BBS 05: Dealing with Bloggers: Partnering and Defense Strategies

January 25, 2005 at 2:45 PM

Blog Business Summit comments on Robert Scoble, Buzz Bruggeman, Anil Dash’s session on Dealing with Bloggers: Partnering and Defense Strategies.

All three of them are spread across the stage. Kinking things off with a mention of the Corporate Weblog Manifesto. Anil is talking about the bits of this presentation and to take them away as lessons learned because all three of them have learned the hard way doing this. He’s now talking about being frustrated with Microsoft products. He relates the size of Microsoft to the size of his home town, and in his home town there were those with good ideas and some with crazy ideas or bad ideas. It starts to put thing in perspective. A company can change the world. I have worked for companies who became faceless corporations. We have mechanisms in place to retaliate against this.

Robert says build a great relationship network before you even start blogging. They are now making points about starting blogging on a reactionary level first instead of starting with an established relationship with those who you know and know you. If you have no creditability in the good times, you’ll have no creditability in the bad times. Anil points out that simply acknowledging that the conversation is going on is a big step in the right direction. Audience question about why they didn’t ask for pricing suggestion rather than rolling out. Anil points out that they did ask for pricing and that’s what it was based on, yet it wasn’t so much what they charged it was more about how it was communicated.

Anil is going into detail about the Movable Type licensing story and the lessons learned. Listening to the negatives is important, responding reasonably is very important. Robert mentions how he started linking to all these blogs mentioning Microsoft sucks and showing how they aren’t really adding any value or solving any problems… helped show how constructive criticism is much better than unbridled criticism. Short story about taking feedback to the extreme, if you take the feedback and act on everything your going to end up with a product that is not what you were intending to make and doesn’t match the concept of what you were in the business for.