We published this press release today:

AVIS UK WINS INNOVATION AWARD FOR SOCIAL MEDIA PROJECT

Avis UK has won the SOCAP award for innovation in Customer Service at the National Customer Service awards dinner held in London on 18th September 2007.

Avis UK’s work involved monitoring and benchmarking consumer generated content and making changes to its product and customer service practices in response, culminating in launching the We Try Harder blog. These changes have resulted in big increases in the approval rating for Avis (the Avis Net Approval Index has increased over 200% and remains well ahead of the competition) and key product innovations.

Market Sentinel provides the technology for CGC research and guidance on blog editorial.

Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers said yesterday: “The phenomenal growth of social media over the last few years has left many companies scratching their heads. Many congratulations are due to Eibhlin Payne and Xavier Vallée of Avis UK for demonstrating to others how to use statistical methods to understand social media and develop insights enabling them to forge real links with customers. We are very proud to have contributed to Avis UK’s success in creating a genuine partnership between marketing and customer service. Many thanks are due to Sheila Sang and Caroline Harris who worked so hard in helping Avis launch the We Try Harder blog, to Mathew Vattolil whose analysis drove decision-making and to our partners at Web Liquid, Matt Cronin and David Shiell who had the vision to bring the project to life, to Xavier Vallée and Eibhlin Payne themselves for commissioning the work and to Rob White for his tireless efforts in bringing it to reality”.

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:

Mark Rogers of Market Sentinel is quoted in Dominic Rushe’s piece on corporate blogging.

Companies also fear what their employees might say and that corporate blogs will attract special-interest groups keen to attack a corporation.

A corporate blog is a way of redressing the balance. Most companies have more “authority” about their brand than a blogger, said Rogers. But if a company is failing to communicate with its customers online, the opportunity is there for someone else to fill that gap — and the company may not like what they have to say.

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.

Suw Charman has written a barbed, but far from inaccurate piece about the reluctance of UK companies to blog.

Dell have launched a blog, a bit more than a year after the Dell Hell debacle with Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis, documented in our case study “Measuring the influence of bloggers on corporate reputation“. There have been a few negative comments. Steve Rubel upbraids them for not mentioning Jeff Jarvis. Jeff Jarvis was not impressed, but at least they linked to his raspberry. I can’t help thinking that Dell should be applauded for at least trying. Blogs are hard to get right, particularly for brands, and the humble tone of voice is a good start.

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]

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.

Tomorrow I am on the blogging4business panel in London and talking on the topic of “what blogs are saying about your business”.

So what are blogs saying about your business? In the US, where blogging has become a widespread phenomenon, blogger Eric Mattson has just demonstrated in an anecdotal survey that top US companies are much discussed. [Hat tip to John Cass of Backbone media for the link]

The UK situation is different. Athough the last few months has witnessed a huge growth in the use of community sites like mySpace, the majority of bloggers are either hard-core early adopters, or younger people. That still leaves blogs as a smaller scale phenomenon in the UK than in the US as far as most brands are concerned. Pick a UK-focussed brand like John Menzies and the comment count on Technorati is pretty anaemic. 79 comments in the database, and most cut and pasted from online news sources like Reuters and the Scotsman.

The truth is that for most UK industries the bulk of commentary happens in message boards or in other traditional sites. This kind of commentary is technically harder to get at than blog commentary (Technorati won’t be much help) but it’s also less susceptible to infestation by keyword spammers.

Market Sentinel has a number of automotive industry customers and our automotive database is comparatively light on blogs. The majority of these sources are sites which allow customers to review cars, or simply message boards. For the automotive sector at least, blogs are a rather small part of the story thus far.

This is not to say that the automotive industry shouldn’t itself use blogs to communicate with its consumer base - of course it should. And the most enterprising of the online brands are either doing this already or have plans to do so in the near future. But as far as listening is concerned, brands need to spread their nets a little wider than the blogosphere.

