Tyson Foods’ Hunger Relief Program

Better late than never. I was going through my files today and I found this old piece written after a Blogwell event which took place in New York two years ago. So here it is with much delay but I thought it was worth reading and publishing anyway. Now that I have gone through it I regret I didn’t publish it earlier on because I think that this business case was/still is very inspirational:

Blogwell presentation number 3: Tyson hunger relief (http://www.tysonhungerrelief.com)
April 2009, NYC, NY

Tyson, hunger relief, presentation by Ed Nicholson
in charge of social media, Tyson foods in the US

The third presentation of Blogwell number 3 was that of Ed Nicholson, in charge of social media at Tyson foods in the US, and was entitled how Tyson foods, uses social media to build a community around the issue of hunger.

Tyson’s Ed Nicholson, our fellow member from Socialmedia.org - photo courtesy of disruptology.com

To an extent, this is a similar subject to the one we already tackled in a post about a previous Blogwell presentation which took place in San Jose at the end of October 2008, when Kaiser Permanente presented its initiative against obesity. This time, even though the approach is similar, the aim is quite the opposite as it is aimed at those people in the US suffering from hunger.

I found the description of how a big company like Tyson is trying to tackle this issue, using social media, quite interesting and inspiring. Tyson’s initiative is not about just about a website. It’s about “engaging people in productive and visible ways” Ed said. And God knows there are many people at Tyson foods, even though their name may not be very well known in Europe.

In Iowa alone 9,000 people are working for them, and up to 10% of its workforce is actually involved in this hunger relief program. This hunger relief, social media initiative is more than “the campaign for Tyson.” Ed added. It is actually used to leverage donations in order to tackle the issue of hunger. It started in 2000 and has been going on for now nine years.

(Tyson Hunger Relief Food Donation at Finney County, Kansas – picture by Tyson foods inc.)

The idea is to use the website in order to “give food to the people who can’t afford it”. Ed is insisting upon the fact that there was already “a phenomenal community engaged in this issue”. These are good stories, which are also very favourable ground for online blogging and donation events.

Tyson foods has already 2,814 followers on twitter (and 8,201 2 years later). The company is actually following very strictly disclosure rules, as per Socialmedia.org guidelines, and it displays its name on its twitter page. The number of people who find food insecure, according to Ed is staggering. This is instrumental in making the social media initiative by Tyson very dynamic. In a matter of four hours, any post can receive up to 800 comments!

There is no doubt very few social media initiatives can attract that many comments in such a little time. Ed insists upon the fact that “these tools change all the time, but relationships are here to stay’”. I think this is a very wise description of the social media context, one has to focus on relationships, not on the tools, which are only a means to an end.

“Some people understand the media part”, Ed says, “but not the social part”. They are not all one-way push tools. They are about “generating communities”. And generating communities, has nothing to do about technicality, it is a human thing, hence the “social” in social media.

Ed says that agencies can’t develop communities for Tyson because they can’t create strategies. It takes times it takes time therefore, and you combine your way in.

Questions and answers

Q: negative posts.

A: They are kept because they give us an opportunity to respond. “You are using hunger for the wrong reasons,” says one very nasty comment on their blog. “But it’s one point of entry in the discussion”, Ed says.

[note, now it’s me talking: As I pointed out many many times, this kind of opportunity to respond is made available in social media, but it will not in traditional media. As as a consequence negative comments on social media in my eyes are less dangerous than in traditional media].

Q: developing policies and guidelines

A: policies and guidelines are about doing what’s right and what’s legal. But Ed insisted upon the fact that policies were not established first. It started off doing the job and then putting the policies in place.

Q: personal versus company

A: Tyson is a company account on twitter, not a personal account, but it’s managed by Ed. He decided to declare it in his own name, rather than using the company name. Sometimes he uses its twitter account to tweet about stuff, which is personal.

Q: health/nutrition issues

approximately 20% of kids (out of 37 million) are by definition obese. Moreover, they can be both obese and malnourished at the same time. Ed says that food banks are also getting into twitter too and that partnerships with agencies are possible.

