Introduction

Of the Internet publishing phenomenon, weblogs (blogs) have emerged as the easiest and most popular way for the individual to post essays, news, rants and anecdotes on a variety of topics ranging from politics and philosophy, to simply raving about personal failures and achievements in one's own life. As a matter of fact, the clout bloggers possess has grown to the point that during the 2004 presidential campaigns, several of them (professionals who specialize in their gonzo journalistesque style of reporting political news with obvious slants) were allowed entry into the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. In 2005, a few of them were allowed into the White House Press Corps. Clearly, blogging has so far proved itself an important communication tool.

Because the blog's interface often is emulative of a journal or diary, the illusion is given that it is “protected space (Efimova and Hendrick 2)” for the writer--that somehow the blog is private and that those who the author desires not to encounter it won't. Consequently, authors oftentimes write about very personal thoughts and ideas. They talk about things that they might not otherwise feel comfortable sharing with acquaintances on the street or coworkers in the workplace. It is this very illusion of privacy that has made blogging both very popular and liberating, as well as very dangerous.

In February of 2005, Mark Jen was fired from his job at Google, Inc (Crawford 1). Having only been hired for a month, performance wasn't the issue. Neither was interpersonal communication with coworkers. Rather, Jen's blog had been discovered by managers at Google. In several of his entries, Jen spoke freely about his experiences at the company. And while what Jen published would have traditionally been deemed nothing more than chatter by the water cooler, because he made his thoughts available to the entire globe instead of limiting them to a few of those around him, Google saw Jen as a risk and terminated him. Several similar stories have abounded in recent months. The issue of mishandled knowledge as a threat in a world of global connectivity is unprecedented. Such unprecedented connectivity and the reaction of companies like Google to it raises several profound questions.

One such question especially pertinent to the field of technical communication is that of “knowledge management.” Certainly, as the business world places increased value on intellectual capital and recognizes the importance of knowledge as a core source of competitive advantage (Wick 6), the management of knowledge and the resulting ethos (good or bad) that is manifested by how appropriately that particular knowledge is handled becomes inherently vital to the success of any modern company.

How exactly is the blog relevant to such knowledge management? Well, if the case of Mark Jen is any indication, the blog can serve as a gaping hole in an otherwise secure knowledge network. A hardware company, for example, would not build warehouses so insecure that random passerbys could just walk through an unlocked door and take as many boxes of hammers or nails (tangible assets) as he/she desired. Likewise, it is in the modern company's best interest to protect their intellectual capital (intangible assets) by preventing unauthorized distribution and allocation of knowledge. When Mark Jen distributed knowledge especially relevant to Google via his blog, he may have been inadvertently freely distributing Google's intellectual capital to a billion people. Unquestionably, it can be seen why Google saw Jen's actions as a risk and why they might be suspicious of other employees who publish blogs. Yet, it should be stated that Jen is not a criminal. He, like millions of others, possess no harmful agenda when they make posts on their web journals. And it could be the subject for another essay as to whether or not his actions should be protected as free speech or not, and thus immune from termination by Google. However, what should be examined, is that his naivety, when it came to the concept of posting company knowledge on a public blog, is indicative of how we, as a society, continue to view knowledge, security and the internet. While the individual may view the blog as a free-for-all outlet to post whatever he/she desires, the corporation tends to view the very same forum as a threat to their well-being. It is true that both are somewhat valid in their respective conclusions, yet it should be understood that the blog is neither absolutely harmful nor absolutely beneficial. There are boundaries that have yet to be defined, a gray area of sorts, that if properly utilized, could provide mutual benefits to both the netizen and the modern-day company alike.

With that said, does the blog have to be inherently harmful to the contemporary company? Could it instead be used to not only foster the growth of a company's knowledge pool, but serve as a powerful marketing tool as well? Could it make use of the very discourse made possible only by the Internet to enhance the image of a particular company and sell more of its products? Can both the consumer and producer benefit in the blog world?

