Why did the much-predicted 2005 stampede by corporate America into the blogosphere fail to materialize?
The number of Fortune 500 companies with strategic public blogging initiatives, after all, is still quite small -- somewhere between 3-4%, depending on how you figure it. Many of those firms are what you might call "the usual suspects" -- i.e., technology firms such as IBM, Sun and Microsoft that are enmeshed in network culture. And basically none of them are the sort of brand-name consumer powerhouses that could really push blogging and related customer-contact media into the mainstream of everyday business.
By itself, this delay is not surprising, especially when you look at the history of early corporate involvement with the Web a decade ago. When the World Wide Web first emerged in 1994, some pundits predicted the "imminent demise of the shopping mall" as name-brand consumer product firms rushed to set up online stores. In point of fact, it took four years for the dollar volume of online shopping to even hit the $1 billion mark -- in other words, to even reach half the size of the real-world market in blow dryers.
Change, it turns out, usually takes longer than the pundits predict. Especially change in the business world.
But it does beg the question: What are the factors or conditions that will drive mainstream American firms to truly embrace external public blogging -- whether for marketing, product development or other purposes?
I asked two authors of business blogging books -- Jeremy Wright and Debbie Weil -- for their thoughts on this question:
Jeremy Wright, a corporate blogging consultant and the author of Blog Marketing, named three factors holding back a stronger corporate embrace of blogging:
"First, these things take time. It never happens as fast as we imagine. Second, the software tools are in many cases still too immature for enterprise use. And third, a clear ROI (return on investment) from blogging remains to be demonstrated."
As for Debbie Weil, also a blog consultant and the author of the forthcoming The Corporate Blogging Book, she stressed the psychological roadblocks to corporate blogging:
"Fear is the single most important thing holding corporate America back from embracing blogging. Fear of being open, fear of a two-way conversation, fear of not being able to control the message, fear of the time commitment."
Wright and Weil make good points, to which I would add one more:
Blogging really is not for the faint of heart or the control freak -- two personality types usually thought to be well-represented in the ranks of management.
That's because, first of all, there really are dangers involved in tearing down the traditional barriers to direct customer interaction with the firm. There are a lot of angry consumers out there -- their anger fed by decades of having to deal with shoddy products, indifferent service, and the lack of corporate transparency and accountability -- and now, thanks to blogging, for the first time in history they can finally hit back. Just ask Dell, Sony, Kryptonite, Circuit City, and others whose brands, if not also their revenues, have taken a beating from the blog-fueled revolts of angry customers.
But just as important, blogging will ultimately force companies to abandon many of the traditional ways they have always managed not only their public affairs but their marketing and product development functions as well -- not least by giving customers a far more powerful and direct voice in enterprise decision-making than has ever been the case before.
In short, blogging requires firms to turn many of their operations inside out -- or, more accurately, to reverse the polarity of corporate thinking and practice from inside out to outside in.
Think about it: With notable exceptions, most large companies have always operated on a push-driven model, creating everything from their products to their marketing messages in-house and delivering them to what has always been (until now) a passive consumer marketplace. Now, thanks to blogging and other new developments, the transmission belt to the consumer is reversing direction, and marketing and new product insights will increasingly flow from the customer to the company.
That's a huge, epic change -- the sort of change that will require a lot of "tough love" for executives to embrace.
As Weil noted:
"If you put blogging in the basket of corporate communications it runs absolutely antithetical to so-called current best practices."
Ain't that the truth.