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