Changing Industries

An excellent examination of authenticity and branding floated through my RSS reader this morning, courtesy of Fast Company. While there is no foolproof recipe for authenticity, they do a good job of breaking it down to four key elements, based on the histories of authentic, and not-so-authentic branding strategies.

As I read the article, I found myself thinking that each of these four key elements of authenticity — sense of place, point of view, serving a larger purpose, and integrity — could be well served by a business blog.

Here’s how:

1. A sense of place. This isn’t true of all brands. I don’t think anyone really cares where Jack from the Jack in the Box commercials lives. But for some brands, a link to heritage or culture is integral to the coveted sense of authenticity. The problem is that in many cases, the sense of place is nothing but smoke and mirrors, done with varying degrees of aptitude. And as we all know, smoke and mirrors does not translate well to the blogosphere.

   That said, if a brand truly does trace its origins back to a place, a blog can help bring that place — and the brand itself — alive for people the world over. For example, Plymouth Gin which sponsored our speaker dinner after last year’s conference, would benefit from just such a strategy. It lays authentic claim to Plymouth England, where the gin has been made since 1793.

2. A strong point of view, fits in brilliantly with the goal of a blog. Fast Company uses Martha Stewart as an example of a brand that comes across as authentic because of the presence and distinct point of view of its leading lady. Martha’s recipes “stand in the face of a world where food is mass-produced and preparation for the average dinner is measured by the number of minutes it takes to microwave the thing.”

   If point of view is the secret sauce that makes a brand tick, then blogging is an organic extension of that brand. After all, what better way to express a point of view than a daily stream of posts written from that perspective? Wells Fargo does this brilliantly with it’s “Guided by History” blog, whose writers integrate the historical with the present by telling stories from their own lives. It has nothing to do with banking, yet it extends the Wells Fargo brand perfectly.

3. Serving a larger purpose. According to FC, brands that fall into this category include Google, which stands for progress with a “do no evil” attitude and Whole Foods, which stands for a gourmet, organic lifestyle. Both are about more than just making money.

   If your goal for your brand is to explain the larger context in which your company makes the world a better place, then a blog can accomplish this. Just look at how General Electric has expanded its vision of innovation with its Global Research Blog. Recent topics include everything from statistical modeling and the HIV epidemic to what GE is doing with thermal science.

4. Integrity McDonald’s used to take a defensive approach to its image as a destroyer of the environment. It even went so far as to sue Julia Hailes the author of a book about green living because she implicated them in the destruction of the rainforest.

   But McDonald’s realized quickly that if the brand said one thing while the company did another, people would no longer trust them. Today, Ms. Hailes’ criticisms are openly welcomed at McDonald’s corporate events. The company has extended this growing sense of environmental and social responsibility with its corporate social responsibility blog, where the brand’s integrity is put on full display.

Authenticity has growing cachet in marketing, and so should blogging. Because the single best way to seem authentic is to be authentic. Why fake it when you can do the real thing?

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a big believer in Facebook. I think it’s an awesome social network. I use it to communicate with my friends more than I use traditional e-mail.

One of the coolest features of Facebook is the one that allows you to share content with your friends. You can simply post an interesting article on your profile, or you can push, or “spit” it to friends who might find it interesting.

When Facebook sucks in outside content, it grabs images that are associated with the content in question. Sometimes, the image grabber sucks in an ad rather than a news image. (See the image at left for an illustration).

I wonder whether Ford paid CNet an additional premium to make sure that their ad was sucked into Facebook, or if they just got lucky. Will ad placements like this eventually garner additional revenues for content providers? And what about the distribution mechanism? Might companies pay social networks with sharing features a premium to ensure that their ads (tagged with an ID code) are sucked in with shared content?

In a time when people are leaving newspapers for the Web media mogul Rupert Murdoch has made a $5 billion bid for Dow Jones — parent company of the Wall Street Journal. That’s 67% above market value!

The Journal’s own Stephanie Kang writes that Murdoch’s interest in the Journal is primarily about online content. In a recent interview, Murdock touted the unique value of financial journalism: “You can charge for it,” he said simply.

Murdoch has long said that newspapers need to adapt to the Web. If the family-run Dow Jones accepts his friendly bid, he’ll be in a unique position to lead the way.

The United States Army has instituted regulations requiring that a commanding officer approve all posts to personal blogs.

The concern is that non-classified information might leak out to enemy intelligence through seemingly harmless blog posts. And commanding officers who don’t want to take unnecessary career risks or spend additional time vetting blog posts may simply ban the practice outright.

