CitizenSpin

Volvo blog revs-up for success

Back to blogging, with news of a really effective corporate blog. My dissertation is done and the MSc complete – more of that in future weeks.

In the meantime, what sparked my interest was the new Volvo C30 – a sleek three door hatch which reminds me of the Volvo P1800 (driven by the Saint and also owned by a friend’s dad when I was a youngster).

What’s fascinating is that during a search for more information about the new C30, I stumbled across a blog by the designer - Simon Lamarre. His C30 Designer Blog describes the inspiration for the car, talks about the excitement of seeing ‘his’ car launched, and the recent press trips to test the new car.

As a prospective customer, this was great. I gained an insight into the life of the designer – not just the inspiration behind the vehicle, but also the politics and the bureaucratic hurdles that need to be negotiated. The blog contains sketches as well as a record of his feelings and experiences. Lamarre also talks about the reaction inside the company (which is part of Ford) to the blog.

The blog is powerful for a number of reasons:

¡ It’s written by an individual who is obviously passionate about the project – the enthusiasm shines through in the writing

¡ The blog provides added depth to the consumer experience – the opportunity to enter into a dialogue with the man who designed the vehicle

¡ The blog is also one step removed from Volvo – Lamarre is doing it as an individual, not on the corporate web site but through blogspot.com

In short the blog maintains a feeling of independence and impartiality, so that the motivation appears to be sharing the unique experience of launching a new car, rather than a cynical marketing exercise to attract early adopters. Of course it works as a promotional tool exactly because of this.

Matt

Citizen blackmail or legitimate consumer campaign? Land Rover response contrasts Dell Hell

In contrast to the Dell Hell and Dell Hell 2 postings, it appears Land Rover in Britain is attempting to engage with consumers who’ve bought their new Discovery model and are dissatisfied with it.
Adrian Melrose has been cataloguing his troubles with two successive Discover models at his site www.haveyoursay.com. Apparently the site gets 700 visitors a day, and built up quite a head of steam amongst consumers via the blog. He eventually had his faulty motor replaced.
Neville Hobson has followed the saga and reported that Land Rover were planning to use the www.haveyoursay.com site as a forum for consumers – to engage them in a dialogue about issues. Land Rover’s Customer service chief, Mike Mulholland, said that the company had not been across online issues, but now customer feedback can be found here.
It’s a big move for a company to tackle criticism head-on – and is a brave move. It’s also a great opportunity – they have an audience of bloggers out there, and if the company listens to them they will have converted them from being detractors into brand advocates. The company can start a corporate blog and also start a genuine two-way dialogue.
But these new instances of consumer campaigning raise new issues around the role blogs can play in forcing a poor customer service issue into the public eye. Is it ground breaking citizen journalism, or a case of one consumer with a gripe being able to hold a company to ransom?
However, now that Land Rover have the ear of thousands of interested and connected customers, they have un unrepeatable opportunity to change the climate of opinion about them, as they have started doing with Mike Mulholland’s response.

Matt

Dell Hell - it continues

Following up to my previous post on Jeff Jarvis’ battle with dell – here’s proof that what goes on in the bloggsphere is picked up by mainstream media.
The whole sorry tale of Dell’s refusal to acknowledge problems with customer service is played out in the Media Guardian – the media supplement of one of a UK national paper. Jeff Jarvis explains his motivation for using his blog to attack Dell in the first place:

“I decided to turn this into a test: Was Dell reading blogs? Would Dell respond to me in our public forum? Would it recognise the PR crisisette that was brewing? Simple answer: No. Dell was silent. Dell failed the test. I emailed its marketing department: Anybody home? Anybody blogging? Nothing. I finally sent (and blogged) an email to the chief marketing officer and US VP (and the chief ethics officer, for good measure), begging for relief.”

… and the buzz that grew up around it – damaging Dell’s reputation:

“My blog saga garnered not only comments and links but also press coverage from tech blogs, newspapers, and magazines (see www. buzzmachine.com/?tag=dell). But the most telling moment came in a blog post by Toronto venture capitalist Rick Segal, who overheard a bank teller in his office food court saying, "I was going to buy a new Dell but did you hear about Jeff Jarvis and the absolute hell he is going through with them?" Says Segal: "Lots of people are making the assumption that 'average people' or 'the masses' don't really see/read blogs, so they can take a little heat and move on. Big mistake."

It just goes to show that good environmental scanning – by looking at what’s being said online – and using sites like Technorati.com or Icerocket.com to see what’s being said in the blogshpere – can help to highlight upcoming issues before they become much bigger, and more possibly costly, corporate issues.
Jarvis offers two other pieces of advice for corporations:
1) Talk with your consumers. A Dell PR executive told blogger and Houston Chronicle columnist Dwight Silverman that the company's blog policy was, in Silverman's words, "look, don't touch". How insulting: You ignore you customers. How much better it would be to ask their advice. Beats any consultant.
2) Blog. If execs at Microsoft, Sun, and even GM can, you can. Show that you are open and unafraid to engage your public. Beats PR.

None of it rocket science, though it does require a proactive corporate communications department with the clout to instigate some action when they see and issue arising.
Matt

Dell Hell – consumer complaints prompt corporate blogging u-turn

It looks like Dell has learned an expensive and difficult lesson about consumer blogging. After a customer service row has been enacted online in the blogsphere, it has instigated a new policy to deal with unhappy consumers. But at what cost to its corporate reputation?
The company was accused of ignoring bloggers, and ignoring the growing body of discontent with its products. Over the past few months, Jeff Jarvis used his popular Buzzmachine.com blog as a platform to name and shame the company. Jarvis first wrote about the topic in June, and continued posting updates through the summer.
Most recently Jarvis wrote an “open letter" to Chairman Michael Dell, calling for the company to heed the growing band of dissent online over its poor consumer relations.
In his post, Jarvis points to evidence that Dell has suffered a slump in customer service, market share is shrinking, and share price dipping.
A pretty powerful argument that Dell’s business is drifting.
BuzzMachine frequently receives more than 5,000 visitors a day. According to Itelliseek’s BlogPulse the posting was the most linked to post in the blogshpere last Thursday.
Subsequently, Dell spokeswoman Jennifer Davis told Shankar Gupta in Online Media Daily that the company will now monitor blogs. And when they see a problem crop up, she says, the details will be passed-on to the customer service department, who will contact the blogger directly to try to resolve it.
"Obviously, Mr. Jarvis' experience could've been handled better," Davis said.
As for other bloggers, Davis said that ideally, when customer service receives forwarded complaints from bloggers, representatives will approach them directly to diffuse the problem. "That's certainly what they're supposed to do," she said. "I can't comment that it happens 100 percent of the time, but that certainly is what the process is designed for."

As a case study, it’s a powerful example of the blogsphere having an influence on corporate image and reputation - the Jarvis blog was picked up by numerous other blogs, and by journalists who wrote about it in newspapers and magazines. Dell appear to have been slow to respond and therefore exacerbated the problem.
However, another interesting debate has sprung up on BuzzMachine – if Jarvis had been a lower-profile blogger, would the result have been the same? Is the blogsphere an egalitarian community where all bloggers wield equal consumer power? That may be the dream / intention – but I don’t think it’s true.

