PR Communications

Disney Parks Roll Into Blogging

Walt Disney, a Fortune 500 company launched a new Disney blog for Disneyland Resorts, Walt Disney World Resorts and the Disney Cruise Line. The new blog brings the total number of Fortune 500 companies listed on the Fortune 500 business blogging wiki to 78 or 15.6% of the Fortune 500.

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

Comcast Adds Blogging To Social Media Engagement

Comcast has added a new corporate blog  www.comcastvoices.com that gives us 61 or 12.2% of the fortune 500 blogging. Here's wiki update for the Fortune 500 Business Blogging wiki, a census of the Fortune 500 blogs.

Shucks, I can no longer use Comcast as an example of a company that is implementing social media engagement well but does not have a blog.

The blog is very, very well designed, though I'd suggest adding Feedburner to the list of widgets along the side navigation, so many blogs have feedburner now (this blog does not) that it is becoming a standard.

Twitter RT @johncass Comcast adds new corporate blog, 61 or 12.2% of the f500 are blogging http://is.gd/3sv6

Social Media Maturity Index: Finding Social Media Engagement Leaders

Develop a blog, start a Facebook fan page, create a Second Life Island; all efforts in building a social media infrastructure that can be used to engage customers and community. Yet, launching a social media website is no indicator that a company will build a thriving engagement strategy. Rather how a company engages customer and community using social media is more important than what technologies they deploy. You might be able to rattle off a list of companies that have a blog, but it is much tougher to identify the companies that have a successful engagement strategy. Jon Garfunkel & I have developed a social media maturity index to make it easier to identify social media engagement leaders. Working with Jon Garfunkel, we took my original ideas, influenced by others, about a social media engagement rating system and developed the social media maturity index. Interestingly, Jon took our same discussion and has his own take on the model, The Open Community Enablement Model (oCEM).

This index can be used to determine the best practitioners in the industry regardless of the size of the company, and as a consequence the community can learn from those leader’s efforts.

One innovation suggested by Jon Garfunkel was changing the existing three point scale of my ranking system to a five point scale for evaluating social media leaders. John suggested we use the Capability Maturity Model’s process for evaluating the level of engagement. I think the maturity index rating should scale from 1 = no involvement, to 5 = heavily involved with engaging customers or deploying social media technology for engagement.

1 Listening
2 Receive Feedback
3 Problem & innovation response
4 Acknowledging & Demonstrating Action
5 Knowledge management

1 Listening – Describes the level of social media monitoring conducted by a company. Integrated into a monitoring system, has a triage system been developed by a company to sort and pass on information within the company?

1 = No monitoring is being conducted.
2 = Limited monitoring is being conducted, maybe at the level of free tools such as Google or Technorati.
3 = A formal monitoring system has been developed and deployed, the monitoring system feeds a triage system that passes information onto people who will respond to opportunities discovered within social media.
5 = Sophisticated routing of opportunities

2 Receive Feedback – A company is ready to receive and accept feedback from customers over the web. Here the customers will use the company’s mechanisms for sending feedback.

1 = No formal mechanism has been made available for customers to give feedback to a company.
3 = Customer feedback is welcomed by a company, however the mechanism is primitive, there has been the embryonic development of a feedback system, and there is a workflow process for who will take action on customer feedback.
5 = Sophisticated web 2.0 tools for customer feedback are being deployed that allow for the aggregation and sifting through of customer feedback, for example, bazaarvoice’s feedback system and salesforce.com’s idea engine.

3 Problem & Innovation Response – Does a company conduct outreach within social media to engage customers and community?

1 = A company does not allow or encourage a response using social media.
3 = Engagement happens on a limited basis, perhaps on the company’s blog or within social media networks, the company is taking a web 1.0 stance in a web 2.0 world. Responses are restricted to thought leadership rather than innovation management or customer support.
5 = Extensive engagement occurs on company social media websites. A company conducts outreach to their community beyond the goal of thought leadership or responding to controversial issues. Goals such as innovation management and customer support are pursued through a response strategy.

