The impact of blogging: real or imagined? Microsoft blogging guru Robert Scoble talks about what the technology means for companies and how they can use blogs to their advantage

Communication World, May-June, 2006 by Natasha Spring, William Briggs

Robert Scoble is frustrated. He's just attended a major technology trade show, and the single-manufacturer event has left him underwhelmed. As the official "technology evangelist" for Microsoft (a title he's tired of hearing), Scoble estimates that he lives about a year ahead of the rest of us, technology-wise. He clutches a new-model cellular phone with all the bells and whistles, enough memory to power a nuclear submarine, and an enhanced image screen that displays clearly readable text. The phone is his connection to his blog (scobleizer.wordpress.com), on which Microsoft allows him free reign to talk about the company and anything else. With 24,000 or more daily readers, the blog has made him one of the most influential communicators around.

So when Scoble met recently with CW Executive Editor Natasha Spring and frequent CW contributor William Briggs of San Jose State University (Scoble's an alum) at one of San Francisco's oldest bistros, the irony of the time and place wasn't lost on anyone. In a freewheeling ramble, Scoble set the record straight on blogs, their impact on the media, whether companies have anything to fear from this new communication medium, and the release of his new book, Naked Conversations (reviewed in this issue, page 16).

Q: How is the jump from e-mail to blogging affecting organizations and their employees?

A: If you look at big companies today, how do employees get information? Let's say I have 300 salespeople working for me and I need to get a report from each one every day on how many sales they quoted. I might want a report saying, "I met with Joe Smith at General Motors yesterday, and I sold him 500 widgets." There are two problems with sending that to me in e-mail. One, you're polluting my e-mail inbox. E-mails should be used when I need to answer you, when we need to have a conversation. Anything that does not require a response, that is just information, like a report or a newsletter, should be posted somewhere else. The less e-mail pollution I have, the more productive I am. I'm looking to take stuff out of my e-mail and put it somewhere else, where it is more useful for me and also makes the e-mail that is actually still in my inbox the kind that requires a response.

There is another problem with sending e-mail. If you send me a report, someone else can't see it. Only I can see it, so now I'm a gatekeeper. I have to choose to send it on. Whereas if you're writing in a public space, like a blog, "Hey I'm working on this and I'm having trouble with this kind of problem" or "I'm having trouble with this account," other people can chime in and try to help you out, or maybe fill in skills you don't have. All of a sudden magic starts happening inside the company, and people feel more connected. It gives them that sense that they're working on something that's cool that other people are finding interesting and can help them with.

Now that I'm publishing in a public space every day, people from around the world help me out. It's something that you don't discover until you do it. Most people are scared [of using blogs] because of privacy or because they're afraid of other people stealing their ideas. But when you start putting everything you're doing in public, you start getting new kinds of input that you didn't have before. People start working with you.

Q: What about organizations that feel threatened by blogs? They feel out of control, and there's a sense that if they allow or encourage participation by employees or customers, they'll be even more out of control.

A: The fact of the matter is they are out of control and they're just holding on to a memory. When I talk about blogging to big companies, I see fear; I see a memory of the way the world used to be.

I just wrote a book on corporate blogging, and my co-author, Shel Israel, who was a PR guy in Silicon Valley for 20 years, told me that when he had a new company to get press for, he only had to make 14 phone calls. That's because the power of the media world was centralized. There were only three TV networks in the U.S. 20 years ago. Now there are hundreds of TV networks, and that's just the start of it. Now anybody can publish anything--for example, I can take this recording I'm doing here and publish that on my blog. And so where it used to be that you had to pay attention to 14 people, now you have to pay attention to some 12-year-old in Australia who seems like he only has 10 readers on his blog. But I've seen blogs like that go from 10 readers to the front page of The New York Times in less than two days, because it's discoverable. There are search engines that will bring you any mention of anything, from any newspaper in the world. That kid in Australia who writes about his Xbox [video gaming system] can get discovered by [technology columnist] Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal. A journalist can say, "I have a story due tomorrow about the Xbox. What are people saying about the Xbox today?" And now they can find everybody in the world who says anything about the Xbox. Some kid who's saying, "My Xbox keeps crashing," now often he has a story.