Blogcouncil is dead, long live Social Media Business Council!

Of course, we knew already about it, but it’s been made public only recently that the late Blog Council has changed its name to Social Media Business Council (aka SMBC). We are very pleased to be able to relay that information (note: I am a proud member of smbc) and we wish our friend Bob (picture below) and the whole council a lot of successful un-conferences and blogwell meetings.

The aim of the name change is I believe obvious, that is to say to send a clear message to the business community – and the social media community – that social media isn’t just about Corporate blogging, it’s about a much broader range of subjects and tools including micro-blogging, social networking and others. This however – I can almost hear a few giggles here and there – that Corporate blogging is over and that we made a mistake by promoting Corporate blogging. Nothing could be more false. It means that Corporate blogging is one of the tools – and a powerful one at that – and that it cannot stand on its own without a few others on the side.

For your benefit, here’s the press announcement made by the Blog C… sorry, the Social Media Business Council

Blog Council becomes the Social Media Business Council, moves to SocialMedia.org

Posted by on June 30, 2009

Big news from all of us here at GasPedal and the newly renamed Blog Council: Our community for social media leaders at large companies has officially changed its name to the Social Media Business Council and has moved from BlogCouncil.org to SocialMedia.org. Here’s the press release with more details:

Chicago, IL — The Blog Council, a community of social media leaders at large companies, has officially changed its name to the Social Media Business Council and will call SocialMedia.org its new online home.

“Every day, our members share advice on how to build successful, scalable and self-sufficient social media programs,” said Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Social Media Business Council and its parent company, GasPedal. “This new name and domain better reflect the wide range of issues our community focuses on.”

The name change was a collaborative effort, with members sharing dozens of name suggestions before selecting Social Media Business Council through a vote at Member Meeting 4 in New York City.

• read more on the blog of the Social Media Business Council

note: picture courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/hyku/ on Flickr, this picture was made available by its author under the Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic creative common licence.

 

media-aces: evangelising about Corporate social media in Europe

http://media-aces.org blog now open

Media-aces.org is the blog which will underpin our new club of European social media enterprise experts. This isn’t just another blog about web 2.0, but the platform which we will use in order to evangelise about social media and how important it is in the business world.

• read on at http://media-aces.org

 

6 steps to valuable Internet content (unabridged)

6 steps to valuable Internet Content

important notice: this is the unabridged version of a post first published on bnet.co.uk

After a decade and a half of evangelisation by the likes of Seth Godin (re his book entitled: Permission Marketing) and those who followed in his footsteps, Marketers are now finally waking up to the idea that pre-formatted communications aren’t the right way to engage with customers (re Forrester’s Laura Ramos’s report on why Marketers, even in B2B have to get to grips with a new communications paradigm). So now is the time to hone these story-telling skills in your Marketing department and write valuable content for the Web. But what do I mean by valuable content? I mean content that brings value to your visitors, which could possibly initiate discussions, questions and comments (I’m talking about articulate comments, not cyber-babble).

In this article, I have expressed my views about writing for the web (also summed up in a creative commons slideshare presentation per below), based on what I have been able to implement successfully in the field over the past 15 years, in order to find out how that can be done:

Step 1: the idea that web text has to be terse is not a good idea

It is often said that people don’t read on screens and that as a consequence you shouldn’t write long pages and keep long stories short. There are several reasons why this is not relevant:

• If your site is performing well, most of your visits will come from search engines, not from your own links (based on my experience, I would say that ballpark figures range from 40 to 70+% of readers coming from search engines, 70% being applicable to pure content-orientated websites). And text-related search results won’t show pages with no text,
• It is true that people don’t read in the same way on the Internet (see step 3), but it is false to say that they don’t read anything on screens. Besides, when content is good they will probably print it out in order to read it offline. After all, this will not be counted as an additional visit but it is as if not more important than online reading,
• Search engines are fond of text, and indexing is based on keywords, not images, and certainly not hot air. One of the key success factors for your SEO (i.e. search engine optimisation; we’ll get back to this subject in a future post) is that the keywords your visitors will be searching for will be present in your pages more than once. If your text is too short and doesn’t comprise these keywords, it is bound to remain the Internet’s best kept secret,
• A good story doesn’t depend on its length, but on the author’s ability to retain the attention of his readers. Otherwise, many a classic novel would have been banned due to excessive length and numerous repetitions.

To sum it up in a few words, if your text is too concise, it won’t be seen by your visitors because most chances are that they will never even land on your page (QED).

Step 2: spice up your text with images, not the other way round

(note: that is to say if your website isn’t about paintings or photography or luxury goods )

I have often found that people are mesmerised by pictures. Yet, there are a few problems associated with this:

• First and foremost, you might see the pictures but search engines won’t. OK, Google has an image option but the way that images are indexed on Google is dependent on the text that surrounds them (amongst other elements we’ll describe in a post dedicated to search engine optimisation),
• Flash animations aren’t really a good idea. Since the 1990’s I have seen several cyclical trends with regard to Flash technology. Every once in a while, a flurry of flash-based websites will crop up and then disappear because they are mostly irrelevant, unmaintainable and above all unseen by search engines. There are statements all over the Web mantioning that flash animations are indexed but this is only partially true. Lastly, visitors hate flash animations, if I judge by all the comments I see in the surveys I carried out on the subject. I would recommend that you use flash technology only when it’s really needed, for high-end luxury products for instance, or art-related websites, and also for interactive presentations/applications which bring actual value-add to the visit process,
• Large pictures placed on a web page tend to kill the text around and below them (more details on pictures and eye-tracking here). All the eye-tracking tests I have seen performed on this particular subject tend to converge and even e-commerce websites are falling prey to this kind of issues. When asked to click a promotional link for instance, users usually avoid clicking on the large banners that have been installed for that purpose – even very visibly – on the web page. At best they will see that an animation is moving but they will seldom read it and click it. Is this a valid explanation for the very poor ratios delivered by advertising banners? This remains an open question.

Step 3: hypertext, hypertext, hypertext

What Sir Tim Berners Lee has to be remembered for is not the Internet (which was created in the 1960’s) but the http protocol which enables html pages (themselves an evolution of the sgml publication language) to contain rich text for online publication. Most of our readers will probably not know that the ‘ht’ in http is an abbreviation for hypertext, i.e. the ability to transform a text into a hot link which will take you to another page/image/etc. called a URL (unique resource location). Without html, the web wouldn’t exist, so I fail to understand why so many communications and media professionals still want to build websites in which there are no links.

As a consequence, when creating a new web page, one should immediately think about not just adding links to it, but actually shaping the content around those links.

Jakob Nielsen – probably the world’s most revered web usability expert – is proving the point on his page (http://useit.com) on which no images exist but in which all the text of the home page is made of links. Internal links, external links, links to videos, glossaries, resources, partners, podcasts etc. the list of possibilities is endless. And all link-less websites should be ditched immediately.

The web is not a place for a cut and paste from your Corporate paper brochures, there is no value for your visitors in doing that, and they won’t come back to your website if you do this.

