This is my favorite part (see end) of the must-ballyhooed BusinessWeek article, "Blogs Will Change Your Business". I been refraining from partaking of the business blogging Kool-Aid of late. (Yes, I still have a tad bit of the aftertaste of New Economy Kool-Aid lodged in my throat. I see blogs as one vital component; not a savior for all your business and marketing woes.)
I've never said this in public. I was supposed to launch BusinessBlogCoach.com (you'll note, it's not online) this January at BlogBusinessSummit and NewCommForum.
But I had a little wake-up call in December. And a bird's eye view of "accidental" citizen's journalism.
Anyway, after a contemplative revisit on my strategy, I have a new and original direction. I'm tempted to think the best thing to do is to use surprise as a competitive advantage ala Google, or even the hyper-steathly Apple. (It's not like either of these companies occupy the long tail, either.)
What's next from Google? Hard to say. We don't talk much about what lies ahead, because we believe one of our chief competitive advantages is surprise. Surprise and innovation. Our two chief competitive advantages are surprise, innovation and an almost fanatical devotion to our users. - "Google History" from Google.com
Read the snippet from BusinessWeek below and then I ask you... Do you honestly think this participatory marketing feedback stuff works for small tykes - anyone other than the big boys like Microsoft and BusinessWeek whom have thousands (ok, hundreds of thousands) of readers to "fact-check their ass" as the blogosphere rants?
When you are a tiny (stealth) venture with a long tail readership, will you get enough engagement to make the risk of a potentially fool-hardy public experiment worth it?
Do you need the power of a common foe to get a grassroots corps of volunteers marketing on your behalf such as the likes of Firefox devotees (I suppose BzzAgent's appeal nixes that argument). But what drives people to contribute their most precious resources like time and attention?
What about timing? How much of the 'kernel' do you need done before you just throw it out there? How many of your ducks need to be in row first? It's not as if Torvalds just said, "I'm musing about building this alternative operating system, gals, whadayathink?"
This isn't an idle question. I'm grappling with it right now. Maybe you are too.
11:57 p.m. Thinking out of the box here for a minute. What would this article look like if it were a real blog, and not just this glossy simulacrum?
Think of the way we produce stories here. It's a closed process. We come up with an idea. We read, we discuss in-house, and then we interview all sorts of experts and take their pictures. We urge them not to spill the beans about what we're working on. It's a secret. Finally, we write. Then the story goes through lots and lots of editing. And when the proofreaders have had their last look, someone presses the button and we launch a finished product on the world.
If this were a real blog, we probably would have posted our story pitch on Day One, before we did any reporting. In the blog world, a host of experts (including many of the same ones we called for this story) would weigh in, telling us what's wrong, what we're overlooking. In many ways, it's a similar editorial process. But it takes place in the open. It's a discussion.
Why draw this comparison? In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here's betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.
Friday 11 a.m. So why not start here? We've done our research on blogs, made our dire pronouncements. Pretty soon, someone in production will press the button. But this story should go on, as a conversation. And it will, starting on Apr. 22. We're launching our own blog to cover the business drama ahead, as blogging spreads into companies and redefines media. The blog's name? Blogspotting.net. [It's up now.] See you there. - from "Blogs Will Change Your Business", BusinessWeek, May 2, 2005 issue
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