“ We are all so different.” —Dr. Alfred Kinsey
“We are all alike.” —The 14th Dali Lama
English today is the dominant language of business blogging just as it is on the Internet. As we wrote this chapter, signs of business blogging life were stirring in other languages including Spanish, Italian, Russian, Finnish, Danish, Estnian, Chinese and Korean. But we could only find business blogging ecosystems flowering in two other languages —French and Japanese. At first, this puzzled us. For example, we had expected Germany, the most populous European country and a leader in engineering and IT would be prominent.
By contrast France, with 60 million people, had over 3.5 million bloggers in July 2005, and many of the most compelling business bloggers, including some of the highest ranking business leaders. Loic Le Meur, one of several senior executives from Six Apart, Inc., publisher of Movable Type and Typepad, assisted us heavily in researching this chapter, making contacts for us and even providing some much-needed translation assistance. Le Meur runs Six Apart’s European, African and Middle Eastern operations. He is also one of Europe’s best-known bloggers, writing in both French and English. He summarized the nation-by-nation disparities in blog development in a single word—culture. “Some countries are conducive to the openness required in a successful blog. Others are less conducive,” Le Meur told us. “We French are accustomed to expressing our thoughts as individuals out in the open. So are you Americans. On the other hand, Germans tend to be more reserved.”
As Le Meur escorted us through our virtual tour of the European business blogosphere, we found, as we did in English speaking countries, we found the most interesting blogs in very large and small companies. Among them the blog of Michel-Edouard (M.E.) Leclerc, one of France’s best-known and most popular business leaders,
Leclerc is president of the Association des Centres Distributeurs E. Leclerc, a co-op association of about 600 small and large retailers, mostly in France, but throughout Europe, particularly Italy. Its strategy is to negotiate tough and in volume with suppliers to keep customer prices low. The association was established in 1949, by M.E.’s father Edouard Leclerc, who owned and operated a single retail shop in Brittainy, then decided to organize like-minded retailers across France. The organization imposed rules of operation including voluntary limits on markups. The senior Leclerc’s ideas were well-received by retailers and even better received by retail customers. The association includes food markets, restaurants, gas station, pharmacies, travel agencies, jewelers, clothing stores, dry cleaners, toy stores, shoe repair services and sundry other merchants. There are few French citizens who do not shop at one or more E. Leclerc association stores and the popularity of the association is as immense with the general public as it is reviled by high margin competitors.
According to Jeff Clavier, a French citizen, who founded Silicon Valley-based SoftTech Venture Consulting and blogger. “The whole idea was not for the Leclerc to become a super-rich billionaire like many association competitors, but to give the people the best products at the lowest prices.” There are definite political implications. The co-op association has become a low-cost threat to high margin monopolies and the urbane, Sorbonne-educated Leclerc has become the face and voice of the organization. He has campaigned effectively on behalf of consumer rights, playing the driving role in several acts of consumer legislation. The popular Leclerc was mentioned so often as a candidate in the last presidential election that he had to go on television to declare he would not run.
He holds a degree in economics and from his blog, it is clear that his interests are on global human and economic issues. You won’t find him directly promoting E. Leclerc agendas. In fact the blog is run separately from the association and he uses it to present his insight and opinion on politics, French, European and global economic issues. the rights of the handicapped, helping tsunami victims (the Leclerc organization donated over two million euros), French hostages, a poetry book he admired, overproduction of French wine and the quixotic nature of the Italian economy.
When Leclerc started blogging in early 2005, the French blogosphere he was quick to criticize it, among them was Le Meur who put up a long post in the form of an open letter. "Mssr. Leclerc, he wrote, “ I don't know you and please don't take this personally, but here is what you would get from a real blog rather than on this website that you have made and call a blog. If you don't filter comments, you will get dialog…” listing the flaws, such as no RSS feeds or Permalinks one at a time.
