Blog on

In 2000, just as the air was about to go out of the dot-com boom, a group of entrepreneurs and journalists published a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual. Its fits of hyperbole seem slightly quaint now, but threaded through it was a very important point: in the vast, networked world, the individual voice was becoming crucial.

In a chapter headed ‘Markets are Conversations’, Doc Searls and David Weinberger warned that the era of mass marketing to “the undifferentiated hordes” was drawing to an end. Consumers now wanted “to speak with your business in a human voice”. Another chapter heralded the need for companies to pay attention to the resurgence of voice on the internet.

Rachel Cunliffe had that book in mind when, in 2002, she did what as many as ten million other people have done in the 21st century: started writing a blog. Blogs — short for weblogs — are the most highly evolved expression yet of the internet’s power to publish.

While the blowhard bloggers who claim their personal journals will make the mainstream media irrelevant in the next few years are getting way ahead of themselves, there’s no denying the impact of these individual online voices. Bloggers break stories, irk the mighty and engage their readers in a different, more personal way than mainstream journalists. You can have a relationship with a blogger that you can’t have with a newspaper masthead.

Cunliffe is best known as the co-founder (with her husband Regan) of IdolBlog, an online community dedicated to the NZ Idol TV show that created the kind of fan community that the broadcaster, TVNZ, could only dream of — in large part because of its direct, personal approach. She and Regan now write a regular journal from the Cunliffes’ web design company, Cre8d Design (www.cre8d-design.com), a general design blog, a site for Shortland Street fans and various topical journals under the couple’s breakingnewsblog.com domain.

She also works with other businesses that want to incorporate blogging as part of their own customer strate-gies — and usually directs them to read The Cluetrain Manifesto as a primer.

“I think that all successful business blogs will have a human sound to them, rather than merely corporate-speak and marketing messages,” she says. “The more you let people into your business’s world, the more interesting and insightful it will be to people visiting the blog. That said, I don’t go overboard with personal life in my working blogs — that’s what my personal journal is for.”

Stephan Spencer, the founder of the New Zealand consultancy firm NetConcepts, is also spreading the creed — and some famous people are taking his advice. Last year, he advised the Carter Centre, urging former US president Jimmy Carter to keep a blog of his eight-day visit to West Africa on the centre’s website. The result, according to the centre’s communications chief Connie Nelson, was “one of the most successful web projects the Carter Centre has undertaken to date”.

The blogosphere, Spencer recalls, was “abuzz” with the short-lived Carter blog: “thousands” of websites discussed and linked to it, permanently raising the performance of the centre’s website in Google searches. He says the American business world has woken up to the power of this kind of communication in the past year. Naturally, Spencer has a blog of his own (www.stephanspencer.com).

“It puts a human face to your company,” says Spencer. “It helps position yourself as a thought leader. It’s great for networking, as you end up building relationships with other bloggers.”

Mediacom’s Michael Carney has a more prosaic take on what business people can do with a blog — “customer support, evangelising, information flow — the same kind of things you’d use a newsletter for” — and notes that the core principles of blogging are far from new. They might be found in The Cluetrain Manifesto “or any of the direct mail books of the last hundred years. Relationship marketing ain’t exactly a new topic.”