Matt

Corporate reputation and share performance

We know that image + identity = reputation, and the role that PR has in establishing image and identity. The problem has been proving that the cash spent on PR impacts on the bottom line. Now new research links reputation with share price movement.
A report in the FT quotes research by MORI, the polling company, which tracked UK companies for customer satisfaction. It discovered that changes in the level of customer satisfaction led to moves in the share performance – between 3 and 12 months after the customer satisfaction snapshot.
The five companies tracked were Tesco, J Sainsbury, Vodafone, British Airways and Marks and Spencer.
The FT article goes onto explore this area for investors – saying that institutional investors, fund managers and the like, are trading on this connection between reputation and share prices. Some are commissioning their won private polling data.
The paper quotes its own report from March – in which it revealed that Scottish Widows Investment Partnership sold most of its four per cent stake in William Morrison after polling of former Safeway customers showed that many switched to rival supermarkets following the takeover by the Yorkshire-based group. Morrison shares collapsed over the following months.
It will be interesting to see what impact the current dispute at British Airways has in the future.
The FT quotes Waheed Aslam, MORI development director: "Investors believe in the link and increasingly want private data that add value to their investment decisions. They do not want information that their rivals can obtain."
It’s not clear yet whether this link works for other sectors – the five companies examined by MORI were all in customer service and three are retailers. MORI is planning to research other sectors like energy, banking and technology.
It’s all a blatant pitch for more business for MORI of course – who can see a new market opening up in research for investment banks, but it’s great ammunition if you needed it to justify PR spend and get that voice heard. If you need any extra ammunition the MORI Reputation Centre has some good pointers.

Matt

So where does this citizen-journalism impact big business?

So, there are all these consumers out there busy blogging and writing content. What are the consequences for corporate communications?
We’ve seen the Ketchum debacle – whereby a video of the locks being picked hammered their business. Shel Israel & Robert Scoble have investigated Kryptonite further for their new book – see Naked Conversations. They conducted an interview with the company’s PR – and drew out the subsequent lessons that could be learned by corporate communications practitioners who are faced with an onslaught from the weblog community.
However, I’ve been sent another interesting example by Shari Aaron of Freshmarketing. The site, which is due to launch in five days, is aimed at ‘citizen consumers’ – a group she describes as caring, aware and empowered. He site – www.alonovo.com – offers information about the environmental and social performance of companies before consumers buy products. She says the data is provided by a company / organisation called KLD – so it’s not consumer generated content, but she says the site was started by ethically aware consumers.
An example of the market stepping in where government and big business have failed?
Here in the UK, the Cooperative bank makes a big play of its ethical credentials, and from what I understand this has helped carve them a distinct and growing niche in a competitive marketplace – Gary Davies at Manchester Business School has studied the Co-op Bank in some depth in relation to corporate reputation managment.
At a time when information is becoming universal thanks to the Internet, and news travels more quickly thanks to bloggers, and citizen journalism, there are fewer places for big business to hide. So transparency and clarity in corporate communications becomes essential for building a sound relationship with consumers.

Matt

What is Word of Mouth good for?

I’ve was posed an interesting question by a friend this week. He was looking over CitizenSpin and was taken by the discussions on Word of Mouth (WoM) marketing.
So what works for WoM? After initial discussions with Ian McKee of Vocanic on WoM I decided to have a look around his blog for a few pointers.
He publishes a list of the top ten product categories which benefit from WoM: Automotive, Consumer Electronics, Consumer Packaged Goods, Entertainment, Fashion, Healthcare, High Tech, Publishing, Toys & Games, Travel – taken from Emanual Rosen (Anatomy of Buzz)
To this Ian adds a few extra suggestions: Cosmetics, Health and beauty (shampoos etc),
Baby care products (for people with babies it is hard to avoid the conversation).
But are there any examples of WoM working well for other categories. I used to work in the personal finance field – and I’m wondering if it could be applied to mortgages, insurance or bank accounts? You certainly know it if a friend or colleague has had a bad experience in the financial life – but would WoM work positively as a promotional tool?

Matt

Greater challenges from within or outside big organisations?

Corporations may be facing ‘challenge’ and chaos from the ‘creative revolution’ –but thanks to David Phillips who commented on my previous posting on the issues raised. He suggested that there are as many divisions and challenges to manage within and organisation, as there may be externally.

“Loosely organised groups will be increasingly given leverage,” he says. “The idea of monolithic structures is a bit old hat. Most organisations are a coalition of 'loosely organised' groups anyway. We now need to understand the nature of people, their tangible and intangible assets and the values they find attractive.”

His research into Relationship Value suggests that this is really the reality of life in large organisations. Working in one myself, I know there are many different groups of people, all pursuing slightly different goals. Some areas have even been described as ‘feudal’ – with all the associations of medieval lords defending their fiefdoms.

And it seems a reasonable point – PR is about managing relationships with external, and internal, stakeholders. Who is to say that the internal stakeholders are any more cohesive than external factions are?

Matt

The creative revolution: 'challenge' and 'chaos' for corporations

“Institutions will come under increasing degree of pressure and the more rigid they are, the more pressures they will come under.”

Clay Shirky talking at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford, as reported on BBC News. The International Herald Tribune gives background to the conference - including the launch of the Apple Mac and the compact disc.

“I’m predicting 50 years of chaos,” he adds, “Loosely organised groups with be increasingly given leverage.”

A lot of what is being talked about is in the arena of creative collaboration – people working through the channels and tools of the net to develop new products and services. And the development is being driven by consumers. The example of the mountain bike is quoted – developed by frustrated Californians who were unhappy with ordinary bikes. 65% of bike sales are now mountain bikes. The internet is aiding this kind of collaboration.
“It’s when the net combines with these passionate consumers that you get the explosion of creative collaboration,” according to Charles Leadbeater – Tony Blair’s favourite political analyst.
Addressing the conference, U2 front man Bono said:

“… if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now you need a laptop. If you wanted to make a film, you needed a mass of massive equipment and a Hollywood budget. Now, you need a camera that fits in your palm and a couple of bucks for a blank DVD. Imagination has been decoupled from the old constraints, and that really, really excites me. I'm excited when I glimpse that kind of thinking writ large.”

But it’s not just technology and making consumer goods that’s aided by the net, Bono sees greater potential:

“What I would like to see is idealism decoupled, idealism decoupled from all constraints: political, economic, technological, whatever. The geopolitical world has got a lot to learn from the digital world, from the ease with which you swept away obstacles that no one knew could even be budged, and that's actually what I'd like to talk about today.”

And, of course, when you combine the net with passionate consumers or campaigners, you get communication challenges for corporations.

Matt

Better jobs to people with clever blogs?

Time spent on your resume or CV could be better spent blogging according to an article in the latest edition of The Economists Intelligent Life (Summer 2005, p141). The article Blogging up the Ladder suggests that an intelligent blog can be an aid to creating and individual online brand, which in turn can be used to further your career.
The article quotes the example of Biz Stone, author of two books Who let the blogs out and Blogging, who was recruited by Google after both sides carried out due diligence on each others work online. In fact the article goes on to quote the ubiquitous Dan Gillmor in saying that a blog could soon become a must for anyone who wants to make it to the top.
The article goes on to say:

All this illustrates a broader trend. As people spend ever more time online buying things, participating in discussion groups, and having our names cited by others ever more information about them gets posted on the internet. In the process they begin to acquire and online persona, which needs managing carefully.

