A friend of mine while reading the above shouted “So is it customisation and selling services to companies who want to jump on the blogwagon where the money is?” and he went on “consultants and website designers have been doing this for ages…or is it selling weblogs to the masses?”. First of all, I reckon we all agree that consultants and website designers have been doing it for a long time. And selling weblogs to the masses is not my point here, although companies such as Radio Userland and Pyra Labs (recently acquired by Google) are doing pretty well by doing exactly that. My aim is to show that weblogs mean business but not necessarily in such easily identifiable ways. Had it not been for the OpenFlows weblog, which is of course free for all to use, I doubt if any company or individual would hire the programming talent of the company known as OpenFlows. The weblog, in other words, is a living ad of the company. It demonstrates in real-time and under real-world circumstances, rather than in a closed-doors demonstration distanced from reality of the typically encountered product marketing pitches during industry conferences, that the company’s product does not collapse under pressure and the company is really committed to what it’s selling. By engaging in community dialogue at its own weblog, it also demonstrates that the company is open to criticism and feedback from the marketplace. The company is not distancing themselves from the marketplace; on the contrary, they do all they can to connect to the marketplace and engage in a conversation.     

In the infuriating Cluetrain Manifesto, theses 34 – 40 read[1]:

To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities. But first, they must belong to a community. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market. Human communities are based on discourse – on human speech about human concerns. The community of discourse is the market. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die. 

For one thing, OpenFlows understands that “companies that do not belong to a community will die”. We should remind ourselves that OpenFlows is cashing in on open source/free software. Making money out of open source/free software is not evil - as some people wrongly believe - as long as the community rules are strictly adhered to. To rephrase that, if the company does not ‘belong’ to the community, a commercial symbiosis (between the community which provides the product to start with and the company) is most certain to fail. And failure results in inability to use the product. Therefore, it is safe to say that Openflows is a community-centric organisation; is run in harmony with the open/source community ethics and its weblog is dedicated to the continuation of public discourse centred on issues of interest to the community.

Further testament to this offers Felix Stalder, co-founder of OpenFlows, who wrote in 1999 that portals exemplify an “old trick all over: if you cannot sell to the audience, sell the audience” and judging by his tone, he wouldn’t be keen on betting his company on mass marketing practices. Three years later, in Open Source Intelligence, which he co-authored with Jesse Hirch, the other co-founder of Openflows, it is made clear that their professional activities and leisure interests are compliant with the community principles. The term Open Source Intelligence, they write, refers to “the application of collaborative principles developed by the open source software movement to the gathering and analysis of information”. Interestingly, the No Logo weblog is one of the three case studies discussed in the paper.

Community weblogs can be immensely valuable for organisations. That is obvious. What is not so obvious is where the revenue will come from. Unfortunately, there is not one-size-fits-all model. For Chris Locke (2001) only corporate underwriting could be a viable and guaranteed revenue model as any other model is currently unable to ensure that community members are not been alienated in the corporate race to eke out a profit. “The problem is that commercial enterprises have clearly defined goals: to sell something. Real communities, on the other hand, are amorphous and can change their goals and, the moment they become incompatible with the goals of the company, they clash. Since the company that owns the servers dictates the policies (after all, it’s private property), communities tend to lose in such conflicts”[2].

Corporate underwriting, in order to harness the community, loosens up the burden on the success criteria that corporate-backed weblogs are judged against. “Success should be measured on the quality of the content and the diversity of its sources – instead of by the sales leads it generates” (Locke 2001:106).  These criteria are in stark contrast to the ones set in a e-CRM driven community which evaluate the community’s success based on “the number of participants, amount of time spent in the community, and transaction intensity – [and whose ultimate goal is] to create profiles on individual customers which will yield rich data sets about both individuals and customer segments” (Hagel & Armstrong 1997:143). By this token, Slashdot is immensely successful.

Nevertheless, as a headstrong marketer, I still believe that money can be made. I do not wish to enter the debate on micro-payments. I do however wish to discuss the possibilities of affiliate marketing in the context of massive community weblogs like Slashdot. In the space of a week, more than a thirty posts (or stories) linked to specific products make it to the Slashdot weblog. Some of these posts are celebrating a product, others make sure than none will ever dare to buy it. It is naïve to assume that none of the Slashdotters would buy products discussed favourably within the weblog. Of course they do. As Flemming Funch (2003b) says, collaborative filtering works best with people he trusts rather than algorithms and systems similar to Amazon’s that make recommendations based on past purchases. So, in such an affiliate marketing scenario, revenue flows in from referrals. But who gets the money? Is it the marketing genius behind Slashdot who pays for the server expenses that should get the money or the volunteer who provided the link to the product and wrote the review at the first place? Or both? If it goes to the marketing genius, it’s not fair for the volunteers who are then been exploited. If on the contrary it goes to the volunteer, it’s not fair for the marketing genius who through his efforts to put a community together has exposed the link to an audience way beyond the volunteer’s otherwise potential reach. What if they split the profit halfway? The volunteer who provides the link (and the ink) gets 50 percent of the commission and the ‘owners of the weblog’ get the other 50 percent. That would be fair. Of course, a mechanism for automatically distributing the profit would need to be devised but this wouldn’t be that hard to achieve either. The real problem lies in setting up partnerships with e-tailers, not to mention that not all e-tailers offer affiliate marketing programmes the way Amazon does. This is the main flaw in such a business plan. But I reckon that given time this flaw could be overcome and this model could offer a glimpse of the future to come as either more and more e-tailers start their own affiliate marketing schemes or eBay and Amazon become the definitive electronic marketplaces for all kinds of products.