In a statement to Wired, retired paratrooper Matthew Burden of The Blog of War anthology said, “This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging. No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has — it’s most honest voice out of the war zone. And it’s being silenced.”

If ever there was an organization in need of a world-class enterprise blogging platform, the United States Army — the whole military, for that matter — is it. Rather than putting the burden of supervision directly on overworked, stressed out and ill-prepared commanding officers, why not have a group back home that screens blog posts as they come in?

The vast majority of information that is posted on military blogs is utterly harmless, and silencing the voices of soldiers abroad and at home is ill-advised. It seems that the military is throwing the baby out with the bathwater when all they need is a good platform.

Just did a Google News search and discovered that the long-time issue of duplicate items appearing in the results (sometimes dozens of times…) has apparently been resolved. See below — the ability to “sort by date with duplicates included” is now optional! My few tests show an average reduction of 50% in results sets. Google Reader users like Scoble can now peruse more results with less tapping of the keyboard.

PR Squared’s Todd Deffren Defren (sorry, Todd!) has a great interview with Michael Raynor author of The Strategy Paradox.

The basic thesis of the book, from what I gather without having read it (yet!) is that many business people believe that they future is mostly foreseeable. Yet, something unexpected always comes up. Sometimes, the unexpected sinks a company. So businesses need to create flexible future plans that can accommodate unexpected changes in technology, markets, best practices, etc.

I particularly liked Raynor’s answer to Deffren’s question about transparency and social media as it relates to unforeseen change and strategic planning:

What role has the transparency of social media played in helping companies better predict the relevant future more accurately to business climate changes?

Social Media causes more uncertainty; it actually can hinder a company’s ability to predict and plan. There are far more avenues for gathering information but, too much data can be bad.

Importantly, Social Media not only provides more data but also becomes a component in and of itself – for example, the WSJ recently recounted the media war that played out when a wanna-be whistleblower within the company raised a stink about a large-scale IT project. Because examples like these will likely happen more often, it creates a new source of uncertainty and change - at a rate that no large company could accelerate to meet (especially if they are doing things that are big and complex)!

Scenario-based planning allows you to tackle what could go wrong without being accurate about what will go wrong. Social Media needs to be considered for both its benefits and dangers.

The mythology of strategy is that it is all about vision, commitment, dogged determination – these are virtues if you survive, but if you fail they could just as easily be reconsidered as wrong-headed obstinacy. Social Media has a way of highlighting our qualities, for good or ill.

Link to WSJ article mine.

Basically, my takeaway here is that businesses need to stay on their toes and cover their bases when it comes to social media. Even if you’re not engaging directly with social media, its existence increases the likelihood of an unforeseen problem in need of a solution. If social media doesn’t play a role in your strategic planning, you are acting as though you can predict a future in which rapidly changing technologies do not affect your business.

And that would be a bad delusion to hold onto.

Today in the Wall Street Journal, the article Circulation Falls at Many Papers describes how readers are transitioning away from paper-based news.

Many of the nation’s newspapers continued to post circulation declines, reflecting the industry’s continuing battle to hold onto readers migrating to the Internet and other media, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Meanwhile, in January 2007, Netratings announced that traffic to blogs aligned with newspapers surged in 2006.

The number of visitors to the blog pages of the top 10 online newspapers grew 210% in the past year, far outpacing growth to the parent sites. Nielsen/NetRatings found that while the unique audience to online newspapers grew 9% from December 2005 to December 2006, the number of visitors to blog pages at the top newspapers skyrocketed and accounted for 13% of the parent sites’ total traffic.

Today’s Wall Street Journal Report on Search Engine Optimization offers some great advice for businesses that want to boost their search engine rankings. Their approach combines traditional search engine optimization techniques with blog-based evangelism.

But while the article mentions blogs here and there, it never states explicitly that blogs cover most of what the experts they interviewed recommend without a lot of fuss. After the jump, I’ve broken the article down into its basic components and explained why blogs can help you do just about everything the Journal article suggests.
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If you want to understand the attitude that resists starting a business blog, you should watch Helen Mirren’s astonishing performance in The Queen (iTunes).

More about why on my personal blog.

According to the Wall Street Journal today, smaller, more flexible blog networks offer advantages for advertisers. Reebok is one company who is putting more emphasis on blog ads:

And the ads didn’t show up just on Glam.com. Glam has assembled a network of roughly 300 similarly themed blogs, Web sites and magazines that it links to — broadening Glam’s reach. Glam’s female-oriented network drew 10 million unique U.S. visitors in March, making it the second-largest women’s online property after NBC Universal’s iVillage, according to comScore Media Metrix.

