Global PR Blog Week 1.0

Day 2: Emergence of Ideas

July 13, 2004

The topic for our second day was Corporate Blogging. This generated a multitude of posts, including an interview with uber-corporate-blogger Robert Scoble, a discussion of ethics in PR and many, many how-to articles. The full list can be found here.

As happened Monday, some themes and questions emerged from the set of posts, which I thought I'd highlight here.

1) Is it important for a blog to have an individual personality or can a group blog work to showcase an organization's personality? Here, here and here.

2) Are blogs a "technological revolution" or a "publishing revolution"? How important are human factors and culture? Here and here.

3) How do we convince leadership to blog? Many posts had lots of practical advice.

4) Is there something inherently corrupt or wrong about corporate blogging? We are being viewed with suspicion by some. And what's up with PR Ethics in general?

Author: Elizabeth Albrycht | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 1 comments
Category: @ Elizabeth Albrycht | Announcements | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Day 2: Lessons Learned

After the experience of Day 2 of Global PR Blog Week, we the editors thought we'd highlight one major point and reiterate a few things.

The major point:

The participants in Global PR Blog Week are self-selected. We simply posted an invitation on our wiki, hoping people with an interest in sharing their knowledge about PR, marketing and blogs would agree to join in our effort. Many have, and you see the results of that work here.

However, that openness of invitation rested upon the trust that people would not abuse the opportunity and use this forum as a link engine for their own businesses. Unfortunately, you will see that that trust has been abused in some of these posts.

We are sticking to our original philosophy of openness, and the posts will remain. However, this community will need to evaluate whether next year's event will be juried and invitation-only.

Related to that point, there are posts here that are only going to reinforce the negative opinion of PR people and the suspicion that we are trying to corrupt blogging. There have been some rather strongly worded comments to that effect. We leave it to you, community members and readers, to respond.

Some reiterations:

We remain astonished at the level of typos, punctuation and grammatical errors in these posts. We three editors, working nearly full time over 24 hours yesterday, simply could not keep up. Please proof your work! We are professional communicators, for goodness sake. This is totally unacceptable.

During our second day of editing, we realized that the multiple posting problem had more than one dimension, as posts with the same titles broke the extended post links. So, once again, please follow these rules:

1. No more than 3 posts should be submitted per day per author
2. Do not title those posts the same
3. Post titles should be short (4 words or so)

We decided to feature only the first 15 posts on the front page, as otherwise the page took too long to load on dial-up connections.

Finally, we entered into a discussion as to whether we should apply for a Creative Commons license, and which one to choose. We have no closure on that one, as there doesn't seem to be one for groups of multiple authors. We've posted to their licensing discussion board and will let you know the results. We'll also continue this discussion on the wiki in the near future.

Author: Elizabeth Albrycht | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: Announcements

 

Day 2 Stats

We had more than 1000 visitors Tuesday.

Our total page hits for this week so far is 2,906, with the average visit time at 6 minutes.

Page Views:

Average Per Day: 1,380
Average Per Visit: 3.3
July 13: 1,114
This Week: 9,658

Technorati: Global PR Blog Week 1.0 has 238 Links from 68 Sources

Author: Elizabeth Albrycht | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 2 comments
Category: Announcements

 

Chat schedule for July 14

Some of the authors scheduled to post on July 14 will be available for chat during their "office hours" (all hours EST):

• Elizabeth Albrycht — 4 am - 2 pm, via Yahoo! Messenger (e_albrycht)
• Angelo Fernando — 9.30 am to 12.30 pm, 2 pm to 4 pm, via MSN Messenger (heyangelo)
• Bernard Goldbach — 5 am to noon, via Yahoo! Messenger (bgoldbach)
• Alice Marshall — 10 am to 3 pm, via e-mail: marshall [at] prestovivace [dot] biz
• Anthony Parcero — 11 am - 2 pm, via AOL IM (avparcero75)

Before starting a conversation, please reach an agreement on the discussion's degree of confidentiality: is it confidential, is it blogable, would you agree to be identified by name, etc.

All the authors will respond to your comments and questions throughout the day.

Author: Administrator | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: Announcements | Topic 3 Making PR Work

 

Corporate Blogging

I think there is a lot of power in corporate blogging. It seems some think everyone has drunk the koolaid and aren't looking back. Let me try to give a realistic view.

At 800CEOREAD, our weblog is a PR tool for the company and authors we sell. We are working to be the leading information provider on business books and business book publishing. We do this through "signed" book reviews, excerpts, author visits. etc. This expertise and knowledge has our readers spending 2 to 7 minutes with our brand every day. I think that is pretty compelling.

We have two things going for us. The first is the fact that there is always new content being developed. That means there is always news to be reported. The second is a vacuum. Our blog is filling a space that many would think too small to even bother with. For us, it fits perfectly with what we do.

Author: Todd Sattersten | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 1 comments
Category: @ Todd Sattersten | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Getting blog postings into search engines

How to instantly get your business blog postings to show up in the search engines

Search engines love blogs.

Blogs tend to be frequently updated, contain fresh insights on hot topics, link to other sites, and provide resources for further topic exploration.

That's one reason why blog entries tend to predominate over regular website pages for many search topics.

There are two things that you should know to make sure that you optimize the search engine placement for your blog. First is how to write your blog entry so that it does well in the search engines. Second is how to make sure the search engines find your blog.

How To Write Blog Entries So They Rank Well In The Search Engines:

1. Before writing any blog entry that you want to use as a search engine traffic magnet, figure out what keywords you want it to be found under when people search. Most of the time you will be most successful with two word combinations or higher ("marketing strategy" rather than simply "marketing".)

2. Use your chose keyword combination frequently throughout your post. They should be in your headline, the first sentence of your copy, and around 5% of your copy throughout your posting. Don't go much higher, as you will then be penalized and won't show up at all.

3. Write good content to which people will want to link. Most search engines rely not just on the words on your page, but also the links into a given page to determine where sites rank in their results. So, if you write great stuff to which people choose to link, you'll generally do much better than writing carefully crafted, keyword-dense copy that is so bad that nobody sends links your way.

4. Write postings that are longer than normal blog entries. Search engines discount short content pages, as this is a favorite tactic of spammers. 250 words or more is ideal for placement with the search engines.

5. Structure your blog template well, with your headline as an h1 tag, your headline as your title tag, using your blog's keyword function to get your keywords placed another time on the page, etc. You may want to ask your programmer to work with your blog's template for you to optimize these factors.

How To Make Sure The Search Engines Find Your Blog Entries:

Many people think that the secret to getting listed in search engines is submitting each page to the engines on a regular basis. That practice may have worked well in the past, but now search engines give top credit to pages that they find on their own through following links. Thus, smart bloggers work hard to make sure that there are multiple links to their key blog listings:

1. When you write something great, link directly to that post from your main website using the title of the entry or better yet, your targeted keywords as the text in the link.

2. Make comments on other people's blogs, linking into your page that discusses that same topic, again, using your targeted keywords as the text in the link.

3. Use the power of RSS syndication and server side includes to pull your headlines and short excerpts into other pages on your site, such as your index page and news pages. This process gets technical, so I won't explain it here, but here's an example of a site pulling a blog's entries into their pages using RSS: Aviation News. There are several programs out there that make this possible, one of my favorites is CaRP. Tools like these can be used either to pull results in from your own blog, or from other many other news sources.

4. Submit your blog and its RSS feeds to each of the blog search engines. You can find them either by searching the web for topics like "promote your blog", "blog search engines" and "RSS feeds", or can cut the time required dramatically by picking up a copy of Blogging For Business, which contains a list of the top 50 places to promote your blog.

As you do so, and as you write a constant stream of great copy, you'll discover that your blog is not only showing up in many different search engines, but that tons of traffic are coming to your site as a result.

Finally, we promised to show you how you can instantly get your blog content into one of the top search engines.

Yahoo has a great feature in their MyYahoo service which allows you to pull the most recent posts from whatever blogs you choose and have them displayed each time you open up your myYahoo page, like this:

While this is a great way to be able to easily track posts made to the blogs that you find most interesting, it's also a great way to get Yahoo to add your entries to their index, quickly and at no cost.

Here’s the way this strategy works. Simply go to Yahoo and click the MyYahoo link close to the top of the page.

If you don't have a MyYahoo account follow their simple instructions to create one.

Once you get into your MyYahoo page, click the choose content button, then on the resulting page, click the box for RSS Headlines under the MyYahoo! Essentials header.

This will make RSS Headlines live on your MyYahoo page. Click the Edit box next to that option which will take you to a Choose Your RSS Sources page. In the top box there, put in the address to your blog amd save your results.

Now, go to your blog and make a blog posting.

Come back to your MyYahoo page and refresh it. It may take a couple of tries, but, assuming that Yahoo’s server’s not too busy at the moment, you should see the content update on your MyYahoo page, with your brand new post being pulled into your MyYahoo page.

Here’s where the cool part comes in. Calling an RSS listing into a MyYahoo page also triggers the visit of a Yahoo spider to your site, checking out any of the pages that haven't been previously indexed in their search engine.

So, in the process of pulling your RSS feed into your MyYahoo page, you've also alerted Yahoo that you have a new post, which usually means that your post will be added to their index in record time! I've seen it work in as little as 24 hours. Try it yourself and see what happens! Then watch your traffic soar...

Aren't you glad that you came today?

Author: Don Crowther | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 1 comments
Category: @ Don Crowther | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Response to External Comments

I've got a mild rebuttal to Mr. Horton's blog

No Flamethower here!

I did want to respond to your blog post, but rest assured there is no intent to flame here. I can see where you're coming from, and your misgivings are certainly valid, I'm not sure it's as bad as you fear.

What I see happening is a lot of others just like me who are thrilled to be able to have a technology that allows us to do something we've either always done, but it makes it easier, or allows others to try something new. It's still writing, though, and writing anything on a sustained, regular basis is hard work. Not everyone is up to that; witness the number of abandoned blogs. People have the odd idea that somehow the technology is going to do the writing for them, and when they discover that's not the case, they go back to whatever they were doing before, after a day, a week or month of failed attempts to create the magic they were expecting.

I don't think there will ever be a situation where everybody's writing and nobody's reading. Even with all this technology, there is still a major percentage of people who just wouldn't consider writing anything for public consumption, ever. Even some published book authors are telling me, "Oh, I don't know what I would say!"

I've been hung out to dry myself on this next one: not everybody is a writer. I made that statement of perceived broad insult to the world in general only a couple of weeks ago on a discussion group for academics (the PhD kind) and you would've thought I said schools were obsolete. Sheesh! In the real world, this statement is actually true, and hardly anyone would dispute that. With a blog, you have the added necessity to promote the thing, if you want anybody to read it. Not everybody can or will do that, either.

There have always been weird perceptions of new technologies. I don't know how old you are, but I've known people who insisted on picking up the living room and dressing up before the TV was turned on. ;>) Not many people went to that extreme, but there was a persistent notion in the early days of TV that it was somehow two-way, and the people in the studio in New York could see the people at home in Scarsdale or Kalamazoo. My mother once told me that when I was a toddler I thought Arthur Godfrey was my dad. It took a while, but eventually I figured out that wasn't true, and I knew the difference between Daddy who came home at dinnertime and the picture on television during the day.

It won't take lawsuits or anything radical to convince the general public that blogs are simply a content management technology. People will discover it themselves. There are a lot of people who still think the simple act of having a website will bring them fame and fortune. You and I know it can't, but it takes time for the rest of the world to catch up. They will.

Of course I remember the Internet bubble and the gazillions of dollars floating around on thin air. This is not the same thing. Sure, some people may think it is, as happened last winter, when I had an e-mail from a lady asking me how she could promote her blog and get a book deal. Turned out that not only was there no book, this lady didn't fully understand she'd need to write one. She expected somehow having a book deal meant that a publisher recognized your life or your ideas were so wonderful and charming they would come and bring writing people, and the whole thing would be lovely, and she'd get to be on TV and make millions of dollars. Ah, yep.

The only thing I can't get my head around from your post is why you think all these bloggers need an editor. They're not all for general public consumption, if you didn't know that. (There is no insult intended here; I just figure maybe you don't have the whole picture yet.) Even on the professional level, who is to know if the editor knows any better than the writer?

For example, I just finished reading a hardcover book I checked out from my library. It was entitled, And That's the Way IT Will Be. Subtitled, News and Information in a Digital World. Publisher, New York University Press. The copyright date is 1998. I love reading these old computer books, because they're often unintentionally hilarious. I'm sure your local library has a good collection of these. The problem with this book was the fact that the editor was apparently sleeping on the job. Each page has one or more typographic errors, in addition to frequent grammar and spelling mistakes.

This is indicative of the quality of hard-copy books available today. It's one reason why I stopped buying books. There are very few books that have been produced with no errors, either hard-copy or e-published form. Making books right is their job; but they aren't doing it. Same applies to periodicals. If you have occasion to read a small local newspaper or weekly, they often look like the product of Mrs. Ardisana's Sixth Grade Class.

As a reader and customer, it looks to me that editors just don't. They may be filtering or something for tone, or accordance with the publications standards, but there isn't much I've seen in editing for quality. I can safely say I haven't seen one book that was published without errors of some kind in about ten years.

Even so, there have always been publications of dubious value, no matter the technology used to produce them. I think we're in a shakedown period, and those blogs of value to a number of people will succeed and be widely read. There will be some that have a small, highly focused audience. Some will be reserved for an audience of one or two, not intended for public viewing.

We can't presume any intention for all of the blogs; any more than we can presume the same intention for all of those who have cars. Some people will go to the beach; others will use the car to drive to work. The difference between cars and blogs is that we know what cars are capable of; we don't yet know that about blogs.

Author: Trudy W. Schuett | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 3 comments
Category: @ Trudy W. Schuett

 

Blogging For More Sales, To Influence the Media and Show Your Expertise

So it's almost the end of the 4th quarter, and you're really not quite sure whether or not your company's going to come out a winner when it comes to earnings, or perhaps you're a single salesperson in a company that makes you at least meet your monthly quota, but for some reason people just aren't buying.

Why aren't they buying? Well, perhaps you have a useless product or service, or perhaps you just haven't educated them enough about it, other than your sales pitch, which people are rather sick of hearing. Pitching doesn't sell things, anyway. Not anymore. Nope. People are consciously tuning your ads out, too. What's going on?

Throughout the 20th century information became abundant. People only became dependent upon salespeople to make the actual purchase, or transaction, as we call it in my business. This, of course, is one of the value-points of PR, and people do tend to rely on articles they read about a product or service more than they do what an actual salesperson says, unless you play the advisory salesperson role, which I often do.

People are smart. They like to make their own decisions. They do not like, nor will they allow anyone to make them feel as if they were manipulated, whether by a sales pitch or an advertisement. So the modern salesperson should also play the information distributor-broker, gatekeeper and salesperson role. This is where blogs come in.

Having successfully blogged for sales, I can tell you that they provide salespeople the following benefits:

(1) The open showing of product (and area, in my case) knowledge to clients and prospective clients, or prospective buyers.

(2) The ability to keep your "pipeline" full, simply by typing a few keystrokes and updating daily, or even weekly (this is how I remain No. 2 in Real Estate Popular and in Google's top 5 for certain keywords, and I pay $0 for Search Engine Optimization because the blogs I contribute to increase my ranking automatically). A blog allows you to link to your website within each post, automatically providing you higher search engine rankings. Your blog will automatically be highly ranked by most search engines, simply because they're able to be updated more often than say, your company website.

This will only prove successful if you use an automated lead gathering source, which should also be placed in your company website so salespeople can follow up with potential purchasers. Various real estate companies have included automated systems to generate leads for their agents, and quite successfully, but combining blogs with an automated lead generating system could also benefit numerous pharmaceutical companies, which more often than not compete with non-pharma companies for Internet sales (Viagra, Cialis Valium and many others can be found marketed by non-pharma-sanctioned sellers on the Internet, often at prices disallowing much if any profit to the companies making them). Some technology companies could also benefit. Here are a few who I would advise to use blogging in order to increase their sales numbers:

1. Tech Data - The world's second largest global distributor of electronic computer equipment could make its sales force both more efficient and increase its volume by implementing blogs into its sales and marketing strategy. Steve Raymund, blogging could increase your company's sales.