So not only do corporations need to think about reputation management online, but the same applies to individuals. It would be interesting to find out the positive aspects for the individual blogger anyone found a new job?

Matt

Blog watching marks end of market research?

Blogs are growing into the ultimate focus group - cries Brian Morrissey in Billboard (20/06/2005). He cites the case of US Cellular who wanted to reach college age consumers and speak to them on their own terms.
The company commissioned Umbria Communications and G Whiz to eavesdrop the blogsphere and examine postings relating to mobile phones.
Its interesting, as in a previous posting I referred to RSS possibly turning blogging back into a one-way communication channel allowing corporations to pump out information unquestioned. In this case linguistic analysis was used to carry out quick and dirty market research to listen to what the consumers had to say. I suppose its the flipside of that RSS coin.
The research was employed to shape a TV advertising campaign based around the themes they discovered.
One advantage to this kind of research is that the results would be less prone to bias the subjects are unaware that they are being observed, and you could argue that the opinions expressed are therefore more genuine. However, who is motivated to blog about their mobile in the first place? Someone who may feel unduly passionately about how good or bad it may be so this in itself could create distortion.
It is however, and interesting example of how the Internet is enabling better environmental scanning in the world of Corporate Communications, especially among some of the hard to reach segments of the population.

Matt

RSS goes mainstream - Microsoft promotes citizen media?

Just as blogging has brought power to the people to create their own content, RSS feeds are about to bring power to the Internet users - the consumers of the media. RSS feeds give people the ability to sift and select their own content - in effect creating their own online 'newspaper', with the stories they're interested in.
Microsoft has created waves by announcing that their next operating system (Longhorn), and the next version of Internet Explorer, will incorporate the ability to handle RSS feeds. This will have the effect of making RSS mainstream.
At the moment only about 5 percent of Americans subscribe to RSS feeds - see January's survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project - that's about 6 million people.
Microsoft says that in the next version of Internet Explorer, a user who visits a page that has an RSS feed will see a notification button light up on the browser. Clicking a plus symbol in the browser will subscribe to that feed, and the feed will go on an internal subscription list in Longhorn.
But RSS is about more than just news and information, Charlene Li of Forrester Research has been working on a report about non-blog uses of RSS for marketers. There are a number of interesting ideas she's found, and that other people have suggested:

Purina has feeds for updated Web content (e.g. dog and cat care advice); coupon or bargain sites like Slick Deals and TechBargains also have content feeds; Deals on the Web (dealsontheweb.com) - a site for bargain hunters looking for consumer electronics - has feed for their latest finds; Amazon has details of it's latest deals. There are examples of PR uses of RSS - for example Apple has its PR feed on RSS - a great way to distribute press releases. And travel companies seem to be up there with both Continental Airlines and Delta Vacations having RSS feeds.

So RSS goes mainstream? Though a couple of issues strike me about the corporate communication impliactions: firstly it provides a great way for a corporation to sidestep the established distribution channels and get their message out there in way that doesn't allow it to be messed-up or mangled in the disseminatino, but secondly, whereas blogs allow for a two-way dialogue with consumers, the use of RSS feeds seems to reduce the meduim to the old 'transmitter' and 'receiver' model of communication.

Matt

Blogs give consumers the upper hand - lessons from Kryptonite

"Blogs have shifted the balance of power between man and business ... man now has the upper hand."

There were a few good examples of how blogs are shifting the balance of power for consumers quoted in the newspapers at the weekend.
The Financial Times describes how Kryptonite, a manufacturer of bicycle locks in the US, had to replace hundreds of thousands of locks after material harmful to its reputation appeared online:

"In September, a viral video spread through the blogosphere, showing how to pick a Kryptonite lock with a ballpoint pen. The company scrambled to reply, but its tiny offline PR team was no match for the citizen forces mobilised on the internet. Blogs spread the word that Kryptonite was flawed and the company ended up offering everyone a new lock."

In fact 300,000 locks were exchanged at a cost reported to be $10m, and the company also ended up settling a class-action lawsuit by offering up to $3,000 per stolen bike. The video of the Kryptonite lock being picked can be found here.
The Independent quotes the same story, and also that of TiVo:

"When a commercial blog called PVRblog.com ran a piece claiming that adverts would be shown on its machines, all hell broke lose in a 75,000-strong online TiVo community. The company only realised there was a problem when the story hit the Los Angeles Times."

This example raises the issue of environmental scanning, and how issues being raised online can act as an early warning to problems before they hit the mainstream media.
The FT article goes on to ask if power also brings responsibility. The focus is on legal obligations, but it could be argued that there are also ethical or moralobligations as in any other area of journalism.

Matt

Blogging guidelines – or how not to get sacked

There are many examples of people who’ve been sacked for their blogging activity - Joe Gordon sacked in the UK by Waterstones book shop, Troutgirl sacked by Friendster, and sacked Delta Airlines employee Ellen Simonetti.
They all fell foul of their employers in the early days of the evolving blogsphere - there were few guidelines in place. It’s something that’s still being worked on here at the BBC, as a policy for blogging is still being drawn-up.
Some companies seem to regard corporate blogging a powerful communication tool; others a threat with much greater risks than potential benefits. So having a sensible set of guidelines seems like a sound way to avoid problems.
Corporate Blogging has pulled together a selection of guidelines from employers, and drawn-up a comparison of blogging rules - and there is a bit of pattern-spotting among the rules:

The Core; all companies
• You’re personally responsible
• Abide by existing rules
• Keep secrets
• Be nice

The Common; approximately half of them
• Add value
• Respect copyright
• Follow the law
• Cite and link
• Discuss with your manager

The Unusual; only one or two companies mention
• You can write on company time
• Our goal
• You may disagree with the boss
• Stop blogging if we say so
• Contact PR

At Sun they recognise the risk that bloggnig can pose and have a Policy on Public Discourse which is similar but gives more guidance:
• It's a Two-Way Street
• Don't Tell Secrets
• Be Interesting
• Write What You Know
• Financial Rules
• Quality Matters
• Think About Consequences

More examples can be found at these sites:
• Feedster Corporate Blogging Policy
• Thomas Nelson Blogging Guidelines
• Plaxo Public Internet Communication Policy
• Hill & Knowlton Blogging policies and guidelines
• Yahoo Employee Blog Guidelines (pdf)

Finally there’s a nice note from a blogger at Yahoo – as a few words of advice to colleagues considering blogging.

Also some legal guidance doesn't go amiss - the Electronic Freedom Foundation published this useful Legal Guide for Bloggers although with a US focus. But the BBC has a very useful online guide entitled How to Avoid Libel and Defamation. 

So logs of thougt, some agreement in some areas, and lots of variations.

Matt

Why have a corporate blog? And should PR or marketing functions take the lead?

Backbone Media has published some preliminary results from their Corporate Blogging Survey. There are some interesting headlines. It seems that getting information or content out to an audience is very important – portraying blogging as a marketing tool, but other early results indicate that ‘increasing sales’ was less important in blogging than  'boosting search engine rankings'.

Though there was also a trend in the initial surveys to list 'thought leadership' as the highest priority – if this winning the hearts and minds of early adopters and those with influence then it seems like it’s a PR function, and 'getting product feedback from customers' was also a strong driver of blogging – PR or  marketing?

Other responses point to the PR potential of blogs being exploited by companies – using them to build relationships with key stakeholders.

