PR Communications

B2B Business Blogging Interview At Podcamp Boston

Todd Van Hoosear at Tech PR Gems interviewed me at Podcamp Boston last week, he posted the result on his blog the other day. We talked about B2B blogging, something I've covered a lot over the years because of my experience with Backbone Media, that was B2B and a lot of the case studies in the industry are B2B.

Blog Talk Radio Interview With Zane Safrit

Zane Safrit, a friend and colleague in the social media world interviewed me today on Blog Talk Radio, we talked about blogging, SNCR, Social media and the cluetrain Manifesto.

Zane asked me to put together a list of links to some of the studies and case studies I’ve developed over the last five years. I thought I’d share them here as well:

2004

Corporate Blogging Survey 2004

Dell Blogging Case Study

2005

Corporate Blogging Survey 2005

2006

Blogging Success Study

2007

Blogging Guidelines Project

2008

New Influencer Study

Red Cross Podcast

Nuance Study

Fortune 500 Corporate Blogging Wiki

My SNCR Podcast Interview With Comcast’s Frank Eliason

My podcast interview with Frank Eliason of Comcast Customer Outreach was recently posted on the Society for New Communications Research website. The podcast forms the basis of a case study for the society's research study, "Exploring the Link Between Customer Care & Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media, which was sponsored by Nuance Customer Care Solutions.

Frank describes the recent incident with Michael Arrington on Twitter, and how Comcast is developing its internal social media customer outreach team.

American Red Cross Podcast For SNCR's New Influencer Study

As a Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research, and member of their research committee, I've been involved with the society's New Influencer study. The study involves a survey of professionals about their use of social media, and outreach to new influencers. The study also features a series of case study interviews, and I’ve worked on three case studies, including; The Union Gospel Mission in Seattle, Emerson Process Management, and the American Red Cross.

I conducted recorded interviews with each of the participants, the interviews were transcribed, and I wrote up each case study, the first of which has been turned into a podcast and was recently published by the Society. The first podcast interview was with Wendy Harman, who runs social media monitoring and outreach for the Red Cross. If you listen to the podcast, you will hear the Red Cross is doing some exciting things with social media and outreach, though not on the same scale as Dell, the nonprofit is following the same path, initially monitoring conversations about the organization on blogs, then responding by commenting, and lastly launching their own blogs and social media groups within different social media technologies. I think the Red Cross case study is going to be interesting for nonprofits and companies alike, the Red Cross is using social media in some really interesting ways, especially Flickr and Twitter. Check out SNCR’s podcast on the American Red Cross.

Social Media Flu

A rocky weekend, I was very sick with the flu on Friday. Both Karin and Bram have had the flu for a week or so, but lots of sleep on Friday seemed to knock my bout on the head. Unfortunately I missed the AMA Boston Volunteer appreciation event on Friday evening. I was well enough by late Friday night that I decided to keep my commitment to the Podcamp Boston 2 and volunteer for the registration desk on the early shift. Podcamp is an un-conference, which means there's a lot of organized chaos, presenters sign up to present on a wiki several weeks before and you are very much guaranteed to get a spot if you do something sensible.

We did not have all of the equipment for the start of registration, but true grit and a lot of effort on the part of the leaders of podcamp and fellow volunteers meant we were able to get everyone registered on time for the keynote. Susan Kaup or Sooz from BostonNow.com did an awesome job, as well as Julia Roy, who wrote out all of the sessions by hand on Saturday morning. It was great to meet all the volunteers on Registration especially, Steve Sherlock and Jack Daniel, Steve for our chat about the early history of New England, and Jack for his interest in blacksmithing.

I had to leave early on Saturday to help Karin with Bram, but I was back the next morning for the registration desk. I did not have the chance to see very much of the presentations, but I enjoyed meeting everyone, and hope next year my family is not in the middle of daycare flu season during Podcamp!

The next big event is the society for new communications research conference in December here in Boston at the Colonnade Hotel, speakers from all over the country will be converging to present on social media.

Boston PodCamp Oct 26th - 28th 2007

The first PodCamp was held in 2006 on September 8th and 10th in Boston. I was not able to make the event because of family issues. The UnConference proved to be so successful that it inspired PodCamps all over the world. This year's Boston PodCamp promises to be better than ever. The event will be held at the Boston Convention & Expo Center in Boston on October 26th to 28th.

Von Boston the premier IP Communications conference is the platinum sponsor for the event. Which means they spent $50,000.

