We are making some changes based on previous feedback. The Chapter One we previously posted has been spiked. You told us it was over the top, so we dumped it. The current Chapter Two, "The Soul of the Borg," about Microsoft, becomes Chapter One. We are writing a new Chapter 2, that focuses on history and looks at what's different.
Title: Of Bloggers and Blacksmiths
"It began with conversations. Then we got into broadcast media. Now we are going back to conversations. It’s a full circle.”
—Terry Catchpole, The Catchpole Corp.
If you came here expecting to see a couple of middle-aged white guys talking in the nude, you’ve come to the wrong book. This one’s about a revolution that is transforming the way businesses and customers communicate with each other. It’s about stripping out all the crap that gets in the way of understanding and trust between them. Mostly, it’s about blogging, the most powerful tool so far in this revolution.
Naked Conversations is no objective examination, although we have worked hard to make it fair and accurate. We are blogging champions. We believe blogging is not just a wise course for businesses wishing to be closer with their customers, but an essential one. We see the day in the near future where companies that don’t blog will be held suspect to some degree with people wondering if those companies have something to hide or if the owners are worried about what the people who work for him or her has to say.
We’re not kidding when we say there’s a revolution going on. From where you sit, business might seem the same today as it was yesterday. Your PR folk may be shoveling out words, your direct marketing campaigns may be garnering response exceeding two percent returns from people who never asked to be reached—but the stuff, as you probably already know, is getting more expensive and less effective all the time. And between yesterday and today, another 10,000 people probably started blogging (in fact, when we were writing this book Microsoft reported that they were seeing 10,000 new blogs started every day alone on its MSN Spaces blog service). Some indeed are teenage diarists or the politically obsessed, but to an increasing degree, new bloggers are talking business.
Perhaps these business conversations were about your market, customers or products. Chances are highly likely that one of these days, that’s what they will be talking about. We think you would be wise to join in, to thank those who sing your praise or correct errors. But to state your case, you need to join the conversation. By ignoring it, you remain powerless to state your case or to learn by listening to what people who care are saying.
Naked Conversations is about how and why you should join the conversation. It also tells you how to be a success at it—not from the perspective of what tools to use, but from the sense of what strategies to lay in place and why. If you are an employer, we tell you why you should encourage your middle and upper management team members to blog and why they should do it from their hearts, talking about the parts of your business they know best. We explain why it’s good business to protect these employees from status quo guardians who would prefer to control and centralize messages.
If you choose to join the conversation, your company will be the better for it and your customers will be happier. You will develop better products and services by enjoying their collective wisdom and you will save a ton of money by dumping expensive marketing tactics that not only don’t work and annoy the people they target. We cannot promise that blogging will make you, taller, thinner or more sexually robust. Like you, we’ve grown jaded by too many such claims already
What we can do is introduce you to a great many business people who blog—and blog successfully. Much of this book is to simply let successful bloggers tell you their stories. We use their words as often as we can so you can hear their testimony and judge for yourself. Occasionally, we disagree with what they have to tell you, and we’ll respectfully tell you our views. We published early drafts of Naked Conversations on our own blog, and we’ve included a few comments from people who visited and disagreed with us. We owe these blog visitors a good deal. They were the source of many of the stories we tell. They were our fact-checkers and sounding boards. In short, they helped us make this a better book.
Hopefully, some of these stories will apply to you and your business, wherever and whatever that may be. We spoke with bloggers who operate in Fortune 10 boardrooms as well as alone in home offices. We report on Japanese dentists and sports team owners, t-shirt makers and the tailor of some of the world’s most expensive suits. Feel free, if you are reading this in a bookstore, to thumb through these chapters to see if any of these consultants, technologists, entrepreneurs, artisans, restaurateurs, lawyers, developers, start up jockeys and public company executives have something to say about blogging which may be useful to you. If you are online, go to our website http://nakedconversations.com and read the complete interviews, which are often much longer, and you can see exactly what these people said in their own words.
Make no mistake. We are blog champions, but this book looks at the darkside of blogging as well. We examine the risks and restraints—time consumption, legal concerns, negative comments, conflicts with PR, getting fired, giving away competitive information. We also tell why every one of these bloggers—well over 100 of them—will tell you why blogging has been worth it despite their business diversities.
Naked Conversations also puts blogging into “Big Picture” perspective. On one hand, a blog may simply be a tool, but that tool is the most powerful component so far in a communications revolution that has been going on for quite some time and is now reaching its tipping point. The revolution is about the way businesses communicate, not just with customers, but with their entire constituencies—partners, vendors, employees, prospects, investors and the media. Blogging is not the first tool. There have been many conversational technologies before—email, SMS, IM, chatrooms, even the telephone.
