What Is Your Social Media Hub?

Sergio Balegno, Research Director for Marketing Sherpa, is a recognized thought leader in Internet marketing best practices. He gave a superb guest lecture in my social media marketing class last week. There was one thing in particular that he articulated much better than I’ve been able to do. It has to do with organizing your ‘traditional’ Internet and social media marketing around well-defined hubs.

It’s clear that any Internet marketing effort needs to have an activity hub. In the early days—before social media—it was equally clear that the hub was the website. All marketing efforts, PPC and display advertising—pointed there and Internet marketing objectives were achieved there. Objectives might have been driving traffic to retail stores, providing content for customer acquisition and retention, conducting ecommerce, or others as appropriate for the enterprise marketing strategy. Whatever the Internet marketing objective, the website was needed to achieve it.

Enter social media and our efforts to understand how to integrate these networks effectively into our marketing strategy. What is the correct centerpiece of for this marketing element? Social media efforts can point back to the website, and sometimes that may make sense. But often the efforts on public networks are best pointed back to the corporate blog. Sergio used as an example the Cisco Collaboration program that I wrote about last week.

Why should social media point to the blog and not to the website? The main reason is that blog content can—and should be—updated frequently with content that supports the social media efforts with precision. By its very nature, website content is updated less frequently and often is less precisely targeted to particular user segments and/or interests.

That led me to a second ‘ah-ha’ moment--the importance of recency in achieving prominence in search engine results. I hadn’t updated my thinking from the era (a couple of years ago) when things like keywords, number of incoming links, and number of clicks were only determinants of rankings in organic search. Here’s a summary of rank determinants; click through for a mind-numbing list from seo experts. With the addition of things like news, images, and videos search results pages provide the most current as well as the most relevant content. Search any current event and see for yourself!

The take-away is this: Your website is the hub of your ‘traditional’ Internet marketing. To be direct, it’s where you can sell things or acquire sales leads. An increasing number of the people who become leads or customers are going to find you, learn more about you, and develop trust in you through social media. The blog provides timely content and connects to activities like your YouTube channel and other social networks. It points readers to your website for conversion when their time is right. Their time, not yours! That makes your blog the hub of your social media marketing.

There’s still a lot of work to do in integrating all this activity. But a clear understanding of this key principle is necessary to an efficient strategy with marketing effectiveness!

It's Not HAVING Platforms; It's USING Them Well!

Robert Collins retweeted the link to the 2010 Global Social Media Check-Up survey by Burton-Marsteller. Thanks, Bob! It has interesting data on how companies in the Fortune Global 100 are using social media. I took the data from the short version of the report.


Many of them do have Twitter (notice it’s first!) as well as Facebook, YouTube and their own corporate blogs. When they break it down by geography, it’s not surprising that US firms have more of everything (my sense is that the US is far ahead in the business use of social media) except YouTube. About as many European companies have YouTube accounts as US companies—interesting!



There’s interesting activity data on all 4 platforms, but the one on corporate blogs really caught my attention. The data from Europe and Asia seems reasonable. If you make posts, you generally get some comments, especially if your blogs provide information of value to your customers. Why so few posts in the US and so many comments? It has to do with the labeling in the chart. Here’s what Burton-Marsteller says:

For example, only 11% of U.S. corporate blogs had posts in the past month, but 90% of the blogs with posts had comments from stakeholders (Graph 7). So, while some corporate blogs have fallen into attrition, corporate blogs that are active and have a strong purpose and following provide a useful two-way dialogue for organizations and their stakeholders.

Ok, that makes sense. For me, actually it makes excellent sense. It’s about the maturity of the social media effort in the US and in the user corporations. Today’s eMarketer headline makes the same point: Longtime Twitter Users Most Vocal.

There’s also the issue of using any of the platforms well. Take blogging. I was recently asked why a corporate blog wasn’t getting much traffic. They were hoping to use it for acquisition as well as for customer support and retention, although I’m not sure they had stated it that precisely. So I asked if they had registered the blog on Technorati, at least. Not sure—he’d check. Do they use good tags? “No, we don’t take time to tag.” I tried to politely say that’s a BIG DUH! How can you take time to write a blog post and not take a few extra seconds to tag??? I also suggested that they use alt tags on their images. It’s a product-oriented blog, and having the search engines able to search images would be a big help.

As I’ve said so many times before, just having a corporate platform isn’t the answer. You have to use it, to monitor it, and to respond to deserving entries.

One more thing about the report. The short version has sidebars on social media activity in various countries. That’s a must read if you operate in any of these countries! Check it out; here’s the link to the full report.