The top three reasons to blog were:

• Another way to publish content and ideas

• Build a community

• Thought leadership

The bottom three reasons were:

• Respond to negative comments

• A way to get interview requests from journalists

• Crisis communications

Matt

Word of mouth, blogging and PR / corporate communications

I've been thinking about word of mouth, or peer to peer marketing to give it its proper name, and how it relates to blogging. Its something that was raised by Ian McKee of Vocanic in an email he sent from Singapore. He asked:

I focus on peer to peer marketing. Now I have had a few discussions as to where PR fits in this context. Separately? Or should word of mouth be considered in the fields of PR? What do you think?

In a previous posting I quoted the Intelliseek report, Consumer Generated Media, which talks about online word-of-mouth vehicles, including but not limited to: consumer-to-consumer email, postings on public Internet discussion boards and forums, consumer ratings web sites or forums, blogs (short for weblogs, or digital diaries), moblogs (sites where users post digital images/photos/movies), social networking web sites and individual web sites.
In their still to be published book, Shel Israel and Robert Scoble are planning a chapter on Word of Mouth, in which they discuss the power and efficiency of word-of-mouth marketing through examples that include ICQ, Skype, Firefox.Explains the connection between blogging and word-of-mouth.
Ian's response:

Is Word of Mouth part of PR, is PR part of word of mouth.Should it be managed by a separate team or be part of CRM or even brand.This whole area got huge debate at the WOMMA Conference.
My take the answer is different for each customer, and the strategy they are taking.IF you are a brand like Nudie or Red Bull, then marketing clearly own WOM and PR.If you are Head and Shoulders shampoo clearly things are different.The one thing that is true is that the people who run this stuff need to communicate to make sure that it is integrated and consistent.

It is this kind of communication which motivates publics to move from being aware to being active. In the corporate landscape it would makes sense that PR professionals manage this relationship. Thats where Id say word of mouth marketing and PR fit together.

Matt

Blogs and the Internet: a tool to defend as well as attack

I posed the proposition previously that the internet is providing the tools for publics to become more connected, and as Grunig suggests, more prone to move to activism.
Grunig & Hunt (1) assert that there are three stages in the evolution of publics. In the first stage, the public doesn’t recognise the problem; the public then moves to the aware stage - recognising the problem. Finally the active stage is reached – the problem is recognised and the public decides to do something about it. According to Grunig the idea is to communicate with an aware public before it actively opposes an organisation and becomes an activist public.
Thanks to Adriana at the Big Blog Company who reminded me about the Intelliseek report – Consumer Generated Media. This white paper describes how consumers use the internet to educate each other about products, brands, services, personalities and issues. This can be via a variety of channels, referred to as Consumer Generated Media (CGM) - online word-of-mouth vehicles, including but not limited to: consumer-to-consumer email, postings on public Internet discussion boards and forums, consumer ratings web sites or forums, blogs (short for weblogs, or digital diaries), moblogs (sites where users post digital images/photos/movies), social networking web sites and individual web sites.
The report points to the growing influence of the Internet in motivating Grunig’s publics: “In essence, the Internet has exponentially supercharged the concept of word-of-mouth behaviour, giving it a power that marketers have only begun to understand”, it adds: “The internet is significantly amplifying the power of brand apostles and owners, affording them many more venues and ‘megaphones’ for sharing their views with others.”

So who’s listening to this CGM?
The report suggests:
Consumers - Because it informs purchase, loyalty
Reporters - As it accelerates research and fact-finding
Analysts - Because it offers scoop/insight company won’t volunteer
Competitors - Allows them to exploit actual users of competitors’ products as “intelligence gatherers”
Regulators - Because vocal consumers provide leading indicator into future problems
Activists - As it helps reinforce/solidify a key position

The white paper from Intelliseek focuses on the marketing potential of the information available online, but in the context of the work done by Grunig on two-way communication as a Corp Comms tool, it seems the Internet provides an ideal tool for engaging these publics in a dialogue before they move to that all important activist stage?

Matt

(1) Grunig, J.E. & Hunt, T. (1984) Managing Public Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.

Does corporate blogging devalue blogs?

This morning (Sunday 12/6/05) BBC Radio 4s Broadcasting House programme ran an item about blogging and how business is getting involved:
"The world of weblogs, blogging to those in the know, used to be one where individuals reigned - but Chris Ledgard has been finding out how corporations have started to get in on the act, perhaps even the BBC."
It included the increasingly common tale of an employee sacked for blogging about work - in this case the salutory tale of Heather Armstrong of dooce.com - a web designer who was fired after writing about work.
The piece suggested that corporate blogging is 'not quite blogging', Award winning blogger Tom Coates, PlasticBag, suggested that the best people talking for companies are the people expert and familiar enough with their products to say something meaningful. He added that if a communications professional is hired to write about at company or product then the blogspere is going to be cynical.
The piece concluded that the clever thing for companies to do is to work with employees who want to write a blog. It quoted the case of Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm yogurt, who employs a blogger and lets employees blog:
"It's only when we become humble and recognise that were just people selling to people that blogging will become the mainstream, companies how try to employer this tool to talk about how cute and wonderful we are going to fail. Tell it straight; share the dirty laundry as well as the good stuff."

matt

Using Blogs to Build Direct Links to Public

Using Blogs to Build Direct Links to Public
Firms are turning to the format to bypass the media and get out their message 'unfiltered.'
From Los Angeles Times - 06/06/2005

When General Motors Corp. wanted to stop speculation this spring that it might eliminate its Pontiac and Buick brands, Vice Chairman Bob Lutz took his case directly to dealers and customers who were up in arms about the possibility.

He wrote about it on the company's weblog.

"The media coverage on the auto industry of late has done much to paint an ugly portrait of General Motors," began Lutz's entry on GM's FastLane Blog, which the company launched in January.

The March 30 entry went on to say that widely reported remarks he made to analysts the week before had been "taken out of context" and that the automaker would not shed the brands.

A growing number of companies are stepping softly into the blogosphere, following a path blazed by Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and others in the technology field.

The Internet journal format, they find, lets businesses expand their reach, generate product buzz and encourage consumer loyalty -- while bypassing traditional media.

"When we feel that we need to get a direct response out there, we've certainly got this bully pulpit to some extent," said Michael Wiley, GM's director of new media. "It's a place where we can talk directly to people unfiltered."

It's hard to quantify how many companies, executives and employees are blogging, but there are probably more than 100 official corporate blogs, with hundreds more in the works, said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer for Intelliseek Inc., a company that analyzes and tracks blogs.

In addition to Lutz, other notable executives who pen public blogs include Richard Edelman, president and chief executive of the global PR firm Edelman, and Craig Newmark, founder of the online swap meet Craigslist.org.

Done well, corporate blogs can create good word of mouth among consumers who aren't reading business pages or thumbing through trade magazines.

The FastLane Blog gets between 150,000 and 200,000 unique visits a month, and Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz's blog gets 300,000 visits.

But bad blogging can easily backfire. Readers will pick up insincerity instantly.

"Don't go toward fake blogs. Don't launch character blogs. Use a blog for what it's for, transparency," said Steve Rubel, vice president of client services at CooperKatz & Co., a New York public relations firm.

Rubel follows blog news on his blog, Micro Persuasion, and runs his company's unit of the same name, advising clients on blogging and on podcasting, the suddenly fashionable creation of downloadable person-to-person broadcasts.

He and other PR professionals can rattle off blogs gone wrong -- usually "fake blogs" that stir up the ire of bloggers by hiding the fact that they are really ad campaigns, such as one that McDonald's posted in advance of a Super Bowl campaign about a Lincoln-shaped French fry.

Blogs that smack of press releases won't do the job, Rubel said. He tells clients to see what's out there about their company or industry, then decide whether they want to engage bloggers or even start their own blogs.

One executive praised for his no-holds-barred approach to blogging is Schwartz, who started Jonathan's Blog about a year ago. Sun also encourages its employees to blog, and about 2,000 do.

For Schwartz, a blog was the natural way to reach out to the software developer community that Sun seeks to attract, an audience that regularly turns to blogs for information anyway. Schwartz often uses the format to criticize analysts and rivals.

A post Schwartz wrote last August claiming Hewlett-Packard Co. had abandoned an HP operating system, for example, resulted in a cease-and-desist letter from the company -- which Schwartz promptly referenced and linked to on his blog.

"At the end of the day, the job of any good leader at any corporation is to communicate," Schwartz said. "The hallmark of companies that will find blogs useful is the company that cares about its perception ... and the integrity of its relationship with its customers."

Companies that decide to enter the blogosphere should set up some rules, Rubel said. Key is making sure bloggers don't reveal proprietary or financial information -- a lesson learned by former Google employee Mark Jen, who was famously fired after gabbing about life at the company on his personal blog, which was not sanctioned by Google.

Jen, now a software producer at Plaxo Inc., helped develop the information management company's blogging policy. He says that as long as companies are prepared to deal with the sometimes harsh comments left by visitors, corporate blogs are a great tool for raising company profiles.

At GM, Lutz receives dozens of comments on each of his entries, ranging from "I drive a Buick and have for years. I love the brand!" to "Yawn!! Buick. Uhhhhh, does anybody buy Buick anymore?"

Visitors also have alternately praised Lutz for his candor and accused him of letting his PR department write the blog.

Wiley said opening the GM blog to comments was a source of concern, but executives ultimately decided that comments were key to having a two-way conversation with customers. He said comments were edited only to remove profanity or personal attacks.

As for Lutz's entries, Wiley said that he and an outside PR firm gave Lutz suggestions for topics and did light editing, but the words and thoughts were Lutz's.

A main goal of the blog is to keep the 97-year-old automaker culturally relevant, Wiley said.

"GM isn't always considered to be on the forefront of cultural trends," he said. "By getting in at the forefront of a communication trend ... being a part of that kind of gives you a fresh image."

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
Date: 06/06/2005

A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip

A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip
From New York Times - 08/05/2005
By TOM ZELLER Jr.

DON'T ask Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media and its growing list of popular Web logs, about his empire. ''People come up to me as if it's witty and say, 'How is the empire going?''' Mr. Denton said, ''which is pretty pathetic.''

Don't ask him about his business plan, either. He says he never had one. The only reason he formed the company, he said, was to make his network of blogs -- which includes Gawker, the flagship chronicle of Manhattan news and gossip; Fleshbot, the thinking person's diary of smut; and about 10 other titles -- more attractive to advertisers.

''It doesn't help with readers,'' he said. ''It's actually a disadvantage, because it looks corporate.''

At a time when media conferences like ''Les Blogs'' in Paris two weeks ago debate the potential of the form, and when BusinessWeek declares, as it did on its May 2 cover, that ''Blogs Will Change Your Business,'' Mr. Denton is withering in his contempt. A blog, he says, is much better at tearing things down -- people, careers, brands -- than it is at building them up. As for the blog revolution, Mr. Denton put it this way: ''Give me a break.''

''The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe,'' he said. ''They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed.''

For all of the stiff-arming and disdain that Mr. Denton brings to the discussion of this nonrevolution, however, there is no question that he and his team are trying to turn the online diarist's form -- ephemeral, fast-paced and scathingly opinionated -- into a viable, if not lucrative, enterprise. Big advertisers like Audi, Nike and General Electric have all vied for eyeballs on Gawker's blogs, which Mr. Denton describes as sexy, irreverent, a tad elitist and unabashedly coastal.

He says that there is no magic behind Gawker Media, his three-year-old venture based in New York. To his mind, it is built around a basic publishing model. But like it or not in the overheated atmosphere of blog-o-mania, Mr. Denton, 38, remains one of the most watched entrepreneurs in the business.

If his reluctance to be interviewed is theater, it is deft theater. A British expatriate and former Financial Times reporter, Mr. Denton is tall, slim, and salt-and-pepper handsome, with the slightly embarrassed air of someone who invested in the dot-com boom and came out unscathed. (He made millions in two previous ventures -- including a company called Moreover Technologies, an online news aggregator that presaged the twitchy, check-this-out linking that now make blogs de rigueur reading for desk jockeys worldwide.)

STRIDING toward the unadorned third-floor TriBeCa loft that is the closest thing to a Gawker nerve center, Mr. Denton reiterated, in a polite, sometimes halting staccato that often fades into a string of inaudible syllables, that he would not discuss money. He declined to say if Gawker was profitable, or how much he paid Gawker's dozen or so bloggers -- editors, as the company calls them.

He fired up a Marlboro Light and, hustling across Canal Street, chattered obliquely about overhead (minimal in the blogging business), libel (always a concern) and Fred Durst.

In March, Mr. Durst, the Limp Bizkit front man, sued Gawker, among other sites, for linking to a sex video in which he appeared.

''Honestly, though, we don't know why you're so mad at us,'' Gawker's editor, Jessica Coen, sneered in a March 4 entry. ''The situation is really rather simple. Someone sent us a link to a video of your penis, we went into shock, and we shared it with the world for about two hours. Then we wept, found God, took a hot bath, and removed the video from our site.''

Mr. Durst eventually dropped the suit.

A grueling climb led to the quiet, whitewashed loft space where a few Gawker Media hands -- including Lockhart Steele, the company's managing editor, and Gina Trapani, the editor of one of the company's newest blogs, Lifehacker -- were plucking away at laptops. (Gawker shares the space with another blogger, Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan of Apartment Therapy.)

Mr. Steele, who joined the company in February, is the den mother for Gawker's far-flung collection of bloggers and is in near constant communication with them throughout the day via Instant Messenger. About half of the editors live in New York. The rest are distributed around the country. In California, Mark Lisanti edits Defamer, the Los Angeles counterpart to Gawker, and in Colorado, Brian D. Crecente edits one of the newer sites, Kotaku, dedicated to video games. In New Orleans, John d'Addario edits Fleshbot, while Ana Marie Cox covers political gossip from Washington on Wonkette.

Each editor is under contract to post 12 times a day for a flat fee, Mr. Steele said. (Gawker has two editors and now posts 24 times a day.) It is best to have eight posts up before noon, if possible, to keep readers coming back, he said.

The editors scan the Web for the best tidbits. Readers, and apparently even published authors, send in tips. When a Gawker site highlights articles from, say, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, it is likely, both Mr. Steele and Mr. Denton said, that the article's author sent an e-mail message to Gawker pointing out its existence. (This reporter's naivete about this process was met with gentle laughter.)