“You are not just hitting one portal; you have thousands of these other sites. By showing up incrementally on these other sites, you are getting more bang for your buck,” says Marc Fireman, head of digital marketing for Reebok.

Blogs also are more flexible with their coverage — but at the cost of editorial integrity?

Glam has also shown it is willing to blur the line between editorial and advertising by, for instance, getting its sponsors mentioned in its network of blogs. While bloggers have editorial control over their sites, they’re often receptive to anything that looks like news in the fashion, style and beauty areas. For example, Glam Media announced yesterday the launch of a handbag designer competition with Hearst Magazines’ Marie Claire. During the day, a number of blogs noted the news with links back to the contest’s site. In the Reebok campaign, the Glam-affiliated fashion blog “Couture in the City” recently posted an item about the Glam exclusive “Scarlett Hearts Rbk Giveaway.”

This morning’s Wall Street Journal has a cover feature detailing how Justen Deal, an employee rabble-rouser was able to create a public relations nightmare at Kaiser Permanente with one widely-broadcast internal email criticizing the company’s efforts to digitize sensitive patient information.

The e-mail was sent on a Friday after most employees had gone home for the weekend. Kaiser IT staff spent much of the weekend trying to purge it from the e-mail system, but they met with limited success. According to the Journal, “by Monday, the mass mailing had reached an estimated 120,000 computers at the company. It had also leaked into cyberspace.”

The highly critical epistle was picked up by the blogosphere and became a major issue for the company. Some even speculate that it could have affected Wall Street perceptions.

According to the Journal:

“Mr. Deal…quickly became a cause celebre in the blogosphere and beyond. HIStalk, a popular health-care IT site, featured ‘an exclusive interview,’ with Mr. Deal. One stock analyst says that Kaiser’s tribulations could alter the competitive landscape for IT vendors.”

We’ve said for years that a blog post is “an email to the world” and it’s obvious that when this mail jumped from someone’s in-box to a blog entry it took on a life of its own.

Justin Deal– the author of the email was not a blogger, so to send a large-scale message, he had to cobble together a mailing list via manual means:

“But it wasn’t as easy as pushing a button. He didn’t have access to a company-wide “send all” address, so he improvised. He says he bought a cheap software tool that helped him gradually build a list on his own computer.”

Consider this: if Kaiser had been using an enterprise blogging system (like Blogtronix, iUpload, Marqui, and others) instead of e-mail for internal workgroup communications, Deal’s embarrassing efforts would likely have been stymied because it would have gone out as a blog post with a central location rather than a mass mailing. Furthermore, this posting could have been held for management review before being made public. Posts peppered with terms (as this mail was) such as “conflict of interest,” “recklessly,” “losses,” “inefficient,” “exposed,” “internal resistance,” “ignored,” “problems,” etc. etc can automatically land in a “potential rants” folder for review by superiors before propagating.

This is one reason we work with corporate clients to set up blogging systems that accommodate several blogs, some public-facing, some internal. This platform allows management to exercise control over what is said and when. It also means that public-facing employee posts are driving link love and Google Juice to the corporate domain.

That said, it’s obvious to us that it’s not always in an employee’s long-term best interest to create a media property — especially in their spare time — that they can’t take with them if they make a career move. When Scoble left Microsoft, his blog went with him. If the blog had been a Microsoft property, his value to another firm would arguably have diminished significantly.

So. In many cases we encourage employers to have their staff populate blogs owned by the corporate entity, while at the same time we tell friends, relatives, and clients who are independent consultants to avoid investing a lot of personal time in any blogs that can’t migrate with them.

Yes, we are consistently inconsistent.

Scoble wrote today that he was rather surprised that he hasn’t yet been contacted by any companies marketing to new parents. After all, he’s announced his wife’s pregnancy to the entire world via his blog.

He also says that the advertising industry should pay attention to Twitterment. This service basically compares two terms based on the frequency with which they appear in Twitter entries. Here’s a chart comparing the frequency of mentions of Coke vs. Pepsi:

If a representative sample of consumers were using Twitter, this would be unbelievably useful. But the vast majority of people don’t even know what Twitter is, let alone pay attention to or use it. Like I mentioned before, individual tweets don’t get linked to, so they don’t have any real search engine presence.

That said, I do anticipate that one day a Twitter-like feature will be a common feature among social networks and fully integrated with people’s individual Web presences. When that happens, analyzing the data will be of immeasurable value to marketers the world over. But until then, the most relevant measures of the online conversation will continue to be analytics like the report we’re generating about CES.

Update: And speaking of Twitter as a feature rather than a service, it looks like Facebook just cloned it with RSS feeds and a dynamic page listing all friends’ status updates. I almost feel like this is more useful to me as a personal tool than Twitter is.

