PR Communications

Brawl Over First Fortune 500 Corporate Blog Resolved!

During Dr. Nora Gamin Barnes’ presentation on her research results at the Society for New Communications Research Symposium in Cambridge, MA on Friday Shel Israel suggested that the first Fortune 500 company to run a corporate blog was General Motor’s Fastlane blog (Jan 2005).

I piped up and suggested there were earlier corporate blogs among the Fortune 500. We also got into a debate about the definition of a corporate blog. If the criterion is the blog is branded by the company and run by company employees not for personal purposes I think I can find at least one blog earlier than GM.

Looking back I conducted my first corporate blogging survey back in 2004, and interviewed Gary Lerhaupt at Dell, the company had started a Linux blog, here’s the interview with Gary.

That blog is no longer around, but it was definitely an official corporate blog.

However, to me Microsoft, and SUN were certainly using blogging for corporate purposes. We had several large technology companies before Jan 2005 encourage employees to write a blog, and gave them a corporate blogging platform to run a blog. The blogs may or may not have been personal though. See this badly written article of mine in 2004, where I mention Microsoft had 700 employee blogs.

Several companies; Microsoft, Oracle, SUN, also had blog aggregation sites. I an article about blog aggregation in 2005, mainly about Macromedia, but I’d found several blog aggregators during 2005 from the large Fortune 500 technology companies. We have to remember that blog search engines were only just appearing, Technorati started in 2005 so many of the big blogging companies build their own blog aggregators to bring the community together.

If you define a corporate blog as the “official” blog then Dell might be the first in the Fortune 500, but if you include employee blogs like John Porcaro’s or Heather Hamilton at Microsoft, I think we have to look back earlier in time.

In addition, Microsoft’s channel9 website goes back to 2004 as this posting from March of 2004 indicates, maybe not the first corporate blog, but certainly the first corporate Fortune 500 video blog.

Beyond FTC Guidelines, What Else Is Happening With Blogger Ethics?

Stephen Baker, a business journalist at Business Week recently wrote about his concerns regarding the social media guidelines at the Washington Post as that company is a potential buyer for his employer Business Week. Baker wondered if he would still be employed at Business Week if those guidelines were in force there.

I’ve long been interested in how journalist’s approach writing and codes of ethics because I think the profession has hugely influenced blogging and the practice of corporate blogging. I wrote about how corporate blogging owes a debt to journalists and the profession in chapter three ‘Developing a Blogger Relations Strategy,’ of my book in the section on what journalism can teach bloggers. There’s been a convergence in styles of writing, tools, and perhaps even ethics.

Here's the snippet of what Stephen was concerned about:

Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything—including photographs or video—that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility. This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online.

When I first read Stephen's post about the social media guidelines at the Washington Post, I thought I recognized content that echoed the journalist's code of ethics. So I took another look at the code of ethics published by the Society of Professional Journalists, here's the preamble to the code of ethics:

Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility. Members of the Society share a dedication to ethical behavior and adopt this code to declare the Society's principles and standards of practice.

From the preamble:

And reading through the code I thought the section on acting independently was most relevant to the Washington Post's guidelines Stephen Baker had highlighted:

Act Independently

Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know.

Journalists should:

    —Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
    — Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
    — Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
    — Disclose unavoidable conflicts.

I believe that it has long been the practice of professional journalists to refrain from joining community and civic organizations that may appear to compromise their journalistic credibility. The WP guidelines don't seem all that different than the code of ethics when it comes to that point. However, it is one thing to pay dues to an organization and another to retweet or join a facebook fan page for a campaign or organization. Yet, by the very action of showing support for an organization even if it is only the simple step of supporting a fan page, doesn't that journalists association open themselves to breaking the journalist’s code of ethics?

The Washington Post guidelines also called for "Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything—including photographs or video—that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility."

In the section on Seeking truth and reporting truth, the code of ethics addresses the issue of cultural values and stereotyping.

Seek Truth and Report It

Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

— Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.
— Avoid stereotyping by race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance or social status.

