“Consult. v. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on." —Ambrose Bierce
Consultants are a special breed of business professionals. Their best work is often braided into the fabric of other company products, services and brands. They are most often contracted when a company is anticipating or undergoing change. They are supposed to have special expertise in a definable area and they are expected to care about outcomes beyond their own compensations.
Except for the largest, most consulting organizations, don’t have the money for huge self-promotional campaigns. The may have a website and a Yellow Pages ad. They may sponsor a local, or niche market event, but for the most part, they depend of word-of-mouth to market their reputations. Even if they have lucrative practices, nearly all consultants need to build marketplace if they want to grow their businesses.
Consultants are nearly always early in the business food chain to adopt technology change and adapt their businesses accordingly. They then take this new expertise and deliver it to other businesses, be they dry cleaners or aeronautical design. In short they are new technology enablers.
Consultants are important to blogging for two reasons:
(1) Those who blog are building reputations that make them category leaders, whether that category is defined by geography or niche, and
(2) Consultants are the experts who are now starting to bring blogging into other businesses. Consultants evangelized PCs, local computer networks and the Internet into business environments. They built up the Worldwide Web. In the case of blogging, we believe they will play key roles into a great many areas beyond two current stockpiles of technology and politics.
In Europe and the US., we found more consultants blogging than bloggers in other forms of business. When we used our Naked Conversations blog to request references to consultants who blogged, we received 24 recommendations in 24 hours, many more than when we received after similar calls for bloggers in other categories.
Consultants are wisely using blogs in decidedly different ways than they use their websites The consultant-bloggers gaining the highest esteem, are building reputations, not selling services. Many we spoke to made clear that they started blogs because of a need to express themselves, rather than as a business plan action item. Some go out of their way to avoid self-promotion. Many avoided competitive attitudes and are quick to point out what others in their field are accomplishing. Everyone we talked with seemed more eager to extol the benefits of blogging much more than their personal business acumen.
For some, blogging offers a change in their perceived positions. Most consultants must be content through their careers as attendant lords, standing off in the wings, while their clients enjoy center stage. Now, some are finding themselves enjoying personal levels of prominence they had not previously imagined. Through their blogs, a great number of people are seeing who they are and how they think—and in many cases, they like what they see. This broadly expands both professional and personal possibilities.
While some consultants, may plan for this new prominence, for most it’s more like what happened to Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt at Firefox. They just started something because they had passion and talent. They wanted to share it with a few friends, or like Atty. Ernest Svenson, a New Orleans-based corporate lawyer, he just felt compelled to do it and fame—or something akin to it—followed.
Ernest and Open
Svenson is best-known as blogging’s ‘Ernie the Attorney.’ He has an eye for irony that fine-etch his blogs. At first, he didn’t want us to interview him. “I don’t blog to market myself. It isn’t about self-promotion. I just hate the thought of being seen as ‘Mr. Marketing Guy.’ I think that sort of stuff fails on blogs. Instead, he told us, he writes to discover “insight about myself.” People just want a story: What’s the deal? Just tell me how it works. The best thing you can do, if you want to market on a blog is don’t. Just talk.”
While other lawyers may pontificate on lofty issues, Svenson speaks of simpler things in a wry, self-effacing voice. A case in point was one Christmas Day when he and two teenaged daughters were heading to Panama to visit family, shortly after his marriage broke up. Snow, a rare visitor to New Orleans delayed the first leg of the trip, making them miss a connection and leaving them stranded. They wound up staying the night at the Houston Airport Hilton, taking holiday dinner at the “Kettle Inn—Home of the $7.98-all-you-can-eat Buffet.' You might expect dark and morose reports, but Svenson stayed upbeat, expressing the joy of discovering the hotel’s free WiFi and posting photos of his son’s once-in-a-lifetime New Orleans snowman.
A legendary Macintosh champion, he posted photos of airport monitors displaying the familiar, but still ominous, Microsoft ‘Fatal Error’ warning. You feel for him, but he makes you smile. More important it demonstrates transparency and authenticity. Ernie the Attorney is not trying to sell you legal acumen. He is allowing you to see and know a real person experiencing a real-life vignette. If we ever happen to find ourselves in New Orleans and in need of an attorney, we know where we will turn. We’ve only been face-to-face with Svenson twice, but because of his blog and we feel like we know and trust him.
