Blogging

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

ThoughtFarmer: A lesson in excellent blogger outreach

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Just today, I’ve received half a dozen pitches by email. Some are nothing more than press releases without even a passing effort at personalizing the pitch. Others make nothing more than a passing effort. So it’s a welcome relief—not to mention an entertaining and engaging experience—to get a pitch that is personal, creative, and attention-grabbing.

The pitch began with a cryptic email from Darren Barefoot, who asked for my mailing address because he had something to send me. (It helps, when making this kind of request, to already know the person to whom you’re reaching out, which speaks to the importance of having relationships vs. blasting out material to bloggers who have never heard of you.)

A week or so later, a package arrived at my house. It contained what you see in the image below:

• A letter welcoming me as a new employee of a ficititous company called Tubetastic Inc. (slogan: “We make tubes. A whole series of them.” This pitch was going to people who would appreciate the dig at U.S. Sen. Ted Stephens and his famous speech supporting an end to net neutrality in which he described the Internet as “a series of tubes.")
• An org chart showing exactly where I’m situated in the new company (I’m the Tubular Comptroller, part of the Operations department, reporting up through ZDNet’s Dan Farber, Tubetastic’s Director of Tube Distribution.) The org chart also shows me who else has received the pitch.
• A name badge complete with my photo, copied off my website.

There’s no hint in the welcome letter of the pitch behind the package. Instead, Darren (who signs the letter as an HR rep) informs me I’ll be featured in an upcoming edition of the company newsletter, then invites me to learn more about the company by logging into the company’s intranet. The letter includes a username and password. Who wouldn’t log on?

What I found was Tubetastic’s intranet fully loaded with Enterprise Web 2.0 features: Twitter feeds, blog posts, a presence status (like Facebook’s), a newsfeed that updates me on what other employees have been doing (also like Facebook’s), and my profile. This is where the draft of my “interview”—set to appear in the company newsletter—is waiting for my comments as well as an answer to an additional question. The profile also includes links to the latest articles from my real blog along with the ability to edit my profile, which already contains all the information a typical employee directory would offer (title, reporting relationship, mailing address, phone number, email address, etc.).

The top of the home page features a link that will explain everything. This is the pitch: The intranet was created using a tool called ThoughtFarmer. I followed a link to a ThoughtFarmer page that includes YouTube videos, screenshots, and other resources that go into more detail on this “ultimate intranet.” The elevator pitch tops the page:

ThoughtFarmer is the ultimate intranet. Forget the impossibly complex, seldom-used corporate intranets of days gone by. ThoughtFarmer is a simple, social way for employees to collaborate, share ideas and find information.

What’s special about ThoughtFarmer? It combines the best of wikis and social networking. It’s an intranet for intranet-haters. Plus, it sits behind the firewall, just where your IT manager wants it.

At this point, I was spending a fair amount of time noodling around both the faux Tubetastic intranet and the ThoughtFarmer site. I must confess, I was pretty impressed with ThoughtFarmer, which includes a slew of features ranging from single-signon and polls to inline tagging and image galleries.

What I didn’t see is any reference to the kinds of resources that reside on the old intranets that are still important: benefits enrollment, work-related online applications, database access, requisition forms, new-hire recruitment tracking, payroll stubs and the like. Most employees use intranets to complete tasks, so these are important. My guess is that you would continue to host these resources right where they are and link to them from tabs you’d create, such as “Human Resources” and “Work Tools.” Maybe someone from ThoughtFarmer will confirm that in a comment here.

But the point is that I spent time with this product site—and wrote about it—because the pitch was compelling. If I had received yet another press release introducing ThoughtFarmer, it would have gone where all the other press releases I receive go—into my email trash. So, what did Darren and the ThoughtFarmer marketing team do to stand out?

• They made the pitch personal. They made it clear they knew who I was and that I wrote about intranets with some regularity.
• They piqued my interest by asking for my mailing address without giving me a hint about what I’d receive. I only accepted this offer because I knew Darren.
• They sent the pitch to me in the regular mail in a package that cried out to be opened.
• They spent time and effort to create something different. While mock intranets have been around for more than a decade, this is the first one I’ve seen that listed me as an employee.
• They made the pitch interactive. I really can modify my profile and get engaged with the intranet at a number of levels.
• They actually had a compelling product to show off.
• The personalized profile, the name badge, and the other personalized elements are cool, but none of it feels even remotely close to a bribe.

