A big thank you to Kelly Feller who emailed me and several others at Intel this article from the Wall Street Journal, “Most Corporate Blogs Are Unimaginative Failures”. This is perfect timing as I am planning to launch a new consumer blog for Intel in the coming months. The following is a tidbit from the article:

Many businesses have launched corporate blogs in an effort to better communicate with customers and capture a little Web-2.0 mojo. But Huffington Post they ain’t: Not only are these corporate blogs boring as paint, but the businesses behind admit they don’t have much value.

The article also cites a Forrester case study which I believe to be the core problem with corporate blogging in general:

Forrester found that most B2B blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” Seventy percent stuck to business or technical topics, 74% rarely get comments, and 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news. Not surprisingly, 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies—the rest call it somewhat or highly significant–and the number of new corporate blogs among the companies Forrester tracks has dropped from 36 in 2006 to just three in 2008.

I see two problems here. First is that many of these corporate blogs are using a blog as a one-way communication channel. That is, they are repurposing press releases and white papers as blog content. They are also restating the exact same technical specs that can most likely be found on the product pages of the corporate web site. They simply have a blog just because their competitors do. Nothing new, nothing real, nothing cool, nothing engaging, nothing personal.

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If you could only bring 6 Social Media Pros to an island to start a Web 2.0 Marketing Department, who would they be?

Making it on Jeremiah’s list of ‘Social Computing Stategists’ got me thinking about my team, what we do, what we want to do and what’s next. My team is fairly new and we’ve been at it for about 9-months now and the various disciplines and skill sets of our team was built trial and error over the past few months. As we plan for the next fiscal year I can’t help but think big so I started creating a list of all of the things a ‘Social Media and Web 2.0′ team should focus on (leaving out the boundaries of resources). Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Social Media Strategist - In ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Lewis Carroll wrote “if you don’t know where you want to be, it hardly matters which direction you take”. At the core of every good team there’s a good plan. This is the person who pulls everything together. They build the Social Media Marketing plan and determine what the objective of the campaign is and therefore what tools should be utilized and how.

Community Manager – There are currently two communities that we have an active presence on - Facebook and NetPro having someone actively facilitate conversations in these communities would really take things to the next level.

Social Site Management – The great thing about engaging your customers in social media is that you can tweak your message depending on the audience. The tough thing about engaging your customers in social media is that your message could end up looking different for every audience. At the core of any marketing strategy lies a common message. We now have a presence on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Depending on the campaign we may leverage one or more of these channels and having someone to manage the communications and having it centrally executed is critical.

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OK, *Exotic* may be a bit of a stretch, but while our numbers are growing rapidly, we are still small in numbers.

If you haven’t seen Jeremiah Owyang’s current list (many of you probably had because you read his blog and if you don’t you should), but just in case I’d encourage any Social Media Managers, or as Jeremiah calls them; Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations, to head over and add your name to the list.

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Good thing I drink Pepsi because according to Dr. Ralph Walton as pointed out by John McManamy, “Don’t Drink the Diet Coke,” there may be a correlation to depression and bipolar disorder to aspartame - the sweetener used in Diet Coke. What does this have to do with marketing? Well, as Brian Morrissey points out in Dell’s Hearing Test, try typing ‘Diet Coke’ in Google and see what comes up. Two of the top 5 search results are pointing to articles about how Diet Coke is associated to depression. I would hate to be in their PR department right now.

This claim is based off of a single research study that was done 15 years ago and now because a blogger picked up on it it’s resurfaced and is a top search result. It been up there since June 5th and there’s no response from Diet Coke. Are they even listening to the conversations happening on the social web? Do they even know that post is out there and spreading further each day? Maybe they overdosed on Mentos…

My colleague Brian Ellefritz points out that this is great example of why corporations need to be monitoring (and participating) in conversations about their brand. Consumer generated media is not something that can/should be ignored. I think Mark Jarvis, CMO at Dell says it best, “Your home page is Google.” From a B2B perspective we can all learn from Sun’s blogging strategy in how to jump in and join the conversation and ultimately improve the sentiment of what gets communicated online. You can bet that Sun keeps a close eye on what new conversations about their brand emerge from the social web and if this happened to them I can’t imagine they’d go this long without noticing. Keep reading »

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I mentioned in Part 1 that community managers require a broad range of experience and wear a lot of hats in the course of their jobs. To me this is what makes the job so interesting. We must draw upon everything we’ve ever leaned both personally and professionally — and we’re always learning things that we put into practice. There is no “status quo.”