2. DELL - I think it's high-time that DELL CEO Michael Dell got a blog. By blogging regularly, people would contstantly stay tuned in, and when people are constantly attuned to your blog it's much easier to pitch your computers to them. After all, they've tuned into to your blog for weeks, so a simple mention without a pitch involved doesn't look like a sales pitch, but your sales sure do go up when you're blogging to a regular audience. I would even bet that people who buy their first DELL tune into Michael Dell's blog (if he does make one) and continue to buy DELL's because through the blog, Dell would be directly communicating with them. DELL could also give blogs to customers as a promotion, or a co-branding venture. Dude, get a blog!

3. Cars.com - Cars.com could use a blog to constantly communicate with prospective buyers and provide them with updated information that they can't get anywhere else. That way it allows the company to build brand wareness while providing their potential customers with free information, so when it comes time to purchase a car, Cars.com would have already earned their trust, and they can search for cars anytime by the search tool implemented into your blog after it's created, assuming Cars.com does create one.

Any company with an Internet presence with lead generating or e-commerce tools will more often than not benefit from a blog. Why?

Blogs provide a constant source of information, so you can, in a sense, become the expert that people used to depend on newspaper columnists and salespeople to be, but many of them now often read the columnists, as well as five to nine blogs daily. Most professionals are experts in their field, so getting a blog simply allows a professional person, sales or otherwise, to showcase their expertise to the world.

Bill Gates, who is rumored to be getting a blog soon, has come to realize this rather self-evident truth. Blogs can easily make a CEO an expert because of two things: A CEO's expertise and the newspaper column likeness of a blog. This makes it easy for CEOs to communicate with three stakeholders: (1) The media, (2) Company shareholders and (3) Current and potential customers.

I track my blog visitors daily, and there are instances when St. Petersburg Times staff writers have visited, just days before a similar newspaper story to my blog posts was published in the Times. Journalists often get story ideas from blogs, and sometimes blogs themselves become stories.

Of course, with a blog you can also become part of the media landscape. Take Hundred Acres, for example. Its contributing writers are real estate agents and bloggers, but the posts typically read like brief news or magazine articles. Some bloggers are also selling ads using their blogs, Nick Denton's Gawker being one of the most successful ones. Hundreds of thousands of people flock to Gawker daily. What if a CEO received that kind of attention?

Then he, or she, would have to have a blog. CEOs can easily and inexpensively create brand awareness, show their expertise to the world and retain customer and stockholder satisfaction, on top of communicating regularly with the media, all with a blog. Publishing a book is still optional, but not always as necessary, because blogs often tell the stories of our lives, and those often are the most interesting to read.

Author: John Mudd | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 3 comments
Category: @ John Mudd | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

How to launch a corporate blog for a professional services organization

Traditionally, branding is associated with physical products and consumer packaged goods. But branding has become a crucial part of business for the service industry, which today employs more people than all other industries combined. And mergers and acquisitions in combination with global deregulation has seen the rise of many powerful global brands in the service industry. Financial services has been in the forefront of this development and four of the 30 most valuable brands (according to Interbrand) in the world are financial services brands (Citibank, American Express, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch).

Branding is increasingly important for professional services companies for several reasons. You cannot store a service, it is consumed at the same time as it is produced. If you are going to buy a new digital camera, you can go to the store and look at it, feel it and try it out before you buy. You can’t do that with a service which means that your impressions of the brand are extremely important. You buy a service on trust: this brand will best fulfill my expectations.

Services are also hard to show. How do you illustrate management consulting?

In a professional services company, like a law firm, a PR agency or a management consultancy, you sell competence. The most important and most expensive asset is your employees. Since services are hard to illustrate, much of the brand is built in the meeting between your employees and the customers. And the more frequent and qualitative conversation you have with your clients, the better. Corporate blogs can play a vital part of that conversation.

We can assume that the harder it is to evaluate a service before it is bought, the more important it is that the customer has favorable associations to the brand. And the more knowledge-intensive and less standardized the service is, the harder it is for a customer to evaluate the service prior to purchase. It might be easier to evaluate a cleaning company than a PR agency. Another factor is the risk involved in the purchase. The higher the risk, the more importance is placed on the brand.

Few things are more effective in marketing a professional services company than establishing experts or thought leaders who act as speakers at seminars, get publicity when quoted in media and in general act as the face of the brand. And one of the most obvious advantages of corporate blogs is that they fairly quickly can build industry experts and corporate stars. That said, it should be clear that professional services brands are among those that can benefit most from starting corporate blogs.

Corporate blogs can help professional services companies, well, any company, to improve different aspects of its communications, not just in brand building. Before starting a blog, ask yourself:

What areas of communication needs improvement in your organization (some examples)?

External communication
* Brand awareness/Brand positioning
* Business development
* Issues management/lobbying
* Crisis communication
* Media relations
* Recruitment marketing
* Customer support
* Reseller/dealer support
* Community relations

Internal communication
* Knowledge management
* Sales support
* Project communication

I have researched as many case studies and articles about corporate blogging as possible during the last months in order to list some of the arguments why blogs should belong in the arsenal of the marketing departement.

External communication

Brand awareness/Brand positioning

- Build awareness of the company and the nature of its business.
- Change the positioning of your brand.
- Influence the influencers - "Nike is talking to the right people -- instead of the most people -- who happen to be the influencers".
- Market your expertise - "As with conventional publishing, bloggers get their names out there and can carve out niches as experts."
- Improve search engine ranking. A few days after the Stockholm Spectator had an article about plagiarism at Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter, 5 of the 10 first results of the journalists name in Google came from blogs.
- Drive traffic to your company web page. New content makes readers come back, and the effect will spill over to your corporate web site, which probably is not updated as often.
- Reach new audiences. RSS and news aggregators allow people to ”subscribe” to words or phrases which in turn makes it possible for your messages to find new audiences.

Business development

- Launch a product or service - "Oxygen Media launched a blog to promote its new show Good Girls Don't."
- Gain new clients. "Today's "tech-friendly" (law) students will become tomorrow's corporate counsels. Indeed, the idea that these students will ignore technology and revert to paper-driven processes becomes the increasingly ridiculous conclusion. More specifically ... these decision makers of tomorrow may also immediately think of the web as a logical place to start looking for a lawyer."

Issues management/lobbying

- Many politicians use blogs for opinion building. Organizations and corporations can too.

Crisis communication

- I have yet not met a PR Manager that honestly can say that he quickly can post messages on the company web site himself on a Saturday afternoon, without having to call some site owner in a central position within the company. A crisis blog could be a quick way to post information in times of crisis, from remote places and on odd hours.

Media relations

- Companies are beginning to experiment with sending press releases via RSS. Predictions are that journalists will start using news aggregators and RSS readers to avoid being dependent on a mail box full of spam. So far, we have no indications that this actually works, rather we can see that the news stories sent out via RSS are being picked up by bloggers who spread the news. For example, the 8 press releases distributed by Apple via RSS between June 8 and June 23, 2004, were all picked up by blogs. In the Bloglines monitoring system, all press releases were picked up, the most popular one with 15 references (certainly more bloggers wrote about the topics without posting a direct link)

Recruitment marketing

- Today's students are more used to finding information online, and via blogs, and they will become tomorrow's employees (and clients, competitors etc).

Customer support

- RSS can replace email as communications channel. The number of e-mail newsletters is increasing, so is spam. Many newsletters get caught in the spam filters. Syndicating your communication via RSS can be more effective, or at least as a support to the regular newsletters. "At the height of the spread of the Sobig.F virus (...), PaidContent.org publisher Rafat Ali suspended publication of his daily e-mail newsletter and opted for an RSS version instead."

Reseller/dealer support

- Blogs can be used to distribute information about new campaigns, new products, FAQs, to your resellers and dealers.

Community relations

- To engage in a more direct conversation with customers, users, developers, employees etc. “Sun sees its Blogs.sun.com web site as a possible model for a new type of grassroots corporate communication.”

Internal communication

- Motivate present employees. Lets them show their expertise.
- Encourages dialogue, in contrast to ordinary top-down "weekly newsletters from the boss".

Knowledge management

- Act as a learning tool internally.
- Blogs as research tool. Feeds offer an efficient and inexpensive means to notify a large audience of a research question or need.

Sales support

- Competetive intelligence. "Information about new campaigns or new products. Verizon is reportedly using commercial blog technology within its competitive intelligence and market research group."

Project communication

- Improve information sharing within projects. The Navy’s eBusiness Operations Office is using blogs to improve information sharing for program managers, project experts, contractors, sponsors, and war-fighters.

Now that you have the arguments for starting a corporate blog I will share some thoughts on how to get started. Since I am in the starting phase of launching a corporate blog for the law firm I am working for, this corporate blog roadmap is written with the eyes of a PR practitioner in a global professional services firm, but can certainly be useful for most organizations. My top priority with a blog is to build brand recognition and promote experts in different fields of law, so if your purpose differs, there might be other factors to consider.

But first we must distinguish between
- Corporate blog: an official blog from a company, which signals that the blog is an official communications channel for the company
- Employee blog: a blog run by one or several employees of a company, with or without the endorsement of the company, about the company or business related to it

How to start a corporate blog:

1. Identify what area of communications you want to improve.
2. Choose to start a corporate blog or to encourage an employee blog.
3. Should you start a group blog or an individual blog?
4. What geographic area should the blog cover (global or should one country begin as a trial project?) and what language should you use (if you start in one country and think of replicating to more countries, should you have all in English or should they be local)
5. Company wide blog or blog per practice group, market unit, product group, industry sector?
6. Find evangelists who are good communicators and willing to spend the time posting on the blog.
7. Get the accept from your CEO or whoever has the final say.
8. Create an editorial policy about who gets to blog, tone of voice, areas to cover, length and frequency of posts, information sources to cover, copyright aspects, target audience, do’s and dont’s.
9. Get accept from your IT department. They will worry about security and the risks of having several individuals post information live on a website. Get their help in selecting admin software and setting up the blog, domain, RSS feeds and tracking/measurement capabilities.
10. Create a corporate blog with the correct graphic profile according to your brand guidelines. Include biographies and photos of the bloggers.
11. Create an extensive list of information sources for the bloggers to cover in order to get information to comment on. Include official news sources, media, other blogs, press releases etc.
12. Give your bloggers access to a news aggregator so that they get the feel of RSS feeds and how it works.
13. Give your bloggers a list of blogs to read. Most people are not used to reading blogs and need to become familiar with blogging style writing and netiquette (linking policies etc).
14. Allow a trial period for some weeks, to be able to fine tune and make adjustments.
15. Start an RSS-feed and make the blog public.
16. Begin marketing your blog. List the blog in blog directories.
Link to the blog in your email signature and from your corporate webpage. Tell your customers and your employees. Don’t send out a press release about it, to get credit let blogs market your blog.
17. Evaluate, adjust and evaluate again.

Corporate blogs are not a universal solution to all communications problems, but used correctly they can be a perfect tool to improve external or internal communications. Law firms in the US have come a long way in using blogs, or "blawgs" as a tool for branding. Many other professional services firms will follow in their footsteps.

Footnote: Since I am offline for the first part of this week, I will not be able to answer questions or comments until Friday.

Author: Hans Kullin | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 3 comments
Category: @ Hans Kullin | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Constructive Bridges

[Note: This posting aggregates three separate postings: Constructing Bridges, Continuous Mindshare, and Interactive Engagement.]

Constructing Bridges

Many blogs "preach to the choir." This has quite a lot of value as well in terms of inspiring and rallying converted constituents.

But your intent is evangelism, then your intent is to convert the unconverted...the unwashed masses (i.e. they've never heard of you or your ideas). This is a much more ambitious task.

As I write this, I realize just how big a topic this idea alone is. It's about bridge building, often between two cultures. It's about change management as well.

It's important to understand the status quo and what would motivate change. And it's important to show respect for those that still are skeptical of your message or its underlying intent and talk to them in their language. Typically dialogue is accomplished through respect for values and tapping into universal and common desires and motives rather than bashing the idiocy of the current system. Those that are still invested in the current system aren't going to listen to an attack on something they're heavily invested.

There are certainly areas in technology that result in polarization. But as an evangelist you want to understand the reasons (the objections to your message) behind polarization more than you want to join in the crusade.

For instance, in my "agile software development" and "agile project management" example, it is not simply enough to highlight pro-agile stances around bigger-picture contextual references. Unless your "big picture" also includes looking at the reasons why heavy weight methodologies (often cited as the "opposite" of lightweight methodologies that are encompassed by agile techniques) such as CMM and often, RUP, are popular and have been in use for a long time in the industry. In the areas of agile project management, one couldn't ignore the prevalence of the Project Management Institute (PMI), its traction, its message and its certification process. You have to understand the mindset of the heavyweight methodology proponent. You have to understand its strengths.

Your best best for conversion would start with those potential readers that are using the methodology just because that's all they know of - but they are aware of its limitations in particular cases and situations of software development and open to new solutions. It's important to show respect and understanding (both will strengthen your arguments and reasoning) and resist creating a religious war.

And don't underestimate the power of inertia. Typically a product/service benefit must be 10 times better than the current solution to justify a switch in most customer's minds. An example of the power of the inertia is the fact that most corporations won't budge from using the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser even with its multitude of security concerns - what it has going for it is "ubiquity and inertia." Powerful forces indeed. Typically if you are "selling change" - which is typically WHY evangelism is needed - you cannot ignore this fact.

Continuous Mindshare

What is different is that the blog allows for constant communication. If people read the blog every day, they are spending two to seven minutes with us every day. Mailers get thrown away and email get deleted. RSS allows the posts to be delivered to them and they can opt-out at any time. Blogging by its nature is more personal than other marketing communication. I think that strikes a chord with people. (Todd Satterson's interview on 800-CEO-READ blog via CorporateBlogging.info)

Imagine that the audience you want to reach is spending a few minutes with your blog every day (assuming you are updating that frequently). Now that's continuous mindshare. And that's the beauty of blogs. You don't have to wait and hope that the trade press will pick it up…you have a continuous direct conduit to your audience, many of them whom are connected influencers as well.

But continuous mindshare is not a given because you've thrown together a blog. No "build it and they will subscribe." You have to proactively build and grow an audience that anxiously anticipates your next post.

Enticing and encouraging new visitors to subscribe in the first place is necessary. Make the RSS feed easy to find and, depending on the market and your objectives, offer an email subscription if the RSS feed would be a hurdle.

Getting a visitor to your blog site once is not enough. Good intentions to visit again are simple to forget - if you've gotten them to the blog initially and they're interested, encourage subscription there and then.

To keep that continuous mindshare, it's important to post frequently - I know that for many corporations this may realistically occur only 1-2 times a week (and that's really the minimum). If you want to accelerate your success - post every day - yes, each and every day. Make it a daily habit for your readers to look forward to reading your blog.

Immediacy is also important here. Immediacy means respond to direct feedback, comments, or interesting and compelling 3rd party blog posts within 24-36 hours. Otherwise, you often miss the window of opportunity especially in heated debates - the conversation has ebbed and flowed into another topic (that's the A.D.D. nature of the blogosphere). Did you know Technorati doesn't even bother to report results on any topic older than 7 days? The blogosphere is also affectionately known as the World Live Web or the Living Web.

And don't sing the same old refrain over and over like a broken record. Imagine you had to read this stuff every day. I'm not going to mention names, but some blogs have gotten to be way too predicable. You know exactly what their opinion is and what they're going to say. Some consistency around your objectives is required but keep it at a high level. The posts themselves should strike to be fresh, compelling and even surprising. Try taking a different tack or arriving from a new angle, point to new offbeat links, and just be counterintuitive once in a while to sustain interest and avoid staleness. Evolve your message and keep your audience coming back.

Interactive Engagement

Richard Schreuer of marketing research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey talked about how to measure the impact of advocacy. According to their data, advocates tend to recommend products to an average of 6 other people. They've also found that receiving a recommendation on a product increases purchase intent by an average of 6%. So by combining the number of people who say they will recommend a product with the estimated increased purchase intent, you can estimate the financial impact of advocacy. (via Decent Marketing)

While advocates, or customer evangelists, is one of the goals of corporate evangelism, companies must be prepared for the fact that they don't control a conversation.

