Corporations are taking note that blogs can do good — and bad — things for their business.
And a story in the San Jose Mercury News about a Blog Business Summit being held in San Francisco notes a specific example of a consumer/blogger who may have already had some impact:
Take the woes Dell Computer has faced. In recent months, big-name blogger Jeff Jarvis, on his Buzzmachine.com blog, has hammered on Dell for its poor customer relations. That, in turn, unleashed a deluge of similar comments from his readers, and spurred other bloggers to whine about Dell, too. On Wednesday, the University of Michigan released a survey confirming a drop in Dell’s customer satisfaction ratings, something that may or may not have been related.
It also notes this always-mind-blogging figure:
There are at least 70 million blogs, and counting. And at least a half-dozen blogging software companies are competing for those users.
The piece goes into detail about “21-year-old blogger Matt Mullenweg” who was at the conference to “select corporate and other confidants a sneak peak at his latest offering: a special blogging software tool for companies.” It’s a version of his WordPress:
Bloggers have a swagger to their stride these days. Just a few years ago, Mullenweg, of Texas, thought he was going to be a musician, but a fascination with computers sidetracked him. He soon found himself the lead developer of a fast-growing blogging software, called WordPress. He has since moved to San Francisco.
Today is his big day. He’s showing off the corporate version of his software, called WordPress.com, for the first time. It will allow companies to host the software on their own or WordPress servers — giving employees the freedom to blog….
In an industry where there is notoriously little money being made, there’s hope corporations may pay big bucks for help in understanding blogs and in producing their own….
Just how should companies respond to snarky bloggers? Clam up, or let their employees start their own blogs to respond? Mullenweg and scores of his cohorts here believe companies will see the light and launch their own blogs. The trend is still in its early days: “Right now, they’re paralyzed by fear,” says Mullenweg.
Interestingly, this story notes that at this conference largely populated by corporate p.r. types trying to find out how to communicate with bloggers Mllenweg’s main competition is Six Apart which produces Typepad.
Clearly, the corprations’ goal now is to find a way to use Blogtopia to increase sales, at least keep sales the way they are — and certainly to also avoid losing sales. Which is what Dell seems to be doing in its mind-blogging bungling of its laptop sale to Jeff Jarvis.
FOOTNOTE: Because Jarvis is a high-profile blogger should not matter to Dell. If his Kafka-esque experience happens to him despite posts and letters to company bigwigs, what happens to others who don’t have a blog and any Internet or other prominence? Setting up corporate blogs and attending conferences will never replace COMMON SENSE in dealing with consumers…who always tell others about their experiences…which creates a real buzz machine.. (We have a Dell laptop and on a simple matter contacted customer service and it was not a fun experience dealing with their 1-800 reps apparently based in South Asia.)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.