Bloggers aren’t highly regarded for our journalistic ethics. We’re often maligned for not checking facts, publishing half-truths, running with innuendoes, and becoming one big echo chamber. All of these criticisms are not without their merit.

But sometimes the shoe is on the other foot. We all remember the way that the blogosphere called Dan Rather out on his damaging mistake regarding phony documentation about president Bush’s service during the Vietnam war. This week has presented another such opportunity, one that the blogosphere has attacked with relish.

Eighteen year-old Emily Hilscher was the first victim in last week’s tragic killing spree at Virginia Tech. She was an aspiring veterinarian who loved animals. Pictures show a sprightly girl with sparkling blue-green eyes. She was often photographed riding horses or goofing around with a silly expression on her face. She was beautiful and very compelling.

The mainstream media spent a great deal of time fixating on Hilscher because she was the first person killed in the massacre, and because the circumstances of her death made it look initially as though she was targeted specifically. The college and the police originally believed that the murders of Hilscher and her neighbor Ryan “Stack” Clark were an isolated domestic incident and questioned Hilscher’s boyfriend, Karl Thornhill at length.

Meanwhile, speculation in the mainstream media went way off track. Some mainstream papers speculated that Hilscher’s murder was the unfortunate result of a lover’s quarrel. Others went so far as to insinuate that some infidelity or cruel rejection on her part was the catalyst that set off gunman Seung-hui Cho’s murderous rampage. Wired cited but did not link to unspecified “news reports” that claimed, “Cho had been dating one of his first victims, student Emily Hilscher, and that she broke up with Cho two weeks ago.”

Hilscher’s friends, family and her boyfriend were thunderstruck. How could the media get it so wrong? And how could they say such things about the person they loved so much just days after she was brutally murdered?

Some bloggers perpetuated the rumors, but a critical mass resisted. Questions arose, aided by a Facebook group that became a hub of information for those who were seeking to distribute the real facts about Hilscher’s life and death. Some mainstream press venues also picked up the call for truth. A week later, very little doubt exists that Emily Hilscher was not involved with Cho.

Last week, I wrote that the most compelling information about the Virginia Tech tragedy could be found on blogs and social networks, rather than in the mainstream press. Now it appears that the most factual and relevant information about this senseless tragedy is also available in the new media, rather than the old.

Sarah Ellison and Suzzane Vranica report today in The Wall Street Journal that for most newspapers, online advertising growth won’t be as strong as predicted. Blogs and other news sources such as myspace are partly to blame:

Media buyers also indicate marketers are beginning to look beyond traditional journalism sites, realizing many news junkies go elsewhere, too. “Advertisers are getting less scared of blogs and newsgroups and now are beginning to take money away from the traditional newspapers’ sites,” says Greg Smith, chief operating officer of Neo@Ogilvy, an interactive ad agency owned by WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather, New York.

Another significant drain profiled is the move toward search-focused ads, which of course is a key source of revenue for many bloggers. FYI that we’ll be hosting sessions contrasting ad networks for bloggers at our next event.

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As competition from Web and satellite-based media continues to eat into the radio market, Clear Channel is working hard to find a new formula that will keep listeners tuned in.

Their newest idea involves eliminating commercials in favor of integrating sponsorship announcements more subtly into programming. They’re testing this model with their new Dallas-based Lone Star 92.5. For example, a host might say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking: you are not free to enjoy nonstop Lone Star music thanks to Southwest Airlines and Lone Star 92.5.”

This is similar to the way that many video and audio podcasts set up their sponsorships. Just look at how Seagate has integrated their brand with The Scoble Show.

Media buyers need to be particularly aware of this changing format. If this model bears out as well as I think it will for Clear Channel, you’ll soon be changing your entire media plan. You’ll no longer simply buy time in which you can insert a pre-produced ad. You’ll be working with individual radio stations to determine how your company’s message can best fit within the culture and musical genre of the radio station in question.

This is also a potential big change for advertising firms. If this model takes off, companies might wind up skipping the production phase of radio advertising entirely and working directly with the radio station to produce ad copy. Advertising firms that specialize primarily in radio content will need to develop new specialties and become even more familiar with the content, message and audience of specific radio stations in specific markets.

Jeff Jarvis has a great post up this morning that explains why cable is a dying platform for content distribution. Because of the Web, content is becoming commodified. No company can have a monopoly on great content. The new platforms are those that enable people to share content freely. Like Google and YouTube.

Jarvis argues that the future of media is in enabling people to connect with the information they care about. But even if you’re not in that sector, this still matters to you. Because like John Battelle told us last year all businesses are publishers now if they want to stay competitive.

