If you aren’t using the platform in the way it’s designed to be used, you’re just pumping old practices through a new pipe.

A blog without comments is a column on a website.

Until I familiarized with the work of Dave Taylor, after Sam’s first post on this subject, I didn’t realize how important blogs were to businesses. Have to agree with Taylor — give up control of your message to let it replicate.

Also, omments can hurt, especially if you’re not used to them. The author is under no obligation to enter the discussion. In other words, he doesn’t have to read the comments.

That way he, or the company, can continue under the illusion that they have control over the message. Plausible deniability or something like that.

I think the mission, as you state it here (and that’s consistent with how the site is running now) is more than acceptable. How to make blogs work in a business environment is a big question, and having a professional group where the people doing it can trade ideas is a good thing.

So at this stage, I think a lot of us agree on some basic points: it’s a good idea conceptually; the launch set some inaccurate expectations; and where it seems to be right now makes sense.

What matters to me, at least, are the first and last pieces of that equation above. Best of luck – I’d really like to see companies getting their heads around the possibilities better than most of them have to date. It’s good for them and it’s good for their customers.

Did we flub the launch? Probably. Should we have done more communicating (full blog, etc.), or less communicating (just kept it a small quite group)? I don’t know … but that ship has sailed.

In terms of should the Blog Council be blogging, I still think that it isn’t our place. We are a support group for our members. Those companies have hundred of blogs and are fully participatory in the blog discussion. The role of the Blog Council is to provide them a forum. We’re a support group … we’re back office.

We don’t have a mandate to speak for corporate blogging in general, or even for our members. But every word we say would be taken as an official comment on behalf of our members companies. it’s not our place, and would be wrong of us to assume that platform.

Now, this would be different if we were a full trade association that represents an industry (like WOMMA). The job of groups like that is to blog, and blog like crazy.

But the Blog Council should support great bloggers, not speak for them – in my personal opinion.

Thanks,

Andy Sernovitz
Blog Council

And I think that it’s perfectly OK that individual bloggers decide not to accept comments. I just think it’s a bad idea for companies to do so, and an even worse idea for an organization that is espousing best practices to do so.

I think every blogger has to make the call that best suits his/her purposes, but we all have to accept the results of those decisions, too. If you make a decision that causes others to walk away…

I agree completely about the companies and organizations issue. If you aren’t using the platform in the way it’s designed to be used, you’re just pumping old practices through a new pipe. As I say in my first take on the Blog Council, this is sort of what always happens with a new medium – people try to use it the way they used the old channels. And it always fails.

Perhaps someone could convince me that some companies can have successful blogs without comments but I guess I’d like to see that example.

Yeah – same here. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but on this issue I haven’t been so far.

I like to think that the folks involved have been reading these kinds of exchanges for the past week and have already started learning valuable lessons. I guess we’ll know in time.

I may have overgeneralized some in paraphrasing what others were saying. Taylor was, in fact, more critical of the concept. I think I read that as a response to the execution instead of the concept, per se. Like, had they done it right he’d not have been led downt hat alley. I’m speculating, of course, and he certainly doesn’t need me to speak for him.

Blog without comments isn’t a blog? So Seth Godin’s site isn’t a blog?

You know, I’m a guy who’s been at this thing a long time, but I’m hardly in a position to be writing the definitive lexicon. With all due respect to Seth, a lot of bloggers would say no – no comments, it isn’t a blog. And I tell every company I talk to on the subject that comments are a must. So maybe at some level I think that what he’s doing isn’t perfectly bloggish.

Maybe the way you tease that out is to ask if there’s a difference between doing a blog and an online column.

I suppose at the end of the day, my disappointment in the blogosphere mostly had to do with the jump-to-conclusions nature of the discussion. We “experts” didn’t do enough thinking about it before we all formed opinions and started railing on them. We’re supposed to be better than that. I hate counseling clients that bloggers aren’t that scary, it’s OK to work with them, they’re generally reasonable people…only to see something like this flash up.

This is no doubt true in some cases out there, and I’m the last guy to argue against thinking something through before commenting. For my part, I didn’t say anything that I think was necessarily off-base. I thought they were screwing up terribly, and the changes they’ve made actually validate a lot of the criticism. Had they gotten the initial launch right – that is, if they’d looked on 12.6 the way they look today – I probably wouldn’t have mustered much more than a “good idea, hope it works out,” and maybe even a “can I join?”

As for the “soft launch” idea, yeah – but when you go balls-to-the-wall with the iteration that’s not ready….

So a few responses:

1. I don’t think that the issue bloggers had was simply the fact that they didn’t have a blog at launch or that the design of their site positioned itself as a blog. It’s revisionist history to believe that that was the case. Look at statements that were actually made, such as this one from Dave Taylor:

“My translation: ‘we’re all clueless, but don’t want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of ‘marketing 2.0′, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.’”

That hardly sounds like what you said above: “I said, quite explicitly, that I thought it was a great idea in concept, and most of the other folks piling on say the same thing.”

If you look at Twitter, and a wider range of blogs, you’ll see that bloggers were jumping ugly for a vast number of reasons – everything from the way they announced (of if they even should), to the private nature of the group, to the name, to the members, to the need for such a group, to the ability of this group to have any value to the world, to the design of the site itself.

Now, I do agree that bloggers, a week later, are pulling back from their anger as they have had discussions about the potential value of such an organization. That’s different, however, than never having had the anger in the first place.

2. Blog without comments isn’t a blog? So Seth Godin’s site isn’t a blog?

3. I’m not crazy about the way they announced either. The site was rough, and personally I would have liked to have seen a blog there for them. But I can respect both a rough launch (I’ve launched literally hundreds of web sites in the last decade+ and not all of them were “good” launches), and the choice not to blog about an inherently private activity. Whether I agree with their choice doesn’t mean my disagreement should lead to knee jerk anger and name calling…which is what we saw initially in the blogosphere.

I suppose at the end of the day, my disappointment in the blogosphere mostly had to do with the jump-to-conclusions nature of the discussion. We “experts” didn’t do enough thinking about it before we all formed opinions and started railing on them. We’re supposed to be better than that. I hate counseling clients that bloggers aren’t that scary, it’s OK to work with them, they’re generally reasonable people…only to see something like this flash up.

Thanks again for the discussion!