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.

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.

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.

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 …”

We are working with a customer in the automotive sector looking at commentary in both message boards and blogs. It has brought out some interesting characteristics of web users. The volume of commentary in blogs is somewhat lower, and that in message boards somewhat higher than we had anticipated.

I am not aware of any research which compares blog-writers with message board contributors. It seems to us that there are distinct contrasts. Bloggers tend to solitary, opinionated, contrarian, message board contributors are friendly, clubbable and consensus-seeking. Bloggers are cats and message board contributors are dogs. Not very scientific, I know. I am always quoting some Delahaye research which showed that 23% of blog comments are negative and only 11% of message board comments. Previously I had assumed that this was because of the nature of the conversation. The blog is a monologue (with interjections) and the message board is a dialogue, or even a public meeting. Now I am beginning to think the differences go deeper.

We will look for chapter and verse.

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.

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)

Dell used to have a reputation for quality, convenience and price, combined with peace of mind, thanks to their expensive, but reliable customer support. They made an emotional connection with the PC buyer.

Their recent woes are again highlighted by Business Week. This is more than a “PR” or even a “Customer Services” story. Dell have lost the emotional connection with their buyers due to their failure to deliver on their promises. Blogger Jeff Jarvis has been instrumental in bringing to wider notice a systematic and deep-seated malaise in Dell’s quality assurance and customer service. Plenty of people had issues before Jeff did, and continue to have them today. Read the comments at the bottom of the Business Week story for evidence. Jeff was simply responsible for bringing the issue in front of the mainstream media. Here at Market Sentinel we are quick to bang the drum for blog monitoring, web watching and encouraging companies to use the right tools to respond to PR issues, but in this case to reestablish the emotional connection they have lost Dell have to fix the problem of underdelivery first and then talk about it in the blogs and the forums.

It is significant to note that Dell’s stock price is down, due to stalled growth. The weight of negative commentary coming out of messageboards and blogs has yet again proved to be a reliable leading indicator of stock price. If you would like to benchmark your own company or someone else against its competitors contact us to hear about Market Sentinel’s “Net Promoters” index - based on the work of Frederick Reichheld - we can help you establish whose stock you should be buying, and whose you should be selling.

Mark Rogers is interviewed by Guillaume du Gardier of Blogging Planet in a podcast about online visibility, brand auditing and benchmarking, and brand response.

Apple have admitted that there are problems with screen quality on the new Apple Nano and offered a product replacement programme. Despite retailers criticising the company’s stance on the issue as “arrogant”, this action was somewhat delayed. Commentators attributed Apple’s decision to the campaign by Matthew Peterson’s “flawed music player” which had created negative buzz about the product in the loyal Apple community.

Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers will be addressing the IAB’s Power to the Consumer seminar in London, UK, on Thursday 15th September 2005.

He will discussing the new options that blogging offers companies wanting to get messages about themselves to the consumers, and the pitfalls that lie in wait for companies who are slow to monitor and respond to blog and message board commentary.

Chris Edwards has published a long and thoughtful piece about our Search is brand white paper.

He makes one point that calls for a clarification - yes the stats were UK only. We are planning a wider survey in due course.

He also makes two points which call for a response:

1) the report counted everything that was might be seen as damaging to the brand as “negative”. He mentions the fact that a search on Dairylea brought up a reference to an historic product recall. This is true. We assumed that anything that would diminish the public perception of the brand was negative.

2) Chris questions whether search engine optimisation and blogging are enough when a brand is deep in the mire, as in the case of the Kryptonite lock. We would answer that the Kryptonite case and the recent issues with Land Rover instead demonstrate a couple of important things:

a brand under attack in the blogosphere has to respond early. If a blogger has raised a valid problem, then it is important not to ignore the problem and hope the blogger will get bored and desist. Blog attacks are public and remain on search engines forever. If the problem is a real one, others will find the attack and link to it.

the brand has to address the problem. There is no point in planning a sophisticated Google-bombing, SEO-ed up to the gills, widely syndicated response that doesn’t take away the original pain. Only if action has been taken on the problem, and the company has publicised that action, will the links go to the new source of authority. For example the “how to get a cash refund for my Kryptonite lock” page.

We would argue that SEO and blogging are both useful tools in making a corporate response public. If there is a problem that effects a small number of consumers, then the brand has nothing to lose by creating a well-indexed page which comes up on Google when a description of that problem is entered as a search term, and making sure that all stakeholders in the company know about that page. Ideally it would be part of an FAQ.

Blogging is an informal way of dealing with issues major and minor and getting the word out. “We screwed up. We have decided to give you all your money back or offer you a free upgrade. Here is what you do. Email us here if you are stuck. By the way, we are building a better version of the product applying the lessons of this experience.” This is an approach that is much more likely to win back lost trust and loyalty than putting out a press release written in legalese, or Google-bombing your detractors.

Market Sentinel is currently pitching to a large company with a prominent detractor. Two thirds of the traffic his campaigning site is getting, he says, comes from people putting the words “[product] problems” or “[product] complaints” into Google.

The company’s customer service FAQ is absent from the top ten results of this search.

This effectively means that the detractor is doing the job of customer service for the company. He is qualifying the customer service experience, and providing the answers to the consumers. This is not a healthy situation for the company concerned.

