On day 3 of the blogger bus tour we had the opportunity to meet face to face with two young start-up managers from San Francisco based Social Chorusan “influence marketing” company named Social Chorus. We were able to spend a whole hour with them and discuss influence, influencers, people-powered marketing and … “the power of the middle”, a concept which I have found particularly appealing.
Nicole Alvino (above) is SVP and co-founder of Social Chorus, she was “employee number two” in the company. Bobby Isaacson (below), senior Manager, implementation has been as Social Chorus for about three years now (he admitted “feeling like a dinosaur” which sounds strange for such a young man) and does business development that is to say that he sets up partnerships with other companies, in order to be part of their ecosystem.
Social Chorus (the company was in fact renamed in February 2012 and is the result of the merger of youcast and the halogen media group) is a social marketing/influencer platform. The main problem the company is solving is that it is virtually impossible for customers to figure out whether influencers are really influential. This is in essence, what Social Chorus is about: it provides both a tool and service for finding influencers (they might not just be bloggers, but also power twitter users for instance. There are two offices, one in New York City and one in San Francisco.
NYC and SF: a world of difference…
To European eyes, those two cities might appear very similar but in fact, according to Bobby and Nicole, they are very different. New York is more about media and advertising and agencies, whereas Silicon Valley and San Francisco have always been, at least since the seventies onwards, more about high tech. But this is not all. Mentalities are also very different. Bonding is more difficult in NYC, a very large metropolis where, according to our discussion, people and companies tend to keep things for themselves, rather than share and get together in Californian fashion. And this is what makes all the difference. As I described in my post about Rocketplace, a lot of what happens in Silicon Valley is down to the ecosystem. San Francisco has a leg up in that game. Only Boulder, Colorado and Austin, Texas are adopting the West Coast spirit our hosts both declared.
social media at the forefront of investment
Start-up investment has changed too according to Nicole. “2 years ago, investment was more into media and advertising, now it’s a lot more about social media” she said. This is changing the ball game, Nicole said, “now that agencies are becoming more social they are tending to move over to SF”.
topical and brand influencers … not who you think
Social Choris is aiming at “brands wanting to become more human and having relationships with influencers” Bobby added. But how do you identify them and how can you tell they are really influential? “it’s a combination of art and science” Bobby went on. “There are topical and brand influencers” he said. Social Chorus will traditionally tap into its 1.5 million influencers database but they might also use Kred and Klout. Sometimes the best influencers are niche bloggers through .
social media influence: the pyramid metaphor
“Imagine a pyramid” Bobby went on: “PR handles the celebs, super fans and topical bloggers are in the middle and at the bottom, you have the vast majority of fans and readers who click and comment”. They might not be bloggers, they could just be twitteres for instance. Social Chorus’s focus of the solution is measuring the impact of a conversation with influencers. Manage the relationship over time.
the “power of the middle”
As soon as I can, I will also post a video interview of Nicole in which she explains that most brands are wrong to focus on just the top celebrities. “This can become pretty expensive soon” she said. I would also add that celebrities are often too self-centred in order to be generous. All middle tier influencers on the contrary are more open and more prone to become brand advocates because they will want to develop a relationship in the long term with the brand.
only 10-20% of agencies are ready to do that for themselves
Social Chorus is working with agencies like Edelman, Ketchum and others. It’s mostly agencies who are delivering this service to clients, but there are a few clients like Gatorade for instance who do this for themselves. “What we find is that the interest in that space exceeds the knowledge of how it works” Bobby declared. As a result, only 10-20% of the brand on average are willing to do this by themselves.
One of Social Chorus’s biggest challenges though is to hire developers; there is a lot of competition for developers. A very skilled developer in the valley can be paid $100 k and even up to $ 200 k if he has very special skills it’s commonly said here. As a matter of fact, as an entrepreneur told me at an after work party last night: “the developer in question might even be paid more than the project manager he reports to!”.
Social Chorus can operate over 3 different countries: UK, US and Germany. They will soon launch a new version in 2013, which will extend the service to other countries.
For those who don’t know yet, I (as Director, Web & Social Media at Orange), I will be part of the Silicon Valley Blogger Bus Tour 2012, which will take place in September (17-22) as a blogger … and the organiser of that tour. Here is my take on why I am participating and what I am expecting to do/see there:
I’m a Jack of all trades. I’m not just a blogger, I’m also the organizer of the Tour. On this Tour we’re dealing with blogger PR in a different way than it usually is done in big companies like this.
What we do here is we partner with the bloggers : we work together as a team, and the fact that I’m also a blogger makes it possible. It’s a matter of us going over there together, reporting and sharing our enthusiasm and content.
To me this is very important : it’s how good content is produced and engrossing stories started. And I’m not even talking about the friendships that are being initiated between members. Undoubtedly those who are taking part in these tours are invited to other tours, depending on their skills and focus.
my views on the Silicon Valley Blogger Bus tour 20 12 as an organiser
We also want to look at the way we organise the tour. A member of my team is going to have a subjective look at what other bloggers are seeing, through their blogs and contents. So we’ll be able to tell a story about the story as well.
And finally, how are we going to tackle the main subject, which is innovation in the Valley? I really wanted to give a different angle about this SoLoMo (social,local,mobile) approach in the Valley, so we’re going to see many innovators to understand whether or not innovation is still thriving in the Valley although I don’t have much doubt about that, knowing how it is over there.
It’s my 7th time there and I’m sure we’re going to have an exciting time. So stay tuned to the live.orange.com and don’t miss a thing about the Orange Blogger Bus tour 2012.
For those who don’t know yet, I (as Director, Web & Social Media at Orange), I will be part of the Silicon Valley Blogger Bus Tour 2012, which will take place in September (17-22) as a blogger … and the organiser of that tour. Here is my take on why I am participating and what I am expecting to do/see there:
So this is what we want to check out on the field with a group of 13 bloggers from all around the world : France, England, Australia, China and Romania.
So this is what I’m interested in: I want to understand how innovation is thriving beyond Facebook, Twitter and Google, which are the over-hyped companies. I want to see something else.
I also want to see how this innovation is thriving through the eyes of my colleagues from around the world so I think a lot of background is going to be thrown into that.
