The new battleground

As companies begin to understand the power of blogging, some interesting new battle lines are being drawn up. For example, the CEO of the Carphone Warehouse - Charles Dunstone is well known in the industry for his somewhat pioneering blog in which he throws caution to the wind (well, kind of) and blogs about the good and the bad parts of his daily role. As a result of this, John Petter, BT’s COO is going to start his own blog. Now don’t get me wrong - I’m delighted that a senior member of BT’s operating team is interested in touching parts that other media cannot reach, but I wonder to what extent this is purely a reactionary decision in the face of Dunstone’s popular blog.

An article in today’s FT by Tom Braithwaite (p.21 or online here) looks into this subject in more detail.

Another example given in the article is Richard Charkin, the Chief Executive of Macmillan, the publisher. He has been blogging since December but for very different reasons. In this instance, Charkin was advised by his IT team that his e-mail newsletter was slowing the company’s system down. Switching to a web-based blog let him solve this problem. In the process he has also managed to position Macmillan as a company that has embraced the digital world. “I think it’s important for a company to have an image which is forward-looking rather than backward-looking” Charkin says. He now claims a readership of over 20,000 and his profile in the industry has grown expedentially.

The article goes on to talk about JP Rangaswami who introduced blogging to Dresdner Kleinwort. JP has pushed against a great deal of resistance to get staff at his organisation using collaborative tools like blogs and wikis and the results are now starting to tell. In the FT article he is quoted as saying: “The first fear factor seems to be about loss of control; and my claim is what they perceive as their form of control has already been lost.” Having met JP at a recent conference (arranged by our own social media guru - Adriana Cronin-Lukas), I can confirm that this quote is understating JP’s passion and belief behind this. He has realised the power of these tools and is in a position where people are listening to his advice. This is rare in today’s larger companies but the more they see the opposition doing this, the more nervous they are going to get about missing out on something. That’s when they’ll take the leap.

This raises an interesting question for me. If these companies are purely getting into blogging and social media out of fear, will they end up missing the point? These tools must be embraced and accepted wholeheartedly. It brings to mind something my dad used to say to me when I asked him how much he would pay me for washing the family car: “Not a penny - either do it because you want to, or don’t do it all. If you want to be driven around in a dirty car then that’s up to you.” I think this applies here and it will be interesting to watch the cross-industry progress of competitors taking to blogging (or not).