The impact of blogging: real or imagined? Microsoft blogging guru Robert Scoble talks about what the technology means for companies and how they can use blogs to their advantage.

Robert Scoble is frustrated. He's just attended a major technology trade show, and the single-manufacturer event has left him underwhelmed. As the official "technology evangelist" for Microsoft (a title he's tired of hearing), Scoble estimates that he lives about a year ahead of the rest of us, technology-wise. He clutches a new-model cellular phone with all the bells and whistles, enough memory to power a nuclear submarine, and an enhanced image screen that displays clearly readable text. The phone is his connection to his blog (scobleizer.wordpress.com), on which Microsoft allows him free reign to talk about the company and anything else. With 24,000 or more daily readers, the blog has made him one of the most influential communicators around.

So when Scoble met recently with CW Executive Editor Natasha Spring and frequent CW contributor William Briggs of San Jose State University (Scoble's an alum) at one of San Francisco's oldest bistros, the irony of the time and place wasn't lost on anyone. In a freewheeling ramble, Scoble set the record straight on blogs, their impact on the media, whether companies have anything to fear from this new communication medium, and the release of his new book, Naked Conversations (reviewed in this issue, page 16).

Q: How is the jump from e-mail to blogging affecting organizations and their employees?

A: If you look at big companies today, how do employees get information? Let's say I have 300 salespeople working for me and I need to get a report from each one every day on how many sales they quoted. I might want a report saying, "I met with Joe Smith at General Motors yesterday, and I sold him 500 widgets." There are two problems with sending that to me in e-mail. One, you're polluting my e-mail inbox. E-mails should be used when I need to answer you, when we need to have a conversation. Anything that does not require a response, that is just information, like a report or a newsletter, should be posted somewhere else. The less e-mail pollution I have, the more productive I am. I'm looking to take stuff out of my e-mail and put it somewhere else, where it is more useful for me and also makes the e-mail that is actually still in my inbox the kind that requires a response.

There is another problem with sending e-mail. If you send me a report, someone else can't see it. Only I can see it, so now I'm a gatekeeper. I have to choose to send it on. Whereas if you're writing in a public space, like a blog, "Hey I'm working on this and I'm having trouble with this kind of problem" or "I'm having trouble with this account," other people can chime in and try to help you out, or maybe fill in skills you don't have. All of a sudden magic starts happening inside the company, and people feel more connected. It gives them that sense that they're working on something that's cool that other people are finding interesting and can help them with.

Now that I'm publishing in a public space every day, people from around the world help me out. It's something that you don't discover until you do it. Most people are scared [of using blogs] because of privacy or because they're afraid of other people stealing their ideas. But when you start putting everything you're doing in public, you start getting new kinds of input that you didn't have before. People start working with you.

Q: What about organizations that feel threatened by blogs? They feel out of control, and there's a sense that if they allow or encourage participation by employees or customers, they'll be even more out of control.

A: The fact of the matter is they are out of control and they're just holding on to a memory. When I talk about blogging to big companies, I see fear; I see a memory of the way the world used to be.

I just wrote a book on corporate blogging, and my co-author, Shel Israel, who was a PR guy in Silicon Valley for 20 years, told me that when he had a new company to get press for, he only had to make 14 phone calls. That's because the power of the media world was centralized. There were only three TV networks in the U.S. 20 years ago. Now there are hundreds of TV networks, and that's just the start of it. Now anybody can publish anything--for example, I can take this recording I'm doing here and publish that on my blog. And so where it used to be that you had to pay attention to 14 people, now you have to pay attention to some 12-year-old in Australia who seems like he only has 10 readers on his blog. But I've seen blogs like that go from 10 readers to the front page of The New York Times in less than two days, because it's discoverable. There are search engines that will bring you any mention of anything, from any newspaper in the world. That kid in Australia who writes about his Xbox [video gaming system] can get discovered by [technology columnist] Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal. A journalist can say, "I have a story due tomorrow about the Xbox. What are people saying about the Xbox today?" And now they can find everybody in the world who says anything about the Xbox. Some kid who's saying, "My Xbox keeps crashing," now often he has a story.

Q: In the past, there was at least the perception that an organization could manage its reputation. But now this kid in Australia or anybody might attempt to take the company down. Is this a good thing because it can keep the organization honest, or is it a bad thing because now you can be victimized from any direction at any time?

A: I don't like to think of it as good or bad--it just is. And companies are going to have to live with it whether they like it or not.

