HW 16: Five Pillars

In the chapter "Blogs: Humanizing the Face of Corporate America", Robert Scoble talks about the benefits blogging has to offers to corporate companies. Mainly, that it sets up a more intimate relationship with the customers, and a better understanding of what they want. And knowing your customers' needs will help you design products that will sell better. And we're all about the bottom line...
To really take full advantage of blogs, Scoble instructs companies to "remember that five things made blogging hot" (Kline and Burstein). He refers to these things as "The Five Pillars of Conversational Software".

ONE: Ease of publishing.
The first appeal to blogging, as it hit mainstream, was that anyone could do it. You could set up an account and start putting in your two cents on almost any topic, and exchange dialog with anyone in the world. So essentially, blogging could possibly reach a wide variety of customers, in all sorts of demographics.
TWO: Discover ability.
When you check out one blog, you will ultimately be lead to about ten other ones, pertaining in a similar topic. As long as you word your tags right, more people will come across your site (product) that didn't even mean to. Companies should take full advantage of this: the networking paths are already set, it's just a matter of placing your ads on the right one to guarantee you the most customers.
THREE: Cross-site conversations.
Word of mouth was the original way for products to really become known. Now with the Internet, it's like having a world-sized coffee shop, or water cooler for people to stand around and just chat up their latest purchases. Like the second pillar, companies don't need to do much. Just put their information out there, and let it run its course.
FOURTH: Permalinking
If someone finds a post they find interesting, they can isolate it, and pull it up later on. This is really good for companies, because now the information can easily be re-accessed, granted someone has a computer. They can send that specific article or post to someone else who may be interested.
FIFTH: Syndication
This is the core of blogging. It's the exchange of ideas, posts, pictures, etc sent into the gigantic social network that blogging has become.

If companies fully utilized these five pillars, they can efficiently get their product out there, and make the most money using little to no sources.