It's interesting being in the middle of a blogstorm. It causes interesting conversations, that's for sure! (Even here in the halls at Microsoft).
Tim Bray, of Sun Microsystems chimes in: "There's a word for companies that base all decisions on ruthless quantitative ROI metrics: Bankrupt."
My co-author, Shel Israel, in a followup to our failure to answer Werner's question, takes a second stab at "why Amazon should blog?"
Me? I go back to when I was a retail dude in a small store in Silicon Valley in the 1980s.
I learned that if you didn't open the door you didn't get any customers.
You had to open the door, even if you thought today might be a slow day and you'd be better off going to the beach (there were days when we did less than $500 in business, which didn't even cover our rent and electricity, much less our salaries, but we opened the door anyway).
This is a people business. Even when it scales all the way up to a billion dollar business.
I was reminded by that yet again yesterday. My cell phone rang. Rajeev Gopalakrishnan said hello. He runs a .NET User Group in Harrisburg, PA, USA and wanted me to help him find some more speakers for his user group. He invited me to speak.
Now, will that conversation add anything to Microsoft's bottom line? No. Will it show up on a spreadsheet somewhere? No. Will it satisfy Werner's question? No.
But it's exactly why I blog. I want to be found in the search engines. I want people to know there's a guy at Microsoft (actually, now more than 2,000) that cares about what his company does and is accessible.
I didn't start a blog to get 20,000 readers. I started a blog to talk with Dave Winer and Dori Smith and share with them what was going on in my life and tell them what I thought about what was going on in theirs.
Speaking of which, I disagree with Dave's take on this argument this morning. People shouldn't start blogging because their competitors are. They should start blogging because they want to talk with their families. Their friends. Their customers. And other people. About what they care about.
You know, we'll come up with demographics. Psychographics. Business intelligence. ROI graphs. And all that too.
But I really could care less about the numbers. Maybe that makes me a bad blogging evangelist. That's OK.
Our book tells you about 188 other companies and what they thought about blogging's effect on their business. Their relationships. Their accessibility.
David, in my comments, reasks the question again: "Why would people prefer to hear from Amazon over the authors who sell on Amazon and the other customers at Amazon?"
I go back to Rajeev. Why did he call me? I was accessible. He wanted to have me help him out. A simple phone call. A simple blog.
This is not a numbers business. It's a people business. Are you available to share your business with people or are you hiding behind customer support walls, spreadsheets, or IT solutions to interacting with your customers?
I am not going to remain a blogging evangelist. I have to get to work on Rajeev's request. That's the downside of being accessible. Your customers tell you to do more work. Off I go, have a good weekend!
Oh, and I remember my first interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. He told me how he offered his Apple I to HP and Atari and was rebuffed. Why? Because his bosses at those two companies didn't think there would be enough people who would buy a personal computer.
In other words, Wozniak didn't have the numbers either. Did that matter in the end? 
Update: James Robertson, who runs his own business is a Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, says the same thing in his post "Trying to find the ROI in blogging."
“But, if you’re that risk adverse, then I definitely wouldn’t start a blog. You’d be boring and there’s nothing worse than a boring blog.”
Cheap shot. Sorry I wasted my time trying to help you understand.
@5. If it’s not a numbers business, then why care about what the cust sat surveys may say?
@5. If it’s not a numbers business, then why care about what the cust sat surveys may say?
Nobody: it’s ironic that someone who isn’t even willing to sign his or her name to his or her posts is saying “cheap shot.”
Here’s the deal. I’ve written now thousands of words on this issue. So have many other people. If you aren’t yet convinced to blog after all that then you just aren’t going to be convinced, OK? So, move along and go back to your job where you aren’t even allowed to use your real name.
There’s no way you’re gonna blog if you aren’t even willing to use your name here.
Dmad: did I say +I+ cared? I care whether customers are happy, yes, but other people care about tracking the numbers.
Blogging has been going on at Microsoft now for more than four years. If the numbers folks decide it isn’t good for business, it’ll stop. The fact that they haven’t stopped yet means that they like what they are seeing.
But, I’m done. If you all want to keep arguing about this, go ahead. I’m going to try to have a weekend. I haven’t had one of those in a while.
