Corporate Blogging: Oxymoron Or Path To UnMarketing?
David Kline at BlogRevolt poses the question:
[BlogRevolt.com: What's Holding Back Corporate Blogging?]
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.
He goes on to ask Jeremy Wright and Debbie Weil this question, and Debbie nails it:
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.
I once interviewed Ray Lane about social networking (see here), and one of his comments was amazingly general:
Sometimes you have to wait for a generation to die before new technologies can catch on.
I think one of the key problems is that we, as a society, have so deeply internalized the dynamics of capital-M marketing, and all the attendent clap-trap -- messaging, positioning, markets, segments, and all the other mumbo jumbo -- that corporate types are incapable of imagining a world in which those incantations no longer have power. Like Freudian psychiatry, which has been shown to be basically without foundation, but people walk around spouting about superegos, the id, and our dark unconscious, as if its real. Its just a mass hallucination.
Corporate types steadfastedly refuse to believe that the post-marketing world is better, because individuals want control, and have grown immune to the tricks and sleights-of-hand that make up marketing, in general. And blogging is considered an adjunct to marketing, "just another channel" to carry messages, slightly recast perhaps, to one "segment" of the "market."
Honestly, I have grown so disenchanted with trying to debug this mindset, or to explain what the new world order is to people afflicted with this mindset, that I recently fired myself from the American Marketing Association's Hot Topic series. I couldn't face another roomful of marketing and PR types looking for the path of least resistance.
The only hope is to adopt the vision of UnMarketing:
- There are no markets, only individuals making individual decisions based on communications with other individuals.
- You have little control over what people say about your products. You can only listen, and engage.
- Adopting blogs as 'another channel' won't work.
- No one believes anything written in the third person anymore.
- Your "market" -- the union of the various communities talking about your products and your competitors -- is smarter than your marketing department.
I know its a watered down Cluetrain Manifesto, but I couldn't help myself.
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