[Update] My colleague at our partner Onalytica Flemming Madsen draws attention to a phenomenon which can be made use of in the blogosphere today, and that is something he calls “statistically improbable links” and which we deliver in a branded form as “Stakeholder Spotlight”. That is to say - what urls are disproportionately linked to by the stakeholders in a particular topic? We have found this to be a fascinating predictor of trends and an early indication of problems. Flemming has identified that the Vodafone stakeholders are highlighting a blogger who has a complaint about data charges. For other Market Sentinel customers we have found that this functionality throws up interesting links to companies that might be considered acquisition targets, with the stakeholder group serving almost as a focus group of what might be considered cool and interesting on the web.

Google has reported that the UK population as a whole now spends more time online than they do watching TV. This is an epochal change for marketers. It means that they must finally get to grips with a medium (the internet) that has remained largely resistant to their wiles.

Think of an online marketing campaign that has impressed you. I bet you that you can’t. Think of the online products that you use and value: iTunes, Amazon.com, Skype, Google. I would bet that you did not find these products as a result of a marketing message. Someone recommended them to you. You may have followed a link on a web page. And if you did I bet that link was contextual. It was not an advertisement.

Old school advertising is good for awareness, but it has not been a major part of the success of internet-era marketing. Internet era marketing is about testimonials, about peer recommendations, about serendipity: stumbling across something interesting whilst looking for something else.

It is no surprise that the way to internet marketing success has been shown by paid search. Paid search has the huge advantage of being contextual. Advertisers choose when to give you their message. They give you their message only when they think you are likely to transact. They are only going to communicate to you if they feel their communication is welcome.

But there are other products waiting in the wings behind paid search. These products, too, will depend on marketers opening a conversation only when they know that a consumer is responsive. It is one reason internet marketers are using our products at Market Sentinel. They want to find out what is being said online in ongoing conversations, conversations that are (or could be) relevant to their product. And then they want to join in with those conversations.

And that joining in process is one of the hardest things to pull off. Years ago, when I was at the BBC, I was one of those responsible (with my current colleague Sheila Sang) for launching the BBC’s message boards. It was an invaluable opportunity to learn about how communities worked. One thing I learnt good and early is that if an outsider comes into a community with an irrelevant marketing message, they will be shunned. It is as if an insurance salesman were to wander into a snug bar and suddenly pitch into a sales spiel in front of eight surprised drinkers. Such a conversation only works if it is relevant. If someone is discussing where to go skiing, and you happen to mention that you know a good place, they will be keen to listen, particularly if you seem to be impartial.

That is why we work with our customers to identify where the appropriate conversations are taking place online, and to identify the authorities. That is the beginning of understanding where a conversation can begin. Is there a strategy for beginning a conversation that always work? No. Conversations of this kind are like pick-up lines, nothing quite works twice. But honesty helps: “Hi I know you like my product because I noticed you talking about it. I am keen to hear your reaction to some new features I am planning to introduce.” This is the strategy that Intuit used to get their QuickBooks blogging strategy underway.

You might call it contextual marketing, and, as a science, it’s in its infancy. We are taking baby steps to figure out how it should work. As ever in this new world of marketing communications, it is going to be all about permission, about honesty and about relevance.

Not the least of the good things at the NewComm Forum event was the chance to meet Jeremiah Owyang of Hitachi Data Systems, author of the 69 business blogging tips a feature he diffidently subtitles “learn from my pain”. Jeremiah’s tips are pretty much the best thing that has been written about corporate blogging so far from the inside.
1. Understand and be able to articulate the concept that “The Participants are taking charge” (Scott McNeally, Sun)

1. Understand and be able to articulate that “Consumers trust other consumer opinions over all others”

2. Understand that a conversation about your market will occur regardless if you participate or not

3. Understand that blogs are nothing special or nothing new. In fact, blog tools are often less sophisticated than most free email services. A blog is just a tool. The key point is that now everyone (esp consumers) can easily publish their opinion, and other can easily find it (other consumers)

4. Business blogging is publishing and participating in the conversation in your market.

5. Listen to the blogosphere: Start listning yourself, or consider hiring a company to monitor and report on the blogosphere. There are a variety of tools that can do this, but this really is part time to full time job.

You can see the results of his learning at Hu Yoshida’s data storage blog, which combines elegance and authority.

