It's a Blog World After All

By: Jena McGregorWed Dec 19, 2007 at 12:48 AM

Blogs were once the domain of angst-ridden teens and doomed presidential candidates. But the likes of Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, and Dr. Pepper are all climbing on the blogwagon. Turns out, Web logs are a nifty knowledge-management tool. And companies also see them as a promising medium for advertising (naturally).

That's why some businesses are going straight to bloggers for buzz. Random House's Crown Publishing sends books to bloggers for review. Nokia sent a small group of bloggers its 3650 model camera phone to take for a whirl. To help companies find bloggers who fit their target, Internet marketing firm Richards Interactive has even started ProjectBlog.com, a database of bloggers who've completed demographic surveys.

In an episode that shows both the promise and peril of a corporate embrace of blogging, Richards helped Dr. Pepper/Seven Up run a blogcentric campaign last spring for its new milk-based drink, Raging Cow. It started a blog for the cow--"the cow had his own site," says director of corporate communications Mike Martin (who's a little fuzzy on bovine anatomy). Then it screened hundreds of young bloggers to find a suitable group to help promote the drink. Dr. Pepper flew the five winners and their parents to Dallas to try the product and gave them several hundred dollars in Amazon gift certificates.

While Martin says the campaign was a success, it provoked an angry backlash in the blog world, where the relationship between the company and the blogs was seen as crassly commercial and poorly disclosed. "A case of crude corporate cluelessness," wrote one widely read pundit and law professor. Todd Copilevitz, director of interactive strategy at Richards, admits the company should have had the bloggers repeat disclosures more often.

Other companies are finding their visits to the blogosphere less bruising. Tiny 10e20, a Web design firm in Brooklyn, recently began requiring employees to post updates on their progress to a blog twice a day. Within the first six weeks, 10 projects were turned in early. Having a central repository for information helped--but so did the added scrutiny that came from letting everyone see how a project was progressing. Software maker Macromedia, one of the first companies to adopt blogs for customer service, saved tens of thousands of dollars in call-center support when it released a crop of new products for software developers in 2002. A trusted group of employees started blogs to answer users' questions, and the blogs have grown into online communities that give Macromedia valuable customer feedback.

At Microsoft, Scoble sees his blog as a way to put a gentler face on the often-reviled software giant. Is it working? The Scobleizer has detractors who think he's just a shill. But a comment from "thad," who began reading the blog before Scoble became a Microsoft employee, is revealing: "Really liked a lot of your ideas. Then you were assimilated and I came to see how you'd change. But something else happened. You turned me on to XP and I liked it. It is almost enjoyable to work on. . . . you have changed my views on the big evil company."

Jena McGregor is Fast Company's associate editor.

From Issue 81 | April 2004

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Recent Comments | 26 Total

December 1, 2008 at 10:08am by Matt Timothy

The reason this open-source market of thinking and writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas. The flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings. Reason is not the only fuel in the tank. In a world where no distinction is made between good traffic and bad traffic, and where emotion often rules, some will always raise their voice to dominate the conversation; others will pander shamelessly to their readers’ prejudices; others will start online brawls for the fun of it.

It's a Blog World After All

Recent Comments | 26 Total

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