I am addressing a CBI conference this week in Birmingham, UK, where the agenda is to discuss Crisis Management and digital media.

When we established Market Sentinel two years ago we thought that online monitoring and response would be a leading part of crisis management. As time has gone on and we have learnt more about crisis response, we now have a much clearer idea of what works and what does not. Onlinetools have a part to play, but they are more effective in crisis prevention and in dealing with the aftermath of a crisis than they are in managing the crisis itself.

The nature of a crisis

A crisis rarely comes out of the blue. Normally it is something which was previously an “issue” - poor earnings, a problem with a product, a safety worry - which suddenly flares up. In principle the web is a great medium for addressing such issues before they get to the crisis stage, but in practice this rarely happens (more on that below).

When such crises arise the management of a company has an imperative first to act and only then to speak. When they speak they do well to speak to the nearest mass media, radio, TV and print - ideally simultaneously. Such statements should of course be carried on the website or blogsite, but that is not the first outlet for them. Most media outlets will put the full text on their news websites in any case.

When a crisis happens the senior management of a company would naturally be well advised to monitor the response to their words. PR company Weber Shandwick recently reported that a large majority (61%) of business executives were sceptical about responding to bloggers, even if they had their facts wrong. They instead highlighted fixing the underlying problem. The communications professionals should perhaps be exercised by the response to the message, but in practice - again - their time is better spent talking personally to key stakeholders, answering questions and getting the message out.

There is, however, a huge opportunity for using the web to speak directly and in detail to smaller stakeholders where call centres can simply not cope. For example - is your laptop battery one of those which is likely to explode? Here is a link to the webpage.

The nature of the web

The web is an accretive, not a narrative medium. It helps to think of the web as a palimpsest of information, where new information does not quite efface old information, but gradually becomes more prominent, thanks to the impact of new links, new ways of looking at the old information.

Search engines react to changes in corporate reputation only slowly, as the consensus around a topic changes over time. Google indexes only part of the web, and indexes disproportionately the pages that change frequently. Often the key pages in corporate reputation management belong to influential but staid bodies like institutes of safety, or regulators, or tax authorities.

This means that it is only when the immediate firefighting of the crisis is out of the way that the web comes into its own. Perhaps the brand has sustained some damage. How much damage and from whom? Who needs persuading of the error of their information?

This is the time when the tools that could usefully have been deployed earlier, in the pre-crisis, issue management phase of the problem can be deployed. Here it is useful to benchmark corporate reputation in relation to an issue, to identify key stakeholders who need to be communicated with, on or offline, to monitor those stakeholders, to analyse their own networks of influence and to work at understanding how knowledge flows through the group.

So, I am in the lucky position of not having a crisis on my hands, what should I do? First: write down the issues that might become crises; second; note what I am doing to keep an eye on them from a communications perspective; third: ensure that I know who the key authorities are in relation to these issues. Understand them, listen to them, monitor them. When they start talking about these issues, you know that the issue has moved one step closer to becoming a crisis, but you also know where to address news of your response.

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.

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.

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)

A mile and a half up the road from our office in London is an area - Borough - which has undergone huge investment over the last few years. There are plans for even greater development, including constructing the tallest building in Europe, the Shard of Glass, designed by the man who co-designed the Pompidou Centre, Renzo Piano.

A search on Google for Shard of Glass reveals some interesting things about how brands function online. There is an official site for the Shard of Glass, but it has the unintuitive name www.shardlondonbridge.com and is not to be found on the first page of results. The number one result is a website called www.shardofglass.co.uk. This is the unofficial website for the Shard of Glass, built by James Hatts, the man behind the local community site www.london-se1.co.uk, home of a thriving message board about local issues.

What else is on the Google front page? A spoof website about ice lollies that contain “shards o’ glass”, news coverage of the project’s announcement, a book called Shard of glass, a software company called Shard of Glass studios … you get the picture.

Why is the community site result number one?

• It has an intuitive url
  
• It benefits from a large number of contextual links including links from influential sites like dmoz
  

The community site is number one despite consisting of a news story and little other information. Why is that?

Well, let’s look at the official site. This contains beautiful panoramas of the site, location maps, statistics - a smorgasboard of relevant information.

BUT search engine crawlers see less than fifty words of this. Here are those words:

“Home A Vertical City Timeline Renzo Piano Image Gallery Development Team Contacts Information You need flash to view this. State-of-the-art office space Efficient, flexible floor plates from 14,456 sq ft (1343 m²) to 31,473 sq ft (2,921m²) to let. More info Truly mixed use A truly mixed use vertical city in one building. More info T&Cs Sitemap”

Notice the absence of the phrase “Shard of glass”. Notice the presence of the phrase “you need flash to view this”.

There is no interactivity in the official website, no fresh content, no reason for the crawlers to visit it. (The news page is as invisible as all the rest, and without syndication, noone else will be carrying its headlines). Its links are partly from professional partners and partly internal.