“I was hoping somebody who reads my blog could reach Leclerc,” he recollected, but doubted anything would happen. Two days later, he was driving in Paris when his cell phone rang. “I hear: ‘Hey Loic, this is Michel-Edouard Leclerc’s office. When can you meet with him?’” In one of those Marshall McLuhan moments, Jeff Clavier, sitting in Silicon Valley, had read his friend Le Meur’s post and showed it to his wife, Bernadette, who had worked for Leclerc for 10 years. She forwarded the post to her former employer—along with Le Meur’s phone number. Leclerc directed his assistant to call Le Meur who managed not to drive off the road when he received it. Less than 48 hours after panning one of France’s most influential luminaries, Le Meur found himself sitting across from him in the latter’s executive office. “Well, explain to me how a blog is so different from a website,” Leclerc asked him and to prove his point, Le Meur went to Google and typed in Leclerc’s name. Le Meur’s recent negative posting came up first. Leclerc stared blankly at the Google screen his jaw slightly dropped: "How did you manage—on a search for my name—to get your name to come out above mine?’ I told him that because he didn’t have a real blog, he had no Google juice. But if he converted this thing he had started into a real blog, his name would eclipse mine”
Amazed, Leclerc paid subsequently began incorporating blog functionality. Not only did he begin accumulating Google juice but also blogosphere authenticity. Over the protests and mutterings of his marketing advisers who feared negative comments, Leclerc now lets visitors post their thoughts unfiltered. “I was really impressed with Leclerc, more than I thought I would be. He showed me a paper diary where he had has made one entry every day for 20 years. He was already a blogger. He just didn’t know it and the tools were not yet there. This is now reflected on his blog. Leclerc wants to be closer to the people. His blog seems to be the perfect tool for this.” Adds Clavier, “Despite being one of the most famous, and visible French executives, Michel-Edouard has remained very approachable and genuine. That's why I am not surprised that he got the 'blogging thing' so quickly. His blog is an enabling platform for larger scale genuine conversations.”
Both his diary and his approachability came across in our conversation with him. He told us that he takes his paper diary with him everywhere he goes as he always has, and the blog is merely its extension. The diary, he told us, corresponds to two needs. One is personal: it is my way of structuring my thoughts, organizing my ideas, taking the time to have a clear vision. The other is professional: Every day I conduct meetings with our executives and company managers, I take part in about 10 conferences. I am constantly questioned about the actions of my group and how I view the company, the economy and social relations.
In order to save energy and capitalize on already formulated answers, I decided to create a personal site. My colleagues, younger than me and more expert on the Internet, convinced me to blog in order to be more interactive and more in line with the current events.”
He’s learned and changed because of the experience he told us. “Blogging is thinking in front of others. It is accepting that you are open to their comments, their suggestions and criticism.” This exhibition in front of the public leads to two attitudes: First, humility. You need to be prepared to make amends, to review an argument or reformulate it. Also, you need to be intellectually strict. When you lead a huge company, you create expectations that you did not want to create. My blog is in the public debate. It is up to me to be as credible as possible, coherent and not to contradict what I say in my blog with the company’s actual practices.”
He said that when he first started blogging it felt like an intellectual game, but over time, a sense of responsibility sets in. “All these comments ultimately constitute a kind of social recognition. With the increase in audience, you become a little bit of an addict. It pleases your ego. And it is here that you measure your responsibility. If you don’t take care, a blog can not only be a tool of influence (which is good) but also a tool of manipulation. I personally consider that due to the fact that I am well-known, requiring me to be even more responsible in what I write. Of course, that prevents neither humor nor polemic,” he said.
Although he finds unevenness in the quality of comments he receives, he told us they “oblige me to polish up my arguments. These are good tests before I take the floor at conferences. I was, for instance, very fond of reducing the VAT [ European Community Value Added Tax] for products that most respect the environment (organic, fair trade, etc.). I thought that would boost their sales to the detriment of products that pollute more. But comments kept insisting the idea would be nearly impossible to implement and I moderated my position.” Another time, Leclerc used his blog to take on a member of French Parliament who proposed banning merchants from bagging up buyer’s goods in non-biodegradable bags. Leclerc suggested recyclable bags as a more pragmatic alternative...” both cases,”been supported by many bloggers in their comments. So, the member of Parliament moderated his proposal.
