“Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”
—Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point
Every few years, something comes along to change the way everything is. In the middle 1990s, it was the Internet. Previously our lives were changed by email, computer networks, PCs, fax machines and photocopiers. The continuum of change extends all the way back through TVs, phones, cars, trains, the telegraph, electricity, the Gutenberg press, perhaps all the way back to when the wheel first rolled out.
Blogging has not yet proven itself to be on this same level of significance. We think it will. It takes a while before revolutionary technologies prove themselves to be such. Revolutions are often declared to be such only when you look back on them, not forward as we are doing. As we write, many business people are still scratching their heads wondering what the big deal is about blogging. The challenge is to finish scratching and start acting befor the same heads get hit on the side with 2 X 4s.
It comes down to the conversation. Conversations are at the essence of the way people communicate, always have been. And we doubt any future technology will replace the essential value of face-to-face meetings. Conversations build trust. We walk into an office, see a photo or a trophy and start knowing something about who the person on the other side of the desk is. We talk about a local event and trust starts to build—or it doesn’t. We like to do business with people we can talk with. Do we get deceived? Of course, we do. But most of us feel, the more we talk with someone, the better we understand what they are up to and the more comfortable we become.
Technically, a blog is a very simple thing. It’s nothing more than a website with content displayed in reverse-chronological order. New items, or “posts” are at the top of the page. Except for team-written corporate and collaborative blogs, site visitors can identify the actual person or persons writing them. Blogs are loosely joined to each other by linking. Find one blog, and you can probably spend hours clicking links from blog to blog to blog – many of which talk about ideas and theories and rants on other blogs or on mainstream media (MSM) sites like the New York Times or USA Today.
Watch enough blogs and you see a worldwide conversation happening. Often this conversation is about products or companies. It’s what someone we interviewed called word-of-mouth on steroids. Blogging is the newest tool, but technology has been extending the conversation for years through email, IM, SMS, social networking software, chat rooms and the like. All of this, as Frank X Shaw, head of the Waggener Edstrom, PR team told us, “the world has become a smaller faster place.”
Blogs extend conversations beyond the limitations of physical showrooms or boardrooms, employee cafeterias or trade conference daises, and includes anyone anywhere who wants to join. Many can communicate with many, on a global basis, in an orderly and constructive manner. Not only do they let real people doing real jobs in the corporation get to speak out, blogs allow them to listen. Just listening goes some distance to solving one of the greatest perceived deficiencies of today’s large businesses or so it seems to us.
This is in marked contrast to what has been going on. To many people technology processes are being used to prevent conversations. You’re a customer with a complaint or a problem and you call up. You get a voice processing system. You go the website and find FAQs, but no person to email, a name of a responsible human. You start thinking there’s a subliminal message: “The person you have reached is not in service and there is no new human at this time. If you need further assistance, that’s too bad. We don’t really care. It’s too expensive for one of us to talk to you and we already have your money.”
Microsoft illustrates how blogs can, at a minimum, soften this impression. The icy image of a heartless monolith is being thawed by more than 1,500 human voices. People are reading words and seeing video blogs that show flaws, typos and grammar errors and that humanizes Microsoft, making its employees seem more human and accessible. Has Microsoft’s behavior really changed? We have no idea. But we do think blogs, in a very brief time, have given developers a sense of a warmer, softer, more responsive company and now if you have some feedback for a product team, say, the OneNote team, all you need to do is go to Google, type in “OneNote blog” and you’ll find Chris Pratley, the guy who runs that team. Post a comment on his blog and you’ll probably get an answer. At least you’ll know the right guy got the message.
That’s what is special about blogs -- they are the best technology, so far, for giving conversations global reach. While blogs remain a far cry from face-to-face, they’ve only just begun. Perhaps in the future, blogs will be holographic, like the inter-global conversations of the future we see on Star Trek. Blogs are morphing as we write, hooking up to maps, letting people comment about sushi restaurants by location, or post about traffic hazards as they occur.
