Public Relations / Marketing / Advertising

in the article How Can a Company Protect Its Reputation on Web Sites? Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal writes about the realities of expunging negative information posted about your company on the Web. In many ways he gets it right, but in a few aspects, he’s a bit deficient in his coverage.

He implies that there’s not much you can do to demote negative content in Google search results, which is SO not true. We have a client who was involved in a lawsuit several years ago (which they won btw) and their attorney had posted about his efforts on their behalf. The content was not really all that negative, but it was the fifth item from the top when you searched for their name in Google. Our client wanted it sent to as far below the fold as possible, so largely thanks to our efforts, it moved from position 5 to position 65. It went from the first page of search results to the sixth.

How’d we do it? We launched a blog that mentioned them frequently and invoked a blogger engagement campaign that got others mentioning their name as well. It worked like a charm. Worthen references Daniel J. Solove, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School who is also a blogger, so I am guessing he concurs with us on the power of blogging.

Here are a few key quotes from the article and my thoughts.

“Once information finds its way online, it’s almost impossible to get it off.”
If he means that Google won’t forget about it, that’s generally true. Otherwise, pages come and go all the time.

“One thing not to bother with is so-called search-engine optimization, in which you hire consultants or buy software that’s supposed to make good information rise to the top of Google rankings.”
True. We’ve posted many times that most SEO efforts are largely ineffectual voodoo in comparison to spending the same money on content creation.

“A better bet is to confront the accusations head on. If a blogger writes that your company has poor customer service, leave a comment on the site saying you’re trying to fix the problem. Similarly, never ignore false rumors, as these can spread like wildfire on the Internet. Mr. Solove says to address the rumor on your Web site as early as possible.”
We couldn’t agree more.

Want some help pushing the bad stuff down? We’re happy to help.

Eric Goldman reported yesterday on American Airlines’ decision to sue Google (pdf link) over their keyword advertising practices:

This complaint pleads the usual claims for this type of action, including direct, contributory and vicarious trademark infringement (I don’t know why the vicarious claim was made; it’s deficiently pleaded); a false advertising claim that the “sponsored link” language communicates a false impression of actual sponsorship; dilution; various “soft” state claims (unfair competition; misappropriation and others); and tortious interference with contract because Google allegedly knew that American’s distributors weren’t supposed to buy American’s trademarks as keywords.

Eric’s got a lot more legal chops than I do, but it sounds to me like American Airlines thinks that they’re losing business because Google is allowing other airline services to advertise against the American Airlines trademark. In other words, Google is letting competitors trade on the AA name.

I’m not really sure what they’re trying to accomplish with this suit. The only thing I can think of is those TV commercials where they say “compared to other leading brands” instead of “compared to Coke.”

The idea, I think, is that you can’t use another product’s name in your ad. You can suggest it, but you can’t use it. Advertising on Google against AA is a little bit like using another product name in your ad. I wonder if it’s close enough.

We’re testing a new tool that is showing promise as an effective engine for measuring the tone of blog posts (but not comments–yet…) as they relate to a specific product or company. We’d love to include some of your data into the research, and would provide you the results free of charge. All we ask is that you take the time to cross-reference the results to your own analysis and tell us how the system performed.

The only data we need is: 1) A list of permalinks to posts that discuss a company or product, and 2) the name of the company or product.

We’ll send you back the list of links with an attached rating to each permalink: positive, negative, or neutral.

If you’re interested, just email me: steve AT blog business summit dot com (no spaces.)

I effing *love* Hugh Macleod!

[Via Jake McKee with regard to our lovely impromptu chat last week.]

Jake Mckee — a.k.a. the Community Guy — is one of my favorite people I’ve met since I got into this blogging thing. He’s graciously accepted our request that he speak at the conference this September. I had a nice chat with him via AOL Instant Messenger this morning. We talked about how traditional marketers approach communities, how they should approach communities, and why the Web changed everything.

Jake articulates some of the most important ideas in online community building so very well. I’m really looking forward to his sessions at BBS07. Transcript of the conversation after the jump.
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Wired’s Scott Gilbertson has an excellent point about Facebook: it’s a walled garden. Personal data goes in, and it doesn’t come out.

