Here is the text of my remarks to a business communicators conference in Sydney today:
New technologies seem to follow a certain pattern of adoption.
First, they are rejected as useless.
We all know the amusing anecdotes that involve famous people predicting that telephones and computers were just fads.
Websites were not seen as necessary 15 years ago, but within a few years everyone had one and now they are essential.
If you don’t have a good website, you’re not going to be taken seriously.
Especially as we now live in a world where people google everything, whether they researching a potential purchase or checking out a business contact.
During this transition from uselessness to ubiquity, we hear a lot about ROI.
What’s the ROI for the fax machine, the website, the mobile phone, the blackberry.
Part of the problem here is that ROI grows exponentially with their adoption.
Like the fast disappearing fax machine. If you are the only person in the world with a fax machine it is pretty useless.
But once most of the people you do business with have them they are invaluable.
So quizzing people about the ROI of things sounds clever when they are relatively new, it sounds a bit less clever when everyone has one.
If you want to be in business and get taken seriously there are things you need like a mobile phone, a web address, an email address and a business card.
My argument is that pretty soon that list will include blogs and other social media accounts, like twitter and linkedin.
When people want to check you and your business out, they will look for your blog.
They expect your blog will tell them a lot about who you are, what your views are on key topics, whether you are insightful or a bit obvious and so on.
They will google your name - what will they find?
What will your future boss or client or customer find?
Will they find lots of people linking to you with approving comments, or not?
When blogs are ubiquitous, we won’t keep asking what is the ROI of my blog but more interesting questions like how can I make my blog better, attract more readers, have more influence - and keep the costs down.
So why will everyone have a blog?
First. Because they are cheaper and more powerful than existing websites.
I’m not talking percentages here; I mean orders of magnitude cheaper and orders of magnitude more powerful.
They look better, they load faster - blogs are designed for sharing information and for communicating, they have lots of features to help do these things.
In fact, blogs are websites designed to maximise the power of the Internet.
Second, because search dominates the universe
And you need to be high on the search list when your customers, investors, regulators, politicians, media etc go looking for stuff that affects your business.
You can’t allow a vacuum and you can’t let your critics fill that vacuum.
If I google you or your business and I don’t find anything than that’s a little sad.
If I google you or your business and I find lots of criticisms and no responses, well that’s a little disturbing.
Search engine optimisation is fine, everyone has to do it to some extent.
But the big thing is content - regular, fresh, compelling content.
The media provides regular, fresh, compelling content.
And now so do bloggers.
Traditional corporate websites do not.
If you don’t blog you’ll get left behind.
We’ve seen some social media action in Australia through Telstra.
We are seeing a lot more in the USA.
Technorati found -Most bloggers describe themselves as personal (79%), followed by professional (46%) and corporate (12%). Of course, these descriptions are not exclusive and 69% of corporate bloggers also describe themselves as personal and 65% of corporate bloggers describe themselves as professional bloggers
One-quarter of US industry associations have blogs, about another third have plans to start blogging.
I think the successful Obama campaign will drive a further sharp increase in social media and social networking.
Especially, if Obama uses social media and networking to build and activate support for his policies and programs while he is in office.
So the era of web 2.0 is rapidly coming upon us.
Web 2.0 is first of all about publishing and broadcasting.
That is re-inventing the Internet as a publishing and broadcasting medium rather than the old idea of document storage.
It is about communities.
Search drives a lot of traffic but so do communities.
Microblogging services like Twitter and social networking like facebook and lots of stuff like friendfeed are also driving traffic.
These services act like personal referrals from people you know - you say I like this article and people on your facebook friends list will also go and have a look ditto twitter and friendfeed.
Ernst & Young uses its facebook presence to recruit people because facebook is where young people - and not just young people - hang out.
Telstra uses twitter, so do Virgin Atlantic, the McKinsey Quarterly and LabourStart and many more will do so.
So I just think it’s inevitable.
But what are the pitfalls.
Content is the main pitfall.
Most blogs fail because people simply don’t post interesting stuff on a regular basis.
And they don’t interact with readers and communities.
If you can’t write or don’t like writing you won’t be a successful blogger.
If you want to start a blog, and you should, find someone in your organisation who loves writing.
If you can’t find someone internally, recruit someone - it will make all the difference.
Have some clear goals, but don’t over-strategize.
Good bloggers do it and learn from their audiences. What do people click on and respond to?
Develop clear guidelines but keep them simple.
Yes, there are issues about disclosure, defamation and so on.
But it is easy to exaggerate them.
Finally, integrate.
Don’t do social media as a stand alone.
Make it part of your overall communications strategy.
Thanks.
