Internet Changes Everything

Blogging the Market; Part 3

Continued from Part 2

Part 1

Killing Mrs. Hierarchy
By looking in front of the glass, the individual employee weblogs that many have envisioned stretch beyond a strictly professional weblog. Imagine a junior analyst in a professional services firm being uncurbed by the hierarchic axe and posting his objections to an impending human resources policy, thus raising serious questions as to its viability. If he has proper arguments to substantiate his discontent with the new regime, his voice will be heard throughout the entire organisation. And this is a very powerful argument to dismiss.

Organisations ought to experiment with weblogs both internally and externally, testing how personal weblogs tied to individual employees, weblogs centred on projects, and weblogs as a corporate homepage work for them. There is no one size fits all solution, and this is why early experimentation, and gradual roll-out combined with corporate education programmes are crucial in order to identify where weblogs are needed and will make the greatest difference, as well as ensure that employees are equipped to get the best out of this new tool. Yet it is inevitable that weblogs will dismantle corporate bureaucracies, as increasingly more employees will have a say in how the organisation is being run. Naturally, there will be exceptions. Some organisations will implement weblogs as part of a totalitarian idea designed to silence voices and satisfy pure hype. This can be done, and it will be done. If none else outside of the management elite has the capacity to post to the weblog, or criticise other people’s post, then weblogs are bound to be perfect candidates for the new hype-bubble. If weblogs are only deployed to appeal to technophile customers, or investors, no actual change will occur in how communication is channelled across departments, work groups and workers. The same problems will persist and communication bottlenecks will not be resolved. On the other hand, if a corporate-wide initiative on weblogs, with the full support of the top management, is aiming at exploring new and better ways to communicate with the customers, and seeks to establish a platform where unhindered collaboration among workers and teams is fostered, then the stage is set for rapid transformations, ultimately catalysing new corporate structures and bringing about a more collaborative culture.

The conversations in the marketplace have begun
Increasingly more companies are convinced of the commercial value that weblogs can add to their corporate and marketing strategy and have started exploring weblogs’ potential for a spectrum of applications.

Camille Jacks blogs for eCriteria, a web services firm, at http://www.ecriteria.blogspot.com/. The weblog is wittingly titled: “Blog Discussion for Web Service tools integration, improved publishing and refined content”. Unfortunately, there is no link to the weblog from eCriteria’s homepage. Another web services firm, Collaxa, has its own weblog at http://www.collaxa.com/news.blog.html and Collaxa links to it from its homepage, however they’ve changed the URL of the blog for a couple of times and this has resulted in degrading the blog’s listing at Google. Yet another tools vendor, Cape Science, is also blogging at http://capescience.blogspot.com/. This weblog is focusing on developers and there is a link from Cape Science’s homepage to the blog.

Groove Networks has also joined the conversation. Groove attracted lots of attention when its CEO and founder, Ray Ozzie, started his own blog. There is a link from the corporate homepage to a page listing all employees’ blogs as well as other blogs that write about Groove. Ray Ozzie’s commitment to blogging demonstrates a worthwhile lesson that corporate managers and CEOs should better pay attention to. By becoming a blogger himself and encouraging employees to join his ‘blog parade’, Ozzie has paved the way for a collaborative, democratic organisation that places great value to communicating one’s honest opinion with the marketplace. This is the best approach an organisation can follow to reap full benefit out of weblogs. By making weblogs an integral part of Groove’s corporate strategy and organisational life and making them publicly accessible on the Web, Groove ensures that it experiments with the cutting edge of organisational innovation and marketing but most importantly it also lays the ground for a collaborative culture wherein employees are not afraid to speak their minds and become actively involved in steering the company forward to the future.

Figure 10: Groove Networks CEO Ray Ozzie’s Weblog

And this determination to mould technology for effective collaboration and communication is reflected in Ozzie’s thoughts about weblogs and collaboration at Groove: “Our work lives are all about interpersonal connections, our businesses processes are structured into connections amongst people and systems that must be coordinated. What better use of technology than to help people to connect?”

It seems that weblogs are steadily creeping into organisations of all sorts. Demos, based in the UK, is a leading independent think-tank with a weblog that frequently challenges conventional notions on education, politics, public services, and business.

