If the objective of this book is to be a primer on corporate blogging in the Indian context, it serves its purpose admirably. Informative and well researched, the book examines blogging from various angles, and is of equal interest to business owners, managers and laypeople. Those interested in this new tool of business stand to gain a useful understanding of a phenomenon that has the potential to seriously change the way in which commercial communications are conducted.
Writing this book couldn't have been easy, because blogging is a relatively new, especially in India. The authors, however, manage to find a balance between the level of detail and information that makes the book useful. Authors and also avid bloggers Rajeev Karwal and Preeti Chaturvedi comment on the social implications of the blogging phenomenon and the hundred-odd pages is about the optimal length.
Karwal, founder of Milagrow Business and Knowledge Solutions and Chaturvedi, a media and marketing enthusiast, skilfully place blogging within the communications media landscape. It is tempting, while writing about one specific medium, like blogging, to make it larger than it is, but the book avoids that trap. It does take the position that blogging is more than just another important medium, and claims that it is a very disruptive phenomenon, but the book earns the credibility to make the claim plausible. The muted tone gives it sobriety; a more evangelical style would have detracted from the central message that blogging must be taken seriously, and understood well.
Having said that, one glaring gap in the book is the lack of commentary on the challenges and opportunities that corporate entities face in driving a "blogging culture" through their organisation, and ideas on how to go about tackling them. The authors describe well the near-inevitability of blogging as a tool for gaining competitive advantage; some examples on how cultural change was managed by various organisations while rolling out this tool would have been invaluable.
In fact, devoting an entire chapter to addressing the issues of cultural change that blogging would demand would not make the book too long, and its absence is a serious lapse. Any disruptive technology, method or tool demands some management intransigency within organisations in the adoption phase; yet, this one-sidedness is precisely what a successful blog tends to eliminate. How do you drive (quasi-autocratically, for example) a phenomenon through your organisation that fosters more democratisation? The reader would have loved to read examples of how companies successful in establishing their corporate blogs dealt with the problem.
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However, the book's chapter on ROI is a very welcome inclusion. The authors make a very compelling case for a holistic approach to measuring the effectiveness of blogging that goes beyond the "numbers". Business leaders love numbers, because they are taught to measure, measure, measure. But if one thinks about it, the practice of a near-exclusive obsession with numbers is a form of corporate laziness, an avoidance of the real issues; a confusion of the map for the territory it represents. The ROI chapter is a must-read for this reason, and it could be said with some fairness that the authors manage to go beyond the principles for measuring ROI in just blogging, and offer a sort of loose model for thinking about ROI in the larger context of investing in tools that help increase competitive advantage.
The book could do with better quality control! There are errors of grammar aplenty – almost as if setting the stage, the foreword by Jagdish Seth shows a complete disregard for the proper usage of the definite and indefinite articles. Moreover, there is a stylistic inconsistency that detracts from the flow of the book. For instance the acronym "HBR" is expanded; "RSS" is not; the former probably doesn't require it; the latter certainly does. Labelling a graph "Online trend of internet usage in India" does not tell the reader what the graph is about – is there an "online" and an "offline" usage of the internet? Or does the label suggest that the trend is available "online"?
The style of the book is somewhat conversational, and ostensibly, the conversation is with an Indian reader; so words like "corporates" (later defined in the book as ET50 or Fortune 500 companies) are liberally used. The book then misses the opportunity of addressing a non-Indian audience interested in understanding blogging in an Indian context — this audience would be scratching its head at the word "corporates". Business colloquialism is a good thing, but colloquialism has a local context, and is not useful in a work of non-fiction.
The writer is Channel Manager for NetApp in Canada, and lives in Toronto.
Corporate Blogging In India is published by Wisdom Tree (2008, Pages: 127 Price: Rs 345)
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