Yet the section on seeking truth and reporting it is really concerned about the articles that journalist's write, rather than their private correspondence. It begs the question, isn't there a difference between the public face of a journalist and the private life of a journalist? In today's world of easily published content a person's private life becomes their public life as well. I can easily see a journalist writing an article that is unbiased, and not stereotyping in their stories, but then on a blog or twitter express a private thought that expresses their own cultural values or a stereotype. Perhaps a journalist who is a republican makes a comment about democrats in general or visa versa.

I'm wondering if we are now expecting too much of journalists? And even putting them at a disadvantage in a world were open dialogue about everything is possible. Stephen Baker made this point in his article. He wrote, "If BusinessWeek had rules like the Post's, I'd have been out of a job long ago. I've written in recent months about BW's lengthy editing process. Not everyone liked it. But Executive Editor Ellen Pollock, to her credit, came onto my blog and joined the discussion. I also wrote a fairly critical post about our parent company, McGraw-Hill. Again, it was a sensitive subject. It upset some people, and perhaps I crossed a line. But we talked about it, and I'll try to use my best judgment going forward."

I'm wondering if the Washington Post guidelines are meant to uphold journalistic ethics in line with the code of ethics for journalists, and if so does the code restrict journalists from expressing private thoughts in so public a way on a blog or twitter? And because of the development of social media, and competition from bloggers, the journalist community may have to rewrite their rules. Or were WP the guidelines just poorly written in expressing the sentiment of the journalist’s code of ethics?

It could also be that the guidelines for the Washington Post are much more stringent and in line with the journalist’s code of ethics than Business Week, after all a paper that's brought down President's might have to be even more careful about ethics to maintain credibility.

I really would like to see more of a discussion in light of the code of ethics, mainly because I believe that journalists have hugely influenced bloggers in their code of ethics and etiquette in writing on the web. If many journalists are becoming bloggers and bloggers journalists, what is the new standard for ethics across all the professions?

WebEx Blogger Updates Dimdim Review

David Chao the WebEx employee updated his blog yesterday. David runs a personal web conferencing blog, and wrote a blog review of Dimdim, a competitor in the web conferencing space.

David had not published a disclosure about his employment directly on his blog or in the review post, plus he had not published a comment from Kevin Micalizzi, the community manager of Dimdim. Kevin had commented on the post because he found David Chao's post to contain several inaccuracies about the servers Dimdim uses to support clients. David Chao had suggested Dimdim uses Amazon.com servers 100% of the time when Dimdim has their own servers, while clients do use Amazon.com servers it is only at their own request. David Chao had based his comments about Dimdim's servers on a Mashable article that referenced a Dimdim client using Amazon.com.

David Chao has updated his blog to display a disclosure about his employment with Cisco within the side navigation and in the original review post.

In addition to publishing Kevin's comment, David posted a comment in his Dimdim review post stating that the facts about Dimdim servers were inaccurate. David also gave a more detailed explanation of why he did not publish Kevin’s comment on his blog in a comment on this blog PR Communications.


In addition to the discussion with Kevin Micalizzi from Dimdim, David Chao had also criticized the Amazon.com EC2 servers. In response a blogger had commented on his blog. David had then got into an exchange with the blogger via email, which he published on his blog (hopefully with the blogger’s permission!)

I think what’s interesting about the incident with David Chao is that through community persuasion we’ve been able to make helpful suggestions about disclosure, publishing comments and responding to them that gave David enough information so that he has changed his blogging practices. This case study is an example of how situations turn around once people, companies and brands understand the value of engagement and realize that there’s nothing to fear but everything to gain.

WebEx Blogger Never Published Dimdim Comment!

In a follow up to my two earlier posts, the WebEx blogger, David Chao, has revealed to me via email that he did not delete Kevin Micalizzi’s comments on his blog review of Dimdim; rather David never published the comment! 

David Chao decided not to publish Kevin’s comment when he discovered that Kevin Micalizzi of Dimdim published his own blog post about David’s post.

David also said that he thought the link to his linkedin profile was enough of a disclosure about his connection with WebEx.

I gave the following background to David on some of the practices that are not written in stone but are expected to be performed by bloggers in many blogging communities:

1) Disclosure about your connection with a company is usually expected in a post or on a blog, especially if you work for a company or are paid by them in some way. While you do prominently put a link to your linkedin profile on your blog, you have to click through to read your bio. That extra step though small and not unreasonable, in the context of writing a post about a competitor means that to many bloggers having a link to a bio is not enough, the community expectation would be that you’d disclose your connection with WebEx in the post that reviews Dimdim.