Rockosphere.tv and Topaz Partners were Silver Sponsors

Topaz is a one of the most active PR companies in the social media space in Boston. Todd Van Hoosear at Topaz is one of the founders of the Boston chapter of the Social Media club; Topaz also runs a great PR blog and podcast.

I just posted an idea for a session at PodCamp, and I hope other people will join in and take part, I wanted to get as many people together who are currently running blogger relations or community relations for their company, we can discuss best practices in how to build a community using social media.

Jenerous Podcast On Corporate Blogging

Eric Mattson of the Jenerous Podcast recently asked me to take part in a podcast with him for his growing list of 1,000 podcasts. We chatted about corporate blogging and some of the do's and don't's of blogging.

Jumping The Shark Twice With Personalization

Shel Holtz made a great comment on Dave Taylor’s recent post about personalization in last week’s addition of the For Immediate Release podcast, I also wrote a post recently about Dave’s article, “Does Personalization Jump the Shark for Corporate Blogging?”. Since reading Shel’s article (its excellent by the way) and listening to Shel’s commentary, I was inspired to make another audio comment on the FIR podcast. Here’s my podcast comment and text:

Download personalization.mp3

Dave Taylor is right about not providing too many personal details in a professional blog, if that’s what the audience prefers. I think that Dave makes a very compelling argument for technical audience or where the product is complex.

In the northeastern and backbone media blogging success study Eric Anderson, a product manager with adobe described his thoughts about personalization, he did not think it would work for him or his blog readers. This was especially interesting as in an earlier interview with Mike Chambers from Macromedia/Adobe, he had told me that Adobe encourages its employees to not talk about personal topics on their blogs. It seems where an audience is technical personal content may not be all that relevant.

Here's an interesting quote I did not include in the podcast commentary from an article I wrote about Mike Chamber's interview:

Macromedia developed a blog aggregator early. The aggregator has been running for two years, the second version is six months old. The aggregator contains all 50 to 60 Macromedia employee blogs and over 400 customer blogs. Content is syndicated into the blog aggregator as bloggers post. To be accepted into the aggregator, a customer submits their site. The site is then reviewed for content. Once the site is accepted, Macromedia doesn't monitor the content.

Before the aggregator, the Macromedia blog communities had grown so quickly that both employees and customers had difficulty keeping up with the community. The aggregator enables Macromedia employees and customers to filter through what's most popular to find the content they want to read. Customers can subscribe to daily, monthly and category RSS feeds in the aggregator.

An issue arose in the first version of the aggregator: bloggers were categorizing blog posts on technical categories, but the posts were off topic, with social commentary not related to Macromedia products. While the information was valuable for community discussion, a lot of customers check the aggregator 10 to 15 times a day, so when off topic feeds were included it would hinder a customer's experience. Users wanted a way to focus on the Macromedia-related content.

Macromedia developed a type of category called smart categories. Smart categories index the posts, analyze the posts for keywords appearing on the page, and -- based on the conversation -- put the post into a smart category. The smart category feature can also exclude off topic posts, not including content, or contain other language Macromedia wanted to exclude. Macromedia maintained the existing regular categories for community continuity, but positioned the smart categories higher up the left hand navigation on the blog aggregator page.

In the latest version of the blog aggregator, Macromedia's traffic has risen dramatically. Most traffic to the aggregator does not come from search traffic, but blogger direct traffic from links and RSS readers pointing to the aggregator.

So Dave is right in some circumstances, however, I do think the majority of blog audiences are looking for personalization in content. In the Northeastern study of 20 bloggers the majority of the bloggers stated that personalization was important to the success of their blog, however this was not a very scientific poll or sample.

I recently conducted some blog reader interviews. I thought I’d read a quote from one of the blog readers that illustrate the importance of personalization by a corporate blogger.

Tim Jackson is the marketing manager for Masi bike and runs the MasiBike Guy blog. James Thomas reads Tim Jackson’s blog Masi Guy James answered my question, "Has your impression of the blogger's company changed since reading his/her blog? If so, in what why has your impressions changed?"

“I have always had a favorable impression of the Masi brand. My collage roommate, who I traveled to races with in the early nineties, had a couple of very nice Masi bikes. To be honest, I didn’t really know much about the new iteration of the Masi brand until I started reading Tim’s blog. The fact that I can see the passion for cycling that goes into the bikes makes me, maybe subconsciously, like the brand a bit more. I have never met Tim personally, but through his blog and the comments that he makes on my blog, I feel like I know him a bit. That personal connection that the blog creates certainly influences my perception of the company. I would probably not buy a new Masi just because I read the Masiguy blog, but if all other factors were equal, the personal connection created by the blog would influence me to choose a Masi over another functionally equivalent, similarly priced bike. I guess a better way to express that is that people are more comfortable buying from someone they know. Tim’s blog makes readers feel like they know someone in the bike business.”