Nobody: it’s ironic that someone who isn’t even willing to sign his or her name to his or her posts is saying “cheap shot.”
Here’s the deal. I’ve written now thousands of words on this issue. So have many other people. If you aren’t yet convinced to blog after all that then you just aren’t going to be convinced, OK? So, move along and go back to your job where you aren’t even allowed to use your real name.
There’s no way you’re gonna blog if you aren’t even willing to use your name here.
Dmad: did I say +I+ cared? I care whether customers are happy, yes, but other people care about tracking the numbers.
Blogging has been going on at Microsoft now for more than four years. If the numbers folks decide it isn’t good for business, it’ll stop. The fact that they haven’t stopped yet means that they like what they are seeing.
But, I’m done. If you all want to keep arguing about this, go ahead. I’m going to try to have a weekend. I haven’t had one of those in a while.
[...] Scoble seems to do it to get top billing on tech.memeorandum. That’s what he said hereBut while he and many others were harping on ad nauseam about this stupid non-event, let’s see what actually happened in the world today: [...]
I don’t know – based on this:
http://news.designtechnica.com/article9959.html
what makes you think bloggin is working for your employer?
I don’t know – based on this:
http://news.designtechnica.com/article9959.html
what makes you think bloggin is working for your employer?
One of the problems of blogging is that real-time thing. It’s ok to be passionate, until you figure out you are working on week ends. Hmmm. If that’s your own blog, it’s all fine, but if your blog is by any mean a voice for your company, then you are working for them for free on week ends.
There is nothing wrong saying “we’ll get you answer on Monday”. Bloggers tend to avoid that, it’s uncool.
Add that to the new nature of work these days in hi-tech with teams overseas that often require to work late hours.
Add all of this, and think again.
One of the problems of blogging is that real-time thing. It’s ok to be passionate, until you figure out you are working on week ends. Hmmm. If that’s your own blog, it’s all fine, but if your blog is by any mean a voice for your company, then you are working for them for free on week ends.
There is nothing wrong saying “we’ll get you answer on Monday”. Bloggers tend to avoid that, it’s uncool.
Add that to the new nature of work these days in hi-tech with teams overseas that often require to work late hours.
Add all of this, and think again.
but you have to measure your success somehow. A company like Amazon, and any F500 company that you think needs to start blogging will surely ask the question: “what will it benefit us?” And after that, they will ask “how do we measure the benefit?”. They can’t measure it by feelings, or number of comments, or the number of hits they get. It has to translate it a benefit to the bottom line. Otherwise it’s a waste of their time and resources. Companies exist to make money. So, while its great that blogging has perhaps had a slight improvement in customer satisfaction with their customers, I gotta believe at some point someone is going to ask if it is resulting in more software sales. The stock price seems to indicate blogging as not had a bottom line impact on Microsot.
So, when you suggest that a company like Amazon could benefit from blogging, they are only right to ask you to prove it. Because I gotta believe that everything that Amazon does regarding customer interaction is wih the ultimate intent of selling more product. Otherwise, why would they spend the resources doing it.
It’s admirable that you like Microsoft enough that you want to spend your free time singing its praises and pointing out its flaws on your personal blog. But, if MS or any company would like to implement blogging as a strategy, then you’d be hard pressed to convince any CEO that the numbers don’t matter when you are asking that CEO to apply their resources to such an endeavor. Again, that endeavor better ultimately result in better sales and thus more profits. That fact that a customer may think that it’s great a company’s employees are blogging doesn’t really matter if that customer doesn’t buy from that company. I submit that that is ultimately what mattered to Amazon.
but you have to measure your success somehow. A company like Amazon, and any F500 company that you think needs to start blogging will surely ask the question: “what will it benefit us?” And after that, they will ask “how do we measure the benefit?”. They can’t measure it by feelings, or number of comments, or the number of hits they get. It has to translate it a benefit to the bottom line. Otherwise it’s a waste of their time and resources. Companies exist to make money. So, while its great that blogging has perhaps had a slight improvement in customer satisfaction with their customers, I gotta believe at some point someone is going to ask if it is resulting in more software sales. The stock price seems to indicate blogging as not had a bottom line impact on Microsot.