2) Unless a comment is obvious spam or inappropriate, even if that comment is negative but constructive, once you publish a blog, the etiquette of most blogging communities is that bloggers with open comments should publish any posted comments. When a someone like yourself who is connected with a competitor to the company you are commenting upon, the fact that you didn’t not publish Kevin’s comment looks to some people that you don’t want to allow any real discussion around your blog post.

3) If you write a post and get any facts wrong, and someone informs you that those facts are incorrect, the standard practice in the industry is that you post an update to the original post. You might also go the extra step of writing a follow up blog post to notify your readership who may be subscribed to your RSS feed that there is has been a development in the story, otherwise the readers may not have caught the update to your original post.

These practices are very much entrenched in blogging communities, most bloggers would expect that you’d follow them no matter what other people do on their blog. While David Chao might consider Kevin’s actions, his post, inappropriate in the sense David had not had sufficient time to publish Kevin’s comments, before Kevin published his post. Most bloggers would overlook the fact that Kevin published his blog post not realizing his post had gone immediately into moderation because they would have expected David to publish the comments, whether Kevin published a post or not, and follow up with Kevin to clarify any information that was incorrect.

The community expects a blogger to consider their own actions on their own merit and not in the light of other people’s practices or actions. While Kevin did state David Chao deleted his comments when he did not. When David did not publish Kevin’s comments for all appearances what Kevin is stating in his blog post is what happened. By remaining silent people don’t know your side of the story and assume that everything Kevin published is correct. If David were to engage Kevin, publish his comments and update his post David would be seen to be engaging Kevin and demonstrating that he has nothing to hide.

Update: Also, check out Neville Hobson’s great comments in the For Immediate Release podcast on the WebEx blogger deletion incident.

Disclosure: I learned about the WebEx blogger story through Kevin Micalizzi, Community Manager at Dimdim at a tweet up I organized recently with Kevin as a featured guest.

Five Social Media Insights On Disclosure, Competition & Social Media Guidelines

After writing my post about David Chao, the WebEx employee who wrote a personal blog post with a review of a competitor's product without disclosing their connection with WebEx directly in the post, I thought I'd ping a few colleagues in social media land to get their opinion on the David Chao's approach in the hope that community persuasion might cause a change of heart.

In addition to the original review, David Chao did not publish a comment placed on his blog by Kevin Micalizzi of Dimdim, a competitor; Kevin had clarified some incorrect information published by David Chao about Dimdim use of Amazon.com's services.

Susan Getgood

I asked Susan Getgood, a long time colleague from the AMA about the incident, here's Susan's reply:

Your questions:

Should David have revealed his connection with WebEx in his post?

Should David have written the post?

What do you think of David’s reaction to Kevin’s comment clarifying some facts on David’s original post?

How can companies prepare employees for conducting blogger relations?

My take:

Should you write a post about a competitor? It depends. If the competitor is in the news, and you have something constructive to add to the discussion, a post might be warranted. Should you review a competitor’s product? In the context of a clearly labeled piece that also discusses your own product, sure. Happens all the time. Standard marketing practice.

In a blog post purporting to be objective opinion? Without clear attribution of your own interest in the matter? Absolutely not.

To answer your specific questions, David Chao should not have written a purportedly objective review of DimDim; as an employee of WebEx, he has a stake in the game. There’s no way he can be objective. Further, anything he writes about DimDim, or any other competitor, should have the clear disclosure that he is a WebEx employee. The reaction of deleting the DimDim comment simply compounds the ethical problem.

What can companies do? Employees who are participating in social media, whether personally or on behalf of their companies, should be given simple guidelines on how to engage when mentioning their employer, company products or job. At a minimum, these guidelines should include disclosure of a blogger’s material interests and business relationships.

Bottom line, it is about blogging with integrity. As we stated in the Blog with Integrity (blogwithintegrity.com) pledge:

"I disclose my material relationships, policies and business practices. My readers will know the difference between editorial, advertorial, and advertising, should I choose to have it. If I do sponsored or paid posts, they are clearly marked."

A further point about integrity. Another element of integrity is welcoming “respectful disagreement with my own ideas.” (Blog with Integrity pledge). Sounds like that isn’t happening here either.

