Robert Scoble, now earning a living dealing with PR people in the ‘valley, understands the difficulty of blogging from within large organisations. Robert refers to one of the 4000-or-so bloggers at Microsoft: David Weller.
The best way to learn about an organisation, its plans and products is with a search engine. Marketing and product teams are absolutely scared witless of the transparency that blogging provides. It’s not evilness, it’s the fear of informing the competition. Especially in the online world where the small is as powerful as the large, and products live and die within a 24-hour cycle.
Marketing and PR prefer a “write-only” internet. Sadly, the internet as we see it today is read and write, read and write.
Maybe Microsoft is not “ubercool” because it’s not obscure enough. Too much transparency, too many eyes, too many mouths. Please don’t forget for each one of these mouths, there is a matching set of ears. We are listening too. Bloggers write, and see the response, feed this back into the cycle of product development.
One wonders about other organisations, and if the “eyes” to “ears” ratio also applies. Read and Write.