In both cases, blogging had a moderating influence,” he asserted.
Leclerc told us he did not wish to be “a slave to his blog.” He reads all comment each morning then reserves a half-hour daily to blog. He spends much time traveling throughout Europe and disdains bringing a computer along. Instead, while in transit by plane or train, he hand writes his blogs, then uses a Dictaphone for his secretary to transcribe and post. On week ends he does his own entries, but, “I enjoy concentrating on the content more than sitting in front of my screen online with other Internet users,” he said. While his blog began as a personal experiment, the Leclerc Association is experimenting with ways to incorporate blogs internally and for improved customer interaction with customers, with tests inspired by “our friend Loic Le Meur.” He said he thinks blogs will prove superior to opinion polsters in helping the Association understand what customers want. While, the blogosphere often talks about companies becoming more transparent, Leclerc observed that customer comments made them more transparent than do survey results. Internal bogs will examine “best practices” by category. For example, discussing among Association grocers the best way to display fruits and vegetables to allow customer interactivity.
We asked him about European business blogging which he described as being in the “crazed” early phases and where comments can be harsh. “There's a lot of zapping. But the phenomenon already regulates itself and you see the implementation of a kind of market segmentation. There are the blogs of young people which, better than chat, enables them to exchange ideas, music and to create a more intense associative link (around sports for instance). In the world of companies or in the environment of arts or culture there are also a lot of corporate initiatives.But what I see is that apart from corporate blogs or festivals, the managers, the animators or the artists create in parallel their own blogs dissociated from the first ones. Blogging enables one to have a greater humanization of communication.
He seemed to share the Naked Conversations view of blogging’s far-reaching implications to both business and society in general. “The communication systems in our modern societies have multiplied the information possibilities. Paradoxically, they have institutionalized them. Information has become merchandise—a consumer good. You take it or not. You adopt it or you don’t. The link between the reader and the media is passive. There is no mutual enrichment. With the blog, every citizen can question a politician or a company manager. You can ask him (or oblige him) to justify his remarks or to argue with him. Blogging gives the opportunity in a certain way to go back to democracy because, on the net, you don’t care about social hierarchies and statutes. Every employee or consumer can question me on my blog. At the same time, they can also understand that behind my function and my position there is a man who also has passions, training, a culture that is not limited just to my job,” he said. However, he added, “Be careful. The model has its drawbacks. If the brands and companies invest in their blogs for commercial purposes, by skillfully hiding their objective, blogging can end up discredited in the same ways that we have come to mistrust big commercial TV channels or newspapers.”
Polls that came out during our research on Leclerc indicated that he would be a front-runner if he chose to run for French president. We wondered if we were interviewing the next head of state and could not help but insert it into the conversation. “I like public debate. I have a passion for political questions. With my job, I happen to be at the head of an extraordinary observatory of social life. I am managing a network which works with 8 000 industrial suppliers, around 30 banks and all the administrations. My group is located in several European countries and I buy goods everywhere in the world. Thanks to these links, to our networks and to the work of our executives I have gained a certain vision of society. And I try to enrich the public debate,” he began. “You should not leave the political expertise only to political professionals. I personally made the choice never to be at a loss for words and to say what I think. This is why my fellow citizens choose me by an overwhelming majority in the opinion polls. They like people who spend their energy for the society. They applaud a certain kind of courage. And I am extremely flattered by this,” he told us.
But, as we began to anticipate a news scoop on Le Monde, we learned he would rather blog than be president.
“I think I am more legitimate and efficient in my economic activity. Within 20 years, with my group, we succeeded in changing the French legislation which was quite dusty. We obtained a court a decision against the oil monopolies. Thanks to our actions, there is free competition for cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and branded textiles. I did a lot for the practical transition to the Euro currency and [lowered] prices. One of the major questions today is the environment and the sustainable development. I fight for the development of fair trade, for energy conservation and for a reduction or recycling of packaging. If I were a Member of Parliament, maybe I would be heard a little bit. But as a manager of a company who expresses himself with all the strength of a commercial network I can experience ideas and make them much more credible. Yes it is on the practical level that I feel myself the most efficient. On my blog, like elsewhere in all types of media, I can convey more positive ideas than if I would have been mayor of a city or Member of Parliament representing a district.”