He’s not the first to complain, nor is he the first person to propose a solution. But I liked the way he articulated the next step in the process of opening the Web:
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Wired ran an article yesterday that encapsulates one of the biggest problems with the emerging Web. The money quote:

For people who’ve grown up in analog, Second Life is not that hard to understand,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, a consulting arm of the global ad giant Publicis Groupe. “I have a store in the real world; I have a store in the virtual world.” In contrast, the kind of digital marketing that actually works requires a conceptual leap. Successful online marketing is targeted and specific, like direct mail — but it’s direct mail in a fun house, where the recipients can easily seize control of what the mail says, where it goes next, and how it gets there. You need to know how to buy up keywords to maximize search returns, how to make the most of recommendation engines, how to use the viral potential of Web video, how to monitor what’s being said in blogs and message boards, how not to blow it by trying to be deceptive. Building a corporate pavilion in Second Life doesn’t require any of these things. It’s simple and it’s obvious.

The lesson here is pretty straightforward: online community building isn’t about fancy technology or flashy corporate pavilions in 3-D worlds. It’s about enabling people to connect with one another in ways that are meaningful to them. As Liz Strauss told me, you can’t have a community without people.

Since we launched our BlogTips Facebook application twelve days ago, several trackable conference registrations have been the direct result. I calculate a 43.75% net ROI in approximately 1/30 of a year. If you multiply that out, that’s an annualized 1,300% rate of return on the investment. Not too shabby.

By some metrics, it’s the single most effective marketing campaign I’ve ever been involved in — especially when we’ve only launched a 1.0 widget with limited functionality. Admittedly, we haven’t scaled to a volume where it’s a main driver of revenue (yet,) but it’s clear to us that this is an arena that shows great promise. It’s also a heck of a lot easier than fighting over AdWords terms.
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If I were responsible for giving the Sprit of the Blogosphere Award, I’d give it to Liz Strauss. Our speaker Andy Sernovitz put us in touch. I had a really lovely chat with her yesterday and came away with a renewed vigor for blogging. That’s usually how I know I’ve had a great conversation with someone.

One of the things that struck me during our chat was that “online community building” is becoming a buzz word, kind of like “synergy” or “paradigm.” She told me a story about a corporate marketer who told her that he was going to build a community on his company’s website. She asked him what he would do to get the people to come there and how he would work with them. He kept returning to the “community” angle, and she kept asking, “but what about the people?”

Liz has an astonishing number of comments — tens of thousands, in fact — on her blog. She’s very proud of this. She hosts open comment nights and spends inordinate amounts of time getting to know her readers. She explained to me that the secret to good blogging is understanding that your posts should be conversation starters rather than statements. The only way to really engage with people is to leave your posts unfinished.

About halfway through our conversation, I started feeling guilty. I realized that I didn’t spend nearly enough time engaging with the commenters on any of the blogs I write for. I asked her, “how do I make sure that my commenters understand that I do care about them when there just aren’t enough hours in the day?”

“You just did,” she replied. “You show up. You read what they’ve written and you make sure they know you were there.”

The moral of this story is that the business buzzword of “online community building” doesn’t really cover what needs to happen when a company sets out to build a community around their brand. Many corporate marketers seem to be approaching the issue with an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. But if you want to have a successful online community, you need to step out from behind your role as company spokesperson/spin-doctor and actually talk to people. Talk to them like you talk to your friends. Be yourself.

This mentality — which represents a real paradigm shift, not just a buzzword — will be a subject of renewed focus at the conference this September. We’ll be talking about technology and numbers and ROI to be sure, but we’ll also be talking about the real power of social media: the people that use it.

We recently completed development of our very first application for Facebook. The application is called BlogTips and it enables users to share their tips for what makes a great blog with their friends and the wider blogging community on Facebook.

Last week I posted that we’re eating our own dog food by building this Facebook widget. Building applications that add value to existing communities is one of the best ways to get the word out about anything.

In fact, usefulness appears to be the new #1 rule of online marketing. If your blog doesn’t provide any useful information, nobody will read it. I guarantee that your audience isn’t interested in your corporate marketing talk or the latest press release. They want real, practical information that adds value to their daily lives. The same is true of applications for social networks. People don’t want to stick your advertising on their profiles. But if you provide something that they’ll find useful, they’ll be more interested in helping you get the word out.