They are already extending well beyond text. So far, their development and astounding adoption rate, have occurred ad hoc. While one person, Dave Winer, is generally credited with starting blogs, on spontaneous impulse, blogs were not invented and planned as were the telephone, PC or the photocopier. They just happened. Over five years, a lot of people, working independently, but cooperatively, made innovations which they shared in the true open source spirit. Over five years, rapid adoption came from the convergence of three factors into one of those perfect storms we so often hear about. These factors came into play simultaneously and by coincidence:
(1) The Tainting of the Enterprise—Corpspeak’s tendency to overstate good news while hiding the bad contributed to the need for a new clean, back channel of communications. But there was a bigger issue: blatant abuse by corporate executives at companies like Tyco, WorldCom and Enron. The top-level improprieties also revealed that our system of corporate governance had melted down. The head of the New York Stock Exchange who did little to respond to fictitious reporting walked away with an overly generous compensation package; Federal prosecutors were slow to act; Wall Street analysts, entrusted to be objective, turned out to be shills for their sales departments; trusted Arthur Anderson was found guilty of cooking books. A great many people already held suspicions about the occupants of big company executive offices and now the media overflowed with confirmations of these suspicions. The perception grew that perhaps all executives in all corporations, overseers and auditors in all governance bodies were no better than organized criminals with white collars and nice suits.
At the mid-level of these large companies, many dedicated employees found themselves twice victimized. First, they were among stock shareholders who had been hurt and second outsiders suspected them of collaborating in these grandiose bilking schemes. Do you remember those faces of dazed Enron employees whose fat 401Ks were suddenly worthless? They found themselves unemployed. And the word “Enron” on a resume was not what it had been.
In the previous chapter, Lenn Pryor told us that he and most Microsoft employees had no idea as to what his CEO and chairman had or had not done in terms of the Federal antitrust case. Yet, to varying degrees all Microsoft’s 56,000 employees were regarded with a cynical eye. Beginning with Joshua Allan and spreading across a multinational organization, 1,500 employees, mostly mid-level, felt compelled to speak out through blogging. Many just wanted to show they were real people doing their jobs with dedication—even when they made mistakes. None of them, as far as we know, used blogs to declare they were not crooks or to discuss the guilt or innocence of their bosses. They just used a channel to show their desire to interact with customers and other constituencies.
(2) Unemployed developers. When the dotcom bubble burst, a lot of extremely talented software developers found themselves with time on their hands to play with the latest and coolest stuff, which just happened to be blogging tools. They hung out in coffee houses that offered cheap or free broadband connection and they built an ad hoc global social network. Via their blogs, they talked about many things, but mostly they talked about how cool they thought blogging was. This salted the word of mouth evangelism that would explode blogging over the next few years.
Some of these unemployed bloggers like Evan Williams started developing tools that would make it easier for more people to blog. He co-founded Blogger which was eventually acquired by Google. About two years later, a young unemployed married couple, Ben and Mena Trott came out with Movable Type, to make it easier for Mena to publish her own blog. In October 2001, they posted an offer for free downloads from a home computer, and received 100 downloads in the first hour, equivalent to Williams estimate of the entire blog universe when he launched Blogger 26 months earlier.
In October 2003, the Trotts introduced Typepad, a weblog hosting service with tools so easy, that, for the first time, just about anyone with average computer understanding could start a blog and it would look like the most professionally-designed website. They formed Six Apart, the largest independent blog authoring tools company. MovableType is the leading blog toolset for business.
(We hope someone writes a book on the history of blogging. It’s a fascinating story involving the convergence of a great number of coincidental factors and colorful players. Since this is a business book, we only have time for this executive summary.)
3. Google—Formed in 1998, the world paid little notice to yet another dotcom, particularly a free search engine service. Times changed. By 2003, Google was debatably the most influential of all online companies. A high-rank on a Google page has become more valuable than what you said about yourself on your webpage or in a press release. Some would argue that a high rank had more enduring value than say, a BusinessWeek cover story. Even if you preferred the BusinessWeek cover, a high Google page ranking would get it for you faster than a PR effort or a full page ad.