For us, the Leclerc interview was a highlight of the Naked Conversations experience. We are in no position to comment on French or world politics, but we wish we saw the vision and humanity displayed by Leclerc in the people who stand for election there, in our own country, or anywhere else for that matter.
Golden Parachutes [sbhd]
Leclerc is not the only high-profile French executive to blog. Pierre Bilger, former chairman and chief executive of publicly traded Alstom, the beleaguered French engineering company began blogging after he retiring from the company he headed, which required a financial bail-out from the French government to survive. Bilger had been criticized for spearheading acquisition of a Swiss company which proved to be an expensive pill to swallow. He consequently returned a $4.6 million severance package derided as a golden parachute. In his first post, he wrote that he had been silent on issues concern for too long. “Now I am free to speak his mind,” he declared, and he does so with near-daily frequency on issues of business and economics.
Le Meur estimated there were at least 10,000 French business blogs in June 2005, with adoption rates accelerating in large and small business organizations. One of our favorite small business stories is about a company that might not exist without its blog.
At the Heart of The Strawberry
La Fraise, or “The Strawberry,” is the passion child of Pierre Cassard a self-educated former web games and communities developer based in central France near Lyon. He’s just crazy about t-shirts, rarely wearing anything else on the upper half of his body. To him, t-shirts are a “tremendous way to express one’s self, not just in designing them but in wearing them. T-shirts allow you to convey a message, or to stand out from the crowd,” he said.
But in retail shop after shop—you see the same commercially churned, mass-produced piles of folded cotton—hardly the stuff of free expression or passion. Convinced he could do better, but not quite certain how, Cassard decided to do start his own online T-shirt shop and simultaneously, his blog. Originally the blog, he confessed, was to feel less lonely as he embarked on his new endeavor. He would just share his experiences with anyone who might be interested. He quickly discovered there were more than a few interested people and they were more than a little willing to share their feelings on t-shirts. They started sending him t-shirt designs. Others commented on the ones they did or did not like. Each consecutive month the numbers grew. When we spoke with him in May 2005, his most recent monthly tally was 300,000 visitors, viewing two million pages. He averaged about 30 comments per post and a recent one drew an astounding 345.
Said Cassard, “I quickly realized how important it is to have a human presence in an online shop. A lot of big shops do not have this. People get the impression they know me. Actually they do. I talk about my personal life, my family, and probably they feel more confident that I am trustworthy.” The blog connects all pieces of his operation. Readers submit design concepts for new t-shirts, then other readers vote on which ones they would buy if produced. When a design musters enough votes, Cassard compensates the designer with 300 euros (just over $350), and produces and ships them the day they are ordered, mostly to French customers.In May 2005, his average monthly sales were between1500 and 1800 units. Revenue averaged about 36,000 euros (about $42,000), with growth continuing to trend upward. If this is a cottage industry, it is becoming a very large cottage that will soon be able to afford tennis courts and a swimming pool in the yard.
Le Meur often references La Fraise as a proof point when presenting to Europe’s largest companies. “Often, they laugh at me. They say, ‘we are this multinational corporation and you bring us this t-shirt guy?’ I say, no, wait. Before you throw me out of the room, our T-shirt guy has figured out how to put the customer at the center of everything, rather than out on the edge. The customers have more product ideas than he does and he prospers by listening to them. They decide what he manufactures and markets. What could this strategy do for you?”
Sometimes they still throw him out of the room. But sometimes they want to hear more. He advises those who will listen: “If a blogger has enough passion, the blog becomes the central place on the Internet for that topic. Companies understand the importance of Google, but they don’t yet get how blogging fits into that. If the corporation doesn't do this for themselves, then someone else will. That is why Andrew Carton’s Treonauts blog (covered in Chapter 5) is so much more influential on the Treo company websites and their marketing materials. They can no longer take it away from him.”