His blog magic comes from an obvious disinclination to take himself too seriously even when the situation seems to call for it. When we asked him about it, he related yet another personal story. His father was a psychoanalyst, and when he was 11, Svenson snuck a peek into his father’s notebook, where he was stunned to discover the things people told his father. They were so much more interesting than what he heard in every day grown-up conversations which seemed to center on discussions of the weather. Today, he finds himself more comfortable than most in blogging about personal matters.
Ernie the Attorney covers diverse subjects but he doesn’t wander far from the intersection of technology and society. By contrast, with Scoble, he is not always as a technology champion. “Sometimes technology is like spam trying to intrude into people’s lives, making slow adopters feel left out. Mostly, I observe how technology affects people, and often it just adds a lot if stress, even as it promises to make people’s lives easier. It isn’t doing that if people don’t know how to use the stuff.”
We were talking with him on his cell phone. As he said, “Actually, I love technology,” the phone went dead as if on cue to illustrate his point.
When he started blogging in May 2002, Svenson wrote about sports, life, angst over the untalented New Orleans sports teams—almost anything but the law. What with the ‘Ernie the Attorney’ handle, however, blog visitors expected legal commentary. He still avoids discussing his practice, but to accommodate site visitors, he began to talk about how laws change society. He beat the drum for Federal Judge Richard Posner, whom Svenson admires for delivering objective, clear opinions.
While blogging has landed Svenson a few referrals, there’s been no great windfall. While a few individuals have sought him out because of his blog, his firm’s core practice is large corporations. Over time, such enterprises also may turn to blogs to know people prior to contacting or contracting them, but not yet.
Svenson may not have planned it that way, but blogging has boosted his legal community stature. Over 1000 people visit his site daily, including a couple of judges on the New Orleans bench. They’ve asked him to serve on a committee to determine courthouse WiFi options. He’s invited to speak at conferences a few times a year and recently was invited to join a group of prominent lawyers in a new blog called Between Lawyers at Corante, the popular blog publishing conglomerate.
He feels blogging has evolved him. His circle of friends is global. He’s marvels at how much blogging has taught him to listen closer and tolerate opposing views. He used to argue with people who posted opposing comments. Now, he’s learned to do his best to understand. While blogging may help him in his legal practice, on a larger scale “it helps me get through life.”
Collaborating with Competitors
In the last chapter, we wondered if there was room for a second English tailor blog, after Thomas Mahon. Our answer is that the next tailor will need a fresh angle. Being first always helps, and it’s no different in the blogosphere. There are lots of blogging lawyers and the prominent ones keep finding new things to say or fresh approaches.
One of the best known in the category is Atty. Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Law Professor who has become the perceived guru on the issue of intellectual property (IP) in the Digital Age. Does that mean that the IP turf is now staked out, prohibiting other lawyers from addressing it? Actually, no. Blogging invites others into topical conversations and in many cases, encourage collaborative efforts.
We were a bit surprised by the number of lawyers collaborating on blogs, perhaps because we perceive the profession as being among the most competitive. It is part of their business to argue on one side, trying to defeat the other. Perhaps that’s why so many lawyers enter politics.
But in at least one case, we found blogging got three erstwhile competitors to collaborate. Attys. Stephen M. Nipper, Douglas Sorocco and J. Matthew Buchanan are all patent lawyers with a particular interest of blogging’s impact on intellectual property issues. Each started blogs within three weeks of the other, then discovered each other through blogs. In a short time, they found themselves to be trusted colleagues, exchanging email, talking by phone, starting collaborative wikis and eventually launching a podcast. Even though it had only been a short time, they found that they had become trusted friends with a common interest in dealing with how intellectual property attorneys relate to and treat clients. The result is Rethink, a collaborative blog addressing IP in ways that do not come close to redundancy with Lessig.
After all this, the three attorneys finally met at a tech conference where Ernie the Attorney spoke. Since that point, they have merged and focused their wikis to collaborate in greater length and depth than one would want to find on a blog. The wikis have been consolidated and will be developed into a book.
