Pinkie’s Realm

David Kline’s essay, “The voice of the Customer” in Blog! focuses on the business aspect of blogging, and how greatly it can affect a company’s success. Many businesses in this modern age have begun to use blogging as a marketing tool, though some may have missed the point at first. A few corporations, in attempt to reach the vast community of bloggers, launched ploys to promote their products. The problem was bloggers caught on, and soon boycotted the fake blogs and the product. Other companies however took advantage of the blogging phenomenon in a more successful way. They created company operated blogs in which they offered useful information to their customers regarding their area of business, not just advertising their products alone. And other companies mapped out blogs that concentrate on their area of business, and so they could discuss and promote their product throughout those particular blogs. Because of the raw truthfulness and sometimes unforgiveable nature of the blogosphere, many companies have experienced negative outcomes of bloggers discussing their faults. Recently though, there has been yet another method in which companies are reaching their customers–companies are having their very own employees talk with the customers via blog.

One such company (mentioned by Kline on page 114) that has has experienced positive feedback is Microsoft. Robert Scoble is a programmer who works for the company and now has his famous blog “Scobleizer”. It has revolutionized the way customers and companies communicate, and Scoble himself has so drastically transformed the firm’s image that he has been named “Chief Humanizing Officer”. After searching for his site on the internet, I found two. Both of them seem to be his blog, Scobleizer, but after reading them both I found that one is his new site and the other his old. Both of the websites can be found at http://scoble.weblogs.com/ and http://scobleizer.com/. His heading for his previous website was “Microsoft Geek Blogger” and his new heading is “Tech Geek Blogger”. Other than the headings, I can’t find much of a difference between the sites other than the URL. I was surprised by how personal his website was, it didn’t exclusively focus on Microsoft, computing, or programming, but his personal life as well. He posts videos and provides links to everything he discusses, including advertising, traveling, Google, Yahoo, and of course Microsoft. Overall I can’t say that I’d be a devout reader of his blog, but I did find it interesting and perhaps helpful if I get more into programming one day.