Misdialing the number on Nokia
For better or worse, bloggers and traditional journalists seem to relish when the other gets something wrong. Score a big one for bloggers, who helped launch a new smartphone. Stephen Baker, a Businessweek technology correspondent becomes a case study for how traditional media’s claims to superior fact checking needs some fact checking of its own. In June 2005, Baker published a “Case study of a marketing blog: Nokia’s 7700.” Except the phone in question turned out to be the Nokia 7710, not the 7700. But that was just the headline. Baker went on to misplace seeral other shots at bloggers and Nokia.
“Look how Nokia is using a blog to promote a new phone. It's a textbook example of how corporations are bending the blog format to fit their needs. You could make a good case that this site, strictly speaking, is not a blog. It's invitation-only (I tried to register and failed.). It's really just a bloggy wing of a very slick Web marketing effort by Nokia.”
The blog in question, however, turned out to belong to Jacques Froissant, a well-known French independent blogger who has no affiliation whatsoever with Nokia. And the password in question was to prevent comment spammers from mucking up Froissant’s site and getting in for us was a snap when we tried it.
In fact, Froissant was one of about 500 bloggers who agreed to have Nokia loan them the new smartphones if they would agree to post impartial reviews—pro or con on its heavily promoted new phone. Loaner programs like this are nothing new. Auto makers and computer manufacturers have been conducting such programs for their reviewers for years. Nokia’s innovative twist was asking the tech-centric bloggers to try out the phone. Froissant was among the majority who happened to love the phone and he emoted great passion in what he wrote. We think Nokia deserves credit for innovation and we assume such loaner programs will soon become commonplace. A Nokia spokesperson said the program was “a successful test” and the company plans to use it more extensively with future products.
When all this was pointed out to Businessweek’s Baker, he was nonplussed. He opted to print neither an apology to Froissant, nor a retraction, but inserted a note into his online column: “ [I] received a message from the blogger who runs that site. He says Nokia has a V.I.P. program but that he set up the site on his own. My mistake. I'm leaving the post in, because it has some interesting traffic.”
Baker stuck to his concluding point. “Forget the arguments about what's a blog and what's not. What's spreading around the world is not the pure blog, but instead a million flavors of bloginess [sic].” We agree that there are many flavors of blogs, just as there are many flavors of business writers, as Baker exemplifies. But wait a minute. Doesn’t the Nokia case show more about how blogging is changing traditional marketing than the reverse? Nokia recognized the power of the French blogosphere and approached it in a way that is effective to traditional marketing goals.
Another French language blog of note is a corporate effort from pharmaceutical manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline, whose blog deals with high level issues such as the financial risk implications of investing in new drugs or the cost and logistical challenges of a worldwide vaccination program. What is most interesting is because pharmaceutical companies are frequently listed among categories of companies who should not blog because of the confidential nature of their work. Ironically, a company spokesperson declined to answer our email inquiries.
Driving in the Slow Lane
With a population of 80 million, Germany, Europe’s largest country, has a population 25 percent larger than France. But while France had more than 3.5 million bloggers as of this writing, Germany’s bloggers were estimated at 200,000 and fewer than 100 of them were business bloggers, according to LeMeur. Most, predictably were consultants. One prominent business blogger of note was Marcel Reichart, managing director, marketing and communications at Hubert Burda, one of the Europe’s largest media companies. Deutsche Telecom, owners of T-Mobile in the U.S., has a blog for its German T-Online service, but posting is sporadic, comments are not allowed and it looks more like a static website than a blog. The Fish Market, an e-commerce company, has a charming, heavily trafficked blogsite. The site would probably not fare as well in the U.S. because it is so highly commercialized but seems to be working just fine there. Frosta, a well-known German food company has also started a blog.
