Tech blogs not just talk? a technology marketers' worry

Abbot Laboratory's Omnilink Biliari Stent, does it belong in a blog?

A technology marketer in a medical device start-up just gave me his opinion about blogs: "they are just talk, and if you are going to talk, you need someone really good to do it." He gets about an offer every two weeks to get a blog started. But his company does not see potential for professionally written articles from a 23 year old blogger that cut his teeth on commenting in political or Internet gambling blogs. His web design and SEO provider has made a pitch for blogging, the result was disappointing at best. The image of the blogger simply does not fit the serious business of selling medical devices to doctors. In his words "doctors over the age of 50 do not read blogs". I wanted to say: "executives in fortune 500 do read Clayton Christensen's and Jakob Nielsen's blogs" and they take them seriously. Imitating Bill Clinotn's famous political election slogan: "it's the topic stupid" was on my lips. But I didn't say anything at that point. I wanted to go back to my office and gather examples to "prove him wrong".

Once I started gathering lists of "serious blogs" I realized that it's not going to be useful, not to me or to him. Not only to this potential client, but also to anyone in his company. There are two ways of looking at communication. These are more basic than marketing communication as a whole. The failure in the image of blogs falls into these two categories:

• The media itself: contextual association in what the medium itself represents. This is what Marshal McLuhan defined as: "the medium is the massage". TV is for entertainment, you didn't put medical ads on TV in the US in the 1950's, you didn't do it even in the 1970's. You don't put serious professional communication on blogs, it's a waste of time.
• The content: what Bill Clinton's campaign adviser James Carville coined "it's the economy stupid". You focus on what you want to say not where the message runs. On TV for Americans presidents never talked about serious subjects, but Carville made Clinton do it!

Who is "right"? If you are a start-up medical company you worry about your effectiveness. If you don't get it "right" the company will suffer, maybe even get hit so hard that you will not be able to recover. But why focus on small medical start-ups? This issue is global. Big medical companies, technology companies, consumer companies, they all have to worry about their communication effort. What about independent consultants, with even more at stake, much smaller budget?

Marshal McLuhan still echo after all the years, history of medium repeats?

If you are going to communicate and market effectively you need BOTH! YES BOTH! The medium has to be right to be effective at all, this is what everyone who starts out thinks. The medium is definitely stereotyped, which is what Marshal McLuhan observed in the 1960's. Does this put blogs in the world of "just talk"? Just political commenting and deep technical conversations? This seems to be the case in the mind of traditional corporate marketers*. But if it's just talk, why do serious thinkers use such trivial medium? Well, here comes Carville's observation in the serious political arena of presidential elections: the message itself is MORE important. Why is this the case? Because you need to get your message out PERIOD! Even on TV news that has the image of entertainment more than information you need to use it as if it was "serious medium". Carville and more and more media experts understand that there is no substitute to getting the listener's ear and eye. Even if you don't fit into the medium's stereotyped mold.

This leads us to the message itself. If you want to communicate a message, if you want to make sure someone clearly understands you, how do you go about doing it? In the days of Marshal McLuhan you had to do it on TV and pages of magazines. Today it's the Internet. Obviously there is attention paid to messages on the Internet, specially the big company's messages about technology and business. I am not going to convince anyone that Ariana Huffington will get serious about the economy or unemployment, or that bloggers will stop writing about spiders, socks and Lego construction. But that does not matter, if you ignore the medium's stereotyped image (blogs are for just talk). That's what I call 'falling into the stereotype trap'.

The stereotype trap is what Carville clearly saw in the early Clinton presidential campaign. The TV reporter asks you a question about anything, and you answer it. You have to, you are on TV! That's what TV viewers want, that reporter knows what will get ON TV! -- When I write it here it sounds a little sarcastic and maybe silly. But this is exactly what small medical equipment marketers are doing with blogs. But they are in good company, take a look at Microsoft's blogs.

Microsoft has a "community Blogs" page with introduction: " Blogs are Web pages which are updated frequently, written from the point of view of an individual, written in an informal tone, and usually expose an RSS feed for syndication. Use the directory below to find blogs about Microsoft technologies written by Microsoft employees. These blogs will provide you insights and opinions about using Microsoft technologies and software. " Sure enough reading through the blogs they are very technical "insider" articles by individuals. They probably replaced newsletters and articles with blogs. But you will not find "serious business" information here.

Microsoft BI (Business Intelligence) department has a blog. The landing page needs a formatting fix but once you go to an article the blog takes a traditional look with Tag cloud, archives, blog roll on the right sidebar. So here you will find a bit of serious talk about Microsoft's business. Maybe Microsoft is not a good example of blogs for business.

Let's look at what the software industry calls a more "progressive" company. Red Hat is the company which popularized open source software. They essentially "packages" open source and made it useful to the common technology geek. Get a Red Hat Linux "distribution" and Linux works just like windows. Here there are few sections of their web site which are essentially blogs. Red Hat Magazine is a blog. Red Hat press section is a blog and they call it "News Blog" at the home page.

Taking a look at Adobe's blogs, they seem to be much like Microsoft's. Lots of technical blogs for each product and a many personal blogs. Some blogs I would say are more "strategic" or high level. Take a look at the security blog, here is technical information but not just for the pure technologist. But than again Adobe can be considered an old stogy institution in comparison to real Web2.0 companies.

