Category Archives: marketing

A manifesto for the new PR

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The Arthur W. Page Society has just released a manifesto for the new world of corporate communications, and I’d recommend that anyone who works in PR or marketing download it. The Society is an exclusive group of senior execs from big companies, so their opinions carry some weight. While the report is short on quantitative research (though there is a survey of 31 CEOs discussed at the end), it’s hard to argue with its overarching conclusions: businesses no longer control their messages; constituencies are expanding and diversifying; and corporations must be more transparent and open about nearly everything they do.

“The 64-page report is called The Authentic Enterprise: Relationships, Values and The Evolution of Corporate Communications. Below are some excerpts that I snipped from the PDF. They’ll give you a flavor of the recommendations, but it’s worthwhile to read the whole document.

Thanks to George Faulkner at IBM for tipping me off to this new research.

Quoting:

“For those corporations that remain public and that aspire to build trusted brands, sustainable marketplace success and community reputation, the imperative of authenticity will inevitably grow in importance.

“We are no longer in control of our traditional spheres of professional activity. Indeed, all business functions are at the dawn of an era of radical de-professionalization.

“…New priorities and skills for which the Chief Communications Officer must now assume a leadership role: 1. Leadership in defining and instilling company values; 2. Leadership in building and managing multistakeholder relationships; 3. Leadership in enabling the enterprise with “new media” skills and tools…

“For business, globalization has long been transforming markets for capital and labor. Now it is reshaping the footprint – and even the idea – of the corporation. This institution is shifting from a hierarchical, monolithic, multinational model to one that is horizontal, networked and globally integrated.

“The chief communications executive and the communications function of a 21st century corporation will increasingly be responsible not only for the reputation of their single company, but also for understanding, communicating and even helping to shape the reputations of its ecosystem partners – such as clients, partners, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other influencers.

“More than 300 million camera phones were shipped in 2005. They are now the most widespread image-capture devices in the world. At current growth rates, there could be one billion camera phones in use worldwide by 2008. That means nearly one person in six is a potential photojournalist – or, with the spread of video capabilities, documentary filmmaker.

“Teens in the U.S. – the consumers of today and the employees, shareholders, voters and leaders of tomorrow – spend 60 percent less time watching TV than their parents, and 600 percent more time online, interacting with, influencing and being influenced not by institutions, marketers or professional communicators, but by their peers.

“Procter & Gamble…“imports” 50 percent of its new ideas from outsiders. And Eli Lilly has created an open R&D marketplace called Innocentive to match problems needing solutions with independent researchers who can solve them.

“All of this makes the 21st century enterprise vulnerable at a wholly new level to unexpected developments that can damage the brand, negatively affect employee commitment, undercut outside relationships and destabilize management, including the CEO and other corporate officers and Board members. This, in turn, means that the stakes are much higher for what corporate communicators do.

“We used to segment communications carefully to targeted audiences. In an open information commons, everyone can see (and, increasingly, modify) any public communication, no matter to whom it is targeted.

“Message ‘segmentation’ is no longer practical or desirable. Despite the proliferation of diverse stakeholders, all are now on a level playing field.

“Values are the fundamental basis for enterprise communications. “To be an effective communications function in the authentic enterprise:

  • “We must not only position our companies, but also help define them. While expertise and authenticity are essential, communicators’ counsel to the corporation must now encompass its fundamental business model, brand, culture, policies and, most importantly, values.
  • “We must not only develop channels for messaging but also networks of relationships. In a business ecosystem of proliferating constituencies, communicators must lead the development of social networks and the tools and skills of relationship building and collaborative influence – both to seize new opportunities and to respond to new threats.
  • “We must shift from changing perceptions to changing realities. In a world of radical transparency, 21st century communications functions must lead in shaping behavior – inside and out – to make the company’s values a reality.

“Conduct public relations as if the whole company depends on it. Corporate relations is a management function. No corporate strategy should be implemented without considering its impact on the public. The public relations professional is a policymaker capable of handling a wide range of corporate communications activities.

“Realize a company’s true character is expressed by its people. The strongest opinions – good or bad – about a company are shaped by the words and deeds of its employees. As a result, every employee – active or retired – is involved with public relations. It is the responsibility of corporate communications to support each employee’s capability and desire to be an honest, knowledgeable ambassador to customers, friends, shareowners and public officials.