Charlene Li gave an interesting and wide-ranging keynote Friday morning at the New Comm Forum. She took a 30,000 feet look at social media, with particular reference to blogging, aiming her sometimes impassioned comments at a broad audience.

“Social media is all about ceding control to build the relationship with the consumer. They won’t put up with anything else, as the processing power has moved to the edge of the network, the consumer has been empowered by it.

“Look at my own situation - I can work anywhere. The rest of my team works remotely from me. I am displaced.

“What has made this possible? Cheap hardware, for one. Have you seen this $200 computer? Incredible. The impact of RSS - I don’t have to go looking for information, I can subscribe to it. It finds me. Sites like Trip advisor[travel reviews], Blogger, Wikipedia, eBay, Google and services like Bit Torrent [file sharing], the Linux operating system show this in action. Technology has moved towards the “people”.

“Like anyone, I trust recommendations from friends and family first, followed by online recommendations way ahead of other sources. Brand loyalty is declining. It is down from 59% to 54% in two years between 2002 and 2004 in Europe. It may not sound like much but 5% over two year is a major decline. The new technology has empowered communities, not institutions.”

Li mentioned as case studies some work done by Umbria about mobile pricing plans, analysing customer complaints online and using them to create a more consumer-friendly offering. She cited the website istockphoto, which derives its inventory from user-generated photos, and mentioned Burpee seeds, who have given their business a huge fillip just by shrewd use of RSS feeds of seasonal offers.

“Brands are being defined by the communities that accept them. For example on Bob Lutz’s famous GM blog, there is a Community-driven conversation about the Solstice” Li reported an exchange between commentators on the blog …

“Guy one: I can’t wait to own a Solstice: it’s a chick magnet of a car

“Guy two: What about us family guys?

“Guy one: Get rid of the kids.

“The phenomenon of Digg [tech-focussed news where the item’s prominence is driven by social bookmarks] derives from the same motive. If you are a corporation, you have to let the customers become the brand. This is what Nike ID have done with their software which lets you design your own shoes, and then encourages you to let other consumers vote for your design. Similarly with CNet, they have taken the decision to window other sites’ content

“From companies I hear from corporations a lot about the risks of ceding control - the fear that the employees and executives will say something bad: ‘We can’t have negative opinions on our site’

“But the point is that constructive criticism should be welcomed. Sure, you don’t need abusive comments, but it is better to have your brand advocates engage you directly with their constructive criticism, than have them do it behind your back. People say: ‘We’ll lose control of the brand’. I say: ‘You already lost control of the brand.’ They say: ‘People will delete the RSS feed.” I say: ‘Do you really want to send unwelcome emails, instead?’ People say: ‘We’ll get sued.’ I think those risks are easily manageable.

“So, how does your company get involved with all this? First: decide how involved you want to be with social computing. At a minimum listen to what is being said in message boards and on the blogs. Test the waters and immerse yourselves in the tools. It’s a new mindset and you are not going to get the hang of it straight away.

“Take the case of Dan Entin: he blogged that he couldn’t find his favourite deodourant (Degree Sport, as it happens). A sharp-eyed Unilever employee spotted the post got in touch, advised him on local stockists and then gave him a box of the stuff. He blogged it, naturally. That is a huge PR win for Unilever.

“I would argue that companies should focus on the relationship, not the technology. It is not so much about blogging or about podcasting … it is about the relationship with the consumer. Technologies will come and go, but the relationships will outlast them.

“For companies my advice is: start small and prove the business case. It’s a mindset: it will take some time. It took eight days to set up the small block blog. If you want to get your feet wet I would suggest that a recruitment blog is worth having. You always want to attract new talent to your company. Or at the very least ensure that your press releases are in RSS, or that when you do an earnings call you make it available as a podcast. You don’t have write new stuff necessarily. You probably have some existing speeches from executives that you can repurpose.

“The key thing to consider is to let you cusomters tell you when you are doing it right and also when you are doing it wrong. And then measure engagement, measure frequency of visit, length of stay, links. And benchmark your position before and afterwards.

“I hear about return on investment: Typepad costs me $15 a month and I have got $1m of business off it in the last year

“In conclusion: what does it all mean:

“Social computing will move into the enterprise. Wikis and blogs are perhaps even more effective internally than they are externally.

