Last October when blog network Weblogs Inc (WIN) sold to AOL I pondered if this would mean a raise for their writers. If that’s the case, then the food came off the table of some 1,300 other AOL employees who are getting shown the door:

AOL LLC said yesterday that it will reduce its workforce by 7 percent, or 1,300 employees, many of them call-center workers whose job was to persuade members not to cancel Internet service subscriptions.

WIN CEO Jason Calacanis said he learned about these layoffs from Digg, and that it he is “not involved with this side of the business.”

While I’m sure Calacanis doesn’t know what is going on in the call center workforce, I find it a bit telling that at least some of these jobs can’t be reassigned. None of those call center employees are bloggers? I realize training guerilla don’t cancel AOL callers are different than bloggers, but maybe Calacanis could have fired up a call center blog or something?

And then there’s Microsoft who has clearly embraced blogging en masse as a corporate culture. They have thousands of blogs including Scoble of course but look at their stock over the last five years. Has blogging had any significant impact on the bottom line?

(source: Yahoo! Finance)

[crickets chirping]

Taking a dump where one sleeps wouldn’t be a good idea but then I’m not part of a big business, so I can dump away. All the happy claptrap about how blogging is putting a better face on big business doesn’t seem to be translating to the bottom line in at least these two companies. Let’s face it, the bottom line is the bottom line for these businesses. If they don’t do things which increase the value of the stock for shareholders, then expect more layoffs, not less. Blogging be damned. Sooner or later this will bite into a department Calacanis does have something to do with, if he hangs there long enough that is (and some doubt he will).

Or is the argument that if these companies didn’t have blogging they’d be even worse off? They’d have had even worse results? I’m sure that will be the rebuttal speech. Go ahead, bring it.

Blogging for small business a different story
Conversely, I think blogging does help the little guys. Small businesses can benefit from a personally written and regularly updated blog. It can get that business some exposure in places they may not otherwise be able to afford to advertise. It can get a listing in Google right next to companies like Microsoft or AOL. Levelling the playing field. It is possible. Blogging is more for the small companies than it is for the big companies, despite the cries from some marketers and evangelists about how all Fortune 500 companies should be blogging.

I think big business should have a voice to their customers and perhaps the Google blog (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) is a decent template for how this should be done. I didn’t care for their blog in the beginning, it seemed more like PR fluff than anything, and some days it still seems that way, but they have had some meaty posts there. Particularly some of the stuff rebutting cases in litigation like Google Print. You don’t see that kind of stuff on many big business blogs.

And you don’t see thousands of Google employees out there blogging and I think that’s a good sign. It makes sense having a few employees here and there — who are actually good at it — but when it becomes a place for employees to bitch about what is happening, it is doing more damage than good.

Sidenote: I see somebody quietly removed the “individual” who submitted the 3,282 MSDN blogs from the Share Your OPML service I mentioned was being gamed on Monday.

I think it’s time for PR folks and blog evangelists to start realizing blogs aren’t going to help save big business, even if Israel and Scoble write a thousand more books trumpeting the subject. Can they help small businesses? Yes, I think they can. But I think the impact on big business is neglible at best. The numbers are talking.

The main problem with big businesses trying to blog is that they are too far removed from what real people actually care about and the strength of blogging is that real man/woman on the street. The every day Joe and Jane. These big companies hide behind long, overly complicated legal agreements, phone systems filled with machines, anti-customer policies and procedures and layers upon layers of management. Until most of this BS changes, blogging won’t help them. It can’t. They don’t understand what the rest of us actually care about.

Disagree/agree? Are blogs having any significant positive financial impact on big business? Please cite some examples. What big companies are turning it around financially because part of their strategy involves having a bunch of blogs/bloggers? I’d love to read of some real world examples. I keep reading the hype but all I see in the financials are tripe.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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