Thursday, January 13, 2005
Everyone's a Critic
Since the internet was out most of the day it gave me a chance to catch-up on my magazine reading, which turned out to be very fruitful, because I stumbled across a blog article "Why There's No Escaping the Blog" in the January 10th issue of Fortune (subscription required). The authors focus on the interaction (and friction) between business and the blog world. It sounds similar to what the new Hugh Hewitt book "Blog" covers.
The article features different company bloggers like Microsoft's Robert Scoble. Who posts, "...on topics ranging from how a company programmer had fixed a security bug to the fact that his wife is becoming a U.S. citizen. Nothing too profound or insightful, yet scobleizer has given the Microsoft monolith something it has long lacked: An approachable human face."
This is how the authors describe the impact of Blogs: "Each blog adds to an inescapable trend fueled by the Internet: the democratization of power and opinion. Blogs are just the latest tool that makes it harder for corporations and other institutions to control and dictate their message."
Another featured blogger is Jeff Jarvis who said this when asked about the blogs impact on corporations: "There should be someone at every company whose job is to put into Google and blog search engines the name of the company or the brand, followed by the word "sucks", just to see what customers are saying."
All parties interviewed agreed that, if a company is going to blog, honesty will be a basic requirement or you will have no credibility in the blogosphere. Steve Hayden, vice chairman of the advertising giant Ogilvy&Mather had the best line in the whole article:
If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie. The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You're fighting very powerful forces because it's real people's opinions."
Indeed.
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The article features different company bloggers like Microsoft's Robert Scoble. Who posts, "...on topics ranging from how a company programmer had fixed a security bug to the fact that his wife is becoming a U.S. citizen. Nothing too profound or insightful, yet scobleizer has given the Microsoft monolith something it has long lacked: An approachable human face."
This is how the authors describe the impact of Blogs: "Each blog adds to an inescapable trend fueled by the Internet: the democratization of power and opinion. Blogs are just the latest tool that makes it harder for corporations and other institutions to control and dictate their message."
Another featured blogger is Jeff Jarvis who said this when asked about the blogs impact on corporations: "There should be someone at every company whose job is to put into Google and blog search engines the name of the company or the brand, followed by the word "sucks", just to see what customers are saying."
All parties interviewed agreed that, if a company is going to blog, honesty will be a basic requirement or you will have no credibility in the blogosphere. Steve Hayden, vice chairman of the advertising giant Ogilvy&Mather had the best line in the whole article:
If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie. The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You're fighting very powerful forces because it's real people's opinions."
Indeed.
# posted by Joe Florida @ 4:58 PM 