The shift from crafted unilateral (outbound) messages from corporate to the public to a more authentic, interactive participatory exchange is certainly new for PR and, even more so, for corporations.

The shift implies listening, not just talking. And a continuous feedback loop.

You don't always initiate the conversation, either. Fast Company magazine's restrictive linking policy came under the ire of Boing Boing - one of the most popular blogs - and quickly spread through the Internet:

FastCompany -- the tech magazine for the new economy -- has a spectacularily clueless policy on linking...

As far as lessons learned, Fast Company replied:

This is an instructive example of some of the challenges and opportunities that can arise as more organizations -- not just individuals -- begin blogging. With increased visibility and transparency comes interactivity and responsibility. And if you ever have a question, want to share an idea, or need to clarify something, don't hesitate to contact me directly.

On corporate blogging, Ross Mayfield muses:

Whether large scale adoption of corporate blogging will occur outside tech because of control has less to do with characteristics of industries than leadership. It happens first in information intensive industries, but can happen anywhere a manager wants to gain competitive advantage and is willing not just to give up some control, but recognize its already lost.

Assuming one can be comfortable with the knowledge that conversations are already occuring and control is often an illusion, how do you leverage engagement with interested parties?

A comment by a a Sun blogger on DivaBlog asserts that what's more typical is that no conversations around your company and its products and services is occuring:

The idea of a conversation is great, but what's difficult is to engage the dialog, to connect the other on the discussion thread.

Engagement occurs not just at the final sales delivery channel - to gain advocates for already finished product - but much earlier - during the conception and design phases of products and services. Iterative (for each new and improved version) and interactive engagement is a feedback loop through the entire lifecycle of the product including the earliest embryonic stages. Customers become stakeholders. When customers have a role beyond that of 'consumer' they will engage. Blogs can assist in connecting to the desires, dreams, and wants of the market and to gather that feedback. The product itself is always the primary message. Effort placed on building a buzz-worthy product simplifies evangelist's role.

Author: Evelyn Rodriguez | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 1 comments
Category: @ Evelyn Rodriguez | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Thought Leadership, Evangelism in Blogs

[Note: This posting aggregates three separate postings: Thought Leadership, Evangelism in Blogs, Creative Passion, and Contextual Relevance.]

Thought Leadership, Evangelism in Blogs

Almost everyone, even personal blogs, are 'evangelizing' something - whether that is their favorite presidential candidate, the strategic value of enterprise I.T., or their love of knitting.

Let's say that your company or a client is interested in either starting their own corporate blog or 'pitching' ideas to the blogosphere (the collective virtual space inhabited by bloggers).

A common perception among those new to blogs are that they are frequently updated websites and thus follow the general guidelines for website content that most professionals are familiar with. While blogging software may be used for purposes of website content management, I'm using a more specific definition that aligns with the top 6 characteristics of blogs outlined at CorporateBlogging.info - namely, Personality, Voice, The Links, Conversations, Frequency, Feed.

There are five factors to consider for success with a corporate blog that is used primarily for evangelism and thought leadership as I defined those terms in my Q&A.

These factors will be discussed in greater detail in subsequent posts:

1. Creative Passion
2. Contextual Relevance
3. Constructing Bridges
3. Continuous Mindshare
4. Iterative Engagement

In addition, it's important to remember these points as well.

1. Your product/service is the primary message; it needs to be a story that begs to be told.
2. You are the message.
3. You don't always initiate the conversation.

Creative Passion

I outlined the importance of passion fairly well in a previous post. I'd like to highlight and expand on a few points made in that post. Blogging can be fun or it can be a tedious unrelenting chore.

You're not going to have much luck forcing employees to blog, even if it is part of their job description, if they don't have the desire to do so. I'm a big stickler for authenticity so I'll be honest here. I optimistically thought (even with the to-do list I had going) that I'd whip out these posts before I headed out on vacation to Ireland. But alas, I find myself sitting in an Internet café in Dublin because I made a commitment to participate in Global PR Blog Week. Don't get me wrong, I think the idea is incredible and it's an honor to participate, but under the circumstances right this moment - yes, I wish my vacation started a week out and I'd rather be strolling amongst the monastery ruins and lakes nestled in the Glendalough valley instead of staring at my laptop in a windowless basement.

That is not the frame of mind that you want employees to be writing from - sure, there will be a few posts where their heart isn't in it - but that should be the rare exception not the rule.

Why am I stressing this so hard?

• Blogs get abandoned quite frequently due to burn out, lack of interest, why am I doing this onerous obligation soul-searching and related reasons. I've abandoned one blog myself because the topic was too constrained for me and it ultimately felt like an albatross hung around my neck. Next time around it's fun. Most people underestimate the time and effort required to sustain a good blog. The only way the project is going to be ongoing is to make sure that enthusiasm doesn't wane. How do you do that? Tap into some aspect of your product/service that your authors and audience are enthused about. Employees will be blogging in their off hours if it's fun for them. Edwin K., the primary author of the Collaxa blog, actually used the words "fun" in describing his 2 and 1/2 years thus far of evangelizing the business process management and BPEL space. Fun, passion, challenge, enthusiasm: It's the only way the commitment will be maintained.
• You're competing for attention. There are over 3 million - amazing! - blogs tracked by Technorati now…god knows, there are plenty of bloggers that don't know to ping Technorati and are thus uncounted. For the majority of bloggers, this is a personal labor of love. They're not paid to write and in fact, their hobby takes hosting dollars in addition to their time and effort. Their motivation springs from love of something and it comes across in their writing. Your blog will be competing with those interesting, compelling voices for a share of the time folks devote to their blog reading habit. I was taking a random jaunt at Bloglines (if you are a user, you can see how many subscriptions others have) and I was surprised by how few blogs most people are subscribed to compared to my 300+. http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?id=evelynr" At this point, I am loathe to add any new blog to my roster - I'm already too overwhelmed. Bottom line: If you want to compete, your blog must also be interesting and compelling. (Even more so if the topic is already being covered fairly well.) The best way to achieve this is that the authors are jazzed about writing.

This passion factor is one reason that I advocate that each author have their own blog. The sense of ownership created by having your own space - a 'room of one's own' - spurs the author on and gives her the drive to create and build up their own body of work and their own audience.

With team blogs, it's easier to feel that if you don't post for a bit maybe someone else will pick up the slack. It's also a bit harder with team blogs to impart an individual personality and voice as well as engender a deep sense of ownership. For additional perceived authenticity and credibility (and perhaps to avoid legal ramifications), I even advocate having each individual blog hosted outside of the company domain.

Contextual Relevance

Your blog isn't for you - it's for your readers. You're looking for a match between your interests and what's relevant to your target reader in their context. Make certain you have a target reader in mind and an objective for your corporate blog. You've got to search for the 'bigger context' around your topic - the topic you're evangelizing or establishing thought leadership around.

I can probably best describe this through examples.

Before I leap into examples, I would caution technology companies in particular not to solely evangelize "the blue-sky future." In this industry, we tend to (at least I know I do) want to project out 5-10 years (or more) to where the world is headed. While that makes for fascinating reading and fun researching and writing, if it's the only timeframe you're discussing it will be harder to maintain a wider readership beyond futurists.

Relevance means just that - in your readers' mind they are wondering, what's in it for me? Everyone is aware they need to think long-term but I'd balance this with short-term "what's in it for me right now" views. Lay out your product roadmap from your current in production version out as far as you can and map your posts to balance between the present, the short-term 6-18 months and the blue-sky view of where your customer's world is headed.

When the Pivia Software blog started the objective was to reach influencers and blog readers such as press, analysts, and venture capitalists as we weren't certain how much of our customer base was reading blogs. So that was Step 0, knowing your objectives and readership.

Step 1 is choosing the overall theme for the blog. We did a little informal 'research' on the most popular blog search engines to determine which topics were already showing up in "conversations" in the blogosphere. On one hand, you probably don't want to blog on a subject that is oversubscribed. (Recommend: Positioning) And if it is oversubcribed, you will have to find your own niche to differentiate among the crowd. We probably don't need yet another generic social software blog, for instance.

I was looking for a topic area that matched Pivia's software and market strategy as well as a topic area that had at least a little traction among current blog readers. It's easier for a new blog to break ground and gain readers if there at least a few other blogs it can link to covering similar and adjacent areas of interest.

Now, that's a Catch-22 if you're evangelizing a new concept - you're not going to find much in the way of current conversation. There's not going to be buzz around it…because, duh, it's new. It's so new, you may have even invented it. I remember clearly when Java didn't exist at all. Sun Microsystems put a lot of effort (pre-blogosphere) to educate the industry, build buzz and establish third-party fervor for the new language. So, at some point, new concepts, new technologies, new standards, new markets will be "unfindable". What then?

At Pivia we searched on terms like "application performance" or "application delivery" over a period of a few weeks - nothing. I had personally followed blogs for quite some time, but since I emphasized other technology interests it had been over 18 months since I tracked enterprise software or networking technologies. We extended the search to adjacent areas. Unfortunately, some of the adjacent areas are difficult to track due to their generality and commonality such as "user experience" or "Web applications" or "distributed enterprise" (and many blog search engines could stand to be beefed up). We also did research to determine the most influential blogs that covered enterprise software and networking topics. I checked whether press and/or analysts in the general enterprise software and networking areas had their own blogs.

Basically, I was looking for topics that already were discussed from time to time in the blogosphere to "hook" into and to kick start the blog into gear. These are also great indicators as to what people care about and are finding worthy enough to talk about.

Currently, the Pivia blog is titled Performance Matters for various reasons. It ties into their tagline "Because Performance Matters" but more importantly because it also it has broad connotations - the blog will discuss matters related to performance - and that can extend beyond just Web application performance - to the performance of your employees. Be careful when choosing a theme not too box yourself too narrowly - you never know where you might take your product direction.

A hypothetical example (no Kodak doesn't have a blog) is that Kodak's blog would be better served being about the general topic of memories and its related topics such as preserving a Kodak moment rather than specifically about developing film. If Kodak had several bloggers, then each one could focus in on niches around the broad theme and in that case, you could have one blogger focused on high-end photography for the professional geeks.

Another example. I'm passionate about "agile software development" as a methodology for software development - it's something that I'd love to evangelize. A quick search over two weeks showed that there is some conversation in the blogosphere but not a lot around that specific search topic.

And don't even attempt searching "software development" - that's an overloaded term and oversubscribed. At first glance, due to the sparse results from "agile software development" it might appear that it would take a lot of work to build up buzz and conversation around that topic, but a general understanding of the demographics of the blogosphere and knowing that the topic is being evangelized heavily offline in addition to by press and analysts would give me the confidence to start a blog specifically on this topic. My friends evangelizing agile project management may take longer to build buzz as more developers than managers are bloggers and familiar with agile software development, but there are ways to use current buzzworthy topics and add relevance to them.

Step 2 is choosing individual post topics. Continuing on the agile project management theme, authors (or an assigned market researcher) would need to be scouring blogs, events/conferences, press and analyst reports for relevant ideas. The trick is to think broadly and see the implications and patterns between two topics. For instance, a blog post by a 3rd party about the failure rate of new product launches could serve as a great launching pad for a discussion on why and how agile project management practices help ensure successful product launches (Curious? A biggie is collaborative feedback with customers). A 3rd party post on the difficulty of coordinating offshore software development resources could trigger a post on how teams are organized and projects managed using agile methodology.

You may have to just get creative after a while. For instance, it was hard for me to automate the process of finding relevant topics for Pivia. Lately, we're focusing on broad areas (for instance, the distributed enterprise trend, and the use of the Web as an application delivery platform) that are difficult to "Feedsterize". I hit upon an indirect tactic: I used the term "latency" (a term that doesn't result in 100,000 hits but is still quite relevant) as a way to automate some appropriate posts that could serve as fodder for posts for Pivia authors.

However, it is still vitally important to read the most influential bloggers and press to make sure you can jump into a current heated - and revelant - conversation while the iron is hot. Usually there are a few folks in each company that seem to read up more than others, it's helpful if those persons could pass along links to blog authors as well. (In fact, they should be bloggers themselves - as often the best bloggers are the most well-read!)

Of late, we've toyed with expanding the focus of the Pivia blog (perhaps as a temporary six-month intensive series) on all matters related to the distributed enterprise, especially around remote and mobile employees. This means we'd tackle topics that aren't even necessarily technological whatsoever but encompass (relevant to the end-customer) business and management issues related to distributed offices and the extended enterprise as well.

The art of contextual relevance is like art - knowing what to pull in, emphasize from the whole spectrum of reality and what to drop - and emphasizing what universally resonates with your core reader.

The best haiku have metaphorical power, because the concrete observation which is the subject has wider resonance. In this sense the haiku poet is like a great photographer: the art is in the selection. One could photograph everything and anything, but only those images that catch a universal significance, that show some balance of forces, are worth publishing. - Source here

Author: Evelyn Rodriguez | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 2 comments
Category: @ Evelyn Rodriguez | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Perfectionism, Identity and Blogs

One thing I've noted both first-hand and witnessing other bloggers initiating into the world of corporate blogs is the effect that authorship - a by-line - has to create an online identity. This is a vital component of the successful blogs - personality and voice - and an important differentiator to what make blogs distinct from much other media (and share more similarities with syndicated columnists or talk show hosts).

The other side of the coin is that people tend to take their blog posts too seriously. What do I mean?

When I started blogging I would re-read and re-write my posts several times; double-check spelling and all the links and quotes. And if I wasn't feeling particularly "on", I'd avoid writing altogether. I've seen corporate bloggers do the same thing - often to the nth degree. Seeing your name in print - associated with an article you wrote - for posterity (or at least a very long time with permalinks) can be a little intimidating. It's your reputation, your credibility at stake - the post becomes an extension of yourself and what you represent. Perceived external expectations for quality can keep one sharp and focused…or they can lead to stress and potentially burn out. However, for the most part these expectations for perfectionism are internally created.

A blog post will never be perfect. There is no time for perfection; while a professional writer rewrites their story several times (7-10 times for published non-fiction) and has the benefit of professional editorial review and copy-editing…a blog should never have that level of scrutiny or you're probably missing the boat on getting your message out in a timely manner. And thus, the post will always appear to come up short - at least according to the author - compared to the ideal post in their mind's eye. Nope, it may not be good enough to publish in Time Magazine.

Eventually what I see is the pressure is too much. Blog posts trail off because they're too much work - at least in order to meet our lofty expectations. This is particularly an issue with corporate blogs - where the standards appear even higher than for personal blogs.

It's important to explain to corporate bloggers they will be forgiven for a few mistakes, a few typos, a few unremarkable posts - freshness, rawness, intensity, frequency and immediacy are much more highly valued qualities in the blogosphere. A huge shift in thinking for most of us.

Myself included.

Again, my identity (appears) to be at stake.

For a blogger, there will never be no shortage of reasons why it's not the ideal, perfect post.

If you've done any amount of writing two factors to effortless writing may have been stumbled upon. 1) Being in touch with your "muse" and 2) writing uncensored, unfiltered from that place of connection - that is the rich soil that the authentic voice emerges from. Blogs are more about raw but precious gemstones than countless rewrites and continuous polishing for a flawless jewel.

And most importantly, stopping short of 100% completeness, wholeness and perfection leaves room for your audience to engage, collaborate, and add to the work. I hope you know that these posts are merely works in progress and not completed masterpieces.

I invite you to take up your own brush to the canvas...either in the comments or on your own blog or in your own private thoughts.

Author: Evelyn Rodriguez | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: @ Evelyn Rodriguez | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Thoughts on Thought Leadership

I'm a big fan of the book "Momentum: How Companies Become Unstoppable Market Forces" (see my review here and follow-up here) and found it invaluable in terms of its view of thought leadership and establishing momentum for 'digital products' - that's a broader view than just software companies - it actually encompasses any company with a significant online or digital component. And it's also one of the few books that speaks to 'branding' for B2B companies. If I knew everyone that were reading these posts was coming from that frame of reference, I'd use it as a basis to launch into how to apply Momentum concepts via blogs. But since I doubt that's the case, I'll just share a few tidbits related to thought leadership, which they define also as 'conceptual innovation' or perhaps these days meme creation.

The most important points are that it's crucial to focus on what's relevant to the customers' or readers' world not yours, that ideas not the molecules move customers, and to be as forward-thinking (read: bold) as possible.

