One last thought from the book on business blogging that I’ve mentioned before, Naked Conversations. From authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, thoughts on whether blogging is a revolutionary phenomenon for businesses:
“If we were to have met you in 1994 and told you that some young developers at Netscape were finishing up a ‘browser’ that would let you read Internet pages and get to these pages by just clicking on a link, and it would change world information sharing, you might have just stared at us blankly before returning to your regularly scheduled program. Your life was just fine without the World Wide Web. What possible change could it mean to you? We would speculate that revolutionary change usually just creeps in on you. We doubt that the first stagecoach driver who watched a locomotive speed past him realized that this would doom his chosen vocation. Or the monks with quills realized the full implications of the Gutenberg press. No one even noted the name of the guy who developed the wheel. He or she probably just invented it out of necessity.
“We believe the chain of small incidents that caused blogging has revolutionary implications to businesses, in marketing, customer support, internal communications, investor relations, product development, and even R&D…The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no going back.
“Businesses of all sizes will be wise to pay heed. Revolutions may be hard to predict, but ignoring them often has unfortunate consequences…In business, numbers speak. They indicate blogging is no fad, and its relevance to business cannot logically continue to be denied.”