Now that’s blogger relations.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Your Blog: the latest from Dell

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Dell, the poster child for a big company embracing social media, has launched a new blog. Dell’s chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, announced ”Your Blog” on Direct2Dell, the customer service-focused blog launched during some of the company’s darkest days.

“YourBlog” will focus on the uses to which people put their computers. Lionel thinks of it as “a little bit Community + Lifehacker + ReadWriteWeb + Gamespy.” Dell employees will contribute to the blog, which features an idea submission field: The blog will steer toward topics about which people want to read.

So far, only an inaugural post with two paltry comments appears on the blog. The welcome message comes from John Pope, who writes:

It is our hope that by providing such a venue, the hyper-connected power of social media – primarily its infinite potential for stoking two-way dialogue – will help you get more out of your passions. Things like photography, gaming, music, film, fashion, social media … and all things computer related. For Dell, it’s another opportunity to listen, learn and ultimately act in mutual self-interest.

Support for conversations with customers seems to be unconditional at Dell. Lynn Tyson, the company’s investor relations chief, said (in an FIR interview) that she encountered no resistence to starting DellShares, one of the few IR-focused blogs. Even the lawyers have seen the results. Dell also gets that it’s people, not the corporation, that have conversations.

“Your Blog” could be a potent extension of Dell’s existing efforts. If it becomes a home for people looking to soak up all they can about their passions, as Pope puts it, then those people will have a regular positive brand experience. That will require some hefty blogging to compete draw the attention of people inclined to follow Lifehacker, ReadeWriteWeb, Gamespy and the like. If anybody can pull it off, though, it’s Lionel and his colleagues.

I’ve already subscribed.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Live blogging from the New Communication Forum

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UPDATE: Evidently, ShiftEdit is having trouble connecting through OpenID, so I’ve had to log in using my Facebook account and recreate the NewComm Forum live blogging page. It’s here: http://www.shiftedit.com/Thread.aspx?Id=243

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I’m trying a service for live-blogging, currently in alpha, called Shift-Edit. I’m heading over to the New Communications Forum (just about a 90-minute drive for me) around 10:30 this morning, with both my laptop and mobile phone in tow. I can post from either to the New Communications Forum section I’ve set up in Shift-Edit (the latter via email). If you’re interested, you can catch the posts here:

http://www.shiftedit.com/Thread.aspx?Id=239. They should start around 3 p.m., after the board meeting ends.

How blogging can work

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When I posted yesterday about the Nina Garcia story I’d picked up in my feeds, I made it clear that I wasn’t claiming the story was a fact. The report from a gossip blog said, “A little bird told me” that the New York PR agency had turned its interns loose on gossip blog comments to defend their client, and I was quick to note that “a little bird” is far from a substantive report. I also noted that I hoped somebody from Rubenstein would drop by and clarify.

Somebody did. A comment arrived this morning from Steven Rubenstein:

Our company policy - which everyone here signs - is to ID who you are and who you work for when posting a comment online.

As far as the Jezebel story about interns from our staff (or anyone for that matter) posting anonymous comments about Nina Garcia - it simply isn’t true. When we post, we believe in full transparency because it’s both the right thing to do and it’s good business.

Steven Rubenstein
Rubenstein Associates
(PR firm for Nina Garcia...amongst others)

So, I noted that a rumor was spreading in the blogosphere, asked if it was true, and got an answer in less than 24 hours which is now on the record for everyone—including the bloggers at Jezebel, the blog that started the rumor—to see. And my respect for Rubenstein PR has ratcheted up several notches, given not only the fact that the company is monitoring the space, but that Steven, executive VP of Rubenstein Associates and president of Rubenstein Communications, provided the answer himself, authentically, through engagement rather than some kind of formal statement.

Is this one way blogging works?

Monday, April 21, 2008

Rubenstein PR: The opposite of authentic?

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I have to confess that, before an article referencing her turned up in my feeds, I’d never heard of Nina Garcia. Based on where Garcia’s name is turning up, she’s probably much more familiar to my daughter, who is 19 and pays attention to these sorts of things.