4 Acknowledgment & Demonstrating Action – This rating determines the extent to which a company will acknowledge receipt of ideas, and criticism, and how the company demonstrates it is taking action. To achieve a high maturity level a company will have both the processes in place for acknowledging, demonstrating receipt of ideas and taking action, and also deploying a company infrastructure for handling innovation management and customer support issues.

1 = A company may be active on social media and respond to customer feedback, but there is no acknowledgment and demonstration of the actions that will be taken based on customer feedback and suggestions.
2 = System for implementing innovation management embryonic, it is possible to take action based upon feedback but the mechanism is organic.
5 = A process has been developed for acknowledging feedback. When needed, resources and people are committed to taking action. To acknowledge receipt of feedback and ideas, whether a decision is taken to act or not, the decision results are published within social media for public consumption.

5 Knowledge Management - Knowledge Management is the process of recognizing useful information and publishing it in an open, searchable forum. A social media technology is deployed that enables customers and community to contribute and build a resource.

1 = No process or tools are used for building useful knowledge
3 = Off the shelf tools, bookmarking tools like del.ici.us, or wikis are used to collect useful information.
5 = Purpose built tools for knowledge management, active management and moderation of those tools.

Please let us know what you think of the index, and if we should add something or edit the description?

Fortune 500 Blogs Drop From 13.4% to 12%

Thanks to Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph. D., Chancellor Professor of Marketing at UMASS Dartmouth, and Kyle Austin at Racepoint for simultaneously pointing out that several of the blog links on the Fortune 500 business blogging wiki were dead or that several companies were not in the Fortune 500. I've gone through all of the links and double checked they were live or discontinued blogs.

The following blogs were taken off the wiki list: Countrywide, ING, Nokia, Ford, Honeywell, Sprint & the Pitney Bowes blog. With all of these blogs removed, the count of blogs is down from 67 blogs to 60 blogs or 12%. You can track the up and down progress of the blogs in the Fortune 500 list signup list.

I also noticed that quite a few of the links on the wiki needed updating: Oracle, Nike, Time Warner, Viacom, HP, Intel, IBM, Wholefoods, and Xerox.

Ford has not had a blog for quite a while with the removal of the Ford Bold Moves blog. With the hiring of Scott Monty, it is interesting that blogging is not central to today's social media engagement process, Ford shares that with Comcast an effective and active social media engagement process that does not rely on a blog.

The Fortune 500 Business Blogging wiki is a community project, as community organizer I am always looking for help with the continuing work to finish the census of the Fortune 500 and their use of blogs. Or you can write a review or interview a blogger at a Fortune 500 company. Let me know if you see any changes that need to be made to the wiki.

Update 02/11/09: Nora just pointed out that Accenture is in the Global 500 not the Fortune 500, removed them from the list. We are down to 59 companies or 11.8% of the fortune 500 with blogs.

New Business Blogs At FedEx, Ingram Micro & Safeway

Three new corporate blogs found recently for the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki.

FedEx Started October 2008. Writes about community, disaster relief, economics and the environment.
Ingram Micro  Writes about Ingram Micro's Seismic services.
Safeway Started November 2008.  All about food found at Safeway.

Want to write a review or interview the bloggers let me know; publish the review on your blog, and we will link to your post from the corporate blogging wiki.

FIR’s Trust In Blogging Panel

Josh Bernoff's new report on blogging discovered that only 16% of online US consumers trust corporate blogs.

Neville Hobson & Shel Holtz invited me to join a panel discussion on their BlogTalkRadio show and For Immediate Release podcast.

Rather than abandon the idea of blogging completely, the group discussed what strategies companies should use to connect with their customers and communities using social media.

This conversation was very timely for me because I've been thinking a lot about the purpose of lists that feature companies using social media or blogs.

Here are a few lists; Rachel Happe, Peter Kim, Debbie Weil, New PR Wiki, and Twitter Brand Index.

(if you know of more let me know, I will add to this post.)

