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Val Landi's Weblog: Thursday, February 2
The most memorable quote from Naked Conversations, a new book on the importance of blogging as a communications channel by Microsoft’s blogging pioneer Robert Scobel and PR veteran Shel Israel, is in the book’s forward by Tom Peters, who quotes the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who once observed, “All truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third it is accepted as self evident."
The importance of blogs as a new communications vehicle that’s changing the way businesses talk with customers is now in the third, self evident phase.
Even, I suspect, to the dead-man walking species of third-generation old-world print-media types such as Forbes magazine, who were stuck solidly with both feet and head in the second, “violently opposed,” phase of the Web revolution this past October with their signature feature article by David Lyons and its now infamous pull quote:
Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.
(Wow! You couldn't make that up if you tried. By contrast, BTW, Business Week's Blogspotting is best of breed, especially Rob Hof's TechBeat and Fine on Media. I read both religiously.)
Blogs (and soon podcasts) are rapidly changing the way corporations converse with their customers. As the Web is replacing print media and soon TV by moving the power to the readers and viewer (the deer now have the guns), blogging is providing a more niched, targeted, intimate, immediate, and conversational experience.
Naked Conversations is a terrific, fast-paced read with vivid examples of how blogs have changed the fortunes of major corporations from Microsoft’s famous Channel 9 blog, which dramatically softened the company’s image and improved their software developer relationships to the effect of the blogosphere on the meteoric viral adoption of Skype (25 million users in 19 months) and Firefox (25 million downloads in 19 days!).
Scoble and Israel dissect in depth the six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel that accounted for these mind-boggling adoption rates:
Blogs are:
1. Publishable: anyone can do it, cheaply and often
2. Findable: via search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN.
3. Social: the blogosphere is one big conversation, “a global thought bubble.”
4. Viral: blogs are “word of mouth on steroids.”
5. Syndicatable: with the click of an icon you can get inbox delivery via RSS.
6. Linkable: because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to
millions of other bloggers.
My two favorite chapters are “Emerging Technologies” and “The Conversational Era.” Everything never changes, as Scobel and Israel emphasize, but something has changed and blogging has made the world a smaller, faster place. It’s changing the way we communicate and interact, and business is the better for it.
Blog free, or die!
Naked Conversations (published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. $24.95) is available at bookstores and at Amazon.com
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