SAP, the German-based global enterprise software behemoth, claims to have the largest German business blog which is directed at nurturing its global community of SAP users. We are not so certain because much of it is behind a firewall. But several senior SAP executives, including board member Shai Agassi, blog at sporadic rates. The company does seem to be encouraging company employees to start blogging. Agassi told Le Meur he advises employees, “if you blog, you exist and you start gathering a community around your expertise.” We found this interesting because it appears to among the very few blogs that is both private and yet extends beyond the company firewalls.
We were disappointed when BMW graciously declined to discuss their blogging plans. We think they are an ideal company to blog because the passion of their customer base is already comprised of passionate evangelists. We have rarely talked to an owner of a Bimmer who did not advise us to own one ourselves. If blogging can move the needle for the likes of General Motors we can only speculate as to what one could do for BMW.
One irony— eBay enjoys a huge and growing presence in Germany, which is further evidence that that people trust Internet technology. The country may be passengers in that slow lane so far, but when they put their pedals to the metal, as anyone who has experienced the Autobahn can attest, the Germans are capable of moving amazingly fast.
How can blogging take off in France and lag in Germany? Le Meur points out that while French, like Americans aere quick to express their feelings and aspirations, German business people tend to be cautious in what they publicly disclose. After years, at the nexus of Cold War spy networks, business seems to have grown comfortable to maintain high levels of secrecy. German author and freelance journalist Jochen Wegner —speaking at Les Blogs, Europe’s first blogging conference, said culture is key to why there is so little going on in Germany. “It is not natural for Germans to share their views and talk about themselves,” he said.
Siestas in the Blogosphere?
By comparison to Spanish-speaking countries, Germany, however is exploding in the Blogosphere. The second most popular language in the Western world has about 50,000 blogs total, according to Blog Census, part of an organization that tracks blogs by language. That’s less than we would expect to find on North America’s West Coast. According to Mariano Amartino, an Argentina-based blog evangelist and community-building consultant “Spanish speaking companies don’t blog,” he told us. Why not? First, off, lots of companies still don’t understand what a blog is.” His estimate for all Spanish-speaking business worldwide—about 10, one each in Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay and double that in Spain and Argentina. Amartino is probably responsible for generating about 20 percent of them through his consulting business. We also suspect he forgot to count his own, which is perhaps the best-known Spanish language business blog by an individual.
Amartino helped Argentina-based Clarin, the world’s most popular Spanish speaking newspaper create two projects. In 2003, he helped the build Clarin.com, , which we think was the first media-owned blog worldwide. When Amartino was involved, the site was receiving 18,000 visitors daily who were leaving over 3500 comments a week to access current event related subjects. During our visit in mid-2005, comments had been stripped out in favor of Trackbacks a trend we found prevalent elsewhere.
As we were writing Naked Conversations, Amartino was helping Clarin with a new project that, he said, “takes into account the value of having real bloggers write the blogs.” His new project, Clarin Weblogs, quietly launched and in July 2005 was receiving about 5000 daily visitors. The key difference is the new blog covers issues of the blogosphere exclusively. According to Amartino, Clarin wants to build a presence in the emerging Spanish speaking blog community, riding the wave when the new phenomenon inevitably takes off.
He sees two barriers currently slowing adoption: (1) Small businesses, often skating on thin margin have the misperception that the cost of all things Internet-related as too expensive, and (2) Large corporations still “don’t get” the powerful benefits of blogs and continue to dismiss them as irrelevant online teen journals. Amartino sounded far from discouraged because blogging is gaining momentum in the development community who, he believes, will carry blogging into tradition corporations over time.
China Dragging
Business is booming in China according to just about all observers. So is Internet access with 92 million of its 1.3 billion people now going online, according to Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe. But while the 2004 regime change brought hopes to the business sector, it has also strengthened censorship controls on the Internet.
According to Isaac Mao, a principal researcher at CES Labs on e-Learning and co-founder of CNBlog.org, which tracks blogging on a weekly basis, there are 1.23 million bloggers nationwide with about 760,000 posting at least once weekly. This number is far below other estimates, but we were convinced that Mao, considered to be China’s foremost blogger, was in a better position to estimate than other sources.