Above, I mentioned that even a company as notorious for hoarding knowledge as Microsoft has started experimenting with weblogs. Apple, not to be outdone, has also jumped on the blogwagon. Ken Bereskin, VP of OSX marketing, is promoting feature enhancements in OSX at his weblog at http://radio.weblogs.com/0100676/. Naturally, the market has responded with AppleScript Info at http://radio.weblogs.com/0103146/ which is a conversation among Apple customers that will certainly prove of immense help to the company. There is also the MacNet Journal weblog, where Rob McNair-Huff, co-owner of White Rabbit Publishing, shares tips and thoughts with his Mac buddies. What started as an e-zine and an email newsletter and went under in 1997, was revived as a weblog in 2000 when Rob could no longer resist to blog and since then his community of Mac friends keeps getting larger. With the help of donations from his Mac friends, Rob hopes to keep his blog afloat.

Jupiter Research also joined the conversation on January 13, 2003. In a press release at Yahoo!, Jupitermedia Corporation announced that its Research division will be the first research advisory firm to offer dedicated research analyst weblogs covering technology and business news and events and offering timely analysis on the latest developments as well as individual analysts’ personal thoughts and essays. Jupiter Research Director Michael Gartenberg commented “the addition of the Weblogs allows us the opportunity to engage our clients in new ways and to share our insight with the world”. Indeed, seven Jupiter research analysts have launched their personal weblogs. There is a page listing all analysts’ weblogs and is linked from the corporate homepage. You can also locate the weblogs by searching for individual analysts from the corporate homepage which takes you to individual analysts’ homepages with a link to their respective weblog. This may sound a bit troublesome in order to find an analyst’s weblog, but it does work.

It only remains to be seen if these weblogs are compelling and engaging enough to carry on the conversation with the market. One way or another, the jinni is out of the bottle and corporate weblogs are springing up everywhere.

Weblog Links Moderate Conversations
Yet, one may wonder why it is important to link to an employee’s weblog from the corporate homepage. Obviously, it’s a matter of commitment and trust. Aside from promoting an employee’s blog, a link from the corporate homepage is a rough estimate of a company’s encouragement toward the employee - blogger. It is as if the company is saying that an employee, who is not necessarily designated to speak on behalf of the corporate headquarters, is nonetheless speaking. And whose musings, thought they may be unofficial and not representative of the shareholders or the top management team, are not to be discarded as unsubstantial or irrelevant. Understanding that “markets are conversations” and that real commercial value lies in conversations that are not moderated or steered from the top, it is as if the company publicly states its respect for its employees and firmly acknowledges that is interested in what they have to say.

Furthermore, links, as they are used in weblogs, are more than connections to scattered bits of information. Although not so obvious at first, links can be used as a tool to moderate space and conversations. Ray Ozzie (2002b) was stunned to find out that:

…blogs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own words. If someone on a blog "posts a topic", others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink. This goes on and on, back and forth. In essence, it's the same hyperlinking mechanism as the traditional discussion design pattern, except that the topics and responses are spread out all over the Web. And the reason that it "solves" the signal:noise problem is that nobody bothers to link to the "flamers" or "spammers", and thus they remain out of the loop, or form their own loops away from the mainstream discussion. A pure architectural solution to a nagging social issue that crops up online.

By glancing through Ozzie’s weblog posts, one would reckon that he’s averse to receiving any commentary, since there’s no place in Ozzie’s blog to leave any comments. But Ozzie suggests that anyone having any comments to make should reply on their own blog, and point back [by linking] to Ozzie’s blog.

What distinguishes this type of moderation is that it does not depend upon a central moderator to decide what is ‘noise’ and what is not; instead it is moderation from the community and is decentralised across the network of bloggers.

Weblog Links Depict Social Capital
Moderation aside, links in a weblog context, are visualising relationships among blog nodes, in effect constituting a varied social barometer against which social ties can be identified and measured as to their relative strong ness or weakness. Ross Mayfield (2003a) has vividly encapsulated the significance of links in order to identify covert relationships:

…weblogs are distinct from the web and web sites. They are really communication tools that are personal and provide diverse link-modes that make it a social medium. Link-modes include:

These link-modes provide a diverse selection of how blog-to-blog relationships can be defined. The etiquette for forming relationships is in flux, and link-modes provide ways of declaring them. The denser the link-mode declarations, the stronger the social ties.