Step 4: Good content shows in the title

Often I see product managers coming to me with requests about their web page and when talking to them I realise that they haven’t really thought of the people who will be visiting these pages. They keep their minds focused on their product names but they fail to ask themselves two important questions:

1. What is the generic terminology for my product vs the product name which net users will only use if they know it,
2. What is the problem that my product is trying to solve (Michael Bosworth would have used the term ‘painpoint’) which I could describe here (see step 6 for details).

And most of the time, I can tell from the title of the page that these elements, and possibly many other Marketing aspects which have nothing to do with the web, have been overlooked.

So working on the title of your page is a good place to start your Internet Marketing work for shaping web content. Please note that a good title is usually made of a combination of three keywords separated with hyphens or commas.

(note: As understanding SEO means knowing how to search for information, I would recommend that you read this article about information tracking on the Internet).

Step 5: Keywords mean a lot

Once a good title has been found, one can start working on the keywords that we would like to see indexed by Google. If those keywords are nowhere to be found in the page, then you stand absolutely no chance of being indexed properly by Google and other search engines (keyword tracking tool available here, courtesy of Google).

A keyword is a combination of words, in which the order will matter (as an aside, foreigners using accented words will face another challenge, for accented words are indexed separately from non-accented ones. e.g. “café” is not identical to “cafe” for a search engine).

And keywords mean a lot, not just about what you are describing, but about what net users are searching, the problems they have, the solutions they are looking for and even who they are. Keywords will tell you a lot about your users/visitors.

Step 6: Creating valuable content

So now that we have taken all first 5 steps into account, it is now possible for us to work on building valuable content for our web pages and to focus on our visitors. We can split the latter into 3 different categories:

1. Your client/visitor understands his/her problem, and has identified a solution: detailed, straightforward product/solutions descriptions should be made available to address this requirement. Diagrams should be plentiful, descriptions should be clear, technical terms defined in a glossary. Interactive applications can also be developed so as to facilitate clients’ choices and search when there are many devices for instance,
2. Your client/visitor knows he has a problem but isn’t aware that a solution exists, in which case his/her point of entry will be the focus on the problem via a search engine. Your buyer or influencer will browse the web in order to find information relevant to his/her problem and he/she will use the keywords that are relevant to this particular problem. Putting yourself in the shoes of your client/visitor will help you guess what these keywords could be,
3. Your client/buyer doesn’t even know that he/she has a problem, let alone that a solution exists and that you are selling it. Attracting buyers and influencers of that kind to your website will require more effort than just shifting your boxes. Most ICT vendors know this situation, since type 3 customers are probably the most numerous, and it’s often dubbed evangelisation. Evangelisation is when you have to prove to your client that this solution he/she hadn’t thought about is bound to solve a problem he/she didn’t know he/she had. And the best way to do that is to demonstrate the problem, either through ROI analysis, consulting, or even what is called opportunity assessments (engagements in which clients are shown that a problem exists and that solutions can be found). Your website can also act as an opportunity assessment (see outsourcing example available here) if you build your pages in order to target this population and demonstrate that the problem exists. Those pages will mostly be aimed at the ecosystem of your clients, and your content will have to be usable by this ecosystem (namely by consultants) who can in their turn use it to advise their clients.

 

near real-life 3D avatars: killer application or virtual scarecrow?

3D animations from photos by motion portrait

We have already covered the subject of 3D avatars aka IVA’s (Intelligent Virtual Agents) for business on this blog.

Motion Portrait in Japan is taking this one step further with the ability to turn a 2D picture into a fully-fledged 3D intelligent animation. The result is awesome and can be seen on their home page at  http://www.motionportrait.com/e/. If you refresh that page you’ll see different versions of the same avatar, with different accessories (fuzzy-haired wig, moustache and thick eyebrows,  spectacles or plain 3D animation).

Very impressive indeed, and also a bit weird to a certain extent in so far as it is very close to a real person and therefore very strange. Motion Portrait also offer manga-style IVA’s or other formats. Their IVA’s aren’t just made for web pages but can be adapted for mobile phones, TV programmes and game consoles.

 

Blogwell #3 presentation by Nokia’s Molly Schonthal

  
Blogwell in NYC (photo by Yann Gourvennec)

The second blogwell presentation at Blogwell #3 which took place on April 29 in NYC, was that of Molly Schonthal from Nokia, who is in charge of social media for the Finnish cell phone manufacturer in the US, and also one of our representatives of the blog Council.

Molly’s presentation was truly outstanding, there were so many questions and answers at the end of the presentation that I’ve had a hard time trying to keep track of them all, but a good many of them will be transcribed in this post anyway.

The presentation was entitled “from broadcast to social media”. And it started with references to Tara Hunt’s latest book, “the Whuffie factor”, on which we have already had an opportunity to comment on this very blog (click here for an interview of Tara Hunt about her new book).

Molly insisted on the fact that “what is difficult for a big company is ‘listening’, participating openly and respectfully.” It might in fact sound to be an obvious thing to do, but it’s not always for a large organisation, for it is so easy to be concentrated on one’s internal organisational issues and forget about one’s clients. So what are the changes as a big organisation is facing when trying to engage in different kinds of relationships with its customers and ecosystem?

1.  One has to think, Molly says, not in terms of technological adoption, but of “psychological adoption”. Web 2.0, she says, is not difficult from a technical point of view, and it can be set up in a matter of seconds. But working with communities can take a lot longer than that.

2.  Her second point is just about that, when she says that “building networks take time”. And, “it does not follow the principles of normal press relations”. She even coined the phrase “social release” which she opposed to press release. What it takes is actually creating messages that are relevant to influencers. And to stop and listen and engage. And she also insisted upon the fact that collaboration is about “cross functional interactions which are at the heart of success”.

What Molly and Nokia’s teams have been able to achieve in the field of social media is just awesome. Here are just a few examples which I have been able to catch up on the catch on the fly:

1. Nokia encouraged the widespread adoption of 2.0 tools internally,
2. Nokia developed what they called an “infopedia” internally. This is some sort of Wikipedia, but it is internal. It was actually instrumental in getting Nokia employees to understand what a wiki is what a blog is etc.,
3. Nokia also created a blog hub: all internal blog content was focussed in one place that is to say that access is granted to what employees are talking about, sharing thoughts and ideas,
4. An internal webTV was also created, which is some sort of youtube which enables employees to upload, invent and discuss,
5. externally, blogs have also been rolled out, therefore enabling conversations about Nokia products. They also created a platform called “blogbites”, which enables them to generate three-minute podcasts from existing text.”

Engaging with influencers is also a very important item on the Nokia agenda, and they are engaging with them on events, such as SXSW09.

Molly also insisted on what she called the blogger test centre tour which actually consisted in sending bloggers to two different countries. The stories were published in leading blogs such as Gizmodo, Techcrunch, the BBC etc. A 500,000 audience reach was achieved for that event in 2 geographical areas (the UK and Australia).