My opinion is that Momentum stresses the CEO as the 'personality' too heavily as a key factor to building "momentum" behind a company. Perhaps the idea of personality itself is the key takeaway. Personality and voice are key components of any blog. (The book was published before corporate blogging came on the scene.)

In their view, the CEO is a human face that the public can latch onto. In the snippets below, when the books' authors speak about "scaling the CEO" - you are probably thinking that blogs are a perfect way to do that. Employees should be well-versed (and engaged) in the corporate vision and longer-term road map anyway for their day-to-day jobs and now they also can be the holders and messenagers of the vision.

"The NC [network computer] wasn't the first time [Oracle CEO, Larry] Ellison created news and piqued customer interest by providing a compelling context for, and putting a human face on, a confluence of market forces."

"The personal passion, market insight, and hyperbole of Ellison's view of the opportunities created by the media server and the NC gave them a "bet-the-company" feel."

"In some important way, the media server and the NC succeeded in building customers' belief that Oracle was the right choice for them, even as their strategic technology choices were still evolving in the post-IBM computing world. Ironically, the demise of the media server and the NC validated Oracle's position in customers' minds as the company with the product strategy most likely to overcome whatever future challenges might be required of database technology -- the exact predicament these same customers hoped to avoid by choosing Oracle."

"Clearly Ellison understood how to draw attention to himself and his company by moving beyond simple product announcements. Ellison did two things particularly well in his role as industry visionary. First, he aligned the underlying technology trends of the information technology industry and positioned them as powerful market forces made up of products and companies with a common enemy: Microsoft. Second, he personalized the concepts in ways virtually anyone could understand. In this way, he intuitively grasped, before many of his
contemporaries did, that customers would ultimately reward him for taking risks -- even when his big ideas failed. In looking back on our experiences with EMC, Intel, Sun, and Microsoft, we found similar issues existed for each company; each featured a CEO with a visionary agenda whose public persona was larger than life, especially when compared to our clients who were losing market share -- IBM's John Akers, Motorola's Gary Tooker, Hewlett-Packard's Lew Platt, and Kodak's Kay Whitmore."

"But the most interesting aspect of [Cisco CEO, John] Chamber's view of the future was not its ultimate accuracy. What was different about his vision was the fact that it wasn't a vision for Cisco. Chambers was offering a perspective on the future business model of his customers.

"Until the Marketplace of Ideas, a company's vision typically stayed inside the walls of the organization. Prior to the widespread adoption of digital technologies like PCs, cell phones, and the Web and the accompanying change in customers' expectations for differentiation, companies used vision predominantly to motivate employees, build morale, and strengthen company culture."

"In summary, the world's capacity for executive visibility -- especially for executives of digital companies -- grew exponentially and reinforced the demand for executives with presence and a vision of the future. Our momentum research validated the idea that a company's vision of the future could not be limited to its internal audiences. ...

"In order to achieve momentum, a company has to motivate not just the customers themselves, but also the ecosystem around a customer opportunity. The futures contract that comes with all digital brands must also include the brand extensions in a product or service ecosystem, or the company risks losing a source of differentiation."

"To address the futures contract he had with Cisco's customers, Chambers had to articulate a vision that promised to move its ecosystem partners in the right direction. In speaking to Cisco's telecommunications customers about the revenue opportunity at stake [reference to Cisco's famous 'voice is over' talk to telcos], Chambers was also trying to rally an entire industry around the economic opportunity available to third parties in the voice-to-data business transition. He had seen IBM and Wang lose ground to more nimble competitors as the business opportunity of corporate computing moved to the PC and computer-server business models, and he was certain that the same inclusive, standards-based business model would prevail for the Internet."

"We've said throughout this book that ideas about the impact of technology on business and people's lives are the currency of innovation in the Marketplace of Ideas. Customers expect momentum brands (and their CEOs) to tell them things they don't already know about how to solve old problems in new ways -- what we call thought leadership. In a B2B context, thought leaders illustrate over-the-horizon business concepts that describe the impact of digital technologies on a market's business models, business processes, or customer behaviors. "Conceptual innovation" is how the International Thought Leadership Council defines thought leadership.....The most effective forms of thought leadership extend beyond the "what" to the "how". In other words, customers want to know more than what to expect; they want to know how to understand the impact of digital technologies on their businesses, and what strategies, approaches, or models to deploy in order to take advantage of the new technologies."

"Think of your CEO as a product."

"Encourage your CEO to sacrifice around one of the three key areas of thought leadership: business processes, business models, or customer behavior."

"Look for sources of validation in the academic, consulting, or analyst communities." [Look for sources in trade press and especially blog posts.]

"Scale your CEO."

"Develop deliverables that scale your CEO's vision of the future, especially deliverables that are available via the Web. Include video and radio programs to establish a sense of the CEO's personality and how it aligns with the customer experience. The most common and effective channels for thought leadership are public speaking, best practices, case studies, original market research, white papers, and books. [And now blogs!!] These proven tools put your CEO's ideas in decision-making opportunities and conversations -- even when he or she isn't in the room." [Not the stress on the CEO's ideas….it's the ideas, the vision that need help spreading and the CEO cannot do it alone.]

Author: Evelyn Rodriguez | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: @ Evelyn Rodriguez | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Case Study: Blogging to Spot Trends & Forecast Markets

Small Business Tends LLC is a company that uses blogs to spot trends and forecast the likely behavior of the small business marketplace.

For nearly a year now we have been collecting and organizing information about small business. The process has been an educational one.

With more than 300 pages up at Small Business Trends and the launch of a second TrendTracker website, we have learned that blogs are great for identifying trends and for disseminating insight into developing trends.

Spotting Trends

We daily roam the Web, print publications, TV and radio looking for information that tells us something about small business.

We rely heavily on news reports, traditional content-oriented websites, print publications, and newsletters for the intelligence we gather.

We scout out subject matter from a wide assortment of other blogs.

• First of all, blogs point us to original sources that have raw data. (Bloggers have a way of discovering the most intriguing information!)
• Second, blogs by their nature, with their culture of linking and creative thinking, tend to create buzz around popular topics. In other words, the more the blogs are talking about something, the more we pay attention -- it may signal an emerging trend.

Based on the most popular blog topics, we pull together a critical mass of information that we can then run through our small business filters.

We also rely on events and conferences, and our daily work interactions to identify trends. For example, we both are consultants with half a century of experience between us. We have worked at virtually every size organization, from large corporations, to small businesses under 100 employees, to solo home-based businesses. We have bootstrapped. We have raised outside funding. Our experience and how we apply it to ongoing relationships with small business clients are important ways that we take the pulse of the small business market.

And last but not least, we rely on input from our network of contacts -- and from our readers. A blog offers the opportunity for our readers to make comments. We learn from them. That level of interaction feeds back into our content gathering and trend recognition process. It also supports our efforts to bring more readers to the site.

Tracking Trends

Using blogging tools has helped us develop our websites and eased the process of publishing.

In a past life, we ran the Web's most popular motorcycle website. It had thousands of pages of content, multiple databases, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to develop and manage. Even so it was a lumbering beast compared to the immediacy of a blog.

With a traditional, dynamic, database-driven website, we were able at best to publish new information once a day. The process of publishing was laborious. Content would first have to be created. Then it would be passed on to developers who would code it. Next it would be loaded into a database. And finally it would be called up in a template.

With a blog we can publish new content at any time with the click of a mouse. Almost no coding needs to be done. There is no dedicated staff of developers. The people who gather and analyze information post it without having to rely on an IT department, content management specialists, Web developers, or database managers.

Because a blog is so easy to publish, we are light on our feet. We spend more time developing meaningful content and analyzing how the data supports developing trends. Almost no time is taken up in the process of organizing the presentation of our content.

Blogging has allowed us to pull together a creditable level of content far more rapidly and easily than we could have using earlier Web development tools. Take a look at Small Business Trends’ 300 plus posts and see if you don't agree.

What we have done with Small Business Trends and TrendTracker, would have been prohibitively expensive for a business of our size if we had stuck to traditional content management and Web publishing schemes.

Site Marketing and PR

We also use other blogs to market our blogs. By becoming active members of the blogging community we are able to trade links with blogs and to post on other blog sites. This, along with good focused content, has given us excellent search engine position, which in turn increases our traffic. Technology such as RSS feeds and newsreaders helps us get our content out to even more people.

We also utilize a traditional email newsletter. We’ve simply placed the signup link on our blog. We increased ten-fold the signup rate once we placed the link on the blog, versus the commercial website. The newsletter is free and serves as a marketing vehicle for the blog.

As a blogger, you are able to develop your reputation very rapidly. All you have to do to be an expert is to post good information and insights on a regular and frequent basis on a focused topic, and then let the world know about it.

Summary

Blogs are tremendously versatile websites. That makes them multi-purpose tools when it comes to spotting trends and forecasting the behavior of different marketplaces.

The process we have followed at Small Business Trends is one that can be adapted to any subject matter. It's simply a matter of immersing yourself in the blogosphere and seeing where it will take you.

Contact:

We will be available from 10:00 AM to 12:00 Noon (Eastern U.S. time) on July 13th via instant messenger to answer questions. We can be reached at "Smallbiztrends" on AOL instant messenger, and "smallbiztrends" on Yahoo messenger during those times.

Author: Anita Campbell | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: @ Anita Campbell | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Blogs Are Corporate Brand Threats

Global PR Blog Week Day 2: Corporate Brand Threat: Blogs & Disruptive Messaging

The great power of the one-way brand marketing strategy via static print collateral, messaging and websites is losing ground to the interactive “talk-back” power of blogging. Are PR-backed blogging initiatives the “needed mechanism” which will help save the corporate marketing branders’ day?

Micro Media is Changing the PR Practice

The proliferation of Weblogs and RSS news feeds has changed the practice of public relations forever. Despite the belief in media consolidation, as TechJournalism’s Rebecca MacKinnon says, “We are no longer living in a world dominated by mass media conglomerates. Today readers are just as likely to be influenced by something they see on a blog as they are by an article in the New York Times.” As P&G’s Global Marketing Chief, R. Stengel, said in a recent Business Week article, “The Vanishing Mass Market,” which outlines the death of mass marketing, “P&G is now standing mass marketing on its head by shifting emphasis from selling to the vast anonymous crowd to selling to millions of particular consumers…[companies] find the people...are very focused on them....and become relevant to them.” This means that to keep clients relevant to consumers today that the role of the public relations counselor is changing quickly. Corporations are still looking to communications agencies to reach key audiences. The difference, however, is that PR pros must not only secure the "earned media coverage" they have been known to do for decades, but now they must also know how to include bloggers and their niche audiences (many of whom are part of the audiences they are trying to reach for their client organizations) into their media relations outreach. As MacKinnon says, “the rules of engagement are different” in this world of participatory journalism and disruptive messaging, or as McDonald’s Chief Marketing Officer now calls it “Brand Journalism.”

Fortune 500 Abandoning “the Universal Message”

In June 2004 McDonald’s CMO, Larry Light, made history. He announced in Advertising Age that the company is pulling further away from mass marketing because no single ad can tell the whole story in today’s economy. Pointing to the fact that we are a society now surrounded by the web, email, and wireless technology (which give us 24/7 global connections to each other), he went on to announce McDonald’s adoption of a new marketing technique called "Brand Journalism."

“No single ad can tell the whole story in today’s economy…brand journalism represents the end of brand positioning as we know it… We don't need one big execution of a big idea. We need one big idea that can be used in a multidimensional, multilayered and multifaceted way.” -McDonald’s CMO, Larry Light

The announcement of a change in McDonald’s marketing strategy was probably due to the fact that in January of 2003, the Company announced its first-ever quarterly loss--$343.8 million--since becoming a public company in 1965. Undoubtedly the announcement is also reaction to the movie, Super Size Me, which slapped McDonald’s in the face by coupling a gentleman’s one month McDonald’s-only diet with an extensive online marketing and blog monitoring campaign of his weight gain (which ripped through the blogosphere like wildfire). This caused brand damage. Mr. Light described the “Brand Journalism” concept he plans to use as marking "the end of brand positioning as we know it." (Al Ries & Jack Trout are you listening?) This is not ‘light’ news coming from the Chief Marketing Officer of the world’s #8 most valuable brand (see Business Week’s 2003 Interbrand Study).

Light’s new strategy entails using many stories rather than employing one message to reach everyone.

In effect, he declared that McDonald's was abandoning the universal message concept. He went on to define Brand Journalism, which he also referred to as a “brand narrative” or “brand chronicle,” as a way to record "what happens to a brand in the world," and create ad communications that, over time, “can tell a whole story of a brand.” To branch out, he said, “The Company is using many platforms and has shifted the advertising budget….two-thirds of that budget was once dedicated to prime time broadcast TV…now, only one-third is,” he said. Surely we wonder where exactly his budget is being shifted? Surely Light doesn’t mean merely moving his media budgets to the already heavily-funded customer touchpoints like email newsletters and wireless alerts to cell phones. Perhaps he means blogs?

“The Company is using many platforms and has shifted the advertising budget.”-McDonald’s CMO, Larry Light

Summary

In light of the above, blogs are posing threats to Fortune 1000 brands and in order to meet the new brand threat that blogs pose, corporations are attempting to influence bloggers in their media relations outreach, as well as shifting media budgets to strenghthen their own online corporate brand voices.

Author: Robb Hecht | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 1 comments
Category: @ Robb Hecht | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

A Very Brief Look at Blogging for the Uninitiated Executive

As usual the latest deluge of internet hype this time concerning blogs, bloggers, and blogging is doing more to nauseate us than enlighten us. Just about every techno-wonk in every type of publication around has written something about how blogs and their associated technologies are going to change everything (yet again). This quick piece is my attempt to cut through it all and merely provide an initial toe-hold for any non-nerd attempting to scale the mountain of hype that surrounds the blog phenomenon.

While I will be brief here I want to emphasize that the advent and evolution of blogs and associated technologies is definitely something significant and further reading is highly encouraged.

Firstly, don't get stuck on the term blog. Don't worry that you may have missed some important technical concept or that you haven't been paying close enough attention to Star Trek. Blog is simply an abbreviation for Weblog which was the name geeks gave to their online diaries they started publishing on the internet back in the jolly old 1990's.

Although a blog can still be used as a diary it may be less confusing to first think of a blog as a tool for publishing cheaply. What was once something that a fairly geeky person had to code and maintain on an internet server has been productized into an easy to use hosted publishing service. Now, for about $10/month, even a relative luddite can sign up with a blogging service like Typepad.com and easily publish a full-featured professional looking online journal.

While the underlying web technology hasn't really changed much blogs are a huge leap forward from the amateurish publishing we saw with "home pages" in the early days of the internet. The blogging services that we have today allow nearly anyone to easily create a publication very much like a magazine with features for publishing news and pictures in an attractive layout, archiving articles, advertising, syndication, and reader commentary.

Indeed what we are witnessing with today's blogging services might be better grasped as a publishing revolution rather than a technological revolution. Although creation of content and promotion still require hard work the barrier for entering publishing is barely a speed-bump anymore when anyone with a minimum of technical expertise can set up a nice looking online journal for a small monthly fee. Smart people and organizations are taking advantage of this advent in publishing and publications devoted to all kinds of interesting niches are popping up everyday.

Here are a few examples of how blogs are being cleverly used:

I-S-Cubed Inc. --- http://iscubed.typepad.com/onsecurity/
Corporate blogs are just now starting to appear and I-S-Cubed's blog is a good example of what we may soon come to know as a garden variety corporate blog. This blog is a timely journal about the company it represents. It says here we are, here's what we do, here are the interesting issues we're dealing with, and here are the thoughts of our key thinkers. Official corporate communication like press releases have not been forgotten but are instead woven into a more human readable stream of posts on the blog. The ISCubed blog is nice looking yet very economical and simply created using the Typepad service.

Payments News --- http://www.paymentsnews.com/
Payments News is the blog of the Glenbrook consulting group. The blog is a constantly updated digest of interesting news items touching financial services technologies and other areas related to Glenbrook's expertise. What better way to showcase your expertise than to publish a niche news journal devoted to things you find interesting and important for your clients? I think this blog is also created with the neat and economical Typepad service.

