Debating and discussing Deloitte’s new data on online communities

Posted by Blog Council Staff on August 26, 2008

In early July, Deloitte published the 2008 Tribalization of Business Survey along with Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR). The study’s key findings highlighted the benefits and challenges for companies creating online communities:

• 35% saw an increase in WOM for their brands
• 28% saw overall brand awareness increase
• 24% reported an increase in customer loyalty
• 25% had more than 1000 members
• 50% said the biggest obstacle to success is “getting people engaged”

Many in the blogosphere jumped on the story and cited the data as the death knell for online communities (including the Wall Street Journal). It’s far too early to tell whether or not this is true, but our members are going to talk about it, debate it, share their own experiences, and see what can be learned in the next Blog Council Show and Tell.*

DETAILS
Blog Council Show and Tell: Measuring the Value of Online Communities
With: Ed Moran, Director of Product Innovation for Deloitte
Date: Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Time: 1pm ET/10am PT (1-hour call)
Dial-in: Members can find call info in the Member Center

* Show and Tell calls are fast phone calls where members confidentially discuss and solve real-world issues with their peers. Calls are held twice a month and private for members only. If you’d like to participate, please contact us about joining the Blog Council.

Succesful brand to blogger relations strategy

Posted by Blog Council Staff on August 25, 2008

We’ve been covering Toby Bloomberg’s, Diva Marketing Blog, series on how to run a successful blogger relations strategy. Toby is back with part four of her blogger relations series, this time focusing on when brands talk to bloggers.

Toby’s big take-aways that apply both to the bloggers and the brands:

• Relationships are based on communication. Educate us about what you want and need.
• Have patience.
• Respect
• Values are important
• Etiquette Is Important - Please Play Nicely

Anyone interested in blogger relations should read the rest at Diva Marketing Blog.

As always, we recommend reading the Blog Council’s Disclosure Best Practices Checklist 3: Blogger Relations before starting your own blogger relations campaign.

Ten great posts on corporate blogging

Posted by Blog Council Staff on August 25, 2008

Mario Sundar, Marketing Nirvana, lists his “Top 10 posts on Corporate Blogging.” Mario is Community Evangelist & Chief Blogger at LinkedIn. These ten posts are a great place to start if you’re interested in learning more about corporate blogging.

Graco’s social media success story

Posted by Blog Council Staff on August 22, 2008

Gavin O’Malley, MediaPost, writes about Graco’s successful social media campaign.

According to O’Malley, “18 months, ago, Converseon and Graco Baby first begin “listening” to the conversation–for several months before proactively doing anything–to develop a clear understanding of the landscape in the parenting category.”

“Based on the information they gathered, the agency and clients formed a strategy to make Graco an accepted and welcomed brand in the online parenting conversation. They also attempted to “humanize” the Graco brand, and to build lasting relationships with the community by demonstrating that behind the brand are concerned and engaged parents.”

“Additional “conversation mining” found a robust, active parenting group that was largely resistant to commercial efforts to engage them. A core thrust of Graco’s strategy was, thus, not to force the brand into the conversations, but instead create and foster environments to facilitate relationships between influentials, and then get invited to the conversation.”

“The core components of that campaign included a series of Graco blogger “Get-Together” events across the country to lay the groundwork for the launch of a corporate Graco parenting blog authored by a team of Graco employees. The blog was designed to focus on “parent first” issues, stories, advice. The blogging effort was supported with the complementary use of other social media tools, including Flickr, YouTube and Twitter.”

“As a result of these efforts, online chatter about Graco nearly doubled and positive sentiment increased 15%–68% positive in 2007 to 83% positive this year. Also, the blog now regularly attracts thousands of unique visitors.”

Read the whole story at MediaPost. Thanks, WOMMA for the tip.

Event Roundup: Engaging Detractors, with Valeria Maltoni, SunGard

Posted by Blog Council Staff on August 21, 2008

The Blog Council hosts bi-monthly “show and tells” exclusively for its members. This week’s call was titled “Engaging Detractors,” presented by Valeria Maltoni of SunGard. Thank you to Valeria for presenting and everyone that participated in the call.
The next call will be on September 10th hosted by Ed Moran, of Deloitte & Touche.

Monitoring social media for big business: Guest Blogger - Debbie Curtis-Magley, UPS

Posted by Debbie Curtis-Magley on August 20, 2008

(Members of the Blog Council lead corporate blogging and social media at large corporations. We are delighted to share their thoughts on blogging from the corporate perspective. This post is the guest author’s personal opinion.)

Navigating the blogosphere can feel a bit like traveling through the Wild West. You might find your brand mentioned in lots of fascinating (and sometimes bizarre) conversations. Effective monitoring provides insight into customer pain points that may not be on your company’s radar. It can also identify emerging opportunities that haven’t shown up in research studies.

