Fortune: No Escaping Blogs
Robert
Scoble points to Fortune's
article on corporate blogging -- "Why
There's No Escaping the Blog." It's a pretty long piece and pretty
well done, too.
Some nice info on how Scoble's honesty is helping to improve Microsoft's reputation:
That last sentence in Scoble's quote is the kicker. I think Sun has come a long way to implementing that very thought with the blogs on BSC and the other Sun blogs not hosted on BSC but aggregated on Planet Sun. I talk to developers and system administrators for the OpenSolaris project, and they all say they are reading the Solaris engineering blogs. And more are commenting now, too. The conversation is, indeed, well under way. And I can easily point to the benefits in my own little job.
Here are a couple of Sun bits from the article:
I still want to see Scott blog, don't you? :) My goodness ... can you imagine it? I asked him about it once when I saw him walking around MPK (Menlo Park campus). He just laughed. Loudly. :) Oh, well. So much for my influence, eh?
Blogs are bumping into all forms of communication:
I can understand this position. I spent nine painful years pitching messages in PR. But I'm out now, and I have a different perspective. Why must everything be a pitch to deliver a message no one believes? And why pitch bloggers? Why perpetuate the bad PR that the PR industry so richly deserves? Why not simply read blogs to understand the issues and the communities trying to interact with a company. And why not simply blog right along with those communities and join the conversation? In other words, skip the pitch. Your message is now delivered through the medium of the conversation -- which tends to only support credible content. This article is just filled with stories of companies who joined the conversation and benefited and companies who didn't and got burned. There are some good stories about Kryptonite, Dan Rather, Mazda, and Six Apart. All worth reading. These stories, though, have to be especially terrifying for companies that are still missing this little phenomenon. Oh, well.
Some nice info on how Scoble's honesty is helping to improve Microsoft's reputation:
When
it came to the criticism emanating from Boing Boing, Scoble simply ...
agreed. "MSN Spaces isn't the blogging service for me," he wrote.
Nobody at Microsoft asked Scoble to comment; he just did it on his own,
adding that he would make sure that the team working on Spaces was
aware of the complaints. And he kept revisiting the issue on his blog.
As the anti-Microsoft crowd cried censorship, the nearly 4,000 blogs
linking to Scoble were able to see his running commentary on how
Microsoft was reacting. "I get comments on my blog saying, 'I didn't
like Microsoft before, but at least they're listening to us,'" says
Scoble. "The blog is the best
relationship generator you've ever seen."
That last sentence in Scoble's quote is the kicker. I think Sun has come a long way to implementing that very thought with the blogs on BSC and the other Sun blogs not hosted on BSC but aggregated on Planet Sun. I talk to developers and system administrators for the OpenSolaris project, and they all say they are reading the Solaris engineering blogs. And more are commenting now, too. The conversation is, indeed, well under way. And I can easily point to the benefits in my own little job.
Here are a couple of Sun bits from the article:
The
biggest chunk of the 5,000 or so corporate bloggers comes from
Microsoft, but others work at Monster.com, Intuit, and Sun Microsystems
-- where even the company's acerbic No. 2, Jonathan Schwartz, gets in
on the action. (A recent Schwartz post openly criticizes competitor
Hewlett-Packard: "Yet another series of disappointing announcements.")
...
...
Even
blogging boosters Microsoft and Sun have hit bumps. Microsoft fired a
temp who posted photos of Apple computers sitting on a company loading
dock. Sun CEO Scott McNealy was urged not to blog after he showed trial
posts to company lawyers and colleagues. "I've got too many
constituents that I have to pretend to be nice to," he says.
I still want to see Scott blog, don't you? :) My goodness ... can you imagine it? I asked him about it once when I saw him walking around MPK (Menlo Park campus). He just laughed. Loudly. :) Oh, well. So much for my influence, eh?
Blogs are bumping into all forms of communication:
Blogs
are challenging the media and changing how people in advertising,
marketing, and public relations do their jobs.
...
Blogs are just the latest tool that makes it harder for corporations and other institutions to control and dictate their message. An amateur media is springing up, and the smart are adapting. Says Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Public Relations: "Now you've got to pitch the bloggers too. You can't just pitch to conventional media."
...
Blogs are just the latest tool that makes it harder for corporations and other institutions to control and dictate their message. An amateur media is springing up, and the smart are adapting. Says Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Public Relations: "Now you've got to pitch the bloggers too. You can't just pitch to conventional media."
I can understand this position. I spent nine painful years pitching messages in PR. But I'm out now, and I have a different perspective. Why must everything be a pitch to deliver a message no one believes? And why pitch bloggers? Why perpetuate the bad PR that the PR industry so richly deserves? Why not simply read blogs to understand the issues and the communities trying to interact with a company. And why not simply blog right along with those communities and join the conversation? In other words, skip the pitch. Your message is now delivered through the medium of the conversation -- which tends to only support credible content. This article is just filled with stories of companies who joined the conversation and benefited and companies who didn't and got burned. There are some good stories about Kryptonite, Dan Rather, Mazda, and Six Apart. All worth reading. These stories, though, have to be especially terrifying for companies that are still missing this little phenomenon. Oh, well.
How do I filter blogs.sun.com so only technical stuff appears. Perhaps Sun would consider adding a simple portal, where readers can login and personalise. I'd like to see only Solaris and Linux. Right now, BSC is one size fits all, and it's getting too big.
I'm also using Thunderbird to RSS the blog. But I have to do it one by one for each blogger.
thank you.
Posted by iwan ang on December 28, 2004 at 06:10 PM JST #
Posted by Alan Burlison on December 28, 2004 at 08:38 PM JST #
Posted by 199.172.169.17 on December 30, 2004 at 12:24 AM JST #