Robert and I were the wrap-up speakers yesterday at the New Communications Forum. We did pretty well, but one point I tried to make had not fully formed in my head and I didn't articulate it as well as I would have liked. I've had a day to think about it.
A year ago, when we started writing Naked Conversations, there existed a significant chasm on social media issues between the developer-driven blogging community and the top-down structure of the enterprise. As recently as six months ago, our blog enthusiasm was greeted by traditional marketeers with "horror and hostility."
Yesterday, we were not. The image of the conference with two attendee camps--KoolAid drinkers and abstainers had dramatically eroded in a space of less than six months. Of course, we heard some of the bellwether questions: "Isn't it just a fad," "where's the ROI" and "how do I get/prevent my CEO to/from blogging?"
But those dwelling on the question were lessened in ranks, and a chat with a couple already agreed with the answers and were really looking for words to use to persuade others in their organizations. My sense is that the big picture premises of the blogging community are already understood and accepted by a large number of traditional marketers.
There is general understanding that blogging is fundamentally changing how companies communicate and that dialog beats monologue and because it does, disruption to systems in place cannot be held back for very long.
Last October, when I told a BlogOn audience that blogging had reached its tipping point, I saw corporate marketers in the audience roll their eyes and drop their jaws at my arrogance and ignorance. I used the same line yesterday and people gazed back at me with a look of, "Yeah. So?"
At the end of our talk, I chatted with Hitachi's Jeremy Owyang, whom I enjoy and respect increasingly each time I see him. While he had enjoyed himself and his own presentation was apparently well-received, he sounded mildly disappointed. He said that he was personally done struggling with the "why-to" blog at Hitachi Data Systems and was now more concerned with the "how-to" blog. He was more concerned with how to inject blogging into corporate structure and learning finer points to make him a better blogger. I think there were a sizable portion of the audience who were at similar points.
My takeaway is that blogging has already been injected into a great number of corporate cultures, even as the "why-to" question travels to outer circles further on the inevitable marketing graphic. Next week, I'm being interviewed by a pharmaceutical magazine. A year ago, I wold have been disdained as addressing an irrelevant topic.
So my takeaway from New Communications Forum is a big one. Blogging is normalizing. It is following the usual adoption trends taught in Marketing 101. The number of marketing people watching blogs, starting them and evangelizing is going to inevitably eclipse the number of technology developers who got this all going. This is as it should be and marketers and other people in large organizations will adapt blogging from what it is today into something different. I can only hope that the ethics set based on authenticity and transparency that they started will be maintained as blogging moves into the mainstream rapids. As it shoots down those rapids, I hope it fares better than websites and email did in maintaining a certain structural integrity.
Blogging started as one of Seth Godin's Purple Cows. I would still like to write about unique or valuable blogs--blogs that will help others find their way into the blogosphere. I hear about dozens of new blogs every week, but few, if any meet that criteria. I see blogs that are high quality, blogs that are good for the businesses and business topics they are designed to address but very few that are of Purple Cow uniqueness.
In fact, this is a good thing, if you are a blogging evangelist. The blog is starting to become part of the business normal, just as email and the Internet did. Both of these early disruptive innovations are now boring because they are so much of the usual business routine. It was not all that long ago that having a website, or allowing employees to email on company time were highly controversial with legal departments fretting the repercussions just as they do today over blogging.
The blog, it seems to me, is becoming just another brown cow. This again, is a good thing. First comes the excitement, then comes the prolongs inevitable change. This is what is supposed to happen. New things need to normalize if they are to endure if they are to really and truly change corporate communications as our book argues it will.
A year ago, we searched the world for business bloggers who were doing something that could show other people in other companies, perhaps in other countries, something valuable. Sometimes, we had to really work to uncover them, using our two Rolodexes to dig them out. Now, we receive on the average, one request a day from a new blogger for coverage. We will report on them when we see them, but mostly we are seeing some very nice brown cows that should do the business they relate to well. But they are not breaking new ground in the way EnglishCut did for a Saville Row tailor who not has a significant global reach.
How does all this bode for our book and this blog? Well, for the book, I think Robert and I have hit the shelf at the right time. I think we have a hit on our hands and that may t joy in our hearts, not to mention money in our bank accounts.
But our intended audience for this blog is actually different than for our book. A great many of you know what the book is designed to tell you. We consider you our book collaborators. First, you were a source of content and insight, then you actually helped us write it and now you are spreading the word to people who know less than you about blogging and its business benefits. You have done an astounding job of it and we thank you for it. Big time.
But it's time to expand the focus of this blog. While I'll continue to cover the topic of business and blogging, this blog has already begun to expand our interests into Web 2.0 companies which are shooting up with amazing rapidity and strength dramatically extending and accelerating the continuum of innovation spurred by blogging.
Web 2.0 is topically a natural extension of blogging. These companies are forming a "people's web" where the blog allows an efficient conduit for two-way communications. What's important here is not the conduit per se, but that it allows the customer to take his or her rightful place at the center of the corporation. As Charlene Li said in her conference keynote, the new technology puts the power at people's fingertips, instead of into the hands of the corporation.
I got into blogging because of its disruptive promise. Web 2.0 is a natural path that follows the lines of disruption and I'm going to follow down those line.
