naked conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel… how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers

There are other ways that one can profit through online publishing (and not just monetarily)… one of those having your own company blog, or better yet, freeing up your employees to be able to blog about their particular areas of expertise.

What this process opens up is an open, honest, dialogue between your company and your most important constituent groups: your vendors, your customers, your developers, your prospective customers, your ultimate end users, the press, etc.

Unlike old line PR practices, a corporate blog is not a one way form of communication where you control all the information. It’s not something you use to put the spin machine into full mode. It’s a tool where you engage in an open honest conversation with your marketplace.

It’s a fabulous tool for buidling trust and good will to a public that has little of that to share. It’s great for bouncing ideas off of your customers, sitting back and getting some real honest feedback, both positive and negative.

It’s an indispensible tool to use in a crisis, like when your company, product or service has gotten some unfair criticisms or reviews and you need to set the record straight, based upon the facts.

It’s higher maintenance than standard PR. It may well involve you having to burn the midnight oil giving reasoned, honest, compassionate answers to readers who have made negative or even nasty remarks on your most recent blog piece. But if you can maintain a steady, open, transparent presence when all the sh*t hits the fan, you will come through on the other end a stronger, more reliable, more trustworthy source when it’s all over… And I would say that that is worth money in the bank.

Scoble and Israel very patiently instruct the readers about the risks and rewards, the do’s and the don’ts, the shoulds and the shouldn’ts of preparing a blog as the employee of a major company as well as a senior executive. They use constructive examples of people who have been fired by their companies for inappropriate blogging practices and how you can avoid a similar fate.

What was remarkable to me was that most of the book was written — and open for public feedback - on their Naked Conversations blog. And what great buzz they created for their work, simply by sharing the process of writing it publicly. Naked Conversations would have been a radically different book had they chosen to hole up somewhere and write it privately. They will both tell you how they benefited from the process itself.

Which is why I’m encouraging my brother, Roger, who has a blog focused on the music of Rufus Wainwright and is planning on writing a book about the topic, that he should emulate Scoble and Israel’s style of “open book writing”. I would think it would really get the buzz going amongst Wainwright’s most ardent fans.

There are some great “How to” chapters worth reading in this book: among them Chapter 10 (Doing it Wrong), Chapter 11 (Doing it Right), Chapter 12 (How Not to get Dooced) and Chapter 13 (Blogging in a Crisis).

I would argue that you could probably skip the rest of the book, read those 4 chapters, than go back and pick and choose which chapters among the remaining interest you.

In any case, it’s a good book. You ought to buy it if you are interested in blogging, contemplating creating an employee blog within your company or creating a company blog.

Here’s the Amazon Link for it… You won’t regret it…

Stay tuned…