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Stop the blogging! February 9, 2005
On one of my frequent trips to work last week I heard a story on the radio about how some corporations are looking to blogs for feedback from their customers. The piece went on about how limited information could be when you get it from marketing surveys, and how many executives just LOOOVE to mingle directly (ironic?) with customers through corporate blogs. I guess the idea is that an exec could post a story or question on the company blog, like this one, and readers, like you, could post comments about it. One guy was quoted as saying that this kind of thing was much more useful than running focus groups.
Yeah. Right.
First off, I've been on the receiving end of scathing user feedback. When I ran FilePlanet.com we got hundreds of pieces of barely literate hate mail each day. We shut down the messageboards for the site because they were chock full of vitriol. Much of it was complaints that were either demonstrably untrue or against practices that we knew were necessary for our survival. Granted, you can still learn from that stuff and improve your communications, marketing, and help pages, but it's not nearly as wonderful as these guys think.
The real nail in the corporate-blog-as-information-source is that it's completely unstructured. A focus group or a survey you can direct, limit, and otherwise focus to issues that you know you want to find out more about. You can standardize the information that you bring in so that you can compare it to other measures and quantify it. "People love our toothpaste" isn't nearly as valuable as "74% of people who like our toothpaste say it's because of the taste, 10% because of the packaging, and 9% because of the scent." Granted, mine may not be everyone's experience and open forums like blogs might possibly be good for generating topics that you don't know about and thus can't ask about in the first place, but there are survey and focus group methodologies to accomplish that, too. And again, they can do it in a much cleaner fashion.
Of course, this whole thing has my motor running because it's only a small step to go from using blogs to gather information from customers to using them to gather information on employees, where survey and focus group methodologies are already used to great effect. I just hope that companies decide that a completely open-ended format is more appropriate just because it's gee-wiz high tech and snappy.
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I/O Psychology
