Mighty corporations ignore the whispers on web diaries at their peril. Sean Hargrave reports on how the big brands are logging on to save face.
They were once seen as the preserve of the geek, but nowadays personal opinion and diary pages - weblogs or "blogs" - are so powerful that huge corporations are taking an interest. The sites that started as observational home pages for enthusiasts have become so powerful that they are starting a new industry of blog monitoring in which media companies scour the net to advise brands on how their name is being talked about online, away from the traditional newspaper and broadcast media sites.
The thinking behind this emerging service industry is simple. While there were only 130,000 sites four years ago, today there are about 10m. These web pages can make or break a company's reputation because they provide links to one another and allow people to comment on postings.
In fact the medium has become so important that Bill Gates has even launched his own website (at www.microsoft.com/billgates), which is rumoured to be on the verge of modernisation - featuring regular updates rather than just transcripts of speeches.
It is not just computer brands who are starting to realise that the blog is a huge image-making network that cannot be ignored. Olympus, for example, has devised a new marketing strategy to embrace the medium. Whenever a new camera is approaching its launch, details are passed on to prominent blogs, a spokesman reveals, because the sites are crucial to getting interest ahead of the launch as well as getting early feedback on what the public thinks of the new model.
That is the feeling at Ford, which has recently started to use a blog-searching service because, as its executive director of public affairs, Tim Holmes, reveals, the manufacturer realised that no modern brand can afford not to listen to what people are saying about it online.
"Like most big companies, we monitor the press, but the problem with that is it's always retrospective, everything's a few weeks old," he says.
"The real value of searching the net, including blogs, is that you get a live picture of what people are thinking about certain issues. It means that you can predict if there is going to be an issue that's going to grow and become something you need to respond to before it gets to the mainstream press." The classic case of what can happen if you do not tune in to the blogger came with a flood of bad publicity for Maytag, a top-end washing machine manufacturer in America. Complaints about one of its models not emptying properly, and so smelling out kitchens, had been appearing on many blogs until they finally hit the site of Bob Vila, presenter of a popular property show called This Old House.
It resulted in national press coverage of a problem that Clare Hart, CEO of media monitoring agency Factiva, believes could have been nipped in the bud, had the company been alert to the power of the blog.
"They're a prestige brand and they really got their noses rubbed in it," she says. "It's for precisely that reason that we now offer our clients blog searching as well as traditional media monitoring. If you can find out about problems early on, you can deal with them before they get so much weight behind them that they become serious enough to tarnish your reputation." A spokesman for Maytag confirms that the company has monitored the web for a considerable amount of time as it is a useful way in which to keep up to date with consumer issues and that, in this case, it reacted speedily to correct problems with the washers.
Hart, however, points out that the real power of the blog does not lie in the net giving a voice to people whose opinions would never have spread so rapidly before. Their importance is rooted in people trusting one another's views more than those published on official company websites.
"The PR firm Edelman does this great 'Trust Barometer', which measures the trust we place in certain types of people," Hart explains.
"After a doctor, the person we would most trust is the average person who's 'just like us' - a company CEO is eighth on that list. It's the same for news sources about companies. After specialist business magazines, we trust family and friends and colleagues journalists are sixth.
"So it's a pretty shocking piece of research that shows we trust people who we feel are like ourselves and are not out to promote something. That is why blogs have such power. We trust them, and if we disagree with an opinion, we normally have the option of adding our say." Blogs are not just a potential problem for brand names, says Sports Interactive's community director, Marc Duffy.
The computer games developer - behind, until the end of last year, Championship Manager as well as the recently launched NHL Eastside Hockey Manager - believes blogs are essential for companies wanting to stay in touch with their public.
It is due to launch a follow-up to Championship Manager (now owned by Eidos) called Football Manager, for which Duffy used a company blog to get feedback from users. "We always keep people up to date with every stage of development of the game and then get opinions back," he says.
"We're forever getting really good tips on what people would add to our games. One big area, for the new football game, is how we should allow football managers to scout for new talent. If we didn't use our own blog to run things past our customers we'd have to launch a game first and then only get the feedback later on for a later version." In fact, blogs have become so powerful that they already have the launch of a company to their credit. Kathy Rittweger, CEO of Blinkx, was on what she thought was just a normal trip to the offices of Business 2.0 magazine to show the editor her new search software. Om Malik, one of the journalists in the meeting, was so impressed that he immediately wrote about it on his blog.
"He called me to say he'd done a 'blog' on us and I have to confess I was disappointed as it didn't sound as good as an article," Rittweger reflects.
"Within a couple of hours we were being mentioned on thousands of sites and I had venture capitalists calling me left, right and centre. The blog made us so popular that we had to bring forward our launch from autumn to June.
"It's hilarious that we are referred to as the 'poster child' for the power of the blog, but we didn't mean it at all, it was just serendipity. It certainly ensured we concentrated on making Blinkx search blogs too, it showed us that they're just far too big to ignore."