For deep, narrow coverage, blogs are better than mainstream media

A few Philistines are still maintaining that blogging isn't a worthy medium for intelligent discussion, that it's somehow less valuable than the "professional media."

Yes, there are crappy blogs out there, just like there are crappy newspapers and magazines. The low barrier to entry of blogging means there is more crap--but, long-tail style, there is also content of tremendous value, erudition, power and influence.

I learned of one more example today. Tanta, who wrote for the Calculated Risk blog, died over the weekend.

She warranted an obituary in the New York Times and a mention from James Surowiecki (from that most professional media outlet, the New Yorker). Here's another tribute from Felix Salmon at Conde Nast Portfolio.

And it wasn't because she wrote about Britney Spears or LOLcats. According to the Times,

Thanks in large part to Tanta’s contributions, Calculated Risk became a crucial source of prescient analysis as the housing market at first faltered, then collapsed and finally spawned a full-blown credit crisis.

Blogs allow writers with deep, narrow expertise, like Tanta, to pass on their learning, share their opinions, and illuminate that which for most of us is unknown. For me, in particular, I still read general-interest media, like the Times, New Yorker, WSJ, HBR, etc. But for subjects I want to explore more deeply, blog content is far better and more valuable.

There's no way Tanta would have had a voice twenty or even ten years ago. That's a benefit to readers everywhere. Including, as her case makes clear, those from the "professional media."

Tags:
blogging, blogs, finance, obituaries, media

Where are you on the Bloggers' Continuum?

Tags:
blogging, blogs, weblogs

Time to start listening to front-line employees

I have a colleague who runs a small outsourced contact center in the Pacific Northwest. I told him of my project to find and use stories from call centers to get more useful customer input. He said, "It's a great idea, but nobody listens to the reps."

Then, as I wrote about last week, a bank that is renowned as a great place to work told me that an idea to have tellers share via internal blogs customer interactions they found interesting was a non-starter: "We just put into place a policy to limit the access our employees have to the internet."

Well, it's time to start listening to the reps. It's time to let tellers blog about what they experience.

We generally accept that having happy employees at the front lines can help revenues, because happy employees convey good feelings to the customers they meet, making those customers feel better about who they're buying from, etc.

But it's now clear that in addition to courtesy and helpfulness, front-line employees also know more about what customers want, what they like and don't like, how they feel about the company, than anyone else. Because "the reps" hear it, every day, direct and unfiltered.

Back in the day, the only way an executive could access this insight would be to visit stores and talk to employees and customers him/herself. This still happens. But with cheap, ubiquitous data-sharing technology like blogs, RSS, wikis, social sites, etc., there's nothing standing in the way of systematically gathering and immersing oneself in detailed, rich information about customer interactions--even if you're the CEO.

And don't you think getting the chance to communicate, and being listened to, might increase the job satisfation of the front-liners?

An executive at a large US insurer told me that at their quarterly management meetings they listen to selected recordings of customer calls. "It's always a shock when you hear what customers say directly. We're so far removed from the customer."

Precisely.

Related post:
Enterprise use of 2.0 collides with restrictive access policies

Tags:
narrative, social media, blogging, learning, customer relationships, customer service, knowledge, knowledge management

Dell's web2.0 efforts pay off

Dell has taken a beating in the marketplace (both the commercial marketplace and the reputation marketplace) over the past few years. When founder Michael Dell took the reins again, you had to wonder whether his presence back in the CEO chair would really mean something, or would Dell slip into permanent stall mode like so many PC makers of the past (remember Gateway?).

So it's notable that Dell has distinguished itself among consumer electronics companies for embracing the capabilities of web 2.0 to engage with customers and influencers. According to the excellent new book "Groundswell," by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Dell used a PR crisis created by a blogger to jump-start its participation in social media, by 2006 was monitoring blog posts on the company, proactively seeking out problems and responding to posts, if necessary reaching out to users with technical support.

That effort has expanded to include sensing problems by monitoring Twitter (as well as using Twitter to communicate with end-users and others).

