Online Media Cultist

A Daniela Barbosa piece alerted me to the fact that my bank, Wells Fargo, has a nice little blogging operation going. The background design displays pencils and paper clips and calculators floating around. It talks about exploring the “new frontier” of the blogosphere, and has a bunch of Wells Fargo bloggers writing about the general topic of financing college and managing debt.

It’s kind of cute, actually. And the fact that it’s kind of cute is pretty amazing: this is a huge and potentially impersonal and frightening bank making things down right homey for us regular folk. I really like that the bloggers mix some personal stuff in, and aren’t just regurgitating corporate brochures about FAFSA and college loans. This entry, by Staci Schiller, writes about a trip to New York City for the BlogHer Business ‘07 conference, and chit chats about the bright lights and Madison Square Gardens of the big city. The fist comment: “hello, I need a student loan and information” kind of makes the whole thing sort of hilarious and compelling.

The point, if there’s one to be made here, is that all companies – particularly customer-facing ones – would be well served to blog. There’s simply no better way to put a human face (or faces) on a corporate entity. Blogging and the business world are similar in that it’s a grind it out, attract and hold one loyal customer at a time kind of operation. If people can relate to and feel comfortable with and eventually trust an information source that just happens to be associated with a particular business (and there’s the trick: the blogger has to be interesting and compelling and relatively transparent, all while representing something of an online outpost for a business) there’s every chance that they will make a purchase or select a service from that business.

Start-up founders are ideal bloggers because they’re able to share their enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit while guiding readers through the crazy ups and downs of launching a new venture. Eric at the MyBlogLog Blog and Topix CEO Rich Skrenta’s Skrentablog are fun examples.

That quote - you could’ve given us help, but you’ve given us so much more - actually comes from the mouth of Bill Murray’s character in Quick Change (one of the all-time underrated comedies) to a magnificently and contentedly unhelpful New York City taxi driver.

It could easily however have come from Topix CEO Rich Skrenta to the monolith that is Google. A Wall Street Journal piece details Skrenta’s and Topix’ frustration with Google over the company’s change from a .net domain to the more popular .com. That change, on top of costing Topix $1 million in acquisition fees, may end up costing a lot more due to lost search engine traffic, the lion’s share of which stems from Google.

It’s painfully hilarious that the CEO of Topix, a pretty large and well known web company that reportedly receives 10 million visitors a month, received the following advice at a time when it could potentially lose millions of search-based visits: “…an email recommending that, if the switchover were to go badly, the company should post a message on an online user-support forum; a Google engineer might come along to help out.”

Skrenta very rightly responded with, “‘This can’t be the process…You’re cast into this amusing, Kafkaesque world to run your business.’”

A host of web publishers shares Skrenta’s pain. Breaking through the layer of automated responses when attempting to contact Google is a Tolkien-esque quest that many have attempted and few have succeeded at. Because Google so tightly guards the nature of its search algorithm and system of “page ranking” web pages, it very rarely will dole out specific information about why a particular website moves up or down its search rankings.

Small variations in page rank can have an enormous effect on placement in Google’s search rankings and effectively cause thousands or even millions of visitors to show up at a website. Or, in the case of the new Topix.com, potentially not.