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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Rogers is going to be at SES London this week, giving a talk about how brands can make sure that they get their own messages out online, even (or especially) during major crises. If you plan to be there and would like to meet up, please get in touch through the website or call the office on +44 (0) 20 7793 1575.

When we first speak with a brand manager or a PR person they normally ask us these questions:

“What are people saying about my brand in blogs?”

“Can you help me monitor that?”

We say: we can help you monitor blogs, but first you need to do to help us define the questions you want answered. Monitoring blogs, review sites and messageboards on its own gives you large quantities of information, but few answers that can help your business. It is easier to make a business case for spending on online research and analysis if you can be pretty specific about the question that you need to have answered and about the relationship between that question and the business’s bottom line.  These are the questions that we suggest the client starts with: Question 1: “Why do people choose my product?”

Question 2: “Why do people choose my competitor’s product?”

Question 3: “Why do people recommend my product to their friends?”

Question 4: “Why do people recommend my competitor’s product to their friends?”

Questions 1 and 2 may seem at first blush to resemble questions 3 and 4. But actually they are dissimilar. When someone recommends a product they will often choose a reason that says something about themselves. People will rarely say: “I chose this product because it’s cheapest”, but they may often say: “I chose this product because I care about the environment”. Conversely, why people actually buy a product is often around a combination of product features, reputation and price.

(Reputation and price are in some measure inversely related. Products with good reputations generally achieve that reputation by good service. Good service costs money and although consumers are tempted by cheap offers, they know that “free broadband” generally carries a cost in poor customer support. We recently completed some detailed research in this area which shows that brands with good customer support can keep their prices higher for longer than their competitors. )

All these questions are answerable from online research, and we can put numbers against the characterisitics of a product which are most likely to drive adoption. Those numbers have direct benefit to a key hiearchy of stakeholders within the company:

a) the product managers suddenly know which aspects of the product are key to marketing success (and which need most attention);

b) the marketing managers know what is the key product strength to push in relation to the corresponding weakness of a rival’s product;

c) the word-of-mouth marketers and PRs know which messages are most likely to drive viral adoption amongst users and can devise appropriate campaigns.

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:

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.

A client, reviewing some of the sentiment scores on the net approval work we have been doing for them recently asked: “why are these people so negative? We don’t get these scores from our off-line net promoters work.”

The client was identifying a pattern we see quite regularly. Online commentary is more negative than off-line. Why? There is no systematic answer to this question, but if you were to attempt an answer you would divide it into three sections:

The squeaky wheel. People are likely to post on a blog or message board or a consumer review site when they have a reason to. The post can often be prompted by a problem they wish to solve, for example - difficulty with the product - if a car won’t start or a program won’t install. Because of this, and given the likelihood that the problem may persist, complaints about the product and the brand are likely by-products of a web session.

Monologue is more negative than dialogue. Research we have previously published  refers to work done by Delahaye pointing out that blogs are more negative that messageboards. 23% of blog commentary is negative, compared to 11% of message board commentary. The reason? People tend to be more measured, more polite face to face than they are in monologue. They do not make such bold, inflammatory “look at me” negative comments. The reason is that in dialogue a speaker is unsure of the feelings of the interlocutor. If he or she makes an emphatic statement about a product or service, he or she risks spoiling their social relationship with the other speaker (or poster) who may be a big fan of the product in question. This politeness factor may also explain why the results of face to face conversations are less negative than a sample of online opinion might suggest.

The third reason is that, particularly for bloggers, staking out one’s social territory online involves a certain amount of display activity - particularly for men! A vehemently negative comment about a large brand demonstrates a certain kind of alpha male aggression. It is show-off behaviour. Bloggers want to be linked to, and being showily negative, particularly in a witty way, may garner more links than a considered “one the one hand, on the other hand” approach.

Paradoxically, as we explained in our “Measuring blogger influence” report, this negativity amongst bloggers actually reduces their authority on a topic. For the casual reader, strongly negative views are off-putting. A neutral is more likely to be impressed, and influenced by the argument of someone who has weighed up the evidence for and against a brand, citing their evidence, than by someone who says: “Brand X SUCKS!”So … although brands are worried about extreme negative commentary online, it generally has little influence. That is, unless there is a special case.

The special case is, as in the example of Jeff Jarvis and Dell:

a) the issue complained of is real and the complaint justified, and echoed by others;

b) brand makes no direct statement on the topic, leaving the existing authorities no choice but to link solely to the complainant.In that one case, bloggers can be VERY influential.

