Freedom from Blogger

Posted on September 15, 2008 by Paul

Over the weekend, I completed my long-awaited move from Blogger to WordPress. There’s plenty of fine-tuning left to do – and I need to get rid of the hideous graphic in the header – but the transition went pretty smoothly.

I’ve been trying to get off of Blogger for about a year, but migration difficulties – in particular, the loss of link consistency – has frustrated me. With its release of version 2.6.2, WordPress has made migration almost one-button simple. Permalinks are still going back to the previous site template, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff for now to be free of the Blogger system.

I signed up for Blogger more than three years ago when I didn’t know any better. Since then, I’ve learned that blogging software can lock in a user almost as completely as any proprietary software. Because each publisher architects its service somewhat differently, migration has been a headache for years. WordPress is now resolving that problem to the point that moving to its platform no longer requires Herculean effort. I host four blogs on WordPress, with my main blog being the only exception.

Why had I grown frustrated with Blogger?

The selection of page templates is severely limited. I never found one I really liked. In contrast, there are thousands of free WordPress templates available. I’ve found many that I like.
I decided to host my blog on my own domain and use Blogger as an authoring system. This requires Blogger to FTP the files to my server, a process that had become frustratingly long and failure-prone as my site grew. Blogger offers an alternative to host your domain on its own servers for a fee, but since I was already paying a hosting service, this didn’t seem an attractive option.
Blogger has limited support for third-party widgets and plug-ins. WordPress has a vast library of them. This alone is enough reason to switch.
The Blogger content management system has far less flexibility than WordPress’, where you can customize almost anything.
I’ve found the results of Blogger’s “preview” function to have little to do with the resulting Web page. In contract, WordPress previews in the context of your chosen template.
WordPress has a function to automatically import Word documents. You still have to take out some code, but the process is pretty clean.

There are other reasons, but those are the big ones. For a basic one-button blog that’s drop-dead simple, Blogger is still a great option. But as you yearn to do more with your site, Blogger’s limitations become frustrating. Perhaps I will encounter some terrible problems in the next few days that force me to roll back, but for now, I’m enjoying the flexibility and open-source choice that WordPress provides.

Here’s a pretty good tutorial on how to make the switch.

How NOT to Cope With Bloggers

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Paul

My passion for journalism keeps me in close touch with the newspaper industry, a business whose perilous decline I’ve documented through my Newspaper Death Watch blog. A trend has been playing out there recently that is relevant to anyone who is trying to cope with the new influence of citizen publishers on their market.

Nearly every major newspaper company has recently seen blogs spring up that speak to their problems and future. Among them are TellZell (Tribune Co.), McClatchy Watch (The McClatchy Co.) and The Gannett Blog(Gannett Co., Inc.) It’s the Gannett example that intrigues me most.

The independent Gannett Blog is written by Jim Hopkins, a former Gannett editor and reporter. It covers all kinds of topics related to Gannett’s business and its future. These days, that content includes a lot of speculation about layoffs and cutbacks at a company that recently announced it will cut 1,000 jobs, or about 3% of its workforce.

The Gannett Blog has gone viral in its quest to become a sounding board and information source for employees. Jim Hopkins recently revealed some traffic statistics: 91,000 visits and 189,000 page views in the last 30 days. That’s serious blog traffic, and much of it comes from Gannett employees who feel they can’t get a straight story from their employer. Gannett Blog has become the virtual watercooler for a company of 46,000 people.

The conundrum for Gannett is what to do about Hopkins. So far, it’s chosen a strategy of benign neglect. Tara Connell, Gannett’s chief spokesman (and interestingly, a former managing editor at USA Today) has gone almost silent recently as rumors have swirled about layoffs and cutbacks, Hopkins says. Meanwhile, traffic has grown. This recent post has drawn more than 160 comments, many of them from people who identify themselves as Gannett employees. People are now actively trading rumors about layoffs at their individual newspapers, with Gannett blog functioning as the gathering point.

Gannett’s strategy is worse than “No comment.” Not only has the company not contributed its perspective to the flood of comments, it now barely even responds to Hopkins’ requests for information, he says. As the chorus of pleas for guidance from the company grows in volume, Gannett becomes more closed and insular. Gannett didn’t respond to my own requests for comment.

Gannett is approaching this problem in the worst way possible. Regardless of its opinion of bloggers and citizen journalists, the fact is that The Gannett Blog is drawing huge attention among the company’s own employees, who are the most valuable spokespeople it has. Gannett’s failure to respond to the speculation and allegations of this critical constituency has become almost as big a story as the company’s business problems.