Yes, a hoax can be started on blogs. False information can be published on blogs. I've seen it even about Microsoft. But I can fact-check that in real time. For example, a professional journalist was trying to beat up on IE ]Internet Explorer] 7. Somebody posted that IE 7 didn't work with the Google and Yahoo! toolbars. I knew that wasn't true. So I got on the phone with the guy who runs the Internet Explorer team, and while we were talking, I was writing my notes up in real time in my blog. I was saying, "I'm on the phone with Dr. Dean Hachamovitch of the Internet Explorer team. We just saw this Register.com article ..." and I linked to that article so my readers could go and see that this information is patently false. So anybody who really cared could see the whole story happening right there, all within 15 minutes. That's the new PR, that's the new conversation that happens. Yes, somebody can post something totally false about you. But you can come into the story right away and answer it and kill a rumor before it turns into a New York Times article. Once it's printed in The New York Times, you can't correct it, because if it's in the Times, [people think] it must be true. On the Internet, though, everybody is skeptical and thinks, "Well I'm probably not reading something that's totally true here, but it's faster and I can see a conversation happening." People can also search for everybody who says something about that topic. On the Internet, avalanches happen. They start small, but if you don't take care of it, that snowball will just get bigger until you're on the front page of The New York Times.

The worst-case scenario is when you don't pay attention and you don't even know that there's an avalanche, and then a journalist calls you and says, "We just heard that there are several Xboxes around the world that are not working." If you say, "Oh, I didn't know that," you look stupid because you don't have an answer. If you were prepared, you could tell the reporter, "I've already heard that, I've been watching, I've already gotten the facts, here's what we're doing." You have a much better story to tell, and now you have two or three paragraphs on the story.

Take it another way: My blog is read every day by 24,000 people. If something goes wrong in the small sphere, it scales out, and all of a sudden you're just doing immense damage to your brand, and people have these perceptions of your company that just switch overnight.

Q: Is that the fail-safe for not really having to worry about a blogPthat people are out there fact-checking all the time?

A: You always have to worry about a hoax. But with the new journalism, the editing is done in public. If you're interested in this story, you have to watch the story over a couple of days. The old journalism, the editing was done behind closed doors and you didn't see it. And once it was done you really couldn't do anything about it. If there was a lie printed, there really wasn't much you could do about it. You accepted it as part of life and moved on. Maybe they would put a correction on the fourth page of the paper down at the bottom in small little type saying, "Oh, sorry, we made a mistake yesterday."

Q: What are your thoughts on company concerns about having employees out there blogging?

A: Companies are concerned for several reasons. One is that employees are going to tell a customer off or misrepresent the product. Another is giving away secrets, like the Coca-Cola employee who puts the Coca-Cola recipe up. But these risks exist if you let employees interact with the public, either in person or on the phone.

Q: How much time do you spend blogging?

A: Eighteen hours a day. There's rarely a time when I'm not talking to somebody about the tech industry, reading something about the tech industry, looking at blogs. The actual act of writing the blog could be two, four, six hours a day, maybe longer if I'm really into it. There's a whole lot of work that you don't see, which is reading, talking to people.

Q: Have you ever been accused of going too far?

A: Every week. Whenever you're going to talk about ideas in the public place, you're going to make people mad. New ideas sometimes make people angry because they've invested 10 years of their life learning how the world works and now you're asking them to unlearn that 10 years and learn something new.

Q: What advice would you give to would-be bloggers?

A: For companies, read blogs first--don't try to write one. There are search engines out there that let you search for your company name. If you work for Target, search for Target, and see what people are saying about it. Just the act of reading what 20 people say about your company should impel you to answer back. It's sort of like if you're at a cocktail party and you hear somebody talking about you 19 feet away. Your instinct is to turn and say, "Oh, you're talking about me. What are you saying about me?" Same thing online. Listen first, learn to listen to what's going on first, and then talk back. Also, learn the techniques that work. What's the style of writing that seems to work the best? Do you write 11,000-word essays, or do you write 400-word short pieces with lots of links? Which one works better on blogs, and when do you do a podcast?

Q: How do companies answer these questions?

A: By reading and seeing what they like themselves, because a good blog is passionate and authoritative. If you're doing something just because your boss told you to do it, you're not going to be very interesting. If you're not going to be passionate about it, then you're probably not going to do a good job of it. But if you start reading and getting into it a little, that's when I say start writing. But if you read 500 blogs and you're not interested in doing one, then you're not going to be a good blogger. If that's not your thing, don't force it.

Natasha Spring is executive editor of CW.

Williams Briggs, Ed.D. is a former member of the IABC executive board and is director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University in San Jose, California.