This combination of consulting, collaborating, blogging and book writing, seems to have resonance with a diverse players. Author Godin blogs and frequently speaks at conferences and to business groups. The author-consultant-speaker combo is of course nothing new. At the turn of the new century, two former advertising executives, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, became disenchanted with the one-dimensional broadcast aspects of their professions. They coincidentally discovered they both had been focusing their thinking on the efficiency and power of word of mouth evangelism — not the pushy viral or buzz marketing stuff—but the strategic concept inspiring a company’s best customers to transform into product champions.
They started a business designed to evangelize customer evangelism.
The two took a year to think it through and put their ideas into a book: Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, which they published early in 2002, just before blogging started to accelerate. Creating Customer Evangelists advised six key corporate actions:
1. Continuously gather customer feedback.
2. Make it a point to share knowledge freely.
3. Expertly build word-of-mouth networks.
4. Encourage communities of customers to meet and share.
5. Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite.
6. Focus on making the world, or your industry, better.
The advice predated blogging, but they note that blogging facilitates each of the six points and their more recently started blog, memorably titled of Church of the Customer-How to Live in Customer Heaven or Rot in Customer Hell. They are working on a sequel, which will incorporate the significant enhancements to the topic made by blogging.
They told us blogging is the best tool so far to enable companies to convert customers into word-championing evangelists, a powerful mechanism for true believers to spread the word about what you do and why other people should believe in what you are doing.”
To them, word-of-mouth is a fundamental tenet of “two-way marketing,” which supplants the traditional “command and control” practitioners who declare: “We are the company. Here is the message. Now consume it… It's the boarding school approach. Shut up and eat your meat,” McConnell told us.
Huba added that two-way marketing is essential to evangelism. Word-of-mouth tactics may backfire if they are one-directional. She’s wary of “organizations that set out to do something viral or generate buzz. They often end up coming across as “cheesy.” Quick buzz hits may be a nice temporary hit, but Church of the Customer is looking at a bigger picture. “We are more interested in companies trying to create long-term, sustainable, word-of-mouth. Sometimes innovations (such as Firefox or ICQ) create buzz because they offer obvious benefits. But evangelism should be about matters that are enduring. It’s about changing the world.”
Blogging creates an emotional connection, in ways that press releases cannot accomplish, “providing a forum for a real person to talk and others to engage in that discussion. It's a great way to get feedback—one humungous, knowledge-sharing sounding board,” McConnell said.
They sense that blogging in business has only just begun. While awareness is rapidly building, traditionalist fear, uncertainty and doubt remain in the minds of decision-makers, whom McConnell positions “at the toe-in-the-water stage.” At speaking engagements, McConnell and Huba often poll audiences about blogging. Only 30 percent have heard of blogs, less read them and only about five percent have heard of RSS, they estimate.
The top question they hear: "What do you do about negative comments? “People are scared to death of anyone, anywhere saying something that might be construed as negative. This, of course, is highly irrational. It doesn't take into account that your company has supporters, who have a higher level of credibility and can shoot down unfair and untrue comments.”
As an example, Huba referred to Lutz’s FastLane blog. When he posted regarding GM’s decision to withhold advertising dollars from the LA Times because of negative coverage, an early comment was strongly negative. Over the next day, however, at least 30 customers, voicing support, smothered the voice of the nay-sayer.
“This demonstrated the power of customer evangelism,” Huba said.
They see today’s blogging situation as running a parallel course with business Internet adoption in the middle 1990s. Adoption went slow at first. Companies wondered aloud what they could possibly do with a website, then a tipping point was reached, and virtually every company found they needed to have one. Huba and McConnell see a time when business blogs will become just as pervasive. “I see no reason for any company not to blog—unless they’re sleazy. Every company needs a feedback system and the easiest way to do that is through a blog. It’s almost like a truth serum,” she said.
They also believe blogs will evolve over time from their current status as single-page diaries. Company blogs will become more integrated with existing websites, which in turn, perhaps through RSS, will become something more interactive and blog-like.
