Reporter's Notebook: Corporations want to harness the power of blogs. But isn't the blogging ethos at odds with top-down management?I'm at the BlogOn Conference today, and one look at the schedule is enough to make even the most idealistic and doe-eyed blogger feel dejected.
Monday, 2:30pm: McDonald's Corporation: Roadmap to a Corporate Blogging Strategy.
Monday, 4:30pm: Damage Control–Communicating with Customers in Times of Crisis
Tuesday, 2:00pm: Pitching to Social Media
Granted, the conference's tagline is "the business of social media." But it's a bit disconcerting to listen to marketers toss around words like "leverage" and "best practices" and "harness the power of blogs" when talking about a relatively independent form of media.
I mean, harness the power of blogs?
If I were an illustrator I'd pencil that phrase into a word balloon above a drawing of Dr. Doom, shaking his iron-gloved fist at the sky: "It's over, Richards! Your raffish foursome can't hope to defeat Doom—I've harnessed the power of blogs!"
Sigh.
Anyway, the central point of comment and question at the BlogOn conference today is how (and sometimes whether) to tap into customer conversation about brands.
Customers are talking about your brand, with or without your knowledge or consent. Do you start a community forum? Do you start a company blog? How do you monitor the conversations? Can you manage those conversations?
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Many of Monday's panelists, including Peter Friedman, CEO of Liveworld, Inc., advocated a "proactive" approach to fostering customer community.
"It's important to enable and catalyze a dialogue among your customers," he said during the Power of Communities panel.
"You can be very proactive about it as long as you take an empowering point of view instead of a controlling point of view."
Bill Schreiner, manager of AOL's community programming, also argued that it's important to pay attention to influencers within blog communities. Those are the people who have the most insight into your brand or product.
One thing Schreiner said that interested me was "look for the thank you's." The person being thanked the most in an online community is the primary influencer.
Jeff Jarvis, who also sat on the panel, seemed to chaff a bit at any form of managed conversation, which he saw to be means of customer control in disguise.
"I think you've got to lose control here," Jeff said. "It's just people talking! Listen to them! ... Stop thinking you have a message to give out and start listening to what your customers tell you."
Jeff repeatedly mentioned how he would never go to a product's Web site to learn about something he bought. "I don't go to sprint.com to learn about my Treo."
Jeff also took a swing at McDonald's, which is talking about its corporate blogging strategy today.
"The first and most important lesson we learned together at advance.net is that you don't own the community …Community has nothing to do with you… the notion that McDonald's can have a community is ludicrous. Community is gonna start wherever it's gonna start."
While I don't necessarily relish the idea of company-sponsored discussion forums and blogs (where are you, Naomi Klein?), I think they're inevitable.
We can only hope that, when corporations do solicit feedback and do engage communities, they adhere to community etiquette: Be honest. Don't dissemble. Don't lecture. Don't manage. Admit to your mistakes, and strive to correct them. Don't try to manage a conversation, because "managing conversations" is just another term for lecturing.
One last note: I saw a brief demonstration of shadows.com on Monday. Shadows is a tag-based social bookmarking service for sharing and managing information about Web pages.
What's that mean? Basically, shadow.com wants to be the place you go to find out the real scoop about any one Web page.
Say, for example, you stumble across zimbra. You could go to shadows.com and find out what people are saying about the site.
Or, if no one has said anything about it, you could start your own discussion. People rate pages and each other, and they tag pages and form groups based on tags.
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Shadows.com allows you multiple methods of inputting data, which is very important in the Web 2.0 world. You can also import your bookmarks, whether browser-based or from del.icio.us.
I think shadows.com is neat, but here's the problem, and it's not just theirs: tags are getting out of hand. Tag-based sites are growing, it seems, exponentially.
The app I'm looking for is a cross-site tag manager. Something that manages my tag taxonomy, so that I don't tag zimbra as "Web20" on del.icio.us and "Web2dot0" on shadows.com.
It seems that one of Web 2.0's defining characteristics is discrete chunklets of information: tags and small applications are the order of the day.
That is, of course, a reaction against the big, unwieldy applications of the past.
But what happens when we need more and more meta-apps to manage our increasing number of mini-apps?
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