Recent “One Degree interviewee”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/03/03/5-questions-for-robert-scoble, Robert Scoble is often seen as an “edge case”:http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/01/27/more-on-edge-cases/ (although he “hates being called that”:http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/01/26/scoble-im-not-an-edge-case/). I think Robert sees himself more as “canary in a coalmine” – out ahead of us but doing what will one day become common practice. The term edge case implies a way of using things that will _never_ be seen as normal.
In any case, whether Robert is an edge case or not, I’m starting to think that he is a “bright-liner”. You might not know that word, so let me digress for a moment to explain what it is before saying why Scoble might be one and why it might impact your brand.
Category: Strategy
Robert Scoble (“wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scoble) is a technical evangelist who works for “Microsoft”:http://www.microsoft.com/ and maintains the popular blog, “Scobleizer”:http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/. He lives in Bothell, Washington, USA.
Although Scoble often promotes Microsoft products like Tablet PCs and Windows Vista, at the same time he criticises his own employer and praises its competitors. He publishes his cell phone number on his blog and urges people to contact him directly with issues, as well as accepting comments on his blog. His new book _Naked Conversations_ takes you to more than 180 companies and shows you how they are using corporate blogs to change their PR, their marketing, and their product development. The book’s blog is at “nakedconversations.com.”:http://www.nakedconversations.com
(Disclosure: “I”:http://www.schafer.com/ am mentioned in passing in a section of the book discussing how my wife, “parenting expert Alyson Schafer”:http://www.alyson.ca/ uses her blog to build her business.)
*One Degree: You and “Shel Israel”:http://seems2shel.typepad.com/itseemstome/ wrote Naked Conversations ( “amazon.com”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/047174719X/imho-20 | “amazon.ca”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/047174719X/imho0b-20 ) in a very open way. Can you talk a bit about how you used blogs to _create_ Naked Conversations and how that impacted the final work?*
Yeah, we blogged every step of the book from the first moment of its conception. That quickly attracted attention and got two book publishers to bid for our work. That should be lesson #1. Most authors have to beg to get their work even considered. We didn’t need to do that. Why? Because hundreds of bloggers were linking to us and talking about our blog from the first moments. Even now we’re the #1 Google result for “corporate blog book.”
But, if you stop at just the PR and relationship-building aspects of a blog, you’ll miss the deeper impact (even though they are pretty cool all by themselves). By putting the book up on the blog our readers got involved and improved the book immeasurably. They fixed spelling and factual errors. They augmented our reporting and suggested many of the interviews we ended up performing. Without them the book simply would not have been the same.
*One Degree: Similarly, the buzz on the book seems to be building from the blogosphere out – a successful strategy for a number of books recently – how much of this has been organic and how much is a calculated marketing strategy? I’m thinking in particular of things “like”:http://blog.softtechvc.com/2006/02/naked_conversat.html “having”:http://www.lightbox5.com/movabletype/archives/2006/02/naked_conversat.html “the”:http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2006/01/naked_conversat_1.htm “launch”:http://www.julieleung.com/archives/002081.html “party”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/18/thank-you-for-coming-to-techcrunch-5/ at noted “Techcrunch”:http://www.techcrunch.com/ blogger “Mike Arrington’s”:http://www.crunchnotes.com/ home instead of a more traditional book launch.*