Garcia recently left her job (some say she was fired) as fashion director for Elle magazine, which (according to the gossip sites) put her future as a judge on the cable TV show ”Project Runway” at risk. The reason this bit of pop culture got sucked into my feeds, though, was this line, from a gossip blog called Jezebel:

WWD reports that Garcia hired Rubenstein PR to speak for her. And! A little birdie tells us that Rubenstein has handed off some of the Garcia damage control work to its interns, deploying legions of them to comment on sites like Perez Hilton and TMZ. The minions leave encouraging and kind remarks, complete with stats on Nina’s many successes while at Elle in the comments.

Rubenstein Public Relations is the PR arm of Rubenstein Associates. The PR group has a website, kinda, which currently features a home page and an under construction notice, which shows about as much online savvy as having interns pretend to be fans contributing comments to blogs on behalf of a client. (I read through the comments to posts at Perez Hilton cited in the Jezebel article and didn’t see one in which the author disclosed that he or she was a Rubenstein intern.) In a world where authenticity is prized, this behavior, if true, is the opposite of authentic.

I say “if true” because “a little birdie tells us” is hardly conclusive and I’m too busy to play reporter and call Rubenstein. With any luck, though, somebody from the agency is monitoring the blogosphere and will leave a clarifying comment here.

Oh, and don’t fret for poor Nina. It appears she will be back judging next season. I’ll be sure to not miss avoiding a single episode.

WebShare weekend: Britannica initiative gets boost from TechCrunch

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What a weekend.

It started quietly enough. I’ve been working with my client, Encyclopaedia Britannica, to prepare for the hard launch of its WebShare program, set for next Monday with the distribution of the official press release (to be accompanied, of course, by a social media version).

Tom Panelas, the director of Corporate Communications at Britannica, brought me in to help promote WebShare, which has two distinct purposes:

• Give free Britannica accounts to bloggers and other web publishers so they can use the site in their research, cite Britannica articles and provide selective access to Britannica through links in their posts to Britannica articles and widgets.
• Provide readers of these articles with access to Britannica articles without needing an account at all.

The program includes a variety of elements that strengthen the venerable encyclopedia’s first significant foray into the social media space. In addition to the linking program, there’s a blog, a Twitter account (to include a link of the day), widgets and “topic clusters,” collections of links to Britannica articles that relate to a current news story. For example, we put together a list of links that would be useful to anybody covering the Delta-Northwest airline merger the day that story broke.

Leading up to the launch, we’ve been quietly alerting people to the availability of the WebShare website and giving out some free accounts. Anybody visiting the site could register for a free account, as well. The primary targets of our outreach effort (Neville Hobson is helping me out with this) have been (and will continue to be) education-focused bloggers, library bloggers, and journalists. Many who live and work in these disciplines are restricted, right or wrong, from citing Wikipedia articles in their work, which led us to believe they would constitute a very interested group.

Some popular bloggers were also on my list, and on Friday evening, I went ahead and sent off a note to the first of these to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch. Mike reported on WebShare almost immediately, including some criticisms, and attracting over 100 comments (as of this writing). But positive or negative, Mike’s post opened the floodgates. Stories suddenly appeared in Mashable, C|Net, and some other top-flight blogs, as well as blogs written by librarians we had not yet contacted and scads of others. So far, 156 posts have been written about WebShare that link to the site; Technorati has assigned the site an authority of 80 and a rank of 110,846. Not bad for a site that had no links to it at all on Friday afternoon.

I’ve been archiving significant articles addressing the program on del.icio.us.

Tom and the folks at Britannica were prepared. They have received well over 1,000 registrations so far, and have been handling them all quickly. It’s a manual process, since each registration needs to be approved. We also put in work upfront to identify the inevitable criticisms Britannica would face:

• Britannica, with its 56,000 articles, can’t compete with Wikipedia, with over 100 million.
• Britannica’s business model is obsolete. The company must ultimately move to a wiki-based, open-source model.
• Despite the entry into social media, Britannica is still a one-way resource, not engaged in the conversation.
• WebShare is really just about getting lots of link love to boost Britannica’s visibility on Google.

