Lesson from Edelman Wal-Mart – Have your own voice

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It’s fair game to deliver information directly to bloggers. But … and it’s a big but, true transparency requires that you should be prepared to publish for all to see anything you’re prepared to send to a selected blogger.

Blogger relations. Yes, it’s every bit as legitimate as media relations. However, the rules and conventions are not the same.

The news media are competitive. They thrive on exclusives and being first to market with news.

Blogs are about building a community. The point of this community is opinion and exchange. And the tactics and approaches of media relations are not strictly transferable to this community. It requires rules and practices that respect its particular nature.

So, a company wants to influence the views of opinion-leading bloggers. That’s a legitimate objective.

And emailing information directly to opinion leaders is an effective way to get it in front of them. They might not see it on your own blog. But, that brings us back to the big but: true transparency requires that you should be prepared to publish for all to see anything you’re prepared to send to a selected blogger. And to be able to do this in the blogosphere requires that you have your own blog. A place where you can post your point of view, your information, for all to see.

That’s where Wal-Mart came up short. They used their PR firm’s bloggers and the credibility those bloggers had built up to speak directly to other bloggers. But for the rest of us, people outside of their carefully targeted direct blogger pitch, we could not see what the company was up to. The fact that their activity was discovered resulted from the slipshod practices of a few bloggers who quoted verbatim from the material Edelman/Wal-Mart provided to them, without attribution.

So, true transparency was not achieved. And the resultant uproar should prove a cautionary tale for all.

The bottom line: Avoid shortcuts. If you conclude that the blogosphere is important to you, establish your own voice first. Go ahead, contact the bloggers who you think are the most influential. But let the rest of the world see that you are prepared to say in public what you private encourage an intermediary to talk about.

The Google Sandbox

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Ted Demopoulos talks about his experience in the Google Sandbox – “a purgatory like state, in which a new or penalized site is spidered by the Google bots, accumulates backlinks and page rank, but does not appear in Google searches for appropriate keywords. . . .”

Ted reports that four months after its launch, Blogging for Business is finally out of the sandbox and that he is beginning to receive visitors through the search engine.

His advice to new bloggers: “How do you “get out of the sandbox?” Wait, there’s nothing else you can do.”

Social Marketing: Toronto AIMS Seminar with Shel Israel

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AIMS (Association of Internet Marketing and Sales) took advantage of Shel Israel’s presence in Toronto to organize a session on social marketing.

In addition to Shel Israel, the other featured speakers were:

  • Mark Evans, a senior technology reporter with the National Post. His principal blogs are Mark Evans,a Canadian take on telecom and technology and All Nortel, All the Time, a blog about all things Nortel.
  • Amber MacArthur, co-producer and co-host of Call for Help,a daily one-hour TV show on G4TechTV. She also produces commandN, a weekly web/tech news video show online and Inside the Net, a weekly podcast ; and
  • Jon Husband, visionary and evangelist for Vancouver blogging software company Qumana Inc.. He contributes to Qumana’s blog as well as his personal blog, Wirearchy.

    • Some takeaways:

    Mark Evans:

  • Why do I blog? First and foremost, it’s a branding exercise for me and what I do. I have bigger plans beyond the National Post. Unfortunately, the National Post has a backward approach to blogging. They are just getting into it now. And I’ve felt the need to lead them. … Networking. I’m a small fish in a big pond. Blogging allows me to get my thoughts out there, maybe get some credibility and maybe the New York Times will hire me sometime.
  • Revenue: I’m not in it for the money. Although I have Adsense, I make about a dollar a day.
  • Newspapers and blogging: Canadian papers are way behind the U.S. The Toronto Star is most advanced in blogging. The Globe and Mail is a close second and the National Post is way behind.
  • Advice for PR/Marketing practitioners: Jump into Blogging. You don’t have to write one, but read them every day. Engage them. Talk to them. Ask them to talk to you.
  • Corporate Blogs: I have an issue with CEO blogs. In the era of Sarbanes Oxley, most CEO’s cannot say what they feel. Legal and IR filter them and they seem stale.

    • Evans also reminded the audience of the Web 2.0 conference May 8/9 in Toronto. Check out Mark’s blog for more info on this.

    Amber MacArthur

  • Podcasting has expanded my audience internationally whereas previously on television it was only national.
  • Why would I waste time making a podcast if I can’t make money from it? Eventually, there will be opportunities to make money from advertising. I have an advertiser. It doesn’t give me much money, maybe enough to go out to dinner once in a while.
  • 12 to 20 minutes is a good time to get into a topic without going too long. I tune out of the hour long podcast.