We sincerely hope that our contribution to the growing library of Facebook applications is a useful one. Of course, if you’ve tried it out and you think it stinks, we want to know that, too. Leave us a comment, link to this post, or drop me an e-mail if you have feedback either way.

The marketers present here at FiRe not only seem to embracing social media as a great way to drive sales, but in at least two cases, it’s been the only/main way they have promoted their wares.

From the podium this morning, Dave Winer was asked if there was a business model for podcasters. His response was that one might not get paid directly for podcasting, but there might be indirect revenues. As an example, he said that Scripting News was successful in generating sales revenues (I assume for Userland Software) and yet the business never took out ads. Winer indicated that his blog was the key traffic driver.

During lunch I was fortunate enough to sit next to Simon Hackett who is the founder and managing director of Internode Systems, and Agile Communications. Coincidentally, Internode also has not spent any money to speak of on traditional outreach and yet has been extremely successful. Simon told me that much of their success has been due to the positive word of mouth exposure gained from hundreds of hours he’s spent monitoring and contributing to the broadband community forum whirlpool.

The recent admission by Microsoft’s marketing group that the tremendous community reaction to their “Mad World” TV spot for the game Gears of War was not an intended side effect of the ad campaign got me thinking about what Jeremiah Owyang wrote a couple of months ago about community vs. viral marketing.

When it comes to creating viral videos, Jeremiah advises marketers to “stop trying to do something unattainable.” Because while we can dissect viral phenomena and learn from them, it’s almost impossible to create one outright. Viral content is defined in part by its spontaneity. And the conditions under which a carefully crafted marketing message can take off to become a viral scenario involve more luck than good planning.

Blogger Long Zheng seems to agree with this, writing in his post about the Microsoft admission, “the more you try the less it will happen again.”

I think this incident further reinforces the reality that online marketing must be driven by good old-fashioned blood sweat and tears. That is:

1. Build relationships.
2. Be transparent and honest and human.
3. Demonstrate that you care about what your customers care about.

Sure, think about stickiness and how people might do/make stuff with your advertising. But don’t expect that you can replicate the magic. And don’t promise your clients/boss that you can replicate the magic. In fact, don’t even try to replicate the magic. You’ll jinx yourself. Instead, focus on community-building. There’s way more ROI there.

Chris Pirillo has nine excellent points about how to do business on the Web. I’d like to expand on his first point.

Chris writes:

It’s not just about having an open mind; it’s about having an open strategy. You can’t control the Internet. Once you put something out there for the world to consume, assume that they will consume it but not just in the format you offered. It doesn’t matter if it’s audio, video, text, software, hardware or any other service—they’ll want to use it in ways that you can’t even imagine.

This is what Michael Raynor was talking about when he told PR Squared’s Todd Defren that social media injects additional uncertainty into business operations.

And it has more serious implications than the simple re-purposing of content. Businesses need to approach all aspects of social media with an open strategy. Unlike traditional marketing efforts, nobody can control the pace or subject matter of a conversation online. Each individual that participates can take any discussion or line of thought in myriad new ways.

So how does traditional goal-setting jibe with this lack of control? I think it works something like this:

1. Set a reasonable goal for your online interaction.
2. Listen to each individual and how the community responds to the individual.
3. Ask intelligent questions and listen to the responses.
4. Ask, “is my reasonable goal still reasonable?”
5. Either adjust goals to fit community response, or take another step toward your goal.
6. Repeat steps 2-5.

What do you guys think?

To give bibliophiles a look at the people behind their favorite contemporary works, publisher Simon & Schuster plans to launch a book channel on YouTube. The channel will feature two-minute clips of the CBS-owned publisher’s bestselling authors discussing their work and their lives as authors.

Their goal here is right on. The channel is an indirect way of giving users additional content that they find useful. But I think they should focus their distribution methods more broadly than just a YouTube channel. I’d like to see them host the videos on a blog of their own making, just as popular YouTube channel LonelyGirl15 ultimately did. Also, I’d like to see the series as a video podcast on iTunes, so that I can download it onto my iPhone and watch it on the bus.

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?

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.

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.

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.