Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk With Customers - Hardcover

Robert Scoble helps run Microsoft’s Channel 9 Web site. He began his blog in 2000 and now has more than 3.5 million readers every year. Scoble’s blog has earned acclaim in Fortune magazine, Fast Company, and The Economist.

Shel Israel played a key strategic role in introducing some of technology’s most successful products, including PowerPoint, FileMaker, and Sun Microsystems workstations.He’s been an expert on innovation for more than twenty years.

An Excerpt from Naked Conversations:

Bloggings's Six Pillars: There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel. You can find any of them elsewhere. These are the Six Pillars of Blogging:

1.Publishable.Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.

2.Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.

3.Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.

4.Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a newsservice. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.

5.Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free "home delivery" of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.

6.Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.

You can find each of these elements elsewhere. None is, in itself, all that remarkable. But in final assembly, they are the benefits of the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed.

Today's consumer craves human contact. We're sick to death of voicemail. Menus of options that never offer the option we need. A deluge of carefully spun "information" designed not to answer our concerns, but to influence our decisions. Mechanical voices telling us our call is important to them even as they refuse to answer it.

We're frustrated in our attempts to reach a live human being, and when we finally do, all too often it's someone who barely speaks our language and only reads from a script.

It is so surprising that the consumer distrusts the corporation?

Into this charged atmosphere comes a phenomenon called blogging. It's interactive. It's informal. It's peppered with misspellings, grammatical errors, and an occasional forbidden word.

It comes from a real person. And it allows the consumer to talk back.

Robert Scoble, author of the nation's best-read business blog, and veteran consultant Shel Israel believe bolgging is already changing the face of business. They show you how employee bloggers altered the public's perception of Microsoft. How an outspoken NBA team owner uses his blog to connect with fans. How small businesses and Fortune 500 companies alike can benefit from blogging, and how failing to use it properly can be disastrous.

In the totally forthright manner that defines a good blog, Scoble and Israel are equally honest about blogging's dangers. They examine the risk and how to manage them. And they have practiced what they preach. You'll read comments they receive when they publish early drafts of this book on their own blog.

Traditional corporate communication is one-way, and customers are tired of being talked at. They want to talk back. This landmark book shows you how to let them, and why your business may depend on it.