But what do you focus on? And how do you quickly distinguish random chatter from critical insights?

Before you invest in a monitoring service, consider these tips to map out your strategy.

Determine what you want to learn

Monitoring can take a variety of directions, depending on what you want to learn and how your company will benefit from the information. A few approaches to consider:

• General brand conversations: if you’re looking to get a snapshot at the volume and share-of-voice your brand represents within online channels
• Reputation topics: if you need to monitor issues that are opportunities or threats to your brand
• Business industry sectors: if you need to understand your brand’s role and reputation within market sectors

Identify the unique hurdles associated with searching your brand

Unless your company has a truly unique name, it’s likely that search results will show discussions not related to your brand. It’s been tricky with the name “UPS”. It’s part of commonly used phrases, such as “mash-ups”,”big ups”, and “meet-ups”. There are also other services that are associated with the acronym “UPS”, like “universal power system”. You’ll improve your monitoring efforts by identifying terms that pull irrelevant conversation posts in your search results.

Understand the limits of automated search tools

While an automated search tool can help filter and organize the conversations about your brand, they aren’t effective at analyzing the context and tonality of discussions. That’s due to the informal nature of how people communicate online. The construction of a comment, word choice and emphasis placed on certain phrases makes it easy for an automated tool to incorrectly score a negative comment as positive or vice-versa.

You can’t escape the need for human analysis if you truly want to understand the discussions surrounding your brand. At UPS, our staff reviews and tracks the conversations rather than outsourcing this work to a vendor. It keeps us directly informed on shifts in conversations and potential issues brewing at blogs and discussion boards.

Debbie Curtis-Magley is Manager of Corporate Public Relations at UPS

Upcoming Event: PLI and Blog Council host “Understanding Disclosure in Blogging and Social Media”

Posted by Blog Council Staff on August 19, 2008

The Practising Law Institute in conjuction with the Blog Council is hosting a one hour live audio webcast on “Understanding Disclosure in Blogging and Social Media”.

The Blog Council recently published a draft series of checklists called the Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit (see http://blogcouncil.org/disclosure). Join Blog Council CEO Andy Sernovitz, Kevin O’Keefe, President of LexBlog, Inc., John Pope, Digital Media Senior Manager at Dell Inc., and Laurie Steuri, Associate Director of External Relations at Procter & Gamble Co. as they discuss the Toolkit and share the best practices for interacting with blogs, bloggers, and the people who interact with them.

This One-Hour Briefing is essential for internal counsel and other legal advisors who are drafting new employee policy, amending existing rules, or simply want a better understanding of the liabilities and opportunities inherent in these new communications tools. Legal consul can earn CLE credit for partcipating in this webcast.

Date: September 18th, 2008
Time: 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT

For more information, please see the PLI website.

Succesful agency to blogger relations strategy

Posted by Blog Council Staff on August 19, 2008

Last week we covered Toby Bloomberg’s, Diva Marketing Blog, post on how to run a successful blogger relations strategy. Toby is back with part three of her blogger relations series, this time focusing on when agencies talk to bloggers. 90% of the people Toby interviewed reported that they expect to be involved in blogger relations in the next 12 months.

Anyone interested in blogger relations should read the rest at Diva Marketing Blog.

We recommend reading the Blog Council’s Disclosure Best Practices Checklist 5: Agency and Contractor Disclosure before using an agency to conduct your blogger relations.

Avoid getting “brand-jacked”

Posted by Blog Council Staff on August 14, 2008

Valeria Maltoni, Conversation Agent, gives great advice for avoiding a “brand-jacking”.

“Regardless of the social channel, when a company or business does not speak for itself, it creates an opportunity for someone else to use their voice. Call it image or reputation, a brand is an asset, it matters to your bottom line. The digital space is still very much like the wild, wild, west - a lot of unclaimed territory exists.”

“Look at it as an opportunity to invest in re-energizing your brand through customer conversations. Worry less about selling, start telling, sharing, being present - step forward and own your brand, or someone else may take it for a spin.”

Starbucks adds Twitter and blog to their social media efforts

Posted by Blog Council Staff on August 13, 2008

Starbucks has entered Twitter with two handles, @MyStarbucksIdea and @Starbucks. One of @Starbucks first tweets asks Twitter users for their ideas on what to do with the @Starbucks name. “We have our own ideas about what we’re going to do here. We’d love to hear from you, do you (or anyone else) have requests?”

Starbucks also recently announced the new Ideas in Action blog. The blog is a continuation of the salesforce.com powered My Starbucks Idea.

The addition of Twitter and the new blog to Starbuck’s social media efforts comes on top of the lesser known Starbucks V2V social network. For good coverage of Starbucks V2V social network see John Moore’s post on Brand Autopsy.