Archive for July, 2005
Customer Blogs, Part Two: What you need to do to make it work ! (blogher comments)
Part Two of my blogher comments about customer written weblogs.
Warning: Long
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There are pros and cons with a collaborative weblog. Chief among the pros is that multiple voices means no one person has to post everyday and there is the vibrancy of conversation among the posts as well as in the comments.
And chief among the cons is that multiple voices means it is hard for the blog to develop a voice. Until the conversation gets rolling, and that is just about the hardest part of this, the blog can seem really disjointed.
In the case of Multiple Choice, the benefits of multiple voices far outweigh the difficulties, but if you are considering any form of multiple author blog, including a customer one, be prepared to deal with this.
Now, let’s turn to some advice for anyone considering starting a customer blog. What are the most important steps for the company?
It starts with commitment. For any blog to be successful, the author has to be committed. This is equally true for a customer written blog, and that much harder.
You aren’t talking about one person and her ability to feed her blog. You are talking about a group project, with multiple players, each with their own agenda and reason for participating in the blog. The most critical role is the company project manager or blog editor. Her job is to recruit, motivate, educate and promote the blog and its bloggers. She must be absolutely committed to the blog’s success, and willing to do what it takes to get it done. If she is not, the customer bloggers will sense that this really isn’t an important project for the company. They will lose interest before they even get started.
First, develop your editorial mission and do some validation with your customer base about both the idea of a blog and the editorial mission. We did about a dozen phone interviews with customers that my client had identified as highly engaged and good candidates to be bloggers. The interviews included some discussion about their use of the product, so I could sniff out any latent issues as well as get to know the customers. This helped me as a consultant get to know our blogger candidates a little bit. If you have someone internal do this part, you might structure it differently.
Then you start recruiting. In our case, we spent a lot of time working with the customers to help them understand blogging, our proposed blog, and the commitment it would require from them. I developed a FAQ to answer the common questions, held a phone training session with every blogger to get them going with TypePad (our chosen platform), provided them with extensive reference materials, and did a lot of initial handholding.
Eventually we had enough bloggers to go live. Over time, the company has recruited a few more giving Multiple Choice a total of five active customer bloggers. The absolute hardest part of this recruitment process was bringing this solid reference group up to speed with the blog and blogging.
Then you have to motivate them to write. This is why the company’s commitment is so absolutely critical. You are asking people to take 20-30 minutes out their week to write for your blog. They need to see that you are doing the same. And you need to help them, by suggesting topics or highlighting newsworthy events. Bottom line, you have to make it easy for them, or they won’t get started. Once they get started, some of them will take to it like ducks to water and need relatively little ongoing help. Others will need you to hold their hand for quite a while. It takes somewhere from six to eight months for everything to solidify.
So what can you do to get the conversation going? Well, you are already monitoring the blogosphere for mentions of your company and issues of interest. It is a simple step to send a short e-mail every so often to your bloggers and let them know something interesting BEFORE you blog it. That gives your bloggers a chance to write on the topic first. Something really hot? Pick up the phone. It still works. Really.
What else? Well, assuming you get the conversation going on your blog, you need to start actively promoting it, in an appropriate fashion, on other blogs. That means leaving comments and sending trackbacks. And again, here you have to help your bloggers out, at least initially. If one of your writers has posted something extremely brilliant about topic X, and you see topic X on another blog, don’t just tell your blogger and hope they have time to go over and leave a comment. That’s work.
Leave a short comment yourself, referencing the brilliant post, and also tell your blogger so she can decide if she wants to add more information, either in a comment or a follow-on post. You have to make it easy. Of course, you want your bloggers to be reading and commenting like crazy, driving traffic to your wonderful blog. But don’t count on it. Take charge of the situation.
Now this is NOT an invitation to start leaving comment spam. Your e-mail should clearly identify yourself, your role, the blogger and the relevant post. Plus a short commentary that makes sense in the context of the post you are commenting on. Don’t write too much – leave that for your blogger.