In the telecommunications industry, everybody knows about the mobile world congress. The yearly event, which has been hosted in Barcelona for quite a few years now, is the obligatory focal point for all the players in that industry: carriers, service providers, infrastructure and equipment manufacturers, software vendors etc. In a word, this is where it all happens. The 2012 edition of MWC is bound to be even more exciting for all our live.orange.com readers because we have decided to send a team of high profile bloggers on location who will be reporting live from Barcelona. So if you want to know in near real time what is happening at MWC all you have to do is tune in to live.orange.com and read our coverage of some of the most interesting announcements as well as of what is happening behind the scenes on location. Some of our partners English, some not, but most of our content will be posted in 4 different languages as usual. Don’t forget to follow our @orange twitter account for live news about this blog and our live coverage. Let’s find out who our blogging partners are in this introductory post (in no random order):
It’s not everyday one gets someone from Asia (in this case, Australasia too) in one’s team and I have thought it to be an interesting experiment to bring in a partner from China, after a discussion with our representatives at Orange lab in Beijing. Jason Lim has been an Editor at TechNode since December 2010, a prominent Chinese tech blog written in English . Jason’s area of expertise is very broad and covers are start-ups, e-commerce and emerging technologies. Jason is also the Developer Relations Manager for AppStoreConnect, a white-label Android app store in China that powers brands such as HTC, BenQ and Wondermedia Flytouch. Before coming to China, he was a management consultant in strategy, operations and marketing as well as an accountant with Ernst & Young in Sydney, Australia. Jason currently lives in Beijing. Technode’s Twitter handle is @technodechina. for a sample post from Jason, check this piece on mobile payment on the TechNode blog
Mohamed Ali Sousissi is from Tunisia and is the facilitator of the Tunisian blog malissonline.com. Judging by the football shirt, Mohamed is bound to be a good team player. Mohamed can be traced on Twitter at @MedAliSouissi and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Mohamed.Ali.Souissi. Malissoline.com is Tunisian portal written in French which specialises in local and international high tech news. Mohamed’s positioning resides in its ability to explain the high tech world in simple terms, understandable to all.
Anybody in the French-speaking blogosphere knows (or at least knows of) Eric Dupin who is the creator and facilitator of the second to none “presse citron” blog. Presse Citron has established a serious reputation in the high tech world and it is often one of the first to break the news that side of the Channel. Eric writes in French but is fluent in English. His posts will be duly translated in other languages. Our French-speaking readers can get a flavour of “Presse Citron” at http://www.presse-citron.net/microsoft-presente-le-logo-de-windows-8, a post in which Eric and his teams disclose the forthcoming Windows 8 logo. Eric’s twitter handle is @pressecitron. Eric works and lives in Lyon, in the south of France. Eric is a long time partner of the Orange team.
Leigh Geary is the editor and founder of Coolsmartphonea well famed blog in Britain with a (very) cool domain name. Leigh is of his own admission “the one who films hands-on videos in the car” but we assure him that London Police officers aren’t reading this blog. Leigh is passionate about everything mobile, be it smartphones, tablets, phone-related innovations etc. Leigh’s Twitter handle is @gears which makes him once again number one in the name coining exercise. For a sample of the coolsmartphone blog I recommend this piece on how easier it is now to take pictures with IOS5 (Apple’s latest OS for the iPhone). Well spotted!
Frederic Lardinois despite his Gallic sounding name was born in Germany and is a graduate of Potsdam. He is a PhD student at the university of Connecticut and the writer of SiliconFilter, a blog which focuses on consumer technology related to the Internet, and deals with Web apps, mobile apps and devices, as well as Web-connected TVs, cars and similar technologies. Frederic Lardinois, has written, 1,500 stories for the highly acclaimed ReadWriteWeb tech blog before starting his own venture.
Philippe Lagane (Twitter handle @philippe_lagane) is the creator – amongst many others – of the Accessoweb blog. He is one of our most knowledgeable experts and having done business with him, I can assure his work and that of his teams are really top notch. Tune in to Accessoweb if you are a French speaking reader, and you want to know everything about devices, mobile services, mobility in general and all things relevant to that domain. Philippe will be teaming with Christos Ionnitis (@newsmobile) who already was one of our reporters at Le Web 2011 last December. Philippe lives near Perpignan in the South West of France, Christos in Annemasse, in the South East. Both Philippe and Christos blog in French but their reports will be adapted to other languages. French readers should check this piece on the ZTE smartphone announcement by Accessoweb (available in French only).
Glenn Le Santo (@lesanto on Twitter) is our high tech events wizard. Glenn has had a very lively and varied business life. He is a seasoned reported who is passionate about technology, usage and innovation. He is the Twitter driving force behind Exeter Like Minds events (at which I met him) as well as the successful organiser of LincUpLive (check the February conference schedule here) in Lincoln, England. Glenn has been a long time partner of Orange at our Orange Business Live events as well as Le Web 2011.
Raphaelle Laubie is French but she mostly blogs in English. She is probably one of the most passionate business person I have ever met and her range of skills is amazing. She is a Health 2.0 Entrepreneur and her business – a registrar in the heath Internet industry – has even filed an application for the new dotmed “gTLD” (a new generic top level domain which will be devoted to healthcare, due to ICANN’s decision to open the registration of new extensions on top of existing ones (.com, .info, .net etc.). You are invited to check Raphaelle’s blogs on management at http://raphaellelaubie.com/category/marketing/branding-management. Raphaelle is also affiliate Lecturer at ESCP Europe and has even a Doctorate in Progress… On her spare time, Raphaelle is also helping with the Orange team with the coverage of live events.
Stewart Baines (@stewartbaines) is both the co-organiser of our trip to MWC and a contributor to the live.orange.com blog and the Orange Business blogs. He is one of the founders of Futurity Media with Anthony Plewes (@antonyplewes) who will also be present with us. Stewart has been writing about technology for 15 years. His focus is in emerging technologies, social media and future gazing. As a graduate of philosophy & science, he has studied futurology & foresight to post-grad level. Stewart is bound to be our futurologist in that team and will tell us about the future trends in high tech. Check his numerous contributions on behalf of Orange Business Services on the connecting technology blog, the Orange Business Live Blog [French] or the Orange Business Virtualisation blog [French].
Yann Gourvennec (that’s me), is Director, Web, Digital & Social Media at Orange and an Internet writer since 1996. He writes in English and French on his Website (http://visionarymarketing.com) and blogs. He writes in English and French, mostly about Marketing, Web, e-commerce, Management and Change Management.
“Ha tutte le carte in regola per essere un artista” and I have a valid passport to the land of artists Piero Campi
As we are getting ready for a massive event in Paris with Likeminds and Media Aces, with an impressive line up of speakers including Brian Solis, Jeremiah Owyang, Loic Le Meur, Molly Flatt, Olivier Blanchard and yours truly, our friends from Likeminds in Exeter have asked me to write a little piece about me and the Web and it didn’t have to do with business matters, so there it is, with a few literary references of no consequence.