“[CEOs] say that the emphasis of communications work must shift significantly toward internal communications, as they seek to transform their organizations’ culture and workforce skills – not just to make them more efficient and productive, but to embed the kind of pervasive transparency, personal responsibility and values-based decision making that enterprise-scale authenticity requires.

“The greatest danger corporate communications faces, ironically, may lie in our very success over the past two decades, if that success blinds us to the new demands that lie ahead.”

Corporate Blog Council should swallow hard and learn from critics

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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.

Daily reading 11/10/2007

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Managing a Corporate Blog, Like HP’s – MetzMash

Wal-Mart’s Biggest Marketing Tool? Its Web Site – MediaPost, Nov. 8, 2007

“The rate and review feature lets consumers post comments about products online. Since the July launch, consumers have written and posted reviews on 80,000 products, with more than 1,000 coming in daily.

“About 80% of items have either a four or five star rating, which gives us confidence we’re selling quality merchandise,” Vazquez says. “When the service first launched, the suppliers got a little nervous, but even products that get one-or-two star ratings provide useful information and feedback from customers.”

    Top 10 Marketing Blogs – 2007/2008

    ClickZ: Defining Social Media

    Marketing segmentation through social media

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    Howard Kaushansky of Umbria gave an enlightening talk about audience segmentation of social media influencers at Blogworld Expo this morning. He talked about two examples of what his company has done for different clients in the consumer products field.

    For an apparel maker, Umbria analyzed postings to blogs and social networks to identify the following segments:

    Fit Finders (39% of the population), Self Expressives (19%), Bargain Seekers (17%), Label Whores (11%) , Style Gurus (8%) and Dissenters (6%).

    Here’s an example of segment characteristics: Fit Finders are Generation Xers looking for appropriate jeans for their changing physiques. . Low-waisted jeans aren’t working for them any more, but “old person jeans” aren’t appealing either. Plus-sized Fit Finders are looking for fashion-forward styles rather than shapeless designs.

    Self Expressives want control. They want to distress their own jeans, design clothing reconstructed from jeans and add personal style to jeans through patches and embroiders.

    Style Gurus are looking to be unique. They’re looking for authenticity and real inspiration. “Some men are actually starting to become interested in wearing women’s jeans because they view them as more stylish,” he said. These insights emerged from online conversations.

    Umbria’s analysis is entirely text-based. “We’re listening in on this world, not asking them to fill out surveys or segment themselves,” he said. It’s not just what people say but the words they use. Fifteen-year-old girls speak differently than 54-year-old men.”

    For another client that makes packaged food, the company analyzed women’s blogs to identify four core segments: Me Time, Weight Management, Balance and Wellness and Beauty from Within (percentages weren’t given).

    They then analyzed women’s needs and interests by time of day. The company also identified common moods at each time of the day and mapped foods, packaging and promotions to these moods and activities.

    For example, afternoon is “Connect Time” when women share stories and experiences to gain support, external perspective, humor and advice. During Connect Time, activities include emailing, blogging, phone calls, sharing a meal, getting beauty treatments, going out, and spending time with family.

    These segments were mapped to moods and foods. For example, “Me Time” is early morning, often before families are awake. At that time, women are looking to empower themselves. “Me O’Clock” yielded these strategic insights:

    • Women embrace this time as an opportunity to regain control
    • Don’t tell them what’s right; enable them to make better decisions and express themselves
    • The emotional benefit of this time is personal empowerment

    Ideas for productions and promotions:

    • Personalized snacks
    • Calendars with times blocked out for “Me Time.”
    • Market teas and other products with a stimulative effect specific to early morning personal time.

    With blog monitoring, “You can listen to these people and understand what are the drivers and unmet needs.”

    Last group of AMA Webinar questions answered

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    Here is the final set of responses to questions that time didn’t permit me to answer during the AMA Marketing Seminar on Oct. 15. Each of these permalinks is tagged “AMA” so you can easily group them together. Thanks again to everyone for coming and for asking such great questions.

    Q: Chris asks, “Do you think this will impact corporate cultures? And how?”

    That’s a big question, but I’ll try to summarize. One enormous impact of new media will be to force companies to be more open and transparent about their activities, motivations and mistakes. Once customers began talking to each other and sharing their experiences with your company, you have very little control over those conversations. It’s going to be a lot harder to hide your blemishes and to keep secrets.

