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 …”

How often do search engines crawl the web? A report by Dirk Lewandowski, Henry Wahlig and Gunnar Meyer-Bautor of the Department of Information Science at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany looked at websites with daily updates and concluded that many were not crawled more than once every 20 days. There are specific issues identified at Yahoo, and to a lesser degree MSN which often seem to have out of date caches.

The study was undertaken using the expression “Helicopter crash in Iraq”, and looking at updates from Reuters.

The implication of this for communications business professional is that even with daily updated content you cannot be sure that your content will be found by any search engine.

Unless you are using RSS and blogging techniques to ensure that your content is published to as many intermediary sites as possible your story may not even be indexed by major search engines within the news cycle. The implication of this study is that even if a PR professional puts up a press release on their own site and on e.g. PR Web, it might not be being indexed by the major search engines, and is therefore unlikely to be found the 75% of users who use search engines to find information about companies.

A really excellent wiki here listing all the good things you can do with RSS.

Monday night saw the excellent Seth Godin address the Geek Dinner at London’s Texas Embassy. His theme was that the era of interruptive advertising was coming to an end. He argued that people were less and less susceptible to buying products as a consequence of being forced to stop what they were doing and wait to absorb an advertising message. He cited the increasing use of pop-up blockers online, and TiVO on TV. (One might also add those who use RSS readers to that list) He demonstrated declining response rates from such advertising.

Instead Godin argued that all marketers were, as he put it, “in the fashion business”, and that the job of companies was to design and sell things that were, of their nature, remarkable, and which created word-of-mouth commentary. The example he uses here is his famous Purple Cow. A Purple Cow is a creature so extraordinary that its very existence is a matter of comment. As consumers comment on it, they spread news of its existence. The real world analogy is the comparison between BMW and GM’s Lincoln Mercury. GM spends 15 times as much marketing the Lincoln Mercury as BMW spends marketing the equivalent model. BMW don’t need to promote their car. The customers do that for them.

He said (if I understood him aright) that the future of marketing success lay in growth driven by a) remarkable products, b) permission-based advertising media.

This argument does not suggest that conventional advertising and marketing has to disappear. Far from it. It suggests that in order to succeed advertising and marketing messages have to change. They adopt more of the characteristics which were previously the preserve of publishers and broadcasters. Marketing and advertising messages have to take on the characteristics of content. They have to become stories - stories that are interesting enough to pass on. Otherwise they will simply be blocked by our increasingly efficient spam filters.

Seth Godin’s argument relates directly to the use of blogging and RSS. RSS is of its nature a permission-based source of information. I will only subscribe to a feed which is delivering me high-quality information. I will only pay attention to information which is timely and relevant to me. In the blogosphere I will give more attention to blogs which are endorsed or linked by people whose values I trust. In both cases the “story” needs to be strong enough to get me to opt-in to the communication. My finger is permanently hovering over the click which will take me somewhere else, possibly forever.

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.

A long and thoughtful piece by Adam Hill in PR Week surveys the threat to brands from blogging and gives prominence to Market Sentinel’s report on how detractors dominate search results for some of the UK’s top grocery brands including Coca Cola and Kingsmill Bread.

So what should PROs do about it? ‘Blogging has never been in anyone’s control, which is why it is so disruptive,’ says Joel Cere, Hill & Knowlton vice-president and head of netcoms EMEA. ‘Consumers, analysts or employees are now able to share their opinions or voice their discontent on a planetary scale. The disgruntled employee or dissatisfied customer could ignite a full-blown crisis, much quicker and on a broader scale.’

PROs can start by identifying the influential bloggers who write about clients’ industries and track what they are talking about, sending them relevant information. ‘Identifying the public opinion influencers is crucial here,’ says Cakim. ‘Not all bloggers are experts on what they write, and they may not have a large following.’

Steve Rubel has posted the 10 commandments of participatory PR.

They are:

1) Thou shall listen – Utilize every avenue available to you to listen actively to what your publics have to say and feed it back to the right parties.

10) Thou shall thinketh in 360 degrees – Ask not what you can do for your customer, but also what your customer can do for you.

In an interesting blog posting, Charlene Li of Forrester speculates on what direction Google might take a point-to-point payment functionality (the proposed “Google wallet”). Pointing out that such a system already exists in the Google infrastructure for collecting micro-payments on clicks, Li speculates that it might be extended to collect payments on content distribution via the Atom standard.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer gives more details on Microsoft’s RSS support. Key features:

• The next version of the Internet Explorer browser will support RSS feeds (allowing reading and bookmarking);
• Microsoft with integrate RSS support into many of its products for the use of developers;
• There will be an aggregator product (details are a bit sketchy)

Some bloggers were negative, but Greg Rienacker from Newsgator and Dave Winer welcomed the announcement, on the grounds that it will grow the market.

Dave Winer confirms what Robert Scoble hinted to us ten days back. Internet Explorer will support RSS. The full launch is due later today at Gnomedex in Seattle.