Those lists indicate which companies are using social media, and do very little to rate the how well a company is deploying an engagement strategy within social media. The fortune 500 business blogging wiki lists blogs, and also links to a list of independent blogger reviews so there's some value in the reviews in gauging which companies are conducting engagement effectively.

My recent post on finding social media engagement leaders is an attempt to both develop a methodology for determining what a social media engagement leader and build a list of successful engagement leaders.

Check out the FIR trust in blogging panel podcast.

Do You Want To Interview A Fortune 500 Business Blogger?

Here’s a new strategy for increasing the number of reviews for Fortune 500 blogs on the Fortune 500 Business blogging wiki.

It has been almost a year since Easton Ellsworth and I started the community project to revamp the f500 wiki on corporate blogs. The number of blogs discovered has increased and we have more reviews, but we have not completed the census or reviewed all of the blogs.

In the last six month's I've tried a new technique of interviewing f500 bloggers rather than reviewing the blogs of Fortune 500 companies. The two interviews I've conduct, one for Oracle and the other for Newell Rubbermaid went well, and I even think the analysis by the bloggers at Oracle and Rubbermaid was tougher on their own blogs than I would have given on their blogs.

I still encourage bloggers to write a review of a fortune 500 corporate blog on their blog, and then link to their review on the wiki. But I also propose another way to evaluate fortune 500 blogs; bloggers interview the social media marketing managers at fortune 500 companies about their blog, and post their review on their blog, with a link on the wiki.

Here's a link to a post with the list of questions a blogger would ask of a fortune 500 corporate blogger.

Conversation Over Appearance: Finding Social Media Engagement Leaders

Company engagement using social media is not just the appearance of activity, rather that which is most important in a good social media marketing program; monitoring, dialogue, outreach and action. As a consequence I suggest industry observers should rank companies on how they use rather than if they use social media.

Over 60 companies in the Fortune 500 run a corporate blog according to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, a project I organize as a community volunteer where the community counts the number of blogs in the Fortune 500 and asks bloggers to write reviews. The number of companies in the Fortune 500 with a corporate blog is around 13%. 30 or so reviews of the f500 blogs listed on the wiki have been published. Looking across the reviews bloggers judged that engagement and outreach were the factors that rated lower than other success factors for f500 blogs. Companies might feature their blog on the main corporate website, but a number of Fortune 500 companies did not have a good outreach strategy to their blogging community, or even interact with customers on the comment section on their own corporate blog.

How a company develops an outreach strategy, putting the resources in place and implementing an effective feedback and outreach campaign is the most important aspect of marketing using social media. How companies engage and conduct a dialogue with their community is still a new concept to businesses, executives either don't know how to conduct an outreach strategy within a social media community, or are aware but have not committed sufficient resources to make the engagement successful. Really the medium of social media is not really important; rather it is the strategy you use to connect with customers. I've been thinking it would good to develop a new rating system for the use of social media by companies based on their ability to listen and engage customers, the strategy of engagement, listening and action if you will. That system can be used to determine the best practitioners in the industry, whether they be small or large companies, and the whole community can learn from their efforts.

Here’s my first attempt at the new social media engagement rating system.

1 Listen
1a Monitoring
1b Feedback

2 Action, Acknowledge & Demonstrate
2a Conduct dialogue
2b Resolve problems

Each factor would be rated on a scale of 1-3 as follows:

1a Monitoring – We review and estimate the level of active monitoring of the wider community by a company using social media. Has a triage system been developed by the company to sort and pass on information within the company?

1 = No monitoring is being conducted.
2 = Limited monitoring is being conducted from free tools such as Google or Technorati, to limited use of paid services monitoring, but monitoring restricted to brand monitoring.
3 = Monitoring resources are heavily deployed, and a formal monitoring system developed and deployed, one that uses a triage system to pass information onto people who need to act on the information gathered.

1b Feedback – Is it possible to give feedback to a company on their website?

1 = No ability to give feedback to a company on their site.
2 = Feedback welcomed by a company but the mechanism for sending feedback is primitive, some embryonic development of a feedback system within the company emailed primitive web 1.0 system. Feedback passed onto people.
3 = Sophisticated web 2.0 tools used. For example, bazaarvoice’s feedback system or  salesforce.com’s idea engine.