Andy Sernovitz: “large companies getting into social media need support and SMBC was the missing piece in that puzzle”

Last week, I was attending the Blogwell and SMBC meetings in Philadelphia. I also had an opportunity to sit with Andy Sernovitz, the founder of SMBC and well known author of the Word of Mouth Marketing opus.

It’s now more than 2 1/2 years since I joined the former blogcouncil, now known as Social Media Business Council, and a lot of water has gone under the bridge. I thought, as Hervé Kabla and myself – co-founders of Media Aces in France – are currently finalising our book entitled ‘Social Media Taught to My Boss’ (in French, but I’m open to suggestions from publishers), that it would be a great idea to sit with Andy and review the history and principles of SMBC as well as take a bit of hindsight and see how things had developed over the years. It’s hard to describe but spending 3 years of field practice in Social Media for a large company implies that a lot of work and effort has been put into these initiatives. Sometimes it’s good to put down one’s tools and muse.

Andy keeps repeating that doing Social Media for large groups is not as easy as doing the same for an individual or a small shop. I know that many people must not believe that this is true. « You are a big brand hence it’s way too easy » a lot of people must think. Yet nothing has ever been more true. Innovating within a large enterprise is a never-ending, groundhod day-like heavy-lifting exercise. This is why SMBC is important. It enables the heads of Social Media like us to get together, to help each other and to learn from one another. This is what Andy is referring to as being the « missing piece in the puzzle ».

And this is also why there are now more than 150 members within SMBC. Hats off Andy!

here are some of the 150 members of SMBC as of now …

Start-up of the month : Synthesio describes the 4 types of brands on the web (2/2)

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 :

1. 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)
2. BP, that has now become a symbol – according to their detractors – for the environmental problems like Total in France after Erika – justified or not
3. 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)
4. 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.

Start-up of the month : Synthesio describes the 4 types of brands on the web (1/2)

note: many thanks to Synthesio‘s Michelle Chmielewski for her help with the Englsh version of this post

This past July I met up with Loic Moisand, co-founder of the start-up Synthesio with Thibault Hanin, specialised in web monitoring and analysis of social and online mainstream media. They are a great example of a French start-up that has succeeded, in France as well as abroad. I mentioned them previously in two videos filmed with Trey Pennington, who is in charge of Synthesio’s marketing in the US and the UK (video 1 – video 2). This time I wanted to take a moment with Loic in order to find out more about the creation of Synthesio, on one hand,  and about their measurement of influence on the Interneton the other. What I discovered during this interview is a real gem that goes above and beyond a simple market analysis : a very interesting and useful market segmentation that Loic Moisand has created based on his experience in the field that I found to be a fundamental and useful discovery for online marketing experts and branding experts that set their eyes on the web.

I met with Loic in the Cybervillage of Paris at Crimée, the same place where I had met him 1 1/2 years ago ; time enough for the young entrepreneur (28 years old, to be exact) to work hard on developing his start-up. His work has paid off as Synthesio has seen their revenues grow significantly, even if I can’t just yet reveal the exact numbers since the enterprise is private (you’ll just have to trust me when I say – they’re good).

The two Synthesio founders are both graduates of ESSEC (one of Europe’s top business schools), even if Thibault Hanin is the “geek” of the group, having earned his engineering degree beforehand. One worked on the software and the other on case studies, each in their “own little corners” of the school’s campus, according to Loic, before deciding to team up for a bit, just to see. “We worked on a business plan for a month and found that we complimented each other quite nicely”. They were able to raise enough funds rapidly, complete with a student loan, and were off and running. “Our first investors didn’t even look at the details of our businesses plan, they just evaluated who we were and trusted us”. A look at entrepreneurship that is very different from the usual Gaulic jeremiads. “I don’t at all agree with people that say that we can’t invest in France. There are good grants for those that are young innovative enterprise, thanks to the Research Minister,” adds Loic Moisand. Of course the two young entrepreneurs “ate nothing but pasta” for the first year while they developed their offer. But there were numerous surprises…

Business isn’t rational, it’s linked to the entrepreneur’s desires

The story behind Synthesio is interesting in and of itself. Well-positioned today for measuring social media buzz, the start-up began along a completely different route : “We started by creating a sort of Google Alerts,” explains Loic Moisand, but we quickly realized that there was something else going on in social media. Even if we didn’t begin that way”. Founded in 2006, the company took one year to prepare their offer. “I met 400 people, communications directors, research directors, agency directors, etc. during that year” adds Loic Moisand ; and that doesn’t even take into account incidental meetings. Forced to complete an internship abroad for his degree, the entrepreneur chose India for personal reasons, a choice that proved to be incredibly important for what followed in terms of their software operations, which makes the Synthesio co-founder say, “business is not rational and many things are tied to the founders’ desires”. A lesson in humilty and reailty to be taught in business schools, perhaps… “We wanted to visit, have fun, and not make something super French” continues Loic Moisand, and that’s exactly how Synthesio began “with everything in 5 languages from the very start” in order to win – little by little – international accounts that have made a very impressive list of clients: Accor, Orange, Sanofi, Eli Lilly, BNPP, etc. that use Synthesio to measure what is said about them online.

Finding a good brand name

Well-taught  marketers know it all too well : finding a good brand name is a fundamental step. The double-team took it upon themselves to create their own algorithm that spit out original names, and Synthesio came out. The domain name was free, so nothing more than to find a logo, which Loic created, partly Ying-Yang, partly a stylized “S” with “the red representing the human, and the gray, the technology” he clarifies.

25 employees in 3 countries and… 30 languages

Synthesio is comprised of 25 employees today working full-time, plus partners that bring that number up to 35, spread out in 3 countries : France, the UK and the US. “But we have people that work for Synthesio everywhere : Morocco, China, India, Russia, Portugal, Spain, etc because the company handles research in 30 languages (the dashboard is available in 6, including Chinese). The multilingual search engine is the cornerstone of their service along with the fact that the analyses are done by humans. The differentiating point is exactly that. The engine is a proprietary development that is partially protected, as only original features and innovations can be patented.

The buzz analysis market : a fusing of 3 stages (+1 or 2 for France that seems to do everything its own way)

The worldwide market is broken down into 3 segments : free, do-it-yourself and upscale, Synthesio belonging to this last group. France is a bit different as it has 2 different types of actors (ami and Digimind) that are editors as well but positioned on different price schemas. This category doesn’t fit – according to Loic Moisand – with Forrester’s and Gartner’s groupings, which would explain their difficulties in positioning themselves internationally, even if the two actors “perform well on French territory”. Digimind has opted, itself, for the third type of positioning in North America. The France, creative as always, also has another example that doesn’t fit with other models : Trendybuzz, a research company with publisher software.

coming next : Part 2 with a breakdown of Internet brands by Synthesio

Creating and embracing a social media culture (ConAgra Foods)

ConAgra's Stephanie Moritz

Last month, on Nov 10, 2009 the 7th blogwell session took place in sunny Atlanta, Ga. (this is meant to be a joke for I have been twice to Atlanta so far and have seen a lot of rain not to mention flooding). Nearly a month later – and I am a little late for that – now that the dust has settled I wish to recap on some of the best sessions I was able to attend. Stephanie Moritz, ConAgra foods presented her company and its many brands of foods (Hebrew National, Egg Beaters, Peter Pan, Banquet, Slim Jim, Kid Cuisine, Healthy choice…), most of which are huge hits in the US although less or even not at all known in Europe (another tale-telling example of non globalisation; there are many examples of brands which are immensely successful this side of the Atlantic and unknown on the other side and vice versa).

Stephanie explained how a big brand like ConAgra could use Social Media to stir passion within its fans. Here are my notes from that session, the live transcript of which you can also find here courtesy of Gaspedal and the Social Media Business Council.