Links and particularly the ways they are been put into use by bloggers, are a mechanism to add a social element to blogging that further amplifies social bonds, in turn unveiling and schematising online communities of bloggers. In this area, the ever-growing contribution of Ross Mayfield has been invaluable. In his Ecosystem of Networks and Distribution of Choice, Mayfield lays the foundations for a thorough and methodical examination of the political economy of weblogs. Based on the premise that not all links are created equal and conversational relationships are not scale-free, Mayfield suggests that our understanding of weblogs will be advanced if we conceptualise them as collaboration and communication tools rather than merely as pointers to stories and online journals in the context of alternative publishing media. Expanding on the basis that “a link to a site you read isn’t the same as a link to someone you know through their blog or someone you actively collaborate with”, Mayfield explains that there are three different kinds of weblog networks.

The largest of the three is the Political Network and can possibly scale up to thousands of individual weblogs. However, the Political Network tends to exhibit economies of scale and is configured around a star system that emerges as a natural outcome of its Blogs-as-mainstream-media character. This, in practical terms, implies that Joe Newcomer is doomed to remain in the shadows of the Andrew Sullivans of the weblog world. Political Networks of weblogs fall prey, in other words, to a winner-takes-all predator effect. Whether it is first-mover advantage, positive feedback, increasing returns or any other aspect of path dependency and network effects, it is obvious that although more and more people join the conversation, their voice does not travel as fast, nor does it travel as far and wide, as that of the stars of the network - the A-list or clique if you like of widely respected bloggers who attract the lion’s share of the attention and thus, manage to orchestrate the conversation.

Of course, this is not to say that commercial opportunities are nowhere to be found in the political network nor that it is saturated from the viewpoint of a market. But it is subject to the same laws that determine the profitability of businesses whose revenue model is based on traffic and eyeballs, albeit being more interactive than most mainstream publications and programmes since the audience can play an active part by means of adding commentary. Herein lies the opportunity for marketers to experiment in ways that have always proven successful with one-to-many publishing and broadcasting media in the past. One can either focus on specialised content whether that is tech gadgets (Gizmodo), law and politics (Glenn Reynolds), politics (Andrew Sullivan), or blogging (Dave Winer, Meg Hourihan, John Robb, Trotts) or cover a far wider range of subjects, but in less depth, in much the same way that the first wave of Web portals did. However, general and broad content seems to offer considerably less opportunities than specialised content. To stand a chance of making money, therefore, as Jeff Jarvis (2003a) and Tom Oren (2003) pointed out, one ‘d better go niche.

The second-in-size network is the Social Network which can possibly scale up to about one hundred and fifty weblogs[18], and is the most typically encountered of weblog networks with most weblogs falling within this class. This network is again built on weak ties, however, bloggers that participate in the Social Network are aware of the existence and contribution made to the conversation by other bloggers that participate in the same Social Network too. As Mayfield says: “The Social Network is based upon functional weak ties instantiated by an investment in time such as conversational inter-linked posts. A Social Network is transactional by nature, with the means of establishing a relationship commoditized. Close to the Law of 150 in scale, a time investment is made for each node to be at least peripherally conscious of the other nodes and the information flow between them”.

The smallest in size is the Creative Network and can possibly scale up to about twelve weblogs. In this network, bloggers are closely connected to each other and it is not rare for them to engage in a highly absorbing process of creative peer production such as collaboratively writing a script, planning to launch a start-up, working on a project as part of a closely-knit work team, exchanging notes and building on one another’s work as part of a group assignment, or simply having a conversation of the kind one is having with his close friends. The essence is that the occurring conversations are personal and not intentionally meant to be of interest to anyone outside of the closely-knit network.

Network
Size
Description
Distribution

Political Network
~1000s
Blogs as mass media

Power-law

(scale-free)

Social Network
~150
Blogging Classic
Bell Curve

(random)

Creative Network
~12
Blogs as dinner conversation
Dense (equal)

Figure 11: Ecosystem of Networks

Source: http://radio.weblogs.com/0114726/2003/02/12.html#a284

No sooner had Mayfield posted his thoughts on the political economy of weblogs to his personal weblog than others started commenting and expanding on his observations. It should be noted that Mayfield argued that these three networks are clearly interconnected and taken together they form an ecosystem, but his analysis at the time was not sufficient to explain how these interconnections occur, nor succeeded in justifying the supposedly existent interdependencies among the three networks. The missing component in Mayfield’ s analysis, Fleming Funch (2003a) wrote, is the role played by the creative individual and the power of a personal opinion (or conversation) which can spread like a wildfire through the information ocean spanning the three networks and expanding exponentially the reach of a specific weblog post.

