Andrew Lark

Getting Back On Deck... Thoughts On Corporate Blogging

Haven't been blogging much later - just very busy and on the road in Europe for a week with customers and partners.

Interesting pointer from Stowe to an interview by Paul Dunay with Jack Welch about corporate blogging. Jack's advice? Be authentic.

[from Buzz Marketing for Technology: EXCLUSIVE: Jack Welch Discussing Web 2.0 by Paul Dunay]

Buzz Marketing: So what is your advice for companies adopting new Web 2.0 technologies like RSS, social networking, podcasting and videocasting?

Jack: Just be authentic. Be clear in your vision, and have one message and one view that are authentic. I worked somewhere once where they had different messages for employees, analysts and the press. There should be only one message for everyone, and fight like hell to get that message across everywhere you go.

I was asked some similar questions on corporate blogging (which I've always thought was a bit of an oxymoron).

1. Is "ghost-blogging" a no-no: At the heart of any blog is authenticity and the writer's voice. Ghost-writing runs against the very point of a blog which is to engage in a conversation with the community that surrounds you and your company. You can't ghost a conversation...
2. Is there a place for anonymous corporate blog posts (like the Economist?): No. It's hard to have a conversation with an anonymous person. The intent of a blog is not to publish but to converse. I do see room though for participatory blogs where a diverse range of bloggers blog to a single site. I think this is practical for most companies and more interesting for the readers. The Economist is an anomaly in the publishing world.
3. PR person says blogging is “reputation management”. Right or wrong? That PR Person doesn’t understand blogging or the blogosphere – they are contextualizing it through their own lens. And, they are taking a relatively hackneyed descriptor – reputation management – and applying it to a world in which it has little relevance. Various marketing niche’s have tried it with their thesis – brand managers are doing the same with “brand management”. You only have a reputation in the sense that others assign it to you. You earn it. Of course, it could be argued that everything a company does from a communications standpoint is “reputation management” – and that is the problem with the notion. You would hope that blogging would improve and not destroy your reputation right? But does that mean blogging is in fact reputation management in disguise – not at all.
4. How about internal editing of blog posts? This is common. I encourage executives to keep others involved in their posts. They have legal and HR risks associated with every conversation so why not mediate some of that risk. What they do need to do though is time-bound others involvement and be clear on the kind of feedback they are looking for. Blog posts are like bananas – they bruise easily and are best served ripe. They need to let folks know they have but a couple of hours to respond – or a day. This shouldn’t be a highly iterative process that people take a week or so to get done. Too many companies treat the blog post like a press release – at least initially.
5. Other tips: First, participatory media and platforms – from blogs to wikis and podcasts – represent one of the most significant opportunities available to companies to transform their relationship with customers. They represent one of the most significant transformational opportunities since the Internet. Don’t constrain your engagement. Drive it into every corner of your business. Many of the companies I’ve worked with have seen as much value internally as they have externally.

Second. Just do it. Get going internally and let it evolve. If you get it, get going. Don’t spend hours on consulting fees or hanging with PR people, web teams and lawyers. The technology is available as a utility. A blog can be created in minutes.

Third. The rewards significantly outweigh the risks. But the biggest rewards come not from writing blog posts but rather the comments and resulting dialogue. You shouldn’t look at this as a publishing mechanism but rather a “conversation machine”.

Other tips:

• There are no corporate bloggers – there are just bloggers. Be real. Be authentic.
• Blogging is a conversation. You need to move from transmitting to participating.
• You don’t need a blog to be blogging. Start contributing to others blogs with comments and thoughts.
• Never, never, never spin, lie or pour smoke into the blogosphere. Straight-talk will win you kudos.
• Give it time. Don’t expect raving fans at day one. In fact, expect the opposite for a bit. The blogosphere is very critical and self-correcting. Take feedback and tune accordingly.
• Have fun. This is a relatively informal medium. Revel in it.

Thoughts... Comments...

Cisco Acquires Five Across

While I'm not sure there is a great deal of synergy with Cisco's core business, the Five Across acquisition gives Cisco some street cred on the business side of Participatory Platforms. Will be interesting to see how they integrate it.

Cisco delivered the usual corporate patter in explaining the acquisition:

“Cisco believes the network is the platform for organizations to connect with their constituents and for individuals to connect with each other,” said Dan Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG). “With the acquisition of Five Across, Cisco is taking an important step towards helping its customers evolve their website experience into something more relevant and valuable to the end-user.”

I've always been impressed with what Five Across have been doing in creating communities for big brands. They have a platform that scales. Does this mean Cisco is getting into the Participatory Platforms business though? We'll have to wait and see.

