Business Week Cover Story: Blogs will Change Your Business
Business Week just published a cover story on how blogs are changing everything
in the world of business and communications. It is worth reading in its
entirety but here are some excerpts I think are particularly salient:
Explore posts in the same categories: Weblogs and BusinessThe
overwhelming majority of the information the world spews out every day
is digital — photos from camera phones, PowerPoint presentations,
government filings, billions and billions of e-mails, even digital
phone messages. With a couple of clicks, every one of these items can
be broadcast into the blogosphere by anyone with an Internet hookup –
or even a cell phone. If it's scandalous, a poisonous e-mail from a
CEO, for example, or torture pictures from a prison camp, others link
to it in a flash. And here's the killer: Blog posts linger on the Web
forever.Yet not all the news is scary. Ideas circulate as fast as scandal.
Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and
partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your
competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs,
sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other
competitors are up to.
….
This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs
are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video
channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the
publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside
down. It creates media of the masses.How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A
vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a
digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising,
and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear:
Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their
message. Now they're losing control of it.
….An entire industry is rising up to guide companies into this
frightening new realm. And the consultants establish their brands and
reps with their blogs.Now Rubel is positioned as an all-knowing Thumper in a forest of
clueless Bambis. The first job, he says, is to monitor the blogs to see
what people are saying about your company. (An entire industry is
growing to sell that service. Even IBM's (IBM
) banging at the door.) Next step: Damage-control strategies. How to
respond when blogs attack. He says companies have to learn to track
what blogs are talking about, pinpoint influential bloggers, and figure
out how to buttonhole them, privately and publicly.
….Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied
to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs
simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world
is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of
conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private.
Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other,
comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global
conversation.Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth.
Hunched over their laptops at one table sit six or seven experts in
nanotechnology. Right across from them are teenage goths dressed in
black and thoroughly pierced. Not too many links between those two
tables. But the café goes on and on. Saudi women here, Labradoodle
lovers there, a huge table of people fooling around with cell phones.
Those are the mobile-photo crowd, busily sending camera-phone pictures
up to their blogs.The racket is deafening. But there's loads of valuable information floating around this cafe. Technorati, PubSub,
and others provide the tools to listen. While the traditional Web
catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds.Why does this matter? Think of the implications for businesses of
getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking.
Already, studios are using blogs to see which movies are generating
buzz. Advertisers are tracking responses to their campaigns. “I'm
amazed people don't get it yet,” says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior
vice-president who heads up search. “Never in the history of market
research has there been a tool like this.”
….The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS,
or Really Simple Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave
Winer, working with software originally developed by Netscape, created
an easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or even specific postings, into
Web feeds. With this system, a user could subscribe to certain blogs,
or to key words, and then have all the relevant items land at a single
destination. These personalized Web pages bring together the music and
video the user signs up for, in addition to news. They're called
“aggregators.” For now, only about 5% of Internet users have set them
up. But that number's sure to rise as Yahoo and Microsoft plug them.In time, aggregators could turn the Web on its head. Why? They
discourage surfing as users increasingly just wait for interesting
items to drop onto their page or e-mailbox. Internet advertising, which
traditionally counts on page views and clicks, could be thrown for a
loop. Already Yahoo is packaging ads on the feeds. Google is testing
the waters.
….Think of TiVo, (TIVO
) think of the iPod. When you're using one of them, do you consider the
company that provides the programming? CBS, for example? Not much.
You're putting together your own package. The pieces come from lots of
companies and artists. Often you don't even know where.Aggregators do the same job for the Net. So, just like the record
companies, which have figured out how to market bits and pieces of
their albums as standalone songs and ringtones, the rest of the media
and entertainment world is going to have to think small. Content,
whether it's news or a Hollywood movie, is going to travel in bite-size
nuggets. The challenge, for bloggers and giants alike, is to brand
those nuggets and devise ways to sell them or wrap them in advertising.…..
Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass
media's core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers
desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only
once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they
can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will
get feedback, links to individuals — and their friends. That's every
marketer's dream.The big companies have what the bloggers lack. Scale, relations
with advertisers, and large sales forces. They can use these forces to
sell across all media, from general audience to bloggy niches. Already,
Yahoo and Microsoft have been investing heavily to position themselves
for niche advertising. And in February, the New York Times (NYT
) laid down $410 million for About Inc., a collection of 500
specialized Web sites that smell strongly of blogs. “What's to stop
them from turning those 500 sites into 5,000?” says Dave Morgan,
founder of TACODA Systems, an Internet advertising company.….
In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we
mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some
of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it,
editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here's
betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of
success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be
those who host the very best conversations.
