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.

5 tips for your b2b Social Media strategy

note: this piece was originally published on behalf of bnet at http://blogs.bnet.co.uk/sterling-performance/2009/09/23/five-tips-for-b2b-social-media-marketing/

Business brands using social media are starting to see the benefits. But are there any best practices they can use? Guessing that the average businessperson may not know where to start, George Krautzel and Bill Connfrom online agency Toolbox.com have issued a whitepaper on that subject. Here are some ideas:

1. Set objectives first. Don’t head on towards social media just because it’s hip. Who is your target audience and what are you trying to achieve. Are you using the right media outlets for the audience you want to reach?
2. Build a roadmap to engagement. Start advertising on social media platforms and then slowly engage in conversations. “Entry in social media can be as simple as advertising in an online community”, as Conn and Krautzel point out.
3. Examine the costs and benefits of building your own community, as opposed to tapping into existing communities.Building your own community is a lot more costly and exacting than joining an existing one that fits your needs.
4. Transparency is a must. A marketer has to say that he is a marketer, and that’s that. A comprehensive guide to disclosure, as it’s often called, courtesy of the Social Media Business Council. So-called Flogs (fake blogs) are a no-go area,
5. A good marketer listens to what is said about their brand. It’s inppropriate to control feedback, so you should be able to withstand criticism and use negative feedback to improve your service.

I agree with most of Toolbox.com’s advice, but I’d add a couple of caveats:

• Words like “campaign” and “targeting” aren’t really appropriate for social media, in my view.
• And whereas Toolbox advises you to get started with online advertising and then to learn how to engage in conversations, I’d do just the opposite. My ultimate best practice advice would be to ask permission and learn by doing, slowly but surely, one step at a time.

I’ll be picking this theme up in a post soon, but in the meantime, you can download the toolbox social media whitepaper here.

Let me know if you have any other tips to share.

Blogcouncil is dead, long live Social Media Business Council!

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

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

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

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

Posted by on June 30, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

media-aces: evangelising about Corporate social media in Europe

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

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

• read on at http://media-aces.org

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)

why big business needs social media … under certain conditions

 

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

 

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

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

 

7 reasons why the business world hates social media

social media

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

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

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

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

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

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).

10 steps to 2.0 interactivity nirvana

It occurred to me in the past few weeks that there was some kind of missing link in the evolutionary state of the twenty first century corporation towards interactivity. As expressed in an earlier article entitled “15 golden rules for web 2.0” there is a strong requirement for large enterprises to launch interactive marketing initiatives – be they called 2.0, pinko marketing or anything else for that matter – not just because of the buzz word but because there is growing consciousness of the need to engage in better, less top-down discussions with one’s clients. The whole world is awash with concepts like wikinomics (link to past posts on this subject, click here) and co-marketing, but the real issue is not about whether this is required but in actual fact, how to make the rubber meet the road.

And that’s where the missing link is to be found. There is the concept and even the urgent need on the one hand and on the other hand, there is a handful of complex, esoteric tools which managers have heard of but rarely grasp. At the end of the day there is nothing really complex about a blog or an ideagora, but you can’t blame someone whose responsibility is business, who has never worked on an interactive website to come up with clear answers about questions he only discovered a while ago. So this is where we have a role to play, where our ability to bridge the gap between IT and business can actually make a difference.

A friend of mine who is also in charge of a large enterprise portal – his is for a large National retail bank but the issues are really similar to a large extent – was telling me about blogging in his bank. At first, there was some sort of fear, or even disbelief that blogs could lead to anything concrete for the Bank. But one day the General Manager listened to a program on the national radio and he grasped that there was something happening and when he came back to the office, he asked his people about their current plans for using blogs at the Bank to initiate discussions with its clients (and mainly its young clients). His question was echoed all around the top floors until it came all the way back down to the shop-floor and my friend was in a position to do something about it. Actually, not everyone liked what they saw, because client conversations can sometimes be very direct and to be worthwhile, even – or even mostly – not so good comments have to be retained (he had to teach them that and quite a few gnashed their teeth about it). Indeed, they are often the ones which can lead to the most interesting product/service improvements.

But not all corporations are ready to face that music which such good humour and besides, I am not really in favour of big bang approaches to change. There is so much resistance to it in all countries and all sectors that I believe it’s much easier and more effective to apply a staged-approach to change and interactivity. This is why I designed the following interactivity matrix. It was very useful to me and instrumental in selling – smoothly – the idea of expert Corporate blogging. As a matter of fact, this is a first step towards interactivity. It can serve as a test for more interactivity and more adventurous ventures. It can also be beneficial in terms of visibility and traffic gain.

As far as B2B is concerned, there are even areas where interactivity can be instilled for a much lower price and risk-free. This is what I have entitled shared extranet collaboration spaces on which client user groups or even extended sales teams (ie teams including clients’ and partners’ representatives) can exchange files, share information on wiki pages, and even initiate discussion threads in forums. To that end I implemented an online version of Microsoft Sharepoint which enables such teams to collaborate on the web, freely but securely (we even have a SSL connection implemented to enforce data encryption). Extended teams are quite enthusiastic about this, there is no risk at all and management is also very supportive of the idea. I think this is a great step towards interactivity. Ideagoras and full interactivity with clients is of the course the ultimate goal, but they also require maturity and learning curves. The reason why this matrix was so useful is that it helped me fill the gaps which needed to be filled urgently and it helped me buy more time to better implement more ambitious initiatives in the future.

• further reading: ‘15 rules for Web 2.0′

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 …

Word-of-Mouth or when the unbiased opinion is trusted around the globe

All recent studies demonstrate that word-of-mouth (“WOM”) has more of an impact than any other traditional forms of communication. Having a word-of-mouth and social marketing strategy is therefore becoming essential and marketers will have to quickly learn how to effectively target consumer influencers. They should focus as much attention on what consumers are saying about their brands online as they do on any other form of communication.

Word-of-mouth marketing may be the oldest form of advertising but, as a marketing discipline, is a relatively new and increasingly important phenomenon that should be considered as a double-edged sword by marketers. Indeed, the more companies try to control or direct word-of-mouth, the greater their risk of failure. Inspiring consumers to “spread the word” is challenging, and clumsy attempts at it can do more harm than good. Marketers therefore need an authentic approach to make word-of-mouth work well. On the other hand, properly executed, WOM marketing is an incredibly effective weapon in the marketing arsenal, because the message comes from a trusted source.

Giving consumers a reason to talk about you, making it easy for them to share information, engaging and energising them to spread the good word are key ingredients of any word-of-mouth marketing campaign. Here are a couple of tips & tactics to start reaping the benefits of effective WOM marketing …

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