McConnell sees a metaphoric interplay with a congregation being smarter than the preacher. The company preacher may study a lot about a certain position. He or she may have a lot of knowledge on a subject, the collective wisdom of the congregation to whom he is preaching is probably far greater than the preacher can attain via his own research and study. So, it's up to the preacher to be able to tap into the collective knowledge then lead his followers to newfound and greater glories. It is a similar perspective to one served up by Dan Gillmor in We the Media: “Collectively speaking, my audiences are smarter than I am.”
McConnell had one parting thought for company preachers and their choirs: Don’t bother with the atheists. Focus on the agnostics, where there’s hope for conversion.
Designing with Grace
We personally know only three people in the design industry, each unacquainted with the other. Each is a fan of Design*Sponge, Grace Bonnie's elegant blog. Bonnie is a furniture design industry consultant, freelance journalist and sometime PR practitioner. Her blog isn’t about self-promotion, but about design—all sorts of design. She uses few words and many pictures. A casual scroll takes you on a virtual tour of the latest innovations in everything from plastic bags and handbags; to wall art and table top conversational pieces; into furniture, magazine holders, lamps and just about anything else being designed and offered to chic and/or elegant homes.
A while ago, Bonnie was just another under-employed Manhattan-based consultant. Now, she is recognized as a design industry “invisible influencer.” A mention in her blog can very well map the shortest route to coverage in the most influential traditional media columns such as the New York Times.
We think Bonnie demonstrates blogging’s power in niche markets where we expect blogging to play an increasing role. People—like Bonnie— with passions for all sorts of subjects are beginning to emerge. Because of the efficiency of Technorati and PubSub searches, it is easy for like-minded people to find niche experts.
You don’t need huge followings to influence a niche, you just need the right readers. Suppose you had a political blog and you only had three measly readers. They just happened to be the heads of government in the United States, China and Russia and each read you every day, trusted your word and adjusted their own courses accordingly. How many more readers would you need to have influence? Now reduce this fantasy down to the size of a business niche and you can easily see the potential for you to influence your key influencers. Bonnie may not end up with tens of thousands of visitors, but her blog has amplified her impact on her chosen niche.
She told us, “my blog has given me the inside track on my industry, my market and audience. I feel extremely in tune with all three. It's a fantastic way to share your point of view, engage in your community and meet wonderful new people all over the world who love the same things you do. I suggest it with my whole heart. It's brought so much joy to my life.”
Another niche marketing example is Alyson Schafer, a Canada-based education and parenting consultant who started a blog at her husband Ken’s urging. She uses it to advocate reforming child discipline methodology. Anxious, at first that she would be just giving away her best thoughts to potential competitors, she took the chance, and experienced an immediate increased demand to speak and consult. Her blog also drew the interest of a publisher (Wiley Canada) who approached her, and over coffee, offered her a book contract.
There are also consultants whose business becomes the blog itself. Marco W.J. Derksen is a marketing consultant who started blogging in 2002 with MarketingFacts, a Dutch blog about interactive marketing and new media. Over time, MarketingFacts expanded into a group blog. Traffic built to over 2000 visitors per day and more than 120,000 page views per month. Heartened by this, he quit his day job in April 2005 to form Upstream a consultancy on how businesses should blog. Derksen is among the first Dutch blogging consultants and announcement of his new business generated coverage in local marketing magazines and newspapers.
He doesn’t think businesses such as his will be news for long. He told us blogging is heating up in the Netherlands and across Europe. But others in good position to know caution that the European heat has not yet reached the ignition point. According to Loic LeMeur, Six Apart’s executive vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and himself one of Europe’s most popular bloggers, thinks business adoption has just begun to yawn and stretch. “All the consultants in Europe, still don't know what to create in order to wake up the market.”
“The gap between the product managers, CEO and the consultants is huge in Europe and changes are slow. Brands and corporations all wonder what to do with blogging and why they should bother,” he predicted that they will come around to see blogging’s benefits when some unanticipated event will motivate thousands of consumers to express themselves on one product, as has happened a few times in the U.S. brands will finally understand that traditional marketing becomes less important than word of mouth.”
Still, for some it’s becoming a living.
