CorpBlawg

Dissecting Robert Scoble (2)

As promised earlier, today I’m going to look at how Robert Scoble’s blog differs from other corporate blogs, and from blogs in general (apologies for the delay, this should have been up two days ago).

The earlier entry focused on a number of language-related statistics: word length, sentence length, words per post etc. In this second step, I want to look at the distribution of individual words in the three different collections analyzed and draw some (lofty) conclusions based on the results.

Here are the top ten most frequent words for Scobleizer, the corporate blogs collection and the random blog comparison group:

Scobleizer
Rank Word Frequency
1 THE 625
2 TO 442
3 A 431
4 I 414
5 AND 332
6 OF 313
7 IS 255
8 THAT 243
9 ON 221
10 IN 175

Corporate Blogs
Rank Word Frequency
1 THE 35432
2 TO 19714
3 AND 17692
4 A 16457
5 OF 16154
6 IN 11110
7 IS 8475
8 THAT 7819
9 I 7342
10 FOR 7220

Random Blogs Comparison Group
Rank Word Frequency
1 THE 4374
2 TO 2985
3 AND 2975
4 I 2951
5 OF 2097
6 A 2025
7 IN 1335
8 YOU 1146
9 THAT 1120
10 MY 1065

At first glance, you’re likely to think that the three lists look very alike. This is not unusual in any way - in virtually any given English text “THE” will rank at number 1, whether you are looking at the Bible or Personal Finance for Dummies. The same is the case with common function words such as prepositions, which form the basic building blocks of pretty much any text you can come across.

An interesting variation that I want to focus on for the moment is the distribution of the personal pronoun “I” and the possessive determiner “MY”. Both for Scobleizer and the Random Blog Comparison Group “I” ranks at number 4, well ahead of any other pronouns (for example “WE”). In the Corporate Blogs Collection “I” is at rank number 9, making it significantly less frequent. Further down the list, “MY” ranks at 14 in Scobleizer and at 28 in the Corporate Blogs Collection. Consequently, “WE” ranks higher in Corp. Blogs than it does it the other two collections.

Big surprise there, you might think. Obviously Scoble speaks only for himself, thus he is unlikely to use “WE” as frequently as it is used in blogs on corporate responsibility or policy, most of which are authored by a team of people. Even in those cases where there is just one author, he or she often prefers the corporate “WE”, especially when the person in question is an executive. And of course there’s the possibility of largely writing without a personal agent. What is intriguing to me, however, is just how close Scoble is to the Random Blogs Group in regards to “I”-use. The Random Blogs Group largely consists of blogs written by teenagers, housewives, activists and other private individuals. As with their writing, the question of personal involvement is always relevant in Scoble’s blogging - it all relates to him as an individual in some way. I find it likely that this level of involvement in turn engages his readers more strongly than a less personal (that is, “self-centric”) approach would. Telling others about yourself serves a social function; it allows them to empathize with you, to better understand your motifs. “Talking about yourself” does not necessarily always mean relating thoughts or emotions, though. Scoble very often describes where he is and what he is doing because this gives his readers a better understanding of who he is, which allows them to better judge whether they value his opinion on whatever gadget, trend or company he then proceeds to discuss. He makes a conscious effort to overcome the decisive asymmetries in the relationship with his readers: the fact that they aren’t in the same place at the same time as he is. When you’re having a chat with your friend, all or some of the following apply:

- you are physically in the same place, at the same time

- you can hear the other person’s voice

- you can see the other person

- the other person is actively addressing you

- you can immediately respond to what he or she is saying

In a real-life, face-to-face conversation all of these points usually apply. In a technically mediated interaction, whether it’s texting on AIM or talking on the phone, normally some (but not all) criteria are applicable. The more of them are, the closer the interaction resembles a “real” conversation, simply because a real-life conversation has all of these characteristics. Notice how blogs are different. Only the last point works - you can respond to a blog, but not quite immediately. A blog author is very unlikely to exclusively address just one other person; the readership is usually plural and largely unknown.

So what does Scoble do to overcome these limitations? He tells you where he is and what he’s doing to make the kind of communication between him and his readers seem more like a conversation. Of course you could argue that it really is a conversation since you can respond to him - and you’d be right -, but he aims to overcome the other impairments as well. The innovation here is that Scoble doesn’t pretend to address his readers directly (unless he really is responding to another blogger) since he doesn’t really know who they are individually. Instead he focuses on his part of the equation by making sure that you know where he’s coming from and where he’s going with something – both physically and metaphorically speaking.

While the figures cited above are pretty vague indicators which should not be over-interpreted, I think they support the basic idea that blogs can function as time-delayed conversations and are naturally used in that manner by individuals. When organizations blog they are confronted with their inherent inability to have conversations in the same way that individuals do. The options are thus to either let individuals speak for the company – which is risky for a plethora of reasons – or to (mis)use blogs as a broadcast medium. I’m not even saying that the latter can’t work, just that people are likely to be very critical of such a usage, because they expect blogs to work differently.

One thing to always keep in mind is that you’re not real to your readers unless you have a face, name, identity and physical location. We like to think that we can relate to abstractions just as easily as we relate to concrete things, but our instincts often say otherwise.

Cornelius posted this article under Corporate Blogging, Robert Scoble, Thesis on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 4:13 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.