Positively Glorious!

Yeah, I know, your organization doesn’t need one. Your organization has different goals. Your organization is… whatever people. Look, I’ve talked about this in previous posts¹² but want to give you another example.

You don’t have to care about Yahoo!, and you don’t have to know what OpenID is. You don’t All you have to do is know that there are two important things that a blog will add to your organizations interaction with the public. The first is called humor and the second is called humanity.  It’s Interesting that those words are rooted in the same place, is it not?.

Here is today’s example: Yahoo! Releases OpenID Research (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog).

The Yahoo! Team: “Observing these tests was more than a bit frustrating for the Yahoo! OpenID team, and the test subjects may have been distracted by the sounds of the groans and head-pounding coming from the other side of the one-way mirror. Certainly there is a lot of work to be done on the OpenID UX (user experience) front.”

Now, many of you will read that and say something to the effect of “Well, that explains why we don’t have a blog, because that’s not an appropriate thing to have on an official company site and blah blah blah.”

Look, you have a company site, and you have people that work at your site. Those people have opinions that are not always reflective of the company perspective. Why? Because the company perspective is large, beaurocratic, terrified, and often incredibly stupid. Here’s something to consider: You’re public often doesn’t have opinions that are reflective of your company perspective. Why don’t you give people- especially if they are good writers and adhere to basic rules of decency- the chance to connect with those people?

I know that you’re all afraid of letting go of the control- you want the unified public face and all that 1950′s IBM claptrap. I know. But this is not the 1950′s, and your public wants to connect with you not as an organization, but as a human. Having someone in your organization who is an actual human and who writes a bit of the inside story from the perspective of an actual human is, in every sense of the word, A Good Thing.

Get a blog, people. Really. More and more of your customers are expecting it. They want updates on your humanity to hit their RSS feeds. They want to know that there’s a person there.

I’m just one stupid guy, huh? Don’t believe me? Listen to what smart company stooges think:

• It’s a Blog World After All: How companies such as Verizon, IBM, Microsoft are using blogs for knowledge management — and marketing
• Professionals, Publishing for the People: David Weinberger on how conversations within companies can scale globally
• Post(er) Boy: Robert Scoble’s starter set of corporate blogging guidelines
• Best Blog Ever: How VH-1 leverages the Web to produce a TV show
• A Little Help from Your Friends: The state of online business networking
• Between the Lines: Six Degrees of Competition: Alison Overholt on the complicity and competition among social network software makers
• FC Now: Fast Company‘s team blog

Can you hear me now?

1. What do you mean websites are outdated? [↩]
2. Posterous proves why Twitter works for Customer Service [↩]