Blogging your way out
Andrew Carton may be blogging his way out of the consulting business. He didn’t intend it that way, but that’s how it was heading when we interviewed him in May 2005. He had founded a consulting company specializing in digital entertainment convergence and had launched a successful business blog as a platform to support his ideas in that area. He was doing quite well, but wanted to reach a broader consumer audience, when he “ stumbled upon my Treo smartphone – this was my ‘Eureka’ moment. I had some very specific ideas about the type of information that I thought was lacking elsewhere and that I wanted to develop.” He wanted to make it fun, “not just about tech specs and no “endless babbling on my life with Treo, but a destination where people could learn something while being entertained.” So he started Treonauts and the result is looking like a standalone business.
Treonauts grew in a short while from a blog that initially had a few hundred daily visitors to average over 160,000 unique visitors per month—nearly 10 percent of the number of Treo smartphone users worldwide. The blog name has become a user brand. Treo users worldwide have taken to calling themselves “Treonauts.” Carton is regarded by many as the leading third-party source for information and analysis on the Treo, quoted just about everywhere that smartphone is covered, despite the fact, that palmOne and PalmSource, the companies that make the hardware and software, treat Treonauts as merely a fan site.
Equally rewarding may be the revenue he’s generated. Treonauts partners with leading merchants who have developed co-branded online stores in conjunction with the blog – one for software and one for phones & accessories. In the beginning, revenue was as low as as $50 in the first month, but more recently it’s been as high as $20,000. He estimates he’s averaging about $8,000 per month.
While he still runs his consulting business, he told us, “ I am now almost entirely dedicating my time to Treonauts and the business of blogging – both endeavors which I plan to continue to be involved in for some time to come.” Blogging has not only transformed his business, but his life, he said.
“I am extremely private and from the very beginning, one of the hardest things to do with the blog was to completely ‘expose’ myself to the world. It felt a bit like standing naked on a podium at first.”
It seems to us that his naked conversations are paying off.
Did they or didn’t they?
Despite measurable advances in Europe and in Asia, particularly Japan, the U.S. remains the world center for blogging and we found a number of flourishing U.S.-based marketing consultants. The most successful tend to blog themselves, while offering blog counseling in a mix of services they offer to business. Several made clear that their hearts belong to blogging and they hope their careers to follow. Two of note, are BL Ochman of New York City and Toby Bloomberg of Atlanta, GA, coincidentally a cousin to New York City’s mayor.
At one time, Ochman owned and operated one of the top 100 independent PR firms in the U.S. Like Israel, the Internet’s advent led her to believe it was time to re-tool. She took 1995 off to study the Internet. When she returned, her first client was Just for Men Hair Color. After a political reporter observed presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Robert Dole were each appearing at different campaign stops with different hair colors, Ochman built a website where visitors could view them displaying black, brown, red, blond and gray tresses and vote on which color best-suited each. Three-fourths of voters said both should change their hair colors, a coup for Ochman’s client. “We got a ton of media coverage and I was absolutely hooked on the promise of Internet marketing and PR.”
Her experience opened doors. “I started writing for Internet Day and other online publications and clients came from my articles. That's how I got consulting work from Ford, IBM, Preferred Hotels and other big companies.” These days, she helps companies sell online by writing and optimizing content for search engine pickup. She coaches clients on blogging and performs various functions connected with online marketing and communications. She hopes blogging will become her full-time work, “with maybe a little consulting on the side.” I want to sell more of my own reports, run seminars and build her WhatsNext, her blog's circulation to the point where ad revenue will support it as well as her 4000-circulation newsletter.
She started What’s Next in early 2004, and despite the time it sucks out of her work day, she loves blogging’s ability to expand her access to information. She said several new clients have found her through WhatsNext. “Clients I work with these days understand that they really need help to do business effectively online. They know from reading my blog that I am up on what's happening online and they trust me sooner because they know me better from reading the blog,” she said. The blog has also generates speaking invitations for her as it does for so many prominent bloggers.
And there’s another benefit. “It’s fun. It has introduced me to a lot of smart people. Blogging forces me to keep learning and expands my horizons,” she told us.