In the remainder of this essay I will show how the blog can indeed be used as an effective knowledge management tool and market enhancer--how taking advantage of the Internet's bottom-up communication infrastructure can actually empower a company both on the inside and outside. Through demonstrating how blogging can not only cultivate knowledge but help strengthen a company's ethos as well, it will be illustrated why the weblog should be embraced by corporate America rather than feared by it.

Free Advertising: The Word-of-Mouth Quality of the Blog

At first glance, a weblog appears to be the musings of a lone webcrawler, trolling the sea of information that is the World Wide Web. A closer look, however, will reveal a micro world of conversation and monologue joined in a seemingly endless net of hyperlinks. Weblogs are interesting in that they contain attributes of both the monologue and the dialogue. They are simultaneously self-reflecting journal entries and open-ended invitations for conversation. Consequently they exhibit both written and spoken qualities. These dichotomies are reflected linguistically and work in relation to the affordances of the medium. (Nilsson 4)

Take a few seconds, if you would, to reflect on all the products and services you purchase everyday. Think about where you go to receive haircuts, the type of clothing you purchase and where you send your automobile to get serviced. Think about your favorite sit-down restaurant and the movies you choose to pay to go and see. Think about the books you decide to read and the bars you may regularly attend. Of all these products and services it is unarguable that word-of-mouth had a significant influence in your decision to purchase these sorts of services. Especially for the small business, word-of-mouth is one of the most compelling methods of attracting patronage since other types of advertising can prove to be quite expensive. Word-of-mouth can be so vital to the development of a business that referral bonuses are sometimes enacted to reward individuals with recruiting regular customers. Word-of-mouth is a form of conversation, and it could be expected that conversation with friends, family or other peers resulted in you checking out the new Italian restaurant downtown or going to see that independently distributed film that you otherwise wouldn't have heard of. Such conversations often have increased effect on an individual when compared to other forms of advertising (radio, newspaper, internet and television ads) since the interlocutor spreading the word about a specific business is usually a person the listener already trusts: a family member, close friend or co-worker. Our family members especially have noteworthy clout on our purchasing habits. Think of parents who claim they only buy Ford trucks or Tide laundry detergent. It is this very sort of credibility of the speaker (ethos) that enables us to trust our friends, family and peers. In other words, "if it is good enough for him/her it is good enough for me."

Likewise, the development of the blogosphere has created a number of tight-knit communities in which likeminded individuals can begin to converse, relate and eventually trust one another too. The blogosphere offers an additional channel for individuals to find other people they can relate to and find credibility in (ethos). Because the initial monologue of the publisher is open for dialogue, discourse develops and conversations emerge. These conversations are often relevant to the initial topic of the publisher, and therefore if the original monologue was about the author's pet dog, let's say, the resulting conversation would tend to be about dogs, pet care etc. The same can be said if the conversation was about the Beatles: the conversation would be about classic rock, Paul McCartney and Abbey Road. The structure of such online discourse is quite apparent.

With that concept understood, imagine if a blogger, for example, published on how she thought XM was superior to Sirius when it came to satellite radio. If the author was somebody a reader respected, the reader, himself, may start a conversation wondering in text why exactly XM would be the company to go with. The author may respond, or another reader may answer the original reader's query with a response of his or her own. As the author and others begin detailing the positives of XM, uninformed readers may research the company and become more aware of the brand name “XM” itself. Perhaps, within their own minds, “XM” could become synonymous with quality or innovation if the relevant conversation that developed touted such features. To be clear, the cyber version of word-of-mouth would have developed and XM (or any other applicable company) would have just received free advertising (as long as what was being discussed praised the company rather than criticized it of course).

As illustrated, it should be clear how blogging can be used as an effective marketing tool. But how exactly can businesses harness the power of blogging in a direct manner? There are two ways that companies can make important impacts on their respective marketplaces: relevant text advertising and blogging for profit.

