Corporate Migration to the Blogosphere

August 27th, 2008 | Posted in blog 3 Comments »

Looking into the future

A few months ago, I started to write a post about the cultural shift blogging would create in the near and long-term future. I didn’t get very far and quickly became mired in speculation. But when I learned today that RJ Jacquez now has a blog, I started to remember some of my predictions. Basically, it goes like this:

Amateur bloggers start to saturate Google with content that controls the reputation of company products.
Companies, fearing a complete loss of voice, start joining the blogosphere in masses.
With so many people writing and publishing daily, information grows to a ridiculous degree and becomes difficult to manage.
Search becomes the only way to find anything.
Writers, especially those gifted at SEO and content creation, and who have a lot of Google karma/page rank, become major corporate players, with more prestige than ever before.

And right about there I didn’t know what came next. I think at some point there’s a major shift and people move away from the web altogether, embracing a new form. But I couldn’t figure out the details.

Anyway, RJ Jacquez from Adobe, Mike Hamilton from Madcap Software, and Alan Porter from WebWorks all have blogs. I suspect AuthorIt will eventually launch a blog, and the dozens of other software vendors. They’re realizing that it’s marketing suicide to be offline and silent.

Although these bloggers are all intelligent, clear writers, with solid reputations to give them an authoritative presence, the question is whether they will have the creative muse to write day after day in a way that engages readers. We’ll find out.

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photo from UCDavis

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Gordon says:

August 28, 2008 at 4:27 am

We will be taking a different take (I think Adobe does this actually) where we’ll have a “Developer blog” to which we will allow several authors to contribute.

That should mean a steady flow of posts, without relying solely on an individual.

Gordons last blog post..New eyes

Charles says:

August 28, 2008 at 1:53 pm

Great article Tom,

Part of this corporate migration is kicking and screaming, I feel, based on the pull of interconnected persons formerly known as the MARKET.

Bloggers get their message out either towards the company, from the company, or both. Twitters are now a direct feedback loop from frustrated consumers, with more companies paying attention to the direct newsfeed and consumers getting results before the buzz becomes ugly.

Blogging is a skill set that most positions will require in the future – just like e-mail and Word for Windows was in the late 1990s.

The hardest part of this implementation will be in quantifying, on a corporate level, the amount of time each position should have dedicated to its blogging outreach.

cluetrain.org has made much of this for over ten years. I feel it’s one of the most significant pulls of technology in leveling the playing field between corporations and their audience. Here’s an analysis from last year:
Cluetrain Manifesto Approach To Conversational Marketing
http://charlesjeter.com/2007/09/14/

@Gordon
Devblogs… yes… Great idea and devblogs were one of my predictions / featured technology application solutions from 2007.

I did a summary recap post that might help structure some of the concepts if you’re interested:
http://charlesjeter.com/2007/09/23/

I should have taken the open .com address for devblog.com then as well, but didn’t. Oh well, I saw that coming. At least I was one of the first to coin the phrase, if not the first… Maybe I’ll list that as my contribution / accomplishment!

Charless last blog post..Australia’s Learning Object Debate

Tony McDow from the Helm » Blogs and Agile says:

March 20, 2009 at 10:53 am

[...] glad we are getting some recognition for our blogging efforts, which leads me to a few thoughts for the end of [...]

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