Professionals, Publishing for the Public

Related Stories:

• It's a Blog World After All: How companies such as Verizon, IBM, Microsoft are using blogs for knowledge management -- and marketing
• Professionals, Publishing for the People: David Weinberger on how conversations within companies can scale globally
• Post(er) Boy: Robert Scoble's starter set of corporate blogging guidelines
• Best Blog Ever: How VH-1 leverages the Web to produce a TV show
• A Little Help from Your Friends: The state of online business networking
• Between the Lines: Six Degrees of Competition: Alison Overholt on the complicity and competition among social network software makers
• FC Now: Fast Company's team blog

David Weinberger is the author of Small Things Loosely Changed: A Unified Theory of the Web, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and an all-around insightful thinker at the crux of business, society, and the Web. Other hats include strategic marketing consultant and most recently, Internet advisor for the Dean campaign (remember those days?). Back in January, on the afternoon of the New Hampshire primary, Fast Company pulled Weinberger in from the cold for a phone chat about blogs in business. Here's an excerpt of the conversation transcript.

Fast Company: What's your view on how much companies are and should be paying attention to what's being said in the blog world?

David Weinberger: Companies have wanted to be able to personalize their offerings, but they've been stuck with a broadcast model for marketing. They're trying to reach masses of people. So you can say, as [one of my co-authors] says in Cluetrain, that markets are conversations, which I thoroughly believe is true. But the immediate question is how do you scale conversations globally? Markets are way too big to have conversations with.

Blogs are part of the answer to that question, because they're built from the bottom up. They are people talking about what they care about in a public forum. They're not one-to-one, but they're also not one-to-many. They're generally small groups who are reading each other's blogs, but together, because the blogs are linked, they form a much wider conversation of the universe.

So they provide a way for a company to find out what their customers actually think about their products. Do they care about the products at all, and if so, how are they talking about them and what are they saying? Who's championing them? Who's a useful critic and what are the topics that are naturally emerging from the people who care enough about these products to talk about them? Just as a way of listening, blogs provide a type of natural aggregation of talk that simply hasn't been available before.

FC: How is that different from companies listening to what people are saying in online forums or message boards?

Weinberger: It has to do with the rhetorical forms of blogs. Of course, there have been ways of aggregating all instances of the use of a product name, finding every message anybody has left, and that's certainly something useful for companies to do.

But because of the nature of blogs as a persistent place for thought, and because of the fact that they link together in relatively persistent ways, the quality of the conversation can be longer form, more thoughtful, and in an important way, less centered on the original message. This is not an either-or. Message boards tend to be more useful for addressing relatively small topics that generate a set of responses that have some degree of urgency.

FC: On an internal level, do you think, whether it's for communication or for knowledge management or project flow, that there's an internal way that blogs are going to take off or do well in a corporate or business environment?