Blogging for Better Business: In Community with Customers

The central message of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel is best summarized in the following quote:

The revolution is about the way businesses communicate, not just with customers but with their entire constituencies — partners, vendors, employees, prospects, investors and the media.

I think what excites me so much about this book (and why I’ve been blogging about it here, here and here … and, of course, here) is that it ties together — and expands — several threads I’ve been ruminating on over the last year or so, with respect to recognizing that everyone‘s a customer, there is business value in integrity, openness, vulnerability and compassion, everyone has the opportunity (and responsibility) to engage in socially responsible investing of their time and/or money, and ultimately, business is (or can be) good.  If it is true that everything we need to know is already within us, the mark of a great book is that it helps us excavate, synthesize and apply this core knowledge … and by that measure, Naked Conversations is a great book.

The quote I mention above highlights the notion that a business — large or small — is just one part of a larger community, and so businesses will benefit from opening up to that community, e.g., through blogging.  Large businesses can benefit from blogging through what might be called the humanization of the corporation — allowing the passion and intelligence of employees to shine through — and small businesses can benefit from blogging through … well, I guess it comes down to the same thing (sharing passion and brilliance), just on a smaller scale, but perhaps with a larger magnification effect.

The authors note the differences in blogging practices among a few famous, large, technology companies: Microsoft (with over 1,500 active bloggers, or 2.6% of employees) and Sun (over 1,000 active bloggers, or 3.1% of employees) vs. Google and Apple, where there are — or were — very few bloggers … or at least few who publicly identified themselves as employees of either of those two companies.  They chalk it up to culture, noting the relative openness of each organization ("command and control" vs. "listen and participate"), how much it trusts and empowers individual employees, and how charismatic and/or authoritarian the organization’s leaders are.  I don’t know anyone at Apple, but I do have some friends at Google, and my impression is that — within the organization — it is an open and participatory culture that encourages experimentation and risk-taking, though perhaps that openness does not extend [far] outside of the organization.  I think other possible factors include how much the people in an organization feel they are all part of the team (vs. part of one team among many [loosely joined]), and how attached people are to things like stock options … and, perhaps, job security. 

Gene Becker noted recently that he could find only 15 bloggers at HP, and only 7 of them had posted any comments on the board-level drama unfolding at the company … I don’t know too much about HP’s culture, although it appears to be in a transition period (toward what Gene calls HP Way 2.0).  SocialText maintains a Fortune 500 Business Blogging wiki with references to other large organizations with some kind of blogging presence (currently, only 30, or 6%, of Fortune 500 companies have any publicly identified — or identifiable — blogs).

Blogging appears to be far more common as one moves down the long tail of businesses, and Robert and Shel note several examples of effective small business blogs, and examples of how blogging about small businesses can help them attract more attention (or Google juice).  However, I wonder what percentage of small businessfolk are bloggers.  There are over 14 million U.S. businesses (according to BizStats.com) and 12 million U.S. bloggers (according to a recent Pew Internet survey).  Most of these blogs are personal blogs (only 5% of those surveyed cited "business" as the primary topic of their blogs)– although with small businessfolk, I suspect the distinction between personal and professional may not be as pronounced as in some of the larger companies (blog what you love, the money will follow).

Whatever the distribution of blogging is among large vs. small businesses, it is definitely on the rise. Recent Technorati statistics on the State of the Blogosphere, August 2006 show huge increases, with 175,000 new blogs being created each day … if 5% of these are business-related blogs, that would mean nearly 9,000 new business blogs are created daily.  Even if half of new blogs are splogs (spam blogs) — which, I suppose, could be categorized as a special type of business-oriented blog (but I don’t really want to go there) — we’re still seeing a steady increase in "legitimate" business blogs … and that has to be good for business … and the communities businesses serve.

[Update: there is a Blog Business Summit coming up October 25-27 at the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle, with a pretty impressive lineup of sessions and speakers … and, of course, a regularly updated and informative blog.]