Additionally, Ochman’s blog directs traffic to her website where she sells her privately published book, “What Could your Company do with a Blog?” containing 85 examples of companies using blogs in their marketing. Over a four-month period, she sold 300 copies at $97 each directly from the site. She’s also sold 500 copies of an article called “Press Releases from Hell and How to Fix Them” and was planning to update it to include “blog posts from Hell.”
Ochman is not convinced that all business either should or will have bloggers. “It takes more time and effort than might be obvious. Many executives would rather have root canal than write every day,” she observed. (In a painful twist, Israel actually had root canal the day after talking with Ochman. He would have preferred to have spent the time blogging). Also, she said, “I've worked with CEOs who were lousy communicators. Who wants to read their blogs if are going to be close-minded, lousy writers?”
“The businesses that should blog are the ones that are willing to be open and honest. That eliminates a lot of companies who still think that they can control all messages and ignore feedback.”
She also thinks that there are consultants who will or will not blog, based on willingness to share information that could help competitors. “One time someone asked Walt Disney if he wasn't worried about telling so many people about his ideas. And Disney said ‘Those were last years' ideas.’"
Her conclusion: “If you are paranoid about your ideas being ripped off, don't blog.”
Is Blogging Marketing?
“Toby Bloomberg, founder president of Bloomberg Marketing, of Atlanta, GA has focused on online integrated marketing strategies since 1997 “when the Internet was still a mystery to many businesses.” She consults corporate marketing departments and sees blogging as a value-added addendum to the existing corporate marketing mix.
“Blogs add one more tool to a marketer’s repertoire. As with any marketing program, to be effective, blogs must be integrated into a master marketing plan that supports the integrity and positioning of the brand. From a business perspective, are blogs the saviors of marketing and might companies die on the vine without a blog? I think not.”
Her own Diva Marketing Blog shows all the elements we found in successful blogs. It is transparent and authentic, showing passion for subjects she knows. She posts frequently and Googles well. This gets her lots of media interviews and speaking engagements. Bloomberg’s blog has given her a strong brand. Many people refer to her as “the marketing diva,” not a bad credential. She was the 2005 chair for the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Workshop on Blogs, a distinction which we are certain helps her consulting business.
There’s one twist: her passion for blogging is as a marketing tactic.” This was a unique perspective from most people we talked with, but we have the feeling she won’t be lonely for long. In other aspects, Bloomberg seems to sing in harmony with today’s blogosphere. “How much closer can a customer get to a brand than talking with the CEO or the people who are the heart of the brand? The emotional value that is associated with a blog can help inspire trust and credibility that may lead to brand loyalty and increased sales. Blogs can be a powerful experiential marketing tactic,” she told us.
“Companies who do not include blogging, as part of an integrated marketing plan, will miss out on significant opportunities and be at a disadvantage as competitors adopt blogs. Because they help organizations get closer to customers and customers closer to brands, blogs are a powerful tool that few can afford to ignore. Bottom-line if your target audience wants a blog you had better blog,” she advised.
Bloomberg is filled with constructive, specific ideas. For example, to lessen blogging’s time drain, she recommends multiple-author blogs, giving more employees a voice to the customer and the customer a broader look at the voices inside in the company.’ She sees blogging’s eventual ubiquity in the lives of everyday people. “The technology will bring an ease and depth of global interaction that is definitely world-changing.”
She shares the view that any company can benefit by using blogging to open the communications doors wider— at least any company who doesn’t have harmful secrets buried, or enforces a suppressive culture. She told us, “if the company culture is manipulative, employees are not treated with respect and customers are thought of as commodity items, then that company should not blog. That company should close its doors.”
Bloomberg is convinced that blogging’s home in the corporate structure is the marketing department. “Every marketing director I’ve ever met is looking for innovative ways to create stronger customer relationships. Blogging is one of the best tools to accomplish that, so I recommend all companies explore the possibilities. Especially for service and consulting firms, blogs are an excellent way to establish and promote thought leadership.”
She envisions a businesslike evolution for blogging already in motion with a “rapid progression as marketing/business blogs move from a shoot-from-the-hip attitude to a structured and strategic approach.”
While today’s standalone blogs will continue to give news and views very much as they do today, she believes blogs will integrate into larger marketing strategies similar in the “sophistication we’re seeing with email strategies. Marketers will also develop “short-term” blogs that only run the length of a campaign.”