“The blogosphere here is mostly for personal use,” he told us. I don’t see many Chinese enterprises supporting employee blogging like Microsoft or Sun Microsystems, but interestingly, some businesses are using blogs for customer relationship-building. Some small businesses are trying to use blogs to market their products and service,” he told us. For example Tao Yao, is a blog used to sell hand-crafted jewelry online, with the transaction linked to the Yahoo China auction site (Yahoo is one of many western Internet companies who have agreed to abide by China’s increasingly stringent censorship rules).” Mao notes that blogging gives small Chinese businesses easy access to more customers and he expects growth to continue there.
We asked if censorship was a factor slowing business. “China’s government's control over the media including online websites is well known around the world. Though they won't interfere directly with business blogging, it's very easy to be affected, knowing that if they want to shut down or censor some blog hosting site, they can and will.” Mao has had first hand experience. On April Fool’s Day 2005, he posted a joke blog saying he had been shipped off to Siberia. It got mysteriously taken down, perhaps shipped off to some arctic wasteland where it remains frozen in cyberspace.
Japan Rising
Japan, on the other hand, is experiencing an acceleration in both consumer and business blogging, particularly among women who blog and visit blogs more often than men. The Impress Group who conducts an annual survey of Japan’s online trends reports that 32 million Japanese homes had broadband by the end of 2004 and more than seven in 10 Japanese have heard of blogs, up from about 40 percent in 2003. According to the Impress findings, 25 percent of women under 30 are active in the blogosphere.
To better understand why Japan was taking off faster than any country East of France, we turned to Nob Seki, Le Meur’s counterpart for Six Apart in Japan. We told him we were surprised that a country whose business community is noted for polite formality and conservative dark suits would be so active in the blogosphere where up close and personal seemed to be the norm. Seki told us we only had a partial photo of Japanese culture. While Japanese corporations may retain a top-down organizational structure, “people here are different at work than they are at home. At home, we are informal. It’s different when we are in the office, part of an organization. When you leave, you can easily become very personal. In fact, there is evidence that major corporations are loosening their structures after a decade of recession, and through Seki, we would learn that the legendary politeness is not always the case.
Most Japanese business blogs, we also learned, are informal in tone, addressing visitors in a style usually reserved for personal friends or family, Seki told us. Japanese people are very accustomed to switching back-and-forth from formal to informal. “If you are speaking as a company president, he told us, you are expected to be very formal, but sales people talk to customers and prospects as if they were your best friends. Many Japanese blogs are sales-oriented—more than would be accepted in French or English language blogs—and their informal style surprises no one in Japan.
A case in point is a Nissan Motors blog designed to blatantly sell a new city car called Tiida. It caught media notice because it began with the statement from TIIDA’s product manager: “I am Yamamoto from Nissan Motors.” This is unusual, because in Japan, such managers usually don’t get to introduce themselves on a personal level to the public. Each Yamamoto posting focused on another aspect of the car that would make you want to buy it. The low-cost car has become popular and we are told Nissan is considering marketing it internationally.
Before 2004, nobody in Japanese business blogged. Nobody. When Six Apart opened shop there in December 2003, Seki recalled, “People thought we were crazy. There was no blogging market and no market was expected.” Then it developed rapidly through a series of overlapping phases. First website developers bought the tools, stripped out the ones that created an authentic blog and used the rest to build static websites faster and cheaper. Then e-commerce vendors such as Lloyd’s Antique Online Shop of Tokyo, discovered that blogging gave you enough Google juice to triple sales. They took their existing online catalog and recalibrated. Each post displayed a photo of an item for sale, with a catalog-type description." The breakthrough is that they allowed comments through Trackback, so that the e-commerce sites were technically blogs.
While all this was unfolding, larger companies started watching what was happening. Next enterprise players started immersing toes in the blogosphere with internal blogs used to replace intranet applications on the workgroup level. By the middle of 2004, gargantuan marketers, like Proctor & Gamble, the world’s largest consumer products company, was blatantly marketing detergent to housewives via a blogsite extension of a traditional advertising and marketing campaign to have women at home share their washday experiences. It was of course, all part of the launch of a new detergent and was enormously successful.