Hi. My name is Susan Getgood. I am the managing editor of Multiple Choice, a collaborative educational weblog. One of our bloggers, Mary Smith from Doe University recently posted on this topic. In her post, (insert name of post and link here or full URL if no html allowed by the blog) she talks about X, Y, Z.
Or perhaps: She agrees with/disagrees with you, (then elucidate briefly on the dis/agreement.)
Lastly, a few housekeeping things.
Don’t forget to use all your existing marketing vehicles to communicate about the blog to the intended audience. Add the URL to printed materials. Put buttons and links on your website. Issue a press release. Include it in your newsletter if you have one. If you don’t have one, start one. E-mail an announcement to your customers. Post about it in relevant forums. And so on……
In the B2B context, your bloggers probably are doing this as part of their professional development. Make sure you include their bios on the blog, and give them substantial play whenever you can. Likewise, you need to be updating the blog search engines through Pingomatic or RSS Submit or whatever you use. Do not expect or ask them to do it.
If you are a consultant, try to get at least a six month commitment so you can get the blog solid before you leave the project. If you are doing the bulk of the development and then transitioning it to an internal person, it is going to take her more than a few weeks or a month to get up to speed. In that period, the blog easily can lose momentum.
A customer written blog can be both the most satisfying and the most frustrating experience you will ever have. I think I’ve given you some flavor of why it can be frustrating – a customer blog is hard work and it takes time to get it right. And you have to do the work, or don’t bother; as the saying goes, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.
But after all that work, when you see it start to gel – bloggers blogging, and commenting, talking with each other in a community space that you created – you have the satisfaction of knowing you created something unique and valuable, both for the company and the community.
Hey, if it were easy, anybody could do it.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
6:00 pm |
Customer Blogs, Part One: What type of company should do one ? (blogher comments)
Warning: Long
As I’ve mentioned before on the blog, I will be at blogher in Santa Clara this weekend. I will be part of a marketing panel, sharing some of my experiences developing a customer-written blog.
As I always do, I have prepared my notes as both a speaking outline and a two-part post. Below is Part One: What type of company should consider a customer written blog.
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Hi. My name is Susan Getgood. My role here is to talk to you about customer blogs. And not independent blogs by customers or fans of a product. Rather company sponsored blogs for which the chief writers are customers.
As a marketer, I am a strong believer in the voice of the customer. For a long time, I have felt that the true voice of the customer has been missing from corporate marketing efforts. Mostly because we are afraid. Of what they might say. Of what we might have to do. Of the unknown.
So when I first learned about blogs not that long ago, one of my first thoughts was how this form would allow a company and its customers to really connect … if the company had both the character and commitment to make it happen.
Not long after, I found myself working with a client company that wanted to find a way to involve a happy customer base more actively in its marketing.
Long and short, we decided to do a blog.
Along the way, I developed a list of company characteristics that lend themselves well to customer blogging. As well as some tips about developing a customer written blog.
Let’s start with who should consider a customer blog.
I will use my client Software Secure and its blog Multiple Choice as an example throughout this discussion. Software Secure is in the education software business. Specifically they develop solutions that allow schools to prevent cheating on tests administered using laptops. Multiple Choice is at http://softwaresecure.typepad.com
First, character.
Criteria number one: the customers must LOVE the product. If you don’t have fans, you probably don’t want to do a customer blog.
Your fans, or evangelists, are both advocates and references. It is not just what they say, it is the mere fact that they are willing to say it to their peers in a public forum that offers value for your marketing program. Yes, of course, they have their occasional issues, but in my client’s case, they were happy, and articulate, customers who were already presenting about the company’s products at conferences on a regular basis. So, you have to know your base, know that by and large they are happy with your company and its products. If they aren’t, spend your time fixing that before worrying about blogging.