DPreview.com --- http://www.dpreview.com
DPreview is an extremely popular consumer website that has covered digital photography since 1998. While DPreview's format resembles a blog with news postings about digital photography, it is a definitely a full-featured website (with user forums etc.) and NOT a blog. I mention it here because it shows that a format similar to the blog format works for mainstream websites. And as blogging sevices evolve and become more robust I think the technical barrier to producing a site of this caliber will diminish significantly. Already with the blogging services we have today a cruder imitation of this digital photography journal can be created very easily. Imagine if Yahoo adopted a blogging platform and tied it into Yahoo groups functionality. Virtually anyone would be able to create a decently full-featured high-performance consumer news site.

Gawker Media --- http://www.gawker.com
Gawker Media is trying to create a bonafide media brand basically from scratch by building a stable of popular commercial blogs. Capitalizing on the economy and novelty of the blog medium Gawker has hired some good writers and has worked hard at old-fashioned mainstream publicity to create some really popular blog sites. Two of their most popular sites are Gizmodo and Wonkette with the former being a continuous stream of news and commentary on the world of digital gadgets and the latter a savvy political blog.

Intraware Blog --- http://itra.typepad.com
Since I'm writing this I have to mention my own company's fledgling corporate blog. I've tried to post interesting items with an angle toward Intraware but I also post material that I feel is generally interesting for our audience of investors, clients, and shareholders. It is definitely a corporate blog but I feel that original voice is important even in corporate writing and gives the blog a more personable feel. While norms for corporate blogging may emerge soon I would say that if you make it interesting, relevant, and have a little fun, you can’t go wrong. Telling your story with a good corporate blog beats the heck out of periodically issuing sterile press releases.

In Conclusion
I believe in being brief when writing for busy people so I am going to conclude here. I hope that this brief explanation and few examples have given you a more practical understanding of what the heck blogs are. As you gradually digest the blog concept I encourage you to read more. I think you'll find that the evolution of blogs, their related technologies, and emerging techniques for leveraging the blog medium are indeed something significant, and what all this fuss is really about.

And-- if you're an exec with too little time on her hands to keep up with stuff like this you might want to first look into the related technology for syndication called RSS. With most news sites providing RSS feeds nowadays, you can employ an RSS aggregator and then cover ten times the news you usually read in one quarter of the time. I have news fed into MS Outlook using Newsgator and I can scan through headlines on forty sites in ten minutes.

Author: Dave Austin | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 14 comments
Category: @ Dave Austin | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Blogs And Google PageRank

Like most webmasters, you face a constant uphill battle every day, in your attempts to increase your Google PageRank. You see other websites with PageRanks of 5, 6, 7, and even more, and wonder why it’s such a struggle for your website. You are searching for a way, to add those all important incoming links, to add those precious points of PageRank. If you are seeking a low cost solution to the problem, perhaps a weblog (more commonly referred to as a blog) may be just what you are looking for to help.

Before you dismiss blogs, as the domain of angst ridden teenagers and diaries of lunches no one cares about, take a closer look. Blogs have come a long way from those online diary days. They have brought some strong PageRanks along with them as well. Now part of the mainstream, we see blogs everywhere from business websites to political campaigns. They are not just about cheese sandwiches and the lovelorn anymore.

Blogs are becoming a powerful tool, for strengthening a website’s Google PageRank, by taking advantage of what blogs have to offer.

What is Google PageRank?

Google PageRank (one word) is the measure of an internet page based on the number and importance of a site’s incoming links. It is expressed as a numerical value, from PR0 to PR10, with PR10 being the highest possible PageRank (PR). Very few websites achieve that PR 10 level, of course.

Each level is more difficult to reach that one previous. The system is based on an exponential scale, similar to the earthquake Richter Scale. The only difficulty with the Google PageRank scale is no one is entirely certain how the numbers are calculated.

Incoming links for web pages are, in the opinion of Google, votes in favor of that page. On the other hand, Google considers some votes to be more important than others. The simple number of incoming links to a page is calculated by Google, but the relative importance of the “voting page” is given even more weight in the mathematical formula.

The pages that are considered to be more important votes, in turn increase the importance of the page they link. More important pages pass along more voting power. This is measured numerically as PageRank.

Note carefully, that PageRank is for each individual web page, not the entire web site as a whole. Every page in the Google data base has its own PageRank. Sites don’t have “rank”. Every separate page, however, on your web site has its own PageRank..

Be sure to always keep in mind, that PageRank is not the same thing, as your site’s ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs). They are entirely separate items. PR is the relative importance of a page on the web, expressed as a number. The SERPs are where your site appears on a search for your keywords.

Why do blogs have such high Google PageRank?

Blogs tend to have very strong Google PageRanks. These high PageRanks are achieved through one of the hallmarks of the blogging technique. People who maintain blogs (called bloggers) are free and generous linkers. If gaining link exchanges was ever a problem for you in the past, you need to consider a starting a blog.

Incoming links are the determinant of PageRank. That is the strength of blogs. They attract both theme based link exchanges and natural links from other blogs. There are also a number of special blog only directories that supply an additional PageRank boost. That extra set of directories is not available to traditional websites unless they add a blog component.

Blogs are also well represented in the important mainstream web directories, including The Open Directory Project and by extension the Google Directory, and the Yahoo! Directory as well.

Blogs attract links because of several important factors. One of those factors is fresh, constantly updated content. It’s an old adage already that good content will attract links. With blogs, it is a fact. By providing your readers with quality daily posts, other bloggers will link to them, and comment upon them in their own blogs.

That linking achieves two goals. First of all, it adds a strong natural link. Secondly, due to the discussion of your blog post, in the linking blog, your incoming link is quite possibly themed. Because the linking blog is probably in the same general topic area as your blog, the theme is consistent. If it’s not a related blog, the context of the linking post itself can help to theme the link. In either case, your blog benefits from a solid boost in PageRank.

Bloggers are generous linkers to other blogs they enjoy, and posts they believe will be of interest to their readers. Google PageRank is an issue for very few bloggers. There is little concern in the blogging community (sometimes referred to as the “blogosphere”) about hoarding PageRank.

It is simply not on the radar of a huge percentage of bloggers. Because of that lack of concern, some very highly PageRanked blogs will freely exchange links, or link to another blog, with a much lower PageRank.

How can a blog enhance your site’s PageRank?

A blog can easily be added to an existing website. Many off the shelf blogging tools can be imported directly to your site. They can be easily modified to suit your requirements. On the other hand, a blog can be coded from the ground up, to provide a unique tailored look for your site. A blog can be set up as a separate free standing site as well.

Because of the daily, or at minimum three times a week updates, your blog has constant fresh and interesting content for your readers. That content will attract natural and unreciprocated incoming links. The bring valuable PageRank transfer, along with fresh visitor traffic.

If your content is sufficiently interesting and informative, two types of blog links will occur. One is the home page permanent link. The other is the themed link from a blog post. That themed link will slide off the home page, but will bring PageRank from an internal page. Bloggers routinely read other blogs and link to their selected posts, passing along valuable PageRank as a matter of course.

Bloggers like to make link exchanges and often they have no idea or concerns about Google PageRank. Many have never even heard of the concept. Some very good PR5 and PR6 home page blogs are blissfully unaware of that fact. They care about exchanges for traffic and interest to their readership, and will readily swap with blogs they or their readers might enjoy.

Google is thought to be discounting reciprocal links on many static websites, especially link exchange pages. On blogs, that discounting does not appear to be evident. Because blog links are heavily reciprocated, any penalties would show up quickly in a reduction of blog backlinks. That does not appear to be the case.

A quick glance at any number of blog backlinks will display many reciprocated links. One reason for that may be the fact that blog links are almost universally placed on the home page. Another is bloggers, in general, make link trades with other bloggers who write about the same theme. The on page text usually contains similar content, and often the same keywords, in both exchanging blogs.

The blog section of your website will add PageRank very quickly, often achieving a PR4 or PR5 within only a couple of months of existence. You can link that page, to any pages of your existing website, and provide that page with a PageRank boost. This is especially helpful if you are in a highly competitive keyword area.

Problems with blogs and PageRank

Everything is not perfect with blogs, but then nothing is ever without some flaws. Blogs have some shotcomings too.

One major problem to address with blogs, especially if you are utilizing a preset blog template supplied by one of the major blog platforms, is internal PageRank transfer. Blog PageRanks are heavily skewed to the home page. Many of the blog templates are not written with strong internal linkage. Because of that weakness, many internal pages in the archives, do not possess strong PageRanks.

To correct the internal link and PageRank distribution problem, the blog will often require some major changes in the sitemap structure. Since most bloggers have their most recent posts scroll off the front page, and into the archives, many bloggers are not concerned with the problem. That is a concern, however, if you are attempting to maximize PageRank. Some system of categorizing and highlighting, important and heavily searched blog posts, is needed.

Another area of concern are the incoming links themselves. If the link comes from a blog post, that has slipped off the home page, it may take the PageRank boost with it. That is another result of some blogs’ weak internal linking structure. The power of blog links is skewed heavily toward top page links. On the other hand, blogs with strong PageRanks will have some natural PageRank transfer to the internal pages, despite the blog template limitations.

Long term, there may be some potential for concern, about the heavy use of reciprocal linking between blogs. Any possibility of penalties, for excessive reciprocal links should be seriously considered. Adding more natural links and directory links could certainly help in that regard. Over dependency on link exchanges should be avoided. Some degree of balance is needed to maintain a solid ratio of incoming and outgoing links.

Conclusion

Blogs are a powerful tool for developing Google PageRank. They can be utilized as part of an existing website, or as a free standing independent entity. In either case, PageRank accruing to the blog pages can be transferred to any other website pages that need an influx of PageRank.

Transfer can be accomplished through internal linkage, if the blog is part of the existing website. PageRank can flow from a free standing blog by standard linking practices from another website.

Blogs receive strong Google PageRanks, because they gain many powerful incoming links, in a surprisingly short period of time. PR4 and PR4 rankings within the first two to three months of a blog’s existence are commonplace.

Bloggers are free and generous linkers, who happily link to other blogs they enjoy, or as a service to their own readership. Along with those links comes a healthy boost of PageRank. The constantly updated postings to blogs will add many natural and unreciprocated links as well. The fresh content and high PageRanks get many blogs crawled by internet spiders on a daily basis.

The current concern with reciprocal links being downplayed by Google, and the other search engines, doesn’t appear to be evident with blogs. Because link exchanges among blogs tend to be between blogs with similar themes, the reciprocal links are not a problem at this point. That could change, however, so diligence in gaining natural and unreciprocated links is still necessary.

To give your website a much need PageRank shot in the arm, try adding a blog.

It could be the biggest boost to your site’s Page Rank yet.

Author: Wayne Hurlbert | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: @ Wayne Hurlbert | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Blogs As A Website Promotional Tool

You have probably heard much discussion about the new phenomenon of weblogs, more popularly referred to as blogs. Long dismissed by serious webmasters and business people, blogs were thought to be the sole province of angst ridden teenagers, and a few self indulgent navel gazing writers. That is not the case any longer.

Blogs have stormed onto the internet, sporting strong Google PageRanks, and often very large and intensely loyal readerships. The worlds of politics, sports, and business have seen an explosion in the number of blogs, over the past year. Blogs are everywhere on the internet. Along with providing a boost to your Google PageRank, and to your search engine results pages (SERPs), blogs are a tremendous promotional tool for your website and your business as a whole.

By adding a blog to your existing website, or as a cross linked stand alone site, a blog will pay heavy dividends to your business. By adding a human element and a sense of immediacy to your site, a blog will add not only potential new customers and clients to your business, but a healthy injection of goodwill as well.

Blogs provide a powerful promotional vehicle both online and offline.

Perhaps it is about time to consider starting a blog.

Promotional benefits that blogs can provide

Blogs build regular readership traffic. Because of their frequent updates, often daily, readers will return very frequently. A traditional static website has far fewer changes, and often requires coding and the assistance of a technical person. There is no such requirement for blogs.

Most blogging platforms allow for the transfer of fresh blog posts directly to a website, providing a continual supply of new material. Because of these regular additions of fresh keyword rich content to your site, you gain favor with the search engines. The spiders will crawl your site more frequently and index your site more often. The new keyword laden content will create some pages that score highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The content of a business blog should not be blatantly promotional in nature. Instead, it should provide that benefit more indirectly. Posting regular blog entries about industry news in your business area, fair and unbiased product information and reviews, new product development information, and business advice for your readers will establish you as an expert in your field. As an expert, you will be called upon by the media for interviews and often as a speaker in your industry area. The promotional benefits of those activities are obvious.

Other bloggers (people who write and maintain blogs) will also promote your blog, by linking to any blog posts that interest them and their readership. Bloggers are free and generous linkers of the blogs they read. Many bloggers are completely unaware of their Google PageRank and often of their blog's position in the search engine results. They freely link to blogs for the content alone. The search engines are, at best, a distant secondary concern.

You get free publicity and promotion for your blog from other bloggers. Since many of the other bloggers, who link to your blog columns, are in posting similar themed content on their own blogs, you get the benefit of any topic sensitive PageRank that may be implemented by Google. You also get some much needed link popularity and some PageRank boost that help your site in the search engines.

Blogs bring a human element to your business

The very concept of adding a human element to your business, may seem a little obvious to many people. On the other hand, many business and website owners have overlooked the benefits of placing a personal stamp on their business. A blog can provide precisely that human element for you.

The first thing you will notice about a business blog is its frequent number of updates. Almost every day a new post or column is added to the blog. The posts are usually written in a conversational tone and often contain personal elements about the writer. Those personal elements are where the human face on the company appears.

As your readers return daily, and your blog is written in a manner that encourages repeat visitor traffic, your visitors get to know you as the author on a more personal level. The personal writing will include information about you as an individual, as well as information about your company.

Because your blog readers return at least several times per week to read your latest blog postings, you begin to develop a rapport with them. Over time, they become familiar with you and naturally become customers. It is generally agreed by marketing experts that people prefer to do business with people whom they know and trust. A blog helps to develop that trust in you and your products and services.

Promotion online with blogs

The online promotional benefits of a blog are numerous and powerful for your website. The immediacy of your blog can provide up to the minute information about your company to existing and potential customers and clients.

Your blog will develop a loyal daily readership over time. The importance of that readership is its business potential. Every one of those regular visitors is a possible future customer or client. By visiting your blog every day, many of them will be interested in checking out your main business website. In that sense, a blog is a customer attractor for your company and its products and services.

By means of the ubiquitous comments systems found on most blogs, reader feedback can be almost instantaneous. Don't worry about the potential for comment spam or abusive comments. While a potential annoyance, they are minimal compared to the benefits of personal interaction with your visitor traffic.

Most blog platforms contain a built-in comment feature. If your blog system doesn't include one, there are many good third party add-on commenters available. E-mail spam doesn't prevent a business from using e-mail. Comment spam shouldn't stop you from having a commenter added to your blog either.

A powerful feature of blogs is the use of an RSS feed. RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Sydication. Take your pick, as both are correct. What an RSS feed does, is send a blog's highlights to recipients instantly upon publication.

Most blog programs have an RSS or Atom (or a combination) feature for enabling transmission of your blog to a wider audience of subscribers to your RSS feed. Many blogs have a sign-up feature right on the blog itself, making the addition of a feed easy for your visitors to read your blog as you update.

To read blogs, your visitors need to use what is called an aggregator. By attaching an aggregator , which is a blog collection and reading program to their web browser, customers can read your blog posts as they happen in real time. Some well known aggregators include Bloglines, Feedster, and Kinja. There are many more good RSS feed services available as well.

E-mail newsletters are usually on a delayed time scale compared to the speed of an RSS feed. Because of this speed difference, e-mail newsletters will take on a different role for your business. No longer required to provide news, your newsletter can provide more indepth information and special offers to your subscribers. The RSS feed enables you to utilize your e-mail newsletter in new and innovative ways.

Promotion offline with blogs

Blogs, surprisingly, can have some solid offline benefits for your business. One of the most important is the value of your blog to the media. Blogs are regularly scanned by the mainstream and the trade media outlets, vis RSS feeds, for news story ideas. Your breaking news story is of interest to the journalists in your field.

