PR Communications

Dell Corporate Blog Answers

Gary Lerhaupt from Dell was kind enough to answer my corporate blogging survey today. Thanks Gary!

1) Why do you blog for your company?
We had been running public facing mailing lists for over 3 years (http://lists.us.dell.com) and decided we needed a more concrete place to make information available to our Linux customers. Since, as engineers, we were already communicating directly with customers through those lists, running a blog was the next logical step.

2) What goals did you set for the blog?
We knew the Linux community finds it highly valuable to interact directly so anything we could do to facilitate this was seen as a win-win for Dell, the Linux community and our customers. Our main goal was to be helpful and with Linux, blogging appears to be a natural fit.

3) How do you think your blog fits into your company's communications strategy?
Dell is all about being "direct". Having established ourselves in the marketplace by selling computers directly to our customers, blogging is an extension of this philosophy. Why go to a third party source to get your information on Dell and Linux when you can get it right from us, the people developing the products. Blogging is still relatively new at Dell and we evaluate each medium on a case-by-case basis, but for the Linux technical community it has been a great success.

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?
When we've got something that's "blogworthy," we post it. There really isn't any concrete definition, but usually it relates to a fix or a helpful tool to improve the customer's deployment. We're also fond of showcasing work done by our customers (like http://linux.dell.com/blog/2004/03/17/#1413) which could be useful to other customers.

5) Who writes the blog? Who contributes to the blog on a regular basis?
While the Linux Engineering team maintains the blog, any person at Dell with Linux info is welcome to send us their scoop and have it posted under their name. Generally, though, there are a couple of us on the team that do most of the entries. We do a lot of great work here to ensure a good Linux experience on Dell systems for our customers, and we very much want to spread the blogging duties around to share our knowledge broadly.

6) Have you achieved your original communications goals?
Absolutely. For example, we had some professional photos taken of our new Enterprise Solutions labs (where tons of Linux work happens), and previously, there never would have been a practical way to showcase these to our average Joe Linux user. With the blog we were able to post an entry (http://linux.dell.com/blog/2004/05/27/#1033) and share this with whomever was interested.

7) Were there any unexpected communications or learning consequences as a result of publishing your blog?
Not really. We're just glad that people responded positively to it and find it useful.

8) How have you built better relationships with customers?
Like I said earlier, we really wanted to create less formal repository to help people run Linux on Dell. Before the blog and the http://linux.dell.com site, this information was not as consolidated at Dell and confined mainly to our mailing lists. Having the website and blog really make things much easier for our customers to find what they need.

Many Voices, One Company

John Dowdell answered my corporate blogger survey in May. I was reading his answers again today.

"From the company's point-of-view, I guess my blog is an asset that offers quick response and interactivity, but it doesn't have the authority of materials which appear in the core sections of the Macromedida website itself.

(Hmm, that last point is important and could use expansion... in all my writings online over the years, whatever the format, I've been just one person who works with a group of others. I am not the group; I am just myself. The group speaks for itself on the company's website. There are dangers in "the royal we" when individuals write words... I've seen lots of people get confused about who they were, and how much they could speak for the group. The group speaks slowly, but when it does speak, it speaks authoritatively -- I can speak quickly, and speak accurately enough for myself and my own perceptions, but I cannot speak for the group as the group itself can.)"

John stated that "the group speaks for itself on the company's website". A company is a collection of different voices. Perhaps by empowering more employees by giving them blog tools. The chance that one voice will dominate the groups (company's) voice is diminished. Macromedia, MicroSoft and other companies are encouraging more of their employees to blog. How do all of these different voices together effect the direction of a company? People were not silent before blogging, but now with the new technology it is possible to hear more conversations at the same time.

BlogPulse: A useful Site

I recently came across this useful website BlogPulse. The website tracks the current interest in over one million blogs about a particular subject.

The New PR Wiki Week

Twenty-eight Internet marketing and PR professionals from around the world are hosting a PR wiki between July 12-16th. I am taking part in the wiki, my interests are corporate blogging and crisis management. The wiki is being used as a place to store projects. I am storing my corporate blogger survey answers on the website. The actual discussion is going to happen on this blog.

Content the Key to a Successful Conference

Comdex is no more. I was reading Alan Meckler's blog about the news and Alan described how one of his trade shows is very successful.

Fortunately our company has originality and has created the best new trade show in America: Search Engine Strategies. It is vertical and on the money (and makes big money).