Second, the audience has to be online, and receptive to participating in an online community. The customers have to already be talking in some fashion.
Generally, the education software market is a highly engaged market. People know each other, and communicate through trade associations, loose affiliations, and yes, blogs. The existence of a strong blogging community and fan blogs is a good clue that you have an engaged market 
It helps a lot if there is an information gap you can exploit. As we were doing our marketing research, we discovered that there weren’t many online resources that focus specifically on developing a secure learning and testing environment. There were lots of big general sites, with lots and lots of information. Sometimes too much information.
We decided that this gap would be a good spot for our collaborative weblog written by Software Secure customers and other educational experts.
Finally, you have to be willing to give up some degree of control. No one wants to read a blog that just talks about a product, no matter who is writing.
You must develop an editorial mission for your customer blog that is related to your products, but is broad enough to allow a real conversation to develop among your customers and prospective customers. That means having the confidence that the sponsorship of a valuable, vibrant blog will build brand awareness and preference. You don’t need to control every word. And go back to point number one: your customers must love the product and the company.
Here’s how we describe Multiple Choice:
Multiple Choice brings together educators who are leading the way in building secure online learning and testing environments at schools and universities across North America.
Our sponsor is Software Secure, developer of technology that secures the computing environment from cheating and digital distractions.
The sponsorship is clear, the bloggers post directly to the blog (no company review) and they can write about whatever they like within the topic of secure online testing and learning. They are not limited to blogging about the company. How boring would that be.
So, in theory, customer blogging is a great idea. What about in practice?
That’s part two: what you need to do to make it work. I’ll post it on Saturday after the blogher session
Posted by Susan Getgood @
10:21 am |
Checking in, then checking out
Apologies for the light week. I will get back to a regular schedule in a few weeks. For now it is a bit spotty.
A bit on podcasting. Shel Holtz located an interesting research report, and subsequently linked to a very funny post by Steve Gillmor about the "death of podcasting." Net net: podcasting is here to stay, figure it out, decide if it makes sense for your marketing plan, embrace it if it does, and if not, just listen to the podcasts that turn you on. I like the Hobson and Holtz Report (for business) and The Signal for fun.
Don’t know what The Signal is all about. Don’t worry. In September, you will Listen to the podcast or send me an email if you can’t wait.
I am off on a family vacation tomorrow to Ocean City MD and then to blogher in Santa Clara. I may post before then, but if not, you can definitely expect my blogher presentation sometime on Saturday the 30th.
And first week of August will mark the 2d issue of Marketing Roadsigns, our companion newsletter.
And finally from the PR blogosphere (seen everywhere):
Shari Kurzrok - a dear member of our family, a friend and a colleague - is in need of a liver transplant.
Today (July 20th), her condition became critical. Her team of doctors at NYU Medical Center have indicated that her liver has failed and completely shut down, leaving us only a matter of 2-4 days to save her life. Shari’s only hope right now is to receive a liver transplant.
As such, our time is limited. However, you can make a serious difference by forwarding this message to as many people you know - friends, family, and former colleagues. Specifically, we need:
1) To reach anyone who may be in a position to make a liver donation within the next 2-4 days.
2) Everyone to spend a moment today, sending a prayer or thought to Shari in this critical hour.
Shari is 31 and grew up in Great Neck, New York, and is the daughter of Mort Kurzrok. Shari and her fiancé, Rob Schnall, are engaged to be married this October in Long Island. While Shari is deeply loved by her family - she’s also been a beloved member of the Ogilvy PR family for more than five years. Her efforts for the Red Cross’ award-winning blood drive work speak volumes about her character and humanitarian nature.
3) Tell a friend or share a note of concern
If you can provide immediate assistance in locating a potential donor, please contact us at (877) 223-3386 or email: liverforalife@yahoo.com.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
9:14 pm |
Podcasting in business?
One of the things I try to do on this blog is put things in a practical context for marketers who are trying to figure how (or whether) to integrate new technologies like RSS, blogs and podcasting into their marketing plans.
Podcasting has been the issue du jour (or semaine I suppose) with (among others) Dave Taylor and John Wagner representing the "podcasting doesn’t work for marketing" contingent, and Ben McConnell, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz coming in on the pro-podcasting side. Not surprisingly, they all make good arguments for their point of view. And John does appear to be softening.
But like so many discussions in the blogosphere (remember character blogs), I think many of the anti-arguments are confusing content with form, and dismissing the form because some examples of the form aren’t particularly good. Blogs and podcasts are forms, or channels of communication if you prefer. The opinion, messages, stories, pictures, etc. etc. communicated on blogs and podcasts are the content. Some blogs have good content, others not so. The same is true of podcasts.
From a practical marketing point of view, I think the answer is that podcasting CAN be a useful component in a marketing plan, under the right circumstances. Just because "everybody is doing it" is not a good reason. Every business doesn’t need a blog. The same is true of podcasting. The right reason to do a podcast for your business is because it will be an effective tool for communicating your message.
So what makes a podcast special, and more than just web-delivered audio content? Two things: the ability to subscribe to a feed and then easily download the material to a mobile device (MP3 player, iPod). So, if your intended audience for your marketing message does these two things, a podcast might be a very effective way of communicating with it on a regular basis. And as the technology improves, more and more listeners will shift from portable CD players to portable music devices, opening up a larger potential audience.
In particular, I believe podcasts will be an effective addition to the MarCom plan for high stakes messages. There’s been research that shows that people RETAIN a message they heard better than a message they read. [Note: if someone has the original reference and research, I would be ever so grateful. I have it somehwere but I just can't surface it.]
So, if you have a very important message or story you want to communicate to your audience, and they are mobile listeners, a regular podcast on the topic that drives home these high stakes messages could be a very nice supplement to your written and visual materials. Doesn’t replace the written content; we need both. And it has to be entertaining, which is of course the hard part. A good podcast should be indistinguishable from a good radio show…assuming of course you want people to listen all the way through and more than once.
Now, I am a prime target for a good marketing podcast. I’ve had an iPod for more than two years, and I take it with me whenever I travel. I listen to it in the car, when I work out and at my desk.
I would be thrilled with a regularly updated podcast from a fitness company that mixed music, health tips, fitness tips and the like, delivered in 15, 30 and 45 minute segments.
Are you listening Gatorade? I might buy your Propel fitness water more often if you were reminding me..subtly… every time I worked out.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
10:41 am |
Public Relations ROI. Fact or Oxymoron?
Does PR work, and how do you measure it? That’s the topic this week over at the Revenue Roundtable. Here’s my post kicking off the discussion — hope you join in at the Roundtable.
Got your attention?
To not waste time, I’ll tell you my opinion right up front. I believe PR works and can be one of the most effective tools in your marketing arsenal. For more background, read my post on how to define a good pr strategy.
The problem is: how do you prove it? As with its more glamourous sister, Advertising, it is often hard to trace a lead back to the PR campaign that may have generated it.
And, unfortunately, many PR firms deflect the request to prove it with fat clip books as a measure of increased brand awareness. Which doesn’t answer the question: is the Public Relations effort delivering prospects?
When I was at SurfControl, we tracked PR hits against downloads of trial software from the company Web site. After a major hit, downloads increased by a significant factor, for about 2-5 days, depending in the breadth and depth of the coverage, and then returned to normal levels. Proof positive of a definite relationship between PR and leads.
What do you do in your business to measure public relations?
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Check out the Selling to Big Companies blog by one of my colleagues on the Roundtable, Jill Konrath. She recently posted about a freeware tool called Bullfighter that will help you clean out the jargon from your written communications.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
11:03 am |
Marketing Roadsigns newsletter
Yes, I too have decided to launch a monthly newsletter. Since it will be a companion piece to the Roadmap, it will be called Marketing Roadsigns. You can sign up here on the Roadmap and on my website www.getgood.com
First issue will be sometime this week, and it will be archived on the website.
Update: July 2005 issue posted.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
6:43 pm |
Roadmaps Round-up: decision making, pitching bloggers and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.
Finishing up with my blogroll for this week:
From Andrew Lark, Tomcruiseisnuts.com I needed something light after the news of the bombings in London, and this fit the bill.
Another great post from Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users - You’re emotional. Deal with it. She covers the surprising news (VBG) that decisions are most often based on emotions, not logic, regardless of how we choose to justify the decisions. Of course this won’t be a surprise to marketing folks and most women I know, but news like this just might rock the world of a few tech CEOs.
Tom Murphy has an excellent post that lists posts from PR bloggers on the right (and wrong) ways to pitch bloggers. The post that triggered his, from Anil Dash, on how not to pitch a blogger, closed with an admonition about my favorite peeve: PDFs. About four weeks ago, I ripped into someone (privately) who sent me a pitch about a book with at least 3 PDF attachments plus a huge graphic in the HTML email.
Get a simple website, people, post your information there, and include the links in your emails. If you don’t have the technical ability to do this, find someone who does, like a college student or fourth grader. The people getting your pitch — whatever it is — DO NOT want their email bogged down with tons of attachments that they DIDN’T ASK FOR!!!!! It doesn’t matter whether they are on dial up, broadband, corporate network or a blackberry. They don’t want ‘em.
BONUS RESOURCE FOR US FOLKS: If you don’t have your own child to help you with this tech stuff, techstudents.net can help you find a college student to do this work for you.
Also from Tom Murphy, I learned about changes Gartner is making to the infamous Magic Quadrant and a new blog (new to me that is): Analyst Equity.
We’ll have to see how it plays out, but I don’t really see how these "changes" are going to make the whole Magic Quadrant process any less capricious. It still sounds like a "black box" where the analyst doing the Quadrant will decide the key elements based on his or her own opinions and biases, and the companies involved will have a devil of a time figuring it all out.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
11:05 am |
More on character blogs
Lots of interesting stuff from my blogroll today. I’ll start with a comment on the July 4th Hobson & Holtz report.
Early in the show, Shel and Neville discussed a query from a listener, Sebastian Keil. Sebastian has a client, a rental car company, that is considering having a character blogging feature on its corporate blog, where the CEO will also blog. The idea was to have an occasional post from a rental car about where it recently went. Neville and Shel discussed the whole character blog thing at some length, and both agreed that it was not a good idea. You should listen to the show for the whole conversation.
It seemed to me that in the discussion about the character blog aspect (a question of form) they were missing the most important element: WHY the company thought this might be a good idea (the issue of content). Because in the WHY was the clue to perhaps a better idea for the company. I sent the following comment as soon as I got home:
As you both know, I am not at all opposed to character blogs in principle. In this case, however, I agree with you both – a character blog in the voice of a rental car is not the way to go.
My advice: I’d focus on two things Sebastian said about the project, first the WHY: they want a way to show all the ways you can use a rental car, and part of the HOW: they plan to put disposable cameras in the cars for the renters to take the pics that would tell the story.
So – I’d go with a customer blog: put the cameras in the cars, and provide an incentive for the renters to tell their stories. Then you post the best ones in the blog. The incentive could be you’d give everyone who used the camera and provided a brief diary of their trip with a custom digital photo album created from the pix and for the ones you actually use, you could give them a free day or whatever discount makes sense. End of day: you get your stories and you increase customer loyalty in the process.
With this format you could do it as a separate blog or on the blog with the CEO, whichever you preferred.
There is nothing wrong with a character blog. It is just a form. But as marketers, we really should look first to the real voices available to us. Odds are, they will be just as, if not more, compelling. Executives. Employees. Customers. Evangelists.