The questions you should be asking yourself: How can we use emerging platforms to enable our customers to do what they do better? How can we do that without trying to control the outcome of every conversation? How can we reach out to our customers organically by providing a value add that is compelling to them?

Blogging is one way of doing this. Chances are that someone within your organization knows a lot about what your customers care about. Find that person and encourage them to spend company time sharing that information in the spirit of reaching out to your customer base. If you enable them with some critical piece of information, chances are that they’ll stick around to see what else you can offer.

Self-promotionally, I should mention that our conference this September is going to cover this new organic outreach in a big way. I’m especially excited to discuss it with the newcomers at our “Social Media Bootcamp” on Day One of the conference.

The recent tragedy at Virginia Tech has shocked the nation and provided the cable news stations with a 24/7 stream of graphic, tragic images. Viewers have been treated to round-the-clock coverage that repeats the sad facts of yesterday’s massacre — the death toll, the locations of the separate incidents, the statements by President Bush and Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger — ad nauseum.

But in this most recent national tragedy, the most compelling, hard-hitting and provocative sources of news have not been mainstream. The most important news has been broken by the students of Virginia Tech themselves as they share information and grieve together on the student-oriented social networking site Facebook.

Just as September 11th, 2001 cemented the blogosphere as an important source of news, so has the Virginia Tech incident cemented the importance of social networks in how people get their information.

Couple this striking fact with the recent study that concluded that viewers of Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report were more informed about current events than viewers of FOX News or CNN and you start to see a pattern emerging: mainstream news is being rapidly eclipsed by other forms of media, both old and new.

As always, the most compelling and informative content will always draw the most eyeballs. People are moving away from mainstream and network television as more varied and compelling options present themselves. Needless to say, marketers will need to pay attention to this fact moving forward.

Author’s Note: The thoughts and prayers of the entire Blog Business Summit team are with the Hokie nation today as they recover from yesterday’s tragedy.

The Wall Street article Institutions Engage More On Confronting Scandals details how Dartmouth, Tuck, and other colleges are realizing the critical need to insure they are actively managing how they are viewed by the public. Several lessons here for corporations as well.

“Like companies, business schools can be touched by scandals and crises, yet many haven’t prepared for events that can tarnish their reputations. They are often caught off guard and must scramble to react, sometimes exacerbating the damage by failing to communicate effectively with the media, alumni, students and employees.”

The key is to success is a proactive vs. a reactive approach (emphasis mine):

“Angel Cabrera, president of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. “Students are buying a brand and an experience, and they use the school’s reputation to decide where to go.” Dr. Cabrera himself has dealt with recent financial problems at Thunderbird and rumors about selling the campus or merging with another school. “You need to be proactive when you’re dealing with negative publicity,”

The issue of transparency and citizen journalism rears it’s head as well:

“Vincent Hammersley, communications director at Warwick Business School in the United Kingdom, had to adjust to one big difference when he switched from the automotive industry. “At my old job, I could insist that employees not talk to the press on company issues without my consent,” he says. “Now, academic freedom of speech means that I am happy if I hear about a comment from a member of the staff before I read about it in the press.”

Strangely, no mention of blogs or feed monitoring in the article, especially considering the word “engage” in the headline…

At the last Blog Business Summit, I had a nice chat with Mary Hodder where we commiserated on how we longed for a blog search engine that would let us find posts by authors with little to no formally recognized “authority.”

As experienced bloggers know all too well, Technorati and Google easily help us find posts (and authors) that are linked to frequently, but in my mind that just advances the echo-chamber problem. What I’ve wanted is a way to find authors, articles and posts that are largely “undiscovered.”

We have a blog called bigbusinessjet.com that is sponsored by Greenpoint Technologies and covers the rarified space of owning and operating ultra-expensive business aircraft. Today I found a highly relevant article put forth by Dealmaker Magazine (a site with a PR of zero (?!)) that no one else has blogged about, hence has been ignored completely by Google Blog Search and Technorati.

How did I find it? I used the (thankfully under-appreciated!) Live Search from Microsoft. Live Search has some easily accessed parameters that enable you to find unpopular pages that have been recently been updated — and can even provide an RSS feed for that search. The essential parameters are found under the “Advanced” link, and the key settings are within “Results ranking” which brings up 3 sliders (see below.)

What I asked for was newer results that are relatively unpopular but match closely the search string “bbj3″ — which is the industry term for the Boeing Business Jet Version 3. Note how I could just as easily have entered the parameters as text.

Without Live Search, I don’t know if/when I would have found this article. Probably after some other blogger picked it up I guess…