Corporate Blogging Challenges

July 11, 2006 · Filed Under Uncategorized

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Dell recently launched one-to-one and thus another corporation has entered the blogosphere. The follow-on eruption in posts inside the blogosphere occured as expected with they entry of such a big name corporation. See posts from Scoble, Shel Israel, Nicholas Carr, Steve Rubel, Debbie Weill, John Cass, and Dell-hater Jeff Jarvis.

I applaud Dell for braving the waters of the blogosphere. I think their goals of establishing a two-way dialog and learning from conversations are noble, correct, and certainly would add value. I just think a corporate blog by itself is the wrong format for accomplishing these goals.

All of these companies entering the blogosphere and, as Nicholas Carr put it, trying to “find their voice” led me to contemplate whether the goals of corporate blogging and the expected results are aligned. Corporate blogging can have its place in this set of activities, but I do believe that the hype and expectations around blogging are going to far exceed the actual results that any company sees. This post by Nicholas Carr attempts to illustrate this issue … the post and it’s comments are well worth reading. I think it was a good dialog.

I do not wholeheartedly agree with everything Nick said, but I do agree that companies are not going to participate in the blogosphere merely to have a conversation with the blogosphere. The true economic value-added activity that companies can pursue in the Web 2.0 context is to have increased & relevant conversations with customers and prospects. It is this direct engagement, and the understanding and learning that comes from it, that will drive economic value for a company engaging in Web 2.0.

Why are blogs not a complete solution for companies?

First, they are a publishing mechanism that is mostly one-way. With a blog, the publisher decides on the topic. The audience is left to respond to that topic only. No mechanism exists for an audience member to start their own conversation, other than on their own blog, which may never be identified by the company or its relevant audience (other customers & prospects). Thus, much of the potential dialog is lost or never happens.

Second, a ton of learning and value-added activity comes from audience members having conversations amongst themselves. A blog does not allow for this type of activity. Again, a company would have to hope these users all find each other in the blogosphere and start conversing across their respective blogs. The company would then need to find all of these conversations and listen to them. With a blog, audience members cannot start and have conversations amongst themselves.

Third, blogs are publishing platforms and are not easily mined for data and learning and do not incorporate business processes and workflow to accomplish business objectives. What objectives? Well, identification of potential sales leads, conversion of leads to prospects, routing of customer support opportunities, identification of loyal customers who are potential promoters of your offerings, managing the process of responding to customer complaints. Let’s not forget that companies are economic animals - the reason for listening and learning is to increase sales and profits through better products & customer loyalty. With a blog, customers can air grievances and sing praises, but the company is not able to do much with that opportunity beyond responding to a comment one at a time. In fact, a corporate blog may generate a lot of these business opportunities and then collapse under its own weight b/c the company is unable to respond due to a lack of business process support. This lack of scalability will be a no-go for companies over the long haul.

So, here I will agree with Nick Carr. If the goal of a blog is to show an image of being hip to Web 2.0 and claim that you’re going to listen to your customers, it is probably not worth the time. The reality is most of the dialog may end up being with the blogosphere and a small percentage of that will be realistic leads or customers. A lot of potential downside will exist, with small upside.

If the intention is to establish true conversations with customers and prospects in an effort to listen, learn, generate & convert leads to sales, respond to customer concerns, empower customers to interact with each other, and increase customer loyalty then a more comprehensive solution is needed than a corporate blog, and strong consideration to business process needs to be included.

The good news is that Web 2.0 does enable companies to truly engage with their customers and prospects, and enterprise-class solutions are coming to market that aid in enabling companies to leverage all aspects of Web 2.0 to better serve its customers. The blog is an interesting metaphor but by iteself is a broken platform for truly meeting corporate objectives in this regard.

For many of the same reasons here, a forum is not a scalable solution by iteself either. That is a topic for a future post.

A vast amount of potential value creation opportunity exists for companies by leveraging the Web and Web 2.0 technologies. I just hope that too many false expectations are not built into initial corporate blogging efforts to sour companies to Web 2.0 before true value-creating applications come to the fore.

– brian