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Naked Conversations...How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk With Customers.
by Robert Scoble & Shel Israel
The first thing that tells you that this is going to be a different kind of book is the forward. It's one page of what looks like "Stream of Conscious" thinking, with different fonts, resembling random emboldening. However, reading through it you realize that with about 130 words it tells a story about blogging and the blogger. In the forward the notable Tom Peters sets the stage for the importance of business blogging. More importantly, he cuts to the chase and announces that if you don't listen to the story, "you're a Damn Fool".
Over the past couple of years, a number of books on the topic of blogging have hit the presses. Most are of the "How-To" flavor: How to follow blogs, how to create your own, or how to build a following for your blog. Scoble and Israel produced a "Why Blog", big picture discussion about why the blogging trend is important to businesses. They share candid, insightful interviews with some of the top corporate and small company bloggers.
One reason that it is rich in content and stories is that they decided early on to create Naked Conversations using a blog and opening it to the Internet for feedback during the writing process. Consequently, they got useful comments and lots of them. They also had to get the story right; otherwise the bloggers would have called them on it.
Scoble and Israel had quite a bit of foresight since they focus on how businesses use blogs to create dialogs before all but a handful of forward-thinking companies incorporated blogging into their communication strategies. In fact, for those of you who don't know the authors, Scoble's blogging and video blogging has been credited with creating a more positive image of Microsoft over the last five years.
Naked Conversations is a light read, and not something that you have to go through cover-to-cover to get the ideas. If you decide to skim, read the first section to learn about what's happening with company blogs and why. Then, if you decide to try blogging in your company, read Section II with special emphasis on "The Corporate Weblog Manifesto", 34 points developed on Scoble's blog outlining the principles of business blogging (beginning on page 191).
Chapter 5 is noteworthy with in-depth background on how business blogging can help companies facing …the uphill challenges of building larger and more loyal user bases…" The actual company examples include:
- How small, Stonyfield Farms, an organic yogurt maker, used blogs to stimulate growth. www.stonyfieldfarms.com/weblog/
- How a tiny London Saville Row tailor partnered with a popular European blogger, Hugh MacLeod, and grew his business on both sides of the Atlantic, when he blogged about his passion and knowledge for the craft of fine expensive custom suits. www.englishcut.com
- How the blogosphere becomes a technology consumer feedback laboratory. Andrew Carton "…did what Palm should have done for itself…" Carton launched the Treonauts blog (www.treonauts.com), talking about the popular Palm Treo cell phone which receives 300,000 page views each month. Among other topics, he asks people to vote on features they want on their next Treo cell phone/personal digital assistant. This type of market research is priceless.