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.

Keep reading »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed

Something I often discuss with my collegues is a goal for social media to amplify the voice of the individual over the institution. This is because the institutional voice has lost relevance. It is less trusted.

Research has shown that 90% of the audience to a social site is not interested in participating, but keenly interested in the content. They are interested in this content because 1-10% that is responsible for authoring the content is preferred over the singular voice of an institution.

The voice of the 1% contributors come off as more authentic, especially if that voice doesn’t sound like a marketing drone. Instead the 1% is opinionated, often with bias and often inaccurate. However it is real, and with its flaws it is valued over the voice of the institution.

But how can that 1% voice be a voice you can trust to discuss your brand. How can it be a voice that will help carry influence to make your brand relevant? After all you cannot control it… or can you.

I believe the answer is aggregation. Although you cannot control the conversation you can control what topics you make available to the 90% who are keenly interested in the dialogue. Consider your brand’s attributes, features, and capabilities. Then find, foster, enable and amplify discussions on those brand attributes. By playing host and rounding up that dialogue you are encouraging the 90% to go deeper and identify more strongly with the value proposition of your brand.

Keep reading »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed

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.

Keep reading »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed

Recently I was chatting with Josh Hilliker who is the Community Manager of the vPro Expert Center, and I believe Josh is an example of someone who has figured out how to be successful by not over thinking his community.  Josh manages a site that revolves around an IT product. And to be frank it is a product that few understand and who’s value has yet to reach mass appeal.  Now here’s the odd thing, Josh’s community kick but over our other communities based on broader appealing products.  All logic says his community should reside in the shadow of these communities.

So what’s the deal?  What’s Josh got going on the other communities don’t?  Simply put Josh just does it.  He doesn’t slow down to think whether or not his next idea to engage the community is the right idea.  He doesn’t pause on whether he should or should not step out to another site and engage.  Josh runs on instinct and expertise that is not encumbered by a need to analyze or perfect what he is doing before he does it.

However it’s not all full speed in every direction.  Josh does his research and is grounded in his deep knowledge of his audience and community.  He knows where they are online.  He knows the conversations that are happening. He also knows that he must often quickly fail before he can succeed.  And ultimately he focuses on opportunities not on barriers.

Keep reading »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed

The following is a repost (with slight changes/modifications) of something I wrote earlier this year. Still relevant and I wanted to share with all of you.

The following happens all the time.

I just had an experience with your brand. Was it good, bad, ugly, what? Nonetheless, it was such an experience that I twittered my entire network all the juicy details; and guess what? I have over 400 followers. Additionally, all my Tweets get pulled into several other social networks that I actively participate in (Friendfeed, Facebook to name a few) as well as my blog. So you can be sure that my message – whatever it may be – will be shared everyone, everywhere I participate.

Also, that experience had such and impact on me that I am going to write a review on YELP. I really hope for your sake, the experience was a positive one.

Then, if I am feeling up to it, I am going to document my experience in my blog; and I do get substantial traffic via RSS (close to 400 subscribers or so) and from natural search.

I may even submit my post to Digg and then bookmark it in StumbleUpon. Then, I’ll go to my favorite search engine and search for your brand name. I wonder if anyone else had a similar experience. I am beginning to get curios; and may even chime in if I feel the need.

Keep reading »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed

After recent chatter about chips vs. cheese in our blogs and discussions, I decided to try an experiment. I wondered if companies who are hiring for social media and community manager positions actually look for someone who is employing conversational marketing methods–the chips in the chips-to-cheese ratio–to market themselves. I don’t have results just yet but I’ll pass those along when I do.

Before I get down to the details of my test, I thought I might revisit exactly what “conversational marketing and storytelling” looks like. Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on it with several books and blog links. The entry includes an excerpt from PR Social Media personality Shel Isreal that summarizes it to a degree:

“(Conversational marketing is) the concept that people respond better to lowered voices spoken in credible tones than they do to the aggressive in-your-face marketing speak as is evidences in everything from TV ads to the pap-lingo of so many websites….All too often professional marketers lose their credibility by hyperbole, hubris and amplification.”

I think conversational marketing actually goes one step further, incorporating the human or personal touch required to often make deeper connections with people (after all, aren’t customers people?). In his new book Personality Not Included, Rohit Bhargava discusses how marketing and communications from companies has become homogenous and bland. And by allowing their employees to express themselves and their personalities more freely–in addition to cultivating a corporate personality–companies will discover deeper connections with their customers.

Keep reading »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed

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 »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed

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.

Keep reading »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed

Perhaps this is a non issue. Some may argue that since organizations need to give up control to the consumer anyway, there is no real need to collaborate internally about messaging and/or outbound marketing communications or programs. On the other hand, a rebuttal might be that organizations need to collaborate for many reasons to include:

• Leverage best practices among the different marketing organizations and business groups (what has worked, what hasn’t worked)
• Learn, share and communicate (sometime it’s good to just hear what others are doing in the org)
• Identify opportunities to partner on various projects
• Leverage agencies and consolidate the work flow, contracts, etc (might me a money saver)

And, let’s consider the 53rd thesis from the Cluetrain Manifesto which states, “There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.” This tells me that having one voice, one conversation and internal alignment is important to help drive a social media strategy that works.

Whatever your opinion is about this matter, there is a huge issue within organizations. Take this excerpt from the article, “The Prison of Marketing” and it may shed some light on this (thank you @annierodkins for sending this to me):

As one would probably expect, silos often exist between marketing and other functions, such as finance, human resources, sales, and operations. Yet what surprises many is that within marketing itself silos often exist as well—between research and communications creative, or between corporate and business communications groups, or among regional marketing teams.

Keep reading »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed

This is one of those posts where you’ll inevitably learn more about the person behind the keyboard. But hey, they say authenticity is critical for us social media geeks so I suppose it’s all good. I’ll start with a confession: I “play” Second Life. Yes, my name is Kelly and I am a Second Life (SL) addict. Whew, there. I said it. I admit this because it should hopefully give you some background on my perspective. And perhaps it gives me a bit of street cred, which I think is important for what I’m about to tell you.

I’ve been personally involved in SL for over a year and a half. I also write a blog on Second Life–well, actually, my avatar Cindy does. I first arrived to Second Life upon the request of my corporate boss who asked that I venture into the virtual world and help determine if there was any value in using Second Life in a business or marketing capacity. Needless to say once I arrived I was hooked.

I admit it has taken me this long to form an opinion on whether SL was just Barbies for adults or if businesses or brands could, in fact, utilize the social networking or virtual submersion aspects of it for marketing or business benefit. Wait no longer, my verdict is in. And yes, I do think there are important uses and applications for Second Life as a business tool.

Keep reading »

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please subscribe to our RSS feed