Jeremiah Owyang spoke to the topic of Community marketing: Turn executives into powerful evangelists for the company message.

Community Manager is a new role that is now appearing in many companies.

The role of PR is to be message enablers. This will involve learning the new communication tools and helping other executives and product managers to use them.

Community marketing is about giving up control and sharing it with the community. It is message enablement, not message control. It entails getting everyone in the company involved.

Community tools that Jeremiah uses:

• Online forums/message boards. At little cost, you can provide an opportunity for your community to come together and express itself.
• Blogs. The job of the communicator is to identify the people who should be and want to blog and then to guide and help them to successfully blog.
• Wikis: A means to bring together the interests and knowledge of an entire sector or community. You can place yourself at the centre of a resource for the sector.
• Podcasts: A great way to distribute information in a format that increases user involvement.
• Images for PR: Capture and share images and video and upload it to share with the interested community.

When looking for corporate bloggers, look for these factors:

• they are chatty
• they are vocal
• they are subject matter experts
• they do not have to be an executive or famous. Shel Israel suggests that the best bloggers are product managers.
• they should also be native to the Internet.
• they should have the commitment and will to blog. Test them for one month: ask them to send you a practice blog post via email once a week for a month. This will allow you to see their writing style and their enthusiasm.
• they have to have “thick skin.”

Community marketing opens you up to critics. (e.g. Network Storage blog) How do you respond?

Engage quickly. If someone complains about a specific problem, engage them quickly and let them know they have been heard and promise a substantial answer/action as soon as possible. Robert did this with the Network Storage blogger. Following direct outreach from Jeremiah, the Network Storage blog became more balanced in its views.

In effect, Jeremiah had applied media relations practices to blogger relations. He demonstrated that he was taking the critical blogger seriously and made a genuine effort to respond to his concerns. The results: a critic who became a balanced commentator.

You are giving up a little bit of control to gain much more in benefits of positive community perceptions. Be part of the community, not the object of the communities frustrations.

Once you have credible bloggers, they can play a useful role in the announcement of new initiatives and products. If they are enthused about what is being announced, that enthusiasm will come through in their posts.

In initiating these programs, Jeremiah took the initiative without involving the IT Department. The hosted nature and low cost of most social media tools makes it possible to move forward without the overhead of IT Department involvement. According to Jeremiah, “It is better to ask for foregiveness than to ask for permission, which will not be given.”

How do you measure ROI? Blog resonation: Who’s linking to your blog? Technorati wil tell you that. Resonation: You blog stats will show you how long people are staying at each visit and what are they reading. Comments: If people are commenting, you have engagement with your community.

Things that Jeremiah has tried that required adjustments-on-the-go:

• Hitachi’s CTO is an outstanding writer. People thought that his site was ghost written and the company was criticized for this.
• Analysts were reading between the lines of the CTO’s blog and making projections. Consequently, the CTO has to be very careful about what he says.

Jen McClure, Executive Director of the Society for New Communications Research, titled her presentation New Tools, New Rules, New Skills & A New Role for PR. 

Social media tools enable communicators to reach interested audience in a direct way that enables them to engage with them. Communicators can not only reach these audiences, but can listen to the audiences and become an expert resource for them.

As companies come to understand the potential of blogging, the fear of its consequences is abating.

In the “new world of pr,” we have the opportunity to deal with mainstream media analysts in a new way that will build credibility and a positive relationship. By offering genuine insight and content that flows from expertise, communicators can become a sought after and quoted source.

PR professionals must become more technologically savvy. We need to understand the technology and learn how to apply it to our clients’ purposes.

As a first step, all media releases should have an RSS feed.

Rich content (video and audio) blog posts are a cost effective alternative to traditional video news releases.

Social Media Club and Society for New Communications Research are working together on standards for a new media release format which will use RSS and tagging to present information in a way that will give the media what they want in a way they need it.

New rules:

• The end of spin: Spin gets picked up by the blogosphere and called out as that.
• Storytelling is replacing spin: It’s more compelling, positive and truthful.
• We must become “Media Engineers,” because we need to be technologically able to use these tools.
• Social media has the potential to position public relations practitioners as offering a strategic business service.

New tools are being developed and released. Looking at the future, we must stay on top of these.