This will have a dramatic impact on corporate adoption of RSS not just in PR but in productivity tools. It will mean that Market Sentinel don’t automatically have to install Firefox on our customers desktops.

Mark Rogers CEO of Market Sentinel has published a survey of RSS business models on New Media Knowledge.

The day after a customer requests feeds on their Blackberry (we know it’s part of our presentation, but no one actually asked for it yet!), we note that Paris Hilton has one. We originally gave them the go-by because they don’t do Bluetooth. What do we know?

Mark Rogers, CEO Market Sentinel, will be addressing London’s In the City conference on Tuesday 7th June 2005, discussing RSS and its implications for business.

Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer Steve Ballmer promises that blogging tools will be built into the next version of Microsoft Office. (via Dave Winer)

Last night a phone call from Chloe Stromberg at Forrester in San Francisco. She is working with Henry Harteveldt writing about the use of RSS by travel websites and wanted to know if we had developed one-to-one RSS feeds (yes), with end to end encryption (no). People have been discussing this as a possible solution to the issue of spam filtering. Why should I open my genuine mail from eBay or Paypal if I am deluged with Phishing scams (emails that purport to be genuine asking me for my credit card details)?

An RSS reader may be the answer to this. Market Sentinel produces account specific RSS feeds (all the information personalised to one user) but do not yet encrypt. Instead we make security a condition of our contract.

Two solutions:

1) A secure website updates a feed first with neutral information in the feed title, say the words: “account notification” and keeps the description blank. The user then clicks the link to access the secure site using browser security.

2) The RSS feed itself is https and the feedreader and publisher exchange tokens.

I met on Monday an interesting company offering packaged RSS to City institutions and traders. This is a service they might appreciate, and pay for. As I said to Chloe: we would happily build it for anyone willing to pay!

One of the difficulties we have in explaining the benefits to companies of RSS is the sense of it being a new technology that is hard to understand. We have found it hard to improve on this graphic, borrowed from Rok Hrastnik’s website, as an explanation of the benefits of RSS.

Last week IBM announced that it would permit employees to blog. Sun think that employee blogging is an opportunity, and have re-cast their corporate PR to allow for it and to encourage the new kinds of contacts between customer and employee that blogging allows.

Sun see blogging as a way of creating the connected company, and of leveraging the intellectual resources of their employees.

PRESS RELEASE

Whilst blogs are causing a PR revolution in corporate America, the UK has yet to get the message.

Blogs (simple syndicated websites) have revolutionised corporate communications for Fortune 500 companies like Disney, Avon, FedEx, Motorola, McGraw Hill. An increasing number of global brands realise that with 27% of Americans (according to Pew Internet) using blogs for news, it is vital to get their story out in this arena. The Vice-chairman of GM – Bob Lutz – has even started a personal blog. The technology behind blogs - RSS - means that companies can communicate faster and more effectively internally and externally.

They are not alone - in the daily Blogpulse survey - the number of global blog users has passed 10 million and is growing at 13% a week!

But in a survey conducted by the UK blog monitoring company Market Sentinel Ltd, it was found that only one of the FTSE100 UK blue chip companies syndicated their news releases with RSS – BT . And not one of them has taken the step of launching a corporate blog.

The survey was based on direct interviews with 8 companies, telephone interviews with 11 and supplemented with online research. In interviews, when companies were asked why they don’t monitor blogs and messageboards they responded that (most frequent response first):

< “We’ve got monitoring services” (meaning newswires and press cuttings services) “we don’t worry about [the Internet]”
< We use the Internet but mainly to read mainstream media (MSM), but are not aware of RSS/blogging
< We use the Internet, we have heard of blogging, we may possibly have visited blogs, but we don’t really understand what blogs are
< We use the Internet, we understand blogging, we have undergone attacks in blogs and message boards but we don’t believe that this is a problem
< We use the Internet, we understand blogging, we have undergone attacks in blogs and message boards, we agree it’s a problem but we don’t know what to do about it
< We use the Internet, we understand blogging, we have undergone attacks in blogs and message boards, we would like to monitor it but our IT department are in charge of this sort of thing

The survey found that the function of monitoring customer feedback on corporate, product and brand issues is split between different departments who often have incompatible priorities.

Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers thinks that the UK bluechips are missing a trick. ‘Any large company or brand receives thousands of comments and references in the blogosphere. The result is that when customers or partners do a Google search on a company or brand name they are as likely to find a negative comment as they are to find the company’s own message. The big UK companies need to get blogging.’

You can read more about business blogging in the Sunday Times

Excellent article by Charles Arthur in Net Imperative - sorting through the blog hype and making some good points.

Interesting mention of Wired founder John Battelle’s early attempt to create a business model around aggregating blog journalism on the model of Korea’s “Oh My News” from a company called Federated Media.

Market Sentinel’s blog-monitoring services were featured in an article by Paul Durman “Firms line up to rocket into the Blogosphere” in the Sunday Times of May 8th 2005.