How do they make money - Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble, The Scobleizer, is both a blogger and also an employee of Microsoft, where he holds the official title of “technical evangelist”. Those two roles are interlinked. Blogging led to him getting a job at Microsoft, and his job at Microsoft involves blogging.

The Economist ran an article about him, pointing out what he has achieved

he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience.

Robert Scoble used to work for NEC on tablet PCs and used his blog to give tech support and get feedback from his customers. The blog was refreshingly honest and achieved a following among the cognoscenti.

This caught the attention of Lenn Pryor, who is—really—Microsoft's “director of platform evangelism”. Until then, says Mr Pryor, Microsoft had been evangelising mostly one-on-one, “which doesn't scale well”.

Mr Pryor figured that the straight-talking Mr Scoble would make a reassuring pilot or “a great evangelist”. So he hired him. Mr Scoble, for his part, simply kept doing what he was good at. His blog—which he has kept outside of Microsoft's computers, and to which he usually posts in the wee hours after midnight—reads like a stream of consciousness.

And the article concludes with

Will corporate bloggers start to get tongue-tied and sound just like tedious press releases? Mr Scoble, for his part, hates the question but concedes that, theoretically, Microsoft's corporate view and his own could come into severe conflict, and it is not clear what would happen then. Will he criticise only the small things, but toe the line on the big issues?

Two months after joining Microsoft in 2003, and article by a Seattle Post reporter quotes Scoble

"Microsoft is like an anthill, and I'm an ant," explained Scoble, the employee who always thinks about justifying his posts to CEO Ballmer. "I'm allowed to give the ant's perspective on the world, but I'm not allowed to give the anthill's perspective on the world."

I have spent hours trying to get anything "concrete" about Robert Scoble, the real man and about his web site stats. And come away with little real info on either. There is just nothing out there. It is quite neatly summed up in a quote from Mr Scoble's own blog, on the subject of Mark Jen, the ex Microsoft guy, who joined Google and got fired within 2 weeks for blogging about Google in a way his bosses did not appreciate.

Reading Mark's blog I can see a variety of mistakes he made. When you start at a new company you need to build a relationship network before you start discussing the company in public. You need to understand what the various forces that have power (and, at every company there are probably people who have more power than you do -- even the CEO has to listen to the board of directors and to other people inside the company) and you have to work carefully and deliberately.

It's not easy writing in public. All it takes is one paragraph to lose credibility, have people laugh at you, get you sued, create a PR firestorm, or get your boss mad at you. Think about that one for a while.

Robert Scoble has certainly followed his own advice. He is successful in that he has a blog in his own name, but that "evangelises" Microsoft. If he were fired today, he would still be a successful blogger tomorrow, but would presumably have to monetarise his site. At present we have no idea how many people read it, other than it must be a fair few, given its popularity in the RSS feeds.

And I assume that there is no income from the site other than any donation Microsoft may make, or indeed whether his salary is in any way tied to the blog. The blog and Microsoft appear to be intertwined.

A successful, but enigmatic blogger, who has maintained his credibility, even when working for what is not the most loved corporation in the world.