2a Dialogue & Engagement – Determining a company’s ability to engage and its level of engagement with customers and the wider community.

1 = No engagement
2 = Engagement happens, but on a limited basis; just on a company blog or within social media networks, the company is taking a web 1.0 stance in a web 2.0 world. Or a company is using social media just for thought leadership rather than innovation management or customer support.
3 = Extensive engagement happening on company social media sites, outreach to community through technologies is being conducted by the company, and outreach when it happens occurs beyond the goal of thought leadership for controversial issues, innovation management and customer support.

2b Problems are resolved using social media through action - Reviews the extent of the infrastructure within a company for handling innovation, customer support issues, ideas and suggestions where the company deals with the consequences of engagement.

1 = No mechanism for resolving problems. A company may even be active on social media but only reacts rather than taking action.
2 = System of response embryonic and when problems are resolved an organic approach is taken.
3 = Resources and people have been committed to taking action, and a process has been developed. When action is taken, those actions are published on social media for public consumption whether the action taken agrees with requests and suggestions or not.

This was my first attempt at the corporate social media engagement rating system. Let me know what you think and if I should add something or edit the description? Do you think the scale is big enough, perhaps instead of 1-3 we use 1-5 for example?

Here’s a Google Document Spreadsheet of the three companies rated using the Social Media Engagement System.

Inspiration for the additional development of this rating system comes from a post written by Elizabeth Albrycht, "Don't Become A "Walking Dead" Brand: Listen, Acknowledge, Demonstrate.” And my accompanying post, “Fortune 500 Companies That Demonstrate Their Crossing Of The Blogging Cultural Divide.”

Rubbermaid – A Corporate Blog that Organizes The World

The company name Newell Rubbermaid has a long history, and although Rubbermaid is most familiar to me the careful observer should look at Newell to understand the background to the current company. Newell started in the early 20th century; expanding from a manufacturer of curtain rods to a multi consumer products company with six to seven billion in sales. Newell acquired Rubbermaid in 1999; and according to this 2003 Business Week article the merger was not as successful as it could have been.

Rubbermaid’s Business Blog

Jim Deitzel from Newell Rubbermaid kindly agreed to help with this case study on the Rubbermaid blog. I interviewed Jim recently for the review, and Jim gave his own assessment of his blog using the criteria developed on the business and blogging site.

John: What is the background to the blog? How did the blog start?

Jim: We started thinking about the blog early in February of this year. We’d been writing a lot of content on our website, and wanted to add the ability to comment on those articles. From a technology perspective we were not able to allow comments on our existing website. We decided to use a blogging platform, and set up a TypePad account, which allowed for commenting.

By moving to a new blogging platform, we started thinking about the voice of the content. The website had very well written content, but very formal, now that we had the different platform that was not on our website, we could change our tone; it was not a super conscious decision to change the tone, rather an evolution. Our blog is about Rubbermaid, the people who use our products. We attempt to let the voice of the people come through.

A number of people are set up to write, but only a handful of people who actually write. All the blog authors are employees. When we started we had four posts written by an outside writer, who was not an employee, but a partner who writes for Rubbermaid on our website. They don’t contribute to the blog anymore; instead we decided to use employees of Rubbermaid.

John: How did you decide who would write on the blog.

Jim: We chose people within the communications group, whether they wanted to or not . Once they started writing they ended up catching the blogging bug.

The content on the blog attempts to show the process of how you can get organized at home. Much of the voice on the blog is my voice, and a handful of other contributors write. Some of the posts have included “how I organize my jewelry?” One person came in and organized the break room and we wrote about that process. It has been a very organic process. We’ve really tried to listen to consumers and professional organizers. They are as much a part of this as we are.

John: What’s the background to Rubbermaid?

Jim: We make a huge range of products, for in the home. Our core belief is that we make products to help you in the organizing process.

John: Who is your audience?

Jim: We’ve reached out to professional organizers. Lots of people think about storage, how you get organized is important.