As a conclusion Molly insisted upon the fact that one had to allow company culture to evolve, beyond “PowerPoint slides with bullets in them”. (Reminiscent of an article I published a long time ago with the help of Giancarlo, and which was entitled PowerPointitis)

questions and answers

1. how are you selecting bloggers for your events?

Few people can be admitted in the test centre. Loads of explanations about temperatures were given (Nokia phones had to resist all kinds of temperatures, perform the lowest to the highest). The Nokia lab folks were also very excited about the idea and about the ability to interact with real people. The way that Nokia organised this was very straightforward. All Nokia had to do was to “invite them and be nice with them”.

2. measurements?

It is very hard to track results back to sales, Molly says. They do do some monitoring at Nokia, and then look at the number of people and followers (Nokia has more than 500 followers on twitter). Another question was, “how did you convince managers?” Molly responded to that: “our company understands the value of social media”, which is great support what she and her teams are doing at Nokia across the world for social media. She also insisted that social media produces soft numbers, which do not have to be linked to sales automatically.

3. what is the hardest thing?

The most difficult thing according to Molly Schonthal is to “listen well all the time”. It is hard to get an e-mail from a blogger/influencer, she says, because it always has to be taken as an emergency. “One has to stop,” she adds, it’s a “personal challenge”. Raising expectations is an issue (a phrase which I heard often times pronounced during this blogwell session). Planning is also a major issue: “one has to avoid formatting” she adds (mainly on twitter)

4. what are your worries about accountability?

Molly says that Nokia never “discloses private information, earnings, confidential information etc.” But that in the long run, some “of that could happen with maturity” and that “Nokia’s people and managers are not hindered by fear”. (I take this opportunity to link back to the minutes of a previous blogwell session in San Jose which was facilitated by Ken Kaplan from Intel about fear and social media)

5. how do you handle comments?

“You cannot say you’re open and honest and stop people from saying things” Molly rightfully points out. So, you will have to assume that some of the comments won’t always be coming your way and you’ll have to take it like a man.

6. what is the difference between press and social media release?

Molly says that social media release comes with some video plus a bunch of pictures and multimedia files to download and text which is more appropriate for blogs. It is true that more and more packages such as these are made available on the market by agencies on behalf of big businesses.

8. what about smaller bloggers?

There is more than one approach, Molly says, and we hope to do it again with more folks.

9. responding to external comments?

Molly says that you have to ask yourself two questions:

• one: do you have to respond to it? The answer may not always be yes
• two: disclosure: “this is Molly from Nokia, and this is my personal opinion.” Is the phrase which should be used (I would also recommend that you go back to and these recommendations on disclosure)

 

Microsoft at blogwell 3 : listening in the social media era

The first presentation at BlogWell number three in New York, was that of Nestor Portillo, worldwide director of community and online support for Microsoft. There are hundreds of products and services at Microsoft, and by global operations, Microsoft means that it has direct presence in 80 countries. There are many forums in which one can answer questions and initiate conversations, and to be honest, this is not really new to Microsoft.

Internally, there are more than 5000 blogs at Microsoft already, which are aimed at tackling various subjects such as technology, products and services. Some are team blogs, some individual blogs some are Corporate blogs and so on and there are even blogs for some of Microsoft’s VP’s. Mr. Portillo was involved in social media three years ago are, which means actually working on blogs, twitter etc.

• read on at http://blogs.orange-business.com

 

why big business needs social media … under certain conditions

 

Kogart House in Andrassy Ut in Budapest - Digital Marketing Forum 2009

 

On May 5, 2009 I was invited to deliver a presentation at the Digital Marketing Forum in Budapest, Hungary. The seminar was chaired and facilitated by fellow LinkedIn networker, Marketing expert and professional presenter Davig Hughes (apparently an amateur surfboarder too). 

The presentation is also made available online at Slideshare.net:

 

 

Tara Hunt on Social Media: The Whuffie Factor

Tara Hunt (pic Lane Hartwell, all rights reserved)

Tara Hunt is a name that means a lot to Social Media experts but not only. Enterprise marketers are also – or should be – familiar with her earlier attempts at promoting a new form of marketing philosophy entitled Pinko Marketing, the aim of which was to prolong the work that had been initiated by the cluetrain manifesto team at the end of the 1990’s.

Beside her involvement in Barcamp and the coworking project, the San Francisco-based Canadian online marketer has got back to writing a new book The Whuffie Factor which is now available in the UK. I have asked Tara to present her new opus to our BNET readers in this interview.

Read on at http://blogs.orange-business.com

 

7 reasons why the business world hates social media

social media

note: this is an unabridged version of my article publihed on Bnet.co.uk

 In our previous article about social media, we have described the 8 reasons why managers love social media and we have also debunked a few commonplace myths. In this new instalment we’ll look at the flip side of corporate social media perception, the negative one, and we will also discuss the rationale behind each of these arguments.