So, let's look at Google! Sure enough google has a blog section with directory for lots of blogs. Just an an example take a look at an article Helping Healthcare Providers Become More Efficient. Maybe this is not useful for the big 50+ medical professional but it is certainly useful to the people who look for solutions. Maybe in the medical profession the solutions come from the bottom not the top. But how are you going to get to the top? I think that google's official blog answers this question. Google's main blog is a mix of news and business articles. I am not sure that this will sway a serious business user but probably 1/3 of the articles could fit into a serious business blog for google.

I should probably do a series of blog surveys to see who is "in" and who is "out". Or more accurately who is "serious about business" and who is "just a tech talker". Sorry for the sarcasm but I do not have a way to categorize this better. If you do, just drop me a line.

The moral of the story? Blogs are not just for "marketing light" - Blogging falls into the category of what content will deliver your message. If you look at the Internet as the medium of today's business, blogs are just one channel (or format).





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* There is another view of traditional corporate marketers which comes from their traditional suppliers. A big web design, SEO, or even hosting company is not going to offer blogging if they do not have strong writers, strategist, and researchers to support this service.

How, Why, and What about bringing old sk00l to blogging

One of the questions that I hear all the time is how to "educate" or "convert" an old marketer into a Web2.0 model (as if people were cars or computers). It is similar to the question of "when is business going to get back to the good old days when technology ruled high and every company was growing? (i.e. making money)". To me it seems that these questions avoid the simple observation that things change. They change all the time and not always for the better (i.e. for everyone). Blogging platforms like blogger and WordPress were suppose to make writing content on the web easier and reading it much much easier. Well it did and it DID NOT! Which is what happens with every technology change. (I did not say "technology innovation" or "improvement" on purpose)

The idea behind blogging was: just find a blog platform you like and start publishing what you want. You got freedom from the traditional publishers, no cost of publishing and distribution, no censorship... hey this is great!!! As an isolated vague idea in space (before we actually had massive amount of blogs) this sounded too good to be true. (so did nuclear power - free energy for everyone) But this is not exactly what happened, not because people didn't know how to write, edit, research, promote... not because people didn't have something to say, opinion to voice, ideas to float... all the things that newspapers and trade magazines do very well. Whatever your profession, from technologist to business, from scientist to retailer, from car mechanic to pen collector, you may know how to do your work but you usually don't know how to explain it. Most professionals also do not have the experience to write well, write consistently and to do it week after week, year after year. Most professionals are not interested in writing that much or in that much detail. So for the most part, even though we have the "technology" for blogging, that is just one aspect of a blog that makes it useful. Blogging and wikis can be just about the writing. Essentially if you write well and have something important to say people will eventually read it. But all the functions which publishers of newspapers have invented, from soliciting good writing, editing, design, and eventual promotion and advertising; end up to be just as crucial for bloggers and wikis. So in the end a good writer with something to say still needs help editing, still need motivation to get out the articles in a steady flow, still has to have a decent design... all these things. Even promotion and advertising and "distribution" (RSS, index sites) is crucial.

The other technologies of what O'Reilly observed as Web2.0 are even more foreign and remote to people (just today, this will change and quickly). While Wikipedia has revolutionized organization and gathering of information on a large scale, wikis are very hard to run well and even harder to edit and attract content. This is what has made encyclopedias of the past so expensive and fairly rare in people's homes. Encyclopedia is something libraries pride themselves of having. If you look carefully at encyclopedias of the past notice that they actually are not too prolific. While they gather a great deal of information they are hard to publish, took a very long time, and in the end did not catch as a popular format. Let's not forget their cost, when the format did not "catch" they essentially became expensive. I think this will be true for the web as well. That does not mean that wikis are immediately limited in use. Actually, just like other forms of digital technology wikis will probably become more popular in other forms not necessarily encyclopedias.

New Internet technologies make certain things very easy "technically". This is essentially true with all technologies. This is what many business executives see immediately, the "new way to make money". But the next step in the use of a new technology is the real life application. Technologists know this very well. A base technology without applications and users which benefit from them is not going to be profitable. Business people do not always build in the cost of developing applications or managing outside companies to build them. These two factors: slow momentum of usage and ideas for new uses of a technology are both "good and bad". The good side is opportunities which blogging, wikis, and social networking has given us. The bad side is the people left behind. Essentially we can not change these qualities. The interesting observation which a few of us asking that question AGAIN and AGAIN and... "when are people going to upgrade themselves to Web2.0" and again avoids the change factor.

But what do some of us see that the others don't? After all, some "older folks" blog and some "young guns" still design brochures to be distributed by the old mail system? Besides the ability to "imagine the future" here are a few observations of what make some people understand Web2.0 and some don't:

• Seeing the full picture of how an interactive site works, either over time or over a series of articles not in time.


• Seeing good examples of content, design, subject matter, or organization (editing, arrangement) - essentially anything that is complete and already been used by people.


• Seeing examples that are understood and clearly relevant. If you are a business professional only new business blogs will help you understand how this could help YOU.


• Direct involvement in a blog site, writing, editing, use, definition, review, specification for a project.


• Pressure, explanation, challenge, need or anything that will make you think and imagine a blog (this usually comes from peer pressure, a friend or respected personality, competitive examples).

Think carefully on what made you use the first computer, the first real professional tool, the first time you ordered a book or a gift on the Internet. These seem small but changes in people specially when it comes to something that will change beliefs and understanding comes small steps. So I do not ask any more "how are people going to be upgraded to Web2.0" and I usually don't answer it... now I will just send them to this article... uuuffff... one step forward... :-)