David Meerman Scott

I asked David Meerman Scott to comment and in a comment on my blog David stated the following:

John,

I agree that it is okay to write a blog post about a competitor, but I do not think that it is okay to do a negative online  Review of a competitors product. You and I both write books but I would never dream of writing a negative review of a book that competes with one of mine - would you?

However, I think it is a "worst practice" to delete the comments that come in from representatives of the company that you just dinged. That's just wrong.

The biggest problem with this sort of behavior is that the negative aspects of it (you writing about it for example) far outweigh the positives (a few people thinking that a product is not good).

DISCLOSURE -- I am personal friends with and have written about Steve Chazin who works at DimDim.

Cheers, David

Michael Gartenberg

Michael Gartenberg had this to say on one of my questions about social media guidelines.


John: How can companies prepare employees who are using social media?

Michael: In the age of social media, the rules are different. The same way companies are mindful of employee conduct when they're in public representing their firm, they need to instill the same sense of conduct, ethics and behavior when they're online. As personal brands co-mingle with corporate brands disclosure and transparency of affiliations become even more important.

Neville Hobson

Neville Hobson gave his answers in an audio response.

John: Should David have revealed his connection with WebEx in his post?

Neville: The connection with WebEx is a material fact that could influcence your opinion about what was written in the review. Probably is he just did not think about it. However, it is a problem that two weeks have passed and he has not revealed his connection.

John: Should David have written the post?

Neville: I don't see an issue with writing the review, but without the disclosure there's a problem.

John: How can companies prepare employees for using social media?

Neville: Depends on the product, the market, the angle you are writing. So long as the review is open.

Neville: You need to educate those employees, be clear on goals. Also think about the support does the employee receives and need. The framework for social media activity has to be viable for employees. Provide some guidelines for all employees and help to set the boundaries for all employees.

Neville has followed up with a discussion on the FIR podcast

BL Ochman

BL Ochman was kind enough to give me some answers.

John: Should David have revealed his connection with WebEx in his post?

BL: Of course he should have he's damaged not only his credibility in that post, but his overall credibility. His action demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the Internet Age. Full disclosure is a much better policy. Having provided it, he could make his case. I, and other people I have come to trust, always include client identification even in Tweets. I've worked hard to build my reputation as a straight shooter, I wouldn't compromise it.
 
John: Should David have written the post?

BL: Sure, if credibility and honesty don't matter to him. No, if they do!

John: What do you think of David’s reaction to Kevin’s comment clarifying some facts on David’s original post?

BL: It was a kneejerk reaction. He needs to think before he speaks or writes from now on. The Internet is forever, what happens online stays online.

John: How can companies prepare employees for conducting blogger relations?

BL: IBM and Sun and many other companies have policies that basically say "don't be a jerk", "don't give away company secrets," give away intelligence, not intellectual property.

Every company should talk to employees, offer them assistance in getting started, and encourage them to be open and honest.  If a company doesn't trust its employees to blog, they may need to make changes in their hiring and training policies. Cashiers in stores are the employees who customers meet, yet many companies hire and continue to employ lackluster people who make it clear they'd rather be somewhere else.

Companies need to think about who's out front, and put a lot of training and trust and rewards to those employees.

Sure there are some bad people in the world, but for most of us, if you treat us with respect, pay us a decent wage, and give us good working conditions, it shows.

John: The synopsis from these five communications professionals is that disclosure is important, and that social media guidelines can be a good resource for employees to understand how to navigate the waters of social media.

Update: I’ve been in touch with David Chao via email. He tells me that Kevin Micalizzi’s comment was never published, and that after Kevin posted his blog post on the Dimdim blog, he decided to do nothing. David has also discovered that the information he wrote about Dimdim’s servers was incorrect, he based his post on a ReadWriteWeb post, but as of this time he has not updated his blog post.

10/11 Update: David Chao has updated his blog, giving a disclosure about his employment with Cicso, he published Kevin's comments, and updated the original post.

Engagement: The Next Step After Content Marketing

Beth Kanter references my post on the engagement relevancy ranking in here case study on Planned Parenthood's use of social media. She also references John Jantsch's blog post Content Creates Engagement. In that post I'd argued in the comment section that Jantsch was missing something in his article, the idea that real engagement comes from direct outreach and monitoring of the community.

