Dooce-Proof: Business and Management Blogging in the Indian Blogosphere

Gautam Ghosh [for DesiPundit]

It’s unbelievable that Desipundit is just a year old now. We’ve seen so much happen over the last year on the Indian blogging front, that the mind fails to comprehend that chronologically, it was just one earthly revolution around the sun

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen an explosive growth in the number of India-centric blogs. As a national trait we seem to be in love with discussion, with the art of argument that cuts across regional boundaries. Over all, we seem to be in love with politics, cricket and the movies. Those are our national obsessions and they are adequately represented in the Indian blogosphere (or as some choose to call it, the “desi-blogosphere�, though I must confess that I find the term quite weird)

However, the other major pillar of our national identity, work, business and the pursuit of prosperity is not quite represented on our blogosphere. I feel that the reason is not that work or business is not our obsession, or that we don’t care to talk (or write) about it. The reason is more mundane: People don’t blog about business or work because of the fear of employers finding out and firing them for it. Work is intensely personal to us, more than movies, cricket and politics, and having our name attached to our opinions about work in front of the whole Google-enabled world is quite frankly very scary.

So the business blogs have been fairly restricted to opinions about concepts and discussions about the macro picture, the kind of ads they see, and whether Reliance is on the right strategic path or not. But there is no sharing of personal experiences. That takes away the richness of the blog conversations. Therefore you can see the low number of comments on business blogs, than the rest of the blogosphere. On top of that, people tell me that blogsites are banned by quite a few organizations in India.

Therefore, the people who stand to gain most from blogging are:

• organizations and professionals who service and provide products for the niche audiences
• Professionals and firms who lack traditional sales and marketing muscle
• Or people who service the primary blogging and blog-reading population
• Those who are authentic enough to start and engage their customers in real conversations.

So who all can blog their way to business success?

The first groups that come to mind are individual professionals, people who can reach out to prospective customers and need networking and visibility to succeed. They also are more inclined to respond to comments and build a ‘personal voice’ through blogging.

Blogs are ideal platforms for online businesses to start conversations and build communities of their users. In fact the CEO of one of India’s most successful dot com firms mailed me to bounce my thoughts on how to make the transition from being successful in the earlier avatar of the web to Web 2.0

However, businesses have to understand that blogging is merely a tool, and that embracing blogging is the easy part. The actual struggle they will have, is to make the transition in viewpoints, as an organization. Being open, being receptive to communication and being tolerant are not traits that one associates with organizations (Indian or otherwise).

Sure, blogging will be adopted by sales and marketing groups of firms, and they will fail, miserably. That will happen as they will view blogging as just another “communication medium� and not for building relationships with prospective and current customers and employees. Others will try to put up fake blogs, and again will fail miserably.

I am hopeful that there will emerge some organizations that will “get� blogging. They will benefit the most if they have the courage to be transparent and open. They will understand that exposing their own warts adds to their credibility. They will also understand that letting their employees blog is not a waste of time, but an investment into their organizational brand.

One should hope for the best, or why is the blogosphere there !