Naked Conversations
The other day I sent an e-mail off to Adam Curry about the Google Maps of aviation charts and he read my email on DSC 316! Man, was I excited when I heard him mention my email. Later on in the show, he talked about how podcasting is opening the channels of communication between podcasters/artists and their listeners and I'm thrilled to have just experienced that first-hand.
Today, I happened to pick up Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's new book, Naked Conversations and even though I've only read the first chapter already, I'm already excited about reading the rest of it. The first chapter details the story of how blogging got started at Microsoft and how it has helped Microsoft turn its public image around.
An interesting little anecdote mentioned is how they came up with the name Channel 9:
The name is derived from the United Airlines (UA) open audio channel, on which passengers can listen to pilots during take-offs, flights and landing.
It was this channel 9 that helped Lenn Pryor, former tech evangelist of Microsoft, overcome his fear of flying. In the same sense, Microsoft hopes to make people less afraid (or less hostile?) towards them by letting customers "listen in" on the company.
After spending all of last week attending presentations for internships in the financial services industry, these two events brought me real voices from inside companies after having to deal with all the garbage "corpspeak" that comes with those corporate presentations. A bit disturbing was that a quick search last week (which was by no means extensive) didn't produce any results for bloggers who work in financial services. Is the industry that competitive that no one is willing to give up any information that would take away their edge over their co-workers? Or am I just being antagonistic and the real reason is that blogging doesn't really have a place in B2B businesses?
Technorati Tags: Naked Conversations, Scoble, Shel Israel, blogging, blogs, communication, Adam Curry, Daily Source Code, podcasts, podcasting, marketing, finance, banking, B2B