Battling blogs or digital mud slinging?
I’ve become a minor fan of blogs (go figure). They are effective for communicating to small audiences on highly specific topics (like high tech marketing). Their value for creating intimacy with customers, prospect, markets, and media have yet to be fully tapped.
I suppose it was too good to last.
Shortly before the holiday season, Sun’s blogger extraordinaire Jonathan Schwartz provided an entertaining tale of how he intellectually assaulted a customer into indecision about a planned mass switch from Sun to HP. Jonathan related to this customer HP’s own woes with HP-UX, Itanium indecision, and mass product abandonment (well, Jonathan was exaggerating a tiny bit).
So, I should not have been surprised when HP’s own Rich Marcello blogged a customer meeting story of his own . . . and one that smells suspiciously like the same customer Jonathan interviewed. In each piece, the penned pugilists from Sun and HP made overt or implied assertions about the other company – their products were being killed off, they had lost money, their executives were filmed at late night slumber parties at Michael Jackson’s house. Let the duel begin!
As entertaining as this gossip fest may be, it has marked a negative turning point for marketing blogs. Both Jonathan and Rich became partisan politicians, and entered into a thrust and parry dance with one another . . . and not with their markets. Tech consumers, analysts, and reporters snooping for insight and vision saw a high tech version of a Jerry Springer free-for-all.
Now, marketing blogs may have more uses than I perceive, but these two gents managed to lessen the impact of their blogs by using them as weapons of mass corruption. Instead of inviting the market into their living rooms for a friendly chat and a little intimacy, they invited the market into a steel cage grudge match with all the warmth and bloodshed of a professional wrestling event.
And, the market collectively ignored them.