Figure 12: Blogging Bubbles

Source:http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/_d10/_v10/__show_day/_w2003-02-14#000010-000568

Funch (2003a) proposed a bottom-up conceptualisation of the political economy of weblogs. It all starts, he said, with the individual blogger and the decisions he makes as to what he should write about. The fundamental unit of the weblog economy is thus a thought, an idea taking shape in a weblog post. This idea is communicated to the handful of people the blogger has a personal relationship with and reaches on a daily basis through his weblog posts. At this point, the idea or thought infects the small network and spurs an active conversation. But all these people are probably connected to a larger network of people, some of whom they may already know and some of whom they may not. This is the moment that the idea is about to start travelling from a single network based on strong ties to other networks based on weak ties. From there on, given that this idea, thought or conversation is contagious (interesting enough for other people to want to pass it on), it’s only a matter of time until a social epidemic starts which ensures that the idea is diffused within a much larger network of people than originally anticipated.

Hence, an idea (in the form of a single weblog post) metamorphoses into a dynamic conversation, engaging more and more bloggers in its passage from a creative network to a social network, and as if by magic reaches a stage of critical mass which in turn ensures that the conversation will spread even wider, in a way similar to how epidemics suddenly tip. For this process of diffusion to be clarified, we need to recognise that the blogosphere, for all its diversity and perceived separateness, has the means by which ideas, if enthralling enough, will traverse from one weblog to myriads of weblogs, and in the process be made available to a gargantuan in size audience that only mass media could until now reach.

I have yet to come across a better explanation of how ideas evolve into large-scale conversations and then cross the chasm to the mainstream reaching bloggers and non-bloggers alike than Flemming Funch’s gripping account of the process by which his posts - that he calls blogging bubbles – initially enable people to connect, and at a higher level become accessible by the masses through search engines that act as catalysts for further dissemination. In his words:

My blogging bubbles float up and get spread wider. People I don't know read my blog, and read various people's blogs, and we get attracted to each other. Connections form. It might just be that we read each other's stuff, or we link to each other, or we start talking in other ways. That becomes a good basis for forming new groups that can act together. All of our bubbles, mine and those from other blogs, with the added value of our collective linking choices, will float up and into the cloud of the web. Specifically they will end up in an assortment of directories and search engines, most notably in Google. (Funch 2003a).

Weblog Links Set Bombs
With the “added value of bloggers’ collective linking”, ideas propagate through networks and weblogs are communication tools that further augment the diffusive capacity of ideas. But links do not merely make it possible to choreograph and establish blog tribes; weblog links are also an excellent match with the most popular of search engines – Google. Indeed, as John Hiler (2002a) exclaims, it is “a match made in heaven!” capable of energising the most powerful of electronic bombs: google bombs.

People link freely to bits of information and weblog posts on the Net while in the midst of a constant and ever-growing conversation that uncontrollable as it is, it spirals towards a plethora of directions oblivious to traditional market research. Not only are hyperlinks the definitive element on the Web, but search engines have also become so established and widespread that google is nowadays used as a verb. In effect, Google has become the unofficial heart of the Net. People google for all conceivable reasons. They google for news. They google to locate old friends and acquaintances. They google for products and companies. They google for anything and everything. Googling is like searching a giant decentralised database, a massive archive that spans every imaginable category and then some, and that grows constantly bigger. Unsurprisingly, this has even spawned a new marketing branch, usually referred to as Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It’s no secret that having your page turn up in the top ten results at google (or any other search engine as well) is good marketing. Therefore, it’s far more important that the corporate and employees’ weblogs turn up on a google search than just having a link from the corporate homepage to the weblog. Getting more specific about Google, a parameter that improves search engine listing is links. The more links to and especially from related (in terms of content) sites, the more favourable the ranking will be. Another parameter that Google favours is fresh content. And as we know, weblogs are link-driven sites with constantly updated content. This very fact renders weblogs extremely powerful in unleashing ideaviruses and spreading memes.