I do not write about this because this corporate site is particularly worse than any other websites. A search engine optimisation expert last week (the largest in the UK) informed us that only 3% of websites are accessible to the search engines. But the two Shard of glass websites neatly symbolise the problems with brand websites. They are too often invisible online because of poor design, and this weakens the underlying brand. The Shard clearly has a community of stakeholders which lives around it, is interested in it, part of which lives at http://www.london-se1.co.uk. If, during the lifetime of the project, there is a controversy about its development, or any issue on which it needs the support of its stakeholders, it has no links with them. It is marooned, isolated. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. The Shard and other brands, can reach out into their communities of stakeholders. To do so is not just good politics, it is good business.

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.

A very good pull-together on how to respond to negative blogs from the folks at Multi-Channel Merchant. It suggests that a good initial response is to monitor what is being said, and recommends a thoughtful approach to response. Here are some excellent, clear rules on how to blog, courtesy of Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts:

1. Create a “safe haven” for employees to experiment with blogging. Set up a private blog on your intranet or extranet, or start a blog that’s password-protected. Then offer access to that test to a selected audience. Your inexperienced bloggers will feel more comfortable knowing that all your customers and competitors are not watching their every move.
2. Decide on a permanent home for your blog. The Web address you choose should be one that you will be happy with for years to come. Remember that it will become difficult to switch blog services if you allow the service’s name to be part of your URL. Ehobbies.blogs.com, backcountryblog.blogspot.com, and sethgodin.typepad.com are all examples of blogs that are forever wedded to their blog platform, for better or for worse. If they switch platforms, all the links they’ve earned will be unavailable to their new blog. Links are the lifeblood of your search engine visibility, so the significance of this cannot be overstated.
3. Select a scalable, flexible, and user-friendly blog platform. There are so many solutions to choose from! Some are hosted services, such as TypePad, Blogger, and WordPress.com. Some are software packages that you install on your Web server, such as WordPress, Drupal, or Movable Type. You can pore over comparison charts (such as the one at www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blogsoftwarecomparison.cfm), though I suggest you simply go with WordPress (the software package, not to be confused with the hosted service at WordPress.com). WordPress is free, so the price is right. It’s highly configurable, since it’s open source, and it has a plethora of free, useful plug-ins written for it.
4. Decide on a posting schedule. Try to post at least three times a week. Allow several hours per week for this. I typically spend two to three hours a week blogging. Don’t hire a ghostwriter for your blog, or you’ll get slammed by bloggers for lack of transparency (an unwritten rule in the blogosphere). As far as retaining readers, recency is more important than frequency. A couple weeks of inactivity makes the reader feel like nobody’s home. Conversely, having the latest post be only a day old makes the blog appear “fresh.”
5. Build relationships with respected bloggers. Not only will they be more likely to link to you, but they will also offer advice and bolster your street cred. Posting thoughtful comments on their blogs is only the first step. Attend blogger conferences such as BlogOn and Blog Business Summit and meet bloggers in person. Keep the dialogue going through e-mail and through phone or Skype conversations. Become an evangelist, and you will really get them on your side.

Julian Smith of Jupiter Research highlights the increasing influence of blogs in a piece for the BBC website in the context of the WeMedia forum. He mentions Market Sentinel’s Dell case study as an example of evidence showing that bloggers can be influential.

“For marketers,” Smith writes, “this has the potential to significantly impact brand communications if consumer content refers to experiences with products or services that are incongruous and misaligned with official marketing messages.

“When a company’s marketing story differs from the one being told by online consumers, a credibility gap will emerge that could have dire consequences on brand perception and favourability. “

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.

Citing blog traffic, the monitoring company Cymfony points out developing problems with Citibank: customers who can’t use their debit cards to withdraw cash. Cymfony chides Citibank for not commenting. But Citibank respond. They explain that they have been scammed in some way. They had to act before they talked about it, apparently. This new communications revolution puts a lot of pressure on companies to manage their crises online. One gets a strong sense that few - not just Citibank - have the resources in place just yet.

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 …”

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.”

Michael Nutley makes some interesting points about the viral power of blogs in this week’s NMA.

‘In the early days of blogging, it was all about an individual voice - using the Web to publish your journal. As the number of blogs has risen, their function has changed, becoming less about micro-publishing and more about being part of a network. As well as generating unique content, bloggers are increasingly directing their readers to stuff they find interesting elsewhere on the Web or in other media. Add to this the effect that name bloggers have in attracting information from other people, not necessarily bloggers themselves, and what emerges is an incredibly powerful filtering and reference tool.’

Taking music as an example, Nutley goes on to cite the power of the blog in introducing new audiences to unknown bands (taking Arctic Monkeys as a case in point), comparing this revolution with its peer-to-peer downloads predecessor.

