BusinessBloggingBootCamp

A Darwinian View of Blogs as Business Tools: Part 3 - Embracing Public Experiments

For review, or to learn how Graeme Thickens ended up "volunteering" to help examine the evolution of business blogging since he wrote his (then) skeptic's view in April 2005:

• Blogs vs. Social Media: Businesses Need Both (intro)
• Part 1 - A Passion for Your Business
• Part 2 - Gossip, Trust, and ROi

Next, Graeme-Apr05 wrote:

3. Business doesn't like doing public experiments. Again, this seems to be one of the favorite recent themes of the hypesters: that businesses should start blathering with their "corporate voice." But mainstream business doesn't let just one person speak for all its interests. And that applies even to the CEO — or, I should say, especially to the CEO in the current climate of ethics lapses and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Don't you just want to shout, THE EXPERIMENT IS OVER?

But no, that would miss Graeme's point ... and the much more important response that public "experimentation" is one of the high-value benefits that businesses are experiencing with blogging and social media. I take Graeme to have meant that traditional-minded businesses prefer learning what their customers want from spreadsheets, carefully chosen focus groups, and scientifically randomized studies. Since then, however, we've seen many examples of corporate blogs being used to ... gasp! ... ask the customers themselves for feedback.

A Darwinian View of Blogs as Business Tools: Part 2 - Gossip, Trust, and ROi

If you've come via a search, link, or other indirect route, this is Part 2 of a series that grew out of my Blogs vs. Social Media: Businesses Need Both post. Part 1 - A Passion for Your Business examined the role of passion in business ... and in blogging.

Continuing with our re-examination of an April 2005 article in now defunct DarwinMag.com (Internet Archive version) written by a then-blog-skeptical Graeme Thickens only a few months before he launched his own business blog, Tech~Surf~Blog  ...

Graeme-Apr05 wrote:

2. Business doesn’t like gossip. The blogosphere is well known as a cauldron of innuendo and over-the-back-fence chatter. (That’s not to say some political blogs haven’t helped get to the truth in some notable instances — such as the Dan Rather incident. But we’re talking business here.) The fact remains that business people still have two big questions when it comes to this blogging phenomenon: Who would I trust out there? And, what would I get out of slogging through all this uncontrolled chit-chat?

Depends on who's chatting, no? And what they're chatting about.

Pejoratives like "gossip" and "innuendo" aside, one of the things I tell audiences all the time is that thought-leaders in just about every field of human endeavor are blogging and/or commenting on each other's blogs. Cutting edge ideas that will affect your business appear and get debated on blogs (and Twitter) months, if not years, before they show up in mainstream media, or professional and academic journals.

True, the blogs maintained by though-leaders in your field, or in fields of science, technology, or business that affect your business in myriad tangential ways make up only a small fraction of that scary place called the blogosphere. Even adding in the many news and commentary blogs now published by most mainstream media, that portion is miniscule compared to the still fast-growing whole.

So what about those millions of other bloggers, the ones whose grammar, spelling, or choices of topic you may not approve? As Yvonne reminded us recently, Mommy and Daddy Bloggers ... ARE Your Market.

A Darwinian View of Blogs as Business Tools: Part 1 - A Passion for Your Business

My Blogs vs. Other Social Media post last week started as a response to yet another prediction of doom for blogs and, as I wrote it, turned into an introductory post for this series. This Darwinian thing is starting as a play on the "evolution" of ideas about blogging from a piece by Graeme Thickins back in April 2005 and the apparent "extinction" of the online magazine where he published it, Darwinmag.com (here's the Internet Archive version). I have no intention of contributing to the scientific literature on Darwinism, but the wordplay may be too tempting to resist, so we'll see where it goes ... and please let me know if it gets in the way of the discussion.

BTW, I gave a Graeme-2008 a heads-up that I'd be doing this series and now have had the pleasure of exchanging emails and talking with him on the phone. Here's an email snippet from what he had to say: "Wow, Tom, you're really diving back into the Internet Way Back Machine on this one! Seems an eternity, huh? But, okay, I hereby put myself up for even more abuse by the blogosphere... :-)"

I think we'll all enjoy Graeme's current perspectives on this discussion, since I've discovered he's got a rich background and long experience on the Web and he's indicated he'll be contributing to the comments along the way. We'll start that off by inserting the rest of the email mentioned above as the first comment (Graeme sent it after seeing and discussing a draft of this post).

So let's get started. Graeme-Apr05 wrote:

1. Business doesn’t do “passion.” That, according to the experts, is the prime requirement for launching and successfully building a voice with a blog. On the contrary, business is about logic, predictability, executing a strategy, even-temperedness, a steady hand – and, yes, earning a profit (something absent in the field of blogging). Name one successful CEO known for passion who’s lasted beyond a short flameout period (okay, besides Steve Jobs).

Wow! I guess I'd turn the challenge around and ask anyone to name a "successful" leader in business or any other field who did not have a passion for the task at hand. In fact, Darwin might have called passion a business leader’s survival trait.

In his book, Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing, Dr. Lee Thayer describes this essential characteristic as "being 'had by' your cause." Thayer, who is the CEO consultant behind the famous turn-around at Johnsonville Sausage, explains: