Matt Richtel of the New York Times has a chilling piece about how blogging (amongst other fasten-you-to-your-desk activities) carries a severe health risk. The costs of being a one-person media outlet can be high. I didn’t realise the great Om Malik had had a heart attack. Get well soon Om.

Jennifer Slegg has 52 different, excellent ways to make your blog more user- and search engine-friendly. One of those classic pages that could save the weary digital marketer several hours work.

Department store John Lewis have announced that whilst their rivals may be suffering, they are growing market share. The Nationwide building society has seen a surge of deposits recently, partly the effect of the Northern Rock collapse.

Both businesses are growing market share during a slowdown. What is it that links them? In news links Nationwide talk about the quality of their assets, John Lewis MD Andy Street is not quoted as providing a rationale.

Our research points out some common features. What both businesses have in common in terms of consumer generated conversations is that:

a) positive commentary on them tends to contain specific customer recommendations and endorsements. A customer who is complaining about his ISP takes time to say something postive about Nationwide, an entire thread on MoneySavingExpert is entitled John Lewis are bloody marvelous and backs it up with facts;

b) negative commentary involves isolated problems: someone complains about a silent call from Nationwide’s call centre; a thread that starts John Lewis sucks big time, turns into a plug for their customer service as - just as several posters predict - John Lewis deal successfully with a horrible customer service issue.

This is by no means a common feature. A PR client came to us a few days ago on behalf of a business whose online commentary was positively sulphurous. There were no positive comments whatsoever, and the negative comments included threats of legal action. The company apparently thought that it had a “reputation” issue. Our suggestion was that it had a product issue. This is an ostensibly healthy company, but I would fear for it during a recession.

The common threads linking Nationwide and John Lewis is that they seem to provide great customer service and great customer service drives positive word of mouth. Both companies Net Promoter Indices are comfortably ahead of their sector average. And they are demonstrably growing market share in a chilling market.

When we helped Avis launch their We Try Harder blog - it was a joint venture between customer service and marketing. The point that Xavier Vallée and his colleagues at Avis understood is that customer service issues - correctly handled - are the key to having a great reputation. No one is perfect, but if your service is responsive and prompt, you are forgiven and endorsed. Avis, like Nationwide and John Lewis, are growing their market share.

Recent figures from the IAB indicate that UK online advertising has reached £2bn. This number has already outstripped radio and newspapers and is chasing down television (at £3.9bn). The internet’s proportion of ad spend in the UK is the highest in the world.

It is worth a second look at the trends hidden in the figures. The online advertising total was up 42% year on year. Paid search, however, grew at 52% (above the trend). Display ads grew below the trend at 35%. Display ads - which were the dominant form of advertising during the internet bubble - now represent only 22.6% of the total advertising spend.

The reasons are not hard to find: an excellent click-through rate on a display ad is 1%. Most click-through rates are far lower. The web surfers who click on a banner are poorly qualified as prospects. They may become customers, they may not. Even back at the height of the dot-com boom, frustrated ad analysts were writing columns like this - failing to find any way of showing that online advertising had any impact on buying decisions. It is still hard to track the impact of online display advertising and advertisers have found that frustrating.

Compare paid search: here customers have qualified themselves as having an interest in the topic chosen by the advertiser. It is a far more effective way of capturing monetisable online transactions and product searches (58% of the total £1.2bn is now going on paid search). But paid search remains a medium for calls to action, not for branding. It is very hard to give much of a flavour of your brand in the haiku-like format of a Google paid search advertisement. For that you need to find a way to connect emotionally with your audience, to make them feel happy, sad, excited. This remains a huge challenge online.

An upcoming conference organised by our friends at Search Engine Strategies looking at advertising through social networks. Clever approaches here seem much more likely to drive brand value than paid search. If I become the “friend” of Lily Allen, I am clearly qualifying myself much more as a potential buyer of her future output. The same goes for anything entertainment-related. But it is much more of a challenge for brands which are not entertainment related. Social networks pose them exactly the same problems as normal web pages. They either have to post a banner or sponsor an event. They can’t rely on pull, because (as sellers of motor insurance for example) they can’t compete with the Arctic Monkeys. No one on a social network like MySpace will publicly identify themselves with a functional brand - however useful they may find it - in the way they might with a star.

So where do brand builders go? The answer is that they need to identify their own target networks. Every brand has its own universe of key authorities, people who do spend their time talking about motor insurance or pension provision. We have recently been working for the car rental giant Avis Europe alongside our colleagues at UK digital agency Web Liquid. One of the things we helped Avis Europe to do was to identify:

a) who was talking about them and in what terms; b) who was talking about car hire/rental in general; c) the key authorities with whom they needed to connect;

This work identified those who could be thought of as Avis’s own “MySpace” - that is: a community of people who hire cars, talk about car hire and are authoritative on car hire. Our work enabled Avis Europe to identify the key topics that car renters were concerned about, and to help align their product with the needs of that market. We showed them who were the key authoritities in “trustworthy car rental”. Where they sat in that in conversation, and who they needed to impress to be talked about in a more positive way. We identified the key hot topics of those influencers - what language they were using, what their concerns were.

As a consequence of this work, the marketing team at Avis led by Xavier Vallée and Rob White, and the customer service team led by Eibhlin Payne and Stephen Spiers have been doing a lot of product and service development in the background and they have just now begun to talk about that in the form of a blog wetryharder.co.uk. The aim of the blog is to open a dialogue with the marketplace.

This kind of approach sets a benchmark - in our opinion - for what online brand building needs to become: a process of engagement with the online marketplace.

1. You find out what your brand is - by listening to the way it is discussed, by monitoring and measuring those conversations. How important are you? What are your key strengths, your weaknesses? What are your supporters saying? What are your detractors saying?
2. You start acting on the insights, improving the product, becoming if you like more like the best self you can be;
3. You start - very cautiously - to talk about what you are doing, trying to attenuate your voice not to the slogans of the marketing department, but to the words of your consumers;
4. You measure how you are doing. What is the change in sentiment around your product? Are you now preferred to your competitors? On what grounds?

Then you repeat the process. Slowly, and in lock-step with your customers, you build your brand. This process is not just about good market research, or good advertising: it puts both to the service of creating an impregnable place for your brand at the heart of the most valuable place you can be: the place where you solve problems for your customers.

Saturday’s FT ran a piece by Ellen Kelleher about the rise of personal finance blogs. In it the former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget was quoted: “The blogosphere functions the same way the stock market does–by incorporating millions of individual opinions into a general consensus. By itself, the influence of any one blogger is small, but if the ideas are persuasive, they will rapidly begin to influence the “blogosphere” as a whole.”

This is a profound remark. The blogosphere indeed functions as a marketplace in information, where spam takes the place of hype, and where a measurable consensus emerges around which companies have good products, and which ones are poor. Where a company’s employees, channel partners and customers spill the beans on how the company is doing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The blogosphere can be seen as “setting the price” of goods by forcing those with a bad reputation to discount in the search for buyers. Conversely those with a good reputation can charge a premium.

The interesting thing about this marketplace is that - unlike the stock exchange - the numbers are very hard to extract. You have to use social network analysis, natural language processing and statistical profiling to establish authority and sentiment. Having said that, these techniques exist (we and others are using them) and over time Wall Street and The City will track reputation indices as avidly as they track Standard and Poors ratings.

On Wednesday I presented at a fascinating training morning run by e-Consultancy’s Craig Hanna along with Blogging4business’s Matthew Yeomans. The agenda was to educate the audience about blogging as a phenomenon and to give them a sense of what it could teach them about their own customers and how they could use blogging and other social media tools in marketing.

The speakers were Andy Budd of Clearleft, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise, Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

There were some great case studies presented and interesting stories from the floor. Heather wrote it up here. I am afraid I missed Andy Budd’s presentation, but my favourite moments were:

Heather’s account of the huge impact of social networks on e-Commerce (it is as important as search) and her observation that 2% of Amazon purchase traffic comes from blogs. It doesn’t sound like much, but Yahoo! only provides 3%.

Debbie’s account of how marketeers are trying to use social media, sometimes well and sometimes poorly … she used an hilarious parody GM Chevy Tahoe ad, which was submitted in response to an online promotion. (Can’t find a link, but here is an ABC report) I talked about how brand messages are mediated by search, and how that means that the brand has to compete for thought space with journalists, competitors, regulators and bloggers. Thus …

The upshot is that you have as a brand a central duty to find out the words that are being used about you, particularly in the context of links, and try to make them as relevant to your core brand promise as possible.

BTW: After I read what Heather had written about what I said, I sent her the following mail, explaining the points I had been trying to make about links:

Edelman have been famously effective in advising their client Wal-Mart in how to cope with an avalanche of negative press from unions, media and local pressure groups. My colleague Flemming Madsen even credits them with turning round sentiment about Wal-Mart.

All the more surprising then that Edelman should do something as dumb as a blog which purports to be from a member of the public, but actually is from their own team. Richard Edelman has now apologised. This kind of trick is really damaging to a brand, because it erodes the very thing they are trying to reinforce, which is the value of their word. How can I believe you on what you say about your policy on employment, or local sourcing, or whatever it is I am sceptical about, if you are capable of this kind of thing? Ouch.

