March 6, 2006
Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk With Customers
By Robert Scoble, Shel Israel
John Wiley & Sons - January 2006
Robert Scoble is probably the most famous of the Microsoft bloggers. For a company that was (and may still be) renowned for their secretive corporate culture, they've given their employees a chance to chat about their version of Microsoft. Scoble and Shel Israel introduce people to the hows, whys and ROIs of employee bloggers. This is part of the first chapter entitled "Souls of the Borg"; it explains why Microsoft started blogging.
Gates in the Way
Lenn Pryor joined Microsoft impressed with the company's technology accomplishments. When he came on board in 1998, as a tech evangelist he hadn't realized the full scope of the company's worldwide unpopularity.
"The first thing I learned when I visited customers was that people were not always happy to see you," he said. "What got in the way of my relationships was the fact that I worked for Microsoft. The two people who represented the company—Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer—got in my way." He felt he had been painted into the corner by being associated with "two of the wealthiest people on the planet."
Pryor would have this recurring experience. He'd go out to dinner with a customer. They'd be having a pleasant enough time; then the customer would become quiet and pensive for a while, then blurt out: "You know, Lenn, I'm really surprised that you're such a nice guy. I didn't expect you to be." Pryor would ask, "Well, why not?" And the customer would say, "Because you're Microsoft and Microsoft is fundamentally evil. You just don't seem evil, so you're either really good at concealing it or I've read you guys wrong."
These experiences bothered Pryor. Because he represented Microsoft, customers seemed certain he could not be trusted. He stewed over this dilemma for years.
A brief interlude in Microsoft hating occurred for one week every two years in the form of Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC). Around 6,000 developers would mingle with 2,000 Microsoft people. They'd see previews of new technology, share ideas, eat pizza, drink, joke, show each other family photos, and generally bond. "We were actually everyone's friend. We became human in our customers' eyes and they became human in ours. All the misconceptions went away," recalled Pryor.
But when the event ended, so did the magic. Pryor knew that unless he thought of some way to sustain the good feelings, they would dissipate: "We'd be Microsoft again, the evil guys." It had been a long week. He had an
emotional hangover and drove home with a cold. A few days later, he was taking a long shower to shake off a Nyquil-induced haze. That's when the epiphany hit him.
At PDC, there had been a human connection. Microsoft employees saw and heard the customers as more than just statistics, and customers saw Microsoft representatives as real people. If Pryor could somehow bring this
humanizing factor into everyday life, Microsoft's customer relationships might forever change. What Microsoft needed, Pryor realized, was some form of open channel that would humanize Microsoft, a daunting challenge if ever there was one. Maybe, Pryor thought, he could create a form of reality TV inside Microsoft that he could distribute to people using the Internet. He'd bring a camera inside Microsoft to show the developers and tech gurus exactly as they are, when and where they work. He would keep the footage raw, with no editing, no marketing polish, and certainly no slick commentator in a suit with a suntan.
This idea had been kicking around Microsoft for a while. Now, it would become Channel 9, the quirky, impromptu video blog—and the only official company blog. The name is derived from the United Airlines (UA) open audio channel, on which passengers can listen to pilots during take-offs, flights, and landings. Pryor knew it well, because that Channel 9 had helped cure him of his fear of flying: "I had this terrible relationship with United
Airlines and its product. I was scared to death of their product even though I had to use it for business and no one was doing anything about making me feel better about them or their product. Sound familiar?" Pryor asked, smiling impishly at his own metaphor. Pryor said he cured his fear of flying by learning about the life of a pilot: "The more I could understand him, the more I could feel that his best interests were my best interests. I don't think there's any better way to describe how people feel about Microsoft than how people feel who are afraid to fly."
Microsoft, Pryor and the Channel 9 team decided, should build its own Channel 9. His idea was to "just share our lives with people and then they'll see we're human and they'll trust us." He envisioned that Channel 9 would
redefine evangelism. Historically, evangelists have extolled the virtues of their company products by spreading the word about features and benefits. Pryor wanted to shift the focus from products to relationships.
Pryor and co-worker Jeff Sandquist presented this idea to their boss, Vic Gundotra, general manager for Platform Evangelism, who thought the idea of having some guy walking around with a video camera filming people in
hallways and cubicles and having them talk about their jobs and their lives sounded a bit crazy. But he liked the idea and told them to go for it. They agreed the project should start low-key, certainly without marketing hoopla. They also knew there would be people at Microsoft who would oppose it. Gundotra would provide the air cover and his significant support.
Pryor would have to re-jigger his team. There was this guy, Robert Scoble, a relatively new hire who hadn't quite found his place at Microsoft yet. Pryor had known Scoble previously. Winer had been Scoble's mentor and boss at
Winer's UserLand a couple of years earlier. A prolific, passionate, and perhaps fanatical blogger, Scoble was posting up to 50 times a night on his personal Scobleizer site. Before going to Redmond, Scoble had been NEC's evangelist for the tablet PC.