This is anecdotal evidence for something we all experience. A couple of days back I hired a Smart car. The highly-sophisticated, semi-automatic gearbox stalled and left me marooned in teeming rain in heavy traffic. The rental company couldn’t explain the problem and struggled to find me with a replacement vehicle. When I came home I put “Smart Car” gearbox problem into Google and found

http://www.atomised.org/smartcar/faq.php

Yes, it’s the unofficial FAQ - not authorised by Mercedes but highly useful and entertaining. It turns out that either I wasn’t pressing the brake, or the brake microswitch was faulty. Good for me to know, good for the rental guy to know.

Brand owners have two options to make good use of of customers (and maybe resellers) putting their problems into Google:

1) provide a highly-functional, highly indexed FAQ

2) find a way of harnessing their community of users to provide this kind of customer service (think http://share.skype.com)

Neville Hobson alerts us that Adrian Melrose has done a deal with Land Rover and is offering them the use of www.haveyoursay.com to use as a customer feedback forum. Land Rover’s Customer service chief Mike Mulholland admitted honestly that they have not been across online issues. It is a challenge for the guys there and a big opportunity for them if they choose to accept it.

They now have a willing audience of bloggers and blog-readers who know about the issue and are waiting for them to respond. If they take their courage in their hands, jump in and start talking to their customers, ideally via a corporate blog, they will reap a huge benefit in positive PR.

In the interests of openness I should admit that when this story blew up last week I got in touch with Mark Foster, their corporate affairs manager, and pitched him the Market Sentinel web monitoring and response service. The 700 visitors a day Adrian Melrose’s blog was getting represented (according to the calculations of our search optimisation partner Weboptimiser that 25% of the total Land Rover traffic via search engines and more than 100% of the “Land Rover Discovery” traffic. Proof, if proof were needed that, as our white paper points out, a blogger with a tiny budget but a big grievance can out market a very big brand in very little time.

However, now that Land Rover have the ear of thousands of interested and connected customers, they have un unrepeatable opportunity to change the climate of opinion about them, as they have started doing with Mike Mulholland’s response. As vlandro_1.php”>Dennis Howlett points out, a turned-round customer can be an amazing advocate.

via Noisefilter. Larissa Bannister reviews the threats to brands from bloggers in a Campaign article, mentioning Market Sentinel’s work to monitor this and to help companies deal with it.

Online PR gurus Shel Holtz and Steve Rubel have linked to our white paper Search is Brand dealing with the influence of online detractors and methodologies for coping.

Rubel suggests that one way forward is pointed by CommonCraft who deliberately targeted a #1 Google slot for “weblogs and business” and achieved it. Commentators on Micropersuasion suggest that this approach becomes more difficult the larger your brand is.

This is true, but Search is Brand shows that you can target smaller search phrases successfully, even if you are a big brand - like Madonna! The report shows how she could optimise her website if there were rumours of marital problems with Guy Ritchie, for example.

To take a theoretical example, Madonna might want to optimise her web site for the phrase ‘Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce’, and point people to positive content on the site that emphasises how happy she and Guy are, having recently renewed their wedding vows. Then, should the marriage hit the rocks, and more people start making the search ‘Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce’, the site content can be updated to give her side of the story ahead of the celebrity gossip sites which might not be so positive and promoted via the paid-for listings.

Constantin Basturea writes drawing our attention to a piece by Danny Sullivan in Search Engine Watch querying the basis of our recent survey. It’s a point that’s echoed here with the suggestion that might have skewed the results.

Danny Sullivan repeats the searches for the world and gets different results, but then wonders if we used Google UK. This was clearly stated in our survey. It was a survey of ACNielsen’s top 50 UK grocery brands and “Google UK’s top ten search results” as the Net Imperative piece Danny linked to makes clear. The brands are in the main UK brands, like Kingsmill Bread.

It would be useful to repeat the process for the US and for the world.

(Incidentally: the survey date was 6th June. Market Sentinel repeated the exercise just before the publication of the press release and white paper and got broadly similar results, but they do change from day to day.)

Smartapps - a blogger with a complaint about Land Rover has deliberately used his blog to target Land Rover and their PR Harrison Cowley, when direct approaches failed. He cites Market Sentinel and Weboptimiser’s white paper supporting our estimation that blogs are a dangerous weapon for disgruntled consumers to wield against brands and estimates that he is getting 700 visitors a day - most coming from search engines.

Market Sentinel and Weboptimiser have collaborated on a white paper Search is Brand.

Our aim was to provide a useful survey for PROs of the challenges posed to brands by online detractors, and to outline a simple toolkit:

Audit - find out what people are saying about you, and where the issues are online;

Benchmark - establish how your performance compares with your competition;

Optimise your message - make sure your own web presence says what you need it to say and is indexable by search engines;

Respond - go into the blogosphere yourself, either by responding to your critics directly or indirectly, or by establishing a corporate blog;

Monitor - review your progress against your benchmarks.

Your feedback on this white paper would be very welcome.

Grootie posts an image of the Elvis-shaped bread that provoked the attack on Kingsmill Bread, mentioned in our recent survey on online detractors.