Site traffic is a particular obsession. Gawker draws just over a million unique visitors a month; Fleshbot, the most popular site, lures nearly twice that number, and Gizmodo, a site dedicated to gadgets, roughly 1.5 million. All editors can earn bonuses if they manage to generate spikes in traffic -- say, with a link to the latest Paris Hilton crisis or Fred Durst's anatomy.

Ms. Trapani's hour-by-hour traffic statistics serve as the desktop image on her computer. ''It's extremely fast paced,'' she said. ''It's a lot of output. Some days it's overwhelming without a doubt. Other days it goes really smoothly if I get some good reader tips and there's something great going on.''

Like Mr. Denton, she was careful not to discuss specifics of Gawker's business, including how much its editors are paid. But a published interview with Mr. Steele earlier this year provides some insight. Bloggers are paid a set rate of $2,500 a month, he told a digital journalism class at New York University taught by Patrick Phillips, the editor and founder of I Want Media, a Web site focusing on media news.

When asked in the class if the company was in the black, his response was straightforward. ''It is profitable,'' Mr. Steele said. ''We're very small, have no overhead, no office space. Everybody works from home. And you heard what we pay our writers. Nick founded Gawker very specifically with the idea of starting a whole bunch of blogs in very niche topic areas, hire freelance writers to write each of them, hopefully draw a lot of eyeballs and then sell advertising around it. He had the idea that no one site would probably ever make a fortune. But if you have 10 sites each making $75,000 a year, then, O.K., maybe it's not like Conde Nast money, but it's a nice little business.''

Mr. Denton chafed at the mention of Mr. Steele's interview. He said it was misreported and was supposed to be off the record. Mr. Phillips said that no such arrangement existed, and that the posted interview was an exact transcript from a recording of the session.

Whatever the circumstances, for those quivering about the revolutionary potential of blog publishing, or wondering what makes ventures like Gawker tick, there couldn't have been a plainer explanation.

The simplicity of the model may be why Mr. Denton is alternately guarded and dismissive of all the hype surrounding blogs. He seems to recognize that he is not up to anything particularly trailblazing, and that it's only a matter of time before others catch on. Competitors like Jason Calacanis's Weblogs, with its network of more than 70 consumer and niche blogs, are already copying the Gawker model.

The idea of grouping the blogs, Mr. Denton said, was to give the company an air of respectability. ''The only reason we're listed as a group at all is for advertisers,'' he said. ''Advertisers treat Gawker titles more seriously because it's part of a group.''

In other words, Gawker speaks their language. It has a publication schedule and can traffic in digital marketing babble like ''frequency capping'' (how often an advertising spot runs) and ''skyscrapers'' (tall, thin ads).

Such familiarity with the ways of Madison Avenue makes a difference in the world of blogs, where marketers still fear to tread, said Jill Griffin, who is now a senior vice president and group account director at Media Contacts, the interactive division of the Media Planning Group of Havas. Earlier, when she was a digital strategist at the marketing firm OMD, Ms. Griffin was one of the first advertising executives to bring big-name clients to blogs -- including Absolut and G.E. to Gawker.

''I think it was in mid-2003,'' Ms. Griffin said. ''It was just myself and some friends and business associates in the professional advertising community. We just started reading Gawker because we thought it was a hoot.'' She said that after realizing that they were all single, young, well-paid and casting their gaze on this fertile space, she thought, ''We've got to get on that.''

On the Gawker sites, C.P.M. rates -- the cost for every 1,000 times an ad is presumably seen by visitors -- can run anywhere from $4 for a small, button-sized ad to $50 for exclusive-sponsorship ads, in which an advertiser helps underwrite the debut of a new Gawker site. (Sony did this for Gawker's blog Lifehacker.)

Mr. Denton says that a clear line is drawn between news and advertising, and that so far none of the companies buying space on the sites -- including the Times auto section, which advertised on the car blog Jalopnik -- have ever tried to influence content. The editors are expected to write a ''thank-you to our sponsors'' at the end of each week, although this is typically done sarcastically -- for example, thanking advertisers for keeping the staff well-stocked in crack cocaine.

''It goes beyond any kind of question of church and state or journalistic ethics that the whole editorial tone of the Gawker sites is absolutely wrapped up in the notion of take no prisoners,'' Mr. Denton said. ''It owes nothing to anybody, and if one ever started compromising that, it would be grim.''

But others have begun to wonder if the brand itself is a form of compromise. Stowe Boyd, president of Corante, a daily online news digest on the technology sector, suggests that there may be something lost when networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs turn blogs into commodities, churned out for a fee, owned by an overlord and underwritten by advertisers.

''They're pursuing a very clear agenda and they've done very well with that,'' Mr. Boyd said of Gawker. ''But they're just an old media company in new media clothes, and I still maintain that they are missing part of the point.''

The point, Mr. Boyd said, is that blogging is unique because of its spontaneity and individualism, and that bloggers, like dancers and sculptors, are most interesting because they are ''pursuing their muse.''

The editors on Gawker are talented, entertaining and informative, Mr. Boyd said, but also indistinguishable from any freelance writer, with no ownership of what they produce. ''These people are hirelings,'' he said. ''What they are cranking out are the 700 words they signed on to produce.''

Other critics of the blog movement wonder whether the hoopla over the commercial viability of blogs -- particularly as publishing ventures -- is overstated. ''Blogs primarily excel at marketing and promotion for companies or individuals,'' Mr. Phillips of I Want Media said. ''I think blogging can catapult unknown writers, and it can give them a platform if they're talented. But as a stand-alone business, I think the jury is still out on that.''

Mr. Denton, who says that no one, least of all him, is becoming rich publishing blogs, would seem to agree with that notion. It's not about the money, he said -- or about corrupting the art of the blogger. ''If someone is saying that we publish according to a routine of at least 12 posts a day and begin in the morning and if someone is sick we replace them, then I plead guilty,'' he said. ''We believe in regular posting schedules.''

But he also says that nothing he is doing prevents other blogging models from taking shape, or independent bloggers from logging on and doing what they have always done. ''Some of my own favorite sites are ones that have no consistency beyond the wit and charm of the writer,'' he said. ''There's room for both.''

And there is, apparently, a ceiling on Gawker's expansion. Last month, the company started Sploid, a Drudge-like headline news blog with a tabloid look, and Mr. Denton says two more titles are planned for the short term, although he would not be specific about the particular consumer itches he'll be scratching this time. Having covered everything from BlackBerries to Beltway gossip, it's hard to imagine what else looms, but he said writers had already been lined up.

That will bring the number of titles to 14, and Mr. Denton indicated that 17 seemed a good stopping point, if for no other reason than that is the number of titles published by Conde Nast.

He also plans to reintroduce Gawker's ''blog of blogs,'' called Kinja -- a service that even Mr. Denton says was rather badly deployed and even more awkwardly explained in its original form. A team of programmers has been working for the last two years to revamp the service, which allows users to explore and scan their favorite blogs in one place. The new version will be ready in about a month.

SO, onward goes the nonrevolution. ''If you take the amount of attention that has been devoted in the last year to Web logs as a business and something that's going to change business and compare that with the real effect and the real money, it's totally disproportionate,'' Mr. Denton said, ''in the same way all the coverage of the Internet in the late 90's was out of whack.

''There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet for every company's marketing problem, and they're not,'' he added. ''It's Internet media. It's just the latest iteration of Internet media.''