Embracing a Social Media Culture

By Stephanie Moritz, ConAgra foods, USA

Social Media is everywhere. It is now mainstream. Consumers refuse to be marketed at. They want to participate, they have a passion. The challenge is to adapt it within a large organisation. How do you create inspiring programmes for your customers? It takes:

• Targeted manageable plan,
• A plan that supports business goals,
• A focus on consensus building:
  • Setting a plan that achieves and ties to your business objectives
  • How do your get champions on board?
• Long term commitment:
  

  Phil Nieman from Gaspedal and Stephanie Moritz

• 1^st step: understand how social media fits in our culture and objectives. How can you amplify your PR effort using SM
  • Creating a masterplan: define clear business objectives and match them with the SM initiative
  • Enterprise-wide solution. Not just Marketing
  • Establish some guidelines before moving into that space
  • Building the foundation first and listen to conversations. Who Responding to consumers. Addressing issues in a transparent manner.
  • Getting to know the blogging community. We ourselves tried blogs and tried and understand => Building communities
• 2^nd step: getting senior management to become a champion (through CMO)
  • Digital immersion
• 3^rd step: create coalition: there wasn’t much budget or staff. Experts and specialists throughout the organisation have been identified. All cross functional teams were identified. Enthusiasm made it.
• (Audit) Identified key bloggers and organised discussions on products and how they could work together.
  • Created a Twitter page, spent a lot of time on it
  • Created a facebook page
  • Benchmarks, listened to conversations
  • Attended blogger events and blogger media conferences for the sole purpose of listening

When should a brand use social media? Not everyone should jump on the bandwagon Benchmarks are carried out continuously Key to success:

• Set clear goals,
• Create enterprise-wide endorsement,
• Determine roadmap,

Commit.

SMBC’s Bob Pearson: “Social Media is not for geeks, it is about direct conversations with your customers” (unabridged)

important notice: this is the unabridged version of an article which was originally published on the Sterling Performance blog by Bnet.co.uk

Bob Pearson, has just been appointed President of the newly rebranded Social Media Business Council (*) after a successful stint as Vice President, Communities and Conversations at Dell. Bob has been kind enough to agree to answer our few questions on behalf of our BNET readers. My focus in this interview will be on Bob Pearson’s experience, how he plans to use it in his new role, and about his plans for the expansion of the Social Media Business Council.

BNET: you successfully deployed social media initiatives on behalf of a worldwide high-tech company. Is social media only for geeks?

BP: No, social media is about having a conversation directly with your customers. It’s so important that companies take time to see the value in building a long-term relationship with their customers via social media. Many of the initial ideas may have started with “geeks”, who I certainly appreciate, but we live in a world today that has over 1.6 billion people online and more than 500,000 new people going online everyday for the first time in their lives. Social media is becoming mainstream for customers today and should start to become so for companies in the near future.

BNET: what are in your eyes and based on your experience the top three benefits which you, your previous employer and your clients derived from these social media initiatives?

BP: There are many benefits for companies, but gaining ideas, co-shaping your brand and unlocking the value of employees are certainly three important ones.

Social media provides an amazing window into how customers think and what they want. For example, why conduct a focus group with 10 people in a single location when you can build an idea community, ala Dell or Starbucks and receive thousands of ideas and listen to customers discuss them over months? For companies, it’s also important to co-shape your brand and reputation with your customers online. If you conduct strong analytics and you know where your products are being reviewed, you’ll find that a large brand may have as many as 5,000 conversations about itself every day. Ask yourself how many of those conversations you’re participating in or knowledgable of? If you’re not, you’re outsourcing your brand. Powerful thought.

I’ve also seen how social media inside a company enables employees to share their thinking and, quite frankly, let you know if they agree with the direction of the company via their comments or, in some cases, their silence.

BNET: what were the three main successful drivers behind your successful implementation of social media?

