I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the impact and importance of blogging. Specifically in the business realm and the effect it can have on business and personal relationships. However, I’m not limiting this to blogging alone, I’m thinking more about having a strong online presence and the effect it can have – blogging is just one piece of that.
In the old world (a couple years ago) business contacts and relationships were created by personal introductions and built on inter-personal interactions. You got to know about somebody – what they thought about certain subjects, how they felt about things, etc by spending time with them, often on a golf course or something where you didn’t have much to do but talk. People were referred to each other and trust/reputations built based on what the introducing person had to say about the person being introduced.
That has all changed.
With blogging and online presence 2 things happen 1) people are able to get to know you in a very personal way without ever meeting you and 2) you are able to get to know people in the same way. I’d like to present two examples of this.
The first example is my boss, Paul Allen. He has been blogging for a very long time, has a strong web presence and is a respected business man. I know a lot of people who have never met him, never heard him speak and don’t even know someone who has. But, they can tell you all kinds of things about him, his philosophy, his thoughts, his businesses etc, all because they have read his blog. I have met several people who haven’t met him who wish they could work for him. In fact, I have hired two such people. Both Jimmy and Jonathan, whom I hired last week, have never (still) met Paul, but when they were offered a chance to work for him they jumped at it, quit their current jobs and in one case was willing to drop some classes in order to take the job (I told him no way to dropping classes). Why did they want to work for us so bad? Because they are regular readers of Paul’s blog, have read his website and they trust him. They feel like they know what he is about and that he is an honest person. They have faith that working for him will change their lives, and they are right.
The second example is something that happened this past weekend. First of all, I met with Tara Hunt at Riya. I had never met her before, had never had a phone conversation with her, and had only had limited email contact with her. Yet I felt like I was meeting an old friend. I knew all about her recent frustrations, being overwhelmed with alpha requests at work, what she had been up to the last few days etc. I know more about what she has done in the last week than I do about some of my closest friends. When I met her it wasn’t like meeting a stranger that someone had set up a meeting with for me, it was like running into an old friend. I don’t know if it was the same for her, but she did tell me that she has my blog in her aggregator and that she reads my posts, which means she knew quite a bit about me.
The second part of this example is when she set up a meeting for me with Chris Messina. By the time I got to where Chris was meeting me at, he had found my blog and homepage, read through a lot of it and knew a bit about me. In the half hour it took for me to get there, he went from never having heard of me to knowing enough about me to know that he was interested in talking to me.
This is incredible to me. The fact that we have the ability to put information out there about ourselves in such a manner that we can foster trust, reputation, even friendship before even meeting someone is just awesome. What boggles my mind is that more corporations don’t recognize this. What is it that is really happening when someone reads through a blog about someone? It humanizes them. It allows a reliable expectation to be created for the reader about how to deal with the writer. Most of all, it creates a sense of knowing someone – almost a kinship kind of feeling. This is critical to businesses. Appearing to be very approachable is a huge benefit to companies, especially big ones. People respect Paul without ever meeting him, Chris was able to know a bit about me before meeting me and Tara knew quite a bit about me before we met. I was able to make a lot of business contacts over the weekend because of this aspect of the “Social Web”.