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Date: 08/05/2005
Publication: New York Times

Blogs for business

Firms line up to rocket into the blogosphere
From Sunday Times - 08/05/2005
Paul Durman

Companies are waking up to 'blogs' -a new way of listening, and talking, to customers. Report by Paul Durman.

IMAGINE the internet as a large, cacophonous pub 10 minutes from closing time. There are a thousand different conversations in progress. Many consist of little more than childish nonsense. Many are conducted in shrill and angry voices. But some of those present are expressing strong and heartfelt opinions. Some of them will act on them tomorrow. And some of them are your customers.

This, very roughly, is the "blogosphere", the fast-growing part of the internet made up of web logs -the online diaries known as blogs. Amid the mass of meaningless chatter and confusion, many contend that the blogging phenomenon is a communications revolution, as important for business to understand as it is for politics and the media. Those who can grasp the opportunities can shape or protect their reputations. Many entrepreneurs think they can scent money-making possibilities.

Technorati, a web-monitoring firm, tracks almost 10m blogs, a number that doubles every five months. In Korea, the broadband capital of the world, there are an estimated 12m bloggers. France has 2m, most linked to the Skyrock radio station.

In Britain blogging has yet to grip the public imagination. But Azeem Azhar, who used to run a blogging service called 20six, reckons there are at least 700,000 UK bloggers. The general election has provided a modest fillip. A Keele University website lists 170 election blogs, including 70 by MPs, candidates and parties, and a handful from major news organisations including the BBC, The Times, The Guardian and The Sun's Trevor Kavanagh.

The real interest in blogging, though, is in the hundreds of thousands of nano-websites produced by "citizen journalists" -commenting and reporting on anything and everything.

Azhar said: "If bloggers write about a product, they probably care about it, either positively or negatively, more than the normal person. They are most likely to be your evangelist customers, most likely to recommend your product to their friends." Or to discourage others from ever touching it.

In America politicians and big business have been transfixed by the need to influence this new form of online debate. Bloggers made a lively contribution to the presidential election. They are credited with hastening the retirement of Dan Rather, the veteran CBS news anchor embarrassed by a bogus story attacking George Bush.

Big companies are starting to experiment with their own corporate blogs, partly to get their own messages out, partly as a way of listening to their customers.

Robert Scoble, a "technical evangelist" at Microsoft, has become a blogging celebrity, helping to soften the software giant's abrasive image with his Scobleizer blog.

But few British companies seem ready for this change. According to Mark Rogers, a founder of BBC Online who now runs Market Sentinel, a web-monitoring firm, BT is the only FTSE100 company that is set up to distribute its news via RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. RSS newsreaders are the easiest way to track news and what blogs are saying. But without an RSS feed, companies' own announcements are largely invisible in the blogosphere.

Rogers said: "It's a real problem for companies that get embroiled in controversy, because responding to blogging attacks requires different smarts to the normal PR response. The more controversial and outspoken (bloggers) are, the more likely people are to link to you." This in turn increases the visibility of a scabrous blog to internet search engines.

Google owns Blogger, the biggest of the services that is facilitating this low-cost publishing boom. Although most bloggers are indulging their own passion and desire for self-expression, a minority are more commercial, and are able to attract pay-per-click advertising from Google and Yahoo.

Nick Denton, former Financial Times journalist turned internet entrepreneur, regards blogs as a way of cheaply producing magazines for niche audiences. His firm, Gawker Media, produces some of the best-read blogs on the internet, including Gawker on Manhattan gossip and Gizmodo on gadgets.

Others, including Market Sentinel and Infonic, are creating a business by advising large companies on how to make sense of the blogosphere.

Roy Lipski of Infonic, which advises Unilever, said: "Our business is to help corporates understand the shifting landscape of opinions. What do people think about their business, their brands, their reputation? Companies in sectors where public opinion can have a dramatic effect will be taking this very seriously."

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Limited

Date: 08/05/2005
Publication: Sunday Times

Bloggers' new brand starts to click with advertisers

Bloggers' new brand starts to click with advertisers: Web logs are generating such an enormous following that they are becoming valuable marketing spaces, writes Aline van Duyn
From Financial Times - 28/03/2005
By ALINE VAN DUYN

If all goes according to plan, more than 1m Americans will soon be gripped by the mystery of the missing car. The hunt for a stolen Audi A3 - a sporty hatchback that will hit US showrooms in May - will begin next week with a launch party in New York.

At the event, the thriller's first scenes will be shot, with pictures and clues about the theft then distributed on the internet. From there, participants in the chase will use interactive tools to choose alternative plot endings.

How will the publicity be generated? With the latest weapon in the ad man's arsenal - blog advertising.

Blogs, web logs or journals, which cover topics from politics to parenting, have such enormous followings that marketing and advertising executives can no longer resist advertising in them.

The most recent Pew Internet and American Life Project, which researches internet use, found that 7 per cent of the 120m US adults who use the internet have created their own blog. Assuming one blog per person, this comes to 8m US blogs alone. The study also found that 27 per cent of US internet users say they read blogs.

"It's a brand new space, but when you get the right kind of messaging in it, the results can be astonishing," said Brian Clark, who has bought blog ads for agencies Weiden+Kennedy and McKinney-Silver, including for the Audi campaign.

Blog advertising came into its own during last year's presidential election. For the first time, political parties had budgets and strategies for online advertising. Recognising this, bloggers sold space on their sites.

"Blogs themselves have started to realise the potential for blog ads and much more space has become available," said Michael Bassik, director at Malchow Schlackman Hoppey & Cooper, which ran John Kerry's online presidential campaign.

He admits that a year ago he dismissed the idea of blog advertising. Now, he has clients spending up to Dollars 15,000 per week on blogs. "You are reaching a very actively engaged group of people, much more so than readers of more general web sites," he said.

Large companies such as Sony and Amazon have advertised on blogs, and the likes of Nike and GE are also experimenting with the medium.

For bloggers, selling ads provides income to support their hobby or even helps them make a living.

Blog ads are cheap compared with other forms of advertising. Blogads.com, where ad buyers can take space on blogs, lists its most expensive placement at Dollars 3,000.

This buys you a week in the top slot on dailykos.com, which claims to be read daily by more than 400,000 "committed progressive activists".

Demand this year has been higher than expected.

"March blog ad sales will exceed our best month last year," says Henry Copeland, director of Blogads.com. "We thought it would be the end of 2005 before we got back to (presidential) election levels."

The United Church of Christ, a protestant church with about 1.3m members, became aware of bloggers after two television networks, NBC and CBS, refused to run a UCC commercial showing a gay couple trying to enter a church.

"We were impressed by the power of the blogs," said Robert Chase, director of communications at the UCC. "We decided to include blog advertising in our next round of commercials. We have had such a great return that we will now always consider blogs in any campaign."

UCC spent Dollars 1m on cable televison ads and Dollars 15,000 on the blog campaign. With about 74,000 clicks so far (the ads run until the end of March), the cost per viewing of the ad was about 20 cents, Mr Chase said.

Blog ads clearly generate interest, but users say the ads work best if they engage the reader. "In the blog sphere, a standard, loud ad is the equivalent of yelling at a cocktail party," said Mr Clark. "The ads need to be designed so that the bloggers are part of the conversation."

It is not yet clear if big advertisers will go beyond small-scale campaigns and make blogs a regular part of their marketing strategies.