• #1.  All these online conversations could be dangerous, we’ll be losing control”: it’s true that social media is about employees, clients, partners and members of all kinds of eco systems talking to one another. There is often that perception that these conversations might lead to the disparagement of the brand. Such discussions are often perceived negatively by managers, as if they didn’t feel quite sure about how reliable or likable their brand actually is. Hence they fail to assess and nurture brand loyalty through these discussions, although such discussions are often led by volunteers and afficionados. Also, in essence, this is what a brand is all about. A brand is what your clients “say about you when you’re not in the room” (probably by Jeff Bezos but the source is unclear and many versions of that quotation exist). And such discussions, good or bad, are bound to happen anyway, for social media (aka web 2.0) has made free expression available to all Internet users. Use social media to harness all these discussions rather than pretending you can prevent them. There are more opportunities than risks associated with it when you think about it. As Intel’s Ken Kaplan once declared at a 2008 Blogwell conference in San Jose : “social media is not something to fear but to embrace”,
• #2. “Social media is a legal minefield”: a good proportion of the managers who are opposed to social media are afraid of the potential risks associated with freeform comments and trackbacks (back links to your site from external blogs/social media sites). The latter are indeed perceived as a means of injecting external content within a company’s website and managers are afraid of legal consequences. Yet, to put it in the words of my own lawyer: “a legal advisor’s role is not to frighten but to protect. Above all, we are business partners” (I like this guy!). And we did find a solution for our social media initiatives, from a legal point of view: all our blogs and community sites have been placed under a separate legal entity which led us to shift the responsability from the main entity to another. Comments and TrackBack moderation is also a good idea which should not be overseen. The issue in this instance is about prevention, not irrational fears. And don’t forget that it’s a lot harder to address criticisms in traditional media. Comments can be moderated, unauthorised or – even better – give you an opportunity to respond,
• #3. Online negative buzz monitoring is often on most social media opponents’ radar screen too: I am flabbergasted by the ability of certain buzz monitoring software vendors who spread fear about the blogosphere around them to sell their wares. Often, if not always, the so-called Kryptonite Blogstorm example will be quoted. The very title sounds like a legend and indeed it is. The problem is that this example is grossly exaggerated. Traditional media influence can still be a lot more damaging than online media if you don’t take care. I can’t imagine the New York Times being treated as if it were a social media website. Once again, there is more opportunities than risk in social media (full story about what really happened is available here).
• #4. Managers don’t want their employees to be headhunted because of corporate blogging: so I heard one day an Exec tell me that it was out of the question that one of his most prominent consultant be seen on the Internet. I subsequently checked the blogger’s name on Google and immediately found him in LinkedIn as well as on his own personal blog. My reaction was then to encourage that blogger to blog for us. At least, now he is devoting his energy and time to promoting our company and its reputation. Besides, he knows that he is a valued employee of ours and that his work is acknowledged. One more reason to stay with us, and not leave!
• #5.  ”All that Internet stuff is not serious/businesslike, it’s just for techies”: with Internet usage penetration averaging 70% in the  UK (expressed in percentage of the total population, versus 48% in Europe, and the UK being outdone only by the nordics and the Netherlands), this is no longer true. Whereas in the 1990s, people believed that the Internet was made for train-spotters (see that picture taken from a 1996 AOL flyer), it is a sure bet nowadays that most web and social media users will be representative of the overall population. From a marketing point of view, each social media site has its target audiences. Social media is therefore a tool for doing business, as long as you are choosing the right platform for the right geography, population and/or business sector. For instance, facebook is pervasive in the UK but not in France where only top users and IT experts are logged in. LinkedIn is big in the UK but in German-speaking countries, only Xing is used, don’t even bother to invite someone on LinkedIn there, it is virtually never used. In France, Viadeo is by far the leading social network, but most IT pundits will want to be seen in LinkedIn and will snub Viadeo users. So this is complex and more segmented than it seems, and I haven’t even talked about LinkedIn groups which make it possible for you to target micro populations. Social media definitely is a business tool and a place to start networking and building partnerships,
• #6. “All that social networking stuff is a waste of (my) time”: Social networking is often getting media attention but what’s in it for business. Should business people allocate time to improve their networking skills on LinkedIn and the likes or should they consider spending more time doing proper business? The fact is that networking is the essence of business. It took me 4 years to build a serious network on LikendIn. What I mean by serious is the careful – not random – selection of new connections through their profile. And I don’t just mean people I knew and wanted to reconnect with. My purpose was to expand that network in order to increase the number of opportunities for my business activities. And I can’t count the number of opportunities leveraged by such tools, whether it meant presenting my work at a conference, or liaising with my peers, partnering with new companies or even buying new stuff I didn’t know anything about before (incidentally, my counterparts must have been able to sell things too in that process). Of course, some of these encounters were irrelevant but I’d rather focus on the positive side of things by just looking at all these interesting opportunities I was able to seize. Each time a new tool appears however, users are faced with the same problem and that is how to build (or re-build) a network of people first, before you can start reaping the benefits of such tools for business. The network of people is condition #1 for anything you do on social media platforms and it can be pretty much time-consuming mainly if you wish to target people one by one rather than inviting them all at random. As a conclusion Social media is not a waste of time unless you let yourself be driven by the tool (time-consuming tools like facebook or Twitter must be managed properly if you don’t want them to take up too much of your time). In essence, it’s not very different from what we went through at the beginning of the introduction of e-mail in the workplace. Managers started to oppose e-mail because they thought it could be a waste of time for them. But in essence, it was more of a status issue because their personal assistants used to filter all messages.
• #7. “There is no ROI in Social media and corporate blogging in particular”: this final counter argument I kept for the end of my list. As is often the case with innovations, sharp criticsms as well as very apt critical analysis of blogging initiatives such as the corporate blog report by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff are voiced. At that very time when people think they should give up (Gartner would call that moment the “trough of disillusionment”) i.e. when the hype dies away, there appears real opportunities to work on one’s ROI and reap the true benefits of the innovation in question (the “plateau of productivity” in Gartner speak). Social media is no exception to that rule. So why bother about Social media now? At times of “inflated expectations” (Gartner again) it’s hard to focus on ROI. Now that the crisis is making the ROI a must, here’s what we could add to that debate regarding social media in general and Corporate blogging in particular. 
  • Firstly the cost of investing in social media is really negligible. 
  • Secondly, the effort related to the production of the content within the framework of a blog initiative, for instance, is minimal too. In fact it does exist but it is diluted amongst the contributing experts. Social media is about user-generated content. This means that experts produce the effort as opposed to Internet managers spending vast amounts of our budget to get to the same – or even a slightly less impressive – result. And content does cost a lot of money. With user generated content I save hundreds of thousands of euros every year; what’s that for ROI?  Saying it’s free would be wrong though, but the main cost of it all is change management. And producing content is very expensive. 
  • Thirdly, now think about the benefits that we are getting from that effort: more motivated experts, better visibility for our brand, more efficient communications, direct debate between experts, and facilitation of the entire ecosystem, brand awareness and image improvement. The list is endless. 
  • At last, when I decided to ask my boss to write for the blog, I definitely solved the ROI issue because he suddenly understood that blogging enabled him to do things which were unthinkable before. What other initiative was available for him to write about his vision on Green IT to the whole world at a push of a button?

As a conclusion, social media offers so many new capabilities that it is worth making the effort to launch an initiative for your enterprise. Pitfalls exist – as with any kind of tool, be it IT or not – but there are ways to circumvent the problems so as to reap more benefits from this new way of communicating, more direct, more open, and geared towards direct open innovation with clients, partners and your ecosystem at large. If you manage to avoid misusing some of these tools and remained focussed on your business objectives, social media can then be a powerful ally to you marketing strategy. And don’t forget that rational answers to irrational fears exist too, so that you can focus on looking at the half-full glass of social marketing.

 

[En] Great customer service + Snapshots of Sony Style Space – Champs Elysées George V – Paris

A few still pics from the brand new Sony Style space in Paris, a stone’s throw from the Champs Elysées and conspicuously and strangely empty on a Saturday afternoon. Went to the Aftersales counter because I had lost one of the rubber ends of my earphones and couldn’t find a replacement. To my amazement I was given 2 free of charge and with a smile! Great customer service in a lavish, amazingly posh customer space. Individual demos in a demo room (2nd picture). The new all-in-one PCs by Sony are gorgeous and lightning fast. Sure to replace my existing PCV-V1 with one of them. If only mine could die faster, but it doesn’t it’s rock solid and still quick after 4 years.

http://visionarymarketing.com
http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com [En]
http://visionary.wordpress.com [Fr]

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Yann A Gourvennec

 

[En] Great customer service + Snapshots of Sony Style Space – Champs Elysées George V – Paris

A few still pics from the brand new Sony Style space in Paris, a stone’s throw from the Champs Elysées and conspicuously and strangely empty on a Saturday afternoon. Went to the Aftersales counter because I had lost one of the rubber ends of my earphones and couldn’t find a replacement. To my amazement I was given 2 free of charge and with a smile! Great customer service in a lavish, amazingly posh customer space. Individual demos in a demo room (2nd picture). The new all-in-one PCs by Sony are gorgeous and lightning fast. Sure to replace my existing PCV-V1 with one of them. If only mine could die faster, but it doesn’t it’s rock solid and still quick after 4 years.