“Consumers want to create their own applications. Jeff Bezos said that Web 2.0 was all about computers talking to other computers. That makes it easier for consumers to use applications to create new applications of their own. For example you can take Google maps and overlay something else

“I predict that Community-based political systems will emerge, where people who share common views will seek out candidates to represent them.

“Finally social computing will become like air, as it becomes part of everyone’s experience, it will disappear …”

Two new UK business blogs launched this week, one for Honda and one for Guinness. The context of course is about building brand, but the two blogs are very different in style and content.

The Honda blog, which launched yesterday, encourages Honda enthusiasts to register and share the blog. It’s hosted by 2TalkAbout, which is “a new, independent blog network that lets consumers talk about their favourite topics, products and brands. Honda is the first brand that has decided to join the 2TalkAbout network from the start.” Those adding comments can also give each post a star rating. It’s a novel approach to developing the use of blogs and it will be interesting to watch its success. For myself, I’m not sure I’ll be wanting to read about Honda owners asking other Honda owners whether anyone knows anything about the engine specs for the Type R.

The Guinness blog looks as sumptuous as the product it represents. Posts are made by a variety of members of the Guinness team and range (so far) from how the last Guinness ad was made to musings on St Patrick’s Day. The blog states its purpose as an attempt by the business to let the Guinness team and Guinness drinkers communicate more closely. There are a couple of minor glitches (the home button takes you back to the registration page and the permalinks look a bit scary), but overall I’m guessing Guinness fans will love it, and it ticks the right boxes for what this kind of blog should be: open, transparent, honest, relevant, oh - and interesting.

To Paris yesterday to hear the great David Weinberger, by the special invitation of Guillaume du Gardier, now with Edelman.

David Weinberger was one of the editors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and thus has a legitimate claim to be at the heart of the philosophical shift that underlies the rise of consumer-generated media, and the transition of public relations into “public relationships”.

Weinberger is now at Harvard Law School’s Berkman centre for the Internet and society. As he spoke I made some notes on my PDA. This isn’t everything he said - it is everything that he said that I thought was interesting. So not an impartial account at all - and please mail with corrections!

Weinberger:

“If you want to understand at how the internet has impacted information look at Wikipedia. It has 994,000 articles in English alone. I mean, Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes and contains 65,000 articles. That’s not just because the editors decided there are only 65,000 things in the world that are interesting enough to write articles about. It is because of the sheer costs of paper and printing, and shipping books about the place.

“And the Wikipedia is not edited at all, in the conventional sense. No single person decides what’s in or out. Famously, there are articles about the use of the umlaut in heavy metal - something that would never find its way into a conventional encyclopedia. The Wikipedia approach to knowledge management is that the originators don’t manage it at all. They allow people, members of the public to decide what’s relevant, and what’s not.

“What the Wikipedia is to knowledge management, the blog is to personal expression. Everything is allowed. Tonight, though I would like to talk about what a blog is not. A blog is not about advertising …”

Weinberger used the Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit blog. He pointed out that this was not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not a true expression of someone’s experience. It seemed to revolve around two people arguing which of them liked Juicy Fruit more.

“I mean - even the guy from the advertising agency doesn’t like Juicy Fruit that much … Anyone from Juicy Fruit, here? No. Good. I mean, come on.

“A blog is not about cats. I hear that a lot from people in marketing. People blog about their cats, right? In fact one of my neighbours in Boston really answered that the other day. If I want to blog about my cat, who are you to say that I can’t do that. I should be able to blog about anything that interests me. And in fact, there are many blogs about cats. But that is not the point. A blog is about whatever I want it to be about. It is my agenda, and not yours.

“A blog is not about journalism … although some journalists blog and some bloggers are increasingly being hired as stringers by the news media. The worlds of blogging and journalism overlap, but they are distinct. Bloggers distrust journalists because they suspect them of being corporate whores serving some kind of hidden agenda from the news organisation’s proprietor. Journalists distrust bloggers because they suspect bloggers don’t check their facts (right! and newspapers do, I suppose?) and that they are single issue merchants and cranks.