    Already, many marketers are finding that their carefully managed product rollout plans are sabotaged by bloggers who get their hands on secret information. I believe that businesses, particularly large ones, are going to have to learn to live in a world where information can’t be covered up very well. This will force them to be more transparent with their constituents about their plans. That won’t be easy for everybody.

    Internally, I expect social media to flatten corporate cultures. Communication within most companies has traditionally been controlled from the top down. But once individuals have the ability to speak freely with each other, those lines become much fuzzier. In most companies, this will be a good thing. However, a company that values a strict hierarchy will be challenged by this. They can refuse to give their employees blogs, but they can’t prohibit their employees from communicating off-hours via blogs or social networks. Again, this won’t be easy for everybody

    Q: Viktor asks, “Will passionate social media users get paid at some point in time?

    A: Many of them are getting paid now. For example, I spoke in my presentation about Adrants, which is a one-person operation that is generating good cash flow from advertising. Many models are being developed to reward bloggers for their hard work, although in reality very few people can make a living in this way. I expect that a small minority of people will be able to make decent income as new influencers, but only a very tiny number will become wealthy from it. These are niche markets, after all.

    Q: S Law asks, “How do organizations and businesses engage bloggers to get that positive word of mouth?”

    A: Much of my book is about this, so I’ll refer you to that, or to other books I referenced earlier, including Naked Conversations by Scoble and Israel; Marketing to the Social Web by Weber; What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting by Demopoulos, The Corporate Blogging Book by Weil; and The New Rules of Marketing and PR by Scott.

    To summarize, though, you need to take the following steps:

    • Get to know which influencers matter in your market;
    • Read or listen or watch what they’ve been publishing and learn what their passions and biases are;
    • Engage in conversations about topics of mutual interest. Don’t try to sell to them, though;
    • Provide interesting and valuable information that they can use to further their interest and create new content for their sites;
    • Invite them to become involved with your company as an adviser, reviewer and/or media representative;
    • Show your gratitude. In most cases, this doesn’t mean paying them so much as treating them as insiders and respected advisers. Although t-shirts are always welcome!

    Q: Erika asks, “Have you looked at social influencers in the healthcare provider community? What is the prevalence there?”

    A: It’s very difficult to estimate numbers for any topic because of the large number of spam blogs. All the services try to filter out spam, but none succeeds very well.

    Technorati lists nearly 5,000 blogs as being about medicine in some capacity and 2,000 as being about healthcare, although in reality the numbers are much smaller than that. There does appear to be quite a bit of healthcare information out there. For example, a Google blog search on “diabetes” turns up several thousand posts in the last day, and the top few hundred look legitimate.

    In general, people use social media for topics that matter deeply to them, and there’s no question that medicine is one of those areas. If you try searching the two sources I mentioned above, you’ll pretty quickly get a picture of what’s being said out there.

    Q: Scott asks, “How do you weed out fake comments, possibly from the company or someone that is one-sided?”

    A: Most blogging services offer the option to screen comments. This requires a little extra effort on your part, because you must go in and look at each comment individually before approving it, but this is necessary in some cases because comment spammers tend to send a lot of their trash to certain blogs.

    There is no way to verify a person’s identity when they post a comment, other than to verify e-mail addresses or search for their name. In general, you need to use common sense and make sure that comments don’t betray a bias that could

    be driven by competitive issues.

    I should stress, however, that you don’t want to suppress legitimate comments just because they’re negative. People expect to participate in the discussion, and as long as their words are reasonable and not profane, they should be allowed to do that. If you start censoring visitors, you will quickly hear from people about it, and often in public places. Don’t get into blogging if you’re not able to stand a little heat.

    Still more AMA Webinar questions answered

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    Here are more responses to questions that time didn’t permit me to answer during the AMA Marketing Seminar on Oct. 15. Each of these permalinks is tagged “AMA” so you can easily group them together. Thanks to everyone for coming and for asking such great questions. More to come!

    Q: Jodine asks “Another great example of this marketing approach is in the new music industry. Independent distributed musicians that gain their fans from MySpace and other social networks. Is this marketing approach what they call grassroots and/or organic marketing?”

    A: That’s certainly an appropriate term for it. MySpace, for example, has been a gold mine for independent music groups who don’t have the marketing dollars to put into advertising. The idea is to create networks of friends who self-define their interests and share favorite bands among themselves. Also, people who produce podcasts and blogs devoted to music often make it a point to promote lesser-known groups. While these tactics so far haven’t duplicated the throw weight of mainstream media campaigns, their popularity testifies to their effectiveness.

