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| To blog or not to blog? |
May 2, 2005 |
By Don Tapscott
I’m a member of an increasingly popular club, one which you should think about joining. As I write this, I and 7,657,152 other citizens of the Web have set up blogs.
More than 12,000 new blogs join the club daily. Blogging is booming.
A blog (short for Web log) is a personal journal on the Internet. A blog exists for virtually every conceivable subject. Some are intended only for small audiences, such as family and friends, while others have millions of readers. But despite a great deal of media coverage, a large portion of the public still doesn’t appreciate the growing importance of blogs and their impact on public discourse.
Just like e-mail is more formal than a phone call yet less formal than a letter, blogs are a new form of corporate communication.
They are relaxed and casual, yet can often reveal more about a company in a couple of paragraphs than an elaborate 30-minute PowerPoint presentation. People will attach much greater credibility to claims made by a corporate blogger than they will to the company’s advertising or marketing efforts.
Advertising can be meaningless bumph, but a blog is a personal undertaking by a company representative.
Blogs have altered the mass-media landscape and will soon cause similar changes in the broader corporate community.
Blogs will have the same impact on some sectors of society as the audio compression technology MP3 had on the music industry.
Ask Dan Rather. By exposing shoddy research at CBS news, bloggers humbled the once-mighty news organization.
“Rathergate” is a harbinger of the new media environment. With the advent of blogs, every sentence uttered in a newscast or printed in a newspaper can be subject to intense online scrutiny and discussion.
In Rather’s case, the criticism of him from conservative bloggers had become so shrill during the course of the American election that CBS management concluded most blogs didn’t merit a response.
So when blogs started questioning the authenticity of memos pertaining to president George W. Bush’s military service, one CBS executive simply dismissed
bloggers as malcontents sitting around in their pajamas.
The network could have handled the episode much differently. The memos’ authenticity was not an issue of political opinion but of solid research. CBS should have prepared for the legitimate scrutiny.
The network could have posted the details of their own research and why they concluded the memos were real. They could have invited comments from other
experts. They could have used blogging zealots to their advantage, rather than pretending they didn’t exist.
JOIN THE BLOGOSPHERE
Blogs comprise what is now called the blogosphere. There are as many reasons why people establish blogs as there are blogs themselves. In my case, I wanted to continue work that I had started with my most recent book, The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business. David Ticoll was my co-author. My blog is at http://www.AgeofTransparency.com.
The book’s thesis is that transparency is on the march. This force has quietly gained momentum in the past decade and is now triggering profound changes
in the private sector. Transparency is far more than the obligation to disclose basic financial information. People and institutions that interact with firms are gaining unprecedented access to all sorts of information about corporate behaviour, operations and performance.
That means customers can evaluate the true worth of products and services.
Employees share formerly secret information about corporate strategy, management and challenges. To collaborate effectively, companies and business partners have no choice but to share intimate knowledge with one another. Powerful institutional investors today own or manage most wealth; they are developing x-ray vision.
And in a world of instant communications, whistleblowers and inquisitive media, citizens and communities routinely put firms under the microscope. The corporation is becoming naked.
While there are many factors causing the rise of transparency, none is more important than changes in media and technology over the last decade, and in
particular the Internet. People now access the most powerful tool ever for finding out what’s going on, informing others and even self organizing. It raises transparency to a new level. And it’s much more than having a printing press at your fingertips.
Broadcast and print media are one-way, centrally (and corporately) controlled, single message. The multidirectional Internet is the opposite of all these.
There was a great example of this earlier this year when Wal-Mart in the U.S. announced a major PR campaign to fire back at the company’s critics. Chief
executive Lee Scott said his company was under attack from all directions. “We touch so many lives...there is almost not a [non-government organization] that does not have an interest in what we as a company are doing,” he said. Having so many critics was like “being nibbled to death by guppies.”
This is the age of transparency courtesy of the Internet. It’s not unusual for a corporation to have many critics, but what’s new is that they are all speaking with one another via the ’net, swapping ideas, insight, intelligence, experiences and any other scrap of information.
Increasingly these exchanges are occurring in the form of blogs. (In the book The Naked Corporation, we called these guppies a “stakeholder Web.” Every
company has one.) Those guppies are beginning to act in unison, and their collective bite can be painful.
We spent more than a year researching every facet of the new transparency for the book. Accordingly, I now see current events through a transparency-oriented lens. When I read the newspaper in the morning or surf through Google news, I see many stories as manifestations of the
transparency phenomenon. Wal-Mart’s PR campaign is one example. Many of Scott’s guppies are blogs, and by dismissing their criticisms as groundless Scott simply gave the bloggers more ammunition.
I try to share this perspective with my blog readers. It is a way to apply my thinking to day-to-day events and continue the discussion that began with
the book.
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