untyped

Just after my last post about the difficulty companies have maintaining open communication as they grow in size and prominence I find that 37 Signals are turning off all comments on their blog.

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Interesting post by Grant McCracken on the impact social software will have on the corporation. He sees a struggle between the “Old Guard” defending the unified corporate voice, and the upstarts who want bring the messy reality to the corporation’s communication. I swear I didn’t read it before my most recent post but it confirms my thoughts.

It’s pretty rare that I agree with anything that Joel
writes on his blog “Joel on Software”. However, when he
discusses href="http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/30.html">his
site redesign he hits on something that rings true:

A long time ago I paid a top web designer, Dave
Shea, who created a stunningly beautiful design for me to
use. It ended up looking a little bit too shiny, though, so
I never used it. This is a site designed by me, badly, using
my poor Corel PHOTO-PAINT skills and my crappy amateur
photos and my affection for the font “Georgia” and my poor
eyesight (thus the largish font). … The more it looks like
it was designed by a geek, not a graphic designer, the
happier I am, because I am a geek.

Authenticity is a big deal; perhaps the
big deal for small companies. When people contact a small
company they want to talk to someone with a name, not a
random customer support droid. They want to feel a personal
connection to that company, and perhaps that a little part
of their success is due to them. Building this connection
is one reason we write Untyped, and also why we have our href="http://untyped.com/about/index.php">dream offices
on our web pages. It also goes the otherway: by
personalising our web presence we feel a bit more like it’s
ours. In this early stage we aren’t working to build our
careers, we working to fulfill our passions, to build our
dreams into reality, and this sense of ownership is important.

What happens when a small company gets bigger? This is
were trouble hits: they href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_the_shark">jump the
shark. This might be the death knell for TV shows, but
normally companies just keep on getting bigger. Except now
people aren’t using their products out of any attachment to the
company, but because they are forced to.
The signs are that href="http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2005/08/google_brand_an.html">Google
and href="http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/have_we_jumped_the_shark.php">37
Signals, both companies we respect immensely, are
tettering on the edge.

Is there anything that can be done about this? I’m not
sure. It’s a fact that as more people join a company you
can’t expect to know all of them, and vice versa. A lot of
companies spend a lot of money to try and project a single
voice, but this is really a symptom of the problem. Perhaps
the thing to do is let the babble overflow the corporate
boundaries, and let people make their own connections with
those inside, just like they used to? It the opposite of standard marketing thinking, which is all about protecting the brand, but perhaps showing the human reality is the way to keep communication personal. Either way, it will be a long time before we find out.