B5 - who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

B5 (Blogging Bug Bites Big Blue) - seems that Big Blue is taking a page from Microsoft and encouraging IBM’ers to blog. Despite the fact that we’re very much in the early adoption period for corporate bloggers, it’s another good sign that the shift from a read-only to a read-write platform is spreading it’s roots.

I spoke at AdTech last year about the importance of empowering customers to blog about their brands by making available brand assets such as logo’s, advertising footage, soundtracks, etc. I got this idea from Tim Smith who is really smart about how to create brand loyalty. I was amazed at how divided the audience was about this idea. Some thought it to be proactive, understanding there is no turning back to a crafted world in which customers yield limited ability to influence the opinions of a community of users, potential users. Others thought it marketing blasphemous.

The truth is that customers now own brands and the companies that created them are lucky they get to navigate the image making. It reminds me of the late 90’s when the smart, marketing driven companies started to slowly embrace the web despite their fear of losing control. Those companies were careful not to jump in too deep. They tested new ideas, figured out what worked best and then committed. Very smart. It’s an approach that the best companies in this decade will adopt, especially as it concerns user generated content. While the particulars might be different, I have no doubt that being open, gaining real time input from customers no matter how positive or critical, is the best way to develop a community and steward a brand.

Posted by Tony

Sphere: Related Content

c’mon already!

I read a blog post by Michael Air tonight asking what happened to Sphere so I thought this was a good time to come out of a self imposed hibernation and let you know what’s going on.

We’re very much alive (and well!) Our private beta has been really great, awesome feedback along with some excellent constructive guidance. And, as Michael noted, the very positive blog reviews by some really great bloggers (John Battelle; Om Malik; Michael Arrington @ Techcrunch; Jeremy Zawodny; Paul Kedrosky @ Infectious Greed, etc) created a lot of excitement early on - a little too much perhaps. We spent December putting in place a new data center that can now handle substantial amounts of traffic. We can launch tomorrow if we want so our only hold up is ourselves.

End of December, we made a decision to add some very cool, advanced features to the site that we believe pushes the quality of blog discovery to a very different level. Delaying our launch was a very hard decision, one in which we went back and forth on for weeks. Ultimately, despite the great beta feedback, we felt it important to take a step back and work towards our larger goal. I’ve been involved with a number of start ups (Oddpost; Post Communications; Iconoculture; and Automattic/ Wordpress - by the way, this is my first post on the wordpress platform - very nice!) and I believe you need to trust your instincts. In this case, our instincts tell us we can do something really great so we’re focused on getting there. Once we launch (soon), it gets harder to develop, especially with a small team (we’re 4 people). So, we’re in that mode right now, hyper focused, making real progress at a fun rate.

In addition to version 2, we’ve had some excellent achievements that we look forward to sharing with everyone as we get closer to launch. In fact, we’re psyched to go live and get your feedback. Stay tuned.

Posted by Tony

Sphere: Related Content