Let me end with their 9-step checkup. None of this is new to readers of this blog, but it’s a good reminder. The check-up list is:

1. Monitor Your Own — And Competitors — Social Media Presence.
2. Get Top Management “Buy In.”
3. Develop a Social Media Strategy
4. Define and Publish a Social Media Policy.
5. Develop Internal Structure.
6. Contribute to the Community.
7. Participate in Good Times and in Bad. That’s worth some extra commentary. Here’s some of what the report says:

There will always be some situations where it is advisable to avoid participating, but generally speaking, negative content provides an opportunity for a company to share their point of view or set the record straight. Organizations must develop a process in advance that defines how and when they will respond to negative content or misinformation posted in social media.

8. Be Prepared to Respond in Real Time.
9. Measure the Impact of Social Media Engagement.

Good advice all!!!

Fund Raising is Mobile and Viral

Social media and marketers have increasing roles in dealing with social issues in general and natural disasters in particular. The effects of the earthquake in Haiti are devastating and heart rending. Let me sum up some of the things I’m seeing.

• Within hours (2 or 3 maybe?) of the first news about the earthquake I saw a crawler on CNN/Situation Room soliciting mobile contributions. There are several firms that support mobile fundraising. The Mobile Giving Foundation seems to be the largest and best known; their site gives good information on how it works. According to a press release yesterday, their clients had raised over $7million--all in $5 and $10 amounts to the best of my knowledge. This quote from one of their how it works pages sums it up:

Mobile often outpaces on-line donor acquisition by a 3:1 factor. It is also clear that mobile giving represents purely incremental gifts predominately by a new, younger demographic. Donor canibalization doesn’t occur.

• Consumers are confused and wary, and rightly so. Remember all the scams after Hurricane Katrina? ABC News was quick to explain how to tell the difference in a post that I’ve also seen on the national site and a local affiliate site. That’s helpful.

• But we’ve all seen how quickly rumors and incorrect information can flood the Internet via the social networks. The AdAge article about consumer confusion points to issues experienced by both American Airlines and UPS. The latter is particularly interesting; I had just watched a video on how (and why) they had been working on their social media strategy over the past months. That kind of preparation allowed them to respond quickly to the incorrect information with correct information on their own blog. The video is 20 minutes long, but it’s well worth your time—especially if you have a brand to protect!

The Internet is flooded with reports of corporations’ pledges of help, and that’s as it should be. Perhaps also, they shouldn’t expect anything in return for doing the right thing. But as a proponent of cause-related marketing, I don’t fault companies for wanting credit. I saw Art Hogan of Jeffries securities on CNBC this morning. Before he talked about stock prices he pushed his company’s efforts which include a corporate donation, the opportunity for employees to donate a day’s salary, and the donation of all their commissions today to the relief fund. That’s a joint effort and seems to me to be all to the good. He said they had already seen increased trading volume in London and, pre-market opening, it looked as if they would see the same in the US. I checked their website and there’s nothing there. They must have gotten the word out by emailing their clients. However they did it, good for them!

What are the take-aways? First, mobile and viral have both upsides and downsides; all channels need to be monitored for both. When it’s important, get out a correction. Distribute it as widely as possible; I couldn’t find evidence of the informative blog post on either UPS’s Twitter or Facebook pages. Second, cause-related marketing is usually a long-term investment, and the Jeffries anecdote provides nice support for the belief that it does provide ROI. It’s one part of the shift of marketing expenditures from traditional media to social media. Third, today’s environment calls for rapid response. You can’t respond rapidly in social media when the need arises unless you have built a solid foundation.

And needs will continue to arise from all quarters—you can bet on that!

GM--Cautious Use of Social Media in Brand Reinvention

My early morning multitasking included listening to an interview with the GM CEO on CNBC and reading the article about their new campaign in Ad Age, so I’m not sure where I heard it first. I’m reasonably sure that I heard Fritz Henderson say they had already posted the ad on YouTube although it will not be aired until tomorrow.

I was curious to see how many people had viewed it in advance of the TV campaign. I found more than I anticipated. As I thought, only 314 people had viewed it since it was posted yesterday. More interesting is the fact that there are two PPC ads on the YouTube page when you search “general motors.” One leads to the GM Reinvention site.