BP: I’ve heard people say “make the R small and the I big in ROI”. I like that advice. Social media does not have to cost a lot of money to try. What you need are some courage and a willingness to engage directly with your customers. I like asking people “how many customers do you actually speak with every day”? For too many people in companies, the answer is zero.

Here are three key drivers: #1 – know where conversations are occurring about your brand #2 – have clear rules of the road in how you will conduct social media, including an online policy and #3 – realize that customers want to hear from you, they do not want to hear from “the company”, so personalize your approach. The new formula is “Brand + Personality”.

BNET: how big and how successful is the Blog Council and what sort of a club is it?

BP: Social media is becoming a new discipline within companies that impacts all employees and all departments. As a result, it’s very important for leaders in social media to have a private place to share best practices and learn from each other in real time. There is no better person to learn from then a peer who is figuring out the same thing in a different industry.

The result is the formation of the Blog Council, which now has 60 of the world’s leading brands as members, such as Orange, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Intel, Microsoft and Coca Cola.

BNET: are all companies entitled to join the blog Council, or do they have to meet certain criteria?

BP: The Blog Council is for larger companies, generally over 5,000 employees. The key is that members are actively seeking to improve in social media. We want members who want to learn by asking their peers questions, share ideas and do it all in an “ego-less” environment.

BNET: what are your plans for the development of the Blog Council? Is there anything you’d like to share with our readers? A scoop maybe?

BP: Well, it’s fair to say that our name was ready for a change. In fact, we just changed our name to the Social Media Business Council and you can find us at www.socialmedia.org.

BNET: some of the “bloggers blogging about bloggers” to put it in the words of Andy Sernovitz are sometimes critical of the blog Council, what would you like to say to them?

BP: We welcome everyone’s opinion. We’re focused on building social media as a discipline and helping our members achieve success. It’s all about the conversation and we hope everyone will share how they think we can do better (as an organization and for our members).

BNET: there has been points made by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff and also Seth Godin (in his Meatball Sundae opus) that social media wasn’t for all big companies. What is your opinion about that?

BP: I respect the body of work of both Josh and Seth very much, but I could not disagree more with this particular comment. Social media is for every company that wants to improve how it interacts with its employees and its customers. Internally, a company has a major opportunity to unlock intellectual capital of its employees or gain their ideas more quickly to improve products. Externally, we are scratching the surface on how we can empower customers. Imagine opening up new B2B channels between major companies to communicate more effectively, for example.

I’ve worked inside three Fortune 500 companies and have met with many others, so I’m quite sure of the opportunity ahead of us for companies of all sizes.

BNET: Is the blog Council only about corporate blogging or does it cover a much broader spectrum?

BP: The Blog Council is about social media and how it is utilized to improve communications with employees and customers. Social media represents the most direct way to have a conversation and, in many respects, the most powerful way to learn, share and build relationships. The leading companies of the world are embracing social media and learning how to utilize it effectively. Not every company understands the significance of social media today, but that’s normal for any transformation. They will with time.

Thanks Bob for answering our questions very openly. Our Bnet readers interested in knowing more about the the Social Media Business Council can connect to http://socialmedia.org

(*) note: For the sake of disclosure, it needs to be pointed out that the author is also a member of the Social Media Business Council in which he is the Orange representative.

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

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)

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.

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

Andy Sernovitz on Disclosure: “Disclosure is Easy”

Web 2.0

The next presentation at BlogWell after Ken Kaplan’s Intel presentation and John Earnhardt’s description of what Cisco was doing on the video side, was Andy Sernovitz’s presentation about disclosure best practices. Disclosure is utmost important in social media usage within firms. This ethical issue has to be thought through very carefully by social media managers, and not just by lawyers. “Disclosure is essential”, Andy said, it is “the only way to be successful”.