http://visionarymarketing.com
http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com [En]
http://visionary.wordpress.com [Fr]

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Yann A Gourvennec

 

8 reasons why we love Social Media

I have come across many executives from various countries and diverse backgrounds and it seems that they fall in either of 2 categories: those who love and those who hate Social Media (née Web 2.0). To many a big logo, social media is fascinating in more than many ways, to others it’s a no go area for serious brands, and best left off to techies. However strong the opinions they may express, in either direction, these aren’t always backed up by fact. Let’s review some of these arguments and feel free to comment and add your thoughts. Part one of this article is dedicated to the

8 reasons why we love Social Media

• #1: Social Media holds the promise of exponential growth, as inspired by the success stories of the likes of Facebook or, more recently, twitter. It is hard not to be tempted by such a promise. Social media is also seen as a privileged way of gaining access to generation Y. But not just (re.LevGrossman’s Time magazine story entitled Why Facebook Is For Old Fogies“). Social Media may seem easy, you just have to create a Facebook account and hey presto! You’re rich and famous. Well in fact, you aren’t. Social media is a medium of its own and has its rules. Not anyone is granted that sense of cool which is going to make you immensely popular. And social media requires hard work. Really hard work, I mean it, success is not for the faint-hearted,

• #2: For brands, it is also a new way of reaching(more and better)people in a less intrusive, more personal, morelikablefashion.As a result it provides a valid response to the increasing difficulties faced by many big corporations in trying to reach target audiences because of traditional media fragmentation. Traditional top-down communications is just not appropriate anymore (to prove my point let me point you toWells Fargo’s storyand learn from their evolving means of communications by watching the videos of their US commercials over 3 decades [exhibit 1-exhibit 2]). But that’s not all. Internet users are even more exacting about your brand. You can’t just go on delivering the same old messages over and over again. So, play by the rules and be humble, writing for the internet is a job in itself and requires training,

• #3: It is more modern and fashionable than your old-fashioned website. But is it a valid argument? Just becauseSteven Fry is a heavy user of Twitter(forFry’s twitter page click here)andPosterousdoesn’t mean that your business can benefit in the same way. Let’s face the facts, Fry didn’t need twitter to become popular, for he was so long before he chose to use twitter. Not all brands can become cult brands, and likable, and going online will not just make up for years of marketing failure. Strangely enough, some very popular brands like Apple chose not to have Corporate blogs (see Forrester’s Bernoff’s comment on Apple here). Social media should be chosen not because it’s cool, but because it enables brands to initiate and engage in passionate discussions with clients and brand fanatics, or become opinion leaders or evangelists. At the end of the day, there has to be some sort of return on Engagement from social media (and please note that I didn’t mean return on Investment).But if there is no point or synergy with your brand, you should forget about it altogether,

• #4: It is – the Internet in general – more measurable (with a few minor adjustments though,but at least we can measure something). Visits can be traced, people recruited individually, newsletters and files built from nothing. Well, almost. For you to do that you’ll need to break free from that oldInternet presencesyndrome (i.e. merely reproducingonlinewhat you have done in print) and learn how the medium works. For advertising carpet bombing is not a valid strategy insocial media. And opportunities abound:Facebookoffers targeted banner ads, Netvibes makes it possible for brands tocreate their own universe(see Cap Gemini’s personalised start page), orpersonalised widgetswith guaranteed numbers of downloads, and YouTube also allows brands to personalise their YouTube channels (see Wal-Mart’s example here) etc.,

• #5: It also holds the promise of being cheap.And it’s true to a large extent. That is to say as long as you have hired the right kind of professionals who understand social media live and breathe the stuff. As #4 in this list was about highlighting the new ways chosen by social media platforms to make (or try to make) money with targeted advertising, here are a few examples which cost nothing to set up and are bringing results anyway (example 1, example 2, example 3),

• #6: At the end of the day. It also bears the promise of personalised, ‘one-to-one’ marketing by targeting ads to content and linking it to profiles.At least, it enables advertising agencies to propose performance based digital marketing campaigns either through PPC – PPL – PPA – PPS (*), which provide an alternative means of advertising content, newsletters,products or services. With such a system, enterprises no longer pay for a number of banner displays but for an actual result. Such examples exist coupled to social media websites or blogs and enable better targeting of ads,

(*) i.e. pay per click, pay per lead, pay per sales, pay per action etc.

• #7: To certain managers, social media appears often as “this stuff in which we can go so as to manipulate opinions by infiltrating social networks”. I have heard that often, and even stopped a couple of these digital gunslinging initiatives. Don’t believe that no one knows you’re a dog on the Internet because it’s not true at all. Many an Internet illiterate has tried this and it’s not even that it doesn’t work but it’s about the fact that it can really be dangerous and damaging for your brand. If you don’t believe me, just read FT’s February 2009 story entitled Blogs That Spin a Web of Deception. Disclosure is not an option for brands which want to go into social media. Read about Andy Sernovitz’s tips an trick here,

• #8: Social media appeals to many a professional marketer because markets are conversations. All Internet experts know that, except that it is not always true. High tech products (such as mobile devices for instance) trigger passionate discussions but lesser known, niche professional products or services (such as enterprise telephony or outsourcing for example) are more difficult, and that does not always have something to do with market sizes. Don’t believe for instance that setting up a community website is all that is required to kick start online discussions. The first thing that you’ll need is traffic, before more qualitative interaction can take place. Contrary to what most people think, web 2.0 is not about technology, it’s about people. Web 2.0 is not about adding widgets on your static website, only nerds can believe that.

Social media is a tremendous opportunity for Marketing managers wanting to add zest to their strategies and campaigns as long as they can decipher the myths behind social media, avoid the common traps, learn the language and hire the right kind of seasoned professionals to handle such initiatives properly.

 

8 Tools For Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Managing one’s online reputation has become a must. It is absolutely unthinkable for anyone who wants to make a professional appointment to leave a photograph on one’s facebook profile in which he or she is holding a glass of champagne and assuming weird poses (and God knows I came across quite a few counter examples). Many chances are that the person with whom you are about to have an appointment has just gone straight to ‘Google’ your name on the Internet. This is what is called online reputation (or online identity) management (abbreviated ORM), that is to say your image as it is showing online through Internet and social media exposure.

In this article I will list 8 kinds of tools which could help you work on your own online reputation, or check upon other people’s online presence.

