Is Blogging Just About Getting It ?

If brands won't blog, does that simply mean they don't get it? That seems to be Scoble's and Israel's position. Israel is particularly bothered by a disagreement with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who challenged the Naked Conversations authors to "abandon their fuzzy group hug approach" and offer up a hard argument in favor of institutionalizing blogging at Amazon.

Vogels' point of view is refreshing, and it does the practice of blogging a favor by moving the discussion past the simplistic argument that blogging = "getting it."

Amazon clearly has a well-defined strategy for engaging their customers but it doesn't go far enough to satisfy Scoble, who wants to get into their employees' heads in order to understand what makes them tick:

I guess that's why I'm different than a "consumer." I wanna know what's on the minds of the people creating products and services, and, I'd love to have conversations with them about their products and learn some stories so that I can better evangelize their work.

He wants relationships and he wants to to evangelize. But is that what most customers - even those who like Scoble reject the "consumer" label - want?

• Do customers want relationships with every company that gets their business, or for those companies to give them a great experience?
• Do customers want to evangelize or simply share those great experiences without becoming brand champions? And yes, I'd say there's a distinct difference, particularly after reading one too many examples of the Cingular 2125 meme. Or maybe it's just me.
• When customers have problems do they want dialog or do they want to the problem fixed and their distress acknowledged?

This isn't to say that plenty of companies couldn't stand to take a ride on the cluetrain and couldn't benefit from blogging, but I've talked to enough marketers in companies large and small to understand that they're not buying the "blogging is getting it" argument. Particularly since it doesn't arm them with what they need to sell it to others in their organizations.

The maturation of blogging as a medium doesn't mean diluting it, taming it, or subjugating it in a thousand other ways. It simply means it's time - past time - to stop evangelizing it and start making a solid case that doesn't revolve around nebulous notions of whether or not someone "gets it."

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