Last week while I was at BlogOn2005 in NYC, I had the great privilege to sit around a table with three of the world’s most admired and read bloggers:
> Mena Trott, president and co-founder of Six Apart, the company behind Typepad and Moveable Type.
> Jackie Huba, who, with her partner Ben McConnell, wrote a terrific book “Creating Customer Evangelists” and runs the Church Of The Customer blog.
> Steve Rubel, Vice President, Client Services at CooperKatz and Company, a mid-size PR firm in midtown New York City, and the guy behind the well-read Micro Persuasion weblog.
We started the chat by following on from the panel that Steve moderated where he asked the question “what does ‘markets are conversations’ really mean?” and then got into a general discussion about the current state of blogging.
Listen closely for the moment when Steve made us all go misty eyed. It was a beautiful moment and not one that I want to trivialize at all, because it’s actually quite a powerful idea.
Enjoy.
Loved this one and it motivated me to go out register a domain (www.mollyzine.com), Take out a blog at Typepad (Hey Cam, you should hit Mena up for some commission) and move my stuff across from blogger.
Man what I have used of Typepad, I think I am going to love it! This is Awesome!
I do have one large/small problem. I am having trouble accessing my Typepad account from Offline Blogging tools (tried w-blogger, zoundry, Flock and Qumana). I logged a call and have no doubt that a Support rep will get to me soon.
Thanks for a great conversation!
Molly
http://www.mollyzine.com
There’s a lot of debate about old information on blogs impacting more recent decisions for consumers – the best example being the discussion about hackability of the bike locks. You posed the question of what a company can do to counteract that old information.
Let me propose that this is just making visible a social effect that has always been a factor. My personal example: I bought my first car from a real shady dealer in the city, and got ripped off. So I decided from that point that I would never again buy from that dealer, or any other which is on that same street – because the whole bunch of car dealerships had the reputation of being less than ethical, and I didn’t want to deal with that. OK, you might think of that as a bit irrational, but it’s a recommendation that affects the buying behavior of me, my kids, my extended family, and a number of friends – based upon an experience I had 27 years ago.
I would propose that this goes on all the time – people base decisions, rightly or wrongly, on information which might be obsolete. It’s one of the factors, whether it’s made visible by being on the web, or is invisible through peoples’ offline social networks.
So how do you counteract this? By building a company which has a much broader positive reputation which can withstand the ups and downs of individual bad experiences, and the people they influence. By treating people in such a way that they will blog about their POSTIVE experiences. By addressing individual complaints in a responsive and caring way so that the RESPONSE becomes more important than the original problem.
This isn’t a new or unique problem – it’s just much more visible, and the information flows more rapidly, than it might have in the past.
Carl