Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon) challenges Naked Conversations authors Shel Israel and Robert Scoble to “tell me why customers would get a better Amazon product if we would institutionalize blogging at a wider scale around Amazon.”
Werner has to go no further than Simple Storage Services (S3) or A9 or any of Amazon’s other non-Amazon-store products and services to see the value. Of course, this is why Werner has his own blog, and S3 has theirs, and I’m guessing A9 has theirs (although with a quick glance I can’t find it). You want to encourage me to use your products/services? Show, tell, inspire, link. Forums, articles and whitepapers are quite useful. But they aren’t the same as a blog. And as a blogger I’m sure Werner understands this.
I imagine this isn’t what he’s really talking about in his question though. I’m guessing he’s talking about blogging within the Amazon store site. I imagine he doesn’t see a reason for why an Amazon customer support rep or sales rep should blog, for instance.
Well, what if Oprah stops by and wants to blog on Amazon? Imagine an Amazon-exclusive diary about her show–including daily, pre-show Q&A videos with the audience–or mentions of products on her show (obviously with links to purchase them via Amazon) or things that didn’t make the show or maybe mentions of–what else but–what she ate for lunch. What an opportunity this would be.
OK. I bet Werner wouldn’t count this. Even if it would be hugely popular, I’m sure he’d argue that one blog from one personality isn’t what he’s thinking of. Fine. But this at least defines what one form of a top Amazon store blog might be like. That’s the point.
Loren, we do have AmazonConnect which is a place where authors can blogs within the Amazon site (http://www.amazon.com/gp/arms/directory). It is fun to see how we could extend that to addres a wider audience.
What I really wanted to use my question for was to challenge Shel and Robbert to be more “corporate” about their answers if they talk about coporate blogging. That means weighing advantages and disadvantages.
I love the way passionate people (sych as you) are stepping up with giving good suggestions how Amazon should be blogging. There is something good coming out of this.
Werner,
I was just telling Loren that I’d seen author’s blogs on Amazon recently. Unfortunately, I couldn’t show them to him…I just couldn’t find a navigation point on the amazon.com home page. You need to go into the books categories to get there. Also, searching for an author on Amazon returns product results, but doesn’t provide a link to the Connect content. AmazonConnect is a neat idea, but right now it’s definitely a second class citizen on Amazon.
Bob B.
Werner, yes this all has generated an interesting conversation online. I’m guessing that your blog and Scoble’s probably saw the greatest spikes in traffic. (I know Amazon got a few extra clicks as I dug around Amazon.com to find blog content 🙂
I imagine the forums and comment sections that Amazon maintains bring in traffic too, but do they generate the same type of traffic lets say when a book/product is launched? My experience is that this is where blog traffic is the most valuable–on the front end of the cycle.
The challenge is to keep the traffic up (within the same group and to expand it)–and most importantly to keep the value of the content to a high level. Yes, this takes a significant amount of time.
Thanks for the link to the author blogs. Of course, the S3 and A9 blog as well as your blog are really good examples of corporate blogging within Amazon.