    Q: Sanjay asks, “Are there any potential problems for a regional retailer with just a few locations?”

    A: Not that I can think of. In fact, that person is a natural candidate for social media. Facebook, for example, is a great place to find people nearby who are interested in the products that the retailer sells. If I was a camera store owner in Chicago, for example, I might set up a Facebook group for photography enthusiasts to discuss their favorite Chicagoland sites to photograph. You can use that as a jumping off point to create events and even more targeted groups.

    A blog is also a terrific way to showcase expertise, and if you’re careful to label the blog and its posts with regional tags, you’ll do better on search engines. For small businesses on a budget, social media is a godsend.


    Q: Kristin asks, “How will the change in social media affect crisis communications?”

    A: I can think of a couple of major ways. For better or worse, people are increasingly taking their gripes and frustrations to their blogs instead of going through customer service channels. This makes the blogosphere an excellent early warning system. You should have Google Alerts set up for every product and brand you own, and you should also create RSS feeds from sites like Technorati, BlogPulse and IceRocket that can alert you immediately to new topics of blog chatter.

    In terms of responding to a crisis, a blog is perhaps the fastest way to get information online. This bypasses the media gatekeepers and insurers that the message is coming directly from you. If you link aggressively to the blog from your website and from blogs maintained by your employees and outside constituents, you can build visibility very quickly. Sites like Twitter are also increasingly being used by marketers to get messages out to the public instantly.


    Q: Viktor asks “What’s your opinion on intellectual property rights
    with blogging?”

    A: There effectively are none, and this is a huge hairball for new media. The reality is that many people who are now publishing online could care less about intellectual property or copyright. I have had entire articles lifted verbatim from my blog and even mainstream media sites and republished without any attribution whatsoever. It’s not worth going after people legally in most cases, and that tactic can actually create unwanted publicity.

    The entertainment companies have led the charge in trying to bring some order to this intellectual-property chaos, but they have encountered a lot of resistance and their tactics have not always been diplomatic. They have done themselves few favors. I’m afraid that these issues will take years to hammer out, and that our notions of copyright may look very different a few years from now. I wish I could be more encouraging, but a lot of people are wrestling with this problem.

    Cool stuff for marketers

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    Several services of interest to marketers are debuting here at Demo in San Diego.

    The MuseStorm Content Engagement Platform is a service that simplifies the creation of widgets, those ubiquitous branded medallions that show up on blogs and social networking sites and deliver video, images and text streams. The founders claim that businesses typically spend $30,000 to create a widget (not an unrealistic figure, from what I’ve seen) and that they can reduce that process to a few minutes.

    Drag and drop the content container and the relevant content into a workspace, add logos and messages/instructions and generate the final product without coding. MuseStorm provides components to e-mail a friend, download a brochure, request a follow-up, vote, comment, etc. and delivers final code that can be dropped into any html page. More importantly for marketers, the company has back-end tracking and reporting to tell marketers what’s resonating with the audience and what’s falling flat. Pricing is correlated to traffic.

    UK-based Real Time Content Ltd. has one of those “why didn’t I think of that?” services. Adaptive Media Version 1.0 delivers targeted video to visitors based upon interests they specify. It’s a simple concept that must be devilishly difficult to implement.

    Consider the range of videos that a car company might want to show a visitor. A 25-year-old single male might want to see the fastest sports car while a 35-year-old mom could prefer a demonstration of safety features. On most websites today, every viewer gets the same video, no matter what their interest.

    Real Time Content stores a menu of videos, text messages, images and calls-to-action that can be dynamically assembled and delivered to visitors depending on information they provide. So that 35-year-old mom gets a video and text overlay talking about safety features along with an invitation to request a brochure while the single young male might get an invitation to sign up for a test drive. The company has reporting and analytics to show marketers what’s working.

    Shoutlet is a tool for monitoring Web 2.0 campaigns. The service includes a platform for distributing content like video and RSS feeds to dozens of sites, a widget-building function, RSS feed creator and e-mail campaign manager. The reporting is supposed to be where to Shoutlet shines. The developer, Sway, is a marketing services agency specializing in social and viral media. It should know what kind of reports marketers want.

    Sway intends to price under $10,000 a month, which would make it cheaper than the influence-tracking services offered by most of its competitors.