I was wondering why the success? I think it’s because of relationships and personality, Danny Sullivan the founder of www.searchenginewatch.com is widely known as one of the best experts on search engines in the industry. His Jupiter Media website has many ongoing customer relationships; a lot of content on the website is free, but they also sell subscriptions too with more in-depth content. These ongoing conversations with customers give Jupiter the ability to promote their conferences (there are search engine strategies conferences in different cities around the world all year) to their subscribers all year long.

Content is very important on the web for getting a high ranking on search engines, its also important for attracting and retaining customers and the media through viral marketing.

MarketingSherpa.com and SoftwareCEO.com are two other good content websites that might benefit from an associate conference. TechTarget's whole business model is around this idea of creating the complete content experience for customers, online content and conferences.

Search Wars Continued

Looks as if Yahoo may be stopping its pay per click system on the main results page, see this article from C/NET.

Lessons From Corporate Blogging

I've been attempting to understand the value of blogs, especially within the context of companies. I think the biggest benefit I have gained from my PR Communications blog is that the blog is a learning tool for the particular subject a blogger is blogging about. In my case, this is PR, Marketing and the Internet.

I was reading some of the comments made about the "Perfect Pitch for a weblog" on another blog and thought a blogger's comments worth recording for my own archive. Jeremy posted this comment on Robert Pateson's blog.

"Isn't effective selling all about illuminating the benefits a potential buyer will experience? When you're selling organizational blogging to an executive, you'd probably have to focus his/her attention on the improved productivity, innovation potential, or cost savings for the employees who would benefit most: researchers, analysts, strategists, maybe front-line information service workers. A subset of the people in an organization who are immersed in information, and have to formulate and articulate knowledge are more likely to enjoy the benefits we've experienced through blogging, but not all of them...and certainly not many of the people who have no need to (or interest in) processing and synthesizing ideas. The challenge isn't to convince the executive that blogging is good for its own sake (hopeless, anyway), but to help them see that some of their employees would see huge benefits and show them how that might work."

This appears to describe the experiences of technical staff at companies like Macromedia and Microsoft. Corporate blogging is both a communications tool, and a learning tool through shared community.

Perfect Pitch for A Corporate Blogger

Lee Lefever recently won the perfect blogger pitch. An attempt to come up with a 60 second elevator pitch of why companies should use corporate blogs in their communications strategy.

SEO Use Case II

I recently posted an entry about SEO Use Cases, a relative of mine in the UK with more experience than I on programming had a suggestion for a correction.

Referring to my posting:

"A use case in software development testing is a description of all of the ways in which a user wants to use an application. Each use is a request to the application; the use case describes what the system will do in response to the user request."

My relative's comments:

"Not quite. A use case is a context diagram describing all the actors (i.e. interested parties) and resources involved in a particular scenario. To model the system (in The UML) the developer may start by modeling real sequences of events that can happen in the system being modeled. These are scenarios. From this he would describe the behavior expected of the system in terms of time dependent behavior, data flow and data organization.

It strikes me that to return the correct response you would have to ask the searcher what it was he expected. Do this, lots of times and then correlate the results by hand and draw some conclusions.

A good start for me would be to return a hierarchy of results so that I can dismiss a whole site having followed just one link to it."

IndustryBrains.com Can Boost Your Organic Search Rankings

IndustryBrains.com can be one way to give your company’s pages a boost in search engine page ranking on Google. At my former company, Quotium Technologies, I used this method to boost the company’s organic search engine results.

Quotium, a company providing load testing and performance testing software to independent software vendors in the states, and many large financial institutions in Europe needed higher organic rankings.

IndustryBrains.com, a contextual advertising service that allows you to advertise on online media, from Slashdot.org to Businessweek.com, proved to be one quick way to get a boost in rankings.

I placed $0.25 to $3.50 per click through ads on IndustryBrains.com, resulting in an increase in the ranking of a Quotium page for the keyword “load testing”. The page received increased traffic from a higher organic listing on Google and more direct traffic from the text ads on the web media publications.

I determined if IndustyBrains.com was the major source of the increase in rankings by putting “?source=B” after the URL of the page I entered into the IndustryBrains.com listing form. The extended URL turned up in Google, and IndustryBrains.com was the only place I listed that URL.

This is really a great example of what you should not do in search engine optimization, the results are not permanent, once you take away the ads, the ranking disappears within a few days.