So, when you suggest that a company like Amazon could benefit from blogging, they are only right to ask you to prove it. Because I gotta believe that everything that Amazon does regarding customer interaction is wih the ultimate intent of selling more product. Otherwise, why would they spend the resources doing it.
It’s admirable that you like Microsoft enough that you want to spend your free time singing its praises and pointing out its flaws on your personal blog. But, if MS or any company would like to implement blogging as a strategy, then you’d be hard pressed to convince any CEO that the numbers don’t matter when you are asking that CEO to apply their resources to such an endeavor. Again, that endeavor better ultimately result in better sales and thus more profits. That fact that a customer may think that it’s great a company’s employees are blogging doesn’t really matter if that customer doesn’t buy from that company. I submit that that is ultimately what mattered to Amazon.
Of course it’s a number’s business! Even people are a numbers business. I like friends. If I have no friends, the number is zero. If I have some good friends the number is non-zero. It matters.
Maybe I want to get more contacts in my business life. I buy a better business suit (or cool new sneakers maybe in your case) because conventional wisdom tells me that if I look better, the number of contacts I have will increase.
We have no “conventional wisdom” in blogging, so of course people are going to ask about the numbers.
And of course you CARE about the numbers! Don’t tell me you don’t. You talked last month about “tips to get on the A-list”. No, no, let’s talk about the A-list again, please!. But my point was that your post was full of TECHNIQUES designed to INCREASE the visibility of your blog, and get bigger numbers. Is it just accident that you know these things? You do many of them yourself! And, you observe how these techniques work for others.
Face it, you care about the numbers. Maybe you care about people too. I know you do, in fact. And I know you genuinely did START blogging for the reasons you describe. But, also, wasn’t it because it was a “cool way” to communicate and because you “believed in it” and over time wasn’t it also because you felt “MORE PEOPLE SHOULD DO IT”. Numbers.
You can still be honest, ethical, and genuine while measuring how well you’re doing at it.
Of course it’s a number’s business! Even people are a numbers business. I like friends. If I have no friends, the number is zero. If I have some good friends the number is non-zero. It matters.
Maybe I want to get more contacts in my business life. I buy a better business suit (or cool new sneakers maybe in your case) because conventional wisdom tells me that if I look better, the number of contacts I have will increase.
We have no “conventional wisdom” in blogging, so of course people are going to ask about the numbers.
And of course you CARE about the numbers! Don’t tell me you don’t. You talked last month about “tips to get on the A-list”. No, no, let’s talk about the A-list again, please!. But my point was that your post was full of TECHNIQUES designed to INCREASE the visibility of your blog, and get bigger numbers. Is it just accident that you know these things? You do many of them yourself! And, you observe how these techniques work for others.
Face it, you care about the numbers. Maybe you care about people too. I know you do, in fact. And I know you genuinely did START blogging for the reasons you describe. But, also, wasn’t it because it was a “cool way” to communicate and because you “believed in it” and over time wasn’t it also because you felt “MORE PEOPLE SHOULD DO IT”. Numbers.
You can still be honest, ethical, and genuine while measuring how well you’re doing at it.
Spot on! ROI isn’t everything…that’s why we are called human. Working in customer service has taught me to listen and understand the customer before attempting to deliver any product or service. Comments are the voices that help a blog stay true to its soul and links create a support system helping everyone stay True and stay Connected. Now…that’s more important than ROI can be at any point. If this sounds silly, maybe you’ll find my computer problem cartoons better( at http://spaces.msn.com/sillygloop/ )
Blog on!
Spot on! ROI isn’t everything…that’s why we are called human. Working in customer service has taught me to listen and understand the customer before attempting to deliver any product or service. Comments are the voices that help a blog stay true to its soul and links create a support system helping everyone stay True and stay Connected. Now…that’s more important than ROI can be at any point. If this sounds silly, maybe you’ll find my computer problem cartoons better( at http://spaces.msn.com/sillygloop/ )
Blog on!
Robert,
I can tell you that in the IT industry, no, blogging is not doing squat to restore the trust that Microsoft pissed away. In fact, sometimes it may make things worse, because it can look like a blatant attempt to mislead and distract from the meat of things.
It’s handy in that it maybe gives us another way to get things done, or maybe pick up a tip we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, but if you think that blogging alone is going to make Microsoft a trustable entity, even on a purely professional basis, then I would recommend you stop drinking so much.