Today's Wall Street Journal points out that Dell has mastered the art of energizing the "groundswell" to build publicity for its products:

Dell Inc. hit a viral-PR home run last week when photos of a not-yet-released computer -- a candy-red miniature laptop -- swept across the Internet, creating excitement in advance of the release.

The buzz wasn't an accident: It was the payoff from a year-long effort by Dell to engage more directly with bloggers and others who write about the company online....

Engaging with blogs isn't just a defensive move. It has also changed the way the company promotes its products. Chief Executive Michael Dell brought the buzz-generating candy-red computer to The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference with the goal of showing it off to some of the bloggers in attendance.

A writer from Gizmodo, a popular gadget blog, saw the new computer and snapped a few pictures, which he posted on the Internet. The company then posted some official pictures on its own blog, and the story took on a life of its own. Dell's blog post says Gizmodo "caught" Michael Dell with the new computer.

I own a Dell computer, a beige minitower from the old days. It's a nice, boring computer. Dell's efforts in web 2.0, however, are the opposite of boring.


Related posts:
Is your marketing department confused about web 2.0? ("Groundswell")
Twitter and "Every Minute Accounted For"
Companies stall because they don't listen to customers

Tags:
social media, information technology, web2.0, marketing, blogging, communication, Wall Street Journal

Is your marketing department confused about web2.0? Read this

The one nearly universal feeling of companies dealing with the changes that web2.0 has made to marketing is utter bewilderment. I participated in a project to assess corporate blogs last year and I wouldn’t give any company I looked at better than a “C.” In fact, most of them would get incompletes: they had no blogs at all.

Never mind wikis, Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, etc., etc.

So it’s very timely that Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research have written “Groundswell,” a book that illuminates what web2.0 means to everyday businesses. In straightforward language, and buttressed by primary research into how various groups participate in web2.0, Li and Bernoff define the most important web2.0 technologies, show how consumers use them, and lay out how companies can encourage and participate in the conversations about themselves and their products.

At the outset, Li and Bernoff define six overlapping types of web2.0 users & nonusers (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, inactives) and show their representation in various segments. For example, Democrats have more web2.0 users across the board than Republicans. Japanese Fujitsu PC owners are far more likely to be collectors (e.g., content taggers or subscribers to RSS feeds) than NEC’s PC customers.

Through these examples, the authors crisply demonstrate that companies need to understand the web2.0 profiles of their customers, so as to understand, ultimately, how to engage them in productive conversation.

Case studies appear throughout the book, both success stories (Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” videos) and failures (the short-lived blog of Unica’s Chief Marketing Officer). To satisfy old-line executives (especially CFOs), they include pro forma business cases for several web2.0 projects—including laying out the upfront and ongoing costs of these initiatives.

Over and over, Li and Bernoff emphasize the need, when using these technologies, to listen, and not to shout. To be transparent, and to be authentic. Whether this is possible with traditional companies, in which desiring to control the message is deeply ingrained, remains to be seen.

---------------------------------

Examples of web2.0 user types defined in “Groundswell”:
Creators – blog writers, amateur YouTube videographers
Critics – blog commenters, Amazon product reviewers
Collectors – del.icio.us taggers
Joiners – myspace and Facebook users
Spectators – blog readers, forum readers

Related:
Groundswell blog
Corporate IT maximum-security is damaging innovation
How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers

social networking, information technology, web2.0, marketing, blogging, virtual communities, reading list

Influentials--or lots of bloggers--affect music sales

This week's release of a study concluding that more blog mentions increase music sales has caused me to think about the work of Duncan Watts, which has garnered a lot of notice based on this Fast Company article. (Shop Talk readers were alerted to Watts' work in February and May of 2007.)

The study mentioned above, by Vasant Dhar and Elaine Chang of NYU's Stern School of Business, found that the volume of blog posts was correlated with increased sales. In other words, controlling for other factors, a record mentioned in 250 blog posts would sell more than one mentioned in 25.

Which brings me back to Watts' thinking. He taunts Gladwell about the assertion that a small number of influentials can drive product adoption. From the "Fast Company" article:

He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Yet as I look at the NYU data, I can interpret it Watts' way or Gladwell's.