But he also insisted that “disclosure is easy”. It is about “saying you are and who you work for”. In essence, it means that you have to say “I work for such and such and this is my personal opinion”. This applies to you blogging on behalf of your company and can also apply to you managing bloggers doing the same thing on your behalf, be they internal or external. As a matter of fact, it is also fairly applicable to you when blogging for yourself on your personal blog in case you have a full time job somewhere else. It’s a matter of honesty and transparency, which is very much in synch with the early versions of what used to be called netiquette.

read on at

http://www.blogs.orange-business.com/live/2008/12/sernovitz-on-so.html

community marketing (part one): UGC is part of the Internet DNA

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:

1. 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!)
2. 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.
3. 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.

golden rules for corporate blogging: do’s and don’ts (3/3)

the do’s and don’ts of Internet Blog writing

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.

golden rules for corporate blogging: preliminary questions (2/3)

preliminary questions

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.

golden rules for corporate blogging: introduction (1/3)

introduction

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).

Enterprise 2.0 fear factor: Overcoming risks, uncertainties and doubts

There are risks associated with adopting any new technology, and Enterprise 2.0 is no different. Enterprise 2.0 holds the promise of dramatically increasing business productivity, stimulating greater innovation, and creating tighter connections between employees, as well as with partners, suppliers and customers. While these technologies and other social networking softwares are facilitating knowledge sharing, accelerating team communications, fostering increased collaboration and online communities creation, many executives are recognising their value but worry about losing control of information, compromising sensitive data, opening their networks to security breaches or even exposing employees to time-killing “network noise”.

Liability for potentially illegal activity involving workers, risk of malware infections, bandwidth constraints and other drop-offs in employee productivity are obvious reasons why the “open social Internet” just goes against the instincts of many Chief Information Officers.

It is also true that employees using these systems for group collaboration, usually operate outside the approved IT applications, meaning they aren’t actually subject to enterprise policies governing compliance and information protection. It is obviously a challenge for any IT professional to give up control over the IT systems they depend on. As Enterprise 2.0 is decentralised and ad hoc, control is in the hands of users rather than the IT department …

BASF report on Corporate Blogging

Professional blogger, expert and consultant Klaus Eck from Munich makes an announcement for a forthcoming business breakfast with BASF (a client of his) in which a report will be presented by authors Michael Scheuermann and CheeChin Liew. In this report, its authors are said to describe how to make the round peg of 2.0 collaborative communications fit into the square hole of Corporate structure and rules. I hope that Klaus will make this report (said to be written in both German and English) available soon.

To put it in the words of Klaus’s, this is certainly a very thorny issue. May take this opportunity to urge to read (or read once more) my post on the 15 Golden Rules for Web 2.0.

web 2.0: can you make your brand teenager friendly?

Granted, the character on the left-hand side may not be representative of the average European teen age group, but I needed to attract your attention. Still, unconventional behaviour is what awaits the average corporation wanting to launch a 2.0 website. When I write unconventional, maybe I should correct this and replace it with behaviour adapted to different conventions. Jennifer Jactel of the Toulouse graduate school of management is digging her teeth into this issue with a very good report on generational marketing aimed at teenagers.

“Creating a blog has become really easy and its use has been standardized, even in the business world. But managing a corporate blog is still challenging because one has to deal with comments and posts which might get out of hand very quickly; keeping tabs on one’s brand image and reacting quickly to issues is also a serious problem. Of course it is time consuming, but it is also worthwhile.

Indeed, more than saving on communication costs, it enables businesses to get direct feedbacks from consumers and interact with them too, to control the information they want to release, but above all to improve their image through an appropriate Web presence. Because teenagers are Internet freaks, B2C marketing strategies will have more impact if the organization is present online, particularly through a blog. However, teenagers are also advertising-averse, therefore enticing enterprises to be more and more creative and innovative in their marketing campaigns or products; all this means that they also have to gain their trust, mainly through the establishment of direct contact.

Businesses targeting teenagers should really think about incorporating direct web communication within their marketing strategies. However challenging this may be, it can lead to real success in the blogosphere and beyond. Indeed, a teenager who likes something will tell his friends and so on and so forth, thereby starting a word of mouth promotion of your approach”

• read the report on teenager blogs: ‘how to target teenagers using their blogs