Like Antony Mayfield (whom I have to thank for the link) one has some sympathy for Edelman. It is difficult to get this right, but if anyone should know how to do this, it is Edelman, with their payroll of A-list bloggers like Steve Rubel. The web is so unforgiving about this kind of mistake. Edelman phoned Robert Scoble to apologise.

[Update] Here is an excellent summary of the issues raised by Matthew Ingram. Some commenters claim that PR and blogging don’t mix. Constantin Basturea’s comment mentions a couple of successful blogs engineered by PRs at MS&L - Fastlane - and Hill & Knowlton - LG Chocolate phone blog.

After a few informal trials, the UK Conservative party leader David Cameron has - according to the Guardian - started blogging - video blogging - about what the Conservatives are doing. Since the link they point at is down, and giving a Bad Request, invalid hostname error, it is hard to judge their efforts. Webcameron.org.uk seems to be valid, so it must be a screw-up. Perfect Day of 14-15 D’Arblay Street, London, W1F 8DZ are the registrants. Googling them gives you this flash-heavy Pilates site.

Technical boo-boos aside, you have to applaud the initiative. I was particularly struck by Cameron in the Guardian’s account describing what they are doing as “shaky and wobbly”. It certainly is. It is hard to communicate in a new medium and Cameron is right to massage expectations downwards. He will get attacked for doing it, but the people who attack him for it will be exactly the right kinds of enemies to make … crusty old hacks from the mainstream media. It is a good plan to go direct to the public, if you can. And thanks to the web, now you can.

Speaking at AD:tech this week I was struck by how much the currency of this new world is indeed the currency of politicians - opinions, polls, samples. The big brands now have to behave like political brands, which is what they are. They have to test opinion, engage in dialogue and build consensus around what they are doing.

[Update]  The site is now live and the url working.  And it is pretty good - not too long waiting for the videos to cue.  The open blog feature seems popular.

The company Modo e Modo ( manufacturers of high-end notebooks Moleskine) were the subject of negative commentary about quality issues. Paper Bits records how they responded, apologetically, and with detailed information about how they were dealing with the issue. Classy. [via Constantin Basturea]

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise posts here about the most popular UK blogs by visit (ignoring feed subscribers).

The Whole Foods blog

A call from Dominic Rushe of the Sunday Times who is writing about business blogging. I talked as plausibly as I could about what is going on in the UK, but in truth there has not yet been a lot of movement by corporates towards setting up blogs. I recently reviewed Suw Charman’s suggestions as to why. I am convinced it will happen, though it may take the word “blog” losing some of its negative and/or cranky overtones. For all of my excitement about David Weinberger’s vision of what blogging can do for society and for business, real benefits will come when people see blogging as a neutral technology, available to single issue campaigners, schoolkids, mothers, businessmen, musicians and marketeers equally.

I am indebted, though to Dominic for showing me this example (screen shot above) of a corporate blog, done by food company Whole Foods. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey clearly realised the huge threat to his brand from author Michael Pollan’s book the Omnivore’s dilemma and used the blog to take a lot of trouble in answering the detailed points Pollan had made.

Pollan had not approached Whole Foods during the writing of the Omnivore’s Dilemma. In the book he criticised Whole Foods and compared it to Wal-Mart for, he said, failing to source locally. Wal-Mart is a cuss-word amongst liberal shoppers of exactly the kind that Whole Foods targets. Pollan’s is a grave allegation and one that resonates in articles like this from Field Maloney in Slate. Worse, Whole Foods makes large in-store claims for sourcing locally. Worse still, Wal-Mart itself recently announced that it was going organic, posing a huge threat to Whole Foods key differentiator.

Here is a taster of the exchange on Mackey’s blog. Pollan writes:

Let me start by explaining why I did not seek to interview anyone from Whole Foods for my book, which you imply in your letter represents a journalistic lapse. (You should know I have interviewed people from the company several times in the past, particularly in connection with an April 2001 story I did for The New York Times Magazine “Naturally,” for which I interviewed Margaret Wittenberg. Over the years I have also interviewed several store employees of Whole Foods and a great many of its suppliers.) For the purposes of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” I approached Whole Foods less as a journalist than a consumer, since my goal was to capture how the store represents itself and the food it sells to a typical shopper: the signs and displays, the brochures, the labels, the photographs on the walls. Admittedly, this is not a systematic way to describe a supermarket chain-it depends on the sample of stores I visited and what they happened to be selling on any given day. It could be you have stores that sell substantially more local food than the stores I observed. But the fact remains that what I observed I observed, and that is what I wrote in the book. Nothing in your letter leads me to believe my account of what you sell in my local Whole Foods or the farms it comes from is inaccurate.

