PR Communications

Kryptonite Lock Company Corporate Blogging Response

B.L. Ochman writes a post about the problems the Kryptonite Lock Company is facing from a competitor who slammed Kryptonite online. Kryptonite Lock Company caused a massive blog storm a few years ago because of how the company handled criticism of its products a few years ago.

BL explains how recently a competitor claimed Kryptonite locks could be easily broken with ordinary wire cutters. However, as it turns out those wire cutters will cost about $600 to purchase.

Donna Tocci, Kryptonite's PR director responded to the criticism, and had asked BL Ochman's advice. The competitor had criticized Kryptonite on the Kryptonite blog, but had apparently used abusive language. B.L. Ochman recommended outing the competitor and letting the public make their own minds about such behavior.

Here's one of the responses from customers on the Kryptonite blog to a post made by Kryptonite in response to the competitor.

"Well reasoned response! Frankly, their tactics have made me LESS likely to even look at their product!"

Jeff Nolan's View On Corporate Blogging

Jeff Nolan in the venture chronicles provides an excellent overview of effective corporate blogging.

Here's a quote I think makes a lot of sense to me,

"The product group and thought leaders categories are most productive in brand building and genuine information dissemination."

And Jeff went onto describe both a content strategy and who a company should pick to write a blog,

"If your company is exploring adding blogs to the mix, focus attention on exposing product and customer support groups as a first priority. Among executives, the most interesting group to recruit are direct reports to senior executives as they are ambitious and engaged in day-to-day activities, which means that they have a lot to say that is interesting."

Lastly, Jeff captures the other half of blogging well, conversation on other blogs,

"The other half of the coin for blogging is what companies should do to promote third party blogs that center on a specific company or industry segment. Blogger outreach is not easy because it requires that a company let go of the notion of message control and focus on relationship building. Responding to comments in a non-marketing speak manner is key."

Social Media Report In Public Radio

JD Lasica linked to this excellent report on social media in public radio, from the American University School of Communication's Center for Social Media called “Public Radio’s Social Media Experiments: Risk, Opportunity, Challenge”. Here's my synopsis of the report. If you read it I'd be interested in hearing what aspects of the report you found most interesting.

What is new about blogging and social media for traditional media are the "unfamiliar rules of engagement," traditional media is unused to how engagement works in the online world.

First it requires a change in understanding about who is creating content in the new world of consumer generated media. The public participates by contributing content. This means media companies have to develop new ways to allow the public's participation.

Issues of concern

- Managing a large volume of comments with few resources.
- Lack of understanding that managing social media takes time and resources on the part of management.
- Concerns about standards for engagement in the light of journalistic standards. What does the public's participation say about the media credibility?

The media's concerns about social media can be allayed slightly by setting goals for social media projects, metrics that measure the level of public participation.

- Downloading podcasts
- Unique visitors
- Comments
- Trackbacks

It is also important to set expectations with your audience so they can understand what content is consumer generated and what is journalist created.

Transparency In The Face Of Adversity

Nic Frankpitt writes a customer service blog for Brisbane Broadband Help Desk. He loves his job, but unfortunately the company is closing down his division. He wrote about the redundancy on his blog, in a very open and transparent way, criticizing the company and expressing his frustration. The company has not interfered with the posts. Interesting.

Does the blog post help or hurt the company?

Casting Doubt On Jupiter Research

David Card points to Emily Riley's report on corporate blogging at Jupiter Research.

"While 39 percent of social marketers plan to create a corporate blog in the coming year, only three percent of online consumers read blogs when researching products and services online.

The practice works the best for products that take time for consumers to learn about or master, or products that instill a sense of passion in the consumer. Verticals that succeed with brand advocacy blogs include entertainment, financial services, health, consumer electronics, gaming, travel, automotive, and technology."

I am very curious to know how Emily Riley estimates only three percent of online consumers read blogs when researching products and services?

In 2005 the pew Internet project found 27% of internet users read blogs.

In a july 2006 report from pew internet project about bloggers 8% of internet users keep a blog, and 39% of internet users read blogs

I'd like to learn more about the basis for Emily's figures, I cannot imagine that only 3% of Internet users use blogs to research products when at least 39% of internet users read blogs.

Web 2.0 In The Firing Line

Andrew Keen and David Weinberger debate whether the rise of web 2.0 is beneficial to society or not. Issues raised include the loss of authoritative voices that have the opportunity to be paid for creating quality content, text is from the Wall Street Journal.

I found this quote from David most interesting:

"You say "the intellectual authority able to help people understand the world is indeed endangered." Then you ask if I'm convinced that the Web benefits intellectuals. Yes, I am. And that's because, while some talent is indeed solitary, many types of talent prosper in connection with others. That is especially true for the development of ideas. Knowledge is generally not a game for one. It is and always has been a collaborative process. And it is a process, not as settled, sure, and knowable by authorities, as it would be comforting to believe. So forget my homey examples of Joe and Maria. Consider how much more we know about the world because we have bloggers everywhere. They may not be journalists, but they are sources, and sometimes they are witnesses in the best sense. We know and understand more because of these voices than we did when we had to rely on a single professional reporting live at 7."