But what is a google bomb? When searching on Google for “Internet rockstar” Ben Brown’s website turns up. When searching for “macromedia weblogs” a weblog post of mine comes up even though my weblog is not owned by or affiliated to Macromedia. When searching for “second superpower” it is an essay on James Moore’s weblog. “Second superpower”, as a phrase, is most of the times used to refer to the power of public opinion. Strangely, James Moore’s essay is contemplating the central role that web-enabled communications will play in the future for emergent democracy. One may assume that Google acts in strange ways. Not really. Adam Mathes (2001) explains:

Google always shows you pages that have the exact keywords you are looking for, but also shows you pages that don't have those keywords, but other pages linked to that page with those words.

I first discovered this when searching for internet rockstar, which turned up Ben's [Ben Brown] page. At the time though, he did not actually have that phrase on his page however the legions of teeny-bopper blogger morons who linked to him always used that phrase in their links.

In a bizarre surreal bow to the power of perception on the web, what you say about a page becomes just as important as the actual content of the page. The page must be what other people say it is.

Simply linking to a weblog post by including a specific phrase (link text) is the basis of the explosive material. Of course, for the bomb to actually go off, a considerable amount of people have to link to the same piece of information by including the same piece of text. Immediately following his discovery, Mathes (2001) coined the term “google bombing” and as a practical joke went on to try it out. All the harm that his bomb was meant to cause is returning Andy Pressman’s site as the result on a google search for “talentless hack”. No big harm you may think. When the target is a friend and the bomb is just a prank between friends, yes, it’s harmless and funny.

However, when Matt Haughey, founder of the community weblog MetaFilter, decided he had enough with a company called Critical IP and invited others to link to his post entitled Critical IP sucks or to alternatively link directly to the Critical IP website with the text “Critical IP sucks”, the commercial impact on the company went far beyond that of a prank. The result: whenever one searched for Critical IP on Google, possibly looking for the company’s website, the result that turned up was most likely a link leading all the way back to Haughey’s original MetaFilter post where he explained for which personal reasons Critical IP sucks. I bet Critical IP was not much amused.

Flemming Funch (2003a) writes about his own personal experience with a google bomb. His target was Nestle Corporation:

A rather random example is that I wrote a couple of little blog entries about Nestle doing some not very nice things. Now, if you do a web search on CNN or on Google on "Nestle sues Ethiopia", I'm number one. If you just want to know about "Nestle Corporation", I'm number four, before several of Nestle's own sites. Nestle last year made 5.5 billion dollars in profits, but yet you and I, by linking a bit to each other's posts, can compete very well with their web presence and influence public opinion. Not me, but us. It wasn't even my own info I posted.

What does this mean for business? First of all, corporate decision-makers should not dismiss weblogs as hype. Weblogs inevitably influence what you see when you search on Google. And this is not likely to change now that Google acquired Pyra Labs, the company behind the popular weblog technology Blogger and Blogspot. “More than most Web companies, Google has grasped the distributed nature of the online world, and has seen that the real power of cyberspace is in what we create collectively. We are beginning to see that power brought to bear” (Gillmor 2003a). What does this mean for Google? “The company is already blogsmart and will get even smarter” (Jarvis 2003b). What does it mean for bloggers? “Our influence will grow and grow smartly” (Ibid). Regardless of whether the business world likes it or not, weblogs have influence disproportionate to their traffic, and this enables them to compete head-to-head with heavily financed corporate-owned mass media in the battle for information and dis-informaton alike. Maybe it is a sort of “mob justice”, as John Hiler (2002a) says, or the revenge of the nerds as the most niche of media – weblogs – are capable of reaching a mass audience through the heart of the Web.

Marketers assumed that the same process of linear targeting at which they have excelled, would be similarly employed by people when searching online. This assumption is entirely flawed. Cyberspace and search engines turn this linear marketing model to its head. Ironically, while the industrial – age interruption invented mass media and mass marketing to turn customers into consumers; weblogs interrupt the mass media messages by disturbing the electronic waters with a conversational filter that turns passive consumers of corporate information back into customers.