Businessmen, as the Little Prince found out, are only dealing with matters of consequence and they have no time for balderdash. Yet, I don’t think that my Web work is restricted to matters of consequence. Besides, I’m not just a blogger blogging about bloggers either. I am also an artist; at least I wish I were regarded as one.
The Web has been my oyster for the past 15 years. The place – is it a place? – where I could not only write things but express thoughts, mostly about marketing; e-commerce too was on my agenda. A serious business tool in other words. But this is not how it all began. As a matter of fact, business was not my primary objective at all in the beginning. I believe that mere curiosity was the main motive.
I first heard about the World Wide Web, back in 1994, and so I went and grabbed a cheap Internet access package from the computer shop next door. People would come to my house and “see” the Internet. They had no idea what it was and I felt proud for being able to show them the way; not by sheer hubris but just because I love to share and exchange with friends, old and new.
My grandfather was like that. He could hardly get anywhere without bumping into at least one old pal. I believe one can’t escape one’s heritage. Some of us are social animals and I feel like I’m one of them. As I said above, the focus of my interest in the Web at that time wasn’t business, let alone computer science. Instead, I felt attracted to Art like a magnet, and I still do, now that I have practised watercolours for the best of the past thirty years.
Way back then, a person who went – and probably still goes – by the name of Nicolas Pioch had decided to reproduce the Louvre online and I had spotted that gem (this “webmuseum” is still available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wm). That’s what people came to see at my house at the time: online replicas of the Mona Lisa and other masterpieces, miles from today’s technical perfection, but then most beautiful of all … because this had never been done or seen before.
A few years later, I created my own picture gallery in which I could show my own work, and which eventually evolved into a blog, however poorly maintained nowadays.
Soon, I hope, I will be able to use this space to the full, mixing video, painting, etchings and music as well as creative writing and possibly organise happenings and exhibitions online and off-line. This is too early stages right now, as I have more work than ever on my plate, but I am looking forward to that day on which I will be able to devote all my time to my passion for Art, pictures, poetry and all things of absolutely no consequence.
SAP is one of the founding members of the Social Media Business Council. On November 9, SAP was hosting Blogwell, SMBC’s open event dedicated to social media in which each presentation (8 in total) is delivered by a SMBC member. The opening presentation by SAP was dedicated to spicing up events with social media. SAP began working on its community 7 years ago, and it now comprises 2 million members. This community is about engaging with clients and starting conversations. The SAP presentation was delivered by Brian Ellefritz, Global Social Media Marketing at SAP. Brian is a former Cisco representative and joined SAP to head their global Social media team. He is a seasoned Internet expert.
Very few in the audience had tried live video when Brian asked the question. So this kind of Social Media usage added to live events is still very new to many professionals (note: Orange Business Services is doing this quite regularly in all regions, check the http://orangebusiness.posterous.com live blog for details).
Context
Sapphirenow is SAP’s most important sales event, it’s about a decade old. In 2010 SAP organised two events in Germany and Orlando at the same time, that was quite ambitious. Social media took a big part in that event.
The objective was to treat the audience as peers, not recipients and showcase SAP as a savvy user of social media. They had done something the year before but they wanted to move beyond that in 2010. SAP wanted to “take this live event and make it virtual”. “SAP had more bandwidth than CNN” during that event Brian added.
The social media Ambassador concept
Influencers, customers, partners were going to be active pushing the news that they were being told. SAP also wanted to talk to those who couldn’t be there. The way it played out was that most of the content was pushed to Twitter in realtime. The stream started in Germany in the morning and was taken over by Orlando in the afternoon. The Sapphirenow twitter feed was central to that event. Giant touch screens were also implemented.
The ambassador programme was started 2 months in advance. 6 topics were selected, and 6 ambassadors per location were recruited. They had to have large followings and had to be comfortable with social media and have a set of skills which fit in the programme. The initial expectation was 2 blog posts a day. Flip cameras were given and SAP explained what their expectations were. “permisssion forms” were signed and social media business cards were handed out to people as a courtesy. An audit was given to an impartial agency in order to “assess whether that was impactful or chaos!”
The outcome was 1.5 million views in Twitter reach (tweetreach.com), 41 blog posts written in 3 days, 152 videos were uploaded and 15,506 video views generated.
Lessons learnt
Picking personal or business account was an issue
Broad diversity of skills, it was very challenging (some didn’t know what Twitter was)
hastags were an issue (should we have one, one per topic etc.)
video “live” blogging: the camera team was just overwhelmed with too many cameras being brought to them and it was chaos
Once underway, “it’s just like one giant mashup !”
over time, we “stopped concentrating on the number of tweets and blog posts and starting enjoying the live experience” Brian added
The “1.5 million reach” Brian added when asked about what numbers really meant “is when management stops asking question” and the value is when you stop talking about the numbers and when people and managers start seeing the value in the energy and dedication put behind the event and the endeavour.
note: this is the continuation of an interview of Synthesio’s Loic Moisand (see part one here). many thanks to Synthesio‘s Michelle Chmielewski for her help with the Englsh version of this post
Major trends in the monitoring market: consolidation and transversal moves
The market has greatly evolved since 2006 and showed signs of maturity in the consolidation actions among various actors. Scoutlabs was bought out by Lithium Technologies, Sysomos by Marketwire. The bought-out companies were easy prey “at the moment of the explosion of social media with the desire of creating true groupings”.
That doesn’t just mean more consolidations, but also more transversal actions with integrations:
of social CRM (integration of client relations and social media, one of the most significant trends of 2010)
of the press (with press and social media domains becoming more and more intertwined: on the one hand press relations officers are trying to reach information producers that are not connected to the mass media, bloggers in particular, and especially using different methods to transform their press releases into social media releases)
Other actors, including early days French pioneer KBCrawl “have stayed in ‘tool’ mode and haven’t switched to SaaS dashboards” and are being overtaken by swifter players.
brands online reputation: 4 main profiles
I’ve kept the best part for now. 4 years of experience in the field have allowed Synthesio to depict the landscape of online brands in a particularly striking manner; Loic Moisand highlights 4 main types of brands (pictures in the following diagram):
1. “Under-the-radar” brands
These are the brands that…we don’t talk about, or at least not a lot. A little bit like those friends that you invite to a party that don’t show up. There is either no or very little buzz for these brands that are consequently put into a “PR intravenous drip” that could only with hope to revive interest in the brand. In this category we find a jumble of mass-produced products like dishwashing soap and some B2B brands. Here are nonetheless 2 examples of companies that managed to “break the mold” (the best way to revive interest in your brand) :
Blendtec with their famous WebTV series “Will it Blend?” that was present at the last MediaAces conference in Paris June 22, 2010 (http://france.media-aces.org)
“compare the Market”’s URL was too long and getting too many searches for “compare the meerkat”. Comparethemarket, a sort of “progressive.com” decided to create an online character making fun of people that were typing it wrong in order to create their own buzz.