A lot of people visit this site on the search term “brand audit”. Even with the miracles of Google analytics it isn’t always possible to tell who they are and what they are looking for. If you came here searching on “brand audit” or you are a brand owner interested in “buzz tracking”, here is a short scratch sheet on how you can use companies like ours to analyse the competitive DNA of your brand. Market Sentinel answers the following questions:

Who are the stakeholders in my brand? The partners, customers, regulators who have an opinion about it? Which of them talk about it, with what degrees of authority? What words do they use? How can I address them? Change the climate of opinion?

How do my customers rate my brand? What aspects of it do they particularly like, and which do they particularly dislike? Which characteristics of the brand are key to my customers recommending it to one another? How does my brand compare to other brands?

What is new here is the ability to answer these questions using reliable, tried and trusted mathematical techniques. What is new is the ability to reliably benchmark one brand against another, and to do so repeatedly. Market Sentinel performs this kind of analysis for Avis, Intuit, GSK, Rio Tinto, BP, Hyundai … It can be applied in any industry sector, or to any brand large or small. Our customers are in corporate communications, e-commerce, word of mouth marketing, customer service and market research.

Set up times vary, but you can get expect to get actionable data within two-four weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a wikipedia article here.

The Google search has 40,000+ entries.

Via Antony Mayfield

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. “

Yesterday we attended the Blogging4business conference in London. It was very ably put together by Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner of Custom Communications - two journalists who have put together training packages and strategies for communications professionals moving into blogging.

With this in mind, we designed a one pager Your 3-step guide to the blogosphere, (PDF download 70k) which we distributed at the conference. The HTML version follows …

1. Get started:

- Go to Technorati, the biggest of the blog search engines.
- Enter the topic you are interested in.
- When you find a blog that appeals to you, you can use Google desktop (a quick download) to automatically notify you when there is new content.
- Or save your search as a Watchlist, and get relevant information from a variety of sources.

Blogs to explore:

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things A lively commentary on events, the world’s most popular blog has 66,000 links from 22,000 sites.
Engadget Well-written technology reviews.
Dooce Personal blog by Heather Armstrong, who got sacked for blogging about her work colleagues
Public Relations Onlinefor discussing how businesses can best understand and use consumer generated content
British businesses using blogs:

The Guinness blog - bought to you by the Guinness branding team
The Cadbury’s Creme Egg podcast - with Kate Thornton
The Honda blog launched 28th February 2006, already has 107 links according to Yahoo

2. Join in

- Go to Blogger to create a blog for yourself. It takes about three minutes and is as simple as setting up a Hotmail account. Your blog will have the format http://yourname.blogspot.com.
- If you want to set something up with your own domain name for business, talk to a blog creation specialist like Market Sentinel.
- If you would like to comment on someone else’s blog posting, click on comment and complete the form. Sometimes (in Blogger and Moveable Type) you have to register in order to comment – this is to protect bloggers against spam comments from advertisers.
- You can comment on a blog posting on your own blog and put the address (http:// …) of the original comment into the “trackback” section of your blogging software. This will mean that your blog post is automatically linked to the blog you are commenting on. This facility has been abused by spammers, so most bloggers check trackbacks to prevent spam.

3. Get your blog noticed

- Optimise your blog for the subject matter. If your blog is about skincare, then put the word “skincare” into the name of the blog, and into the url: www.skincare.co.uk
- Update your blog regularly, at least once a week and ideally two or three times. Search engines visit sites according to how often they find new content.
- Tag your content. When you make a post, use the “category” or “tagging” facility to tell everyone what it is about. Someone on Technorati will be searching on the tag “dry skin”.
- Use Technorati or Google blog search to find out who else is writing about your subject matter. When you make an interesting new post, politely email them with the url and suggest that they might be interested in reading what you have written. You will make some new friends, and you might benefit from some links!
- If you are hosting your site, make you “ping” all the right ping servers when it is updated.

Market Sentinel works with top brands like Yahoo! Europe monitoring blogs and advising on marketing response.

For more information on how to integrate blog communications intoyour marketing strategy, call +44 (0) 20 7793 1575 or mail simon DOT rogers AT new DOT com

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.

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.”

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.

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.

This is a press release which was released today:

Market Sentinel announced today that Sheila Sang, former editorial director of AOL UK, of handbag.com and executive editor of BBC Online, will be joining the company as Online Publishing Director.

With blogging and content syndication growing in popularity by the day, corporations are increasingly looking to get their message across using new tools like these. Sheila will be working with Market Sentinel’s roster of blue-chip companies to help them understand blogging and to how to use content syndication to reach their stakeholders online.

“I am delighted to welcome Sheila Sang to Market Sentinel,” CEO and former BBC Online colleague Mark Rogers said. “Her résumé speaks for itself. Market Sentinel’s clients are already benefitting from Sheila’s matchless experience in creating high quality content-rich websites.

Sheila Sang will be representing the Market Sentinel in a panel discussion about monitoring blogs at Les Blogs in Paris next week.