• ORM tools #1: metasearch engines (i.e. an aggregator of all search engines) for social media such as http://samepoint.com , will help you check whether you are popular online or not. Samepoint will combine results from various sources such as social networking sites (facebook, mybloglog, linkedin, typepad, wordpress.com, blogger etc.), wikis, bookmarking sites such as delicious and others. I used my own example and I found out my samepoint request could produce up to 1000 results. This is not very surprising in fact, because this is the effect of my online work for the past 15 years. Internet presence takes time to develop, even though impressive results can be obtained very rapidly if you are committed to working on it. What is interesting too is that samepoint shows whether your documents contain ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ keywords. Very few ‘negative keywords’ were found in my case and this is not coming as a surprise either, as it has also been my choice from day one not to communicate online on anything negative or overly critical. Another example of a metasearch social media engine is http://socialmention.com which also deduces a social ranking from the results although it is difficult to relate that ranking to the quality of your work. Social media pundit Guy Kawasaki has reached a ranking of 89/100, and he certainly raises the bar very high given his frantic online activity (Guy has 77,916 followers on twitter as of today),
• ORM tools #2: blog search engines such as technorati or http://blogsearch.google.com make up the second kind of tools which you can use to manage your online reputation. Obviously, the more your write on blogs, including other people’s blogs of course, not just your own, the better your chances to increase your online reputation. Eventually, you will establish the credibility through your writing. For instance, many a CV-related issue in job-seeking can be circumvented in that way (here’s the result of my research on ‘marketing & innovation’ which shows that my blog comes in pole position, just above my Belgian friends from future lab). Thus, writing in blogs can actually position you on top of search engine results without having to pay for anything (this is commonly described as SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimisation), but it also means that you are producing content on a regular basis, not just from time to time,
• ORM tools #3: news search engines such as Google News which are not only scouring the Net for information from newspapers and press releases but blogs too – as long as they have been deemed reliable sources by the Google people. For your blog to be taken into account by Google you would have to go through the manual process of getting your blog registered. Finding the right place for you to submit your URL can be a bit tricky, so here’s the link which will make you save time. Please note that not all blogs are allowed to join the Google News list of reliable sources and that it is a manual process. Within hours of my main blog being accepted by Google News I received a phone call from the people monitoring employee blogs in my company to congratulate me for being registered,
• ORM tools #4:some other search engines look for comments you may have entered on social media sites. http://www.backtype.com for instance, shows a relative low number of comments in my case. This can be explained by the fact that I’m rarely using my own name in comments, even on my own websites and blogs (I prefer to use my brand name so as to enhance the reputation of my website on search engines),
• ORM tools #5: forum search engines. They are a good example is available at bigboards or Google Groups. In my case, little or nothing is showing through search engines for I very rarely go to forums (if I do wish to enter a personal comment on any of them however, I usually don’t enter my name in full for the particular reason that I don’t want it to show. Comments in B2C forums can sometimes be pretty direct and they don’t always provide real value with regard to your online reputation. As to expert forums and technical forums however, they can be very instrumental in publicising your expertise). One thing is worthy of note: comments in forums are online for a very long time, hence the reason why you should be very careful about them. Here’s an anecdote about that: I once entered a comment about Internet set-top boxes on a consumer forum in 1996, which I later regretted, and it took me at least 5 years to make it disappear. In fact in never really disappeared, I merely added more comments on top of that one. Actually, Google Groups will still show comments I made way back 1996, and my former e-mail address – no longer in use fortunately – is also showing through Google. As a conclusion, traces are left everywhere on the Internet, one should be very careful about that,
• ORM tools #6: the next category is micro-blogging search engines such as http://search.twitter.com which scans the most popular micro-blogging engine www.twitter.com. that’s how you can recap on someone’s tweets or even trace those who forwarded or commented on your tweets or blog posts,
• ORM tools #7: this category consists of social network aggregators such as Yahoo’s outstanding Mybloglog social website which enables you to link your blog to others and make friends with other bloggers and promote your articles,
• ORM tools #8: this is the final category of online reputation tools which I’d like to present here, and it is that of people-centric search engines. I would namely recommend http://www.123people.com. One of the biggest issues with social media is that you are entering profile information in all sorts of different places and cannot point people to a single page which merges all this data from various sources and delivers an executive summary. This kind of search engines just does that for you. It will mix all the sources of information from the Internet – including multimedia files – which are related to you and merge them into a mash-up. You can have a look at my own 123people example here. Sometimes results are a bit weird because they show photos of other people which have nothing to do with you. One may actually prefer another tool such as zoominfo which can show more accurate results. In zoominfo, once you have signed up, you will be also able to claim ownership of your profile (through the “reclaim profile” option), which will give you an opportunity to gain control over it. My zoominfo profile can be seen by clicking here.

As a result, you now have evidence that you are leaving traces about yourself all over the Internet. To a large extent, in the past 4 or 5 years (mostly since 2004), social media has even exponentially increased that issue. Now you also have the means – with this very simple toolbox – not just to evaluate your current online reputation but to actually do something about it, as well as communicate positive information about yourself and actually shape your online image.

Down to business now, and remember that there is no erase and rewind button on the Internet!

 

Futurelab’s Thys: in innovation “the wrong questions turn out to be the right questions”

Alain Thys: a relentless innovator and profit-tracker

On March 4th, 2009, I was able to meet and have breakfast with, at last and after a few missed opportunities,  Alain Thys in Paris. Alain is one of the partners of futurelab, a consultancy based in Belgium (of which he originates) together with fellow Stefan kolle. I can’t actually remember when,or how we came across each other, but it is bound to be on the web, and that’s probably how we ended up cooperating on the Futurelab blog by the way.

 

What I know though is that Alain is the author of one of the most important Marketing presentations that I have seen at slideshare.net, which I keep using over and over again, and is entitled marketing accountability (you will find the direct access to the presentation at the end of this article). Alain Thys’s biography is also very interesting.

He describes himself as a “shopkeeper”. He has had extensive experience in European advertising and marketing at companies like Mexx and Reebok. He was in charge of marketing at Reebok Belgium for a while, when it was decided to merge it into the Dutch arm of the company, at the beginning of the 1990s, and that’s when the Internet arrived. It is also when Alain discovered these “funny computers” and the things that we could do with them. A 3-year stint in the Netherlands at the head of the Reebok  marketing unit ended up in a re-org and a sabbatical in Mexico (lucky him!).

At the beginning of the year 2000, he then decided to go into start-up mode and work for a joint-venture in which AOL, and LVMH (Louis Vuitton) were involved. Their new plan was a groundbreaking online idea for the travel industry. This was “way ahead of what was done in those days with regard to online travel”. In fact, it was a bit like à la carte holiday packages, what is commonly described nowadays as dynamic packaging (although very little of it is still to be seen in the field, which means that it’s still ahead of its time).

The usual cash burning story about 2000 bubble start-ups is unfortunately repeated in this venture of Alain’s: a $130 cost per customer was leading unfortunately to a meagre revenue of $16, hardly enough to generate profit. Vision doesn’t always lead to profitability, but there is one thing about visionary people, is that they shall never be deterred. And that’s exactly why Alain decided to move on to the next idea. So he started a new incubator for e-payment in Ireland, related to mobile payment. He admitted to having a lot of fun creating the new start-up, and he did this for a couple of years before joining a media group in Belgium in 2004-5.