    • Jon Husband

  • Pleasantville is the best movie about the effects of the internet and it doesn’t have a single computer in it.
  • First they will ignore you (was done). Then they will ridicule you (was done). Then they will fight you (in process). Then they will lose.

    • Shel Israel

  • Most C-level people just can’t do it. Their primary obligation is to shareholders. They may be constrained in what they can do.
  • The best bloggers are the people, like Robert Scoble, who are able to express themselves, have knowledge and have a lot of heart.
  • We trust people who are like we are.
  • Human nature is to want to have a conversation. Now for the first time, we can have conversations on a global level with people who care about what we want to talk about.
  • Perhaps we can call this “Mass micro-marketing.”
  • Web 2.0 companies in their early stages don’t need PR. They should blog. The blogosphere can capture the imagination of people; word of mouth will get the message out.

    • Thanks to AIMS Toronto for organizing this session.

    Shel Israel and Jim Estill on Blogging for Executives

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    AIMS (Association of Internet Marketing and Sales) hosted a session on Blogging for Executives in Toronto today. Featured speakers were Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, and Jim Estill, CEO of SYNNEX Canada and a Director of RIM.

    The session was aimed at Directors, Vice Presidents and above. About thirty people attended.

    Shel Israel provided an introduction to the what and why of blogging. Each participant at the session received a copy of Naked Conversations. Either most of the participants have already totally assimilated the content of the book or they have yet to read it. Whatever the explanation, there were few questions directed to Israel. In fact, at one point he asked himself a couple questions just to be able to answer them. (Come on Toronto, we can do better.)

    The audience was much more animated in their response to Jim Estill. Questioners probed Estill’s motivation in becoming a CEO blogger and his assessment of the experience. Several of the questioners also asked for Estill’s advice on dealing with the resistance of legal departments and cautious executives. The conclusion I took away is that, at least in Toronto, business blogging has not yet reached the point of normalization.

    A few takeaways from the session:

  • Shel Israel’s advice on selling blogging to a CEO: “Using a conversation to demonstrate thought leadership won’t work; using a blog to enter into a conversation to generate better thoughts will work.”
  • Jim Estill said his original objective in blogging was “to dispel the mystery about me as a CEO. Now, I get personal email from employees – and customers too – who know me through the blog. … One good thing that comes of this is that people feel they know me. When they feel they know me, they want to do business with me. On the down side, there are thousands of people who think they know me and I don’t know them.”
  • Estill says that his blog receives from 150 to 250 visitors on an average day; 1,000 on a day in which there is an event (e.g. RIM and NTP agreement; Fortune magazine interview)
  • Estill estimates that, out of SYNNEX’s 2500 employees, there are 30 bloggers, but probably only two who have persisted and become regular bloggers. The rest failed to persist beyond a few initial posts or they post rarely.
  • Estill in response to a question about how other CEOs and Board Directors react to his blogging: “CEOs and corporate don’t like it. They’re afraid you’re giving away insider information. Most CEOs also worry about the time commitment.”

    • Thanks to AIMS Toronto for organizing this session.

    Shel Israel expands focus of Naked Conversation to Web 2.0

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    Shel Israel has returned from the New Communications Forum believing that blogging is entering a new phase, normalization.

    According to Shel,

    Blogging started as one of Seth Godin’s Purple Cows. I would still like to write about unique or valuable blogs–blogs that will help others find their way into the blogosphere. I hear about dozens of new blogs every week, but few, if any meet that criteria. I see blogs that are high quality, blogs that are good for the businesses and business topics they are designed to address but very few that are of Purple Cow uniqueness.

    In fact, this is a good thing, if you are a blogging evangelist. The blog is starting to become part of the business normal, just as email and the Internet did. Both of these early disruptive innovations are now boring because they are so much of the usual business routine. It was not all that long ago that having a website, or allowing employees to email on company time were highly controversial with legal departments fretting the repercussions just as they do today over blogging.

    The blog, it seems to me, is becoming just another brown cow. This again, is a good thing. First comes the excitement, then comes the prolongs inevitable change. This is what is supposed to happen. New things need to normalize if they are to endure if they are to really and truly change corporate communications as our book argues it will.

    So, Shel is expanding the focus of Naked Conversations beyond business and blogging to include Web 2.0.

    Web 2.0 is topically a natural extension of blogging. These companies are forming a “people’s web” where the blog allows an efficient conduit for two-way communications. What’s important here is not the conduit per se, but that it allows the customer to take his or her rightful place at the center of the corporation. As Charlene Li said in her conference keynote, the new technology puts the power at people’s fingertips, instead of into the hands of the corporation.

