Business Blogging is Coming – Are You Ready?
Deeper Into R. Soble’s and S. Irael’s Naked Conversations

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have written a unique, research driven work of art. Naked Conversations contains excerpts of hundreds of interviews about both the best practices and mistakes of corporate blogs. It is a refined read that comes from multiple and diverse perspectives and tells interesting stories of both success and failure.

Important interrelated success blogging tips include: talk – don’t sell, post often and be interesting, write on issues you know and are passionate about, blogging saves money but costs time, and you get smarter by listening to what people tell you. Blogs are also democratizing the media, driving increased corporate transparency and are rendering traditional corporate PR practices obsolete.

Why is this book vital to your business? If you aren’t blogging and listening to your customers, you are losing an opportunity to innovate, increase brand loyalty and positive word of mouth. In addition, the odds are increasing that your competitors will be gaining competitive advantages through blogging.

The book’s best tip is “read a bunch of blogs before you start.” I couldn’t agree more. You learn about how to name your blog and find your voice, keep it simple and showing your passion and authority for a topic. Blogs that would be similar to yours are easy to find by searching key words on blog search engines like Technorati, Sphere or IceRocket.

Peter Drucker one stated that “Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.” Blogs may transform strategy pushes to a place where customer listening drives relevant just in time innovation. The foreword of the book is by Tom Peters, I do not consider this an accident as we appear to be at the dawn of a significant period of disruptive, yet positive, change management. Blogging is already breaking down layers between the customer and senior executive in companies that have adopted proper blog etiquette. Soon quality may again be defined in terms of actual customer satisfaction and not in shaving pennies off of the cost of providing a product or service.

A critical theme of the book is how the blogosphere builds trust. I emailed Shel Israel and discussed that the Internet’ foundation is trust and the publisher counted that the word trust is mentioned in the book over 70 times – about once every three pages! The world craves and wants trust in all of its transactions. Shel responded, “I think you are right in that what’s going on is all about trust/not trust. I just didn’t realize that point fully when we were writing the book.” This shows we are all still learning and innovating from the conversation, won’t you please come join us?