Convenience

Chapter 12:
Communication in Organizations
3 7 1
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TOUGH TIMES, TOUGH CHOICES
The Brutally-Honest-Opinion Business
Cell phones and fax machines? Your grandfather’s
technology. Video conferencing? Been there, done
that. The Internet? Old news. E-mail? Business as
usual. PDA? Smartphone? Standard issue for today’s
manager.
Obviously, the explosion in digital-communication
technology over the last 25 years has created many
new media. Corporations now rely extensively on
these new technologies, and they’ve changed the
way we work. Virtual teams, global workforces,
outsourcing, just-in-time inventory—these are just a
few of the widely accepted business tools and meth-
ods that could never have existed without new
developments in communication technology. Today,
yet another new technology is at the cutting edge of
business-communication strategies:
web logs
, or
so-called blogs.
A
blog
is any web-based publication consisting
mainly of periodically posted articles, usually in
reverse chronological order. They’re similar to jour-
nals in that bloggers express thoughts or opinions
over a period of time, but most blogs allow readers
to add their own comments in response to original
posts. Blogs allow groups of people, whether or not
they’re otherwise connected, to share thoughts, and
for some readers, professionally (or semiprofession-
ally) posted blogs actually supplement or replace
traditional news media. Blogs can also function
much like face-to-face grapevines to communicate
information that’s suppressed elsewhere.
Nowadays, organizations as disparate as General
Motors, the Dallas Cowboys, and Stonyfield Farm (an
organic dairy) maintain popular corporate blogs;
Microsoft supports 237 blogs (at last count). What
do corporations do with blogs? Naturally, they use
them to communicate with customers and employ-
ees, but they’ve found a variety of other uses for
them, too. A consumer-research firm called Umbria,
for example, charges companies such as Electronic
Arts, SAP, and Sprint $60,000 a year to conduct rou-
tine scans of 20 million blogs. The data is valuable to
corporate marketers, in particular because bloggers
are often early product adopters, and blog opinions
show up quickly. Marketers, however, should be
prepared for the kind of input they’re going to get
for their money: “The blogosphere,” warns Umbria
CEO Howard Kaushansky, “is overflowing with
brutally honest opinion.”
©
Alexey
B
oldin/
Shutterstock.com
Communication technology continues to change at a very rapid clip. While
smartphones and tablets are slowing making laptop computers seem old-
fashioned, so-called “wearable” technology like this smartwatch may soon
become the standard.
(
continued
)