Blogging in Germany
I’m writing this on the early morning plane to Milano, sitting next to Guillaume de Gardier, the European online communications manager for Edelman PR and a blogger; Edelman is sponsoring my three-day tour (Disclosure : I consult to Edelman). The distressingly multi-lingual M. de Gardier comes to this as an Internet believer first and a communications guy second, which is refreshing.
I spent yesterday in Hamburg. I’ve never been there before, but all I saw was the inside of the Edelman office and the inside of a lovely hotel. Hamburg, I’m told, has more bridges than Venice, although I think I managed to cross only one of them.
I gave a talk about “What Blogging Isn’t” to a group of business people most of whom are at best skeptical about blogging; there were also a a couple of dozen German bloggers in the audience, which was a treat. Over the course of the day, the general consensus was that blogging hasn’t caught on yet the way it has in the US and much of Europe. Many theories were advanced, from national personality traits to the cost of broadband. I have no theory to offer.
It was quite a fascinating day. As usual, the chief business objection to blogging seems to be that blogging is risky: An employee might say something indiscreet and customers might post nasty comments.
The first I think is not much of a worry. A blogging policy can make clear what employees already understand: Give away company secrets and you’ll be fired. Be a whiny, complaining jerk who continually slags off your boss in public and don’t count on that big Christmas bonus.
The second concern is real: Some customers are undoubtedly unhappy with you and will express themselves quite clearly in comments on your corporate blog. That can magnify the perception of disgruntledness: If you have a million customers and 1% are unhappy, and 1% of those post negative comments, that’s a hundred angry remarks, which will look like quite a lot. But there are ways to ameliorate that risk, including by being refreshingly honest. Perhaps other customers will come to your defense, which is a strong positive…and quite heartening for a company. Besides, there is a risk to not knowing about your unhappy customers. They’re out there anyway, so is it a bigger risk to engage with them or to not even know about them?
Besides, if avoiding risk is your highest goal, you’ll never get married and you’ll certainly never have children. Loving your children increases your exposure dramatically!
I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, however, have assumed they would have to discipline people into doing that. Blogs entice people to write down what they know and to share it widely. A project blog or a department blog not only surfaces and shares knowledge, it also makes it searchable and archives it. And once a company gets used to internal blogs, it’s only natural (if anything about a corporation can be said to be natural) to open up some blogs to trusted customers and partners, bringing them into the intellectual bloodstream of the organization. And then why not open some blogs more widely? Thus companies inch their way into the blogosphere.
Anyway, Germany was fascinating. The event drew an impressive range of people, and for me it was a day of interesting conversations and a chance to meet with people who share the unexpressed knowledge that the Internet is a new social world in which we are friends already. Now it’s on to Milano… [Tags: blogging]