Explanations

• Good explanation of RSS.
• Good explanation of the Second Life opportunity for PR. Text 100 was the first PR agency to establish a presence in Second Life.
• On Social Bookmarking.
• CNN on CEO bloggers. What's surprising here is the lack of new CEO stories. It's the same old crowd.
• DemoFall companies announced.
• Of the Google brain via Fortune:

"What emerges from months of interviews with employees ranging from fresh-out-of-college hires to the CEO is that Google firmly believes it has a framework for figuring out the future. It should come as no surprise that the plan is as irreverent, self-confident, and presumptuous as the company itself. Google's executives don't articulate it this way, but the framework can be found in the title of Shona Brown's book: structured chaos. Indeed, along with Googleyness, chaos is among the most important aspects of Google's self-image. Understanding how Google thinks about chaos -- like Page's teachable moment after Sandberg's million-dollar mistake -- is critical to divining where the company goes next. "Are lots of questions hanging out there in the market?" asks Sandberg. "Sure. Because we don't always have an answer. We're willing to tolerate that ambiguity and chaos because that's where the room is for innovation." Good strategy -- if it actually works."

Webcast Plug

Steve Rubel, (MicroPersuasion, Edelman) and I are doing a web cast at the invitation of PR Week on Thursday, September 28. Details below. Nonsubscribers can register, by the way.

Everyone is talking about new media channels such as blogs and podcasts. But what does this reality mean for the future of PR and communications? PRWeek is convening a Web cast to discuss critical issues in the ever-changing new media landscape. Moderated by Keith O’Brien, PRWeek news editor and editor of prweek.com.

PR Tech Leader Doesn't Get the Blog Thing...

Paul Abrahams, ex FT hack turned flack at Wag-ED really doesn't understand what all the fuss is about...

Is blogging the 21st-century equivalent of citizen band radio, the personal radio technology that became so popular in the late 1970s that it was included in a Coronation Street plotline and spawned a generation of bad Burt Reynolds 'Good Ol' Boy' movies?

Tom fires back:

Mr Scoble created many millions of dollars in positive publicity for Microsoft, on a salary of less than $100K. I don't think WaggEd could have done a fraction of that, for 100 times the payment Mr Scoble received.

It is pretty remarkable that any communicator doesn't quite grasp the impact of participatory communications and social media - it is even more remarkable to go public with it in such a way. Don't think bad of Wag-ED though, Frank Shaw has a pretty good blog running which I follow.

If all Paul was trying to do was ignite the debate with a contrarian view - and goodness knows we need them right now - he has done a great job.

Blogs a Powerful B2B Presence @ Media Buyer Planner

Well worth a look. According to the study, Blogs have made inroads into B2B technology companies with more than 53 percent of respondents saying the content they read in blogs has an impact on their work-related purchasing decisions. Some 80 percent of respondents say they read blogs, with 51 saying they read them at least once a week.

The Cascade Of Influence

Tom highlights how the cascade of influence is changing - using the LonelyGirl15 (LG15) story. Turns out that LonelyGirl15 (LG15) is in fact and aspiring NZ actress - and - that the videos were anything but amateur.

The first parts of the story were published in online sites, then came the major newspapers: New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times with their coverage. Their stories then helped spark the interest of TV and radio news crews.

The LG15 story is not an important story in itself, but it is an important news story. This is not a contradiction, it is a description of its place in our culture.

The LG15 story shows how the media functions, how they influence each other. It shows how the media networks: blogger, citizen, mainstream, and anything in-between -- push/pull news stories up into the broader mediasphere.

To get into the broader mediasphere, it seems news stories often have to make it into flagship publications of journalist rigor, such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, the Wall Street Journal,  and The Times (London.)

Tom says it well in an earlier post.

Yes, the subject matter of this story was not about anything that matters that much. But imagine this same type of cooperation on really important stories--that's what excites me.

There is always intense competition to be first with a story--but that is good. And it is complimentary competition rather than adversarial. There is no such thing as bloggers versus mainstream media.

This is the media model for the future: a mediasphere that uses the best qualities of professional media combined with relentless pursuit of information by citizen journalists. That's a potent formula that bodes well for our society, IMHO

New Influencers book

Thanks to Steve for the pointer. Looks like this could be an interesting read and the draft's are worth a scan. Steve is featured in the book along with other pundits such as Scoble... Would love to see some of the influencers that are using participatory media and that aren't 'A-List' bloggers - this includes the new media.

Link to New Influencers book - draft chapters for review

Rivers Of News To Go

Dave Winer's notion of "Rivers Of News" gets picked-up in The Guardian - a good overall summary of a powerful concept.

"As the name suggests, it's a simple idea. Each news item arrives in plain text and consists of a date and time, a headline, and usually one sentence...

New items arrive when they are posted, and old ones are automatically deleted to make room. You can dip into the river whenever you like, and click on any headline to get the full story from the original site...

... As Winer commented on his blog: "Predictable backlash from people who say that reading news on a BlackBerry is nothing new, they've been doing it for years. I'm sure they have, and people were listening to MP3s on Macs and PCs before podcasting, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a turning point for audio on the Internet."

Dave is right - and this concept is different in its inherent simplicity and speed. Rivers are reverse chronologies, like weblogs. Current offerings attempt to transport the desktop to the device, are typically slowed by ads and other crap, and are an amalgamation of links that force you to keep on soaking-up bandwidth and minutes. "Rivers Of News" work. Current approaches don't.

Also, take a look at the NTTimes new mobile site.

A ZeFrank Classic

Something to cheer-up your Friday afternoon... Brilliant!