No two community managers have exactly the same job description (as many of you shared in the comments from my last post). And most of us add to our responsibilities as new opportunities are identified (most from conversations with our specific community).

Let’s look at my previous gig as an example.

When I joined Symantec in 2006, the company’s public Web site housed a forgotten area of discussion forums inherited from the 2005 purchase of Veritas Software. Launched in 2003, the Veritas Architect Network (VAN) was a peer-to-peer community for business customers, mainly functional IT managers. Most of the discussions were support related and “How do I” questions.

In addition to peer-to-peer discussion forums, VAN featured the (very) occasional white paper and links to various resources within veritas.com.

Veritas didn’t have a full-time community manager and content was stale. Discussions were seldom moderated. Links to resources became broken over time.

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I used to get in trouble in college classes for making statements and not backing them up. It was much easier to make generic statements about what I believed to be true and not take the time or effort to back up my statements.

While the bloggosphere is a, thankfully, much different world than college, I see a similarly troubling trend. There seems to be an ever increasing number of posts in the marketing space that are, at best, half thoughts with no backing for anything they’re talking about. Granted these are blogs, so you can do that

It’s easy for people to sit on the side lines and throw rocks (I do it all the time). It’s harder (and not as much fun) to recognize the good that companies contribute and then offer constructive criticism when appropriate.

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Community managers like hats. And that’s a good thing – because they wear several.

It’s hard to list everything a community manager does because that list varies from company to company and Web site to Web site. It’s also a moving target.

I recently spoke with a friend of mine at the Patricia Seybold Group, Matthew Lees, who was writing a report titled: “How Should You Manage Customer Communities?”

Matt asked me about my background and how my professional experience helps me do my job. I told him it does more than help me “do” my job – it helps me “shape” my job. This apparently piqued his curiosity and forced me to think back to events that have transpired since my 1988 college graduation.

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Does this sound familiar? You arrive to the office on a normal, bleary-eyed Monday morning to find an email from one of your company executives. He or she has just returned from a conference where “social media” was the topic du jour. You can almost feel the excitement oozing from this individual as he or she exclaims how your company needs to start doing social media, beginning with a blog you need to ghost write for this awestruck executive.

Once you get over the shock of hearing an executive issue a mandate to do a particular marketing tactic without a solid strategy behind it, you wonder if he or she is really serious. How do you know if the company is truly committed integrating a social media marketing strategy into your overall marketing mix? Well here are some ways to tell if they are truly convinced or if they are just paying lip service to the idea in hopes they have discovered one more new and “untapped” channel through which they can talk at customers instead of with them. Keep reading »

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As social media gains acceptance I see more and more corporations/brands hiring bloggers to manage their social media efforts. This is pretty smart since if someone is a blogger they probably understand the nuances of managing these efforts.

The Corporate Social Media Worker (CSMW)

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We have a current debate going on right now within HP’s Community Counsel and I thought I would pose our question to you for your input.

Normally I’m a bit of a blogging purist. NO GHOST BLOGGING. Always use your real name, always use your full name, no pseudonyms, aliases etc.

But we just had a new blog request that made me step back and re-asses my thinking. I find this a useful practice to do whenever I start getting an emotional knee-jerk reaction to a question (which I did this time).

We have a blog request from a group within HR and the proposed author is very hesitant to use her full name. Being a mother with small children she is very worried about having too much private information out there and doesn’t want what information that is out there too closely associated with what she does for a living.

Since she is in HR she is also concerned about backlash from prospective job candidates that don’t get hired or about the potential deluge of recruiter emails she would get (she already gets a large amount). Because of all of these factors (and a self professed irrational fear) she wants to just use her initials.

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