Blogging: Word-of-mouth on steroids

Think about the way most companies launch products. It's top-secret. The product development team is kept under close wraps, hidden even from most employees. A few months before launch, a select group of journalists are invited to an exotic location for a preview of the product. They're under embargo, of course, and aren't allowed to write about the product until the official launch. On the preordained date, the product is released to the world and the launch team prays reviews will be positive and that customers will pay attention.

Compare this conventional marketing arcana with the tack Microsoft took in launching its new operating system, Vista. A team of bloggers, called "Team 99," has been assembled to start testing and blogging about the new system. As a condition of their access to the OS, they had to agree not to reveal certain proprietary details that might be useful to competitors or hackers, but otherwise they were given substantial freedom in what they're allowed to comment on.

This forward-looking third-party evangelism team includes software developers and a variety of "super users" who have high visibility and credibility in the development community. They're not only expected to evangelize, but to weigh in on the quality and usability of the OS, telling Microrosoft and the world what's wrong with Vista and what the company is overlooking. In this new model, beta testing takes place out in the open. The new product is vetted in public, and the powerful momentum of positive word-of-mouth is set into motion.

Is Microsoft onto something? "Hosting the very best blog conversations" may well be the key (or one of the keys, at the very least) to the elusive trickle-down theory of opinion leadership, a concept that's as appealing philosophically as it is difficult to implement. Everett M. Rogers articulated this phenomenon with his "Diffusion of Innovation" theory 40 years ago, and other icons of communication and social research have been seeking to unravel the true nature of persuasion and media since the 1920s. Malcom Gladwell, drawing heavily on concepts developed by researchers and theorists in the fields of Chaos, Complexity, and Memetics, re-packaged and popularized some of these ideas in his recent book, The Tipping Point.

But the problem with both Rogers and Gladwell is that their theories are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Gladwell forgot to tell us how to go about identifying the "mavens," "connectors," and "sales people," and how precisely to get them talking about your product, idea, or service remained a mystery to be solved by the reader and practitioner.

Enter the blog. Let's face it, anyone who takes the time to post a rant on GM's FastLane Blog responding to Vice Chairman Bob Lutz's entry on the virtues of the pushrod engine is a car "maven." They're self-appointed experts who seek to pass their knowledge and opinions on to others. The emerging phenomenon of blogging might just be the engine for reaching these opinion leaders with successful word-of mouth marketing. Traditionally, the only way for car companies to reach these aficionados was to court automotive publications like Car & Driver with expensive launch drive events and costly advertising in their publications. Today, though, GM's Vice Chairman can bypass the buff publications by posting entries directly to his blog, which is read by 5,000 unique visitors per day. This online diary gives him an unfiltered channel to the opinion leading employees, customers, analysts, and dealers who represent the first wave of perception formation regarding important company products and service initiatives. He can extol the virtues of new cars straight to his devotees, and feedback channels provide a quick check on the pulse of these key opinion leaders.

The FastLane Blog is also tapping into customer enthusiasm with regular "podcasts." FastLane radio host Deb Ochs is joined by GM product chiefs and designers to talk about the latest line up of cars. Listeners can zap it to their iPod or other MP3 players and listen to these time-shifted radio shows at their leisure. Six million Americans are already listening to "Podcasted" radio programs on their MP3 players. Millions more are turning away from the polished, faceless information sources of traditional media and tuning into the unfiltered voices from real people on blogs. No fewer that 14.2 million blogs already exist by the last count and 80,000 more are created daily (that's one per second!) and 50 million Americans have visited a blog.

While GM's FastLane Blog is decidedly corporate looking, Sun Microsystems is taking a different approach by unleashing its world-wide employee base on the blogosphere. No fewer than 1,300 Sun employees have their own blogs on blogs.sun.com (link it). Employees are often the most effective marketing channel because they speak to the developer community, customers, and prospects with authority, passion, and credibility on their various areas of expertise. Everyone from the janitor to Sun President Jonathan Schwartz has his or her own blog, and Schwartz's site gets 300,000 unique visitors a month. As you can imagine, this represents a powerful platform for him to engage employees, analysts, and customers in an ongoing conversation.

Careful, though. The blogosphere's do-it-yourself publishing model can easily turn against a company. In the old world order, one upset customer would talk to ten friends about his or her bad experiences. Today, these brand terrorists will blog about it, getting their brand-eroding vitriol linked to any number of other blogs, which in turn are linked to by any number of blogs, and if the raving generates enough noise (or happens to be linked in the right place at the right time), it evolve into an Internet legend or even get picked up by the network evening news. A blog can literally go from obscurity to global fame in 24 hours or less. Millions of people might hear about the complaint and brands can be ruined in short order if the company is ignoring the capricious power of theNet.

Marketers ignore this phenomenon at their own peril. In this brave new world (actually, there's nothing brave about it, as the brand terrorism is potentially driven by anonymous posters) an army of informed, committed, and genuinely empowered employee bloggers becomes necessary to catch and knock down simmering issue before they erupt into crisis.

The blogosphere can be a lot of different things for your company. It can be used as a 24/7/4(ever) online focus group, a whistle blower hot line, a bully pulpit, a suggestion box, and a knowledge management tool. However, harnessing the power of the blogopsphere requires that companies trust their employees and leaders to do more of the communication. This may be a scary prospect for old-school corporate communications, training, and marketing professionals who are used to being in control of the message (and who get itchy as their control slips). Rather than doing the communication themselves, they now face the prospect of facilitating employees and senior executives who are increasingly charged with the heavy lifting of communicating with key stakeholders.