The site is slick and professional and hits all the right notes. It links to their Flickr, Twitter and Facebook pages. I also note that Bob Lutz’s groundbreaking Fast Lane blog now includes posts by many other GM executives in advance of Lutz’s retirement at the end of this year. Point is that the site is totally devoted to GM’s message, but it offers social media opportunities for people who want to talk.
And I’m always interested in the conversation. The first comments I looked at were on the YouTube page. There were 7 comments at the time I looked. Two were from the same foul-mouthed lout, two were clearly cheering GM on, 1 was about the ad itself, and 2 were commenting on the comments. About what you’d expect—or did you expect worse?

The (9, at the time I looked) comments on the Ad Age article were also predictable. They discuss the ad itself, the historical vision and strategy (or lack thereof) of GM—all about the message, not about cars.

The Facebook page is the most interesting of all. (Note: there’s a careful/good disclaimer that the viewer is leaving the GM site for an open site.) There are lots of “likes” of the GM material and many comments. There are many positive comments about the cars and about the importance of “buy American.” What’s even more interesting is the people who are heatedly refuting negative comments about the cars and about the importance of buying cars manufactured in North America.

It’s interesting to watch and to recognize the level of support for GM that exists among the consuming public. It’s even more interesting to wonder if GM will find a way to mobilize this support to its advantage over the coming months.

Right now it’s slick and professional and relatively controlled. Will GM find a way to put consumers in the driver’s seat—something like Ford did, perhaps? Since we’re all now shareholders, we should hope so!

Can Your Corporate Blog be Trusted?

Because it represents your brand, your business blog needs to be trustworthy. A widely-quoted report by Forrester puts corporate blogs far down on the trustworthiness scale; (download the Forrester report here). I’ve written about creating a trusted corporate blog previously, but a new article on Marketing Profs makes it worth returning to. It’s a subscriber-only article; let me give you a quick summary.

According to Kimberly Smith, writing for Marketing Profs:
• Provide real value for your readers
• Be transparent to a fault
• Be direct and write in an engaging, personal style
• Welcome reader involvement. That requires moderation and a policy to guide it; I’ve written about that before also.
• Make it clear that it is an official corporate blog and what the policies are.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that many blogs that appear to be “corporate” are actually personal blogs and have the required disclaimers. Which is the right approach for your company? Or should you encourage a mix of “official corporate” blogs and personal blogs from corporate executives? Both, in fact, have value.

If you are pondering these issues, you might want to invest in Marketing Profs Smart Tools: Blog Marketing publication. It gives some step-by-step guidance that could be helpful. I’d suggest that the first recommendation is the most important; “Define blog objectives and profile your blog’s target audience.”

Your corporate blog is a communications tool, and it must be planned and managed like one. You have to build trust in the information it provides, just like you’ve worked to build trust in your brand.

But I keep asking—can you afford not to communicate with your customers? to communicate directly and without filters and artifice? That’s the way the world is moving. More important, I’m willing to bet that it’s the way the expectations of your customers are evolving. If you doubt that, ask them!

Robust Microblogging Tool

I don’t often write about microblogging. I’m not a road warrior and I have a strong preference for my desktop with its big keyboard and monitor. The limitations of microblogging also don’t fit my concept for this blog.

Ok, so it’s not for me. In spite of that, I see the potential usefulness to some people or in some situations. So I was interested when a colleague brought this site to my attention. It had been sent to her by Dr. Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, whose blog I know. His use of the site suggested it was worth checking out.
The first thing I found was that you can post to many other platforms from Utterli. If you can recognize the icons on the home page, they include all the major blogging services, Twitter, YouTube and others. You can also follow friends on Utterli as you can on other sites like Twitter.

When I looked a little further I found an interview with Dr. Levy himself. He’s talking with WBUR about everything from preventing medical errors to the impact on philanthropy of the Bernard Maddof financial scandal. As a radio station, WBUR is essentially producing podcasts, and they have posted many of them on Utterli. Interesting.

Hear the interview
Visit Dr. Levy's blog

So I learned a couple of good things. I found another useful social media tool—always a happy discovery. I also got a chance to listen to a thoughtful CEO talking about how he is using blogging in running one of Boston’s most prestigious hospitals. I’ve pointed out before that relatively few CEOs blog, and I think he sets a wonderful example of using this communications tool to do something very important within his organization. Check it out, and you’ll see what I mean. That’s a good thought to take into the new year!

Wishing You a Wonderful 2009!