Either lots of people found the music and talked about it separately, and through lots of small interactions (what Watts would attribute to marketers' "big-seeding"), people discovered and bought the music.

Or a few Gladwellian "influencers" touted the music, causing other bloggers to discover the music and tout it as well, adding up to a large volume of blog posts, and thus sales.

Who's right?

blogging, marketing, music

What are marketers to do, if customers won't accept our messages?

Karl Long at Experience Curve (and fellow Futurelabber) has produced a short but potent post on the shift from "traditional marketing and new conversational, people-driven marketing." (The impetus was the following observation from Hugh McLeod in his blog Gaping Void: "Ironies of Ironies: Companies are forever being told 'You no longer control the conversation', yet from what my buddies in the PR industry tell me, their industry is utterly thriving.)

Karl homes in on the concept of social equity. Through forums like blogs, companies and individuals can accrue value in the eyes of their customer base, post by post, link by link. (And there's no doubt that the rise of blogs has been a great asset to the PR industry. Blogs, even crappy, quasi-advertising-laden ones, are a lot of work and require communications talent.)

My two cents: since we marketers can "no longer control the conversation," we are instead listening to customers, tastemakers, retailers, early adopters, then reading the weak signals, removing the noise, amplifying, and sending the customers' message back out into the world--through blogs and other media. That takes far more creativity (and effort) than creating a catchy name, unique selling proposition, and tagline for a product, then slamming it home via advertising.

marketing public relations blogging listening

Feeling constrained is a great inspiration to innovate

'Presentation Zen had another great, novelistic post stating that complaining about constraints in product design is completely misguided—in fact, dealing creatively with severe constraints is the essence of good design.

Then, the New York Times profiled 19-year-old basketball player Greg Oden, variously called the next Bill Russell or Tim Duncan (either is a great compliment, but I'd take Russell), and his switch to shooting left-handed after a serious injury and surgery to his right wrist. As a result, now that his right wrist is healed, he's a much more valuable player than he would have been if he hadn't been required to learn to use his left hand.

I'm working to create something within significant constraints. I've been playing with the Spin-my-Blog service (which allows me to talk for up to a minute and then send the transcription directly to my blog) for some weeks, and I've created a new form that will use the capabilities of the system.

Postlets: very short, conversational posts with limited (preferably no) editing, focusing on a brief business-related anecdote, hopefully funny. I'll load them up whenever they pop into my head.

Saturday's post is an example of the postlet form. Perhaps it adds a bit of freshness or change of pace to the normal blogging stuff. Let me know what you think.

mobile, blogging, technology, blogs, spoken blogging

Here's how I'm using Spin-my-Blog

For the last couple of weeks, I've been doing occasional posts using the Spin-my-Blog voice blogging service. What I've found to be the best approach is to use it as a place to post ideas. Things that I would otherwise write on a sticky note, instead, I speak into the phone. The system translates them to text and sends them directly to my blog listing as draft posts, where I can then edit them, expand them, add photos and tags and prepare them for publication.

It's highly convenient, saves typing time, and I don't lose any ideas (which, I suppose, is not always a good thing).

Voice-to-Screen messaging - powered by SpinVox

mobile, blogging, technology, blogs, spoken post, spoken blogging

Spoken blogging in action

Last month, I wrote about a new speech-to-text service that allows you to speak your blog posts into an ordinary telephone. Now I've got the service, SpinVox Speak-a-Blog, set up with my own blog, and I used it to create today's earlier post.

Some results:

The translation service worked very well. I had to make a handful of very minor corrections--the spelling of a name, a couple of capitalizations, one verb tense problem. But these took all of a minute to do.

I retitled the post, did some slight line editing, and added Blogger labels and Technorati tags. (Note to product management: it would really be something to speak your tags and have the code appear magically in the post.)

I'm going to try to do one spoken post a week to see how they evolve and compare to the written posts. There's enough time to speak about 75 words. Most readers would say that's plenty!

mobile, blogging, technology, blogs, spoken blogging