The End of the Destination Website
Participation websites will be part of the next stage of the Internet's evolution. Destination websites are in danger of becoming the seaside piers of the information age: vast, beautiful and elaborate constructions, condemned to a brief life. (Leadbeater 2001)

In 2001 Charles Leadbeater wrote that “the era of the destination website is over”. What is a destination website? 99.9 percent of corporate websites are destination websites. Some of them are beautiful and well organised. A few of them make it easy to find what you are looking for. For the rest, usability has become the elusive quality. Whenever consultants are brought in to find out what is going on and people are not so keen on buying stuff, they do a usability analysis and almost invariably conclude that usability, user interface, information architecture and navigation are to be blamed for the apparent lack of consumer enthusiasm. As soon as they create a website that consumers find easy to navigate, people will start buying and managers’ headaches will go away, consultants tell managers. But what they don’t tell managers is that all corporate websites are faceless; the embodiment of a barren corporate land depicted on a nice looking web template. One thing the dot.com bomb has taught us is that people will not buy things just because things are available for sale. The Internet and the e-commerce explosion have not turned us into shopping maniacs, as many dot.com speculators would like us to behave. It’s true that we cannot do without the occasional bouts of shopping. Yes, we still buy things online but we do not get online just for the sake of buying stuff. We are there to communicate, explore and find new things and perhaps better ourselves in the process. The Internet is neither a shopping paradise, nor a giant news database. It’s all this and much more. It’s a shopping paradise, a living news database, a rock concert, a sex chamber, a cryptic game, a living conversation, a whirlwind of cultural change, and much much more. It is a mad, mad world. Just like the one we physically inhabit, albeit slightly different in that it has its own rules. One thing that has not changed, although we sometimes refuse to accept it, is that commerce essentially remains a human activity negotiated between human parties. Just like it always has been. Just like organisations.

Organisations are not solely websites or factories or design and marketing gung-ho outfits. They are processes[25]. Delving more deeply into this rather philosophical pondering on the grand scheme of organisations, organisations are nothing more that a set of human-made, human-managed processes developed for dealing with humans and coping with the complexity that humans inevitably manifest and produce when they interact. So, processes deal with stuff that humans make, think and communicate. Some processes are based on mental models and rules whereas some others are based on physical models and rules. But processes are essentially human since humans are the focal point. The only question is whether these processes will be managed in a sequential, linear, pyramid fashion or in a weblike manner modelled on the emerging form of social organisation. Having a weblog as the corporate homepage is not likely to appeal to your customers if there is not a sense of a real person behind it. It’s not just a matter of embracing weblogs: weblogs are not a panacea to all corporate ills. Weblogs are just a tool to connect with the marketplace. Weblogs can help us “achieve a greater "return on connection" from employee, customer, and partner relationships” (Ozzie 2002a). From there on, organisations will find themselves on a steep learning curve: they will have to learn again how to speak and listen. As Ray Ozzie, Chief Executive Blogger of Groove Networks says: “lots to learn. And through this medium, perhaps we'll all learn something in the process”. The actual gains stem from being connected with the real marketplace; not the one you think as real – the one that is real.

Conclusions: What lies ahead
It would be naïve to assume that business managers will turn to weblogging as the solution to their ever-growing pains with customers. Or entertain the possibility that organisations will dissolve entirely into virtual networks just because software enabling human participation and augmenting human communication regardless of geographical location will be in place. The revolution will not come overnight. In fact, I believe it will not come at all. The transition will be as silent as email, mobile telephony and instant messaging. But it is poised to be similarly disruptive. Nowadays, there is no doubt that most people in organisations rely upon their mobile phones and email as their primary means of communicating with their fellow workers. In much the same way that mobile telephony was originally regarded as a fad or as an unnecessary techno – gadget that would only enhance one’s ego, rather than promote tangible business ends, weblogs will slowly but gradually infiltrate offices and work groups.

The case for weblogs is irresistible: massive productivity gains through far more efficient communication, collaboration, and knowledge management. More efficient communication and collaboration because people will no longer worry that their inboxes have become practically unusable due to thousands of incoming emails. No more silly bandwidth problems of the type “your inbox is full, you are advised to delete a bunch of emails and attachments”. With weblogs, files will be there when you want to download them and conversations will be traceable when you want to be reminded of what ensued a year ago during that discussion you had with your now-gone team mates. Email is fine but its contribution to a repository of organisational memory is short – lived and limited. We communicate better with stories. And discussion threads at weblogs come much more closer to real conversations and stories than piles of disparate emails. Email is superb if you just want to alert someone, but for discussions populated by more than two people, it is severely limited in effectiveness as it becomes increasingly hard to track the flow of emails and make out who’s saying what and to whom. From data, databases and information piles to knowledge management through conversations.