Blogging turns out to be the best way to gain Google prominence and has to do with technology. Google spiders out onto the network in search of change. Blogs get updated all the time, while most websites do not.
Every time you post, Google notices the update and that boosts your ratings. Google also pays attention to links—other sites that connect to you. Bloggers who find what you write interesting, will post on their own sites and link back to you. Those links also boost your “Google juice.” In fact, nothing will boost your search engine standing better. Neither a press release nor a full page ad in the New York Times will boost your search engine rankings the way a blog that is updated regularly. If you want a high Google ranking, our advice is: blog and post often. Some business people claim this is an unfair advantage for bloggers. Our advice: your business is at stake so blog early and blog often.
Blogging’s Six Pillars
How it all happened is only relevant of course, if its occurrence actually matters, and in the case of blogging we see five reasons why it matters a great deal. Scoble has previously published these as Blogging’s Five Pillars. We added one for good measure. Blogs are:
(1) Publishable. Anyone can publish one. You can do it cheaply and often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.
(2) Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, author or both. The more you post the more findable you become.
(3) Social. The blogosphere has been called on big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site-to-site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build friendships unrestricted by geographic borders.
(4) Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a news service. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
(5) Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of the RSS-enabled blogs you like into your email software.” RSS lets you see if a blog you subscribe to was updated saving you search time on information that interests you. This process is considerably more efficient than the last-generation method of visiting one website at a time, then each page of that website to see if there have been any relevant changes since your last visit.
(6) Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
Speed of Adoption
According to David L. Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati (a Google-like service that tracks blogging topics, links and trends), the number of blogs has been doubling about every five months since 2003. When Typepad launched, there were approximately 100,000 bloggers. Eighteen months later, the Pew Research Center estimated there were 8.5 million, bloggers, and that 40,000 new blogs start every day. Just a few months later, in May, 2005, Microsoft reported seeing 100,000 new blogs opened on its service alone – per day! While as many as one-third may be abandoned within a year, the overall growth of blogging is among the fastest in history. According to Pew, one-fourth of all people who visit the Web read blogs, and that number is rising at the rate of 60 percent annually.
Today, blogging has become the most rapidly adopted technology in history. Today, in May 2005, more than 100,000 new blogs will start in just one 24-hour period. By the time you read this book, that number will be hopelessly out of date and will undoubtedly be much higher. More than 10 percent of all Americans read blogs, an increase of 60 percent in 12 months, according to Pew Research. Technorati, a company that tracks vital blog linking, says growth is even faster in Asia and the Middle East than it is in North America. The full number of blogs worldwide today is more than 12 million, up from about 100,000 two years earlier in 2003. Half of these blogs are private, a majority of them being used for internal communications behind corporate firewalls.
How many of these blogs are business related? It is impossible to say. As Anil Dash, vice president of business development at Six Apart, Inc., publisher of Movable Type the leading business blog software and hosting told us. No one kept track of numbers when this all started. No one one knew how big it would become, nor how fast it would become big.”
Adoption is accelerating globally as well. In 2004, Sifry reported that Farsi language blogs showed the fastest growth, and in March 2005, Chinablogs reported more than a million Chinese blogs. There are bloggers in every country where internet technology is accessible. Some bloggers post dozens of times a day and their blogs are read by tens of thousands of people; others, such as LiveJournal users, post only occasionally and are content to share thoughts and experiences exclusively with inner circles.
A large number of blogs are password protected, used for invitation-only collaboration in everything from backroom corporate projects to family reunions. Private blogs are growing in popularity in corporations where they are used as a “clean intranet” for collaboration.
Finally, businesses should not dismiss the well-documented popularity of blogging among young people worldwide. They are the next generation of employees and entrepreneurs and they are likely to use the technology tools they know to conduct business as the move into the marketplace.
As far as blogging is concerned, the sea change has already happened. The Genie is indeed out of the bottle, but history would indicate some companies will persist in ignoring it.
So did the village blacksmith.