Here’s an example. You, and Microsoft talk all this crap about how you want to dominate the search space, yet the TechNet/support base/MSDN search engines suck, and have sucked for years. Where’s the dogfooding? Why is it that I can get better results from Google than the KB search? Why should I take MSN search seriously when the company that writes it isn’t using it?
Why should I take “dogfooding” seriously when you don’t do it yourselves?
The Amazon thing also implies a different relationship with Amazon than with a company like Microsoft. I go to Amazon to buy stuff. I don’t need employee opinions on them, they’re worthless if I don’t know the employee. When I want to find a particular book or video game, I don’t want blogs, ratings, and the other crapola. I want:
1) I want to find what I am looking for as fast as possible
2) I want to buy that thing in a fast, efficient manner and LEAVE.
Everything about Amazon needs to help with that. The only blogging I would want might revolve around system status, (DVD store’s down, should be up in an hour) or new features
If I can go in, get what I want, and leave in under ten minutes, Amazon is working *perfectly*.
Amazon’s a middleman, not an end node. Blogging would only confuse that.
Robert,
I can tell you that in the IT industry, no, blogging is not doing squat to restore the trust that Microsoft pissed away. In fact, sometimes it may make things worse, because it can look like a blatant attempt to mislead and distract from the meat of things.
It’s handy in that it maybe gives us another way to get things done, or maybe pick up a tip we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, but if you think that blogging alone is going to make Microsoft a trustable entity, even on a purely professional basis, then I would recommend you stop drinking so much.
Here’s an example. You, and Microsoft talk all this crap about how you want to dominate the search space, yet the TechNet/support base/MSDN search engines suck, and have sucked for years. Where’s the dogfooding? Why is it that I can get better results from Google than the KB search? Why should I take MSN search seriously when the company that writes it isn’t using it?
Why should I take “dogfooding” seriously when you don’t do it yourselves?
The Amazon thing also implies a different relationship with Amazon than with a company like Microsoft. I go to Amazon to buy stuff. I don’t need employee opinions on them, they’re worthless if I don’t know the employee. When I want to find a particular book or video game, I don’t want blogs, ratings, and the other crapola. I want:
1) I want to find what I am looking for as fast as possible
2) I want to buy that thing in a fast, efficient manner and LEAVE.
Everything about Amazon needs to help with that. The only blogging I would want might revolve around system status, (DVD store’s down, should be up in an hour) or new features
If I can go in, get what I want, and leave in under ten minutes, Amazon is working *perfectly*.
Amazon’s a middleman, not an end node. Blogging would only confuse that.
@35, Its probably no surprise that even many of MS’s own internal PSS folks use google to find KB articles and other support info.
@35, Its probably no surprise that even many of MS’s own internal PSS folks use google to find KB articles and other support info.
[...] A whole blogstorm has started up involving Scoble and Amazon.com’s CEO Werner Vogels about this very thing. Watching them dance around each other is amusing stuff, though as always, I wonder how Scoble gets any real work done. Ironically, Scoble doesn’t blog for the money or even to promote Microsoft, but yet he has co-authored a book about how businesses can use blogging to reach customers. I scratch my head, puzzled. Some people are going to get a rude surprise if they ever do figure out return on investment numbers. [...]
