Review: "Naked Conversations"

I previously mentioned that I was reading Robert Scoble's and Shel Israel's Naked Conversations: how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers, and would offer a review at some point. Well, "some point" took longer than I expected. Sorry.

Agency folks and corporate marketers who haven't spent much time in the blogosphere will help themselves by reading this book. It's a well-researched primer on why to blog (or not), how to blog (and not), and who's blogging (or isn't, shouldn't, or won't). There are minor inconsistencies - Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who counter to Scoble/Israel's advice doesn't encourage anyone below him in his organization to blog, gets a pass because he's "consistently interesting." And there is flawed reasoning, like the authors' tendency to align corporate fortunes with those corporations' stances on blogging. Their sense that the "fortunes of [Apple and Google] are slipping a bit" comes off as wishful thinking; there's nothing to substantiate that the lack of blogging cultures at those companies is responsible.

Naked Conversations ultimately falls flat by not addressing some bigger issues that come with corporate blogging. And you can see those failings in the fallout from Scoble's bad week that followed announcements and subsequent news stories that Microsoft is going to be late shipping their new operating system, Vista. Suffice to say, he took plenty of heat, let loose with some intemperate posts that called for the firing/shunning of a writer and editor, and then followed up with something of a mea culpa. Some bloggers applauded him, some accused him of being a corporate shill.

There's a strain of technoutopianism in Naked Conversations that implies that if you do the right things - get off the sidelines and into the conversation - you always have a competitive advantage over those who aren't blogging. This could be so, in the most general sense, but the reality is a whole lot more nuanced and the book does little to demonstrate what to do when the conversation isn't going the way you want. There's no scorecard for the Vista conversation debacle, but I'd be hard pressed to put this whole episode in the win column for Scoble and Microsoft. It's by no means a disaster - the conversation, that is - but you'll have to make up your own mind on the Vista delays.

Beneath all this is the question of staking your personal equity on the company you represent. Scoble and Israel address it from the corporate angle: Should companies trust employees to blog? But they have less to say on the issue of how a staffer comingles her identity with that of her employer. Face it, when you blog for a company you become identified with that company, for better or worse. You ride their highs and you can try to mitigate their lows, but make no mistake, those lows reflect on you, too. We're in a transitional period where companies are testing notions of transparency, but when business and blogger are out of sync it's the blogger whose reputation takes a direct hit. That's not to say that Scoble doesn't see more reward than risk, but he and Israel could have written a far more interesting book if they had addressed the implications (beyond simply being fired) of blogging for companies that are out of step with their customers, staff, and stakeholders. So if you're a communications manager considering blogging, you're left to sort out whether you're comfortable fronting a global forum for discussion of your company.


Technorati Tags: blog, transparency, nakedconversations, scoble