BK1, a large online book seller—sort of the Amazon.com of Japan. It started a site in July 2004, selecting employees to blog about books ,and letting visitors buy the book by clicking on a shopping cart feature in the blog. After three months, the traffic had increased by 10-20% and sales have increased 5-10 % (after adjusting for the impact of a new Harry Potter book that was released in Japanese at the same time). [Note, we are still expecting an interview with Mr. Takeshi Kouno of BK1 which will be posted separately, then included in this chapter.]
A small business blog we really enjoyed was Isshin Dental Clinic in Yokohama, used to market its practice into its relatively small community. Its Haisha Blog (‘Haisha’ means dentist in Japanese) has photos depicting smiling, congenial, white-coated staff. Visitors can read answers to frequent questions and patient testimonials. According to Ginger Tulley, Six Apart director of worldwide strategy and analysis, who translated the blog for us, the clinic has told Six Apart-Japan, that it is “a reasonable investment.” Reasonable indeed. Revenue jumped more than 80 percent in less than a year. We think the clinic is indicative of the enormous opportunities blogs offer to small businesses everywhere. While a website can probably do very little for a local dry cleaner, a the Haisha Blog is indicative of highly localized plumber blogs, baker blogs, and even dry cleaner blogs to come everywhere. Each would focus on showing the authority and commitment of the merchants, tradesmen and craftspeople behind them. If you are in small business, you should think: if it works for a British tailor, a New Hampshire restaurant and a Japanese dental clinic, what could it do for you?
Nifty & Nasty
Nifty Corp.—a Japanese ISP and a subsidiary of Fujitsu was about the first business blog when it started in 2003 and it was aimed at consumers. It was a natural step from a company Nifty, that had been hosting Channel 2, one of Japan’s best-known and most controversial bulletin boards. The controversy surrounded unfiltered and very often anonymous. Seki told us, “People could write about anything. It sometimes got very nasty.” One tragic example was a teenager who announced anonymously on Channel 2 that he intended to go out and kill somebody. Then he did. Bulletin boards are still in vogue with much of the subject matter coming from the depths of the darkside. The anonymous aspects of them has, inadvertently shaped the development of Japanese business blogging which wants to avoid such unpleasantries in blog discussions.
When Nifty introduced its blogging service, they shut down the Comments feature, asking people to continue the conversation through Trackback, because Trackback is traceable. The experiment succeeded. Not only are Trackbacks being used in decidedly more polite fashion than were comments, the need to have a blog in order to join the conversation, ignited consumer blogging. In Japan, it is extremely rare to find a blog that employs Comments. Elsewhere in the world, shutting off Comments remains controversial because it stops people who don’t have blogs from joining in. Likewise, anonymous comments, particularly from “drive-bys” who post ugly comments then move on without participating in conversations. In Japan, Seki sees no likelihood that Comments will re-emerge. “Trackback is more polite,” he told us, “And you know who you are talking with.”
Culture Shaping Blogs
This chapter helped solved one of the mysteries we saw in blogging at the outset. Why do some companies blog while others don’t? Why do bloggers at some companies blog well and with abandon, while others are tediously bland? Why is blogging exploding in the United States, France and Japan and more slowly in Germany, Russia and China. Why is blogging flourishing at Microsoft and Sun and stifled at Apple Computer and Google?
Culture. That’s why.
Culture can be national, ethnic, corporate or departmental. Where people are encouraged to speak their mind blogging is flourished. In places where those in power trust those who answer to them, blogging seems to flourish. There are reasons why political blogging in the United States has taken off wildly and in China it has not.
The issue for companies who restrict it is that in a short while, customers will begin asking why their company doesn’t blog. Cultures usually change slowly and often painfully. If your competitor starts blogging and you do not, you may find the repercussions greater than you think. If you live or work in a place where you do not have the freedom to blog, then we are indeed sorry on your behalf.
