How blogging has gone mainstream

Between my consulting, speaking, book writing and blogging I am blessed to have access to a wide range of technology vendor executives, CIOs, and influencers. What was impressive in my recent book project compared to that to The New Polymath 2 years prior was how much more influential blogs and bloggers have become.

A few perspectives:

Product Launches

In one of the book case studies, Jerry Grasso, VP of Corporate Communications at Lexmark says 

“We launched the Genesis product at BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas…We usually launch products at CES or other technology shows but over the last year we have seen a tipping point for the payback from leveraging social media. We launched simultaneously with press events in New York and San Francisco and even in those cities we invited a mix of
bloggers in addition to more traditional media like the New York Times.”

In the chapter on social savvy I present the example of the buzz Michael Dell created when he showed a Gizmodo blogger in an elevator an unannounced version of one of his products. It goes into how Dell used Radian6 to monitor the resulting social traffic over the next few months through the actual product launch.

We all saw the coverage the iPhone 4 misplaced prototype and its antenna got. The book draws on the influence of blogs on those topics. There are several more examples of the influence of blogs during product launches. 

Topical coverage

I was impressed at the range of topics I could interview bloggers for:  Brad Feld on software patents, Tom Raftery on sustainability in tech, Frank Scavo on vertical technology spending trends, Dennis Howlett on SAP mobility trends, Larry Dignan on RIM’s challenges, Brian Sommer on the negatives of social networks, and many more.

Substantive material

I am not a big fan of end notes – I find them distracting as a reader. I find URL links much less intrusive. My book publisher, to its credit, likes to share detailed citations so people can research a topic much further. So, my book will have over 500 citations at the back. Many are references to books, academic journals, press articles. About 15% of them are references to blogs. Scan those 30+pages and you see plenty of ZDNet, GigaOm, Ars Technica and also many individual blogs. I suspect if I had written this book 4 years ago, the blog proportion would have been 10 basis points lower and the press articles that much higher.  That’s another sign of the volume and the improved quality of blogs in the last few years.

Executive communication

While it is still hit and miss across the industry I was impressed with how much material I could use from corporate blogs. Steve Jobs’ brilliant post about Adobe and why it should adopt HTML5 was to me one of the most effective pieces of marketing to come out of Apple. Google does a pretty effective job of sharing information about its products, data centers, philosophies on its blogs. I learned about Jeff Bezos’ groundbreaking letter to shareholders with all kinds of technology jargon from a blog post by Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels. I could go on.

The Thin Line

The bloggers I admire use multiple channels effectively. Robert Scoble uses video, Hugh MacLeod uses cartoons. I have a thin line between my blogs, books and speeches. UA’s Smart Shirt, Toro’s sophisticated lawn mowers, Deere’s FarmSight, The Hillsborough Tax Collector and many other examples mentioned in the book were first highlighted on the New Florence blog. One of my inspirations for The New Polymath was I noticed I was tagging blog posts across multiple infotech, cleantech, healthtech categories and realized there was a growing set of multi-disciplinary products and technology teams. In reverse, I have excerpted about 10% of my books on my blogs. My presentations are chockful of innovation examples from the blog. To me that’s another sign of mainstreaming of blogs. In many ways, blogs are just another channel for many of us.

Not all good news

I see way too many folks who used to blog now just tweet from industry events. Or they summarize other people’s blogs in newsletters.

Personally, one of my New Year resolutions is to increase my blog posts in 2012. I have averaged 1 daily post on New Florence for the last few years. Hope to get to 1.25 this year. So much innovation and wow to profile! Different themes for this blog, but expect to see more vibrant posts.

Gutenberg is looking down in fascination at the awesome publishing power we all individually have today. More of us need to express ourselves. Interview someone interesting. Review a book or a product. Write about an interesting trend.

Who knows, an author may find a useful nugget for their books like I did on Rashmi’s blog about how Indians have evolved their own interesting social etiquette around missed calls on their mobile phones!