BLOGGING HISTORY 101

The history of blogging is a long and convoluted one. Blogging has been around in some form since the earliest days of the Internet. In fact, one of the first web pages was similar to a blog in that its author, Internet creator Tim Berners-Lee, regularly updated it with a list of all websites (only a few dozen at the time). Blogging eventually evolved into a means of sharing both personal expression and other information that individuals found valuable. Since its beginning, blogging has enjoyed a slight duality: on one hand, it serves as a great online diary, and on the other, it’s a fantastic communications tool. Until 2004, blogging was a fairly specific activity, with only about 5 million bloggers worldwide most of them fairly secluded in their own little niches, blogging about pets, businesses, and tech-related issues. Then came the US 2004 presidential election, and blogs suddenly began getting mainstream attention. Bloggers unearthed issues about candidates, blogged about all kinds of events that journalists couldn’t be bothered to attend, and even received press passes to the Democratic party’s national convention.

Overall, 2004 was a huge year for blogging, as business thoughtleaders such as management guru Tom Peters, author and lecturer Malcolm Gladwell, entrepreneurial expert Guy Kawasaki, and leadership authority Steven Covey woke up to the power of blogs. In fact, these days, no business author’s work is complete without starting a article blog. As a result, the business magazines of the world such as Fortune, Business 2.0, and Fast Company have awakened to the power of the blog and businesses around the world are taking notice. While blog-related inquiries to marketing and PR companies were initially met with blank stares, these companies quickly caught up to the idea, and now blog consulting is a staple of consultants large and small. The early twenty-first century has been marked by mergers and acquisitions in the blogging space as well as a number of scandals but more than anything, it has been marked by growth.

If 5 million bloggers were online in 2004, more than 50 million were blogging by the start of 2005, and that growth won’t slow down anytime soon. In fact, the collective number of blogs has grown so rapidly that no one service has been able to keep up with it, which is one of the reasons that nobody is entirely sure how many people are actually reading blogs. Suffice it to say that a lot of people are writing them, even more are reading them, and more still are being influenced by them. These days, the question isn’t “Do you know what a blog is?”; it’s more likely “What’s your blog?” or “What’s your favorite blog?”

The growth of blogs among businesses has been astronomical. Thousands of new business blogs are being created by companies of every size, in every industry, for just about every purpose imaginable. So, what will you do with your blog?

WRAPPING IT UP

Now that you have a clearer understanding of what blogging is, where it came from, and in broad strokes what it can do for you, what’s your next step? Get into the blogging mindset. As mentioned, hearing what customers really think can be intimidating, but it’s an even more intimidating proposition for your business if you bury your head in the sand and choose not to listen. It takes most companies some time to get comfortable with the blogging way of thinking, so in Article 2, we’ll discuss more about the blogging mindset and how you can learn to value your customer interactions.

GETTING INTO THE BLOGGING MINDSET

For decades, businesses have tried to determine what their customers wanted by using focus groups. As the business world got more complex and markets became more competitive, the kind of information that could be gleaned from focus groups became inadequate for most businesses. Focus groups didn’t provide enough information, nor was the information valuable over the life of the product. Realizing the limitations of focus groups and similar marketing practices, companies decided that they needed to know more about who their customers were, how they interacted with the

company, and how the company could reach out to customers in a meaningful way. This idea of getting a “360-degree view” of customers was a nice concept, but it was never really achievable within the limited spectrum of marketing and communication tools that were available. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was designed to try to pull together information from various systems to provide an idea of not only whether a customer had interacted with your business, but what kind of interaction occurred, who was involved in the interaction, and what it meant to the company.

Unfortunately, most companies could get only limited answers to these questions: whether a customer had bought a company product or ever called in with a question or comment, and whether his or her current contact information was valid. CRM software didn’t contextualize any of the information it collected. It simply created a repository of information. It didn’t create any data on what the customer actually thought, nor did it allow a way for customers to provide direct feedback.

To supplement this CRM data, businesses began to hire customer relationship specialists and product evangelists individuals whose sole job was to make customers aware of the company products on a one-to-one basis to interact with customers directly. For most businesses, this created some sense of value, but the practice simply couldn’t be applied to a large number of customers. Because each individual customer relationship staffer had only so much time, the staffer typically spent most of his or her time nurturing the relationships that had the greatest return the big spenders and the majority of other customers were left out in the cold.