In much the same way that weblogs are bound to lubricate the communication flow within organisations, marketing has a lot to learn from weblogs too. Marketing does not have to be intrusive, and it neither has to be about bombarding people with hocus pocus and other PR gibberish. The one-to-one marketing that so many marketing revolutionaries have envisioned and still advocate is not likely to come from technologies that track every single customer click and automatically customise the content and look-and-feel of the website accordingly. Neither such one-to-one marketing will stem from the farcical anecdote that opt-in marketing is, and from emails whose subject line reads “We are asking your permission to market to you staff you probably don’t need”. Mind you, one-to-one marketing could be exactly that: a marketer and a customer. The marketer writes and says things that are of interest to him, and the customers, if they want, can talk back. No permission needed. Enthused by the spark of the marketer, the customer should be the one who ignites the dialogue, rather than the other way around. No more thinking about how to cut through the clutter, and no more money wasted in prime-time marketing bombs. In the always – connected marketplace, you don’t have to look for the market, the market will find you instead. So, be prepared. Because when the market reaches out for you, what you are going to say is what matters. You can’t just spit the multi-thousand dollar marketing message out and expect that the market will say “Oh, yeah, this is the message. OK then”. Messages were the ideal marketing vehicle in the disconnected age. Back then, prime-time was so expensive that you just could not afford to say anything other than a few words. Besides, customers had no means of speaking back, so what would be the point of actually speaking to them? But now, in total contrast to the age of mass numbness, you have to speak, and you are expected to speak. People will not aggregate around your website because of your “message”. But they will come if what you say makes for a good conversation.

Another good reason for jumping on weblogs is because weblogs are user-centred rather than IT- centric. Until very recently, whenever Jane from the marketing department had an idea about something that should be on the corporate website, she had to go and tell the IT department and they would take care of it. Or they wouldn’t. Most of the times, she wouldn’t even bother telling them. Maybe she couldn’t understand them or it was the other way around. The only other alternative she had would be to tell her superior officer or the management board and then they would in turn tell the IT department. Who said that hierarchic power relations don’t work? The point is that she knew nothing about Web content management systems, and programming Internet applications, and she had no appetite for learning. But now, and thanks to weblogs having replaced the old boring corporate website, she can easily post her thoughts and ideas within a minute. That’s why weblogs are huge: they take the power out of the IT department and the webmaster's hegemony and hand it over to where knowledge really is - to the individual workers who are knowledgeable enough and know how to speak with a human voice. Now, organisational structure loses its historic role of managing power relations at a distance, and as a result the organisation becomes truly hyperlinked and power shifts to where knowledge actually resides.

Epilogue
James Wolcott wrote in “Blog Nation”:

This is what blogging is all about, a one-on-one unmediated relationship between writer and reader paradoxically made possible by the most mass of media, the Internet. Each blog is like a blinking neuron in the circuitry of an emerging, chatterbox superbrain. Resistance is futile. WE ARE THE BLOG. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED.

I would make a minor change to the above so as to read:

This is what blogging is all about, an unmediated relationship between people in the market. Each blog is like a blinking neuron in the circuitry of an emerging, chatterbox superbrain. Resistance is futile. We, the Argonauts, the customers, the marketers, the 8-7 workers, the nudists on the late shift, the academics, the journalists, the professionals and amateurs, we the people are the blog. YOU CORPORATE BUREAUCRAT, STANDARDISED VOICE IN THE MARKET WILL BE ASSIMILATED OR ANNIHILATED. THE CHOICE IS YOURS: SPEAK WITH A REAL VOICE, TELL US A STORY AND JOIN THE CONVERSATION OR BECOME DEFUNCT.

views expressed by other people. In short, a typical weblog does not make recommendations but nonetheless Amazon’s system is essentially a weblog. For more information about the Amazon system, see Linden et al. 2003.

January 13, 2004 at 10:34 AM in Corporate Blogging | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home