    I got into blogging because of its disruptive promise. Web 2.0 is a natural path that follows the lines of disruption and I’m going to follow down those line.

    I’m sure that Shel’s readership and community are eager to follow this path, learning and expanding our own horizons in step with him.

    Seth Godin at Google

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    A video of Seth Godin’s presentation at Google.

    Vintage Godin:

    “There is a belief among a lot of companies … that technology wins. …I don’t think it does. I think what technology does is, it gives you a shot at marketing.”

    “I believe that what made Google work were some brilliant, maybe not intentional, marketing decisions. And those decisions have allowed you the freedom to do some really cool technology.”

    “The challenge is, if you’re going to bother doing something, is it worth talking about.”

    “It’s at the edges that people wait in line and talk about you.”

    “…emotional marketing: If you want me to talk about something, you better deep down love it. Or why should I?”

    “People don’t surf the web. … They poke. They poke around a lot. Poking in and poking out. … Click on one ad and then click back. Click on another and then click back. … Back and forth. Back and forth. And then finally, what you have done is establish a lot of clues…. The problem with clues is that they are too slow. … You’re either going to give up or finally you will have meaning. … You can’t get somebody to be a happy surfer until there is a sense of meaning, until they get the big picture. I think the next frontier is … how do you put in one place enough clues that in one second I get the big picture, I have enough meaning to take action.”

    “The Fashion/Permission Complex: Step number one: Make something worth talking about. If you can’t do that, start over. Step number two: Tell it to people who want to hear from you. Step number three: They do what people used to think of as marketing. They spread the word. They interrupt their friends. … And then the hardest part … Get permission from these people to tell them about your next fashion. … As this asset grows … you have the ability to launch new fashions. You don’t have to start from scratch every time. And you end up not having to find customers for your products but finding products for your customers.”

    “When are you going to build an asset like that one? … The opportunity with all the things that you are building … is to start now before it is too late to build in a permission asset, to build in the ability to have people want you to be a closer partner. To be there so that you can make them the next fashion and they’ll listen. … The opportunity here is to keep building remarkable stuff, but to build it with a compass that says if we build stuff that people want to hear about in a way they want to hear about it, they’ll want to keep interacting with us.”

    Responsiveness: Your success may depend on it

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    Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, says that responsiveness is essential to business success.

    In Hyatt’s experience,

    So many people I meet are unresponsive. They don’t return their phone calls promptly. They don’t answer their emails quickly. They don’t complete their assignments on time. They promise to do something and never follow through. They have to be reminded, prodded, and nagged. This behavior creates work for everyone else and eats into their own productivity. Sadly, they seem oblivious to it.

    …Reality is that we live in an “instant world.” People want instant results. They don’t want to wait. And if they have to wait on you, their frustration and resentment grows. They begin to see you as an obstacle to getting their work done. If that happens, it will begin to impact your reputation. Pretty soon people start saying, “I can never get a timely response from him,” or “When I send her an email, I feel like it goes into a black hole,” or worse, your colleagues just roll their eyes and sigh at the mention of your name.

    …The truth is, you are building your reputation—your brand—one response at a time. People are shaping their view of you by how you respond to them. If you are slow, they assume you are incompetent and over your head. If you respond quickly, they assume you are competent and on top of your work. Their perception, whether you realize it or not, will determine how fast your career advances and how high you go. You can’t afford to be unresponsive. It is a career-killer.

    Thanks to my colleague Jason Prini for pointing to this article.

    No-Bad-News Fridays!

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    Julie Freemen reports that many respondents to a survey in the Nov/Dec issue of CW said that bad news in their companies is delivered by e-mail.

    Delivering bad news shouldn’t be the simple act of blurting out a tough message. The deliverer should also watch for the impact of the message on the recipient and be prepared to talk it through after the recipient has had a chance to consider the message and its implications.

    The worst possible time to deliver bad news in a work environment is a Friday. This gives the recipient little or no time to consider the news and to have a follow-up discussion to work through its implications (and often the solutions) before the weekend. So, he or she is likely to end up going home and mulling over the bad news through the full weekend. Not a very nice way to spend the weekend. And not a very likely prescription to make someone feel good about their place of work!

    At my company, Thornley Fallis, we do not deliver bad news on a Friday. If we must deliver bad news, we try to deliver it early in the week so that we can schedule follow up conversations to work through the implications and positive steps that can be taken to turn bad news into a positive experience – an experience that can be learned from and can form the basis of constructive action.

    Julie wants to hear from other communicators about how bad news is delivered in your organizations. Post your comments at the IABC Communication Commons Employee Forum.