The folks at Britannica are ready for these, and will be using the blog on the WebShare site to address these issues. The company’s president, Jorge Cauz, will be doing interviews with some bloggers, as well. It’s also nice that some comments—and some posts—take issue with these arguments and applaud Britannica’s efforts. (I was delighted to see my friend Brian Solis lauding the program, even though he had no idea I was working on it). And Tom has been jumping in as well, participating in some of the comment threads. (Tom, I’m sure, is exercising some restraint to avoid correcting people who are just wrong, like the one blogger who said that the company uses the old spelling of encyclopaedia in order to “sound more authoritative.” In fact, that’s been the spelling of the company’s name since it was founded in 1768.)

Meanwhile, I’ve spent much of my weekend identifying new posts and making recommendations about which ones should be addressed by a comment and which by a follow-up post on the Britannica site. A few follow-up posts will appear over the next few days.

A couple of key observations come out of the weekend experience:

• The A-listers count. Regardless of how much people say they trust friends, family members, and participants in their networks, people like Mike Arrington can still create a huge amount of awareness and generate a lot of buzz.
• It makes sense for companies to start small with initiatives in mind, but it pays to get the first bits right before moving on to others.
• If you’re going to do social media, do it. Rather than simply roll out the linking program, Britannica was very agreeable to adding dimensions of participation to the mix, including the blog and the Twitter account. This provides a platform for listening to feedback and participating in a conversation about the initiative, and maybe even tweaking it where it makes sense.

I’ll be back with more on the WebShare program as it rolls along.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

American Airlines’ quiet launch of a crisis blog

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UPDATE: The Airline Biz blog from the Dallas Morning News includes an item about AAConversation, including quotes from Billy Sanez, the American Airlines spokesperson who evidently is the “Billy S.” who has penned the two posts that so far populate the blog. Sanez also answers questions about the use of Blogger.com.

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In the past, I’ve argued against the creation of a blog in a crisis. Having a dark blog at the ready, I have maintained for some time, is a lousy idea. In a crisis, companies are suspect. A risk-averse public eyes the organization at the center of a crisis with skepticism. Logical arguments often seem defensive in the face of the emotion a crisis can produce.

It’s much better to already have a blog, with a community of readers with whom you have built trust, that you can bring to bear when that inevitable crisis strikes. Southwest Airlines, for example, has been able to communicate with travelers through its blog during crises ranging from missed inspections to fashion issues largely because Southwest had already established the blog when no crises were imminent.

I am, however, prepared to eat my words if American Airlines’ crisis blog works.

A non-participant in the social media space, American Airlines has been hammered over the last week as thousands of flights have been canceled stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers. Rational arguments about needed inspections pale in comparison to news footage of frustrated and angry passengers spending nights in airports instead of getting to their destinations, which can include weddings, funerals, and the like. The opinion of industry analysts that the FAA is more to blame than American for unnecessarily aggressive inspection demands doesn’t seem to have quelled the anger of passengers marooned in airport terminals as canceled flights mounted.

In the face of public outrage, American has gutted it up and opened AAConversation, a plain-vanilla Blogger.com blog, with the express intent of listening. As the blog states, “We...would like to hear from you.  Please feel free to post a comment.  We will continuously monitoring the site and will post regular updates.”

The first of two posts (so far) includes a video offering step-by-step instructions on how to contact the company online; the video was uploaded to YouTube, along with another—not on the blog—of CEO Gerard Arpey addressing the cancellations. The post also includes links to other resources to help travelers.

The second post announces the airlines’ return to a regular flight schedule.

Few have commented so far, probably because American hasn’t announced the blog’s existence. One of three comments as of this posting applauds the blogging effort while another questions a return to normal: “Returning service to normal is relative when you take into account how horrible AA service is ‘normally.’” The fact that the critical comment appears at all, though, suggests American is sincere in its desire to listen.

It’s encouraging that American seems to be willing to take its hits. It will be interesting to see the company’s response to the comments—who responds and how, whether changes will be implemented based on traveler input, and how active the blog becomes now that the immediate issue has passed.

I’ll watch and cross my fingers that the American Airlines crisis blog represents a sincere effort to engage the traveling public, and if it opens a dialogue that leads to action, I’ll happily revise my assessment of crisis blogs. Stay tuned.