To start using social media:

• Listen and read first. Monitor what is being said. Set up Technorati search feeds. Get a feel for the conversation.
• Then Engage. Once you are comfortable with the conversation, enter it by commenting on blogs. Be recognized as having a perspective and by being part of the community.
• Look at what your competitors are doing.
• Finally, you are ready to launch your own blog or podcast.
• Remember to monitor and measure reaction to your blog.

Smart companies will proactively establish a blogging policy. They recognize that their employees will be blogging. Rather than ignore this, these companies provide guidance regarding what is proper and appropriate that will help their blogging employees to avoid problems before they occur.

And how about the lawyers? Won’t they object strongly to blogging as an uncontrollable medium? As we have more experience which tells us that the problems are rare, we should be able to make a case for this. Also, start with what’s already in place. Most companies have ethics policies and employment agreements with nondisclosure agreements. This should provide a good starting point. And involve the lawyers early in the process so that they can come to grips with it.

Robert Scoble‘s topic for his keynote presentation was Naked conversations: How blogs are transforming your public relations—and your business.

He kicked off his remarks by retelling the story of his departure from Microsoft. The news spread from his telling a handful of bloggers, who posted their “scoop.” Mainstream media took their cue from the blog buzz, followed in far greater numbers than they would have otherwise. Robert says that this illustrates the need for public relations practitioners to pay attention to the blogosphere.

Many bloggers want to break out of the echo chamber of the blogosphere to reach the “mass market.” This has usually been done through mainstream media coverage.

The other way to reach the masses is to rank higher on search engines. Most people find websites through search. It’s a “google world.” And it’s important to be on the front page of google results because most people never click on the second page of results if they can find something they want on the first page.

The online way to finding a larger audience? Blogs, with their frequent postings, attract links. And this moves them up on the google rankings.

To attract links, it is important to offer new and original content. Many people, lawyers for example, feel that they cannot share their knowledge for free. They feel that it will reduce its value. On the blogosphere just the opposite is true. By sharing knowledge, the blogger will attract an audience who will link to him. Through this his prominence on the search engines will increase and more people will find him – including potential customers and clients.

As the blogosphere becomes more popular, bloggers will be competing with an increasingly crowded field for attention. How will they be able to continue to stand out and attract attention? Robert suggests that video will provide bloggers with the means to stand out.

Robert suggests that PR practitioners should take a cue from bloggers and begin to post video press releases in order to really stand out from the crowd. It’s harder to do video. For the time being, video will stand out because of its relative scarcity.

Companies may also pay another price for ignoring the blogosphere. Robert pointed to the well-known story of “Dell Hell.” Blogger Jeff Jarvis was having problems with his Dell computer. He complained on his blog and he complained directly to Dell. Dell ignored him. He posted again and again. Other bloggers picked it up. And eventually the New York Times and other mainstream media picked up the story. By ignoring the blogosphere chatter that Jarvis had started, Dell ultimately was portrayed as nonresponsive, uncaring and providing inferior customer support.

Another aspect of blogging is speed of information transfer. The news cycle has been broken. A story which hits the blogosphere can spread globally through thousands of blogs within hours. This can generate buzz. It also can make the formal announcement old news by the time it happens.

Smart journalists have begun to use this. By establishing Technorati or Google keyword searches on topics of interest to them, they can pick up news as it is percolating up through the blogosphere. In doing this, they can get ahead of the story and develop scoops.

One of the mistakes that Scoble has seen companies make when confronted by this type of story is to refuse to comment. They miss the opportunity to inject their own perspective into the story. (This is not a problem unique to blog-generated stories. But the blogosphere has definitely shortened the time to respond.)

Audio and video get linked to more often than text. Learn from this and enrich the content you post.

New horizons: Second Life. Interesting things are being done there. Companies are experimenting with new branding experiences in Second Life, testing them with a small group of people there and creating buzz for themselves.

One piece of advice to PR practitione8rs who want to pitch bloggers for coverage. Read the blog first. Know the content. Make sure the blogger cares and writes about what you are pitching.

One interesting thing I noted during Robert’s presentation. Very few people indicated that they are using many of the tools that bloggers take for granted. This at a conference with a dedicated social media stream. Yet another piece of evidence that the PR industry continues to lag in understanding and adopting social media.

Robert’s presentation was pitched at the perfect level for a group of people who are relatively new to blogging and social media. It was a rambling presentation. But it covered all the topics with real life examples and in accessible language.