John: How did you reach out to professional organizer?

Jim: We started looking for them in social media; a lot of organizers had blogs and twitter accounts. There is a national association, NAPO or the National Association of Professional Organizers. The organizers are very savvy, they have blogs, and twitter. I started adding comments on organizer blogs, and following them on twitter. However, the real spark that ignited the relationship with the organizer community was when I wrote a post that described all of the professional organizers that I am following on twitter, all of a sudden the professional organizers got very excited, and as the organizer community had not realized how many professional organizers were out there using social media. I am now part of the community and have many conversations with members of the community, I have phone calls with them, and I am even going to the national convention.

John: Would you describe some of the content on the blog?

Jim: In September, I was organizing my pantry, and so I wrote a post about organizing my pantry. As I was organizing, the professional organizer community would give me some tips, and ideas. When wrote a blog post about the organization of my pantry at home, I showcased the results based on those ideas and tips. We are now doing q&a’s with professional organizers on the blog. The questions are about how they organize.

John: Is your progress with personal and office organization part of the voice of the blog?

Jim: Yes, the blog is a lot about me getting organized. Even though I am employed by Rubbermaid; it is really about me getting organized as a consumer, I am showing the reader if I can do it you can do it. We have had some posts, where we will show consumers getting organized, we have competitions, and awards, consumers sends me pictures, both the before and after getting organized pictures.

Corporate Blog Review

Jim used the Business and Blogging approach for reviewing corporate blogs for his review of the Rubbermaid blog Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki.

On a scale of 1-10:

Ease of finding: 5 - Finding the blog on the main site could be better, it is available, and we are redesigning the site. Links to the blog are clicked, the blog ranks up pretty high on Google. Now that the blog is a success it became easier to incorporate the blog on the main site.

Frequency: 7 - We have a frequency that’s appropriate for our audience, one or two posts a week, there are people who blog or tweet too much, rather we were aiming for content that’s something of value to read.

Engaging Writing: 9 - Most of the content is very engaging, whether people are commenting on the blog, or offline content.

Relevant: 10 – The blog does speak to our two core audiences, professional organizers and consumers, the blog’s message is very relevant: You too can get organized.

Focused: 7 – Sometimes we are a little unfocused, an example of this is the scavenger hunt we recently ran.

Honest: 10 – I even dare to post pictures of disaster at my home, and we post the q&a links, also we don’t have any problem linking out to other blogs.

Social Interaction Design (Interactive): 6 – We have designed a good way for people to interact, by using the blog, flickr, YouTube, Twitter. In fact between the blog and twitter, those two things work hand in hand; I cannot imagine any two better social media tools.

Responsive: Between 5-8 - We will respond within minutes once we receive a notification that you have posted something on the web. On the weekends I check for comments, during the work week, I’d even rate us a 10. I review every single blog comment, and use Tweetdeck in twitter to follow the organizer community on Twitter.

Rating & Answers To Final Social Media Questions

Jim rated his blog with 59 out of 80. That’s quite a good rating. I also asked Jim some follow up questions about the organization of his social media efforts.

John: Stowe Boyd wrote a post about the ratio of posts to comments and trackbacks, where he described the conversational index, a ratio of blog comments and trackbacks to posts, once a blog hits parity between conversation and posts, Stowe believes the blog is active. Jim, what about the Rubbermaid blog, what's the ratio?

Jim: Not a lot of trackbacks, only one, not many people are using the trackback feature. Not sure why. We have about 100 comments, and 90 posts.

John: Are you using automated monitoring tools for monitoring the web?

Jim: Other than Google alerts we don’t use any monitoring tools. Monitoring is something we are considering.

John: Are you using sentiment to categorize posts?  

Jim: We don’t.

John's Final Thoughts

This has been my second review of a Fortune 500 corporate blog by asking the corporate blogger to give a review of their blog. The first was the Oracle review.

I think Jim gave a pretty fair review of this blog and social media efforts, I may have given a higher rating because of his response to people in his community using comment outreach and twitter.

Thanks Jim for the interview and review!