Building a Trusted Business Blog

This week’s (June 2) cover article in Business Week is an update of their popular 2005 article on blogs. I’m making a direct link to it because it’s on the home page. I took the opportunity to read BW’s Terms of Use again (last updated April 2007) and found that the policy against “deep linking” is still there. In spite of that, the authors of the cover story clearly “get it,” as far as social media is concerned and the article is well worth reading. Not so all the other editors at BW. Maria Bartiromo’s interesting interview with Chris DeWolfe of MySpace has an edited-in definition: “A click-through is a measure of user engagement with an ad.” Hardly; Eric T. Peterson has an excellent discussion of the effort going into developing a valid measure of engagement to replace click-through as a key metric.

About the time of the first article a colleague said to me that if it’s on the cover of a major magazine, it’s mainstream (before we began doing it; true of many companies). It still is. One of the “alt tags” on the cover of the print magazine captures managers’ worst fears. “Get this: One worker’s ramblings on these networks could land a megadeal or sink the company.” Overblown, but basically true. There are ways of participating in the space while maintaining the integrity of the brand and the corporation. I’ve written about examples, good and bad and about the importance of transparency. Recently one of my students brought a set of corporate policies on blogging to my attention, and this seems like a good time to review them. Thanks, Noah!

I’ve taken some of the best features of several in order to suggest what your corporate blogging policy should cover. Here are important issues:

•Coverage. All employees who blog who so identify themselves are covered. Purely personal blogs, with no reference to the company, are not covered.
•Privacy. Employee blogs must link to the corporate privacy policy and abide by its terms.
•Write well and clearly in a way that promotes interactivity. Make the style lively and personal; write about what you know and maintain your focus. Keep the blog active. Allow both email subscription and RSS feeds. Use images freely, but be constantly aware of intellectual property issues.
•Be responsive. Encourage comments and discussion. Remove only material that is inappropriate under this policy or generally offensive. Reply to comments and emails in so far as you can. Never let a negative comment go unanswered, but insist that you and your readers be civil.
•Be truthful. Identify yourself and post as detailed a profile as you wish, being aware of your own privacy. Never plagiarize; quote, link and otherwise identify content created by others. Be accurate; correct mistakes promptly.
•Be transparent. Include a statement that these are personal opinions and do not represent the company. If any of your activities create a conflict of interest, reveal it.
•Be professional. Don’t say anything that reflects badly on yourself or your employer. Don’t say anything that is derogatory to colleagues or customers or that reveals confidential information.

Charlene Li of Forrester has a good list, updated frequently, of corporate blogging policies that you can review. As you do so, think about any special needs and requirements created by your own circumstances.

Corporate blogs should be monitored, lightly. One approach is to make the marketing communications function the oversight entity. I sugest that brand/operating managers be the monitors. RSS feeds bring new material directly to them. In a very short period of time each day they gain insight into what employees are thinking and doing. This creates an excellent employee feedback channel with the possibility of being excellent insight into what customers and others think.

Does this policy outline apply to other types of networking, Twitter (often described as microblogging, for example)? Probably. Does it apply to other types of networks from personal Flickr sites to Facebook pages to LinkedIn profiles? Probably it does; the basic issue is still whether the person is identified as an employee. Purely personal pages may still deserve mention on the grounds that everything is connected to everything else these days (less than six degrees of separation?) and personal behavior should be acceptable to one’s employer. It would be nice if we could keep personal and work life completely separate, but it’s not that kind of world.

And it’s not a reason to fail to participate in the social media ecosystem that is fast becoming the communications standard around the world.

Managing Multi-Authored Corporate Blogs

A couple of weeks ago some of my students at Harvard Extension got me thinking about the benefits and challenges of handling multi-authored corporate blogs. We were looking at the Direct2Dell blog, which I’ve written about previously. I made the offhand statement that you simply have to have an editor to make a corporate blog like it--which gives voice to many different executives on many different subjects—work as a positive communications tool. Students asked, “Why?,” and that started me thinking.

One of the students followed up with a post on our class blog that referenced an interview with the person who (in 2006) managed 38 corporate blogs for Google. As I started looking a bit more, I found multiple people identified as an editor on the Direct2Dell blog. So that’s two models already.

I looked around Debbie Weil’s site; she’s one of the most prolific writers on corporate blogging. She focuses mostly on CEO blogs. They can be highly useful, but they’re not the kind planned multiple authorship I’m talking about. I’m also thinking about blogs targeted to external audiences, not internal blogs as useful as they can be.

I’ve been involved in a couple of multi-authored blogs lately (the class ones don’t count; students are assigned to make posts and comments on those!), and I’d like to contribute a few words of wisdom.

An editor is essential. The editor motivates contributors, manages the flow of posts, and does all the back-end work like monitoring comments. If the blog is actively marketed, that task probably falls to the editor also.