Not only are there numerous B2B brands fitting into this category that haven’t been able to break the mold, “3/4 of brands fit into this category,” adds Loic Moisand.
Important sidenote : certain brands, depending on the country, their media, and culture, may be “under the radar” here and not somewhere else. The French insurance-comparing site meilleurtaux.com generated high levels of buzz in France but Comparethemarket, the UK equivalent ended up being less successful (hence the need to do things differently)
2. Functional brands
This is another brand category that doesn’t necessarily inspire deep passion but that can generate a large number of comments. It has to do with brands that “we just want to work, and that’s it”. These are the brands that don’t leave you indifferent, but don’t necessarily cry out for your attention, either. In these types of cases the buzz level is rather high, but focused around the product’s/service’s functions, price, the quality of customer service, etc with levels of dissatisfaction that are often quite elevated. This category includes : e-commerce sites, washing machines, household appliances, mass high-tech goods (except for Apple) and telecommunications operators. The response in this domain has been to have a community manager for their own sites (FAQ, tech support, answering questions) as well as on third-party forums to help web users with a proactive intervention (Orange has actually just taken this step).
3. Brands we love
This segment is – of course – brand nirvana. Unfortunately very few brands are able to be a part of this group, for sometimes irrational reasons. The brands that are able to attain this segment are brands from groups 1 and 2 that have “launched an emotional movement”. Apple, video games (Wii), Sony (only for certain products), Coke, and fashion brands are a few examples of “Brands we love”. They are brands that “take up all the space” and the ones that are always examples, which can almost become slightly irritating at times…They’re incredibly popular, and you can’t do anything about it. They are the brands that knew how to create “a relationship that is more imortant than the product” according to Bernard Cova.
Not everyone can get to this stage. It is full of clans of enthusiasts and brand advocates, where brands don’t need to “create communities” because they already exist, often on their own (Apple doesn’t have one blog and supposedly doesn’t intervene in social media other than to police what’s being said, which no one really seems to find surprising and hasn’t cut down on fan enthusiasm).
The best attitude to have for this group is to accompany communities : answer questions, inform fans, encourage them, occasionally give them gifts to thank them for their loyalty. Blogger clubs are also a phenomenon of this group, which can sometimes lead to large demands. Microsoft – in order to avoid always talking about Apple – organized the launche of Windows 7 at the end of 2009 in its Windows café. All interested bloggers were invited to get a very nice gift – their own complete version of Windows 7 on a DVD just for them. The brand decided not to get involved any further in blog discussions than that. It took a respectful approach of its community, which was the right attitude in this case.
4. Sensitive brands
These are brands that are “stressful” according to Loic Moisand’s terminology. The 3 sectors that are affected the most: health, safety, and children. People are scared in this segment, the brand can be scary, or becmoe a threat; the stress is real and “you have to reassure people”. It’s the only thing that can be done. Admitting you were wrong and showing that you are correcting the problem, even if, when opinion is against you, the attempt is bound to fail. Becoming a “sensitive brand” means risking becoming a disgraced brand. Certain brands will forever be in this category, like pharmaceuticals for example (without exception according to Loic Moisand); but there are other brands that switch from other segments to this danger zone :
banks, since the 2007 crisis, have become scapegoats for the economic problems in the West if you believe their detractors, to the point of having lost sight of their essential economic functions (see the example of Kerviel here)
BP, that has now become a symbol – according to their detractors – for the environmental problems like Total in France after Erika – justified or not
chronically : users with worries – based on facts or not (not up to us to decide) – about electromagnetic waves from WiFi connections, Wimax, telephones, etc (here’s a link towards a show with Etienne Cendrier from the site robin des toits)
food brands criticized for their choice of ingredients or their methods, like Nestlé, for example, that became a Greenpeace target in 2010 for their use of palm oil in chocolate products
A dynamic brand classification
A brand can pass from one segment to another at any moment. Apple did, for example, when a rumor about exploding iPhones spread in 2009, as did Renault with rumors of stuck Vel Saltis gas pedals (2005-2006), and Toyta in 2010 with with their own technical problems, even if the rumors usually disappeared along with the crisis.
I find this classification to be particularly useful as it presents us with a point of view that is different from the classic clichés heard on the web about brands. It also allows for web and PR directors to take a step back in order to decide which direction is the best for their brand.
sidenote: this is an empirical classification and is not a result of a scientific study. It may evolve over time depending on the country and brand’s history. The opinions expressed here about certain brands are the personal opinions of the author and do not reflect a proof of good or bad quality of these brands whatsoever.
Earlier this month, WordPress.com, on which this and all my other blogs are hosted, decided to implement social media sharing buttons as a permanent feature of their online platform. I dote on wordpress.com personally, it’s simple and stupid, forces you to focus on content, not waste your time with useless plug-in gimmicks and is fast and furiously efficient (you get indexed in search engines in a matter of minutes).
Yet, there had been growing concerns among my readers that someone preaching social media was in fact not put his money where his mouth was. http://getsociallive.com/ had provided a reasonably user-friendly workaround but that was no match for other wordpress blogs – hosted and managed by their owners – which offered many possibilities in terms of sharing on all social media platforms, facebook, Twitter and Digg being the main ones. So, somewhat reluctantly, I was considering moving my wordpress blogs to my own server, which was possible, but which I regarded as an unnecessary burden and task.
And then I caught a glance of that WordPress announcement (a little link at the top of the dashboard) almost unexpectedly: WordPress was – at long last – making sharing avaible on its wordpress.com platform!
So now you can see retweets on posts and pages easily (make sure you do select the ‘posts and pages’ options otherwise your tweets and buttons won’t be accessible from the main home page of your blog for instance) and share stuff on other platforms too including digg and reddit.
So here is a graphic representation of the “share it” function as implemented by WordPress, right beneath each piece which you have published. As this feature is somewhat hidden here is the process explained to our fellow wordpress.com owners : go to the dashboard of your wordpress.com blog, select the ‘settings’ main menu on the left, then click the ‘sharing’ option. icons have to be dragged – in your order of preference – within the bow in order to appear on your posts. If you still can’t find it, use the following link and replace XXX by your wordpress username : http://XXX.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=sharing.
My readers will not only stop taking the mickey off me now, they will also dash to open their own WordPress.com blog, to which premium features such as domain name registration and redirection are now attached.
