Participating an a Likely Orgy of Self-Referentialism
How many blogs are linking to this Fred Hapgood article from CMO Magazine?
Last summer a Pasadena marketing strategist named Sally Falkow started a blog. Of course she did. Who didn't?...
According to the well-regarded Pew Internet Study, by the end of the year, 32 million Americans (27 percent of people online) were reading at least one blog regularly, and 8 million had started writing one or more. Figures gathered by the blogging site Technorati suggest that on average the number of blogs has been doubling every five months over the past year and a half and shows no sign of slowing down....
The blog that Falkow started was devoted to a major interest of hers: managing online public relations. (The simplest way to find it is to do a Google search of "Sally Falkow website content.")...In effect, she was writing a daily newspaper about online PR strategies, except that items were organized in the canonical blog style: a single column format with the most recent item on top and the resources just a click away.
Like most of us, Falkow occasionally does searches for terms relevant to her own business to see where she stands in the results. As she wrote her blog, she found herself rising steadily in these listings; people entering terms associated with Internet marketing ("e-commerce," "Web marketing" and so on) were increasingly likely to see Sally Falkow in the list of results....In the terms of the trade, Falkow was becoming an "influencer," and entirely without help from the conventional media circuit. As sometimes happens, what had started out as a labor of love had ended up driving her career....
The article goes on to cite examples of companies that don't always fire people for writing blogs about work. (Interestingly enough, Microsoft is mentioned.)
Corporate blogs...are far from the only marketing application of the medium. Another is to encourage a wide range of employees to start blogs. Sun Microsystems has taken that road, and so far close to a thousand employees have accepted the company's invitation. One group of these blogs is tied directly to existing Sun products, such as Solaris or Java....
A second category of employee blogging is not about current products but, among other things, the R&D paths under way at Sun—speech recognition, computing for the disabled, grid computing, the development of translation portals....While not focused directly on Sun products or even on specific R&D programs, the company gets mentioned a lot in the blogs. From a marketing perspective, these blogs can be thought of as organizing client constituencies in advance of possible market introductions....
Many of the rest of the employee blogs are on subjects of general interest—albeit to a technical audience—such as home automation, science fiction or the progress of UBL (Universal Business Language, an XML implementation optimized for business documents and transactions). These subjects might not translate directly, now or in the future, into Sun products, but they leave no doubt that Sun employs a lot of fearsomely bright people....
On the downside of blogging, postings must be updated too frequently for the copy in them to be edited or supervised, let alone vetted by legal departments or marketing....That's partly what makes blogs work; the authenticity and therefore effectiveness lies in the very informality of their voice. Eventually some blogger is bound to push that too far. "We're about to acquire X Corp., but rumor has it we're not going to pay more than $Y," or "Frankly, if it were up to me, I'd fire all the women."
Perhaps such incidents will blow over, but sooner or later an employee of a public corporation is going to post to his blog the forecast of next quarter's results. When—not if—that happens, the SEC will likely make a call that no one is looking forward to. So draws the line between companies such as Sun and Microsoft who see the benefits of corporate and employee blogs and those who prefer to wait to get a better handle on the risks. (The latter usually feels more comfortable using blogs internally.)
P.S. According to Technorati, here's the answer to the question with which I started this entry:
Hapgood has also recently written about transhumanism. I have recently written about Zsa Zsa Gabor's hairdresser. (Did Jaren Millard get memory implants?)
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