A plan is essential. A blog is a marketing communications program and it requires the same kind of planning as other programs. I’ve used a simple strategy brief (agencies are more likely to call it a creative brief) to state the basics in a page or two.

Which comes first—the editor or the plan? The usual marketing answer,”It Depends!” If the internal champion (and there has to be one or we wouldn’t be having this discussion) wants to edit the blog, that person might prepare the plan. If the intent is to hire an external editor, that person will need guidance on what the blog is meant to accomplish and how it fits into the overall communications program. The external editor needs to understand who will contribute and how they are to be motivated or incented.

Give the editor the necessary tools and make the person accountable for achieving communications objectives. That means that one thing the editor will be doing is studying the blog metrics (constantly) and reporting to responsible executives (regularly).

The internal blog champion will probably have to be the person who navigates issues of corporate policy and legal requirements. Those issues need to be understood before the blog is launched because the last thing you want is for posts to be held up for endless checking and approval. Unless your blog is timely and fresh it’s going to do more harm than good—assuming anyone reads it at all! And remember that there’s lots of competition for the reader’s time, so it’s going to have to be not only good, but also relevant to the audience’s needs and interests.

The responsible executives should have RSS feeds for the blog to motivate them to keep up with what’s being said. It’s important for contributors to know the blog is being read internally as well as reaching the external audience. Executives should consider commenting occasionally on items of special expertise. That’s highly motivational.

Does all of this sound like it’s terribly time consuming? It absolutely is. That’s a strong part of the argument about careful planning for a corporate blog. You probably don’t have an internal person who is currently underworked and can take it on easily. Can you identify and are you willing to pay for an external person with the necessary skills and ability to work with your organization? Those are not small questions.

Here’s an interesting list I found—Fortune’s wiki listing blogs by the “500” firms. It’s a good place to see what some large organizations are doing and think about how it might apply to your situation.

While I don’t want anyone to think it’s easy, I’d recommend serious consideration of blogs as a corporate communication tool. If the goal is to get close to your customers, to interact with them instead of just talking in their general direction, a blog may be the way to go. And, in time, it may lead in other interesting social media directions.
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The General Motors Wiki

Last week GM launched a corporate history wiki as part of its centennial celebration. At first glance that appears to be a risky idea. Won’t it draw out every GM-hater who’s had a bad experience with a GM car or truck? Won’t it become a public relations nightmare? Won’t it suck up a lot of the time of GM executives who ought to be contributing to returning the corporation to profitability? The answer to the last question is that it will absorb some time. Having looked around a bit, the answer to the first 2 is not so obvious.

First, GM has a history with social media. The best-known effort is the Fast Lane blog, the voice of Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz and other GM execs. It’s been going strong since early 2005. Lutz started podcasting in the fall of 2005. GM now has several blogs, but it probably says something that the blogs have their own microsite, GM Blogs, that cannot easily (at all?) be located from the main GM site. Was GM initially skeptical about what kind of public commentary Fast Lane and the others would draw? Probably. I’m not a follower of car developments and I haven’t visited these blogs often. However, when you look around, you get the feeling that a lot of these people are pulling for GM, whatever their reasons. Some are critical, some compliment something specific, and a lot have suggestions to offer—everything from design to advertising. I took a look at some of the recent posts, and I see Bob Lutz and many other GM executives responding, not to individual comments, but to themes that have come up. I also see notes from two people identified as “blog editor.” It takes some organizational infrastructure to keep this sort of multi-authored blog going. Is this a better role for PR people than sending out endless press releases that no one reads? I’d judge the blog efforts so far to be successful. GM is not escaping criticism, but it has a voice in the discussion.

With this experience under their belts, they decided to ask the public to help them write the history of GM. They put it in an interesting context—GM Next. They want to honor their history, but they’re moving on into the future. Good spin. The GM Next initiative is featured on the corporate home page. Does that suggest a level of confidence about their ability to manage the program? Any of the links on the home page take you to GM Next. The conversation threads are design, tech, green, ideas and global. The wiki is prominently featured. The home page of the wiki itself shows a well-thought out structure and there’s lots of information to get you started if you want to contribute. It shows that it’s a serious wiki with View Source and History tabs to help HTML-knowledgeable contributors and those who want to see previous versions of the page. Categories that are well worth exploring are the “How to Use, FAQs and Meet the Experts” pages.
A strategy issue worth considering is that the wiki was open to the experts before it was made publicly available. There is already content that sets the tone. There are “Rules of the Road” to be followed, but they are pretty minimal. In several places it is made clear that all contributions will be moderated for adherence to those rules and that their team of experts (which will grow as the wiki becomes active) will moderate disputes about factual matters. They promise that contributions will not be edited, just screened to ensure they meet basic standards.