Be certain that you have easy to access contact information, on your blog and on your website, so reporters can make instant contact with you. They are often on very tight deadlines and can't wait to find you. By being available, your business story can be told, and you can also be quoted as an expert in other news stories. You may also find yourself being contacted as an expert speaker in your business area. The blog will establish your authority credentials.

Your blog will already have helped establish you as an expert, in your field of business, because of your daily informative posts. Since blogs are still relatively new to the business arena, you will also be seen as being on the leading edge of innovation, for your industry. You know that can never be a bad thing.

Be certain to include your blog URL on all of your business cards, letterhead, and everywhere else your main website URL is included. Many people will visit your blog for information, who might not otherwise visit your business site. They will often use the blog as an entry to your company website, and eventually become customers or clients.

Conclusion

The promotional advantages of adding a blog to your existing website, or as a stand alone blog, are many and powerful. The addition of a blog component establishes you as an expert in your field, reaping rewards as a media spokesperson or a public speaker, in your area of endeavor. Being a blogger places you and your business on the leading edge of your industry. Standard offline promotional techniques will also pay dividends when applied to blogs.

Online, your blog will pick up many solid and theme related links from other bloggers, and from traditional websites. The topic sensitive links created will boost your Google PageRank and your search engine results for your main keywords. Often, your blog will provide another search engine result for your business keywords, creating another entry into your main business website.

Because of the freshness of blog content, it is crawled often by the various search engine spiders. That frequent addition of newly crawled content to the search engine indexes will enhance your level of visitor traffic.

Through the use of RSS feeds, your blog posts will be instantly available to your blog subscribers. Used in conjunction with your existing e-mail newsletter, your blog's RSS feed will keep your readers up to date on your business and your products.

Add a blog to your promotional efforts, and reap the rewards, both on the internet and offline as well.

Your business bottom line will thank you for being a blogger.

Author: Wayne Hurlbert | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: @ Wayne Hurlbert | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Corporate Blogging Survey

I've been thinking about the value of corporate blogging and I thought a survey would help answer some of my questions. Here are my questions.

1) Why do you blog for your company?
2) What goals did you set for the blog?
3) How do you think your blog fits into your company's communications strategy?
4) Tell me about the publishing mechanics of your blog. How often do you publish? How do you decide what to publish? Any special publishing techniques?
5) Who writes the blog? Who contributes to the blog on a regular basis?
6) Have you achieved your original communications goals?
7) Were there any any unexpected communications or learning consequences as a result of publishing your blog?

New Questions:
8) How have you built better relationships with customers?
9) Macromedia, MicroSoft and other companies are encouraging more of their employees to blog. How do all of these different voices together affect the direction of a company?

Here is a list of the people kind enough to post answers to my corporate blogging survey. If you would like to post answers, either post them on this blog, my blog or the PR Global Wiki Corporate Blogging Survey page.

· John Dowdell, Macromedia.
· Sean Corfield, Macromedia.
· Brooke Brown, OnClick
· Heather Hamilton, Microsoft
· Gary Lerhaupt, Dell

Author: John Cass | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 2 comments
Category: @ John Cass | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

MicroSoft Corporate Blogs & Other Stories

Remember 1995. Bill Gates did not think the web was important. He nearly made a big blunder by not recognizing the web’s importance, but Microsoft eventually won the day against Netscape.

Today, Bill Gates and other senior executives will not let another technology leapfrog them again. Maybe fearing what will happen to Microsoft if they don’t let their employees’ blog, Microsoft has over 700 employees blogging today.

Led by such Microsoft blogging pioneers as Robert Scoble, Microsoft has given its marketing and technical teams simple blogging tools to start posting content about their jobs and hobbies.

To some, Microsoft is the poster child for large faceless corporation, all this blogging at Microsoft lets MS technical people and marketers put a human face on Microsoft and communicate the company message quickly.

Intelliseek, a company researching and tracking consumer generated media, thinks any company should be monitoring what its customers are satying on forums, blogs and social networking sites.

From MarketingSherpa.com’s article ‘How to track (and influence) consumer buzz online about your brand’ “2004 Forrester/Intelliseek research shows that more than 60% of consumers trust other consumers' online postings about products and brands. In comparison, pop-ads are only trusted by roughly 5%, search ads by less than 40%, branded ads by less than 50%. So an individual consumer post may have far greater impact than the online ad campaign you paid for.”

Tech companies like MicroSoft and Macromedia have a clue. They are on the blogging train now before it leaves the station.

If the only time you ever hear from a PR or marketing professional is when they want to sell you something. Then in today’s media savvy society your average customer will discount or ignore their voice.

If you’re company’s marketing or technical employees are corporate bloggers. Mixing product announcements with an ongoing dialogue about their children’s latest soccer tournament. The audiences’ perception about your company subtly changes.

Therefore with blogging, your audience will listen, and your company has a better change to communicate their message.

CORPORATE BLOGGING PROPOSAL

There are two types of corporate blogs. Those blogs that link into a company's existing customer community and those blogs that seek to create one.

A company with an established brand and customer base that uses the Internet can use a corporate blog to start an online conversation with customers.

Forums provide opportunities for customers to talk and discuss products. But with a forum a company cannot totally control the direction of the online conversation.

A blog lets a company direct and display the content of a website in much more newsy format.

Corporate blogs are similar to online newspapers, in that they allow companies to tell their audience the latest news on both their industry and company’s products.

THE BENEFITS OF CORPORATE BLOGGING

Corporate blogging has been around for two to three years as an Internet marketing method.

A corporate blog is a website dedicated to a particular company, product or industry. One or more authors can run a blog. Authors can be technical or marketing orientated.

The layout of a blog allows a blogger to make daily or hourly posts to a website. This means that, culturally a blog allows a blogger to post many entries on the theme of the blog, thereby changing the content of the home page on a constant basis.

A corporate blog focused on the industry or a company’s products provides several advantages, including:

1) The search engine optimization benefits from a blog. The SEO benefits come from the quantity of content on a blog. It’s also culturally acceptable to post lots of pages of content on a regular (daily) basis. Search engines like new content, especially content that comprises of short paragraphs with many rich and relevant keywords. It’s also easy to generate and boost link popularity to your corporate blog. Here’s why, it is culturally acceptable to post links to other blogs. If you’re posting is relevant and useful to the other blog. The potential customer good will and PR benefits will only be really forthcoming after a few months of blogging. It will take some time to get high rankings in search engines. The quicker you start the higher your ranking.

2) Corporate blogs are learning tools for companies. Blogs to be successful have to be updated constantly. You also have the opportunity to interact with an audience informally. Much more than a corporate website. Corporate bloggers can therefore easily develop online conversations with an audience about products and a company’s industry. Microsoft and Macromedia are two companies using corporate blogging extensively. Both companies technical and development teams are writing blogs to communicate the latest information about products with customers. Blogs allow comment postings from customers. As a result such technical companies are capturing new information from customers at a faster rate.

3) Small hard dollar cost, higher soft dollar costs. Return on investment is why a company should start a corporate blog now. The hard dollar investment is small. Blog are complex content management run websites. However, a simple blogging tool can be rented for $50/year. The soft dollar investment requires regular postings at least 3 times a week.

4) E-mail is losing its effectiveness as a communications tool. RSS will replace e-mail in key areas. RSS (really simple syndication), a method for syndicating content from a source (a website or a blog). RSS is providing an alternative to email as a way to keep in contact with websites and email newsletters. Tired with the barrage of permission-based e-mails, customers will switch to readers that read RSS content. A customer reads their RSS content through a reader on a daily basis. While, at the moment, it is presently culturally unacceptable to send too many emails, even permission based email. Armed with an RSS reader your audience will demand more content. Those corporate bloggers who provide regular content will be more likely to keep their audience’s attention in an RSS reader.

5) Blogs are communications tools that give your company a touch of honesty and establish the company has humans running the place. With a blog it is culturally acceptable for employees to use humor and inject their personality into their online conversations with an audience. Microsoft’s progress into corporate blogging (over 700 bloggers) illustrates that corporate blogging on a larger scale may subtly change an audience's perception about a company.

Author: John Cass | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 1 comments
Category: @ John Cass | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Introduction

How Non-Profit Organizations and Local Governments Can Use Blogs to Communicate with the Public -- Part One

There are so many practical uses for blogs it’s hard to know where to begin. For this reason, I’m going to start from the ground up, with the presumption that most of those reading this are checking in to see what this blog thing is all about. First, I’ll go into the definitions and a bit of the history of blogs, and then expand from there. Information I have that applies to blogs in general will be in the section entitled, All the Basics in One Place. I’ll be focusing on hosted blogs, which are accessed through visiting the site online, rather than the kind that require software on your computer, and hosting by other means.

After we’ve covered that I’ll split this presentation into parts for the specific realms we’re exploring – non-profits and government. Each category has its own unique set of needs or values, as well as many similarities. I also recognize that individuals may have a variety of needs, and so will try to show that there are no hard-and-fast rules, and through your own innovation and creativity, you may find that something usually done for one kind of blog may be helpful at another.

So everyone reading this can become a participant if they so choose, comments are open and available at each section. Some of the information may seem to be a bit more bare-bones than you’d like, so please feel free to ask any questions you may have. If you’re reading this on my assigned day for the presentation, (July 13, 2004) during my “office hours” of 7 a.m. to 12 p.m. EDT, you may get an answer from me within minutes of posting your comment. After PR Blog Week is officially over, this presentation will remain at the blog for future reference. You can continue to post questions or comments whenever you happen upon the discussion and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

I’d like to encourage discussion among participants, as you’d do in an informal presentation with everyone sitting in the same room. My role here is more as a facilitator rather than a lecturer. You may have ideas or points to make that I haven’t thought of yet, so go right ahead and make your point.

After you’re done here, please go over and check out the presentations by the other facilitators. After the event is over in real time, this presentation will still be here so latecomers won’t miss anything. Unlike an in-person conference, you have the ability to attend sessions which may occur simultaneously in real time.

There’s an advantage right there – any kind of org can benefit from holding this kind of conference!

Throughout the presentation, where an individual or website is mentioned, I’ll have the link highlighted in the material, so you can visit the site if you choose.

About me – there’s a section on who I am and what qualifies me to be talking about this stuff at my main blog, WOLves.

Links for sections of this series:
Pt. 1 Introduction
Pt. 2 All the Basics in One Place
Pt. 3 Blogs for Government
Pt. 4 Blogs for Non-profit Orgs

Author: Trudy W. Schuett | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: @ Trudy W. Schuett | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

All the Basics in One Place

How Non-Profit Organizations and Local Governments Can Use Blogs to Communicate with the Public -- Part Two
Avoid Bad Websites!

If you visit a random group of websites in either of our categories, you shouldn’t be surprised to find a number of them that haven’t been updated in months, or even years. I think at some time everybody’s been stymied in their quest for information by a website that is either poorly designed, has wrong or outdated info, or just plain doesn’t work.

The website for a non-profit, or local government is often the neglected stepchild of the IT department. It’s the last thing on the list of priorities, because those in charge of computer or internet-related things have more pressing concerns.

They’ve got to consider the details of keeping the day-to-day operations up and functioning, making sure their databases are secure, keeping viruses out, even training users on working with their systems. Because until now, the website has been a complex issue, requiring specialized training and abilities to produce it. This is not to mention writing content for the thing and/or coordinating the efforts of several individuals, which often requires more time than anyone has to spare.

Maybe you don’t even have an IT department; you’ve got one staff member or volunteer charged with producing the website, among other functions.

Meanwhile, the life of the real world org goes on. There are new projects, new campaigns or fundraisers, staff changes, even changes in location. Left unattended for too long, a website can become a real liability when it doesn’t reflect a true picture of the organization.

Wouldn’t it be great if the website could become a simple, functional, and productive part of your organization’s communications with the world? Wouldn’t it be great if it could be managed by almost anyone with the time and inclination?

This can happen if you use a blog.

Basic Blogging

While I’m not sure than any individual “invented” blogging, I do know that Dave Winer developed Radio Userland software around 1997, and Pyra Labs developed what we now know as Blogger, the hosted blog service, in 1999. Other software packages and hosted products evolved from there. There are now dozens of hosted services and software products available.

Most of the original blogs were either maintained by tech professionals or people wanting to keep a diary or personal journal. That is why many who are aware of blogging mistakenly believe a blog must be a personal journal, and/or that you need to be a ‘puter geek to have one. (This could not be farther from the truth. A blog is simply a content management system. The content is entirely determined by the user. I maintain seven blogs on a variety of subject matter, and not one is a personal diary. I’m no ‘puter geek, either – without Homestead for my static websites, and the blog hosts I use, I wouldn’t have an online presence at all.)

For several years after blogs arrived in cyberspace, they were few and far between. When the Eatonweb portal was established in 1999, there were only a few dozen blogs, mostly maintained by individuals. Those that were most widely-read tended to focus on current events, political commentary, or tech issues. When the September 11 disaster occurred, those who were used to getting their news online turned to blogs for the latest updates, since traditional news sites were overwhelmed with traffic and sometimes inaccessible. In March 2003, the war in Iraq sent even more people to blogs to help them better understand current events.

From there, more people became interested in blogging and developed other uses for them, to the point where we now have about 3 million blogs, or likely even more. In the summer of 2004, blogs are used for a number of practical purposes, with daily journaling only one use. By this time next year I expect blogs for other purposes to far outnumber the journals/diaries.

Think of a Blog as an Instant Website

What makes a blog different from a traditional static website is that it can easily be set up and maintained by anyone who can comfortably use a word processing program such as MSWord, send e-mail and surf the internet. The IT department of your organization need not be involved in the project at all.

Just Add Content!

A blog can be updated often, or not -- as you choose. It can be an in-house product, not accessible by the general public, or it can be available to anyone online. It can serve as a purely informational tool, as a hard-copy newsletter would be, or it can be used for discussion, instead of an e-mail discussion group.

A blog can have one author or many. A large group could have many blogs all appearing to emanate from the same location.

A blog or group of blogs can either reside on your server, or with a host.

A blog can be maintained from any location with internet access – for example, you may sometimes find it more convenient to post to a blog from home rather than the office, or vice versa. Laptop and handheld computers, even mobile phones can all be used to maintain a blog from remote locations.

Make Your Website Speak for Itself

The thing that makes a blog live instead of static is the RSS or Atom feed. This extends the mobility and accessibility of a blog to your readers. They can of course also read your blog on all the same devices you use to maintain it.

To keep track of a number of blogs readers can use an aggregator, sometimes called a news reader. This is either software on your computer or a website online. The RSS feed alerts the aggregator of updates to your blog; and your readers/participants may either visit the blog directly or read the text (and sometimes view photos) in the aggregator. This way your readers are always informed of updates, without the need to add to their already-overwhelming mass of e-mail. These alerts stay on the aggregator until the material is read, making it far less likely that any reader would miss an update.

If you list your blog with directories, people looking for whatever you do can find you.

Yes, this is within your budget!

A full-featured, hosted blog ranges from $1.99 to $14.95 per month or even higher. Because the idea of blogs is relatively new, the adage that “you get what you pay for” does not apply here. Pricing for these services is still quite arbitrary – the price does not reflect either the amount or quality of service at this time. The various services are still figuring out what their customers want, in terms of features and variety of uses.

There are free options, either as a pared-down version of a paid service, or an entirely free service. But these are not full-featured, and will most likely not suit the needs of business, government, or non-profit use.

What is a full-featured blog?

A full-featured blog gives you everything you need to maintain your blog, and function in the online community. You should not need to add elements from other sources, or have any knowledge of HTML or other coding.

The basic features you need are:
• Ability to add a blogroll, or links off to the side, which can lead either to other blogs or websites, or to entries within the blog you want to always appear up front.
• Permalinks for each entry. This gives each entry a unique link you can use to point to specific articles or posts, saving readers the need to wade thru archives.
• Archives. Each entry is saved by date and/or time. Readers should be able to access any post made during the life of the blog. Some hosts offer the option of archiving by category as well.
• Availability of an RSS or Atom feed.
• Trackback feature. Other blogs use this to alert you that they’ve linked back to you, or mentioned something at your blog.
• Visitor tracking. Businesses especially need to be able to track how many visitors they have, as well as the dates and times of visits. A referrer log shows which other sites are linking to you, and how many visits come from those locations. It’s also helpful to know what browsers your visitors are using, as well as the number of visits to specific posts.
• Comment feature available. While the choice to enable this feature is yours, this can provide a means of two-way communication between you and your readers. This is especially important if the blog is to be used for discussion.
• Flexible editing that allows you to use either a word-processor style editor, or a straight HTML system.
• Ability to add graphics or photos.