Echoing the past, it appears that the traditional marketers in the music industry are not willing to engage with this powerful new influence. However, there can be little doubt that in a broadband world, bloggers will be wielding increasing influence which PR and marketing should not ignore.

Intelliseek and Edelman have joined forces to publish The Rise of Employee Bloggers, a paper advising marketers and business professionals about the blogging phenomenon.

The paper lists the benefits of streamlining email communications through a group blog, recording and sharing experiences, and customer feedback among the advantages of employee blogging. The paper also stresses the value of introducing a Blogging Policy to protect companies and employees from potential problems caused by unthinking - or calculated - threats to brand.

As the riots continue across France, the UMP party of prime minister interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy has created a stir by purchasing keywords like “riots” and “violence” on Google AdWords, and placing a political advertisement there. The ad is at the top of the paid search and leads to an _AcgBAQ&num=1&q=http://www.u-m-p.org/site/soutien.php”>online petition in support of M. Sarkozy, who is a candidate for the French presidency. Controversy has surrounded the fact that one of the words the agency has purchased is “racaille” - or scum - the contemptuous term Sarkozy used of the rioters.

The campaign is the work of French agency L’enchanteur des nouveaux médias. It will set a powerful precedent.

An article in the New York Times (requires free registration or use Bugmenot for a one-time password) profiles how Wal-Mart have taken on their detractors with a pro-active PR campaign, run by a number of ex political campaigners.

The PR campaign emphasises the Wal-Mart positives (good value, local employment) and looks to off-set a campaign of detraction from pressure groups like Wal-Mart Watch, run in part by trade unions who oppose the company’s employment practices and who cannot get recognition from the company. (Note their website’s heavy use of email newsletters, syndicated news, its blog and comment pages) The trigger is a new documentary entitled “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” by Robert Greenwald. The documentary looks systematically at Wal-Mart negatives - the effect on smaller local businesses of a Wal-Mart opening up, their healthcare policies and employment policies.

Key quotes:

A confidential 2004 report prepared by McKinsey & Company for Wal-Mart, and made public by Wal-Mart Watch, found that 2 percent to 8 percent of Wal-Mart consumers surveyed have ceased shopping at the chain because of “negative press they have heard.”

To keep up with its critics, Wal-Mart “has to run a campaign,” said Robert McAdam, a former political strategist at the Tobacco Institute who now oversees Wal-Mart’s corporate communications. “It’s simply nonsense for us to let some of these attacks go without a response.”

The impact of the negative sentiment in slowing Wal-Mart’s growth is a classical demonstration of Frederick Reichheld’s net promoters theory. This theory maintains that as the proportion of your detractors grow, your growth is curtailed and that a decline in your net promoters index (the number of your promoters minus your detractors) is strongly predictive of a stock price decline.

It would be interesting to track the impact of Wal-Mart campaign, which is run by Edelman on Wal-Mart’s online net promoters index.

Thanks to Flemming Madsen of Onalytica who suggested we blogged this.

An interesting panel met last Thursday at the Council of Public Relations Concerns Critical Issues Forum to discuss issues around harnessing the power of developments such as blogs, wikis and podcasts as part of a media relations strategy.

The panel was moderated by Jonah Bloom, executive editor, Advertising Age, with panelists Stephen Baker, senior writer for BusinessWeek and co-author of the Blogspotting blog; Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman Public Relations, Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, and Shel Holtz, principal, Holtz Communication + Technology. The discussion has now been published in this podcast.

One striking element to come up was the importance of building internal concensus within a company before publishing in formats such as blogs or wikis. With a move away from what was described as ‘monologue’ advertising deemed vital, it was seen as important to give genuine ownership to key stakeholders, ensuring support for a new approach is based on full understanding from across the company.

Forbes magazine has devoted a sensational cover story to bloggers who set out to damage people and brands. Since the piece itself is password-protected, here is how it kicks off:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It’s not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can’t even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM’s Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims–even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

Forbes’s writer Daniel Lyons point out that first amendment rights protect many writers who are simply out to settle scores, or in the case of “Pamela Jones” - the writer of Groklaw - take a partisan line on SCO’s case against IBM over Linux. Lyons suggests that Jones may be an IBM mouthpiece.

The article is written in a sensational flack versus counter-flack style, but both it and the indignant response from bloggers are worth a read.

(via Micropersuasion)

News this week that Andy Hayler of Kalido is blogging about enterprise software. Simon Rogers of Market Sentinel comments that this is good stuff for the database warehousing geek. The company behind it are our friends at the award-winning tech PR Brands2Life. There’s a lot to be said for this blog:
- It has Andy Hayler’s own unique voice;
- It addresses a distinct and useful agenda;
- It is rich in content that addresses the market in question, which should help it on search engines.
The use of the Blogger domain will make tracking traffic and inbound links difficult. It also runs the risk of getting caught up in Google’s anti-spam measures. But kudos to Kalido for getting blogging.