Among the myriad of blogs that I visit - some regularly, some much less often - it strikes me that the "conversational marketing" blogs or blogs with a conversational marketing element are becoming much more common. It may reflect a bias in my reading but it seems to me that the Microsoft conversational marketing blog is more visible than similar blogs from, say, IBM or Sun.
If nothing else, conversational marketing blogs must be a fairly non-costly marketing tool.
Perhaps the epitome of the Microsoft conversational marketing blog is The Scobleizer Weblog written by Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble.
I will use my reactions to his blog to tease through some initial thoughts on conversational marketing.
Perhaps I am just feeling a little jaded this week but I am beginning to wonder how useful conversational marketing will be long term.
Scoble must put a lot of time into his blog. Various comments lead the reader to conclude that it is an out of hours, unpaid activity. Which I find interesting.
Scoble typically makes mention of an eclectic mix of blog and Web page items which, often but by no means always, relate directly or indirectly to Microsoft products. His is one of the blogs I read most often because it sometimes flags up existing Microsoft products, information sources or preliminary information about upcoming Microsoft products that interest me.
Scoble, adventurously for a Microsoft employee, will often indicate that a particular Microsoft product has problems. Yet, I guess unsurprisingly, those negative comments are often pretty muted. But he actually uses "negative" words, rather than hiding behind "marketing speak" which might acknowledge that there is "room for improvement". That the realistic comments about flaws in Microsoft products are there at all is a positive feature and arguably a departure from past Microsoft practice.
Yet it seems to me that Scoble is, ever so subtly, becoming the Microsoft corporate man. When I first started reading his blog he was a (relative) newcomer at Microsoft and his viewpoint was that of the outsider/newcomer. Gradually, and ever so subtly, his viewpoint has ... in my view anyway ... progressively moved towards the viewpoint of the Microsoft corporate man.
From my perspective as a reader that takes away a little of the freshness. Takes away a little of feeling that he sees things my way .... as a user of Microsoft software.
Scoble has, I suspect, had his knuckles gently wrapped a couple of times about being open. Yet it was that very openness which was (and still is to a degree) a key component, to me anyway, of the Scobleizer Weblog.
It seems to me that to be at its most useful a conversational marketing blog has to have, and more importantly keep , a visible sense of seeing things as the customer ... in this case the Microsoft customer ... sees things.
A conversational marketing blog that loses that freshness seems to me to potentially leave the reader with the impression of being used ... as a target for subtle, subliminal marketing.
Can large corporations ever truly allow their employees the freedom to blog from the customer's point of view? I don't know but I think they should look seriously at that as a potentially productive approach. As part of the "Big Software War" Microsoft needs customer trust. To win trust there needs, in my view, to be an openness which is a departure from traditional corporate culture. Will a new customer-centered openness win out? Or traditional "safe" closed mentalities?
Blogs are, to coin a cliche, a disruptive technology. How and to what extent they will crack the "safe" facade of corporate culture remains to be seen. To win the customer trust that it needs in the "Big Software War" Microsoft may have to allow the disruptive nature of blogs to penetrate further than it currently realises.
Posted by Andrew Watt at October 8, 2003 09:11 AM