I’ll admit that I started this exploration with considerable skepticism, even though I was aware of Fast Lane. What I wasn’t aware of is how many GM people are active in the various social media efforts and how seriously they seem to take it. As a long time advocate of managers at all levels actually meeting and talking to customers, how can I not be impressed? My sense from the beginning has been that social media provide a way for managers to interact with customers in a way that is both effective (in communications terms) and efficient (in terms of managerial time).

GM’s wiki is an experiment in social media worth following. My sense is that their intentions are good, and I wish them well.
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Do These Blog Policies Make Sense?

A post on CNET news caught my eye a few days ago. I read Business Week online and in print. I’ve used their material in textbooks—with permission, which they are notoriously slow to grant). I’ve probably linked to their material on this blog. (No, I don’t ordinarily read user agreements.) I do, however, assume that online publications are happy to have links because they attract more people to the site.

So imagine my surprise when I read the CNET article which in turn referenced a post on the Gawker blog. This quote captures the issue perfectly:

Gawker points to the example of SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who writes in his blog that after being interviewed for a feature story in BusinessWeek, he was expressly told not to link to the story. "Yes, that's right, an ad-driven publication doesn't want us to drive traffic to them," he says in his blog. In addition, he was urged to review the company's user agreement. Mr. MacAskill also has critical words for the LA Times in his post.

Note how many links to various online publications have been generated by this dialog. As you well know, every time you follow one of these links you’ve upped their traffic and advertising rates. Why doesn’t any online publisher want that?

But I did check the user agreement and the Gawker post is exactly right. This is the item in the BW user agreement. Note that it does not say I can’t copy it (it’s well within the 100-word limit for direct quotes with attribution but without permission), but it does say that I can’t “deep link,” which is a link to any page except the home page. And every Internet marketer knows that if you want people to find things, you don’t just dump them onto your home page!

2. use or attempt to use any "deep-link," "scraper," "robot," "bot," "spider," "data mining," "computer code" or any other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, process or methodology or manual process having similar processes or functionality, to access, acquire, copy, or monitor any portion of BW.com, any data or content found on or accessed through BW.com, or any other BW.com information without prior express written consent of BW;
Source: BusinessWeek Online Terms of Use

The BW policy is even more ludicrous in the context of a subsequent announcement by editor John Byrne. He says BWOnline is going to use a new reader engagement metric, the ratio of comments to stories on the site. One assumes they can also use the metric for individual stores as one gauge of the most popular topics. So why would the publication shut off one source of traffic to their pages—and therefore potential comments? Beats me!

It makes about as much sense as this statement, attributed to Target:

“Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets,” a public relations person wrote to ShapingYouth.

The owner of the ShapingYouth blog had complained to Target about an ad that it found demeaning to women. As I write this the original New York Times article (free registration required) has drawn 102 comments—pretty engaging! The comments show a fascinating divergence of opinion about whether blogs should be accorded the respect routinely given to traditional media outlets. Interesting and provocative!

Both Target and BusinessWeek Online seem to have policies that are counter to their best interests as a customer-friendly retailer and as an online publication that thrives on reader traffic. It might also be noted that the New York Times achieved a ratio of 102/1 on this particular article compared to the 23/1 average ratio quoted in articles about Byrne’s announcement. I did look on the Business Week site and couldn’t find a press release or other description of the policy—but then I couldn’t have linked to it anyway!

Enough bashing! There is a lesson here for all who participate in the new media space. The lesson is to be sure that all our policies are aligned in ways that promote our success instead of creating barriers to success.
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Are B2B Marketers Getting More Social?

A few days ago I complained about the difficulty of finding data about B2B use of podcasting. Maybe it was just because I was paying more attention (isn’t that a known psychological mechanism?), but I soon ran across some data suggesting that B2B marketers are making use of social media.

Studies by the ANA/BtoB Magazine and Direct Impact Marketing/Buzz Marketing for Technology agree that blogs and RSS are among the most used of the Web 2.0 tools. Add to that Web 1.0—websites, email, SEM and webinars. It suggests a rich menu of tools on which B2B marketers can spend the increasing proportion of their budgets that are going online (both eMarketer charts, newsletter, Jan 14, 2008).