The first method of utilizing blogs as advertising channels is already being performed through the concept of relevant text advertising. The company at the forefront in popularizing this particular advertising method is Google's AdSense program. The way Google's AdSense program works in the blogosphere is simple. First, individuals agree to post AdSense code on their blog in hopes of gaining a cut of the advertising revenue from Google, perhaps 1-3 cents per each click the AdSense ad receives. Once the AdSense code is present on the web page, the small program scans the text of the blog and then pulls from its database advertisements it deems related to the subject matter of the blog posting, and then displays the appropriate text ad on the site. So, if the blog were to be about trading bootlegs of music concerts, the AdSense program could very well display a textual advertisement for a used record store or something of the sort. If the posting were about how the user just purchased a satellite radio, to use the example from before, the advertisement displayed could very well be one for XM, Sirius or radio vendors.

As blogging begins to become even more popular and the amount of those who publish blogs increase, the marketing opportunities that AdSense and similar programs present will grow more powerful. As more blogs are created, thus encouraging more and more online conversation, companies will be able to market their products with increased directness. Analogous to the word-of-mouth notion discussed above, companies can be right in the middle of online dialogue with advertisements touting their products. And, unlike the limitations of traditional forms of advertising, blog advertisements will allow companies to “preach to the choir,” so to speak, since the AdSense-like programs are able to pinpoint blogs that contain topics and conversations relevant to a company's products and services. It will allow, with relative precision, for the corporation to locate their intended demographic and those most likely to purchase from them in real time via the blog.

Weblogs, in other words, envisage a hierarchy circumvention mechanism, which empowers knowledgeable employees to indulge in conversations with the market rather than communicating solely by means of marketing pitches and press releases that besides have limited effectiveness in a connected market economy. For years it has been suggested that online communities will revolutionalize the way organizations operate, however, the only social process/technological infrastructure that has reached this potential and is dynamically evolving is the weblog. It takes no technical savvy to set up a weblog and start talking to your customers (Dafermos 2).

The second scheme in which blogs can be utilized as an effective business tool is in its ability to allow the company to interactively communicate with its market; aka blogging for profit. The concept in which blogging is known to provide this is called collaborative filtering, and it is especially pertinent to retailers. Nearly every corporate website today is static and unchanging, an electronic version of a company newsletter or newspaper advertising insert, in which the frequency of update is only a few times per year for the former and maybe once a week for the latter. Envision, instead, the power of a corporate website that allowed for excited customers to provide feedback and commentary on a company's products instantly and enable likeminded individuals to develop online communities focused on a specific product in much the same way a blog does. Through collaborating with one another, customers and employees can begin to fully profile what a company's product and services should be--what features customers love and which ones they hate. The guessing game of marketing and the expense of conducting user feedback studies would begin to dissapear as customers, out of their own free will, would discuss products and services on the company website.

One company that has developed a more blogworthy approach to its business is online retailer Amazon.com:

Amazon has not revolutionalised the bookselling industry because it offers such a vast collection of books, many of which are cheaper than at high-street bookstores. Neither because it has laid the ground for cross-selling opportunities by deploying highly sophisticated CRM technologies which track and record every single customer click. What is so special about Amazon.com is that it invites readers to send reviews of books and to rate them on a five-star scale along with a commentary expressing their thoughts and opinions on the book. Authors have the right to reply and other reviewers can comment on how useful the review was to them but they cannot change the review. This process or technology – called collaborative filtering, weblogs or social navigation - has drawn quite some attention. “Among marketers, the hope is that such computerized recommendations will increase demand...It means that people might read more, or listen to music more, or watch videos more, because of the availability of an accurate and dependable and reliable method for them to learn about things that they might like” (Dafermos 31).

Essentially, what Amazon.com has done is transposed the marketplace into a conversation. They have given the marketplace a language and a way for it to respond back directly to the business firm. If a thousand customers make favorable reviews and comments on the new John Grisham novel, for example, not only does Amazon.com understand that it should keep more John Grisham novels in stock and perhaps stock other authors who write about the same sort of court drama fiction Grisham does, but they are finally given unique insight as to why those customers enjoy Grisham. Amazon.com can finally realize what qualities of Grisham's brand of court drama fiction that customers value. They can see, in a more succinct way, why his brand of the genre is more popular than, let's say, Scott Turow. It is this distinct perspective from the customer's point of view that is highly valuable to the retailer, since it allows them to know exactly what to sell, how to sell it and what they need to research and develop for the future. It is not only an invaluable dialouge that possesses the potential to create the word-of-mouth buzz around a particular product, and thus increase demand, but a method of bridging the supply and demand gap of what the customer wants, compared to what the company should make, as well.