In Beth's article she describes how Planned Parenthood has built an infrastructure for content creation based upon monitoring the community.

"Planned Parenthood has built the infrastructure to be successful.  Their online services department is in charge of web site presence, email messaging, and social networking.   They work in collaboration with the communications team.  As Tom Subak mentions, "But something was missing: The intersection of content that we create with what our supporters create. It doesn’t matter whether it is on our web site or somewhere else. There are millions of stories inside of Planned Parenthood – the stories are incredible. We put a human face on our work and what we’re doing. With our stories, we try to figure out how to get more people engaged and change the public’s view. We now have a department called the New Media Content team. Their job is to create, edit, repurpose, identify content across all our channels. Where does this all come together – part of the organization that is thinking about content – in the way that content exists in now. It doesn’t matter where it is or who created. Another thing to is that it doesn’t matter where the content lives – we’ve been creating widgets that can placed anywhere – not just on our site""

In the comment section I suggested companies and organizations follow three strategies when it comes to social media content creation and also direct engagement.

1) Content Marketing: You can create content that is relevant and engages people because it is valuable. Perhaps by providing a how-to, or connecting with some emotionally. The strategy for content development is based upon SEO strategy or your understanding of what valuable in the industry.

2) Content Marketing through social media monitoring: Creating content based upon the monitoring of social media, as you describe in your overview this is what planned parenthood does with its New Media Content team. The team creates, edits, repurposes, identifies content across all our channels. I differentiate this approach from strategy one, because there's a more formal system set up to monitor the community on the web.

3) Social Media Engagement: Engagement occurs when there's a team set up to engage your community on the web about your brand or organization. You answer comments on the community member’s web site; write content about them on your own website. I think there does have to be some context, such as relationship or context within the industry.

I suspect that direct engagement occurs naturally within all three strategies, but what I suggest is that there's a definite choice on the part of companies and organizations about which strategy to follow, as each strategy requires the commitment of resources.

The concepts of inbound marketing and content marketing are relatively new, and both theories focus on the idea that success in social media comes from building the infrastructure to develop a constant stream of content that’s relevant and valuable to your community. Yet I often see little discussion about creating the necessary infrastructure for engagement when discussing content marketing.

I do understand that some companies also conduct engagement as well as following a content marketing strategy, but I think it is really important for companies to understand the value of dialogue to the enterprise. Customers turn to evangelists, customers service, and product marketing.

Marketers are familiar with the concept of creating advertising or campaigns, so the approach of content marketing is an easy next step, especially when you consider that search engine optimization has always been about creating great content. In some ways, the term content marketing is all about SEO. I think if you ask most marketers what their marketing goals are online, they would say lead generation or achieving higher rankings with SEO.

Content marketing put in the context of a marketing department that understands SEO makes absolute sense. This is one reason why the concepts of inbound marketing and content marketing have grown so rapidly, the ideas are not a great leap from existing approaches in SEO and SEM.

Here I'm going to sound rather pompous I am sure, but I've been a blogger since 2003 and the PR and Marketing community five or six years ago was heavily influenced by the cluetrain manifesto and the concept of conversations. PR and marketing bloggers, people who wrote blogs and were involved in the community had come to understand the value of dialogue and conversation as well as content. Look at what the community was writing in 2004 during the Global PR blogging week to understand the focus of the community at the time.

My thinking about how companies use social media has always been put in the context of the practical, how do companies use social media for business, how do they build the necessary infrastructure to be successful? Many of the case studies that convinced me that social media was valuable for an organization described how content creation was a primary reason for starting a blog or other social media technology.

I've discovered the companies that were really successful in social media also put time and effort into direct outreach to their community, and I’ve personally experienced this in my own blogging efforts, here at PR Communications or in the many blogs I've run at the companies I've worked at or helped start with clients over the years. Lastly, the concept of engagement outreach was discussed by the community five years ago in the virtual conference Global PR blogging Week.