As I have witnessed time and time again, it is customary to say that B2C is more adapted to the use of social media than B2B . As matter of fact, I am not at all certain that this is true. The fact that there are fewer B2B examples of the use of social media is probably due to the maturity of that sector with regard to the use of technology and has nothing to do in my eyes with the fact that it is not adapted to social media. Here are 7 reasons why I think this is the case:
for social media to have an impact, one has to foster collaboration and develop a community feeling. This is typically done through the mixing of three main ingredients: passion, help between members and mutual benefit. These ingredients are usually very commonplace amongst existing b2B communities,
B2B communities are niche and they are about passionate experts who can debate about fairly specific subjects in great detail. Comments may be few and far between but rewarding,
the ability to include customers in the definition of a new service, has been a staple of B2B marketing for donkeys years. Customer advisory boards, Product and Client User Groups are very commonplace in B2B environments,
B2B is less exposed than B2C:. Hence B2B players are running fewer risks when engaging in online collaboration than B2C players; there are few B2B equivalents to the Kryptonite or Nestlé blogstorms,
in the B2B world , in most cases, co-creation has already been old hat for a long long time. As a matter of fact, most business to business offers are and have been developed in close partnership with clients and third-party value add providers. Comments in social media aimed at improving products are mostly welcome,
TV and outdoor advertising is out of reach for most B2B companies. Hence the importance of digital and social media. Indeed amongst B2B high-tech companies, it is even very commonplace that they use nothing else but digital to do advertising,
B2B business is made of ecosystems. Social media is ideal for fostering discussions and brand advocacy through such ecosystems.
B2B as a result is, in my eyes, well adapted to social media and even probably more so than B2C even though B2B subjects will – barring a few exceptions – never reach the headlines. So much the better I would say, because this is also what keeps trolls at bay! Agencies solely focused on B2C should also give it a thought and start paying attention to B2B customers and prospective customers, as well as hone their skills in the area of business to business.
The question stunned me I must admit. While walking down the aisle of the yearly event of the Confederation of French Industry Medef – equivalent to CBI – I was getting ready for a session of live blogging in front of a panel of ex ministers, worldwide banking experts, and other celebrities such as former Poland’s premier Lech Walensa when a seated person stopped me by putting her hand on my arm. “Tell me”, she said while eyeing my “blogger” badge which signalled that I was one of the 50+ Internet experts invited by the confederation in order to cover the event, “what is a blogger?”
I must admit that I must have looked pretty flabbergasted. As the media is awash with blog reports and web reviews, and even mainstream Hollywood films like the recent State of Play feature blogs as a main contender in the online/offline press battle, I had surmised that blogging was an established fact of modern life. Let’s face the fact readers, it is not! Joe public still doesn’t know what it is about, or not quite.
Blogging is still exotic to many, and not just across the Channel. Judging by the frequent questions I have on the same lines in England and even in the United States, I can assure you that we are not there yet. So how long will it take for everyone to understand? Judging by what happened with core Internet activities, one started talking about the information superhighway as it was then known in England as early as 1994 but things only took off seriously towards the end of the 1990′s.
Will blogging follow the same trajectory? Maybe it just won’t happen like that. It is highly probable that people will all use blogs/microblogs (such as the outstanding Posterous service) and other Social Media gadgets even before they understand the weird names we have given them. To a large extent, this is what this Social Media revolution is all about, i.e. forgetting about the buzz-words and just going ahead with it.
Yes Madam, you are right, not everybody knows what bloggers are, yet they are truly here to stay anyway.
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:
Nokia encouraged the widespread adoption of 2.0 tools internally,
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.,
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,
An internal webTV was also created, which is some sort of youtube which enables employees to upload, invent and discuss,
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 bulletsin 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)
“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
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.
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:
it is either that people forget about the bottom line altogether. However, there must be some sort of payback on innovation,
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”.
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?
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 291st 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.
Below is the contribution which I sent to the council on behalf of Orange Business Services.
social media: beyond the ROI issue
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.
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.
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!
Rejoice ye visionary readers, rejoice! The tide of marketing is turning at last. After more than 13 years of battling against autistic — and largely inefficient — old world marketing techniques and visions, we are now witnessing a few cracks in the ice of top-down marketing strategy. Firstly, Regis Mc Kenna and Geoffrey Moore introduced new ways of dealing with clients mainly in the IT world at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. The approach was no longer demographic but behavioural. Secondly, European researchers Badot & Cova wrote their ground-breaking opus entitled “neo-marketing[Fr]” in 1992 (many were to follow) introducing so-called “societal” approaches to marketing and even suggesting we use the term “societing [En]” instead of marketing. (Wasn’t that visionary? Bernard Cova now teaches mostly at the prestigious Bocconi school in Milan, and I’ve also had the pleasure of becoming friends with him in the meantime).
The end of the 1990s were the founding years of — not only of the Internet but — the revision of marketing as we know it. Seth Godin taught us that ideas are viruses — and so are products and services — hence the newer and more pervasive notions of Buzz marketing. He also re-educated us (yes, I insist, really re-educated) in order to ask permission from our clients to do business with them. Not only was that the early sign that e-mail marketing had to be done differently, but it also sent a clear warning sign to mass marketers that business habits had to change in view of evolving consumer behaviours. 1999 was the kick-off year for the much revered Clue-train manifesto, a source which is still quoted today as the reference for online marketing. And more recently, Tara Hunt has developed and notion of Pinko marketing, a rather weird and politically orientated way of putting that communication power is handed over to the people. Yet, this is very effective when it comes to getting the message across. Even more recently, François Laurent published a new book entitled marketing 2.0[Fr]. Marketing 2.0 is in fact the sequel to his influential blog: marketing is dead[Fr], but what is really striking is that François — a former marketer at European ex-consumer electronics manufacturer Thomson — is more widely known as the president of one of the two French associations of marketing, Adetem. Lastly Alain Thys is adding to the bargain by expostulating in his excellent marketing accountability presentation that marketing is not only dead but that it committed suicide in front of its shareholders, clients and even the earth! Nothing less.