“Blogging is not about 1 to 1 marketing. 1 to 1 marketing in blogs often doesn’t work, because one of the 1’s isn’t really a 1. It is a big corporation. How can I have a conversation with Wrigley’s, or with Ford? The fact is that blogging is about a conversation. Blogging is a new social space. My weblog is me. It is my body in the new public space.

“One of the key things about blogging which distinguishes it from the stuff that’s gone before - the marketing messages on the one hand, and the conventional journalism on the other - is the freedom to write badly, the freedom to make mistakes. Making mistakes is a sign of authenticity. It is a sign of being human. Of course we are all going to make mistakes. It establishes intimacy. And on the internet pretty good may be good enough. “

Weinberger went on to talk about links:

“Links are little acts of generosity. They are saying: don’t stay on this site, visit this other site. The web is based on links. The web is links. But look at the home page of the New York Times (registration required). It only links to itself - oh, and to advertisers. Journalists talk about bloggers being narcissistic. That’s narcissism. The New York Times home page.

“In the old model, businesses thought of themselves like a fort. They controlled their brand, they released only the information they wanted. But now the fort has holes in the walls. People are having conversations about those companies that the companies can’t control. The fortress business model has been overtaken. Now our customers know more about our business than we do. And the customers trust other customers to tell them about our business more than they do the marketers. You cannot control your customers by the selective release of information. Customers are not there to be managed. We trust Google, craigslist, Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwarz because they are there for us. They are for us.”

Weinberger talked about Howard Dean’s election campaign, which he was involved with as an election strategist.

“The thing that characterised the Dean campaign was its openness, the sense of involvement that it generated. And typical of that was the way that they got this 31 year old kid Matthew Gross blogging. Traditionally the campaign messages are tightly controlled by the candidate and by the press officer. This time Matthew Gross just blogged the whole campaign, talked about it the way he saw it. It caused a sensation, got huge buzz.”

Weinberger on branding:

“Branding - as a metaphor - is drawn from what you do to a cow with a red hot iron. And that is still - mostly - the way it is done. Branding is done by someone to your customers, the way you might brand a cow.

“And yet business is evolving. You start with brand and you move towards the idea of reputation and then the idea of relationship. That means that every business is going to be involved in blogging one way or another.”

Weinberger on trust:

“Blogging is best - or at least very good - if taken internally. The blogosphere operates as a vast, amorphous focus group - a defocus group. It creates a sense of trust. I feel that this is my company. That is like the relationship I have with Google. I feel that Google is my company, although I don’t own stock. “

What should companies do?

“Public relations needs to turn into ‘public relationships’. Companies need to listen, to audit, to engage, to give up control to their employees. Companies need to develop a blogging policy - not rocket science, just saying that blogging employees need to observe the same standards as anyone else - keep corporate secrets, don’t run down the corporation. Fundamentally companies must try to sound like a human being, to be like a human being. Engage, don’t defend, be transparent, and link, link, link, link, link. “

What mistakes do companies make?

“You don’t know more than your customers. Your customers know more than you. Don’t be boring. Take risks. Blogging is about opportunity, about connectedness, about breaking down the walls.”

Weinberger then fielded a few questions. What would he say to corporations who worried about loss of control:

“You would better ask: do you want people to talk about you? That is the question. If you do, you should blog.

“Thinking we were in control was magical thinking, it was delusional. People have always talked about us, we were just deaf.”

Forget Holby City and Casualty, two blogs tell us what it’s really like to work for the ambulance services - the London Ambulance Service to be more precise.

Tom Reynolds is an Emergency Medical Technician. His Random Acts of Reality (Trying to kill as few people as possible…) tells us about life as part of an ambulance crew in London’s busy east end. NeeNaw is written by Mark Myers, who’s an Emergency Medical Dispatcher (the person on the other end of the phone when you dial 999).

Their thoughts give an astonishingly fresh view on the world in which most of us are consumers, and about which many of us have complaints, preconceptions and opinions. Who makes the decisions about how long we wait for an ambulance? How could it be done better? What’s it like to be on the receiving end of the public at its worst - ill, frightened, angry, unfamiliar with the system.