I think content marketing can be successful and is a good next step for companies thinking about using social media. The concept makes logical sense to marketers familiar with SEO. And marketers can outsource content development to other writers. Here I think some people in the industry might criticize me for suggesting hiring a writer to create content and posting that content on a blog when the writer is not an employee of the company is unauthentic. Well you'd be right, but I think it also depends how a company represents the content, does the writer have a byline.

By the way, while I'd certainly recommend a content marketing strategy for a company website, I really think a company should not create content within social media by outsourcing that content unless they are transparent about the action. But I'd not going to spend too much time on attempting to police the industry, why? Because the floodgates are already open. The industry would be better off spending time on developing case studies that demonstrate why building engagement outreach infrastructure is the next step after content marketing.

I'd suggest while you might achieve good results from creating content, from higher SEO and some engagement, if you don't build an infrastructure for monitoring the web, discovering brand mentions, and also industry references, and then triaging those opportunities for response and engagement, no matter how big a content development infrastructure you build a company will not be prepared for crisis communications incidents without the infrastructure for successful engagement outreach in the community.

The leaders in the community of social media; Dell, Comcast etc, are not following a content marketing strategy, they are following an engagement and community management strategy. See Charlene Li's and Wet Paint's EngagementDB research and website for more evidence of why the depth of engagement influences results. Certainly start with content marketing, but move to an engagement strategy once you’ve built the case for building the necessary infrastructure.

Really social media engagement and content marketing are all a matter of resources, it’s a lot easier to hire a writer to write content, than it is to hire someone to respond and manage a community, both strategies can be successful, but the question is can you get a better ROI from engagement. I believe so.

Writing A Social Media Comment

When writing a comment in social media, blogs, twitter, or YouTube read the text of the original article and engage in a dialogue with the writer. Your primary goal is engagement and conversation rather than promoting your own products and services. You will build credibility and a relationship with a blogger if you regularly comment on their blog and contribute ideas that are about the writer's post, rather than your own products.

Here are a few more posts I've written over the years on the topic of commenting:

How-To Respond To Blog Comment Posts That Are Sales Spam

Handling Abrasive Corporate Blogging Comments

Shielding Anonymous Commentators On A Blog

Measuredup.com Sucks!

GM Fastlane Blog Returns A Comment!

Ending Blog Commenting With NeoVictorian Computing

Measuring Your Level Of Social Media Engagement

The biggest change for businesses when dealing with social media is having a conversation with the communities about the topics they want to discuss rather than only promoting a company's products. I propose a new metric for measuring your level of engagement with your community: The engagement relevancy rating.

The industry has made some progress in the development of inbound marketing and content marketing ideas, however, I'd suggest those new disciplines primarily are focused on developing relevant valuable content that attracts customers and community.

Many in the industry suggest good content engages the reader, which it can, but to me engagement means you conduct an outreach strategy where your company engages your community and customers.

By first engaging your community, community management if you will, you build credibility and relationships, so that when you do development content its dispersal through word of mouth networks is much more likely to happen, engagement first, content second.

My book, 'Strategies and Tools for Corporate blogging,' was really all about how to conduct a dialogue with your customers and community. I happened to pick blogging as the social media technology of choice, but engagement is just as relevant across all social media technologies, from YouTube to Flickr. In the book I detail how a company would develop an engagement or dialogue strategy with their community. Many of the ideas in the book were developed as a result of my engagement in the PR blogging community, which I recently detailed in my celebration of the 5th anniversary of the Global PR blogging Week, in that week a lot of the discussion was around the concept of conversations, those early bloggers really understand the concept of engagement, and most of my thinking of the idea of engagement comes from conversing with that community.

I often think this idea of engagement is lost in the shuffle when thinking about how to use social media for marketing. Why is that? Well marketers are comfortable with creating advertising to attract customers, here the focus is on attracting customers and converting them, if engagement occurs it is to sell the product, the concept of engagement around the customer's content is something new, and the ROI of that activity still has to be justified for many marketers.

This is not to say that content marketing is not a good idea, or a wrong step, it's just I think content marketing is a stepping stone in the development of marketing to engagement. I also understand that many in the industry would suggest engagement is part and parcel of content marketing, but I think there's still some debate about the definition of content marketing and differences in how content marketing and inbound marketing practices are implemented. See my debate with John Jantsch in his post Content Creates Engagement for more insight into my thinking here.