"It is still not for everyone, but it can, at the moment, work for specially targeted ads," says Alycia Hise, account director at TMP Worldwide, which buys blog ads for her education clients.

In the meantime, bloggers should look out for a missing car.

The Audi campaign chase is about getting bloggers to think of an A3 next time they want to buy a car. Not so different to other ads, after all.

Copyright 2005 The Financial Times Limited

Date: 28/03/2005
Publication: Financial Times

The Apple Case Isn't Just A Blow to Bloggers Why should bloggers be denied rights given a pamphleteer in the past?

The Apple Case Isn't Just A Blow to Bloggers Why should bloggers be denied rights given a pamphleteer in the past?
From Business Week - 28/03/2005

The blogosphere took a hit recently when a California judge ruled that Web loggers must reveal their sources for confidential Apple Computer Co. documents that they posted on their sites. But the collateral damage in that case may spread to all media, including the business press, by undermining its role in disseminating information to the public. Apple certainly has the right and obligation to seek prosecution for those who stole its intellectual property. But the transmission of information to the public at large is the job of the media, both online and off.

Against the wishes of powerful people trying to control information, the media have revealed corruption in Enron, WorldCom, and elsewhere in Corporate America, as well as questionable government policy going back to the Pentagon Papers. In a free society and a free market economy that depend so much on information, the media play a key role.

Clearly, there are built-in tensions between the media's dissemination of information to the public and the demands for secrecy from the government and industry. But courts have been adjudicating that for many years. The newer issue arising from the Apple case concerns the position of bloggers as journalists in America. The judge ducked the question of whether or not bloggers deserve the same First Amendment and state shield law privilege to protect sources that mainstream journalists possess. That was unfortunate. In principle, it's only fair to say bloggers acting like journalists are, in fact, journalists -- regardless of what platform they use. America has a long history of pamphleteers expressing their views, and it has extended First Amendment rights to nearly all of them over the years. Bloggers are no different.

But in practice, the prospect of 10, 20, or 50 million bloggers claiming journalistic privilege terrifies judges and First Amendment lawyers alike. They fear that anyone who has a Web site, if called to testify by a grand jury, could claim the privilege and refuse to cooperate. The flow of information to the judicial system could dry up as courts spend countless hours balancing the need for testimony against the public's desire for information and the blogger's demand to protect sources to give it to them. The great fear is that the courts will simply get overwhelmed and judges won't extend First Amendment protection to any journalist -- regardless of medium. The courts will, in effect, say that a privilege extended to nearly everyone is a privilege that no one should receive.

What to do? At the risk of being accused of being an elite mainstream media publication, we believe we must face this judicial reality and begin a conversation about who is a journalist. Courts have struggled with this issue for some time. The 31 state shield laws already on the books can help.

Most argue that you must work at some kind of media organization, be it a newspaper, magazine, TV show, or something else, to be awarded special privilege. A number of states define journalists functionally, as newsgatherers or investigative reporters. So a certain regularity and consistency in posting information would help qualify a blogger as part of the media. Being independent and not on the payroll of the organization you are covering would also be part of the definition (whistleblowers aren't journalists but are protected by different laws). The number of people bloggers reach might also be a consideration, but that can become tricky. If only your Mom reads your blog, are you really a member of the media?

It's easy to see where huge philosophical problems might emerge. Employees who put their companies' trade secrets on their blogs can't be journalists. They're thieves. But what if they've been blogging for a long time, providing real information to many people? Do these bloggers have First Amendment and state shield law privileges protecting themselves as sources? It's a very complex issue.

Over time, the courts and the law have extended journalistic privilege to an ever-wider range of people. Freelance writers are now covered, as well as book authors and scholars. The courts have split on giving academics privilege but have extended it to such political advocacy groups as the Anti-Defamation League.

What is needed is yet another expansion of the criteria to encompass those bloggers who truly practice the craft of journalism. Technology has liberated individuals from having to work within any specific journalistic organization and it is time for the law to recognize that fact. Both the media and the courts will be grappling with this issue for years. But by many of the criteria already on the books, the blogger sued by Apple, who runs the ThinkSecret.com site, is a real journalist.

Copyright 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. http://www.mcgrawhill.com
All Rights Reserved

Date: 28/03/2005
Publication: Business Week

More PR Than No-Holds-Barred On Bosses' Corporate Blogs

More PR Than No-Holds-Barred On Bosses' Corporate Blogs
From Washington Post - 19/03/2005
Amy Joyce, Washington Post Staff Writer

The soul-baring, anything-goes, free-for-all phenomenon called the Web log has come to this:

"This is the first of many commentaries I will make on this forum," wrote General Motors Vice Chairman Robert A. Lutz in January when he first started his blog, fastlane.gmblogs.com, "and I'd like to begin with, surprise, some product talk -- specifically, Saturn products."

Web logs -- or blogs -- started as a way to talk about new technologies, vent about life and interact in a no-holds-barred forum. Since blogs became the next big thing, an increasing number of companies have come to see them as the next great public relations vehicle -- a way for executives to demonstrate their casual, interactive side.

But, of course, the executives do nothing of the sort. Their attempts at hip, guerrilla-style blogging are often pained -- and painful.

"Looking back before the dust settles on 2004, it was a great year of building momentum for BCA (Boeing Commercial Airplanes). Our orders went up, with 272 in '04 compared to 239 in '03. It was a super year for widebodies for us," wrote Randolph S. Baseler, Boeing Co.'s vice president of marketing, on Jan. 17 in his first entry at boeing.com/randy.

With blogs like that, who needs news releases? Some Internet watchers wonder if a blog that sounds like nothing more than a corporate press room is worth the effort.

"Repositing marketing materials on a blog is a waste of time," said Rebecca Blood, author of "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog." "I would advise them to just stop right now. Those materials already exist. The blog that is powerful is when it is real."

Ideally, blogs can provide companies with a connection they don't otherwise have with the public, employees and clients. But it may take some time before executives figure out how to best use them.

"Success in blogging is exactly the same as success in conversation, where if you stay on message, you're being a bore," said David Weinberger, a research fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "It's very hard to wean yourself. You stay on message then congratulate yourself for staying on message. Then what you do is alienate readers."

Although corporate blogging gives many readers what they want from a company -- an avenue to listen to and talk to decision makers -- it also loses that edgy, voyeuristic feel of personal blogs about bad bosses, annoying roommates and flings. As much as personal bloggers blithely ignore the conventional boundaries of etiquette, corporate bloggers edit themselves to avoid disclosing a company secret or representing an organization in a way not intended by the marketing department.

Company in trouble? Chief executive in the middle of some scandal? Don't expect anyone to be emoting about it on a corporate blog. No mention on Lutz's blog, for instance, that GM's stock fell to its lowest level in more than a decade this week. The day Boeing's board announced its chief executive had resigned after an investigation uncovered that he had an affair with a female employee, Baseler wrote about competition from Airbus SAS.

Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz rants against new executive bloggers who essentially post news releases. "Authenticity is fundamental," he said in an interview. "Blogs get pretty dull if you just blog your products. There has to be something personal."

It's not often that even Schwartz writes about his private life on his blog, at blogs.sun.com/jonathan, but once in a while, readers will get something like this: "And because I don't want it to come out on some tech tabloid tell-all, I would like to inform everyone that reads my blog that I did, in fact, taste kangaroo meat at a luncheon yesterday," he wrot