There was an interesting spat recently at Amazon headquarters in Seattle that has been reverberating around cyberspace ever since.
What happened was this: the authors of a fast-selling new book advocating business blogging were invited to give a talk to a lunch-time meeting of Amazon employees. Werner Vogels, the chief technology officer of Amazon, asked some direct -- some say rude -- questions, demanding empirical evidence that business blogging was a good investment rather than just a cool idea.
The visitors appeared to be miffed by his iconoclastic, sceptical tone. Up to that point on their book-promotion travels they had been listened to in reverential silence. So the meeting ended on a sour note and the participants went their separate ways -- but the argument continued in, well, blogs.
Amazon's guests that day were Robert Scoble, a well-known blogger and Microsoft employee, and his co-author, Shel Israel. Their book has the intriguing title of Naked Conversations. But the subtitle -- "How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers" -- sums it up. This is about business, not psychotherapy.
Scoble and Israel are evangelists for business blogging, by which they mean blogs published by individuals who work for companies.
"We are blogging champions," they wrote. "We believe that blogging is not just wise for businesses wishing to be closer to their customers, but essential. We envision a day when companies that don't blog will be held suspect to some degree, with people wondering whether they have something to hide or whether the owners are worried about what the people who work for them have to say."
The Scoble-Israel argument is simple. Blogging is "the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool yet developed" and is growing at an astonishing rate (one new blog every second).
Increasingly, new bloggers are not teenagers talking about acne and angst, but workers talking about business.
"Chances are," Scoble and Israel wrote, "that if people aren't talking about your company in blogs today, they will be soon. You would be wise to join these conversations, if only to thank those who sing your praises or to correct factual errors."
If you ignore the `blogosphere' you won't know what people are saying about you. You can't learn from them, and they won't come to see you as a sincere human who cares about your business and your reputation," they wrote.
This was the message the visitors took to Amazon, a firm that doesn't blog but rather prides itself on keeping close to its customers. So it was perhaps predictable that the gospel according to Scoble and Israel would raise some hackles.
Vogels asked questions like: how does having employees blog help increase sales, reduce operating costs, improve supply chain management, reduce inventory or support-call costs? And if blogging can help in these areas, by how much? What percentage can sales increase? What percentage of employees has to blog?
These are questions that any business executive would ask. But they are also deeply unimaginative ones because they are addressed to the world as it is rather than the world as it may turn out to be.
Although the Scoble-Israel message focuses on blogging, it is really about how businesses need to transform themselves if they are to thrive in a networked world, a world where it is impossible to keep secrets, where prices and markets are transparent, corporate public relations is ineffective and where customers empowered by search technology communicate with one another via channels that companies cannot control.
Blogging, in that sense, is just a tool that companies might adopt to help them survive.
But the decision to adopt that tool requires a sea change in corporate attitudes. Naked Conversations is really the next instalment of the famous Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com) of April 1999, the first document that spelled out the implications for business of a networked world.
The manifesto's message was simple -- markets were originally conversations, but the arrival of mass production and of mass markets created by mass media changed that, and the gap between the people who ran businesses and those who bought their products began to widen, bringing in its train a pathological distrust that made consumers increasingly resistant to broadcast messages. "We speak, you listen" became the mantra.
The Internet, by enabling conversations between consumers on a global scale -- and potentially between with businesses -- will turn the clock back, and make markets more like conversations again.
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