Both the blogs recently won awards in the 2005 Medical Weblogs Awards, Best Medical Blog going to Random Acts of Reality and Nee Naw emerging as Best New Medical Blog. Just in case you were still wondering if they really make a good read, Reynolds’ now has a publishing contract through The Friday Project. OK, maybe getting published isn’t perfect proof of being worthwhile reading, but in this particular case, it seems a good validation for this very readable work.

Maybe I’ll even be a little less quick to criticise and more willing to ask what I can do to make things work better as and when I’m next brought face to face with the seemingly impenetrable policies of the NHS.

Technorati have launched a mode button on their search which allows the user to sort by authority. They are trying to solve a problem that bedevils the consumer blog search companies: how to filter out spam results. If spammers are targetting keywords - last week we saw a blog targeting the christian name “Alan” - then live searches become gradually less and less effective. One approach is to say that if a blog has links back to it, it has authority. Increase the number of links and you increase the authority. The idea depends on links having a certain value.

This was the approach taken to internet search by Altavista around 1997-98. Altavista favoured sites with lots of links over sites with fewer. It worked for a while and made Altavista the most effective internet search engine. Then the spammers discovered that links could be spammed just as effectively as keywords and the Altavista approach failed. The problem is that a link does not have a universal value. A link from a spam site has less value than a link from the New York Times.

This is the weakness of the current Technorati approach. A full analysis of the weakness of the Technorati system can be found by our partner Flemming Madsen here.

The NMA this week quotes some interesting case studies about how brands have been experimenting with blog-based marketing in the US.

Levi’s, Nokia, Audi and Budget Car Rentals all ran campaigns on blogs last year, of which Budget’s was probably the most fun, rejuvenating the slightly tired format of the online treasure hunt by posting daily video clues on a blog, linked to stickers placed around US cities (nudged on by a tempting prize of $160,000). Budget sensibly hired BL Ochman to create the campaign, which was run exclusively through bloggers and blogs.

Blogvertising looks like it can offer significant value to brands - if they get it right. Budget’s low-cost campaign drove 20,000 unique visitors an hour to their blog, with several thousand registering to play. The campaign was also in the upper quartile in terms of click-throughs. Audi used just 0.5% of its advertising budget on blog ads, which drove 29% of traffic to its site.

With advertising on bulletin boards and chat rooms generally spurned, it may be hard for marketers and advertisers to get their heads around just how different blogs can be. Every decent branding book worth its salt is clearly tells businesses to stop pushing their messages out and to start pulling their consumers in. Blogging is going to play a huge role in this. As ever, the trick will be getting it right - a challenge for the innovators, but tough in an industry that’s long had the monopoly of owning the message.

I hear a lot of talk about what - if anything - makes a good corporate blog. Not surprisingly, I’m a firm believer that a blog, if managed well, is a brilliant way for companies to talk to their customers. Many of us are passionate advocates of the companies we work for (and will happily bore our friends to prove it). What better way to tell people about the issues faced by a company, the challenges, changes, improvements, benefits, triumphs and disasters, than to blog about it?

The risk is that precisely because there is so much potential in blogging (not even thinking about how google-friendly blogs can be), that this can be seen as a simple marketing tool - and used as such.

Blogs don’t work like that. We don’t watch TV to see the ads, we won’t read a blog to get a pure marketing message.

To be successful, blogs have to be personal, interesting - and truthful!

It’s just plain offensive to presume that we’ll be duped by phoney characters pretending to blog. The Cillit Bang spam on Tom Coate’s blog is perhaps the most extreme example, but others have failed too, for example L’Oreal failed (and learned) with their phony “Claire” blog in France. To quote Shel Israel on the story ‘in the blogosphere you should use only true stories unless you have masochistic tendencies.’

Success depends on transparency, a strong advocate, a clear statement of intent - and some interesting stories to tell. Whether that comes from one person or a team, you need to know who’s talking to you and why.

Bob Lutz shows the way with his Fastlane blog. As Vice Chairman of General Motors, his blog makes use of podcasts, video and of course regular blogging, to tell you what’s driving Bob and his team this week. While I’d have to doubt that Bob writes all his own posts, I certainly believe that the enthusiasm and voice are his. And Bob’s fanclub is now out and cheering for GM alongside him.