As part of an initiative that’s just begun at work, I’ve begun to regularly to read and review books related to marketing, the Internet and PR. I’m currently in the midst of reading Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel and although it was published in mid-2006, it still makes for fascinating and relevant reading.
There’s a very interesting quote in the book from one of the key investors in ICQ, which becomes the book’s main supposition – ‘blogging is word of mouth on steroids’. There are some great examples in the book of this principle in action, including a chapter on Microsoft. As most of us likely know, Microsoft suffered from a huge image problem in the early 2000s and was most commonly referred to as ‘the Borg’. In 2002, an independent initiative by keen employees within the company led to a huge network of bloggers all working to proactively respond to concerns and attempt to change perceptions within the tech sector that Microsoft was big, bad and evil. This approach lead to some change in the way that people blogged and spoke about Microsoft, which given the nascent nature of blogging at the time, was truly amazing.
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