Marketing

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

WOMMA to issue guide to social media marketing disclosure

UPDATE: WOMMA has issued its press release on its new guidelines for social media disclosure.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is set to issue a guide to disclosure in social media marketing sometime tomorrow, February 17. The guide was prompted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines for disclosure of relationships between companies and people discussing them and their products or services in social media venues.

The document is designed to enhance rather than replace the rules that may already exist in your organization. And it’s WOMMA’s intention to continually update the guide given the ongoing evolution of social media.

The guide covers the most commonly used social media channels, including blogs, Twitter and other microblogging tools, social network status updates, video and photo sharing sites and podcasts.

The microblogging hashtag recommendations could be problematic, given the number of similar proposals that have been introduced over the last year or so. (Here’s one proposal; here’s another, and another.) But if all WOMMA members adopt the tags the guide recommends, we may see some consistency emerge around how disclosure is handled on Twitter. The three tags listed in the guide include…

• #spon—Sponsored
• #paid—Paid
• #samp—Sample

WOMMA advises using the same tags on status updates through social networks should there be a character limit in the status update function.

The best advice in the guide—which applies to all of the channels covered—is to provide a link to a complete disclosure and relationships statement, although recommended language for such a statement isn’t included.

The document does recommend language for disclosure that is

clear and prominent. Language should be easily understood and unambiguous. Placement of the disclosure must be easily viewed and not hidden deep in the text or deep on the page. All disclosures should appear in a reasonable font size and color that is both reasable and noticeable to consumers.

For example, for personal and editorial blogs, WOMMA recommends disclosure like…

• I received ___ (product or sample) ___ from ___ (company name), or
• (Company name) ___ sent me ___ (product or sample) ___

WOMMA went through a deliberate process to develop the guide, including creating a blog, Living Ethics, that served as a forum for comments and questions.

I’ll update this post tomorrow when a link becomes available to the official WOMMA guide.

Oh, and by way of disclosure, I was offered a sneak peek at the guide by WOMMA and was not put under an embargo until tomorrow’s announcement.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Death Watch: Marketing and advertising have an important place in the complex media ecosystem

We have a tendency to assume that a law of physics applies equally to the media world. In physics, according to Newton’s third law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

This odd assumption crossed my mind to me as I was reading last night. In the he book I was reading, the author argued that, thanks to the Internet, geography doesn’t matter any more. Under Newton’s law, this makes sense:

Action: The Internet has given us access to everybody everywhere all the time.
Reaction: Geography is no longer a factor in our interactions.

In truth, though, our complex and messy world does not abide by such clear-cut rules. Without question, the Net has certainly broken down geographic barriers beyond the extent to which the telephone (and the telegraph before it) did. But on the other hand, the geography has everything to do with the relationships I have established with people who belong to the same synagogue I do. My wife and I are still friends with parents of kids who went to school with our daughter. And I have strong ties to some of the people who work in stores where I shop (notably the local computer repair business).

It’s not likely I ever would have met any of these people online. And if I hear someone breaking into my house at 2 a.m., I expect I’ll get much better results calling the local police than I will jumping into an online law enforcement community.

The exaggerated death of marketing and advertising

The same book also argued that traditional marketing doesn’t work any more now that people are able to engage one another on the scales afforded by Facebook and Twitter. Yet many of the same people who decry the ineffectiveness of traditional marketing can’t wait to see the next “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercial. (Super Bowl Sunday represents the height of the “reverse-TiVo” phoenomenon, when people record the game so they can fast-forward through the football and watch just the commercials.) Denny’s drew 2 million people to its restaurants for their free Grand Slam breakfasts on the strength of its Super Bowl commercial. And who hasn’t heard of Las Vegas’ marketing campaign, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”?

Give it a few minutes and you can probably come up with a dozen advertising or marketing campaigns that captured your imagination—or at least your attention.