Mackey’s response:

It is difficult to discuss this with you here, Michael, because you are falling back upon your own subjective experience as your only reference point. I want to point out, however, that we never merely “observe what we observe.” We bring to our observations our expectations, beliefs, biases, and world views, and these serve as perceptual filters that tremendously influence our observations. One of the main purposes of my letter to you was to try to get you to examine some of your biases and beliefs about Whole Foods Market that may be filtering what you are actually observing about us. If you come into our stores (or anywhere else) looking for what you don’t like, it is all-too-easy to find it.

With all due respect, Michael, I also think your response here is pretty weak because the fact is that you didn’t try to contact us. I think if you are going to criticize us publicly to hundreds of thousands of people and are going to compare us unfavorably with Wal-Mart, then you at least owe us the courtesy of talking to us first and hearing our side of the story. You certainly spent plenty of time talking directly to Joel Salatin for the book and didn’t approach him as simply an innocent “consumer.” Quite the opposite: you went and lived at his farm for about a week. That kind of first hand knowledge and experience is the essence of good journalism in my opinion and I think Whole Foods Market also deserved to be treated fairly and with respect.

John Mackey produced chapter and verse supporting his contention that Whole Foods indeed sourced produce locally. Pollan emerges a little battered from the exchange.

Mackey was absolutely right to use a blog as a forum for publishing his response and having this debate. Pollan’s book is exactly the kind of publication that bloggers love. Judging from posts like this Mackey seems to have made his point. He is commended for his transparency. He seems to have spiked the guns of those who were setting Whole Foods up to be a corporate villain in the organic foods arena.

Pew have surveyed US bloggers. Headline: “the blog population has grown to about 12 million American adults, or 8% of adult internet users and that the number of blog readers has jumped to 57 million American adults, or 39% of the online population.”

It’s a pretty astounding statistic.

Chief constable Richard Brunstrom of the North Wales force launched a blog on Monday this week. On BBC’s PM radio programme he said:

“We deliberately didn’t tell anyone about it. We just wanted to do it quietly and see what happened. And look what happened. Two days later I am on national radio talking to you.”

The PR power of blogging, particularly during this time of year, when the domestic news agenda flags, is truly phenomenal.

But Brunstrom is by no means alone. There are many police blogging. “David Copperfield’s” is the best of them, and it links to most of the other good ones.

The BBC’s coverage of this contains the note: “Mr Brunstrom’s blog will be in the form of a frequently-updated online journal.” So. A blog, then.

How do you measure word of mouth? The increasing importance of social networks to brands and advertisers has raised this problem very sharply in the last few weeks. Media owners, pharmaceutical companies, automotive manufacturers all need to know the same thing: how am I doing?

If a brand can establish how it is doing in “word of mouth” in relation to other brands this information can drive decisions about the allocation its marketing or campaign spend.

We would need to agree what a ranking in the word of mouth market means.

In the Market Sentinel methodology there are three possible ways of ranking in word of mouth:

• Buzz (numbers of citations)
  
• Approval (sentiment compared to benchmarked competition)
  
• Authority
  

“Buzz” is chat, pure and simple. Measuring it gives you an indication as to whether something is worth mentioning. Britney Spears has buzz. It ebbs and flows. The weakness of buzz as a measure is that you can be talked about without your product necessarily being purchased, or your value endorsed. Key to consumer brands is the central flaw that not all brands have talk-about-ability. Some products and brands are worthwhile, and do their job well (like car insurance) but they are just kind of boring. That doesn’t mean that they are bad products, or that they aren’t relied on, but it means that using “buzz” to track them is bound to fail.

Approval is better, as it equates to the likelihood of customers to recommend your products. We measure it using the “Net Promoters’ Index” - that is a simple index of how many people promote and how many detract from a product or brand in relation to industry benchmarks.

Authority is best of all, it equates to trust, which means that your marketing messages are more likely to be believed, and it corresponds approximately to Google ranking, since it relies on authorities citing you and linking to you. We measure this using a “Stakeholder Analysis” - an index of all the stakeholders in a topic as to who they view as authoritative.