No doubt this time, things are moving ahead, even though the proportion of UGC is still low, there is an underlying trend of change, and this is not coming back to what it was before. So as it is becoming more and more obvious to all that markets really are conversations there is this requirement for a growng number of enterprises to quickly be in sync with this evolution and gear up to community marketing
And then there is Forrester research VP and Principal Analyst Laura Ramos, with whom I had the benefit of being acquainted a few days ago, as we were exchanging on the subject. In May 2007, Laura (see links to some of the most recent and most relevant articles) had a story entitled: “B2B marketers fail the community marketing test“. Her conclusions are clear-cut and uncompromising. To sum them up in a few words:
marketing needs to change in the light of evolving behaviour and rising power of clients (is not only consumers guys, we are talking b2b here!)
top-down and patronising, self-centred, at marketing messages and must be adapted to reflect these changes. A new tone of voice must be adopted.
current marketers are doing a pretty bad job at tying the knot with their clients and — to put it in the words of the blue train manifesto — engaging in conversations with them.
Writing in a blog is not very complex, but there are a few guidelines which should be respected as much as can be. This list of do’s and don’ts of Internet blog writing can be used as a Vademecum (literally in Latin ‘come with me’, a manual which you can take with you at all times) for expert Internet writers. It could also be treated as a Charter describing which rules to follow, and each expert should confirm that they have read these guidelines.
one: do not try and sell your products. Writing on the blog has to be natural and have to be closer to the spoken language. Avoid using cheap marketing arguments at all costs. Don’t even think about listing the qualities or benefits of your products. A blog, let alone an expert blog, is not made for this, but to establish expertise through examples,
two: publish as much as you can. The more articles you will reduce and deliver, the greater your promotion on the web. A professional corporate blog which starts will only have a few articles referenced/indexed within Google, whereas an older blog or website will already have hundreds or more,
three: avoid typos and spelling/grammar mistakes at all cost. this is a very common mistake. A lot of bloggers think that because you’re in a hurry you don’t have to worry so much about spelling or grammar. But this is a very bad habit. Mainly if you have a corporate blog and you are projecting a corporate image. The writing has to be natural, which doesn’t mean that it has to be bad. And if your articles are very pertinent and interesting but badly written, you will attract many impertinent and unpleasant comments on this. Being a corporation also helps as it should enable youto get others to proof read your text. However, I strongly recommend that you avoid rewriting expert text to give a communications flavour to it. This would be very unbecoming,
four: layout is important. It is advised to use Microsoft Word or another word processor in order to check your spelling. However, if you copy and paste text from word into the blog, I would recommend that you start copying it into notepad first in order to clean the text from all unnecessary Microsoft word formatting. Another way of doing this, is to use Firefox and its very convenient language packs which enable you to check your spelling directly into the entry box of your blog,
five: keep your articles brief. Blogs are not for long articles. Websites are more adapted for very lengthy articles. However, you could still post a large article on a blog and then use the “see more” function which will break up the text into different pages in order to make the reading easier. it is also possible to break up your article into several instalments, which will have the advantage of forcing your users and visitors to return to the blog,
six: straight to the point. You had rather publish small or medium-sized articles 2 to 3 times a week than one or two large in-depth ones per month. You can also choose to publish your articles in instalments, it’s a good idea if you want to have returning visitors. Google likes it when the frequency of updates of updates on your blog is high, because it will entice its bots (technical name for the search engine indexing robots that come and index your pages) to visit your blog more often… and your visitors too!
seven: summarise and bulletise to maximise on-screen readability. Don’t hesitate to add a downloadable pdf file for readers who wish to print out your stuff and read it,
eight: keyword presence in titles, tags, categories and page copy. First 10 lines are most important. Use emphasis to highlight important keywords
nine: headlines are taglines! here are some recommended titles for your posts:
X tips and tricks to improve your corporate security, etc.
X tips and tricks to reach 50% benefit/ROI, reap X million $, etc.
X things you should know/do before …
X steps/golden rules to achieve …
Golden rules for Excellence in …
Do’s and don’ts of this or the other
Check-list for …
X tools to improve your Internet/Corporate network security etc.
…
Once more, think about your important keywords, because they should be found in your titles.
ten: High update frequency doesn’t mean your experts should write only for the sake of it. A list of topics has to be prepared in advance in order to ensure that quality will be maintained throughout the life of your expert corporate blog. Don’t hesitate to quarantine articles which you think are not up to scratch by leaving them in the draft list and updating them later
eleven: propose subjects which link to other popular subjects to attract new visitors, i.e. even those who wouldn’t normally be interested in it. But avoid entering posts unrelated to your main objective or topic at all cost. Not only would that be irrelevant but it could also be damageable for your brand.
twelve: use so-called keyword ‘fragmentation bomb’ technique by adding synonyms and varying keywords and titles. This will increase your chances of being found and read. I.e. if your subject is about security ensure that not just the security keyword is present but also others such as intrusion, Trojan, encryption, hacking, network protection, data integrity etc.
thirteen: in order to make it easy for your experts to feed your newly created corporate blog, your experts should get themselves organised so as to produce as much content as possible on a regular basis. To this end and recommend that you set up a wiki website for them to keep track of the list of articles that they should write, who does what, at what time, and also when it is going to be published. As a matter of fact, if you need to deliver many an article, it is probably a good idea that you get your experts to write quite a few of them in advance in order to ensure that the source will not run dry and also to avoid putting too much pressure on the writers. Lastly, if you have blogs in multiple languages, and if some of the content on either of these languages bears relation to the other blogs in other languages in terms of context, then I would recommend that you use translation services in order to make your teams benefit from the content that other teams have written. Do not overestimate the usability of a particular content which is made available in a particular language for another. As a matter of fact, translation is not sufficient, you would also need to adapt the context of the original post to make it relevant, and only experts can deliver that. Use translation services make the first cut translation and then send the text to your experts said that they can adapt it and change it to their heart’s content.
fourteen: create the event and bring interactivity. You could for instance organise contests whereby you’re asking your readers to write posts and submit them to you so that you would give them an ability to be published on your blog. You could also ask your readers to vote for some of your articles. Contests and suchlike would generate visits an increase reader loyalty,
fifteen: be careful about those pictures! Don’t believe that if an image can be picked up easily from the Internet (via Google images for instance) you would be to use it freely on your blog. This is not true, and if you’re working for a big logo you should be aware that using an image for which you haven’t got the rights would make your company liable for damages. Conversely, I do not recommend either that you use images from the corporate standard database because they don’t give a expert look to the blog but instead make it look like advertising, and this is not consistent with the tone of voice of an expert blogging exercise. Illustrations would do nicely, but more importantly functional and business diagrams, preferably user and expert generated, because they will add to the professionalism of the blog, its readability and the overall understanding. Mainly if your subject is technical. As the saying goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, but remember that it’s only true if image usage is right. Professional image databanks (such as Getty or Corbis for instance) are serious about that, and rightfully so. If you want to include an image and your company doesn’t own its own image database, and you want to add professional looking illustrations to it then I would recommend that you use online image databanks like http://www.fotolia.com,
sixteen: about bad language. Bad language should be avoided at all cost, needless to say. Any form of defamation, strong language, criticism, or even downright critical opinion of a competitor, partner, and/or co-worker or peer is just unthinkable. It means that you will have to understand and practise how to deliver interesting and professional opinions without criticising others. Be very careful about that, because writing anything on the Internet leaves traces. And you don’t want these traces to be bad ones. In other words, you have to be careful about the directness of your Internet writing. It has to remain interesting and straight to the point, but not too much. It’s a bit like walking between two walls; the left one is the boundary beyond which Internet writing becomes uninteresting and bland and there is no value. The right one is the limit beyond which too much is said, and could be used against you too. It is absolutely obligatory that each expert adheres to rule number 15.
