the Living Networks
poll.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Adults E-Mail, Teens IM – eMarketer, Dec. 3, 2007
Keys to social media success – iMedia Connection, Nov. 29, 2007 Annotated
Highlights from this practical column:
How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook – InformationWeek, Nov. 26, 2007
The insightful and articulate Cory Doctorow writes about the social strains created by Facebook, friending and the awkward insights that social networks provide into our personal lives. Facebook is hot right now, but it could easily cross over the line and become another Web 2.0 has-been if it doesn’t address the risk of users’ lives being seriously disrupted by the openness that it enables.
10 blogging tips from 10 bloggers – iMedia Connection, Nov. 30, 2007
While many of the recommendations in this article are well-known, there are useful comments from top business bloggers as well as good examples of businesses that have applied these sound principles. One tip that surprised me: spend as much time commenting on other blogs as you do writing your own.
The folks at the snarky PR blog Strumpette apparently took issue with my column on Bulldog Reporter this week in which I listed the Five Stupid Reasons to Avoid Social Media. They dressed me up in scarecrow clothes and exposed me for the straw man that I am. I think I’ll make this my next Halloween costume. Just don’t light a match.
You can read their review yourself and see if it makes any sense to you. A free, signed copy of The New Influencers goes to the best interpretation of what the author is trying to say.
As far as I can tell, they believe my piece is opinion masquerading as fact. They’re right that it’s opinion. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. I also think they were offended by the headline, which is understandable. The title was meant to attract attention, and it appears to been successful in that capacity, at least with the folks at Strumpette.
I’m not put out because Strumpette is number 8,062 on Technorati while I’m a lowly 23,128. I actually like the site and think it does a good job of poking a stick in the eye of the Web 2.0 zealots. But character assassination isn’t a great way to make your point. Clear, well-organized writing is, and that is woefully absent in this garbled mess of a critique. I’m more than willing to debate, but I have to first understand what my opponent is trying to say.