All these tools use technology that lets people talk to each other as people talk when they meet face to face. Bloggers don’t caution each other about forward-looking statements and re-use of our intellectual property or that your eyes may bleed of you take a headache remedy when we meet at parties or in coffee houses. We don’t promise each other that whiter shirts make better marriages or killing pavement crack weeds connotes superior testosterone among suburban males.
We just talk to each other. We make grammar errors. We bop from one topic to another and back again. We interrupt each other to ask questions, make suggestions, challenge arguments. We trust the people we know. One blog pioneer calls it “come as you are conversations,” and says he enjoys seeing an occasional typo because it reveals authenticity, showing you are reading the work of a real person.
Conversely, we have grown suspicious of the smooth-and-refined language of official spokespeople. We use terms like “suits” to indicate our suspicion that there is no human inside. Spokespeople use a strange language, we call “corpspeak,” an oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole. “Corpspeakers” talk to people when they want to speak, not when people want to listen. They use ads, press releases, direct mail and websites to reach us. It’s like the Cold War. We buy develop mental filters and technology such as TiVo and spamguard to avoid their technology, then they escalate to find ways to bypass our filters. But when customers want to speak to them, they install technology and bureaucracy like voice processing, website FAQs, uninformed and under-populated remote customer support teams to dim customer’s voices.
Most people take a negative view of marketing. One exec at a global corporation admitted to us that he no longer reads the press releases from his own communications department. “They’re jus a bunch of crap,” he told us. “But we have some really cool bloggers," he rejoined. This contributes to a general anti-corporate sentimentality that we found so pervasive that we heard it in most large companies as often as we heard it in small business and home office situations.
Naked Conversations is about businesses and their constituencies just talking with each other on an equal plain. This is really nothing new. It’s what the butcher, baker and candlestick maker practiced before they either became chains, franchises and superstores or were exterminated by them. But the philosophy ignited in 2000, when a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto touched a nerve in its argument that markets are conversations—particularly among unemployed developers who were about to build blogging’s essential tools and among marketing people who were wondering why everything had soured.
Philosophically, we can’t add much to what was presented in Cluetrain. Nor do we see a need. We think universal truths, as one of its authors says—are pretty much self evident. But in the time since it was published, a great deal has happened. Blogging has begun to saturate businesses on three continents and should not be ignored. When we began this project, much of the business community dismissed blogging as a passing fad. Now, they are acknowledging it with apprehension. This is progress or so it seems to us. Blogging has passed the denial phase and is entering anger. If it follows the same acceptance path of other technologies adoption will soon follow.
Owners and executives we talked with told us they felt the stress that comes from realizing change is necessary and the systems in place are not performing to expectation. A decade ago, some of them felt the same kind of stress as the Web exploded around them. Ten years from today, something new will probably come along. By then blogging will be as old hat as the website has become today. We may even look back to marvel at how quaint and antiquated it was back in 2006.
But we doubt that blogging’s conversations will ever be forgotten. It’s the first technology to enable a simple conversation to go instantly global. It’s the first to decentralize corporate communications, wresting it from the hands of those who historically controlled it and it eliminates many of the geographic barriers that have restricted relationships between people sharing similar interests.
We’re not quite certain what to name this revolution. In writing Naked Conversations, we heard this phenomenon referred to as “conversational marketing,” “open source marketing,” “two-way marketing,” even “corner grocery marketing.” We think they all fit and maybe it’s indicative of the new marketing that a single name has not emerged, that no one has seen fit to brand it, yet so many people understand and care about what it is about.
And in every revolution, there are casualties. In this case, we think those casualties are the proponents of one-way, command and control broadcast marketing. They argue that things are just fine the way they are. There have always been corporate malcontents. We suggest they go home and ask their family members how they feel about TV ads, junk mail and banners. Some will adapt to this change. We do not argue that marketing in itself will or should perish, only the broadcast aspect of it, the part of it says: ‘We talk. You listen.’
We think those who do not adapt may soon face the same fate as the blacksmith in the last century. When he first laid eyes on the automobile he must have chuckled at the pathetic mechanical oddity. He raised a might arm and banged his horseshoe against the anvil with a bemused expression on his face, oblivious to the fact that most his breed would soon go into oblivion.
Our passionate advice is that the time to join the conversation is now. The barriers to entry are miniscule, the benefits great and, oh yes, a benefit often overlooked in business conversations—blogging is fun.
Enjoy Naked Conversations. Go to our blogsite and tell us what you think. We’re always up for a good conversation.