Zulu
I had (half of) a blog entry before this but I deleted it because I thot it was trash.(And yet, I haven’t blogged in so long.)And yes, this Entry Title is inspired by Hybrid. We’re out of the starting gates again:
The business value of blogging
In response to last week’s Scoble-Israel-Vogels story (summarized here), a few folks have posted on the value of blogging in the corporate setting. In this post, Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems provides one of the best (and simplest) explanations …
[...] Passion and Teflon There are a couple of blogging discussions I see going on that have their own merits and are completely unrelated, yet rattling in my brain this week. 1) the Rory/Dare/Eric discussion I’ll roughly call “Your passion underwhelms me/enthusiasthma ” about the use of both buzzwords and attitude around Microsoft or other such afflicted companies in order to terrorize everyone into feeling peer pressure to care. “As long as employees feel pressured to constantly overflow with passion, they’re going to be terrified to speak when it’s time to address what isn’t going so well. I’ve watched projects continue, and not with any great success, fueled mainly by passion. In those cases, yeah, people are being passionate, but they’re putting all this passion into things that aren’t really helping. They’ve been fooled by their own passion.” And this is happening company-wide. It’s like open honesty and skepticism are getting brushed aside for passion. It’s spreading thanks to that other often celebrated social disease, the meme. It’s everywhere. And the word is used so often that it’s losing its meaning..” –Rory 2) the back and forth that’s been going on between the Naked Conversations bloggers (Shel Israel, Robert Scoble) and the CTO of Amazon Werner Vogel. There’s a bunch of passion going on about the two authors’ visit to Amazon and the critique by Vogel is that there’s no revenue-generating meat to the blogging evangelism, ala “where’s the beef?” The cheap and easy way to tie these two together into a blog post would be to take a shot at Scoble and Shel, say they were too passion-powered and had drunk too much of the blog Kool-Aid, and when they went to Amazon, maybe were too unchecked and passionate to convince the skeptic. I wasn’t there so it would be easy to make up some sort of interpretatioin.
But actually, I think something deeper just happened . Corporate blogging – when done in a progressive Cluetrain way – is actually a platform by which to be skeptical and challenging. Mini-Microsoft keeps Microsoft on its toes and I think that’s entirely healthy. Scoble has had his fair share of unpopular stances which at other companies would be euphemistically called “career limiting.” If no one in the Amazon Blog Triangle had been skeptical (of each other, or the blogging movement) there would have been no dialogue that as a bystander I found profoundly interesting. I’m kinda asleep in my corporate executive tracking; I didn’t know much of Vogel before this exchange. Now I’m interested in him and his thoughts and how the dialogue progresses. It’s a passionate skepticism that I’m seeing unfolding as both sides fence and debate. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen the people Rory warns us about, who substitute passion for brains,hard math, or reality – but you’ve known that kind of person since high school and your mom warned you about them. 
What has led to the low points of my career morale hasn’t been being surrounded by the passion credo zombies, who are easy to spot, but by the actual zombies…people who don’t have the energy to even pretend they have passion, and instead use what little energy they have on just teflon. The people that Mini-Microsoft wants to fire but hey – surprise – they aren’t just at Microsoft. These are folks who frankly need some sort of peer pressure passion system to “make” them even appear to care. (Sort of like a barometric pressure, storm front or something). For many of them, that’s called “money”, but money and passion don’t always go together (as your Mom told you about that guy the starving artist). The people who care the most about their work often say they would do it for less, just don’t tell their boss that. 
And the thing is, left in their natural state, the Teflons’ apathy is catching. Pretty soon you have an environment where no one is accountable, and everyone does the minimum to get by and/or spends energy finagling so someone else gets the blame/task. You’d be stupid not to Teflon in that system - the first one to care has to do all the work piling up. 
What’s refreshing about the Amazon Blog exchange is that Vogel, Scoble and Shel are not asleep. All of these folks are holding both themselves and each other accountable. If they didn’t, we’d have yet another mealy-mouthed exchange, full of passive-aggressiveness, and full of reasons why it’s ok that something is not done or is ok the way it is. The reason I dug my old team at Microsoft.com and my new one at MSN/Windows Live is that for the most part I see people around me who really give a darn. Whether they agree with me or not – and believe me not everyone does, I am insufferable – they care enough to talk about it. In case you guys didn’t know it, the reason I am cheered to come into work each day is you. And of course the customers who care enough to tell me I am full of it or not. 
Cheers all, live it vivid! [...]
Just demonstrating the ease of commenting on a blog to a new client. Nothing to see. Keep on going.
MS
Just demonstrating the ease of commenting on a blog to a new client. Nothing to see. Keep on going.
MS
When you have something to say you have to say. Some people will use your experience and will have fewer troubles in their lives. Some will agree the others disagree but still they will have the information, the arguments to make decisions. And as more people will make reasoned decisions the whole society will benefit!
It’s terrible when people think only about money…
When you have something to say you have to say. Some people will use your experience and will have fewer troubles in their lives. Some will agree the others disagree but still they will have the information, the arguments to make decisions. And as more people will make reasoned decisions the whole society will benefit!
It’s terrible when people think only about money…