This is a book overview/review on Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. The slidecast is presented by Matt Mauney as part of his Social Media and PR class at Georgia Southern University.
12. Presentation by Matt Mauney e-mail: [email_address] website: www.mattmauney.wordpress.com Follow me on Twitter: @mattmauney27
Notas del editor
Naked Conversations – How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. Foreword by Tom Peters. I selected this book because it seemed interesting and, as someone who has been blogging for a while, was interested in what this book had to say about blogs when it came to businesses. This book is about the effect of blogs on businesses and how this new technology can help (or hurt) business.
I was fairly shocked when I Google searched the authors of the book and found this picture. This is Scoble and Israel at the book launch of Naked Conversations. Outside of writing books about social media, Scoble helps run Microsoft’s Channel 9 web site and Israel has played a key role in introducing some of technology’s most successful products like PowerPoint and FileMaker.
Here are some points that I found interesting when reading this book. I will briefly discuss each one and tell what I learned about each topic.
This book is all about how businesses can utilize blogging to benefit their companies. Blogging provides instantaneous interaction with the public and is an affordable and efficient way to connect with your desired audiences. It allows businesses to address their audiences, provides a platform for interaction and discussion, and allows businesses the tools to address crises and make their products better by listening and holding “conversations.”
Blogging is unique because it allows users to connect with hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people by utilizing the Internet. Chapters 2 and 3 address this by pointing out that virtually anyone can publish a blog, have that blog found in online searches, provide interactivity to the visitors of the blog and allow for the blog to be linked and syndicated across the “information highway.”
Chapter 5, entitled Little Companies, Long Reach, focuses on how blogging is both important and beneficial for smaller companies. Although not all of the companies mentioned in this chapter are small companies, they are not global powerhouses. Therefore this chapter is all about how blogging can help a business gain a better reputation and and help the business grow.
Don’t’s – Since blogging is generally seen as a forum where people (or in this case businesses) can voice opinions, there isn’t any real rulebook on what a blog should be, look like or include in terms of content. However, it is important, especially when a blog bares the name of a company, that the blog stays as credible and objective as possible. By doing this early on, the company builds an audience base and is more likely to keep that audience and have it grow if they stay a reliable resource on the web. Do’s – This chapter listed 11 helpful tips to improve a company’s blog. These included: being well-informed, having an appropriate blog name that has the best chance to be found easily on search engines, keeping your blog focused and straight to the point, cite all references and resources and provide as many links as possible.
This book paid close attention to detail when it came to why and how business can thrive when they utilize blogging. The book provided various examples of businesses and CEO that utilize blogging, along with some that have not (at least at the time this book was written) embraced bloggong. Among examples given were Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA franchise the Dallas Mavericks, who uses blogging to connect with fans, and several Microsoft employees that utilized blogging to change the publics perception of the computer and software company. One example that was given of a business that hasn’t embraced blogging was Apple. As one of the leading technology companies in the world, I found it especially surprising that Apple doesn’t embrace blogging and furthermore, discourage their employees from taking part in the “blogosphere.”
Naked Conversations was originally printed in 2006, now that it is 2010, I would like to know how some of the topics of this book have changed, or haven’t changed. Although it was just four years ago, there have been a good amount of developments in technology and blogging in general, so it would be interesting to see how businesses are utilizing blogging now and if companies that were not embracing blogging are now embracing this technology.
This book is extremely informative and takes an interesting look at blogging. For anyone that may be a business professional one day, this is certainly a must read.