According to Marketing Charts:

B2B marketers have adopted blogs and RSS more than other Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, according to the report; moreover, smaller marketers - the Davids among the Goliaths - are at the forefront: [emphasis mine] Some three-quarters of surveyed marketers that have deployed Web 2.0 tools are in companies of 10,000 or fewer people.

In the B2B arena where marketers usually know who their customers are and how to contact them, most companies still have a long way to go in establishing meaningful online dialog with their customers. There’s little doubt that B2B marketers are afflicted by the same concerns about new media as their B2C counterparts—lack of understanding of new media and desire to maintain control over their message in particular. The same arguments apply—marketers need to engage with their customers in as personal and relevant way as possible, and they must understand what is being said about their brands on all platforms.

The trend is in the right direction, but marketers in large corporations seem to be behind the curve. They need to reexamine the policies that inhibit employees from freely engaging with customers and provide incentives for meaningful use of new media to encourage relevant dialog. They’ll not only have happier customers, they’ll be making better use of those marketing budgets.
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Doing Good by Working the Web

A colleague recently brought a Facebook post by Alnisa Allgood to my attention. It describes the efforts of two brothers (who, for a year are communicating only via their vlog, but that’s another story) in behalf of the Project for Awesome. Hank and John Green’s basic idea was to get people (Nerdfighters) to post videos in support of their favorite charities on December 18. By all posting at once they would attract more attention.

It worked! The project had virtually all of the most-viewed videos on that day—shared only with Mike Huckabee, according to one of the brothers--Hank, I think, in this video. It’s about 4 minutes long, but worth watching completely for the ending.View the video here.

The project made its big splash on December 18, but it’s ongoing. There are about 4 thousand videos uploaded under the Project Awesome channel. It’s worth scrolling through several pages to see the diversity of causes represented. It’s also worth watching a few of the participant videos.

This effort reminds me of two things. One is the post I made in October in support of Blog Action Day, which focused on the environment. According to their stats, over 23 thousand posts were made that day. Some were targeted blogs like ours; but some of the best-known blogger names as well as corporate blogs also participated. This, too, was a volunteer effort, although it appears to have had back-end support from Google. So this kind of “flash mob” on the Web works in the short run. Does it create engagement with causes in the longer run? I don’t see how it can do anything less, when a person goes to the trouble to write a blog post or create a video.

The other reminder was my interesting class experience with the Gap participation in Project Red. Young people are looking for causes to believe in and support. Non-profits won’t reach or engage them by traditional methods. Both the New York Times and the Financial Times have recently written about the importance of web-base efforts to a variety of organizations.

Non-profits have work to do. Corporations and local businesses can help and support. There are two questions:
1.How to engage young people on their own ground, on their own terms.
2.How corporations can help—and how non-profits can take advantage of their help—without seeming (being) crass.

Witness the frenzy over “green” at the moment and the hype and misinformation that sometimes accompanies it. How can we do better?

Your thoughts?

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Does the Marketing World Need a Blog Council?

Once again I owe one of my students, Amy Yen, a vote of thanks for turning up an important new web activity. A group of corporate leaders has formed The Blog Council, “dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging” under the leadership of Andy Sternovitz, CEO of WOM consultancy GasPedal. The founding members are a roster of leading corporate names, many of which are already well known for the success of their blogging efforts.

With a blog that’s dedicated to exploring marketing applications of social media, in which I’ve written about blog transparency, I couldn’t be more pleased to know there’s a best practices group. I’m fortunate to contribute to a major corporate vertical blog, eBrandMarketing, while I interact with smaller businesses and non-profit organizations. In a nutshell, large corporations need a way to engage with their customers. Smaller businesses and non-profits need a way to get their message out in an environment where mass media are expensive and increasingly ineffective.

However, we all know there’s a tremendous amount of hesitance to “join the conversation”— with thanks to Joseph Jaffe whose phrase (and book) I find to perfectly capture the spirit. I don’t think it’s any more true of large or small organizations. All are wary. Many have spent years building their businesses and brands and are reluctant to open them up to new media. It’s a scary world they don’t know much about. The smaller ones and the non-profits, however, have fewer resources to devote to learning about it and in some ways they need the access even more.

So I wish the new Blog Council well. In creating an environment where they can openly and freely discuss best practices, I hope they’ll also consider how to share their expertise with a broad set of marketers who need guidance even though some of them don’t even know it yet.
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Announcing a New Blog

I'm happy to announce that a new vertical blog sponsored by Glam Media launched just last night. eBrand Marketing has an interesting line-up of authors and you can expect it to be a lively and informative look at ebranding, especially in the context of marketing to women.

