I can't believe we wrote the whole thing. Here is our final chapter, and, I might add, a whole day ahead of deadline.
The Conversational Era
“It's natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it's also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.” —New York Times editorial Aug. 5, 2005
Sometimes, a tool is just a tool. During our lifetime, hammers have changed very little. If we wrote a book about them, and took years to write it, not much would have changed. Most tools are like that, but not so blogs. In the space of the six months it took to write Naked Conversations, innovations to blogs and the blogosphere were relentless. The number of bloggers more than doubled from under 7.5 million users to over 15 million. Someone started a blog once every second today and about every two seconds someone else abandoned one. We were constantly aware that we were writing about a moving target. We had to delay completing a chapter on blogging in a crisis, because a crisis occurred. A few weeks later, we had to delay completing our emerging technology chapter, because new social media enhancements emerged.
Naked Conversations tried to keep focused on business and how blogging and social media are changing the relationships between companies and their constituencies. We offered a great number of tips and case studies that would should remain relevant despite the constant changes. Our sense is that the business community’s attitude toward blogging has changed from when we started. Back in February, business people dismissed blogging as just a passing fad. This was the denial phase. Then we detected a certain level of anger about blogs as a distraction, about them interrupting systems in place that were allegedly best practices. We even had an enraged CEO tell us that blogs were a scam used to cheat on search engine results. Now, business people understand that blogs are here to stay and companies need to figure out how to incorporate them into the way they communicate. We hope Naked Conversations will help people make the right decisions for their companies.
We argued in our Introduction that blogs are part of a revolution, something bigger than the blogosphere and a great number of people disagreed, positioning the phenomenon as an evolutionary nicety. We believe it is something more fundamental then that, something that shifts the balance of relationships of companies and the communities in which they operate. Like the dotcom area, a few companies will emerge from the blogosphere to become giants and others will fade. Businesses will shift where they invest resources both financial and human as a matter of cost effectiveness. Marketing budgets will be cut and perhaps more money will be redirected to both product development and customer support, not to mention better return for investors. We have already witnessed the meteoric shifts in who influences markets and why they do it. We have continued to struggle with what to call this thing bigger than blogging and we’ll get to that in a minute.
Naked Conversations has not been an objective report. We as blog champions—evangelists convinced that all businesses should blog and to warn that many businesses that don’t might perish. This, we learned along our way, was slightly overstated. We had underestimated the influence of culture, both in businesses and countries. Quite simply, some are open and others are closed. Some leaders trust those under their watch. Others don’t. And that becomes increasingly important as more people realize that corporate blog policy—written or implied—tell outsiders a great deal about how a company sees its employees as well as its customers.
Culture cannot be overestimated in discussing social media. And as technologies continue to emerge, we will find some companies will be heard in one area and remain silent in another. Adam Curry, who works with Apple Computer, told us Steve Jobs will soon podcast, even as he continues to discourage his own employees from blogging about their jobs. “Blogging is just not in the company DNA,” he shrugged, “but Jobs, likes podcasts. Some entities, we are certain, just won’t be a part of this revolution. Those with the power to change a particular culture, will keep their heels dug into the status quo. Not all prominent non-blogging companies decline or fall. But most will perceived in the public eye as less interesting or relevant.
Companies that discourage blogging, such as Google, are starting to lose talented people and are revealing other cracks in their veneers. When we began this project, the foremost search company was undeniably the most admired in personal technology. Perhaps it still is, but we sense to a diminished degree. We think a contributing factor is its consistently mediocre corporate blog. Discouraging employees to blog does not build internal morale or attract talented people. Russell Beattie a luminary blogger, walked out of Google while waiting for an interview because, he said, the culture felt closed to him and the people he met felt arrogant. He subsequently joined Yahoo a company that encourages him and other employees to blog. More recently Google announced it would banish CNET over what seemed to be a petty matter. Either of the incidents alone would be of little interest. But add to it, the perception that Google’s company blog is among the most mundane, the perception starts building that Google is a less open culture than most people presumed. It will be a long time before this darling of investors and Internet searchers will be in trouble, and before it happens the company has ample time to wisely change its course. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
But if blogging is truly part of a revolution, will it be bloodless? We see a clear and present danger for practitioners of traditional, one-direction advertising, marketing. We see its champions in a change or die situation. Blogging and the social media are steadily pounding a silver spike into the heart of it. In its place is this new phenomenon in which customers and companies settle in on a more even plain, where they use the casual language of the simple unadorned conversation. Most people trust such voices more than the ones broadcast in a 60-second spot.
This fundamental change repositions customers from the edge of the corporation to their rightful place in the center. This new customer-centric positioning is a refreshing contrast to company’s seeing customers as no more than pairs of sticky eyeballs.