This media group, itself a media pioneer in Belgium, led Alain Thys to focus on “creating new things and generating new profits”. He admitted to “not being very knowledgeable about the Internet world” which actually led him to ask “the wrong questions, which turned out to be the right questions”.

Alain was lucky enough to actually see the Internet at its inception, he grew with it (not exactly generation Y though). And he learned as he was going along. As matter of fact, and to be honest with him and yourself, everybody’s learning as we are going along in this market (a case of the blind leading the blind I guess).

He then created futurelab in 2005, and Stefan joined him in this transition period. Futurelab is a consultancy geared towards “generating new profits out of marketing and innovation”. This consultancy is actually working very much based on word-of-mouth, and is expanding across Europe, doing little or no cold-calling or direct marketing. But it is taking WOM to the next level with the help of the Internet.

Their work is mostly based around marketing strategy consulting, and their aim is to “generate profit through innovation and customer centricity”. Future lab’s objective is actually to “deliver on that promise of a value to the customer”. He described innovation as being “doing something differently, and that you haven’t done before.” But he also has profitability in mind.

Alain Thys declares that “in 80% of current projects, we see marketing & innovation fail in that respect”. When asked about the reasons why such an obvious metric is actually not taken into account, which seems zanyish and at the same time is happening on a daily basis, he answers thus:

1. it is either that people forget about the bottom line altogether. However, there must be some sort of payback on innovation,
2. the second reason why innovation fails is that most innovators “forget about what it means to the customer.”

So, Alain adds, very often, “what is needed is a different perspective, and this is when consultants become really useful”.

Most of Futurelab’s business is done through word-of-mouth using their Internet website and blog, an incredibly comprehensive digest of the most authoritative Internet and blog writers about innovation, which can be found online. The blog is available at http://blog.futurelab.net and shouldn’t be missed. I would also recommend Alain’s set of slides which are available and downloadable in creative Commons format from sideshare.net.

 

economic downturn shouldn’t deter job seekers bnet expert says

Catherine Hearn - a seasoned expert at Heidrick & Struggles, an exec search company, and a Bnet columnist,  has this interesting story on Bnet about job seeking in the current downturn. And I think she has a very valid point. After all, if an executive search is saying that there are very interesting jobs to be had out there in the cold, she must be right. 

At the same time, the virtually never ending gloom echoed by the press, namely in the UK and especially on the BBC, is somewhat weighing thick on the morale of not only job seekers but people in employment too. 

Come on people, keep your chin up!

• Read on at Bnet.co.uk by clicking here

 

enterprise 2.0: are you ready for the Yammer take-off?

this is the latest post from our friend Rob Evans. Rob is an expert blogger and he joined the Orange Blog Live community recently. The reason why I’m relaying this post is that Rob is describing here how Yammer is becoming really big in the business community. Yammer being a new micro-blogging platform to which employees can register using their business e-mail address. The suffix of your e-mail address (@ibm.com, @hp.com etc.) is the tag which will automatically identify you as part of a Corporate community. And it’s true that Yammer is catching like wildfire.

Now guess what! Rob and I got in contact precisely through Yammer and this is how he ended up enlisting in our blog initiative. Did you need a proof that Yammer is a great tool?

Over to Rob now:

Will Yammer follow hot on the heels of Twitter? by Rob Evans (Orange Business Services)

Use of Twitter, the micro-blogging web-site that allows people to post 140-character updates, has exploded in the UK over the last few months; traffic to the site increased by a staggering 974% over the past year according to Techcrunch UK. The site itself now ranks as the 291^st most visited site in the UK, and was described by the Telegraph as the best known microblogging site:

Twitter is probably the best known of all the “microblogging” sites, and it has been incredibly popular with geeks and the technorati since it launched in 2006. People post messages to the site, either via the web or by text message, and these “tweets” are forwarded on to their network of friends and contacts

Twitter’s seminal moment in the UK was on the Jonathan Ross show on the 23rd of January . This show marked the return of Jonathan Ross following an “enforced holiday”. Both the presenter and his guest Stephen Fry- a self-confessed geek and blogger- are avid users of Twitter, and on the show they discussed how the site works and how they use it.

>> Read on at the Orange Business Live Blog http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/

 

Social Media: Beyond the ROI issue

the Blog Council logo

Below is the contribution which I sent to the council on behalf of Orange Business Services.

With the advent of the Internet since the middle of the 1990s, users have become used to not only getting what they want online, but also to being able to participate and interact with each other. 15 years later, the widespread use of the Internet as a source of information and also a place where users can help each other and solve each other’s problems has changed the face of commerce, of organizations, and even relationships within the hierarchy. In view of these changes which have permeated every section of the outside world, enterprise communications must get to grips with the benefit from the great potential which is made available by the use of social media. The power of the Internet to connect people and get them to interact can not only be used internally, but also outwardly and ultimately with one’s customers to begin conversations in a brand new way. The expected results can extend way beyond the mere ROI issue. This is what we have experienced at Orange Business Services with our 2008 Security Blog initiative.

 

investing in innovation in times of crisis

Business week has a very brief story – relayed by innovation tools on their site – on why businesses should go on investing in innovation. Atkins argues that companies have to go on investing in innovation in order to dominate in the next decade. He is right, but unfortunately and despite the title doesn’t really explain why we – and our managers – do have to pursue the innovation effort.

The answer to that last question is in previous studies carried out by PIMS (see PIMS history in the following transcript) – included in my lecture on innovation at the Paris university. What this PIMS study is showing is that even in times of crisis, innovation is not an option. On the contrary, it is during these periods that innovation is the real driver for success. however, the return on investment is not immediate and therefore patience is required. Success for innovators who won’t give up during the current credit crunch will show – according to PIMS – in the years following the crisis through the acquisition of a few extra-points in terms of market dominance. Results will in no way happen in the short term though and this is why the real difficulty is to show managers that innovation budgets have to be maintained, let alone increased.

It is certain that the main inhibitor in that process is that managers are also driven by short-term issues in those difficult times, sometimes fighting for their own survival and therefore focussing not on innovation but on the bottom line. Hence Sir Stelios’ – the much reverred Easy group innovation – response to an interview I saw on the Beeb a few weeks ago. When asked about the current credit crunch, Sir Stelios responded (quoted from memory) “I’m afraid that business is bound to be boring again; one will have to be a lot more cautious; at the same time” he added “when the going was good, it was easy to confuse luck for skills, but from now on it will be a lot more difficult”. (note: similar feedback from Stelios in a Times article available online at this url).

