Blogging Advice

Personal computers + personal publishing = …

There are many companies in this wonderful world of ours who have delivered products and services into the hands of common, everyday people. Some of these people appreciate those products and services.

So what do you get when you put all that in together? Fan’s who post all sorts of things about the product or service sites. Case in point, one great ad for the iPod Mini by George Masters.

Related cases in point, the recent Kottke/Sony issue and aeons-ago Netflix opportunity fumble.

There was a time when conventional wisdom taught us that there is no such thing as bad press. Think that is still the case? I am not really sure there is such a thing as conventional wisdom (or common sense for that matter, but that’s another post for another time). So, given the plethora of “don’t use our stuff or even talk about our company” activity of late thanks to all those uppity bloggers, should Apple go after Mr. Masters?

No, of course not. All Apple has going for them is viral marketing. With 5-ish% of the market, what else are you going to do? It’s too bad that a company’s reaction to fans with production/publishing ability is based on whether they need the publicity. Or at least think they need it. If you put it in terms of, “Would you like people talking about your company,” most companies are going to say yes.

A company should use its fan base. Are there blogs about your company out there? Congrats. Now go build a relationship with those bloggers. Are there blogs out there being critical of your business practices? Congrats. Now go build a relationship with those bloggers.

Blogs by fans may be outside the control of a company (until they decide to squash them via lawsuit), but they don’t have to be outside a company’s ability to positively influence. If your company is not going to have its own blog with which to interact with customers, make sure you are combing the web for the sites that will allow you to do just that. Most of the blogs have comments enabled; start commenting.

And a side note to Apple… When the iPod Mini first came out, I was pretty upset at the price. Specifically the price-to-gigabyte ratio. To me, there was no way in heck or hell that I would ever buy an iPod Mini. That is until I saw Mr. Masters’ ad. As I was watching it I found myself thinking, “Well… maybe…” And who doesn’t want their potential customers at the “wellmaybe” stage? I am such a pushover.

When Jason Kottke posted audio of Ken Jennings losing on Jeopardy, it instantly became (in)famous in the blogosphere. Unfortunately, Sony’s legal team took notice of the audio as well, and socked Jason with a Cease and Desist letter to take it down. He complied with their demands, however I’m pretty sure that they’re not going to let Jason go so easily.

He wrote today on his weblog how his legal troubles with Sony don’t appear to be over. He also discussed how situations like this make him question keeping his weblog around, for what happens if he does get sued for multi-millions? Jason’s just an individual blogger and can’t afford the legal troubles huge corporations can handle.

This is extremely unfortunate, because the blogosphere is around in order to call out the Media’s bullshit and draw attention to news stories that might have fallen through the cracks. Jason was just providing his readers with a tidbit of information about one of the stories of the moment, and in no way was making a profit from posting that audio file on his weblog. It didn’t take away from any of Sony’s money, and in fact, probably made even more people watch that showing of Jeopardy which increased Sony’s bottom line.

Bloggers need to be able to express themselves, or else weblogs will become another moderated media outlet just like everything else.

Allen Weiner, a Gartner Inc. analyst, discusses how weblogs are beneficial for companies:

“There’s a huge benefit in blogging for companies implementing IT projects. It’s going to be a growing trend over the next couple of years.”

After Google bought Blogger earlier this year, the G-company decided to start using weblogs internally to keep track of projects, code snippets, ideas, and other artifacts that might normally be overlooked. They have a proprietary version of the Blogger backend powering firewall-protected Google employee and workgroup blogs (check out a screenshot), and the idea is really catching on inside the company. Jesse Goldman, the Blogger product manager, had this to say:

“It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents.”

[Read more…] about Google Uses Weblogs

All we need is a blog and then our customers will once again begin to trust us and buy our products.

Last week over at the Squarespace Blog I wrote about blogs being perceived as the “Silver Bullet” for companies’ troubles. The line of thinking goes that you hear a new technology being hyped up and the media begins to jump onboard then it must work because hype and media can never be wrong. Well then let’s just say that two things are not right with this.

1. Blogs aren’t really new at all. Maybe the name is newer than “website”, but this is all they are, websites. You don’t think people were publishing their own websites before MovableType came around?
2. The media is hyping up the technology for the wrong reasons.

I will stay away from #1 for right now and focus on #2.

When I say the media hypes up blogs for all the wrong reasons it is because it seems they still don’t understand them. Of course they see them as competition because blogs break news much faster than the larger media outlets. But really that’s like Wal-Mart viewing Mom and Pop stores as competition. In any case one of the most over-hyped type of blogs that I have seen as of late are political blogs.

Some larger media outlets seemed to think that blogs could change the face of politics. This was proven wrong with Dean. Then guess what? It was proven wrong again with Kerry. Blogs don’t really change anything at all sorry to say, though we were sad to hear of the fall out after the election.

A blog isn’t going to change the message of politicians or the platform they stand on. A blog doesn’t change voting patterns in the past and it doesn’t make up for any scandals that may have occurred. On a blog all they can say are the same things that are said in a meet & greet, yet for some reason people tend to think that a blog changes the message and will make it stronger. It doesn’t.

If that’s the case then why would any company be interested in such a thing? We are seeing companies that read some article mention of blogs and how it has made X company more popular and they think it is the magic formula. But it doesn’t always turn out that way.

Blogs help to spread really bad and really good news rather quickly. Mediocre stuff is left to the big media outlets and their bureaucratic publishing processes. A blog isn’t going to magically change the way your customers feel about what you sell. But it can help you guide that change, and it can do it on your timetable.

The real Silver Bullet is the philosophy behind your company. It’s how you treat your customers. It’s the quality of your products and services. That is the Silver Bullet. Blogs just make that bullet shine even brighter.