What to do With It Once You’ve Got it

1. Post on it.
2. Promote it.
3. Repeat.
I launched my first blog last year as a replacement for an e-mailed activist newsletter that was pretty much dead in the water. At first, I tried to keep to the same publishing schedule established before, but after a while I recognized that there were things worth posting that wouldn’t have the same effect if I waited for my old deadline. So I started posting things whenever they came in (I worked with some submissions from other people) and used news items I saw in addition to my own work to keep content rolling. It wasn’t long before there were times when I’d post every single day, and sometimes more often than that.

This won’t apply to everyone. It’s really not necessary to post something every day, especially if you’re aiming for a long-term publication for a well-defined readership. Some who are new to blogs find themselves reaching beyond the original focus of the blog just to keep posting. The result is a mishmash of unrelated material that can be confusing to readers and dilute the original message. After you’ve done it for awhile, you’ll find the level of frequency and content that’s right for you and your readers.

The world is full of material that will apply to your situation. There are current events, both inside and outside your organization, and subjects that need to be discussed. In the early days, it’s a good idea to learn the habit of checking not only your e-mail, but your aggregator to see what others in your field may be talking about.

For non-profits and governments, it’s not as critical to work toward a high profile in the blogosphere, but keeping informed certainly can’t hurt. Right now there aren’t many blogs related to your field, but that number will grow as time goes on. I’ve got some examples of topic-specific blogs in the appropriate sections.

I’ve got an article on promoting a blog in more detail here at my WOLves blog. It is directed mainly toward individuals, but the concepts are the same.

I’ve also established a blog for the purpose of sharing stories about things that worked for groups and orgs. There are all kinds of tools for blogging, strategies for using blogs, helpful people and etcetera. Tell the world what works for you, and help build a better blogosphere!

Some Recommended Hosts, and etc.

There are many hosts, aggregators, and all kinds of tools and helps. Much of what is now available in terms of hosting is quite useful for those keeping personal journals, but not for business, non-profit, or government uses.

It almost goes without saying that you’d want to avoid any hosting service with the words “diary” or “journal” incorporated in their name.

Although the best-known hosts, Blogger and Type Pad, are used by many, they are not recommended for this use. Blogger works best for individuals with some experience in website building, as it is not a full-featured service and requires add-ons for the blog to function completely. Type Pad is best directed toward a small audience. Type Pad’s visitor tracking becomes cumbersome over about 100 visits per day, only provides partial tracking info, and is sometimes inaccurate. At $4.95 per month for one limited-service blog (it has a three-tier pricing system) it starts out at about double the price of other full-featured blog hosts.

These are things I have used often and found them to be helpful:

The best host in my opinion, is Blog City. They also have a branded blog option for organizations wishing to establish a number of blogs.

Another good one is tBlog. Both have active communities for help and information, and include all of the features mentioned above.

Best aggregator is Bloglines, especially if you’re looking for something that does not require a download.

About.com has an informative section on Weblogs, and a forum where you can ask questions and see how others use their blogs.

Technorati has been the best for tracking the popularity of blogs and discussions, but as of this writing it looks like Feedster may be soon giving them a run for their money.

Also coming soon is a magazine devoted to blogs.

Links for sections of this series:
Pt. 1 Introduction
Pt. 2 All the Basics in One Place
Pt. 3 Blogs for Government
Pt. 4 Blogs for Non-profit Orgs

Author: Trudy W. Schuett | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 0 comments
Category: @ Trudy W. Schuett | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Blogs for Government

How Non-Profit Organizations and Local Governments Can Use Blogs to Communicate with the Public -- Part Three
When was the last time you heard something like this from a citizen/constituent?

“Thanks for explaining the situation. I had misunderstood the way things work, and didn’t realize how easy it actually is to get someone to help me with my problem.”

Probably not very often – or ever.

Governments and their agencies at all levels, from the smallest township to densely-populated states, are trying harder than ever before to be more approachable, and accessible to the residents of the area they serve.

In the past, public meetings and traditional media were the mainstay of communication. Unless there is a “big” issue affecting a lot of people, these meetings are sparsely attended by the general public. Public information officers and departments work hard to see the public is informed on the operations of government, and traditional media (the papers, the TV and radio stations) do the best they can to cooperate.

Outside of election years, and those times when those “big” issues emerge, the public pretty much goes about their business, blissfully unaware of the workings of their local governments. Those times when everything is working well, and it’s not an election year are the times when you’re least likely to hear from citizens, even though this would be the time when governments could best educate and inform.

Websites have gone a long way in making government more accessible. Los Angeles County has put most of its public documents online, saving everyone time and money, and you can get birth and death certificates from most states by filling out forms online. There are dozens of examples of ways to do business with a state or local government online, not to mention the ability to contact elected officials and various departments with questions or concerns.

Here in Yuma AZ, one of our County Supervisors, Lucy Shipp, holds monthly luncheons at a local restaurant to make herself more available to her constituency, as does City Council member Scott Johnson.

While these are great ways to even out the spaces between times of crisis and times when the public “forgets” about their governments, there is still more that can be done. Blogs can make a difference here. Not only elected officials, but various departments could also use a blog to explain what’s going on and how things work.

Elected officials can make themselves available for questions, and ask questions of their own of a segment of the public they perhaps could not have reached before. Those who can’t attend public meetings in person, or even those who do, can see why a City Council member voted the way he did on an issue, straight from the horse’s mouth. The official could also choose to use their blog to show their more-human side, talk about their hobbies or families, or conduct informal discussions on issues they feel need to be addressed. All of this is done without the filter of media, and their own restrictions on airtime and page space.

Government departments could use blogs to explain how things work, and how their jobs fit into the larger scheme of “keeping things going.” For example, somebody from the parks department could talk about why we have parks, how things like playground equipment and restroom facilities have changed over time, and why that is. A staffer from Administration could explain how things like local ordinances and laws come about, and how citizens can take a more-active role in this process. Each department has its unique perspective on their part of the work of government; who better to inform the public than the experts themselves?

In this election year, some localities are giving candidates for local office their own blogs, for the purpose of giving the public a better way of learning their positions on issues, and their intentions for the future. It’s an ongoing Q&A session, conducted more efficiently (and at far less cost) than a series of local meetings or newspaper profiles could ever be.

These ideas are just the beginning of the variety of ways governments can use blogs. Remember, a blog does not require any specialized abilities. It’s not one more job for the already-overloaded IT department. It’s not a very big job for anyone. Once the blog is established it takes no more time than writing an e-mail. They don’t need to be updated every day or every week, and they don’t require lengthy entries, or even that all entries be the same length. Because a blog is so easily used, your designated bloggers can make blog entries themselves at any time of day or night, when it fits their schedule.

It is a very small investment in terms of time and money, with a positive return in encouraging citizen participation. Here are some examples & resources:
London Gov't
Opportunity Wales
State&Local Govnet
Wyre Forest Liberals
Polish Consulate
Help is at Hand
Andrea Reimer -- Green Party School Trustee
Herald Sun Votebook
Downing Street Says
RSS in Government
Clive Soley MP

Links for sections of this series:
Pt. 1 Introduction
Pt. 2 All the Basics in One Place
Pt. 3 Blogs for Government
Pt. 4 Blogs for Non-profit Orgs

Author: Trudy W. Schuett | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 2 comments
Category: @ Trudy W. Schuett | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

PR is dead

The following rant was inspired by Doc Searls and Ross Mayfield. Thanks to Constantin et al for the soapbox.

I don't believe in public relations. I am not a PR pro and never want to be. I just want people and corporations to communicate in the best possible fashion.

I don't believe in messages.
I don't believe in spin.
I believe in communication.
I believe in conversations.
I believe in relationships.
PR is dead, so let's get rid of it.

Instead let's get people who are passionate about your corporation to write about your company. People who believe and who can tread the delicate line between public and private, and the myriad of laws and regulations and write in an informal, natural and conversational voice. People who can tell your company's stories.

Most often, this will be full time employees. This will be BOTH your C level executives AND other employees.

Sometimes (rarely) this can be outsourced if and only if:

• This person is knowledgeable and passionate about your domain and corporation.
• This person is part of the internal information flow of the corporation.

Have these people blog because:

• It's the best way to engage your customers conversationally on the web.
• Best way to get online feedback.
• Best way to increase your Google Rank.
• Best way to build weak ties into relationships that will eventually lead to money directly or indirectly for your company.

Do have a blogging policy but follow the Sun example of it being lightweight, inclusive and permissive.

When the inevitable mistakes occur:

• Be honest.
• Communicate clearly and quickly to the public through your blog what is happening.
• Followup.
• Learn.

Don't overestimate the short term impact and underestimate the long term impact of blogging:

• It takes time and energy to build up readership and relationships and to have true conversations but it's worth it!
• If nobody else blogs in your domain, that is NOT a proof that blogging is irrelevant; instead it's a business opportunity.
• You don't need to be on the A list (blogging is not a popularity contest!):
  • What you need is to be acknowledged by your peers as experts and effective communicators.

How to prevent blogger burnout and keep blogging

• Read others' blogs both in your industry and other industries; I suggest at least a half dozen of each. Use an RSS reader to do this so you don't waste time manually surfing.
• Take a blog break (at least 2 weeks a year e.g Christmas and summer holidays).
• Meet the people who follow your blog in the real world at conferences and meetings or simply over coffee.
• If you are passionate about your domain and your company, blogger burnout won't be an issue.

Author: Roland Tanglao | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 19 comments
Category: @ Roland Tanglao | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Blogs for Non-Profit Orgs

How Non-Profit Organizations and Local Governments Can Use Blogs to Communicate with the Public -- Part Four
Americans Give $241 Billion To Charity In 2003
2.8 percent growth in contributions is highest rate seen since 2000
One thing that all non-profits have in common is the fact you’re all competing for a share of the same amount of funding. A big part of your success depends on your ability to get the word out to the public. It’s not all about fundraising, either. There is always something going on in the non-profit sector; either news specific to your org or to the field in general. Whether you’re part of a large multinational NGO or a small local charity, blogs can dramatically improve the way you communicate with stakeholders and the public at large.

In the past, you’ve most likely depended on good relations with traditional media, and some combination of website, e-mail, and printed or electronic publications. Printed magazines and newsletters are expensive to produce, and e-mailed items run the risk of being neither received nor read. A website by itself can’t always be updated as quickly as you’d like, and none of these provide the immediacy or the conversational attributes of a blog.

The ability to frequently contact a large group of people has some great advantages, in that it not only keeps the needs and focus of your org more in the forefront of their concerns, it also benefits your respondents, as they can feel they are more included in the workings of the agency.

Everyone – from staff, to the board, to the volunteers and the community at large can all be receiving the same message at the same time. The transparency you’re willing to provide will serve you well, and encourage participation through cash donations and volunteerism.

Because of the low cost, and ease of use, even the smallest organization is on a level playing field with the big orgs, with more resources. A single external blog can be maintained by one volunteer or staff member with a minimal skill set. That volunteer need not even work on the blog at your office, he or she could just as easily work from home or elsewhere. Posting general information on the doings of the organizations, and providing readers with an overview of your purposes and issues, this blog could well be the centerpiece for a variety of blogs serving different functions.

Most important of all is the ability to approach the public with your own message, unfiltered and limited only by your own creativity.

When it comes time for a major fundraiser or an activist project, it’s easy to establish another blog for that specific purpose. You can expand your reach in the community even farther with some dedicated promotion, in combination with your usual media contacts.
A volunteer monitoring a variety of blogs can serve as an emissary for your org, joining in discussions and encouraging other bloggers to participate in your project. People outside your org, but interested in your issues, can be referred back to the central blog for more information or to ask questions.

Some of these interested people may be inspired to start their own blogs, each of them reaching a different audience, and build a network of blogs related to, but not directly of your organization.

Once the campaign is through, the project-specific blog can serve as a record of the way things went this time, to be used for reference in future projects. This blog can be allowed to sit idle until it’s needed again. Meanwhile it can show other organizations how they can emulate your increased public awareness. Both your successes and failures can add to the growing knowledge base of using blogs for campaigns in both areas – fund raising and activism.

Here are some examples of non-profit blogs & resources:

Non-Profit Quarterly Article
The Food Museum
Center for the Public Domain
Citizen's League
Earth Share of Washington
Green Media Toolshed
Children Matter
NPO Blogs
Buzz Flood
Network-centric Advocacy

Links for sections of this series:
Pt. 1 Introduction
Pt. 2 All the Basics in One Place
Pt. 3 Blogs for Government
Pt. 4 Blogs for Non-profit Orgs

Author: Trudy W. Schuett | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 2 comments
Category: @ Trudy W. Schuett | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Are ethics good business?

Welcome - you are in the company of honest, decent people who not only value truth and transparency but also believe ethics is good business. (Whether they are honest and truthful because they were born that way, or because that's where the rewards lie... well, that's a different matter...).

Here are a few thoughts from a survey I did about ethics among PR practitioners in the North East of Engand. But before you read on, please take a couple of minutes to complete this survey.
Thanks, now read on...

OK, this contribution is not specifically about blogging, but then new technologies don't change ethical principles. It does, I hope, throw up a few thoughts on the nature of PR that are brought into sharp focus by the open access, boundary breaking potential of blogging.

For example, it touches on some fundamental questions - a brief look at some of the exchanges in the run up to this week suggested some people as see PR as a way of selling a brand or image, others as a way of creating greater understanding between organisations and publics through greater transparency. Some are happy to be advocates for their clients, putting out the good bits and being economical about the less good; others want to be more open. But as the my research suggests, however much some practitioners might preach transparency, there is a widespread acceptance that that's not what the client - internal or external - is paying PRs to do.

PRs often get a bad press but the picture that emerged from interview after interview was of practitioners taking the moral high ground when clients would prefer them to cut corners or be more economical with the truth.

The routine went like this….

Me: “I’m doing some research into ethics in public relations…”
PR practitioner: “Well, that won’t take long then, will it?”

They then went on to tell me – often in quite some detail - how they are not only ethical but more ethical than their colleagues and competitors.

And, to a great extent, I ended up believing them.

OK, it is difficult to explain how 63pc of PR practices in the North East of England can be ethically ‘better than most’, but that’s how they see themselves. Maybe it is not surprising that people in an industry that is focused on reputation should present themselves as being ethical, but it is significant they also view colleagues and rivals as being similarly ethical.

In general, how would you rate other PR teams in the North East?
always ethical (5pc) usually ethical (54pc) neutral (22pc) sometimes unethical (17pc) unscrupulous (2pc)

Interestingly, they also see themselves as being more ethical, or at least more concerned to be seen to be ethical, than many of the people who employed them, and that was the case if they were working in house or for external clients.

Some would say ethics is good business. Would you personally…
agree strongly (47pc) agree (49pc) no opinion (2pc) disagree (2pc) disagree strongly (0pc)

How about your clients/ internal contacts? Would they mostly
agree strongly (17pc) agree (68pc) no opinion (12pc) disagree (2pc) disagree strongly (0pc)

I have put these two questions to a range of different respondents and each time the majority of PRs ‘agree strongly’ but say their clients, or their in house colleague would only ‘agree’. It was only a small sample but I asked my fellow Global Blog week participants the same questions and here are the results.

The picture that emerged from interview after interview was of practitioners taking the moral high ground when clients would prefer them to cut corners or be more economical with the truth.

The study set out to try and identify the ethical ‘centre of gravity’ of PR practitioners – to work out how they arrived at an ethical framework. As the UK's Institute of Public Relations and others try to forefront ethical practice the industry needs to clearly identify procedures for establishing and promoting ethical values.

My research seems to show that there is a whole range of interpretations of what constitutes ethical behaviour. To an extent, these definitions are coloured by work experience prior to moving into PR, as well as exposure to the in house or agency culture.

Some regard PR as ‘the conscience of an organisation’. Do you…?
agree strongly (10pc) agree (49pc) no opinion (22pc) disagree (4pc) disagree strongly (0pc)

Some academics have questioned whether it is a good idea for PRs to take on the role when they are ready to ask for more grounding in the theory of ethics.

