HW 13: Business and the Blogosphere

After reading the chapter called “Blogs Will Change Your Business” by Stephen Baker and Heather Green in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein I realized how important business blogs really are. There are so many business blogs emerging now and people are starting to look at them. Even so, sometimes the blogging world can hurt a business.

“There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, and others constitutional law. And yes many are plain silly. “Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo,” says one April Posting. Let’s assume that 99.9% are equally off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.”

Businesses can make a blog to put the business out there more or even have a discussion board to make their customers happier with products or purchases. In one case GM’s Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz created a blog and car buffs started making suggestions and complaints to him on the blog. These people were car buffs because of the car business. This shows that blogs can attract certain people to joining them or maybe even being a customer at a certain place. On the other hand a Google programmer named Mark Jen had some issues:

“Google is regarded as a secretive company. So in January, when a young programmer named Mark Jen started blogging about his first days in the Googleplex, folks in the ‘sphere instantly linked to him. Jen certainly wasn’t dealing out inside dirt. But he griped that Google’s health plan was less generous than his former employer’s—Microsoft—and he argued, indignantly, that Google’s free food was an enticement for employees to work past dinner.”

Obviously he was fired because he was pretty much bashing his company. That sort of stuff should not be on a business blog… not good for business. At first glance teenagers might say that these blogs are boring and don’t really matter to them. But on closer inspection they do. How can you say that businesses don't matter? They produce the products you the consumer buy! And teenagers buy a lot of things! So, business blogs are good things and should stay.

Lindsay