Blogging and the Invisible Walls of Business

filed under Business of Blogging · 4 comments in the original

Though everyone reading this has a relative level of comfort and trust in the power and relevance of blogging as a communication tool, we're still a fairly isolated group. The rise of blogging through academic circles was a foregone conclusion. The ascent up the consumer mountain, is slowly, but surely, quickening in pace. But what about the business space?

Driven by the bottom line and tight schedules, winning the hearts of businesses and their marketing dollars will certainly pose a far more formidable challenge. To win that support, we will have to come forward with a great deal of compelling reasons to invest both time and money into this space.

From time to time, and more so in the future, we will find out about the clashes in very public ways. Yesterday I came across a link on flex-mx.com that pointed to just one of these incidents. The site, HackingNetFlix.com was making an innocent attempt to connect its readers with the PR department of NetFlix when they were preemptively shut down.

I was seriously disappointed. When I worked in public relations I tried hard to answer every phone or e-mail request, no matter how small the publication. I spoke at user groups at every opportunity (and public speaking used to make me physically ill!). Blogs are a small online community, just like a journal or user group.

I think most companies don’t get blogs yet. I know Netflix public relations is concerned with making USA Today and the New York Times happy, but how can you ignore a community that has tens of thousands of your customers? I had 1,000 people visit my site today, plus an untold number that read my site through RSS and Atom feeds. If you do the math it’s easily 20 – 30,000 readers a month (and growing!).

I know I’m not alone. It’s hard to get companies to take bloggers seriously. I really like Netflix, but they are slowly withdrawing, closing themselves off from their customers (they recently removed their phone numbers from the site). Instead, companies should be embracing these online communities, comprised mostly of the highly desired “early adopters” that evangelize products to the general population.

Source: HackingNetFlix.com, "Bloggers & Corporate Public Relations Departments"

The comments have been very active, both on the site and across many other blogs. Here's just a sampling of the titles applied to this incident:

Big Blog Company, "Netflix flicks off a blogger"

He is absolutely right and I hope this spreads far enough for Netflix to hear. Steve Rubel, Scoble and Dave Winer all mentioned this on their blogs. I will be watching out for any feedback.
BusinessLogs, "NetFlix Misses Out"

I don't know if it's a fear of blogs or a total disregard for their power, but too many companies are underestimating this medium. I can understand that if a blog only gets 20,000 visitors a month that some companies might see it as insignificant. However, if a major publication or independent publisher such as Slashdot pick up on the story then that 20,000 becomes millions quickly.
flex-mx.com, "Netflix Drops The Ball"

Because Netflix's view seems to represent the view of the majority of corporations today (I've heard this story before with different names, and some of the companies I work with have mostly the same opinon). Netflix, along with a lot of other companies, need to recognize that PR is changing. Not working with blogs and smaller websites can actually give you bad PR as in this case. Web designers and developers should help to companies to realize this as much as possible and where appropriate.

What we really need are metrics and case studies that apply the power of blogging to truly win mindshare and confidence. It's quickly becoming the time to start to identify those items.