Corante's Stowe Boyd took UPS Director of Interactive Communications Robert Manning to task last week for his "stuck in second gear" attitude toward blogs and their potential impact on online marketing. What's striking about Manning's original iMedia Connection piece on "Blogging Is Not Fundamental" is the extent to which he gets it...but still doesn't get it:
What I love about blogs is the authenticity of voice, how they further
democratize web publishing, and how they provide more relevant
information through contextual links. What concerns me about blogs is
the signal to noise ratio -- do we really need all these niche,
special-interest blogs, or will it become increasingly difficult to
find relevance amidst the seas of personal web journals (or diatribes)
without much to offer the broader constituency?
In other words, be authentic...but not too authentic, or
you'll become one of those "niche, special-interest" bloggers, and then
how relevant will you be? Manning seems not to grasp that the
"niche-y" nature of social media is what makes it relevant (to
individuals, not mass markets) in the first place, and that online
marketers with a media budget burning a hole in their pocket should be
finding ways to reach more individuals more effectively, rather than
trying to (fruitlessly) capture mass markets through "relevant" blogs.
Stowe's response should be stapled to the forehead of anyone who
either 1) still questions blogs' credibility because they don't
understand the concept of an information marketplace, or 2) still sees
blogs as a "channel" for marketing "messages" because they haven't
learned the lessons of Cluetrain:
In the blogosphere, people who write dumb, uninteresting stuff will
just have no interesting conversations going on, since we vote with our
attention and links, here. The chaff is winnowed out by the activities
of millions of independent actions. What remains are the impacts that
these conversations have on those who participate. Traditional
marketers hate this sort of paradigm, because they have no control,
their 'messages' are changed, and their positioning is upended.
Yeah, what he said.