 Many
times we portray business as a faceless entity without properly
expressing it as an entity of human needs and expectations. The ironic
chasm is that sometimes when people get organized as a business the
subsequent behavior doesn't always seem human.
From Galvin O'Malley at Mediapost: Forrester: B2B Blogging Takes Nose Dive , B2B
marketers should embrace strategies prominently used by mainstream
bloggers to attract readers, build conversations, and engage community
members in sharing their experiences with their online peers, the
report's author advises.
To track B2B
blog progress, Forrester reviewed 90 company blogs from Fortune 500 and
top technology firms to see how blogging has matured since 2006.
Rather than a
crop of new, successful examples, Forrester was disappointed to find
that the number of new corporate blogs took a nose dive.
"The gap
between blog hype and reality widened in 2007," said Laura Ramos,
Forrester analyst and chief author of the report. "After counting 36
companies that started promoting corporate blogs on their Web sites in
2006, the number of B2B firms starting up blogs dropped sharply to 19
in 2007."
Additionally,
with just three new blogs discovered in the first quarter of 2008,
Forrester estimates that only a dozen or so firms will get fresh blogs
off the ground this year.
Corporate
bloggers are apparently struggling to sustain a conversation, while
many B2B marketers are failing to realize that good blogging style
should resemble a coffee shop conversation, not a whitepaper.
As a result,
most B2B blogs are dull, drab, and don't stimulate discussion,
according to the Forrester report. More than 70% of the corporate blogs
it reviewed stick strictly to business or technical topics and don't
share much personal insight or experience.
There is and always has been a chasm
between business purpose and human needs. Closing the gap between the
two requires innovative thinking combined with an understanding of the
human social need and subsequent behaviors that can be facilitated with
advanced technology, a social matrix. On one side of the matrix is the
profit needs and on the other side is the human needs.
Do you think business has a human side?
In progressive
organizations survival and profit are seen to be subservient to
relationships, the human side. Jon Maloney writes: "In
the patently dysfunctional, criminal enterprise, monstrous govt, and
overreaching orgs like Enron, Arthur Andersen, Soviet Union, statism,
UN, etc. ad nauseum, the reverse is manifest, e.g., survival trumps
relationships. It is why businesses fail. "
Business Socialutions require you to act, speak and relate as a human, not as a business.
What say you? |