In that role, he had attended a developer's conference where he publicly advised Ballmer to "give Microsoft a more human face." (Ballmer rewarded the idea with an autographed dollar.) When NEC first shipped its acclaimed tablet PC, Scoble made certain two people in Redmond each got one of the first units to ship. One was Gates. The other was Gundotra, who would eventually hire him.
Scoble wasn't your typical Microsoft kind of guy, certainly not one you'd expect to find in the front office. Said Pryor, "Robert lets his flaws hang out on his sleeve. He's curious like a child and it's hard not to like and trust him."
Scoble had already started his "Scobleizer," which was often critical of Microsoft, but Pryor noticed that while most Microsoft critics tried to climb up and get in your face, "Robert always came across in a way that made me want to listen. He'd say, 'You guys did something wrong. Let me tell you why it hurt me and why it hurts you and why I think you can do better.' Robert tells you a lot about himself. He puts himself on the line. He delivers criticism from his heart."
In fact, Pryor had first discussed the concept of bringing a video camera inside Microsoft the previous March, when Gundotra was recruiting Scoble away from NEC and into Microsoft. Gundotra had invited Scoble to a Sonics
basketball game where Michael Jordan would make his last uniformed Seattle appearance. Turns out that Gundotra couldn't make the game, so at the last minute he asked Pryor to stand in for him. After Jordan's courtside introduction, the two never again glanced at the playing floor. Instead, they spent three hours brainstorming and germinating the video concept. Neither recalls who won the game, but both left feeling certain that, if the idea ever became a reality, Scoble would be the right guy to put behind the camera.
Scoble joined Microsoft shortly after that, but the video idea remained dormant until Pryor's shower stall revelation. Scoble became a Microsoft evangelist, and blogged at home every night. Six months passed before Pryor had his shower epiphany that the Microsoft video blog would emulate Channel 9. When he and Sandquist pitched Gundotra, Gundotra told them to make Scoble the interviewer.
The team, which also consisted of two developers, Bryn Waibel and Charles Torre, and program manager Sandquist, envisioned a hybrid, real-time format, rich in communication and very two-way, with the audience's voice being as relevant as the video itself. Channel 9 would encourage real conversation, not just drive-by stuff, where people hurled inflammatory comments and moved on. "In my mind," Pryor recalled, "Microsoft could start the conversation, but it wouldn't work if Microsoft controlled the conversation."
Channel 9 began as a standard text blog. Pryor recalled, "I wanted everyone to have a face on the site, to eliminate anonymity. The video came soon after, with Scoble's voice being heard asking people about their jobs and projects. The viewers never saw Scoble, but they would hear him mutter an occasional 'Oh crap,' as he inadvertently walked into a wall he didn't see because he was looking through the lens. A Forum section allowed developers to debate issues of all sorts. A collaborative system called a wiki was added to let people inside and outside Microsoft work together on software. "We showed who we are and where we work. We said: 'Come look inside and see and hear our people, hear our thoughts and passions.'" And people did—approximately 2.5 million of them in the first six months.
When asked about the risk involved in a project as visible and open as Channel 9, Gundotra said the project was about increasing transparency, which "is not high risk unless you have something to hide." He thought Channel 9 would accurately portray "a bunch of optimistic geeks who think we can change the world for the better through the power of software. I didn't agree to do Channel 9—I was driving the creation, funding, and hiring of the team."
Said Pryor, "We used Channel 9 as a way to respond to customers. If people wanted to know something, we put up a video about it. If there was a new product coming out, we put up a video. We started responding to issues
in real time. This was not a documentary. This was a new approach—an interactive video of real people talking about their work with customers."
Channel 9 has been generally recognized as among the most innovative forms of blogging or, for that matter, corporate communications. It was the first corporate video blog. It was the first to put the words and faces of customers on the front page, thus creating a form of "equal time" for those who either praise or admonish Microsoft. It was also the first to use wikis to allow a product team to collaborate with customers to improve products and upgrades. It uses RSS, the technology that enables syndication, on every page and was the first full corporate site to do so.
It's open to speculation how Channel 9 will evolve. The Channel 9 conversation strayed one time from its usual technocentric bastion into politics. While some were concerned that Microsoft had lost control of the conversation, Pryor was elated. The conversational shift indicated that Channel 9 was no longer about Microsoft: "It's about the community. Maybe the future of this site is to turn the Channel 9 keys back to the community."
Although Pryor's background is in marketing, he eschews data mining and sees no value in surveys. But he does admit the company has data that shows Channel 9 has shifted perceptions of Microsoft from the negative to
positive in less than six months. "There's no doubt we've moved the needle," he said, adding with apparent pride, "and we did it without so much as a press release."
Pryor expresses faith in the anecdotal evidence that perceptions of Microsoft have moved from a net negative to a net positive. He noted that blog polling site Technorati reported nearly 1,300 other blogs linking to Channel 9 and that PubSub rated Channel 9 in March 2005 at 5,877th of more than 8.5 million sites tracked at that time.
Posted by Kate at March 6, 2006 10:30 AM