Five Years On (part 1)

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Storagebod Blog; I’d blogged a bit before and I had started commenting on various storage blogs but nearly all of the storage blogs and indeed enterprise technology blogs in general were vendor-focused and were pushing the agenda of the vendor. The voice of the ‘user’ was mostly missing…and so Storagebod was born.

Like many things, there was a itch followed by a scratch and possibly then with a bit of blood.

At the time that I started this blog; the vendors were very much in the mode of tearing lumps out of each other on their blogs. They spent more time talking and shouting at each other than actually listening to their customers and focusing on that. Now the blogs have mellowed, in fact many of them have fossilised and others unfortunately are just pure marketing. And still they seem spend more time talking to themselves, telling themselves how great they are, even if mostly they try not to tell us how poor their competitors are…so that’s progress?

There are still some good blogs out there; generally written by people who don’t have marketing or social in their job titles but the golden age of vendor blogging, if there was one, seems to have gone. If your company has a policy around social marketing; it’ll probably kill off the voices that should be heard.

Of course, there’s me and Chris Evans plugging away independently; there’s a few others as well but we could really do with more. I know plenty of you reading this disagree with much of what I write; I only have to read the comments on the syndicated ‘El Reg’ version of the blog and I thank all of my commenters but perhaps some of you might want to give this blogging a go yourself. Hey, if you want to put your toe in the water, drop me an email, leave me a comment and I’ll put up a guest entry.

But I’d also like to see a reboot of the vendor blogs; I’d like to see people write about things they feel passionately about, not just regurgitate the message that marketing have given them. If you work in marketing or social and you see something written that you don’t like; the first reaction should not be to try and get that person on-message; try to work out why that person is off-message and then whether it is legitimate. If it is full of inaccuracies, if it is leaking the companies secrets and if it is going to do the company serious harm; then have a discussion but you need to be aware that many of us really respect the nay-sayers and the outliers in your companies. At times we will be doing business with you because of that respect and it says a lot about a company’s culture if it embraces that openness.

Don’t turn your staff into something that resembles the village of Midwich.

Me, I’ll carry on what I’m doing; I’ll keep throwing bricks and sometimes bouquets. If I think the Emperor’s got no clothes…I’ll be the little boy who points at him and laughs.

But mostly, I’ll keep on doing this because it’s a lot of fun!!