In the new world of citizen-powered publishing, institutions have fewer places to hide than ever. Silence is an invitation to speculation, and individuals now have the means to state their opinions in a very public way. A better course of action for Gannett would be to respond to the comments posted by Jim Hopkins and his readers. Even if that response is a “no comment,” it’s at least an acknowledgement that their concerns are being noted.

You might argue that an engagement strategy is risky for a publicly traded company. That’s just wrong. Public companies live under all kinds of regulations, but there is nothing to prevent them from acknowledging that they care about and listen to the concerns of their stakeholders. Any comment is better than silence.

One of the great ironies of watching the newspaper industry collapse has been to see the same media icons that have long scolded institutions for their insularity become reclusive and inwardly focused when the spotlight is turned on them. Gannett Blog is exhibit A in how not to handle new influencers.

Social Media Tools Don't Matter

Posted on June 23, 2008 by Paul

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Here’s a question I hear from marketers all the time: “We want to launch a corporate blog, but we don’t know how to go about it. Where should we start?”

My answer is that you should start a couple of steps back from where you are. Social media tools – whether they’re blogs, online communities, instructional videos or something else – don’t solve anything unless they address a specific business need. Don’t use social media for its own sake. Use it to accomplish an objective.

Unfortunately, the temptation is difficult to resist. Lots of businesses are experimenting with social media tools these days. It’s natural to think that they know something the rest of us don’t, but the reality is that most people are still kicking tires right now. There are some very successful companies like Apple Computer that are doing nothing with social media because they don’t have to. If the tools aren’t right for your culture or your business, don’t use them.

Whatever you do, don’t start the decision process with technology. The choice of a social media tool is no more relevant to the success of a campaign than is the choice of paint to the structural integrity of a house. Many tools are flexible enough to be used for multiple purposes and some strategic goals require you to leverage many tools in concert.

Stop and consider the problem or opportunity you’re trying to address. Here are a few possible business objectives, with the best tool options listed in parentheses.

Build customer community (blog, video, social network, private community, virtual world)
Counter negative publicity (blog, podcast, video, customer reviews)
Crisis management (blog, video, social network, virtual world)
Customer conversation (blog, social network, private community, virtual world)
Generate website traffic (blog, video, customer reviews)

Many more examples will be explored in my forthcoming book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing. It will be available this fall and you can pre-order it on Amazon right now. I also recommend reading Groundswell, the new book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. It has some excellent advice on how to take a disciplined approach to social media selection.

Note that blogs appear next to every bullet point listed above. That doesn’t mean blogs are a panacea. They are the easiest form of social media to implement, but far greater leverage may derive from more complex tools like customer communities. You should choose media based upon your budget, staff resources and commitment. It’s often best to start small and grow your social media footprint as you become more fluent with the tools. Blogs are a good starting point, but you may need stronger medicine after a while.

Keep in mind the importance of balancing between ease of use, simplicity of deployment and functionality. Many social media tools can be used for multiple purposes. You may be better off starting with a tool that you understand well rather than deploying a somewhat richer solution that carries a steep learning curve.

If you keep the tools secondary and work outward from the business goal, you’re far more likely to reap the rewards of your efforts.

Secrets of Blogger Relations

Posted on May 8, 2008 by Paul

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Since embracing social media two years ago, Dell Computer has learned a few lessons. One of its key blogger relations people shared some secrets last week in a keynote interview at the New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Richard Binhammer is charged with monitoring and engaging with the active ecosystem of people who blog about Dell. In a keynote interview with John Cass, Binhammer talked about negativity, a concern often voiced by PR people. Dell has had its share of blogger criticism, going back to the famous Dell Hell incident of three years ago. But by methodically reaching out to complainers, the company reduced negativity from nearly half of all online posts to about 20% in a little less than a year. The secret? “Just talk to people,” Binhammer said. Most of the time, all they want is to be heard. Demonstrate that you’re listening and you can resolve most complaints.

But here’s an interesting fact: After reducing that negativity factor to 20%, the Dell team has been unable to bring it consistently below that level. Binhammer, whose background is in politics, theorizes that 20% is a natural floor, in the same way that 20% of the population always votes for the same political party, regardless of who runs.

This is worth remembering. Even the best businesses have a few unhappy customers. Your mileage may vary, but you should never expect to achieve 100% satisfaction. It’s more likely that your blogger relations program will get you to a manageable yet stubborn base level. That’s your floor, and you probably can’t do much to break through it.