While this is only one example of how blogs can catalyze a business market the message is clear: encouraging conversation about a product or service can create desirable results. Of course the blog model may not be applicable to certain business models, but at least in the world of retail, it has proved itself worthy in this case.

Fostering Knowlege: How Blogs Are Efficient Knowlege Transfer Tools

In much the same way that weblogs can be deployed to communicate with customers, they can also be used for inter and intra-organizational communication purposes. By adopting weblogs within an intranet context, organizations will boost their employees's productivity and present viable alternatives to current knowledge management systems (Dafermos 54).

One definition of knowledge management is "synthesizing knowledge from people with specialized knowledge (usually subject matter experts) and developing it into an easily understandable form (print or Web documents, multimedia applications, help files) for people who lack that knowledge. (Wick 2)" Teaching employees a new production process would fall under this definition. A corporate librarian archiving internal memos and publications would too. No matter how you see knowledge management, though, it is undisputed that it is something very important to business. Just as a human being's memory grows and consequently allows for him/her to make more informed decisions, so too does an expansion of institutional memory allow for the company to make equally informed decisions.

The growth of memory and knowledge acquisition can be simply classified as learning, and for those of us who have attended any sort of schooling, learning is something that is very complicated:

Knowledge transfer within organizations is “sticky”, which is primarily caused by two sets of factors: motivational factors and knowledge-related factors (Szulanski 1996). The former is related to the motivation of involving knowledge workers to devote the necessary time and resources for transferring knowledge. The latter stems from the nature of knowledge that includes tacitness and explicitness (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995, Polanyi 1962, Simonin 1999b, Szulanski 2000), causal ambiguity (Simonin 1999a, Szulanski 1996, Szulanski 2000), consciousness, collectiveness, objectiveness (Inkpen and Dinur 1998), specificity (Reed and Defillippi 1990, Simonin 1999b), complexity (Simonin 1999b, Zander and Kogut 1995), codifiability, teachability, system dependence, and product observability (Zander and Kogut 1995) (Sundaresan and Zhang 2).

For most of us, simply reading a textbook or informational document is not enough to grasp a concept. In order to truly learn something, we need a knowledgeable individual (professor, teacher, instructor, etc) to present the knowledge in a way we can understand. And a simple lecture from one of them is usually not enough either. Often times it can be said we learn the most by engaging in question and answer discussions with not only the presenter of knowledge but the peers also receiving the knowledge as well. This guided question and answer system is referred to as the Socratic Method of teaching and is one of the oldest and most effective teaching techniques of all time.

Unfortunately, for most businesses, it is financially irrational to hire professional "teachers" to transfer knowledge to employees. Not only is it an added cost to pay a teacher, but having employees spend the bulk of their time learning rather than peforming their respective tasks lowers productivity too. Instead, documents are often distributed and the employee is left to learn on his or her own. Asking another more knowledgeable co-worker for help learning something is an alternative as well, but even then the knowledgeable co-worker's productivity suffers since he/she is occupied with teaching. Furthermore, as evidenced by the realatively low amount of salary teachers are paid in this country, it is evidenced that the value placed on teaching isn't very high to begin with.

A corporate blog, located on a company's intranet, however, is one method of knowledge transfer that can be incorporated to effectively teach a firm's employees with minimal sacrifice of work time. With the blog, several things are happening that make it an effective knowledge management tool. For one, an online discussion develops, thus invoking the incredible teaching power of the Socratic Method. As more employees engage in discourse about a topic, the respective knowledge is more easily understood through the self-discovery process of the question and answer dialouge. As discussion develops, common troublespots in learning among employees are identified and future teaching can evolve to make knowledge transfer more effective.

