Robert Scoble and Shel Israel co-authored this excellent book on “how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.” Just a couple of chapters in but finding a nugget on almost every page:

• Tool Lust –People develop emotional attachments to things that empower new, faster, easier or cheaper activity (blogging)
• Interruption Marketing — Unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant ads, repeatedly hurled at involuntary audiences. (Seth Godin)
• “First there were phone books, then web sites and [businesses] know that if they don’t have [one], it works to their disadvanatage. Blogs are just the next logical step.” — Betsy Aoki, Microsoft blogger
• Corpspeak — An oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole. Corpspeakers talk to people when they want to speak, not when people want to listen.
• If you’re afraid to share ideas, you shouldn’t blog. One time someone asked Walt Disney if he wasn’t worried about telling so many people about his ideas. And Disney said, ‘Those were last year’s ideas.’ (pg 94) If you’re paranoid about your ideas being ripped off, don’t blog.
• If the company culture is manipulative, employees are not treated with respect, and customers are thought of as commodity items, then that company should not blog. That company should close its doors. (pg 95)

If you’re not sure if your sales proposal or corporate brochure or news release is corpseak, stand in the middle of a room with some of your co-workers and read the copy aloud. If they laugh, it’s corpspeak.

I’ll update this post as I move through the book.