    Facebook deserves marketers' attention

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    We’re still in the first inning of the social media game, yet the urge to pick winners is strong. Anyone who’s trying to make sense of all the activity right now is being whipsawed. A year ago, MySpace was all the rage, then YouTube took center stage last fall. Early this year, everyone was atwitter about Twitter and now Facebook is growing like kudzu to the applause of investors and the press.

    While there will no doubt be other market darlings, I think Facebook is the first of these nascent communities to deserve serious attention from b-to-b marketers. If you haven’t been paying much attention, you might still think of Facebook as the social network for college students. In fact, as recently as last fall, a personal still needed a “.edu” e-mail address to join.

    All that changed last late year when Facebook made two critical decisions: it opened membership to anybody who wanted to join and it permitted third-party software developers to build applications specific to the Facebook platform.

    The results have been astonishing. Membership has doubled since the first of the year, eclipsing 30 million in early July. What’s more interesting to marketers is that the demographics of this member base are intriguing. As Rodney Rumford points out in this analysis, members over 25 years of age now account for half of Facebook traffic. That’s remarkable when you consider that most of those members couldn’t even get to the site 10 months ago.

    An even more telling statistic is audience engagement. According to Comscore, 93% of Facebook members log on at least once a month and 60% use the site daily. Those are impressive figures for even a small community site; for one with 30 million members, they’re mind-blowing.

    If you register on both MySpace and Facebook, the differences will whack you in the face. MySpace’s heritage as a music site makes it feel at times like a giant virtual nosh pit. Member pages are festooned with graphics and music plays helter-skelter. In the year I’ve been a MySpace member, I don’t think I’ve received a single message from someone I knew.

    In contrast, when I registered for Facebook, I was flooded by invitations to become friends (social network lingo for establishing a connection) with dozens of current and past colleagues. Facebook allows you to monitor some of the activities of your friends, and it’s an impressive display to watch. People I know are busily exchanging software applications to recommend books, movies, travel destination and professional web sites. The Society for New Communications Research, of which I am a member, chose Facebook as the community of choice for its professional members. And I continue to get “friends” request from actual friends almost daily.

    If it keeps up this momentum, Facebook has the chance to succeed where earlier professional networks like LinkedIn didn’t. While LinkedIn has some valuable professional networking features, it has the feeling of a software application more than a community. Facebook’s approach to the market is proving to be more effective: it started as a community site and then added networking features. Its roots as a gathering place for college students has helped it to continue to attract the kind of members that marketers want to reach. If it continues to grow at its current rate for another year, it will reach the status among adult professionals that MySpace enjoys among teenagers: you simply have to be there.

    This is not to say that Facebook is perfect. Its closed e-mail application doesn’t sit well with people like me, who live in their inboxes. Some of its distinctive metaphors — like writing graffiti on someone’s wall — can be confusing to new members. The process of creating a new group can also be somewhat cumbersome and confusing. And while its applications are impressive, Google still delivers better quality and features overall.

    Nevertheless, business marketers should become familiar with Facebook. It has a chance to become the gold standard for professional networks. Even if it fumbles the opportunity, the dynamics of what’s going on there are important to understand.

    Update: Maggie Fox just passed along this press release from Comscore, showing Facebook traffic up 270% year-over-year, compared to MySpace’s 72%. Of course, MySpace started from a much higher base and is still the leader overall by a wide margin, but Facebook is closing the gap.

    The Wall Street Journal reviews New Influencers

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    Much to my delight, The Wall Street Journal this morning carried a 900-word review of my book, calling it “a persuasive case for companies’ reaching out to bloggers,” and recounting many of the stories and examples I used to argue for greater marketer attention to social media.

    Unfortunately, you have to be a paid subscriber to read the article. We’ll see what we can do about that 🙂

    Having tried (unsuccessfully) for years to get published in the Journal, this was an unexpected endorsement and a very gratifying one. It’s good to see marketers coming around the perspective that social media can be a meaningful channel for customer connection.

    Our podcast interview with David Meerman Scott

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    This week in Tech PR War Stories, David Strom and I chat with David Meerman Scott, author of the forthcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which is due out any day now. David talks about the ideas that got him elected to Marketing Sherpa’s Viral Marketing Hall of Fame two years running, as well as his call for PR people to get a clue about search and start writing press releases using terms buyers care about rather than words they think the media wants to hear.

    This will be a two-part interview, with the second running next week. And we barely scratched the surface of what’s in David’s book. Download the podcast. It’s free!