Scary Blog Stories (Corporate Version)

Happy Halloween, everyone!

I wanted to share a
scary blog story for you, which came out last week
in Forbes
magazine.

It's not a scary story in the
traditional sense (though I might post it to Scalzi's
Halloween assignment anyway).

It goes a
little something like this:

Once upon a
time,

there was a corporation. It was a nice little publicly-traded

corporation, one that was well-positioned in the market, with a sound

business model, good brand recognition and a robust line of products

and/or services.

All the people liked the little
publicly-traded

corporation, which also generated good shareholder value and had
strong

prospects for sustained growth over the middle-to-long
term.

One day, and for no apparent
reason (or because of something that happened to the nice
little publicly-traded corporation that was not its
fault, according to the nice little publicly-traded
corporation's nice public relations people), a mob
of angry bloggers, dressed in ragged pajamas and other scary outfits,
rose up with a great hue and
cry,

and as if as one, yelled out:





"Little publicly-traded corporation! We

don't like you!!! In fact, we hate you and we will
make it our mission to

spread mean, slanderous, hateful, untrue things about you and your

robust line of products and/or services! We will stalk and
harass

anyone who comes to defend you!





(The scary bloggers liked using lots of exclamation points.)





"Plus, we will be so loud and there will be
so many of

us, that our words will spread wide throughout the land and the

mainstream media, and no one will listen to your nice public relations
people!





"And if that's not enough, our mean words will show up ahead of yours
in major search engines! (Which were accomplices to
the mean, angry bloggers, although in a nonliable way.) 






"Finally, our nasty lies will keep showing up, even
after we lose interest and move on to our next victim and there's
nothing you can do about it!"

And
it was true: There was nothing the nice little publicly-traded
corporation could do about it.

The
End.

This is my take on the Forbes
article, which was entitled 'Attack
of the Blogs' (free registration or BugMeNot.com
required).

It's a scaremongering article about how
an online lynch mob (actual
phrase) of bloggers will smear you and take down your company. (The
phrase reminds me of Al Gore's "digital
brownshirts" remark, only the Forbes article strikes me as a
tad more hysterical.)

Now,

first off, keep in mind, I work for a company that has a long
tradition

and abundance of Web sites (way, way before blogs) dedicated to

chronicling how much we suck. Some criticisms were fair, some less so,

and our reactions have ranged from things we've done well and things

we've done poorly, so we're still learning and making mistakes,
too.

Also, since "the blogosphere" is so big and
wide-ranging (20
million strong,

by one count), it's always risky to generalize anything about bloggers
-- it's a lazy shortcut to fall back on (which I,

admittedly, have used).



Back to the article: BoingBoing
was there commenting early in the fray; they also link to the
always-insightful Dan
Gillmor.

Suffice to say, reactions I've
seen have been generally negative, though I haven't
seen any mobs with pitchforks and torches yet (not even digital
ones.)

At some level, the article is so
over the top, I'm wondering if some bloggers just
think Forbes is trolling (or at least, generating
controversy to sell magazines -- after all, didn't they just do a Best Blogs of the Web
this summer?)

In any case, it's so
overheated that it's ripe for skewering; here's a
parody
rant on the printing press from the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
and here's satire from the
QandO blog.

Anyway, a more
level-headed view of how companies should manage their
relationship with the blogosphere depends on really taking that word
seriously: Relationship.





To fall back on a big marketing phrase that's going around and around
and around: "Markets
are conversations." (That link is from another Forbes article
-- go figure -- by James Surowiecki, the author of  'The
Wisdom of Crowds')

For companies, this
means understanding that consumers (even those who are bloggers) are
not the enemy, and are in fact worth listening
to.

Companies

like when people say nice things about their company; the tricky part

is not minding when people say not-nice things about their company --
it shows that those people care -- then knowing
what to do to make things right.

It's a concept that
comes up when corporate-types discuss how to take advantage of brand
blogs, or the unofficial and unaffiliated blogs that fans or
critics of a company write.

However,

to really "get it", companies can't look at blogs and the blogosphere

as something that can exploited. Like many things, the more
you

put into something, the more you get out of it.

This
can be a

little off-putting for companies, because it involves transparency and

authenticity. (I'm reminded of the joke/quote, attributed to different

people: "Sincerity? If you can fake it, you've got it
made.")

It

also means giving up a measure of control, though control in this

context is kind of a myth -- people are talking, and they're talking

whether you're involved or not.

So what do you use
instead of control and spin?

Why,
truth, of
course.

This goes for PR types, too. Here's an
article on media training by PR-type
and blogger David Parmet (whom I also know from a past
life).

Anyway,

there are a lot of examples being passed around of good ways and bad

ways that companies have reacted to the attention of the blogosphere.

Here are a few of them -- you can judge for yourself what falls into

which category.

* The Kryptonite
lock controversy from 2004

* The iPod's dirty
little secret video (about at-the-time nonreplaceable
batteries) from 2003

Also, a fairly current version
involves defective
Sony chips in a lot of digital cameras -- a digital camera enthusiast's
board put 2 and 2 together -- we'll see how this one shakes
out.



Take a look and see what you think. Also, don't forget to brush your
teeth! Thanks. -- Joe