The bottom line

Published on 3/21/2007 in General. Comments

From Hugh:

Blogging is not about reaching a mass audience. Blogging is not about creating yet another sales channel. Blogging is about allowing “The Smarter Conversation” to happen.

In the past two or three years we’ve gone from asking about the metrics and the bottom line for blogging, to understanding that it’s about conversation. Something Doc Searls once said (at Syndicate NY I think) struck me as being dead on. He asked how we would monitize answering the phones. We do answer the phones, don’t we? We don’t do a cost / benefit analysis on having a receptionist, we just do it. Likewise, having a conversation with our customers should be something we have to prove the value of to a committee.

In all of the conversations I have with marketing people and agencies I’ve noticed lately that they are getting smarter on this point. It’s a difficult concept to grasp but it’s starting to break through.

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  • Totally agree, except the part about companies not analysing whether to have a receptionist.

    The place I worked a few years ago went through an efficiency exercise, and decided to do away with receptionists for each floor of the building. They were replaced by a centralized switchboard, phone queues, and a commissionaire in the lobby who knows nothing about the company.

    For in-person visitors, the process of being greeted by the elevator was replaced with a convoluted process of sending the person who was being visited to the main elevator bank to try to meet up with the person who was visiting them. It worked best when you knew what the person looked like. "I'm wearing a red carnation," or something like that.

    Not only should we not insist on a rigorous cost-benefit analysis for blogging, we should take a good look at whether all the cost-saving decisions we make are, in fact, exercises in Dilbertian stupidity.
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