Ed Cone has just published an in-depth article on enterprise blogging, entitled “Rise of the Blog” in CIO Insight.
A very well written piece. A particularly spot-on assessment was:
“By enabling comments on its blogs, Sun can get a look at what mix of customers, partners, developers and employees is frequenting its sites, and respond to them. Customers who used to interact only with their salesperson can now communicate with members of the product team.”
DING! This really is the meat of this conversation. Sun’s folks seem to agree.
Jonathan Schwartz – “There’s an immediacy of interaction you can get with your audience through blogging that’s hard to get any other way, except by face-to-face communication. There’s no other way any individual, never mind someone who’s running a company as large as Sun, could speak face-to-face with that large an audience on a regular basis.”
Tim Bray – “This is a fantastically effective listening device. Customers are coming to us directly as bloggers. People see us do something wrong or stupid, or missing a chance, and they tell us. We get dozens of comments a week that can help us, and they go to the right people—how else is a smart guy in Cleveland going to find the relevant person at a computer company with 30,000 employees?”
This is the vanguard of this thinking, and really is presaging a move towards real customer interaction, as opposed to the things that have been called “CRM” but are really tools for managing sales teams and the Street.
Another bit in there that really stood out was the reference that Jared Spataro of Open Text made regarding the internal use of blogs as a communications medium during the integration phase of M&A activities. (Would have liked to have seen more depth on this; it sounds like a great application.)
Of course, David Weinberger gets the digging quote, saying that “public-facing blogs with voices that sound recognizably human will kill the ‘pompous and inhuman’ tone used in much corporate-speak.”
Indeed.