seventeen: about third party products/companies. Following rule number fifteen, do not draw the conclusion however that you should avoid commenting on other products and any company. Yet, you should ensure that these comments are based on facts and numbers, serious and professional. They should also be proven and undeniable, or otherwise they should open the debate in a fair and open way. Once again, strong language against third party products and all companies should be avoided at all cost,
eighteen: about comments, freedom of speech, openness and pragmatism. In corporate blogging, comments, or rather the fear of receiving comments about one’s Internet writing is usually the source for paranoia. Usually, it’s not so much the experts who are paranoiac, but their management. To an extent, it is normal since it is difficult for management to assess the level of risk which is associated with these external comments. However, if your subject is a niche subject that is really professional and b2b orientated, the main issue they will come across is not that related to having fierce comments, but that of having too few comments or even any at all. Secondly you have to make freedom of speech in your comment available. If it is not open, and it is not free, then it will show and your blog will be so bland that it will attract no visitors and no interest. A little debate is a good thing, and you mustn’t be afraid of other experts or professionals, even ordinary readers voicing their opinion. After all if somebody disagrees with what is said, doesn’t possibly mean that it’s true. So don’t panic, be open and pragmatic. At the other end, corporate blog managers should ensure that all comments are moderated. Openness and freedom of speech don’t mean that you shouldn’t control anything. This moderation feature would protect you and your management from trouble and it should be enabled. However, moderation doesn’t mean censorship. Only moderate these posts which contain strong language, if your blog content filter hasn’t catered for this already. Delete strong language and comments which are not adding anything to the debate. At the end of the day, having quality comments on your posts is also adding to the quality of the posts themselves, having bad quality comments is withdrawing value from your posts.
First and foremost, define the purpose of your corporate blog even before you start writing the first line. What is the objective of this blog? Is it about awareness? Is it intended for you to share knowledge with the community? Is it there to show that your corporation and its experts are particularly good at something? If you are able to answer any of these questions, then you should also know what and how to write in it. Of course, it is possible to maintain a blog just to talk about the weather. But at the end of the day there are very few chances that this is going to benefit your corporation. Eventually, not only will this make your blog ineffective, you may also run the risk of losing your management support. It is particularly advised to target your blog as if it were a standard information vehicle, through a carefully chosen niche strategy.
It is also recommended to create a blog per activity, rather than one that mixes up different subjects. This will increase the community effect and make it a lot more efficient. Think about starting small rather than launch upfront as many blogs as you have domains that you’re dealing with. It is much more desirable to have two or three blogs which are successful rather than a hundred which are not. Besides, don’t forget that blogging could be time-consuming.
How much time should be devoted to that exercise? And by whom? This is probably the most crucial question. If the blog depends on an individual then it can also become a mind-boggling question. Very often, bloggers who do this for leisure, give up after a while or once they have moved to a more time-consuming job for instance and their free time vanishes or is considerably reduced. This is one of the reasons why a lot of blogs disappear after roughly a year of activity. When it comes to corporate blogging, things are theoretically easier because experts are plentiful and it is possible to pool expertise and form expert-teams so that experts aren’t all busy at the same time. One can therefore establish rosters for the blog to be maintained on a regular basis by different people. Even on the open Internet, this is one of the most effectual methods which I have found in order to keep the blog alive in the long run.
Ideally, expert teams for corporate blogging should comprise six to seven bloggers, or maybe more (although it is dubious that there are going to be more than six of seven people who update the blog on a regular basis). Should some of these experts move jobs or tire of entering posts on the blog, do not hesitate to bring in more experts and change the team. Ideally there should be somebody in your corporation in charge of facilitating the team and helping them. A facebook and bios of the experts on the ‘about’ page can also work wonders. It increases personalisation and establishes credibiity. Besides, it addresses the point that the blog isn’t a flog (i.e. Fake blog, a blog written by some advertising agency or fake professionals/experts).
If you want to attract more than 50 visitors per day, at least three to four hours of work will be required every week. Once again, if you’re getting yourselves organised in expert teams, the amount of time that each individual would spend every week on the blog is going to be limited, although it won’t have any impact on the quality and update of the information produced. A minimum of one article a week has to be delivered for the blog to merely exist, but do not expect much if you can’t produce at least three to five each week. Once again, if your team is made of six or seven high-grade experts, this should not be a real problem and should not be too time-consuming. All these people also need coordination, the corporate and marketing teams should cater for that.
Lastly, do not forget that blogging is not an end in itself, but just a means to an end. However, if it is well-managed, it can be tremendously successful with regard to the objective which you have set at the beginning of your approach (see above).
blog post classification
Let’s classify the type of content that you can find in a blog along four main categories:
firstly, the easiest type of posts, let’s begin with those articles which contain lists of links and resources. All you have to do is to add a link to another article, a tool or other reference material, video etc. and establish a link with your activity and add a comment. Please note that articles which do not contain a personalised comment are an absolute non-starter and should be excluded at all cost. Besides, even if it is brief, any comment should contain added value to make the post worthwhile. On average, you should reckon that this type of articles will take up 30 minutes of your time,
Secondly, it is possible to enter articles whereby your experts will comment on news or events and even possibly seminars. In the corporate world there are a lot of these business seminars going on. My advice for this is to publish comments and notes taken during the seminars and presentations. Very often this kind of posts is very successful and brings in a lot of added-value content. Besides, other participants to the seminar event will also be using your minutes and/or linking to theirs. This is also a very practical way of enabling those people who haven’t been able to attend the event to benefit from the content which was produced at that time,
The third type of article which you could post are those one could call reference articles, whereby you will give your expert advice and opinion. These are probably the most gratifying ones for an expert, those which would establish his/her expertise in the most transparent fashion, but they will also be more time-consuming, and despite the quality of their content they might not be the most successful ones. However, this paradox should not stop them from producing this kind of articles, on the contrary. Once again, do not attempt worldwide fame with niche expertise, it is much better to be well positioned on that niche which will make you and your corporation visible in your ecosystem,
Lastly, there is what I would entitle best practice articles. These are the ones in which experts are going to define and describe, for instance, the 10 Golden rules for doing this or the other, the five most common traps which you should avoid etc. They might not be the most profound of articles, but they will work wonders since online visitors are keen to find them on the Internet. This kind of article is also going to bring returning visitors, and track-backs (i.e. Other blogs linking to yours).