Additionally, she predicts a rapid evolution of niche blog communities where blogs will feel like portals enhanced by additional social networking software to allow real-talk conversations. Blog ads are also in her crystal ball, taking a slice away from website ad revenues. “As people turn to aggregators to read blogs, bloggers who include ads on their sites will have to find ways to drive readers to their blogs. Perhaps they’ll add links or white paper downloads accessible only on the blog. Industries that are shying away from blogs such as healthcare, will find ways to come to terms with regulations and the type of information that they can comfortably disseminate.
It’s only a matter of time before blogging is incorporated into job responsibilities. With one more communication channel accessible to customers, an additional level of customer service standards (how frequently to respond to comments, how to respond) will be created.
Brave New or Same Old?
As our friend Bloomberg knows, we disagree with her on a few key points. Most fundamentally, when we envision business blogging as an integrated component of today’s corporate marketing departments, it feels about the way a shirt feels when you’ve gained weight and try to button the collar and discover. Maybe you can adjust the collar button, and roll up the sleeves—but you really have to go back to the way you were for the right fit.
In technology, two companies have experienced the significant proliferation of blogging into their culture—Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Blogging was adopted differently by the two cultures, but both companies continue to bypass their marketing departments. Some of the most influential bloggers like Bob Lutz, Mark Cuban, Scoble tend to ignore the process and controls exercised by their marketing departments. Ernie the Attorney almost declined to talk with us for fear he’d be labeled “Mr. Marketing.”
But before we bristle and shun Bloomberg’s arguments, we need to step back a bit. So far, blog championship has remained rooted deeply into the technology community where all tech transformations begin. It will not always be this way. In fact, Bloomberg is evidence that the center of the blogging revolution is in fact in motion. It’s very much like the early days when the Internet community’s nexus was in the Unix developer’s community, when freeware was all that “netiquette” permitted was freeware distribution
and Usenet Newsgroups was all the interactivity one would ever need. In those days, it was considered socially unacceptable to even utter the word “advertising” among Internet enthusiasts. But, over time, as technology got easier, adoption accelerated. Business adopted website slowly at first, then faster-and-faster and by the time of the tipping point in 1996, it was hard to recall the look and feel of the 1994 Internet. Many technologists would argue the change was for the worse, but such change was essential for the massive adoption that has become the Internet Age.
Now, here’s comes blogging. Rules of socially acceptable blogging behavior have been loosely defined. But others will come and the rules will inevitably evolve. To date blogosphere newcomers have learned the difficulties of adapting it to “sell,” or to attempt to mislead. But in Japan, e-commerce blogging are doing well, and while many attempts to mislead in the blogosphere have been lambasted, we have little doubt that some deceptions have already occurred. Blogs will change over time. Marketing will find a way to loop itself in. While we shudder at how this may result, there is hope. The fundamental argument of this book is not to eliminate marketing, but to change it into something more conversational.
Bloomberg calls this “corner grocery store relationships,” a thought quite close to our description in Chapter Three when we talked about the way customers used to relate with the corner butcher, baker and candlestick maker.
Where we differ from Bloomberg today is in our perceptions of the collective hearts and minds of today’s marketing decision-makers. In Israel’s 25 years of consulting them, he did not find every marketing director, interested in “building stronger customer relationships,” as Bloomberg described them. In fact, among his reasons for getting out of the PR business was his sense that too many marketing departments had reduced their interest in customers to sticky eyeballs, and columns of spreadsheet numbers. Perhaps Bloomberg has enjoyed the benefit of meeting a better class of marketers.
For a long time, the authors considered calling this book, “Blog or Die,” an idea that the collective wisdom of the blogosphere, convinced us was lame. But, unlike Bloomberg, we do see companies who we think will wither on the vine, and the cause of atrophy will include marketing departmentswho just don’t get the transformational change in progress and continue to do what they’ve always done.
In our vision, blogging changes marketing. Marketing changes from what it has become over the past 50 years, the stuff that Godin calls Interruption Marketing, into something new, more efficient and far more effective, which our friends at the Church of the Customer call, “Two-Way Marketing.”