Here is how we would address the problem of benchmarking a brand in relation to word of mouth:

• Identify the topic in which the brand seeks greater authority
  
• Benchmark its existing authority (conduct a stakeholder analysis)
  
• Identify the key authorities to whom the brand would need to communicate its broader proposition
  
• Profile those authorities in terms of their ego-net (who they link to and by whom they themselves are cited), and in terms of the statistically improbable words they use (i.e. their idiolect or individual language)
  
• Assess the brand’s own “Clarity” (consistency of message on the topic) and “Resonance” (the extent to which the brand’s language is picked up - or ignored - by stakeholders). I will return to these concepts later and examine them in more detail
  
• Then we work with the brand’s communications people to produce high value content designed to appeal to those authorities. This communication material could often be contained in a blog, but could form the kernel of a buzz marketing campaign, or a strategy for offline communications.
  

This is a simple, useful “how to” from Boris Mann on how PR and marketing professionals should interact with bloggers:

• Use permanent links (and make them intuitive)
  
• Provide product information (as much as possible)
  
• Project personality (don’t be a robot)
  

The full link is here.

(via Steve Rubel)

Thomson holidays are blogging. It seems to be a mixture of news, jokes, diary items and other interesting stuff. It’s pretty well designed and it has a brand feel about it, without being too stuffy. There are a lot of useful links. After all the conversations we have had with brand owners who are worried about the bad things that might happen if they blog, it is good to see Thomson diving in. It is a confident performance. [via Suw Charman’s British corporate blogs list]

IPTV agrregation and services company Brightcove has sent up a service for Sony which encourages bloggers to link to music videos. Story here. For me this announcement is an extension of the logic used by Le Monde and by the Guardian - trying to harness bloggers to help you extend the reach of your media brand. It will be successful to the extent that Sony are proactive in using their media assets to build a community around their artists. Their community-aggregation skills will be one of the core value-creating skills of record companies in the era of social media.

An excellent survey of “citizen journalism” and the switch of news consumption to being a) continuous b) online by Stephen Quinn of Deakin University, Australia, writing in Ohmynews. The key stats:

• Internet advertising in the United States jumped 38 percent to a record $3.9 billion in the first quarter of this year as more marketers moved to the Web (IaB, PwC);
  
• UK Internet advertising will surpass newspaper advertising in 2006, at 13.3% of total $23bn. (Guardian);
  
• 39 percent of men aged 18-34 surveyed got their news from the Internet compared with 5 percent who read newspapers (Carnegie Foundation)

Michel Edouard Leclerc, chief executive of French supermarket Leclerc launch on May 22nd 2006 a price comparison website quiestlemoinscher.com (”who’s cheapest?”). Last Wednesday (7th June) a the commercial court of Paris, prompted by competitors (chiefly Carrefour) forced Leclerc to withdraw the site, citing a lack of transparency. Leclerc says he will be back.

Leclerc writes up all his marketing initiatives on his website “De quoi je me mele”, which is both a pun on his initials M.E.L. and means “the things I get up to” (lit. “the things I get mixed up in”).

He calls it a “tribune” means probably translates best as “soapbox” or “platform”. (The blog is to be found here).

Leclerc (above) has taken an original approach to corporate communication and how the web can be used. Leclerci’s rubrick for the website reads as follows:

Imagine an entrepreneur who has ideas and is not afraid to express them. The mainstream media interview him about his company’s results and he becomes the man to talk to for his whole business sector - distribution.

The Internet has opened up new possibilities for the exchange of information in this area and I want to explore them. This is why I have opened [this website] in order to let people who are interested find out more and give their own views.

Topics of discussion on the website include globalisation, pollution from plastic bags (Leclerc banned them in 1995) GM foods. And Leclerc is at or close to the top of Google results in most of these topics. His website has allowed him to take thought leadership in the sector. This approach would not suit everyone - it is probably closest in style to Richard Branson or Stelios in the UK - but it takes on the key strengths of the Internet for communicators, the ability to set an agenda.

An image from the hard-drive of the man who “sold faulty laptop”

This site tells part of the extraordinary story of how one man - Thomas Sawyer - was sold a non-functioning laptop on eBay, failed to get redress from the seller, and devoted his energy and resources to using the internet to damaging Tofangsazan’s reputation.

The laptop seller, Amir Tofangsazan, lives in Enfield, North London. Before he sold the laptop, he used it to store scans of his passport, his and his mother’s banking details and photographs he had surreptitiously taken on the tube of women’s legs. Sawyer started posting these to his blog.

The topic has become a touchstone for many people who are annoyed about dodgy eBay sellers. It has become a kind of viral lynching of Tofangsazan.

What is intriguing about this is that it shows something we have working on with our corporate clients, which is that if there is an existing conversation (eBay fraud) then a single campaign - even one as idiosyncratic as this - can become an internet phenomenon.

The comments section 960 comments! (When I started writing this story it was 831)

There is a wikipedia article here.

The Google search has 40,000+ entries.

Via Antony Mayfield