As I believe engagement is lost in the shuffle I've come up with a metric for measuring a company's level of engagement in their community, the Engagement Relevancy Rating.

You'd use the engagement relevancy rating to gauge your depth of engagement with your community, the more you conduct a dialogue with community members that's relevant to their topic of discussion, the greater your level of engagement with your audience.

To determine your relevancy rating, add up all of your comments within a period of time both on your social media property and on other people's social media properties where you can comment. Determine if your comment was related to a topic you wanted to address or the comment was related to a topic the community wanted to address. Divide the your total number of comments in a period, by the total number of comments that are relevant to your community member's post only, you will come up with a percentage that determines your level of engagement relevancy, the higher the percentage of engagement relevancy the more time you've spend engaging your community and less time you've spent promoting your own products and ideas.

Why is the engagement rating relevant and does it provide an ROI? Yes to answer both of those questions because to build relationships in social media you have to spend some time on reading other people's material and engaging those people with content that's about them rather than you. You'll be much more likely to build a relationship so that when you do develop content that's about you, the community will read your content and distribute that content because of the relationship and your credibility in the community.

I don’t necessarily see companies using the rating on a daily basis, but I think it’s a good gauge that will keep people focused on the concept of engagement with their community, a device for dialogue. As to what percentage a company should aim for with engagement relevancy, I’d say about 50%.

5 Principles For Writing Corporate Stories

I've been captivated with the idea that blogging resembles new journalism, the style of journalism developed in the 60's where writers wrote about the facts but also described their response and reaction to those facts; subjective writing instead of objective.

Writers who include: Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Michael Herr developed the movement.

Marc Weingarten's book "The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight," records the exploits and history of the uncoordinated literary movement, and here Lee Eisenberg provides a review of the book in the New York Magazine.

I wrote about my favorite example of how new journalism relates to blogging in 2007, I also had a section on new journalism in my book, “Strategies and Tools for Corporate blogging”.

"I was thinking that blogging in many circumstances is new journalism in action. Here's an example of a blog that I think really illustrates new journalism at work. http://drgreiver.blogspot.com/ Dr. Greiver is a doctor who writes her blog about her practice implementing an electronic medical record system. Many bloggers attempt to be objective but also express their opinion, except with blogging instead of the journalist reflecting and reporting on subjects. The subject and writer are one and the same."

Reading Bruce Temkin's "Use Storytelling To Define Your Culture," I found this article useful because Bruce suggests telling stories about corporate achievements will have more success in cementing employee passion for customer service than management telling people not to do something. I believe stories are so important because when attempting to motivate people to follow an idea its less about pure facts, and more about how people relate to those facts, and that style of writing where the relationship with facts is described is new journalism. You don’t have to use social media to write your corporate story, but social media technologies do provide a good platform for writing a story that unfolds over time, and one where the audience can participate within the story.

Bruce annotated a magazine article from Costco about telling tales, here are Bruce’s five principles for writing good corporate stories.

    * Identify what stories you want; select key elements of your culture.
    * Craft powerful stories; look for good stories and then write them down and perfect them.
    * Use an employee’s name; specificity is good and it helps boost morale.
    * Keep it short; if it’s too long, it’s hard to remember and repeat.
    * Use and re-use the story; don’t be shy in retelling the story.

15.2% of Fortune 500 Blogging

Dr. Nora Gamin Barnes and Eric Mattson wrote a report discussing the number of blogs and level of social media activity of the Fortune 500, "The Fortune 500 and Blogging: Slow and Steady." The study determined 81 or 16% of the Fortune 500 are blogging.

The report provides the list of companies in the Fortune 500 that are blogging, I used the list to update the Fortune 500 Business blogging wiki. I added 15 new blogs Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki to bring the total number of blogs listed on the wiki to 76 or 15.2% of the Fortune 500. The report did not provide a list of links so I searched for each of the blogs, but could not find all of blogs for the listed companies, or I determined that a listed blog was not really a blog, usually because comments were not activated.

Here are the new additions:

Aloca, Avnet: The Soft Pitch, CBS.com blog, Computer Sciences, Davita, Foot Locker Unlocked, Goodyear Blimp Blog, Manpower, Micron Technology, Monsanto, Progressive, Symantec, Toys 'R' Us, UPS,Virgin Media