To me knowledge is a collection of ideas from many people developed over time, therefore creativity comes from collaboration and is one reason why I believe the development of ideas is the real power of web 2.0. I believe the most effective strategy a company can follow in using social media and corporate blogs is to ask for feedback from customers because those tools can harness the knowledge and ideas of the group. However, individual expertise is not to be dismissed. Rather I think that web 2.0 gives us more opportunities to learn from many people who would not have contributed to collective knowledge in the past.

Blog Interviews

Several bloggers conducted interviews with me recently, and were kind enough to publish the results on their blogs.

Matthew Grant from Aquent Marketing and Staffing wrote an interesting interview with me that describes some of the reasons why I blog. But really I think pinpoints some of the reasons why anyone should write a blog.

David Wilson of the Social Media Optimization blog published an interview with me.

And Derek Edmond from KoMarketing Associates described my recent visit to his company's offices.

YouTube Election 2008: Voice Of The People Or Cure For The Summer Media Blues?

Were the YouTube Election 2008 debates a publicity stunt meant to break through the summer media doldrums, or a great example of voter generated media? Both in my view. However if you take the use of such social media technologies to their eventual conclusion, white house press conferences will have YouTube producers with questions on video from the public, and politicians will be using digg like social media technologies to determine the pulse of the public's interests.

Dell has developed IdeaStorm a web-based application that gives customers the ability to suggest product ideas, and other customers can vote the ideas up or down. Dell has already produced products based on the website. What if we had a voter Opinion website similar to IdeaStorm? Well just as a few people and their friends can manipulate Digg you might have a lot of ideas that the majority of the population don't agree with.

Social media does have a role to play in democracy and citizenship; it has already played a significant part in past elections, through forums, blogs and online campaign contributions. It will be interesting to see if politicians interact with social media for policy decisions in the future or just use social media as a publicity stunt.

TagCrowd - A Web Based Tag-Cloud Generator

Looking for a tag cloud generator, one of the people who answered my question on Linkedin had a great suggestion, check out http://tagcrowd.com/. A website that lets you enter text into a web form, and returns HTML code that you can use in your own pages, the code displays a tag cloud derived from the text you entered into the form. You can specify the number of tags you wish to show. Group similar words, and ignore comment English words.

Build Relationships, And Write Quality Blog Articles

Jakob Nielsen, in his article, “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings,” suggests that writing well researched articles rather than short off the cuff blog posts will in the long run attract more paying customers, in. I agree in principle to this idea, who can argue that writing good quality articles is better than writing poor quality articles? However, I do think that Jakob does miss out on some opportunities. He suggests it’s not a good idea to attempt to follow up on current issues with a topical post. As many other people are probably writing similar articles and doing it a lot better than you or I can. In a way I agree with Jakob. In that I’d always recommend you conduct research into what other people are saying about a current event, but also to have an opinion that's different from other people that comment on the same issue. By reviewing the comments of other people in a blogging community and linking to those comments, perhaps also commenting on the other blog posts, not only do you add credibility to a post, you make it easier for the interested reader to review the communities opinions without having to do all the same research. In addition everyone mentioned in your post will probably pick up on the fact you referenced them and may either comment on your post, link to you in another post or start reading your RSS feed. This strategy is really a public relations strategy, and may not suit everyone who blogs, but can be a very successful strategy for people in a blogging community. You just have to be disciplined to stay on top of current topical events. Many of the most successful bloggers follow this strategy, and why it works so well is because blogging is not just about writing, but also a discussion with a community. Either people who just read your blog, or other fellow bloggers. When you discuss an issue in the PR blogging community, everyone else in the community wants to know what you think on that issue. If you are able to keep up with the volume of news and can write an intelligent thought or two about current issues within the PR blogging community over time you will build relationships. High rankings and direct traffic is not just about quality content, it’s also about the relationships you have with people in the community. Now if you can do both…

Having said all this, I personally, I prefer to wait a little when an issue erupts, read everyone's posts, list them and give an opinion. However, I also have a technique where I will write a series of posts about the same issue. When I was writing about the Nokia blogger relations program in January of 2006 for the Blogsurvey blog, I wrote 4-5 posts about the campaign in the same week. That's one tactic that works to a blog's advantage we can write a series of ideas, which eventually can be collected in a larger article. Jakob Nielsen would disagree with me here, he says as much in his article, but that style of writing is why I enjoy writing a blog so much, I can write small ideas that over time collect in to big ideas. Why that’s how I wrote a lot of my book.