You may be familiar with Glam Media. Their website Glam has recently become the web traffic leader in the women's space. It has lots of good content and Web 2.0 features.

I'll be making today's post there with some new data on video. We hope you'll check it out and come back often!

Blog Transparency

One shouldn’t believe everything they read in blogs—except mine of course! But seriously, blog posts are the product of individuals and they may or may not be factually correct, complete, or unbiased. In evaluating user generated content of any kind, I think triangulation is the best approach; if two, or better three, sources agree, then you can have some credence in the content. Do you, for example, read just one product review before making up your mind to buy or not to buy? If you need a quick read on a blog, try Nielsen BuzzMetrics new blog profile tool.

What if you are blogging or participating in some other social media? How do you build trust? The operative word today is “transparency,” but what does imply about our actions? As you might guess, user generated content and its impact on information has been an important topic among journalists. Here’s a recent post that summarizes journalistic issues nicely.

I recently became aware of guidelines posted by the Ogilvy PR group that are worth the attention of all content creators. Some are relevant to people posting in a corporate environment. Companies could use them as a foundation for their own policies. Some are also relevant to the unfettered individual blogger. We should pay careful attention to the following:

• Acknowledge and Correct Mistakes Quickly. We all make them. Acknowledge them, correct them, and move on.

• Know Thy Neighbor. To make your blog authoritative you need to know who else is blogging about similar subjects. Find out who is blogging about what on search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search and Nielsen Blog Pulse. Ogilvy suggests introducing yourself and trying to form alliances. Good idea!

• Use a Disclaimer. Make it clear where you are coming from and what your affiliations are. Even on a personal blog, you may need to separate your personal views from the official positions of your employer. Or your employer may require it. You should check.

• Conduct Quality Assurance. This is the standard advice to all writers, and we all forget it sometimes. Make your posts focus, concise, logical and don’t forget to use spell check. To my disgust, Word’s little green lines are usually correct when identifying grammatical errors.

Ogilvy has gone further and issued guidelines for its PR people when contacting bloggers. All bloggers should read and heed to avoid being used by unscrupulous publicity seekers.

Accenture has been studying trust, especially on the Internet, for some time. A good article is “The Economic Value of Trust.” Prof. John Urban has a step-by-step approach complete with case studies. Everyone makes the point that it takes sustained effort over time to build trust. It can be destroyed with one ill-advised action.

Remember the Wal-Mart blogs and the PR company behind them? The “Wal-Marting Across America” blog purportedly recounted the journey of a couple who parked their RV in Wal-Mart parking lots to shop and take pictures of happy customers and employees. It was all a fake. Wal-Mart pulled the blog and Richard Edelman, president of the PR firm, apologized publicly. Bloggers quickly labeled them "flogs."

In this age of user generated content, if you are not truthful, someone is likely to find it out quickly. And they’ll post it on the Internet.

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Corporate Blogging--The Good and The Ugly

Many of us remember Dell and its customer service problems. One customer’s issues were highlighted on Jeff Jarvis’s popular blog and spread like wildfire across the web during the summer of 2005. His original post had 253 comments and some of his later posts had even more.


This is a “listening (not) to the voice of the customer” problem. My sense is that Dell was very good at it when their customers were large B2B enterprises. When the Internet allowed them to profitably sell to individuals, they took advantage of it. However, they didn’t recast their customer service operation to deal with consumers. Worse, they ignored the 2005 firestorm on the web for several months. When they did respond, it seemed a bit tentative.


But they were learning. When laptop batteries began to spontaneously erupt in flames in the summer of 2006, they were paying attention. They posted news of the recall on their blog, as well as on the Dell website, although critics argued they should have acted more quickly.


The Direct2Dell blog remains active and generates quite a bit of customer response. But Dell is looking for more. Their IdeaStorm minisite actively solicits ideas from customers, responds to them, and creates a community environment. Can this approach work in, say, a consumer packaged-goods environment? How can companies deal with the legal liability “you stole my idea” issue?


That’s the good, when we can learn from our mistakes and oversights. On to the ugly. Many of you know that John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, was ‘outed’ for posting negative comments about competitor Wild Oats on a Yahoo! bulletin board under an assumed name. The problem came to light when Whole Foods made an offer to acquire Wild Oats. It looks as if the fall-out for Mr. Mackey personally and perhaps for the Whole Foods brand reputation may not be over. The case was made a poster child for bad corporate behavior at a recent NARC conference, with a representative from the FTC giving useful guidelines for staying out of trouble. Corporate bloggers should read (Media Post, free registration required) and heed.