If after evaluating the real voices, you still believe that a character blog is the best choice, by all means, try it. It could be just the ticket. Just remember: it is hard work to make characters real, believable, compelling and consistent. After all, if it were easy, we could all be best selling novelists or award winning screenwriters. And even the best fictional franchises have been known to "jump the shark."
A character blog isn’t a bad idea just because it is a character blog. But it is a bad idea if there’s a better way.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
6:55 pm |
Public relations - measuring results, managing media. Plus a word on corporate blogging
Happy Independence Day!
After this post, I am going to take TypePad’s advice and take a blogging holiday over the weekend while they upgrade the software. But I have been holding onto a few things that will be REALLY old by Tuesday. So while they are still sort of blogworthy, here goes.
First, I seem to be on a PR tack lately, and this topic is no exception. A few weeks ago, Sam Whitmore co-hosted the Hobson & Holtz Report, and threw a couple of topics out to the audience for comment. I listened to the show while traveling out of town, and with this and that, haven’t been able to get to my thoughts until now.
The first issue was PR measurement and budget preservation. Sam commented that in order to preserve PR budgets, it seemed that MarComm and PR folk needed to do a better job of quantifying PR results. He also mentioned a PR agency that was in fact promoting its ability to demonstrate ROI.
The key I think is that marketers have got to look at PR as part of an integrated marketing plan, and look at the impact of the PR activities on sales, not just on brand awareness. In other words, count leads, not clips.
When I was at SurfControl, we tracked PR hits against downloads of trial software from the company Web site. After a major hit, downloads increased by a significant factor, for about 2-5 days, depending in the breadth and depth of the coverage, and then returned to normal levels. Proof positive of a definite relationship between PR and leads. Now, if I could have only gotten the sales reps to actually ask the prospects where they heard of the product….
The other topic Sam raised was to ask whether professional media training has created executives who are better at managing the media than the reporters are at conducting the interview. He pointed to an example in the tech trades where two pubs ran eerily similar stories about a tech company … down to the same headline … as proof that the executive being interviewed was clearly more in control of the story than the reporters who were covering it.
I could have this wrong, but it seemed that Sam’s point was that professional media training, which has created these execs who stay on message, is ruining the media, making it impossible for reporters, who don’t have the luxury of the same training, to get the real story. I just don’t think that’s right.
There is a difference between not answering a question (dodging) and staying on message. The company exec (and her PR firm) have a responsibility to the company to tell the story it wants told. They should answer direct questions but as long as they answer the actual question before moving on to their point, it is wrong to fault them for staying on message.
It is the journalist’s job to conduct the interview, ask the tough questions, get the answers and write an original story. Most journalists of my acquaintance do this. We all understand the rules of engagement, and do our jobs.
If reporters take shortcuts and don’t do their homework, don’t ask the tough questions, and rely too heavily on a press release or company statements, versus their own instincts, they just aren’t doing their job. The one the readers expect them to.
The answer isn’t to stop training company executives to be better communicators. It is to maintain journalistic standards. Perhaps, as Sam suggested, journalists should be exposed to the same communications training that their subjects get. I think that’s an excellent idea; the J-schools and the publications themselves should both explore this idea.
But don’t blame the company communicators for doing their jobs. Of course, media training helps the exec do a better job in the interview. That’s why we do it. And we aren’t going to stop.
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Over at PR Communications, John Cass has released the results of his corporate blogging survey.
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Finally, it is my birthday next week and my husband gave me my present early. As I went to the store with him last night to get it, seemed silly to wrap it and wait until Tuesday. So anyway, my iPod is off the s*** list and I am loving my new Bose SoundDock. Tomorrow, we’ll be packing up boxes and boxes of CDs for storage.
Happy holidays everyone. Stay safe, and enjoy fireworks and alcohol responsibly (and not together). See you Tuesday.
Posted by Susan Getgood @
5:12 pm |