Finding Resources
Binhammer also shed some light on how Dell allocates its communications resources. With so many tech bloggers out there, you’d think the company would have a small army of communications folks monitoring and responding to conversations. In fact, it has just two people sharing the job. The reason? Dell is lining up the whole company behind the effort to get more engaged with customers. PR monitors the airwaves, but doesn’t try to resolve every issue. Most comments are forwarded to the appropriate group for response.

I wish more companies would do this. Bloggers tend to be well-informed and passionate, which means that their inquiries and comments demand knowledgeable responses. Companies that simply delegate the response to PR are failing to benefit from the really rich conversations they can have with their most informed customers. Everyone from sales to engineering should want to speak to customers whenever possible. Why let marketing have all the fun?

Bloggers Get Social April 4-6

Posted on March 11, 2008 by Paul

Now here’s a classic Web 2.0-style event! Come and meet other marketing bloggers in NYC for a weekend of fun and socializing April 4-6. In the organizers’ words: “Neither summit nor seminar, Blogger Social is “a first-ever, one-of-a-kind event held by the online marketing community for the marketing community, completely funded and coordinated by community members. Neither summit nor seminar, nowhere near a trade show or conference, the intent is a social event…[It’s] founded upon the idea of time together to better get to know one another.” And no blogging all weekend, they say. You do enough of that, for goodness sake!

It’s co-organized by Christina Kerley, an early social media marketing adopter who gets it as well as any marketer I’ve met. I have to be on the west coast at that time and can’t attend, but for $350 (this is New York City, remember!) it looks well worth the cost.

Don't Let Tools Distract You

Posted on March 11, 2008 by Paul

I was presenting a social media seminar to a public-relations agency recently when the talk turned to uses of blogs. The people in the room were excited about blogging’s potential and were eager to apply the technology to new tasks.

I cautioned them that they were asking the wrong question. The issue isn’t what tool to use, but what problem to solve. Tool selection is secondary.

There’s nothing unusual about their attitude. People often start by choosing tools and work backwards to solve problems. Maybe management has just issued an order to start blogging, or the tool is seen as a tactic to improve search performance or it just seems like the thing to do.

But that’s like starting with a hammer and then figuring out what to build with it. If your objective is to make a house, then you’re off to a pretty good start. But if you want to craft a pearl necklace, you’ve got the wrong tool for the job.

I recently consulted with a client who wanted to build a social network for a defined customer group. It was an ambitious idea, but as we talked through it, we both realized that the process of getting it through internal and regulatory approvals could take a year or more. We finally settled on a more modest idea: Launch a relevant blog, try to build customer interest quickly and then take the results to management in hopes of getting fast-track approval for the social network.

Choose tools wisely
The building blocks of social media are simply tools and they’re not well-suited for every task. For example, if your objective is to alert visitors to a new category of products and provide detailed information on the specifics, a catalog page would be more effective than any interactive tool.

But it’s human nature for people to use the technologies they understand and figure out the application after the fact. Unfortunately, that can waste a lot of time and effort. E-mail is terrible for communicating between groups of more than about five recipients, yet people routinely organize massive projects with dozens of participants by e-mail. Even if the tool is poorly suited for the task, they reason, at least people know how to use it.

A better approach is to define business objectives and then search for tools that support them. For customer feedback, for example, blogs and social networks are a good choice. However, podcasts and video won’t do the trick. So if your objective is to improve customer relations, a podcast may not be a good place to start.

Technology vendors encourage the tool focus. Many of those firms are run by engineers who love to create cool new stuff. They’d much rather talk about features and functions than how to solve business problems. You need to block that tactic. Any vendor that won’t give you references to customers who are solving problems that are similar to yours is blowing smoke.

Social media tools are cool, but they’re always irrelevant if they don’t solve problems. Don’t let technology distract you.

The TSA's bold move

Posted on February 2, 2008 by Paul

I sometimes tell people, “If your products suck and your customers hate you, don’t start a blog.”

Well, the Transportation Security Administration has gone against that advice. More power to them.

The TSA blog mostly does it right. The branding is subtle; the TSA logo appears only at the bottom of the page. The slogan – “Terrorists Evolve. Threats Evolve. Security Must Stay Ahead. You Play A Part” – is meant to invite the public into a discussion about security. I think that’s a great marketing statement. The traveling public feels that security has been shoved down their throats, which is one of the reasons they hate TSA.

And they took the opportunity to express their emotions; more than 700 comments on the welcome post, according to the blog. There’s lots of anger, negativity and obscenity, but also a lot of good ideas and observations from people who clearly know something about security. Give TSA credit. They knew there’d be a firestorm of negativity, they were prepared for it and they responded calmly and constructively.