If you are wondering what to do as a company, my recommendation is take Shel’s advice and consider your audience, look at what your peers are doing in your industry, or in your peer role, such as the CEO in Shel’s example. If people are successful with personalization it’s probably a good idea to introduce such content on your blog, if not, you might experiment but it might not work.

One last point, Dave Taylor states that off topic content is not a good idea for a professional blogger. I don’t think that Dave means that a corporate blogger should not have an opinion or be passionate in writing a blog. You can write compelling content that also reveals the personality of the writer by using writing industry related content. In fact Dave’s post about this issue reveals he is passionate about the issue and has strong opinions. Some listeners will also recall Dave’s opinions about CEO’s blogging or not blogging.

Discovering Which Social Media and Web 2.0 Tools And Websites Customers Prefer To Use To Connect With Other People In Their Community

It is often cited that companies should join the blogosphere because that is where their customers and audience are publishing content. Is that always true? During the process of researching my book, “Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging,” to be published in April 2007 by Elsevier, I discovered that many of the bloggers in the automobile community were either professional bloggers sustained by advertising, journalists, or vendors. I reviewed fifty blogs in the community, and took an educated guess at the background of each blog author. There are only a few ordinary citizens who blog about cars and automobiles. If the number of ordinary citizens who blog is small, this opens the question is it worth starting a corporate blog? After all the reason why a company might blog is to be able to interact with an audience. Just because customers and an audience is not blogging does not mean that the audience is not reading and commenting on the blogs that do exist. Therefore there may be some good reasons to write a blog even though a customer blogging community is not very big, as in the case of the automobile blogging community, you can connect with your audience who are readers.

In my book, in addition to writing about corporate blogging and how to become an effective blogger, I also researched how companies can use podcasting, social media and web 2.0 websites to reach an audience. Since finishing the book I’ve been curious about where communities exist online. If a particular community is using forums, email list serves, blogs, wikis, social media networking websites such as MySpace or Friendster, or web 2.0 websites like YouTube or Flickr? With the automobile industry, where does most of the audience read content related to the industry online, and connect with other people interested in the industry, maybe in existing forums, such as the forums found on AutomotiveForums.com.

Really there’s nothing special about the online automobile community in the sense many online communities have forums where a lot of members contribute. In fact many consumer generated media measurement companies such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Cymfony, or Umbria all suggest the majority of consumer content can be found in forums. No what I’d like to understand is why a community will use a particular form of social media networking website or tool such as forums, blogs, wikis or YouTube. Is it a matter of history and the evolution of the web, perhaps related to the culture of the community in question? Or something to do with the available tools new technologies provide to each community?

Really I am asking the question why do particular online communities prefer certain technologies to other technologies to form a cohesive online community? This question is an important one for companies to ask because if you have a good understanding of which social media tools a community will use, you will be able to develop a comprehensive communications plan that will reach your audience where your audience is using social media tools across the Internet and web.

David Wilson answers this question in a different way in his article, “Building a Social Media Marketing Campaign,” here Dave suggests you should ask four questions to build a social media marketing campaign.

What is the goal of the campaign?
Who is the Target Audience?
How long will the campaign last?
How will you engage your audience?

David’s final question is looking for the best way to reach your audience, and he provides an overview of the steps to answer that question,

“The final question is how will you engage your target audience? What tools will you reach your audience? Some typical social media tools are blogs, MySpace or profile Pages, YouTube videos, advertising/sponsorship, etc. There are pros and cons to all of these tools, and they each can be successful with the right campaign. You just have to make sure that the goal and the tactics aligned to meet that goal are feasible.”

To go beyond David’s four questions, I’d say you have to complete an assessment of your audience online community across each social media tool. In my book I provided an outline of how to develop an assessment of a blogging community, that same template can be used for each social media tools and websites. The assessment of how your company’s audience uses each social media tool and website will determine the resources you commit to each tool and community, and your own company’s capabilities in reaching your audience effectively using the social media tool.

