DISQUS

I agree with you, Nick. But how will we ever know. Is Facebook going to make results public? Will individual application owners?

Hey Jake! This has no bearing on your current post, but I saw it and thought you might find it interesting:


http://scobleizer.com/2006/12/26/shels-writing-a-new-book/

Hi Jake,
I think I see what you're getting at now. And yes I agree with you that business communicators have a long tradition of sugar-coating things.

And yes, conversations between businesses and consumers do have the potential for eruption - like the Raging Cow blog. But even when conversations go awry, businesses can make moves to appease the blogosphere.

Take the story of GourmetStation. They used a character blog that was criticized as inauthentic, and when they recognized that the blogosphere was up in arms about it, they engaged their detractors head on and drove to closure. GourmetStation's blog wasn't an uncategorical disaster, despite the less than perfect blogosphere judgment that went into its creation because its creators made the decision to come out and defend it rather than stonewalling.

To bring it back to the seminar, I'll ask you the same question here that I did in my other comment. What session would you have added to the seminar to give attendees more of the "why?"



Thanks,

Teresa

The fear is a big part of why a lot of businesses are still not jumping in.


I'm not sure if you stayed for the last session, when Anil talked about the future of the Web. But I'll give you a little quote from my analysis of his presentation:



The most important thing Anil talked about was defeating the fear. There?s a real fear among businesses people that the bloggers will say something bad about you, that you can screw up and fail and really harm your company in the blogosphere. And that fear is perpetuated in great part because there are some pundits who attack businesses when they make mistakes or don?t ?get it? as fast as they would like.

But the reality - Anil tells us - is that the blogosphere very inviting to businesses. They love that businesses are using the same communications tools that they use to relate to the world. What?s more, there is no religion or dogma of blogging, no right or wrong way. ?Don?t be so afraid of the changes,? he said at last, ?that you lose the opportunity to take advantage of something so powerful.?

Jake: Again, your criticisms are greatly appreciated, as they help us to clarify our editorial and to make a better seminar next time.


But I have to say - respectfully of course - that your comment about giving a 14 year old a car without telling him how to use it comes across as incredibly condescending.



Our attendees are responsible adults who - unlike a fourteen year old behind the wheel - have life experience and mature judgment. To insinuate that business leaders don't know how to blog is to say that blogging is some kind of elite cult that you can only join after you've been properly initiated. It's that very misperception that drove us to start these seminars in the first place. Blogging is an activity that is instinctively human, people already know how to do it by nature - they just need to understand the technology and what it's used for.



Like Anil said, there is no doctrine of blogging, no absolute right way or absolute wrong way to do it.



Despite our lack of agreement about the seminar, I absolutely value your comments. You've certainly made some excellent points - some of which make me wonder whether we marketed this seminar too broadly. We certainly hope that you'll continue this discussion, as your point of view is critical to us.

Jake: Ahh yes, the infamous difference between our seminars and our conferences... The seminars are for newbies, though more experienced bloggers can and do get a lot out of them as well. The conferences include a seminar at the beginning to get the newbies up to speed, but they're really intended to get more experienced business bloggers together.


You have some interesting and very welcome criticisms of our seminar. I think it's possible that you really were at the wrong event. The entire point of this seminar was to teach the "how." While ethical blogging is obviously an important thing, we felt that it wasn't necessary to cover the topic in serious depth because this is business, not journalism, and we trust that our attendees are already running ethical businesses.



We've also found that businesses already get the "why" of blogging, or they wouldn't be coming to our seminars in the first place. What they come to learn is the "how," and that's what we give them.