Consider, for example, a hypothetical CEO blog. It's written by marketing people, vetted by lawyers, and lacks any and all human voice. In other words, it's a press release. Is there a less effective way to communicate? At least a press release doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is.

Companies should be embracing conversations with their constituencies. And conversation is, first, about listening, and then about speaking in a human way.

What are a company's constituencies? They vary widely, but include (not necessarily in order of importance) customers, employees, suppliers, local communities where the company does business, retailers, investors and—oh, yes—the media. Some of what a company tells the world will be of interest to most or all of those groups. Some will be of interest to only one or two. The messages need to be tailored deliberately for each, but the easiest way to tailor the exchange is to make it conversational, to listen to what the other parties have to say as much as telling them what you think or know.

I'd argue that a company already having multiple conversations with its constituencies will be better off when the inevitable problems hit. The reason is that conversation tends to engender trust. Control-freakish, top-down communications do not.

Dell Computer's recent woes offer an example of the latter case. The company's reputation for quality and service had been sliding, somewhat invisibly to the general public, over the past several years. At the same time, Dell had no blogging strategy to speak of. So when it dismissed increasingly public criticism of its practices, there was little residual goodwill in the word-of-mouth community. A Google search for "Dell hell" must be almost as disheartening to company execs at Dell as recent earnings reports.

Some PR and marketing folks have, as you'd expect, taken word-of-mouth as just another great opportunity to sell stuff. Fine, if it's up-front and honest. But word-of-mouth marketing should not mean, as Procter & Gamble and other companies have been doing with such cynicism, getting people to talk up products without disclosing the corporate inducements behind them. "Beyond lame" was one typical reader response to a P&G site, made to look as if it was written by users of its Secret Sparkle Body Sprays. In reality, the site is filled with advertising copy. If any friend of mine did this to me, that person would have one less friend.

A world of conversational communications can be so unstructured at times that the people who once thought corporate messaging was a command-and-control operation can't abide the inexactitude of it all. Understandably so, because they came to their positions in a simpler time, when the message went through a stratified system to specific people.

But the complexities don't justify retreat. They do justify appropriate caution, especially in the kinds of enterprises where proverbial loose lips actually sink ships, such as the military. In the end, the conversation is about culture. If senior people don't believe in the value of conversational communications, they won't happen. But bloggers aren't going away, and younger employees, customers, et al, now think this kind of communication is natural. And it's worth remembering a simple demographic fact: They are the future.

1 | 2