A next step in this process is actually to build an assessment of a community online. I’ve built such community assessments for blogs, but not a comprehensive online social media assessment of a particular community. One of my goals with this blog in the next year will be to explore these questions, and conduct a social media assessment of a community or communities. I will need to talk with community members to understand the importance of each social media tool to their community, and this will require interviews as well as online research, the interviews will help to answer the question why a particular social media tool is more relevant to an online community than another. This assessment will help to determine if a particular community is a good prospect for very active blogging campaign, or should rather be approached via Second Life, a podcast, a video log, or all of the above.

My thanks to Dr. Walter Carl for his time in sounding out some of these ideas and providing some suggestions.

Microsoft Vista Blogger Relations Program

I am trying something new today, a podcast comment on a For Immediate Release show.

Download personalization.mp3

However, I wrote out my comment initially, so I can reproduce most of it here:

Commenting on Shel Holtz's and Neville Hobson's For Immediate Release show on the 1st of January. Shel and Neville continued the discussion concerning the Microsoft vista review program. Microsoft had sent out a number of laptops with a copy of vista to several bloggers. Unfortunately the review program was poorly executed. Bloggers were not asked if they wanted to receive the laptops, and no system was set up for the bloggers to return the laptops. This review program can be contrasted with the Nokia cell phone review program launched last year by Andy Abramson. In that program bloggers were asked if they wanted to receive a phone initially, and given the ability to return the phone. Overall the execution of the Microsoft vista blogger relations was poor.

If we are commenting on the success of a public relations or blogger relations program, whether we agree or disagree with receiving product to review a product or not, it appears that the program has received some bad press as a result of the execution. It may be that another company other than Microsoft or its agency Edelman might not have received as much bad press in the blogosphere about their actions. But that's all the reason to be more careful in the approach to such programs.

Neville had mentioned that bloggers are not journalists. He is right, however, for a blogger to establish credibility with an audience, that blogger has to ensure that there is an appearance of credibility. The reader who reads a magazine, newspaper or blog is the same reader and will judge the quality of an article on its merits and the reputation of the media and the writer, whether written by a journalist or blogger. A blogger might not be a journalist but if the blogger wants credibility, as credibility builds trust, and recognition in the community that can produce higher readership and many more benefits. I think any blogger should start to think about how accepting products for free will affect an audience’s perception of their credibility.

The society of professional journalists has a code of ethics that provides some interesting perspectives on these issues, I think all bloggers should consider this code and determine how it might work for them.

Part of the code states that journalists should “Act Independently, where Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know. And journalists should 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.”

I know that some journalists do accept products for free to review, and would return the product if received in this way, while some do not. To me everyone blogger or journalist should declare how they procured a product for review.

Neville had mentioned Chip Griffin, the CEO of CustomScoop. Chip had suggested there was too much criticism of Microsoft and Edelman, or at the very least Chip had thought that the way in which people had discussed the issue was over the top.

I’m not sure exactly what Chip had said as I did not see the reference but I think Chip brings up an important issue if I have a correct understanding of his concerns. To me this whole discussion is healthy and lively, and one that would not have been possible just a few years ago. Certainly, readers have always commented on newspaper articles or called into television stations, but ordinary people now have much more power as they have the ability to publish their own content on a blog. A feature of this new reality is that there are many more opinions expressed and sometimes those opinions are not going to be polished. That’s okay with me; I think it’s an important part of the evolving landscape of blogging, podcasts and videologs. I also think the actual discussion about the ethics of product reviewing is good. We do not have this discussion with newspapers and magazines. I’d like to know how many traditional media companies actually do follow the Professional society of journalists’ guidelines and don’t accept gifts and payment? I also wonder how many independent writers do accept free products for review and then publish their reviews in traditional media publications and websites? I also think the only reason there is any debate about Microsoft and Edelman is because bloggers have the ability to write about the background to a story, whereas most journalists don’t have the time or space to write about the research that went into a story. I believe this debate helps the whole community think through these issues, and shows the relevancy of ethics in today’s media rich world.

However, what’s really important is what the customers think? Do customers want product reviews from people who receive the product for free or who pay for the product? If you have to pay, and you are a blogger reviewing many products, and you don’t have a company paying for the review products or are independently wealthy does that mean many bloggers will have to stop reviewing products? Or is there an alternative for bloggers without funding can the bloggers ask their audience for funds to review products? Is there an example of this available?

If I was advising a company to run a product review program I’d have done a few things differently than what Microsoft was advised to do. Anyone looking for a great example of a well executed product review program could not do better than look at Nokia phone product review program starting at the end of 2005.