Yes, there is a leap of faith required in buying our argument. The customer, in fact is not always right. Sometimes their demands are unreasonable. Sometimes they are rude in tone and most companies we spoke with voiced concerns with being verbally assaulted in public. Both Israel and Scoble have recently experienced this in blog comments and neither of us enjoyed it. But we’ve learned, that even when customers are dead wrong, listening will make a company smarter. And demonstrating that you are listening politely will put the majority of observers on your side. It’s human nature, and blogging seems to be shaped by human nature.
We are not preaching wide-eyed altruism, here. This is about business, efficiency and profit. Blogging is smart business. Blogging is cheaper and more effective than most marketing programs in use today. Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz told us he could reach more people through his blog than would a full page ad in a trade magazine—and they could reach him as well. Customers loved Firefox so much they chipped in to a two-page ad in the New York Times, and consequently learned that blogging was a more effective way to get more customers, and it cost a whole lot less. British tailor Thomas Mahon used a blog to increase his business by 300 percent in a few months and make him the best-known member of his profession. Andrew Carton has more visitors to his Treo blog than the companies who make the device and its software combined and he has become more influential to Treo products than executives in either company.
Blogging is unquestionably less expensive than traditional ad and PR campaigns and keeps proving—as it did to the Firefox team, to be more effective. Perhaps we overstated when we speculated that some marketing practitioners will wind up in the restaurant service industry, but some who cling too long and too hard to methods that are clearly in atrophy just might. More will adapt. We have little doubt many will figure out how to make their crafts, more affordable, more credible and more interactive as Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson and others have done.
While we see a cultural divide forming, we also see signs of convergence and healing in the often vitriolic culture clash between the media and the blogosphere. Less than a year ago John Markoff the New York Times leading tech journalist was voiced skepticism about bloggers as conveyors of news. While bloggers and journalists still bump on important issues, they are both being used increasingly as information sources and technologies like Memeorandum are physically merging the two to benefit the consumers of information.
Not all our pre-suppositions panned out. We never found our blogging plumber. Perhaps it’s a cultural matter. Plumbers are a tight-lipped lot for the most part. . We thought we’d find a great deal of evidence of blogging to support micro markets— what Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine calls “The Long Tail,” comprised of millions of markets containing from one to a few hundred or less customers in each of them. We didn’t find them, but then in dawned on us that the tail goes on the back end of the creature, and blogging right now remains on the leading edge. The long tail will get there in time.
Small, independent merchants are part of what makes every community unique and blogging is proving to be an enormously useful tool in the hands of the independent shops and artisan. Some of the smaller enterprises we covered gave us the most inspiration. Pierre Cassard, the French T-shirt started a blog-based business that profits and grows simply by letting customers decide almost everything. The team of friendly practitioners at Yokohama’s Isshin Dental Clinic shows what a blog can do for a neighborhood business. , Ben Williams owner of Horsefeathers Restaurant-where the locals send you, uses a blog to stave off the branded chains that have encroached his turf. Grace Bonney may have been an underemployed consultant without her blog. Instead she is a rising influence on the design industry. We are convinced that blogging offers enormous opportunities for small businesses whether they want to reach the immediate neighborhood or around the world.
A blog is an impressive tool but most people we talked with insisted that it was more than just that. People called blogs “a new communications channel,” a “credible marketing conduit,” a “disrupter of the status quo”, a “mainstream media murderer,” and a “miracle” among other things. Textura Design’s DL Byron offered a gem of a summary at the Seattle Blog Business Summit in July 2005: “You blog, other blogs link to your blog, you link back, and Google loves that.” And while this is a good mechanical simplification, there is clearly more going on in the blogosphere.
We had thought the most appropriate term for this bigger picture was “Conversational Marketing,” but we learned it is more than that. Blogging impacts marketing, but it transcends it. It is vital not just to outbound communications, but inbound as well. It is a crisis firefighter, a superior research aggregator, a tool for recruiting, product building, customer service and support, executive access, employee relations, customer evangelism and most interaction between companies and their constituencies. It will accomplish things of which we have not yet dreamed.
We recalled our conversation with Yossi Vardi, the adult supervisor of ICQ’s founders. He cited research that showed story telling and conversations are at the essence of human culture, are part of the continuity of it. In that light, blogging is a point on a cultural continuum that goes back all the way to when we sat in caves shivering around fires and doodling on the walls. To paraphrase Vardi, blogging is story telling and conversations on steroids.
Ultimately, blogging has ended one era and ignited another. In this new era, companies don’t win just by talking to people. Now people get to talk back. We call it the Conversational Era. It doesn’t change everything because as John Naisbitt told us, everything never changes. But something has changed and it is impacting businesses of all sizes in most parts of the developed world. It has made it a smaller faster place.
And business is the better for it.