That said, I found it hard to wholeheartedly agree with one respondent who put the position succinctly: “If PR is your conscience there is something wrong with your ethics.”

On the job

Have you/ your team ever refused to carry out a piece of work for a client/ your employer on ethical grounds?
yes (39pc) no (61pc)

Has a client/ employer ever asked you to disseminate information you know to be false?
yes (29pc) no (71pc)

It is the role of PR to present the client/ employer in a positive light
always (68pc) sometimes (32pc) never (0pc)

Several respondents said that although they often have to transmit bad news this could be done in a way that reflected well on the organisation. One respondent, a partner in a private consultancy, said: “We take the view that we are advocates. We won’t lie but we are not going to volunteer damaging information. We will put the best foot forward, I would compare it with being a barrister in a court of law.”

Hacks v Flacks
Because I was interested in where ethical values came from I wanted to know if people had worked in other sectors before entering PR, and my sample showed that more than half (22 out of 41) had previously been journalists, suggesting newsroom culture plays an influential role in the industry (there was no clear career pattern among the others, with previous occupations including insurance, marketing, music promotion, administration, civil service and accountancy).

Often responses suggested ex-journalists had different perceptions than those who had followed different routes. For example, they were significantly more likely to take final responsibility for checking facts, rather than pass that responsibility up to their manager.

The final responsibility for checking facts lies with…
me (all 46pc, ex-Journalists 75pc); my line manager (all 25pc, ex-Journalists 2pc); client/internal contact (all 24pc, ex-Journalists 25pc); journalist (all 4pc, ex-Journalists 0pc).

Perhaps these are particularly interesting findings for those who are examining the impact and implications of participatory journalism.

Naturally, I asked ‘Who do you consider to be more ethical - journalists or PRs?
PRs (all 34pc, ex-Journalists 5pc); Journalists (all 17pc, ex-Journalists 9pc); Same (all 49pc, ex-Journalists 68pc)

It would appear this comparison was based on the behaviour of local journalists with respondents making a clear distinction between the two. One PR said: “There are a minority of journalists that don’t come to report, they come with an idea in mind and they will come for a quote to stack up a story. It amazes me that these type of journalists can’t see why people don’t trust them.”

Different cultures

On interesting difference appeared to arise when I asked My prime ethical loyalty is to:
no-one (0pc ) me (41pc) organisation (34pc) client (5pc) society (20pc)

I think this is a key question - one that underpins a lot of other assumptions on ethics - so it was intriguing to compare the results when I posted a small survey of attitides among 12 Global Blog participants. Most were from the US and here is what they said:
no-one (0pc ) me (16.7pc) organisation (0pc) client (25pc) society (58.3pc)

It will be interesting if the survey of Global Blog participants evolving this week reflects this emphasis on society rather than the practitioners own organisation. I will post a comment at the end of Global PR Blog Week.

My office hours, including Yahoo Messenger - Mediations 2003 - today are My 9am to 11am and 3pm - 5pm EST

Background
Approximately one-tenth of the UK population lives in the North East – Northumberland, Tyne & Wear, County Durham and what was Cleveland - but relatively few major businesses and organisations have their head office in the region, with many choosing Leeds or Manchester for their northern centre. This has a clear impact on the structure of the public relations industry.

Although a DTI report suggests the PR consultancy sector in the UK is reasonably well described, gaining a comprehensive picture of activity in the North East is difficult. DTW in Cleveland, is the only North East-based agency listed in PR Week’s Top150 Performers 2004 (based on fee income), ranked 93 nationally, and 29th in the listing of top regional agencies; it had a fee income in 2003 of £940,061, employing 26 staff to service 42 clients. Nationally, only one of the top 20 agencies was based outside London .

Only one North East respondent reported working in a PR team of more than 20 staff, and only seven in teams of more than 10 but less than 20; of the PR Week top 50 regional firms, 26 fell in to this category, and of the top 50 regionals, only five reported 10 or few staff. Nationally, 78pc of respondents said their consultancy employed fewer than 15, and 50pc five or less.
Although North East based agencies do drive or contribute to major retail and consumer brands, a significant proportion of private consultancy work is in the business to business sector; there is little involvement in, say, celebrity promotion and it is possible this has an impact on ethical culture in North East PR. It is recognised that this research would be enhanced if similar surveys were carried it in other parts of country, including London.

Author: Philip Young | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 2 comments
Category: @ Philip Young | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

Robert Scoble interviewed on Corporate Blogging

Microsoft's Robert Scoble — the Scobelizer — is very much at the coal face when it comes to blogging in a corporate environment. In this interview he draws on his experience, at Microsoft and before, to provide some real insights into the power and the challenges of corporate blogging.

Cook: Blogging is obviously part of your role at Microsoft can you give us some insight into how that is developing? Are you doing more and more on your blogs, or is it mainly additional work?

Scoble: So far it's just one of the tools I use to evangelize the next versions of .NET and Windows (code-named Longhorn). I use the blog to build relationships with software developers and influentials. I am building a community of bloggers (every link I make builds the community). I look to help software developers out by linking to them, which gets them higher on Google's search pages and on Technorati's rankings.

Most of my official day work is on Channel 9. I build relationships with people across Microsoft and do video interviews. These interviews start conversations about Microsoft's future. It starts a conversation, which helps us let developers know what's coming and what the market opportunity is on our platforms.

Cook: The first point in your Corporate Weblog Manifesto (posted on 26 February 2003) says "tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth" — this flies in the face of the general perception of pr, marketing and advertising. How compatible is blogging with these traditional communication disciplines? Will those disciplines have to re-think their 'message control' tactics?

Scoble: I think that denigrates what good marketers, advertisers, and PR professionals do. I don't want to be part of an industry that has to lie to sell its product.

But, I know it happens all the time. Tobacco companies, for instance, told the public that its product was healthy, when they knew it was killing people. Would it have been better to simply have been honest? Well, it would have saved that industry from a whole lot of penalties and teeth gnashing.

The thing is that consumers now are getting knowledge networks that are unparalleled to learn about products that they are about to purchase. We can look up Consumer Reports latest ratings within minutes of them being posted. Thinking of buying a car or a book? Search Technorati and Feedster to see what people are thinking.

If people are saying your product isn't good, then you better have an answer. Why not link to those people and try to answer their concerns? Or, do you not care about your brand? Is sticking your head in the sand and trying to ignore the concerns of your customers going to do your company or your brand any good?

Look at how Mark Cuban handled losing one of his star players. He could have said "oh well, that's the basketball business." But he went online and explained what happened to his customers. Think that doesn't build up brand loyalty? It sure does.

So, if you're one of the school that thinks "oh, I can keep lying to my customers and the money will keep flowing in," think again. Your customers are talking about you. Here's another example: the movie industry. In the 1980s the word-of-mouth networks were so inefficient that they could "manufacture" three good weekends just by having a great marketing campaign.

Today, though, the networks are far more efficient. Moviegoers will go to a 7 a.m. show (or, one of the midnight shows on opening day). If the movie sucks, they'll start telling their friends with ferocity. Bloggers will start writing about it. The press will pick it up. The movie will be dead halfway through opening weekend.

On the other hand, look at Michael Moore. He played these word-of-mouth networks like a fiddle (he even gave them permission to redistribute his movie for free!) Guess what happened? Everyone's talking about his movie and it's been the #1 show for several weekends now.

Cook: Do you think blogs will be effective as sales and marketing tools, or will sales blogs lose their appeal for the 'blog audience'?

Scoble: I'm not sure. I haven't seen examples of ANY company talking with their customers in a conversational manner. One of the first is from an appliance company, Maytag. Boring company, right? But look at this, they have a blog. Did that change my opinion of the company? It sure did!

Cook: Macromedia, MicroSoft and other companies are encouraging more of their employees to blog. How do all of these different voices together affect the direction of a company?

Scoble: How does blogging affect the direction of Microsoft? A few ways. First, our customers now know where to go to give feedback directly to the person responsible for a product. Before you'd need to go to a newsgroup, or send an email to an email account to give us feedback about what you'd like to see in the next version. Now, let's say you're using Microsoft's new OneNote product. Let's say you have a list of ideas that you'd like to see the team implement. Well, you can go to Chris Pratley's blog (search Google for "OneNote blog" and you'll find him). You can email him directly (his email address is on his blog) or you can leave a comment in his comment area on his blog.

Does that change the equation? I'm finding it does. Why? Because people are far more likely to give great feedback if they know someone specific is listening. There's been an email alias for years named mswish@microsoft.com but who listens to it? Will anyone have a conversation with you if you send that email alias feedback? Who knows. But I know that Chris Pratley reads his email and his comments on his blog.

Cook: Can you envisage blogging making significant longer-term impacts on corporate behaviour and culture, particularly their tendency towards secretiveness and authoritarianism?

Scoble: Oh, yes. Would Enron have happened if they had shared their business thoughts openly, and in the public? But, that's really a debate for a business school class.

I am happy to see more blogging because of the feedback loop it starts. Customers get listened to more effectively, product teams build better products and support them better. Influentials and evangelists get more information they can use to talk about the products with authority. Everyone wins.

Cook: Corporate blogging seems confined mostly to the tech sector (Microsoft, Sun), do you see a role for it more broadly?

Scoble: I see it spreading. The Dallas Maverick's CEO, Mark Cuban, is now blogging. There are lawyer blogs. PR blogs. And more. Yes, I do see a role for it spreading. Blogging is an efficient way to reach a wide audience (and it's a great way to get your sites higher in Google, MSN, and Yahoo's search engine ranking).

Cook: Bloggers seem to be emerging from across the organisation, not just the corporate communications roles, does this create any difficulties?

Scoble: Oh yes. Companies traditionally are used to controlling the messages that go out. In the old world corporate PR professionals would meet with product teams and make sure they totally understood everything about a product and what they wanted to say about the company and the product to the world. Then they'd go on press tours and visit with the press that they wanted to write about that product.

In the old world, word-of-mouth happened, but companies weren't able to be involved, and because word-of-mouth happened offline only, most corporate PR guys didn't worry too much (other than to try to make products that got people to talk). In the 1980s, for instance, I helped run a camera store in Silicon Valley. About 80% of our sales came from word of mouth. I knew that people were talking about my camera store. More than a few customers told me "my friend told me about your store."

The closest I got to hitting the word-of-mouth jackpot was when Sally Socilich, an author of a bargain hunter's guide to Bay Area stores, talked about us on KGO Radio (the most popular talk radio show in San Francisco). Boy, did the phones ring off the hook that day.

In the new world, however, word-of-mouth networks are far more efficient. Today people can email hundreds of friends within a few minutes of a news event. During the 9/11 terror attacks I was instant messaging with people all over the world.

I've seen several news events at Microsoft already get Slashdotted (that's what happens when http://www.slashdot.org writes about something you've done and links to you. Among all the blog sites Slashdot usually brings the most traffic. One link can bring 10s of thousands of visitors). What's interesting is that often you'll get Slashdotted in the evening. By early morning there can be hundreds of comments, and thousands of visitors. Many members of the press and many influentials (like me, for instance) read Slashdot.

Everytime your company gets written about on Slashdot people are making up new opinions of how "clued in" your company is. By the time our PR company wakes up in the morning, they might already have dozens of calls from reporters around the world about what Slashdot wrote.

Bloggers are the first line of defense. We can either show that we're scared of commenting, or we can react fast — before any official meetings have happened.

This scares the hell out of PR folks. Why? Because corporate bloggers can paint a corporation into a corner that it'll be hard to get out of. Not to mention that there might be legal consequences to what bloggers say. Look, for instance, back on the Tylenol or Intel PR disasters (someone was putting poison in Tylenol's product, and Intel had a chip that had a math error). Both errors ended up costing those companies billions of dollars. Could quick reaction by a corporate blogger have blunted some of the PR hit? Absolutely. But they could also could increase the harm just as easily.

It's a tough line to figure out. But, I think that on average more transparency is better than less. Would Enron have happened if they had a range of bloggers throughout the company?

Cook: Should corporations have blogging policies, and what are some of the key elements they should contain?

Scoble: I don't know if there should be rules, beyond a few common sense ones. But education is key. If you're going to have employees talking with the outside world, you should educate them about what's legally acceptable or not (for instance, there are rules governing what employees of public companies can share and when). You should let them know what acceptable behavior is online. That will vary from company to company and product to product.

Cook: One of the big hassles for PR practitioners is the time it can take to get client sign-off on releases, advertising copy and so on, yet blogging is a fast turn-around medium. Its going to be difficult for corporates to deal with the immediacy of blogging isn't it?

Scoble: Yup, but there's the rub. If you aren't quick you'll miss out on the conversation. Go back to the 1980s when I helped run a Silicon Valley camera store. 80% of our sales came from word of mouth. But I wasn't able to be at the watercooler where people were talking about where to get their next camera. Today I can be — but I have to be willing to both listen to the market (which is easy using Feedster, Technorati, and Pubsub) and talk back using blogs and other techniques like what we're using on Channel 9.

Cook: Most corporate websites are deadly dull, the dreaded 'brochure ware'. Do you see any impediments to the idea that they will be mostly swept away by blogs?

Scoble: Well, you still need a site to provide the facts. Er, the FAQs. Heh. What's the price? Where are the authorized dealers? What are the specs?

Blogs won't replace the official site, but blogs might replace the news page.

One thing I'd like to see companies do before blogs, though: RSS feeds. Why? Because then I could subscribe to their news page and build a permanent relationship with the company. For instance, look at the Maytag Skybox site. Why should I need to visit that with a browser every few weeks just to be the first to know when they come out with a new model or a new graphic for the box I already own? I just want to subscribe to an RSS feed and have it come to me — on my terms.

Cook: Do you see problems with the mainstreaming of blogs, will it diminish their authenticity?

Scoble: I'm not sure what you mean. Blogs are harder to do when you're constrained by committeeism. I couldn't imagine doing my blog if I had to have it checked by other people before publishing. It'd slow me down.

Am I less believable now that I work at Microsoft and am paid by them? Yes. But that's OK. Bloggers are yet another information source that you can use to triangulate in on the truth. The best blogs, even corporate run ones, will work hard to keep their credibility.

Another way to look at it is that when I worked the counter at the camera store I regularly sent my customers over to our competitors when I knew that I wasn't able to fill their needs. Invariably those customers came back to me and were more loyal than before.

I just had that happen to me, by the way. I was looking to buy a camcorder and called up GoodGuys in Bellevue. They were out and the salesperson said "call up Magnolia Audio/Video, I bet he has one." That was impressive. I'm now going to go to Goodguys for my next purchase. This is exactly what I meant when I wrote the Corporate Weblog Manifesto.

One thing I've noticed, too. Your readers will keep you honest. If you decide to try to lie on your blog you'll soon have tons of people talking about how you lied on your blog. I have a feeling that that kind of PR wouldn't be the kind that your company would like.

Author: Trevor Cook | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 4 comments
Category: @ Trevor Cook | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

 

About

The Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.

Links

The New PR Wiki

Recent Entries

Day 2: Emergence of Ideas

Day 2: Lessons Learned

Day 2 Stats

Chat schedule for July 14

Corporate Blogging

Recent Comments

john Cass on Day 2: Emergence of Ideas

Trudy W. Schuett on Day 2 Stats

Tara Hall - Weber Shandwick Web Relations on Corporate Blogging

Morten Jacobsen on Getting blog postings into search engines

Jeff Martin on Response to External Comments

John Mudd on Blogging For More Sales, To Influence the Media and Show Your Expertise

Kevin O'Keefe on How to launch a corporate blog for a professional services organization

spocko on Constructive Bridges

Evelyn Rodriguez on Thought Leadership, Evangelism in Blogs

Alice Marshall on Blogs Are Corporate Brand Threats

Rick Barry on A Very Brief Look at Blogging for the Uninitiated Executive

John Cass on Corporate Blogging Survey

Neville Hobson, ABC on MicroSoft Corporate Blogs & Other Stories

Trudy W. Schuett on Blogs for Government

Jon Husband on PR is dead

Trudy W. Schuett on Blogs for Non-Profit Orgs

Philip Young on Are ethics good business?

Duncan Adams on Robert Scoble interviewed on Corporate Blogging