feed

Being in downtown Seattle tonight reminded me of a great night out many years back with some old pals in Seattle. We had several drinks in a great bar on 1st Avenue and got chatting with a dude at the bar. When we asked him what he did he proclaimed he was a Social Navigator. A great line that we still laugh about.

That got me thinking about the social networking scene that I'm now a part of and the recent post by Jens Alfke about the lack of blogging at Apple and his departure. His post is extremely well written and this part really stuck out for me

 

It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?

 

I was discussing this topic only last week with a PR executive in London. Apple has a very different approach to communications where it's very much command and control by Steve Jobs. I think it works very well for them though what happens when Steve eventually leaves is another question. The whole approach is centred around el Jobso.

Microsoft on the other hand manages to have something in the region of 5000+ bloggers and very minimal control. Literally the internal mantra about blogging is "blog smart". There is a blog policy somewhere but I've never read it and suspect the same is true for most of our bloggers. It just boils down to using your noggin on what you can share and what you can't. I've noticed I blog less at the moment as I'm involved in lots of stuff I can't talk about. It'll ebb and flow but there is no hit squad policing our bloggers. The effect of Microsoft's blogging is a subtle and ongoing shift in perception about the company and its employees I believe. On the whole it's positive from what I have seen.

Oracle has a similar band of bloggers and social networkers and one area they seem to be more innovative then Microsoft is their use of Twitter - or at least they're more visible and organised. Dennis pointed me towards Oracle's wiki of Tweeters and their sort of Digg mashup. We have some similarly cool assets such as Channel's 8, 9 and 10.

So back to Apple. Will they ever have bloggers on an official basis? I doubt it whilst Steve is around. As their market share is on the rise I think their customers will expect more and more interaction and their lack of blogging will become an Achilles heel. I may be wrong and I honestly hope they don't start blogging - they're blog design would no doubt put mine to shame but more importantly, whilst they're doing so much else right, I'm happy to see them getting this part wrong. IMHO of course.

[update] Frank X Shaw who heads the PR account at Waggener Edstrom for Microsoft has a related thread.