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Blogs - What Are They Good For?

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If you've been living on planet earth for the past six months, then no doubt you'll be aware of the blogosphere phenomenon.

Blogs have forged their way into the popular psyche as a result of Hurricane Katrina and July's London Bombings. They've also found their way into the business pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, who in turn have described blogs as `a tool for brand insights' and `the beginning of the end of corporate communications as we know it.'

Whatever your position, you can be sure that the phenomenon is big and it's here to stay. In terms of numbers, blog tracking firm Technorati estimates that the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5.5 months, and that there are currently over 10 million of them in action. In terms of activity, this represents the creation of just under one million new blog `posts' (or entries) worldwide every day....which represents around 37,500 posts every hour, or 10.4 posts per second. (Check out these links for some great volume charts linking blog activity to news activity.)

Blogs are providing people with a low (or no) cost printing press for the modern age. And the one million pieces of new content generated every day covers every minutiae of our lives ­ from reportage on war and natural disasters to what shoes to wear and how Trinny's thirteenth birthday party went with a bang.

But what use is all this stuff to a commercial organization? Companies seem divided on this question. Blogs are either a) a threat or b) a valid new communications channel.

Let's take a look at the first camp....

Lesson #1: Radio Ga Ga

For less progressive organisations, the idea of consumers publishing unfiltered (and indelible) opinions on their products is causing a freak out of mass proportions. The fact that we can now run very public broadcasts on the quality of our goods and services has upset the applecart (we are Radio Ga Ga!). And companies are beginning to face up to the fact that the traditional corporate communications model ­ with grand plans and budgets dedicated to dispensing advertising messages like medicine to a willing customer ­ has gone awry.

In its place, through the medium of blogs, consumers are turning the loudspeaker around and telling firms about their wants and needs in an articulate and organised way. Take the case of 02, one of the UK's leading mobile phone operators. In July, it changed the way in which its customers were able to send multimedia messages to one another, making files arrive as a web link as opposed to an attachment within the message itself. Angry customers claimed that this was a devious way of increasing mobile internet traffic on its network, with users now needing to surf the web in order to view multimedia messages. And so, in numbers, they blogged about it. So much so that O2 reversed its decision in August, citing the negative feedback from the blogging community as its chief reason for doing so.

Other firms have not been so responsive. According to Blog expert and Squiz partner James Cherkoff, "last year, a customer of the US cycle lock manufacturer Kryptonite found that his supertough lock could be opened with a ballpoint pen." He blogged his findings (including a `how to' video) and, in quick time, the post was read by more than 3 million people. As a result, the New York Times ran a story, Kryptonite retailers cleared their shelves, and thousands of products were returned. The company has since replaced 350,000 products at their own expense.

Responsive or not, both these examples show the power of the Blogosphere in directing consumer opinion and purchasing habits. The blogosphere is, unquestionably, a rich source of influence from which companies can learn how their products are being used and approved of (or otherwise!). And the lesson learned so far is that the implied threat of blogs is only felt when companies fail to listen. O2 was smart ­ it listened; Kryptonite wasn't ­ and it paid the price.

How to Listen to Important People...

There are a number of free listening `tools' in place that help organisations to read the pulse of the Blogosphere. Google launched a new blog search tool in September, to compliment established tools from firms such as Technorati and PubSub. All of them allow users to search the blogsphere in the same way they would use search engines to find webbased content. We've found that by using a combination of them it's possible to implement a fairly exacting set of blog measurement metrics around a specified theme or set of key words. For example, using Technorati, it's possible to associate key words with brand names to extrapolate what the blogosphere is saying about the new BMW 3 Series (generally, good things!). And all of these tools use familiar ranking technologies to provide search results that are structured by relevance and importance (for example, Technorati measures importance by the number of inbound links that are associated with a given blog post....a quantitative assessment that tells us a blog post is `influential' because it's being referenced by the wider blogging community).

Lesson #2: Radio GoGo

More progressive organisations have decided to get on board and join the blogosphere. And many of them are doing this to good effect. It appears to be helping them forge stronger ties with their customers (or business partners) by providing an insider's view of the machinations of their companies.

Our favourite examples are in the world of IT, with Microsoft and Macromedia. Both companies are giving a public face to their product development teams through the use of blogs. As a result, their developers are interacting on a daily basis with key customer and partner communities to sound out (on new product innovations) or sound off (on general industry debates). The net effect is that they have created a close and loyal community that has the opportunity to interact with their service/product providers ­ providing feedback commentary on new ideas and ultimately shaping the direction of product development.

In the case of Microsoft, this effort has also had some very positive side effects. Aside from a mountain of positive press coverage, it has enabled them to position themselves more positively within a fast moving and usually hostile environment.In the process, their highest profile blogger, Robert Scoble, has become something of a minor celebrity and a very valuable asset to the firm. As the Ecomonist describes, "Scoble seems to be worth his salary. Impressively, he has succeeded where small armies of more conventional publicrelations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world."

At the other end of the corporate spectrum, Kong is King is director Peter Jackson's daily account of the (re)making of his 2005 production, King Kong. The site acts as a journal for the entire direction of the movie, and has spawned a whole ecosystem of public blogs around it. Like Microsoft and Macromedia, the intention is the same ­ to provide consumers with early access to product development plans, and to give them the opportunity to express their ideas and approval (or otherwise!) in return.

As a business model, this is nothing new. Focus groups have long been used by corporate advertisers, and small businesses everywhere embark on a similar strategy every time they run an idea past a trusted 3rd party advisor. However, blogs bring a whole new economy of scale to the operation.

The lesson learned here is that blogs can be used as an extremely costeffective sounding board or focus group for product development. Key to this is the ability to identify or establish a community that cares.

How to Influence Important People...

Unlike the Economist may suggest, we don't believe for a moment that blogs will replace tried and tested methods of corporate communications (PR and advertising departments can breathe easy!). Blogs are not mass communications devices. People still need to find you on the web in order to interact with you (although new technologies such as RSS can help you find them ­ see our previous paper `RSS: Feeds for All for more on this). Further, they need to be engaged with you, at least enough to care, if your message is to hit home.

For this reason, we'd advocate blogs as a great tool for targeting and influencing specific communities, like the examples above have done. The early success stories come from the world of IT, and this is no surprise since the IT community is more websavvy than the rest of us. But over time, as broadband adoption rises (there are now over eight million ADSL subscribers in the UK and around 100 million worldwide), and blogs become more mainstream (readership of the world's most popular blog, Boing Boing, is now higher than USA Today and Reuters), opportunities will exist for all companies to target specific business and consumer audiences.

Blogging tools like Six Apart's Moveable Type cost under $200 for a lifetime commercial licence. If you already have a web site, then creating a blog on such a platform is trivial and inexpensive. All you need to do is find your audience and understand that what you want to say to them must relate to what they want to hear from you. In other words, you must strike up a dialogue. Think of this audience as your user `community' and think in terms of collaborative product development. There are voices out there that will always want to express an opinion on what you are doing ­right or wrong. The trick is to channel this desire into a forum that helps progress your business. And the `free and easy' blogsosphere phenomenon is tailormade for this.

So, what are blogs good for? Two words: listening and sharing. Go do it today!

PS:If you'd like to know more about how you can explore this brave new world, then contact me.Squiz can help