The blog is written by five people: four mid-level employees and a PR guy. Strangely, there are no photos of the bloggers, but maybe that’s a security measure. 🙂

As a government agency, TSA could afford to ignore the opinions of travelers if it wanted. Launching the blog is a gutsy move my hat’s off to them for it.

And can you believe it? They’re hosting the whole thing on Blogger!

Thanks to Daily Dish for the tip via Alex Howard.

Please attend my upcoming Mass TLC presentation on The New Influencers

Posted on January 5, 2008 by Paul

I’ll deliver a presentation about the dynamics of social media and online influence on Jan. 24 in Waltham, MA. If you’re in the area, please consider coming and supporting the nonprofit Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, which is sponsoring the presentation. Mass TLC does good work promoting the growth of the technology industry in Massachusetts and throughout New England. If we’ve never met before, be sure to come up and say hello!

The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media
Thursday, January 24, 2008
8:00-10:00am Program
7:45am Registration

Where: Foley Hoag Emerging Enterprise Center
Bay Colony Corporate Center
1000 Winter Street, Suite 400
Waltham, MA 02451

The Mass Technology Leadership Council presents Paul Gillin, author of the book The New Influencers.

Blogging, podcasting and other social media are profoundly disrupting the mainstream media and marketing industries. Paul Gillin’s The New Influencers explores these forces by identifying the influencers, their goals and their motivations. The book also offers advice for marketers at both large and small organizations on how to influence the influencers.

This presentation explores:

Why social media are now so important in consumer decisions
How to leverage the blogosphere to enhance your company’s message
Strategies for taking advantage of this new medium
The need for transparency and how to make it work for your benefit
Action items for both small and large businesses
Whether and how your organization should use blogs, podcasts and other social media tools in your marketing strategy

Cost: Members $40.00; Non-members $80.00
Signup form: https://function.masstlc.org/programs_new/event_single.cfm?eventid=808

Corporate Blog Council should swallow hard and learn from critics

Posted on December 8, 2007 by Paul

The newly formed Corporate Blog Council is getting slammed in the blogosphere this week. The council is a self-described “professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging.” It includes some very large companies, although overall membership is small and skewed toward tech and media firms.

The blogosphere has been fairly merciless. Dave Taylor remarks, “My translation: ‘we’re all clueless, but don’t want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of ‘marketing 2.0’, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.’”

Scoble is skeptical, too: “I’ve done enough speaking to enough corporations now that if they don’t get why they should be talking with their customers already I don’t get how hanging out at yet another boring industry conference is going to help them to get it,” he says, pointedly.

Brian Solis says the focus on blogs shows that corporations still don’t get the concept of conversation. He asks if we’re also going to have a Viral Media Council, and a Conversation Council.

Marketing Pilgrim counts comments and finds that blogs run by the council members perform pretty dismally. She and several others point out that comments are disabled on the Blog Council’s site and that the council used a conventional press release to announce its existence.

Commenters are piling on, mostly trashing the whole Blog Council idea.

I hope the people that put their companies’ names on this initiative won’t be scared off by the thrashing they’re getting in the blogosphere. To veterans of the polite and deferential world of traditional corporate communications, this trash talk sounds juvenile and hateful, but it is really just the way people express their opinions in this medium. Conversations here are raw, blunt and sometimes offensive, but they are always genuine. You need a thick skin to play, but if you don’t take it personally, you can learn a lot.

Having worked with major corporations for many years, I’m inclined to be more generous to the Blog Council. Yes, everything the bloggers cited above have said is true, but the fact that these companies are taking action of any kind (and scheduling an event for next month, apparently) is significant. It probably took months just to get to the announcement phase.

Critics will say that that’s the problem: corporations have to water down and approve everything and that’s why they don’t get social media. That’s also true, but these companies have worked this way for a very long time. The fact that the world has changed around them in the last four years doesn’t mean they can respond in that timeframe. There are plenty of people within these companies advocating conversation marketing and meaningful change. They are being heard, but it takes a long time for voices to work their way up the hierarchy at big companies. And the people who head those companies are the least likely to understand what’s going on out there.

If the Blog Council is smart, it’ll ignore the tone and listen to the message. The blogosphere is delivering some important early feedback on the whole idea of the Blog Council. The members should listen, adjust and move incrementally forward. Bloggers can be quite blunt, but they can also be very forgiving. If the council demonstrates that it’s really serious about this venture, then the tone will turn supportive with remarkable speed.

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise

Category Archives: blogging