Secondly, a blog among employees streamlines institutional memory. Because the online conversations are automatically archived, past discussions can be examined to demonstrate how a past issue was handled and the exact result of the action. If the action was a success it is a safe bet that the same action will be a success a new time around as well. Conversely, if it was a disaster, a new method of dealing with the issue should be developed. For instance, if a former employee mentioned in one of his online discussions that the key to cementing that advertising contract with Acme Banks was the fact that he knew its CEO was a New York Jets fan and that making small talk about football with the CEO allowed for pleasant business dealings, a rookie employee who has to deal with the same client may peform the same or similar method. Currently, when an employee leaves or retires from a company, he/she takes his/her knowlege with them. With the blog, however, because of how easy it is to archive, index and retrieve data, the knowledge the employee brought continues to reside in the company's collective databank well after the employee is gone.

Finally, the corporate weblog encourages cross-polination of its employees' knowledge. By bringing together the wide and vast experiences of an entire office, knowledge is more easily distributed and the learning of diverse topics occurs. Surely, the IT lady and the gentleman in the accounting department can both teach each other something regardless of the fact they perform visibly different tasks. If an outdoor clothing company is thinking about developing a new line of outerware, for example, the computer support guy who just happens to be a hunting enthusiast may have some very important things to say despite the fact his explicit area of expertise is grounded in programming computers. Blogging within the corporation allows for the invisible barriers of departments to be broken, tacit knowledge to be more easily exchanged and for increased contact among all employees, not just the ones within the same team or department.

Conclusion

As business continues to grow increasingly connected, communication amongst all players in the new marketplace will prove to be quite important. If customers and clients discuss a company and its products in a specific manner, that company needs to not only know how to properly respond to such data but be prepared in truly accessing and understanding that data also. As knowledge gains increased value within the corporate world, its distribution and proper management will provide growing concern for company decision makers. The blog can be an exciting tool that allows for knowledge acquisition, knowledge storage and knowledge distribution, all at the same time.

But, just as the Mark Jen story indicates, the blog can have its downsides too. This essay is not advocating the blog as the end-all be-all response to knowledge management in the marketplace of the future. Rather, just as fire is said to be both humankind's best friend and at the same time its worst enemy, the blog possesses the same sort of duality. With proper implementation, however, the blog can revolutionize the workplace in much the same way the mobile phone and fax machine have in the past. Yet, before the business benefits of blogging can be fully realized we must put end to the notion that blogging and the corporation are two mutually exclusive concepts.

To be sure, connectivity and community building are essential to the existence of any business, and the blog accomplishes just that. But, because the blogosphere is still in its infancy and its associated ideas haven't quite "caught on" yet, it still requires professional and knowledgeable people to help craft and develop it into the incredible business tool it possesses the potential to be. It will be technical communicators who will have to take on much of this responsibility if the idea of the corporate blog is to be a success.

With that said, it may be true in a broad sense that the weblog can be beneficial to the business world as a whole. More specifically, however, it provides technical communicators with unprecedented opportunites at innovation and leadership. As long as the blogosphere is continued to be analyzed and technical communicators can transform it into a vehicle easily used by the corporation, then the intention of the blog being the business communication tool of the future is one step closer to reality.

Works Cited

Crawford, Krysten. "Have a Blog, Lose Your Job?" CNN/Money Online. 14 Feb. 2005. 30 Mar. 2005

Dafermos, George N. Blogging the Market: How Weblogs Are Turning Corporate Machines Into Real Conversations. 2003.

Efimova, Lilia and Hendrick, Stephanie. "In Search For a Virtual Settlement: An Exploration of Weblog Community Boundaries." Telematica Insituut, The Netherlands. 2004.

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Penguin Press. New York. 2004.

Nilsson, Stephanie. "A Brief Overview of the Linguistic Attributes of the Blogosphere." 2004

Sundaresan, Shankar and Zhang, Zuopeng. "Facilitating Knowledge Sharing and Learning through an Internal Knowledge Market." Pennsylvania State University. University Park, PA. 2004.

Wick, Corey. "Knowledge Management and Leadership Opportunities for Technical Communicators." Technical Communicaton: Fourth Quarter 2000. 2000.