Last but not least, it must be added that a good corporate blog should comprise a mixture of these classes of posts. The blog in which you will have only lists of resources, or reference articles, or even Best practice articles could not be very successful in the long-term.
Once your Corporate stakeholders have understood why Web 2.0 is more than a fad and why its marketing could benefit from it (read our 12 golden rules for Web 2.0) and once they have established how their 2.0 strategy should be articulated (refer to our interactivity matrix), quite a few questions remain: how to create a professional looking blog and how to make it known? How long does it take every day and how many visitors may I expect? Where should my blog reside, should it be hosted or should I put it on my corporate server? What should I do so that it is well indexed by Google and other search engines? What are the do’s and don’ts of Corporate blogging, what are the risks… These are some of the questions that we come across most of the time with regard to corporate blogging. In this article, we will spell out the steps which can lead to proficient Corporate Blogging and we’ll try and address the above questions.
These pages can actually be used as corporate blogging guidelines for the perusal of your corporate blogging experts and your corporate blog managers. You can even use this as a charter (namely the do’s and don’ts chapter in part three) with which you would like them in their regular blogging exercise and also get them to agree to the rules of efficient and responsible corporate blogging. A lot of the material enclosed in this article, is drawn from the experience of experience bloggers and Internet writers including myself who have been working in and around the Internet for many years (13 years in my case).
a few facts and figures
Before you delve into the particulars of this methodology and blogging guidelines, we urge you to read the following lines which will serve as an explanation for the rest of the document.
Maybe 90% of blogs (90 not being the actual number but a ballpark figure) attract less than 50 visitors per day. Don’t raise your expectations too high mainly if your content is not up to scratch,
user generated content is the era of empowered users who go on to the Internet hook up to a website and create a blog for free. Because you’re a corporation doesn’t mean that you own the best experts in the world on the subject that you want to deal with. Expect a lot from other bloggers who will have already started commenting on the subject. What about starting a journey by reading what they have done?
Blogging success is established in the long term: it can take a few years before you reach the top 10 of your category. As a consequence, forget about these people who will tell you that blogging is easy and that collaboration is effortless. This is just not true,
Your expertise might be really good, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that your blog could attract hordes of visitors. A small crowd of enthusiasts is worth a million passive users. Besides, your subject will probably be a niche subject, which is perfectly normal for expertise,
From experience, at least 20% of blogs close within 1 1/2 years from their inception because of a lack of content or a loss of purpose. You have to hold on tight. Once again blogging success is established in the long run. Mainly if you consider that if you have many competitors today, there could be far fewer tomorrow since many of them will certainly give up,
Writing good articles and reviews does not suffice. Quite a lot of time must be devoted to valuing the content and promoting it. The advantage of being a large organisation is that the marketing and buzz marketing can be organised by specialised teams who can free up their experts from that burden,
Don’t do this for money, this is not the name of the game. And don’t try to sell your products this will not work, a blog is not the right forum for this kind of things,
The quality of a blog hinges on the quality of its content, the frequency of its updates, its usability and transparency. Don’t focus on usability in the first place. Quality of content and update frequency are the main issues when you start a new blog. Transparency however is not an option. You have to be clear about your intentions and your experts have to know about this (hence these guidelines). As a consequence one will have to establish a disclaimer whereby one explains that the opinions expressed in the blog are those of your experts and are not legally binding. A disclaimer of that kind is available at the following URL: add link to Orange business services disclaimer,
Blog visibility is established not only through surfing but also through RSS feeds. These RSS feeds are useful for your readers who want to subscribe to your content automatically. Click here for a description and explanation of RSS feeds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format). However, RSS feeds will not do all the work for you. Bridging the gap between your website and your blog is also a good way of bringing more visits to either of those,
If you want your blog to be visited regularly, you will have to update it on a regular basis. There is no future for blogs in which the latest post is older than a few days, a week at most,
It is reckoned that if you want your blog to be visible you have to generate at least 10 to 15 posts per month on average. Whereas it is understood that writing so many posts on your own is a challenge, building teams of people who will feed the system with information on a regular basis is probably going to solve the problem to a large extent. While certain experts get more busy at times than others having a roster of experts at the ready can actually help you avoid going through gaps in the feeding of your system.
What’s in a blog?
Blogs are particularly interesting insofar as they are purely content orientated, they attract visitors and help build up traffic very fast, they are also easier to link to and from than a corporate website which is more geared towards selling your products, and therefore fewer people would be reluctant to link to your content if it is valuable content. The blog will also bring dynamism, RSS, interactivity, and you may even branch into a corporate blogger programme (such as the one managed by Orange business services) which would open the doors to writers from the outside (not in the short term though).
Taken at face value, entering posts on the blog is very easy. It looks like an online word processor which enables you to publish your articles and make them available online as well as manage a few options and features. However, this is a lot more complex than you think. Not necessarily from a technical point of view, but certainly from an Internet writing skills point of view.
With blogs however you do not need to be an Internet expert. And this is certainly what makes them so successful. Besides, Google and other search engines like bogs a lot, because they are dynamic and they produce a lot of content, therefore they are great if you want to beef up your search engine optimisation (aka natural indexing). Lastly, blogs are more direct than Internet corporate websites, they look less institutional and less commercial. They are ideal to start conversations. However, they also have their limitations such as lack of flexibility over how page layout can be managed and the difficulty to fine tune the indexing for search engines (but the latter issue are less of a problem for the end-user/contributing expert).
On day 3 of the blogger bus tour we had the opportunity to meet face to face with two young start-up managers from San Francisco based Social Chorus an “influence marketing” company named Social Chorus. We were able to spend a whole hour with them and discuss influence, influencers, people-powered marketing and … “the power of the middle”, a concept which I have found particularly appealing.
note: this is the continuation of an interview of Synthesio’s Loic Moisand (
Rejoice ye visionary readers, rejoice! The tide of marketing is turning at last. After more than 13 years of battling against autistic — and largely inefficient — old world marketing techniques and visions, we are now witnessing a few cracks in the ice of top-down marketing strategy. Firstly, 