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE NOTES OF MY SLIDE

Brief history of PIMS
The PIMS project was started by Sidney Schoeffler working at General Electric in the 1960s, then picked up by Harvard’s Management Science Institute in the early 1970s, and has been administered by the American Strategic Planning Institute since 1975.
It was initiated by senior managers at GE who wanted to know why some of their business units were more profitable than others. With the help of Sidney Schoeffler they set up a research project in which each of their strategic business units reported their performance on dozens of variables. This was then expanded to outside companies in the early 1970s.
The survey, between 1970 and 1983, involved 3,000 strategic business units (SBU), from 200 companies. Each SBU gave information on the market within which they operated, the products they had brought to market and the efficacy of the strategies they had implemented.
The PIMS project analysed the data they had gathered to identify the options, problems, resources and opportunities faced by each SBU. Based on the spread of each business across different industries, it was hoped that the data could be drawn upon to provide other business, in the same industry, with empirical evidence of which strategies lead to increased profitability. The database continues to be updated and drawn upon by academics and companies today.
What Pims have shown is that the impact of innovation is not immediate. mostly takes place 2 years after investment. This is why really successful companies never stop innovating (look at cisco) and don’t handle innovation as a 6-year cycle which only lasts for 2 years. It must be a continuous effort or it mustn’t be

ROCE: Return on Capital employed: ROCE is a measure of how productively a company manages its refining, marketing and transportation assets. ROCE is the ratio of operating profits generated to the amount of operating capital invested.

http://www.marathon.com/News_Center/Marathon_News/Glossary/

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/tips/archives/2009/01/why_its_time_to.html

 

Internet Information glut: a case of pearls before swine

miraculous fishing
 http://antimuseum.wordpress.com

 Poor is the substance, alas! and yet I’ve read all the books(1) was Stephane Mallarme’s introduction to “Brise Marine” a cryptic yet exalted poem in which the author was venting his Baudelairian ’spleen’ (i.e. in its archaic sense something like the modern ‘blues’ or existential malaise – Merriam & Websters meaning 3), and the urge to flee towards new horizons as if a refreshing breeze from the sea (hence the title) was enticing him to leave his home, everything mundane and above all his new-born child who kept him awake at night and prevented him from creating. Such was the thought that came to my mind when I came across Michael Kinsley’s article in Time magazine entitled ‘too much information’.

Some of Kinsley’s comments were laying the stress on a real issue which we have all – more or less – felt and witnessed. At a recent seminar I was facilitating at Insead on the subject of Marketing in the digital age, and in which I was advocating the use of Corporate blogging, one of the members of the Executive mba made that comment that there was already too much stuff out there, and that the collaborative web was responsible for “letting stupid people write about anything”. Kinsley’s approach is on that same wave-length: “the opportunity for us all to express an opinion is wonderful, having to read them all isn’t”.   

I have indeed thought a lot about that and it is true that freedom of expression is a licence for idiots to express themselves. And god knows there are many. Yet, this is also the very definition of freedom, i.e. the feeling of being “free of restraints” (American Heritage – meaning 1) but also the “exemption from the arbitrary exercise of authority” (ibid – meaning 2), be it that of a famous journalist. Freedom! Sweet freedom! Freedom to write what is right and be praised, but also freedom to write what’s false and be publically contradicted.  

“how many blogs does the world need” Kinsley adds at the end of his inflamed essay on page 56 of the celebrated American weekly (of which I am admittedly a long-term subscriber). That very sentence is resonating very badly I should say. How many people does the world need? How many graduates do we need beyond this or that school? how many countries do we need beyond the G8 members?

Countless blogs, I would respond. Countless countries, people, colours of skin, languages and ideas etc. Let them flourish. Let them flourish Mr Kinsley, for goodness sake, and if any and even many of them aren’t to your or anyone else’s liking, let the plain truth be told: it doesn’t matter as long as these ideas have been expressed freely in whatever language has been made accessible. Should there be a sense of urgency, then let’s gather as many Internet voices as we can to comment, and contradict these bloggers and prove them wrong. Should even 90% of that content be considered as drivel, I still don’t believe that you can find at least one page worth reading. And even that one page is worth fighting for.

I agree with Michael Kinsley though, when he criticises “aggregation”, which “has become the hall of mirrors”. But there are a lot of clever people out there too. Just because 99% of TV programmes is made of junk, doesn’t mean you should miss the 1% that is going to make you smarter. That rule also applies to the blogosphere.

Michael Kinsley, like Mallarmé is hitting the wrong nail. There isn’t a surfeit of Internet junk out there, there is a lot of material in which wheat has to be separated from the chaff. And this is not different from the rest of cultural sources.

But no worries, time (no pun intended), and history will sort this out for us, just as it wiped out most of the books that Mallarmé had read at the end of the 19th century and which he deemed so bad in the introduction of his poem.

Even though I agree with many if not all of Michael Kinsley’s points, one must resist that temptation to define what is right and wrong, even before one has debated the issue, for fear of making sweeping statements and missing a few gems. Freedom of expression can produce interesting results too, although there is no sure bet. At the end of the day, chance plays a major part in creation. That freedom which we have been granted, courtesy of Mr Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and friends, is so sweet that it shouldn’t be looked at as pearls being cast before swine (2).

Ironically enough, Kinsley’s article is posted online at and a digg link has been inserted (the article does not look that popular by the way) , therefore contributing to yet more Internet chaos. Maybe that suffices to prove my point.

notes:

(1) several translations of Mallarmé’s Sea Breeze (1865) are kindly made available at http://www.alsopreview.com/columns/foley/jfwilbur.htm but as Jack Foley points out, none of the translations – and even possibly his own – are satisfactory. I tried my luck with a less literal choice. If a clear example of how beneficial the web can be as to giving free rein to cultural debates and creation, Foley’s columns can certainly be bookmarked. Hats off to the poet!

(2) “give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” – KJV, Matthew 7:6. Which also reminds me of the subtitle of God Bless You Mr Rosewater by my favourite author, the late and much regretted Kurt Vonnegut.

 

The Blog Council | Here are a few trustworthy corporate blogs

Blog Council members working hard under Andy Sernovitz's supervision

Corporate blogging isn’t easy… And Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff published an interesting report about why people don’t trust most company blogs. In fact, looking closer at Josh’s comments, it’s not corportae blogs but corporate speak that clients don’t trust.

But this is no news to us. We’ve been going on about that for donkeys’ years. So now is the time that corporations react differently and start real conversations with their ecosystems (in b2b, it’s not just about clients, an average 21 persons are taking part in any one b2b decision in large 1000+ employee companies according to a Marketing Sherpa study).

So, what are the corporate blogs which can be trusted? Here’s the Blog Council’s take on the phenomenon, and guess what?! The Orange Business Live blog is one of them. Cheers to our writers!

The Blog Council | Here are a few trustworthy corporate blogs

Posted using ShareThis

 

Here are some other examples of trustworthy blogs, too (and yes, they are all Blog Council members):

• AccuQuote
• Analog Devices
• Cisco Systems
• Coca-Cola
• Dell
• General Electric
• General Motors
• Graco (Newell Rubbermaid)
• Intel
• Lenovo
• Mayo Clinic
• Molson
• Nokia
• Orange Business Services
• Petro-Canada
• Pitney Bowes
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• Rubbermaid
• SAP
• Sharpie (Newell Rubbermaid)
• Walmart
• Wells Fargo