What blogging does to your business
I’ve just finished reading two interesting pieces (one, two) by the anonymous author of the Yankee Wombat blog. The writer describes corporate blogging in conjunction with Marshal McLuhan’s theory of media and culture, as outlined in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). In the second entry, he also discusses Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazar (1999) which compares the open source model of software development with customary closed-source methods used by companies such as Microsoft.
While I don’t want to delve to much into McLuhan’s work (my posts are lengthy enough as it is), it is worth pointing out one interesting observation that Yankee makes vis a vis McLuhan:
McLuhan argued that when a new medium emerges people tend to focus on content, not form. [...] Innovations that emerge as people come to grips with the implications of a new media environment are difficult to see at first because no one can see the new environment. Indeed, at first, they can only see the innovation in the context of the old environment.
This is what McLuhan meant with his famous observation that “the medium is the message”. We tend to think of communication purely in terms of content (”what“), while largely ignoring how something is medially communicated. The fact that the how either shapes our perceptions of the message, or that in some cases it can be the message itself is widely acknowledged today. However, McLuhan to my knowledge stressed this aspect most strongly in conjunction with radio and television, which he characterized as “hot” media, in contrast to books which he regarded as “cold” because they require a higher degree of interaction on the part of the recipient (reading in contrast to listening or watching). Traditional mass media is characterized by its unidirectionality - the fact that there is no feedback - and by its tendency to stimulate our senses through its packaging.
How are blogs different? Firstly it is worth noting that from the vantage point of “visual culture” they are actually a step backwards in terms of presentation. Blogs are almost purely textual, with their “special effects” largely serving the purpose of linking to other texts. They are also highly participatory (in contrast to traditional printed media), whether the author is “speaking” to another blogger’s text or his own, responding to comments, etc. In summary, blogs are mostly content and fairly little form.
What does this mean? One consequence of the relative “coolness” of blogs is that they are less useful to attain a specific effect on their readers in the same way that visual media does on its viewers. Words and sentences are always subject to interpretation, while images - though having the potential to be just as ambiguous - usually suggest a clear meaning to us; they “say more than a thousand words”. The fact that blogs are highly participatory further complicates the goal of getting a targeted message across without interference. A continuous dialog produces no final result, it is per definition unresolved and incomplete.
So what’s to like about blogs under these circumstances? I think that precisely because they are so content-centric, because they are participatory and because they can be created by “anyone with a computer and a connection” (Yankee) we perceive them as authentic. And authenticity is precisely what a trans-national, multi-million dollar organization built one hierarchy upon another is usually lacking. Traditional media cannot achieve the same kind of directness, which can be either a blessing or a curse, depending on what your goals are.
As Yankee points out, blogs are certainly an excellent tool for facilitating communication inside a company. To point back to Raymond’s analogy, they have to potential to make the cathedral a little bit more like the bazaar without necessarily upsetting the corporate organizational structure. Their external role in marketing and PR is much more difficult to define. Most products aren’t really the stuff of narratives and passionate debates and regarding PR there’s always the question of how much public scorn you can endure and at what point it becomes dangerous to your company to allow it (then again, if Dell didn’t have a blog people would again turn to blasting the company in their own blogs, as they did before).
Perhaps in the end the most interesting question is not what companies can do with blogs but what blogs will do to them. The ROI of blogging may be understanding not only your customers and industry better, but also your own business. Hard to measure, I know, but a potentially valuable learning experience nevertheless.