Good marketing and advertising are still good. The fact that they’re not as effective as they once were is not a sign that they don’t matter any more. Rather, the increased number of channels available means consumers have more options. A marketing campaign is no longer the sole source of information about a brand, product, service or company. Because we tend to simplify things, viewing them as black and white, many social media purists fail to see complexities and intricacies of the media landscape in which each piece plays its role and supports the others. In this environment, the role of marketing and advertising has changed more than it has diminished.

Multiple relevancies and the media ecosystem

Communicators and marketers have to come to terms with the fact that we live in a world of multiple relevancies. It’s not a zero-sum game. The rise of the Net doesn’t automatically signal a decline in the value of traditional channels.

This represents more than just an additive situation in which new media get piled onto old media. The media ecosystem that has evolved. In an ecosystem, the organisms within the environment interact with and are dependent on all the other habitat’s occupants. In the business-consumer ecosystem, advertising and marketing often create the awareness that fuels the conversation within the social media space.

That’s not to say organizations shouldn’t engage with customers and other stakeholders at an organic level. Companies need to already have a trusted presence, such as the one Dell has established with its cadre of tweeting communicators or the Comcast customer service team that finds and responds to online complaints. No marketing is required to initiate these conversations. But the organic presence of company representatives engaged in conversation with customers kicks into higher gear when an advertising or marketing campaign creates broad, simultaneous awareness of an issue about which customers want to talk.

Domino’s Pizza provides an excellent example of this ecosystem. The pizza chain’s decision to put its vulnerability on display by discussing consumer criticism in a series of television commercials gained widespread attention. Table Group founder and president Patrick Lencioni discusses the power of these ads in the current issue of BusinessWeek:

...the most fascinating application of volunterability is in marketing and advertising. It’s so rare that it packs a strong punch, as long as companies mean it. Go ahead and try to think of other corporate examples of humility and naked honesty. There aren’t many to choose from.

But advertising and marketing campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum and Domino’s—a company that learned the harsh reality of social media the hard way—was prepared for the conversation that ensued. On its Facebook page and on Twitter, the company engaged in conversation prompted by the advertising and marketing. The company added a four-minute video to YouTube that went into greater detail about its turnaround and invited comments.

Of course, Domino’s could have tackled the issue one customer at a time, but kick-starting the conversation with commercials and other ads makes far more sense. Domino’s—utterly clueless when it came to social media a short time ago—has come to understand the media ecosystem far better than many of the pundits who insist there is no longer room for traditional advertising and marketing.

BestBuy is another useful example. The consumer electronics retailer used traditional marekting and advertising techniques to build awareness of its Twelpforce, the thousands of employee volunteers responding to customer queries via Twitter. It would have been a much longer process to create that awareness at the organic level. (To date, the Twelpforce has sent nearly 23,000 tweets, virtually all of them responding to mostly technical questions about the consumer electronics products it sells.)

John January, senior vice president and executive creative director at Kansas City-based ad agency Sullivan Higdon & Sink (and co-host of the all-too-infrequent podcast, “American Copywriter”), told me a couple years ago that advertising is evolving into a gateway to social media activities. Based on this understanding of multiple relevancies, I would argue that Pepsi made a mistake reallocating every nickel of its Super Bowl ad budget to social media. How many more people would have participated in Pepsi’s social campaigns if they had learned about them on Super Bowl Sunday?

Smart marketers will figure out how to take advantage of the interdpendencies that exist in the media ecosystem. Figuring out how multiple relevancies can improve the outcomes of your social media efforts will take a lot more work than simply shrugging off traditional marketing and advertising as outdated techniques displaced by social media.

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Are we overvaluing real-time feedback?

Warning: Lost post follows

Back in 1995, “Snow Crash” author Neal Stephenson teamed up with his uncle George Jewsbury under the pseudonym Stephen Bury to produce a potboiler titled “Interface.” The premise: A presidential candidate suffers a stroke and has a chip implanted in his brain. The chip features a wireless connection to feedback from thousands of watch-like devices distributed to a representative sample of Americans. These devices gauge the wearer’s reaction to political speeches, allowing the candidate to make mid-course adjustments and bolster public reaction to his candidacy.

To me, this bit of speculative fiction defines the notion of a real-time feedback loop.

As the Web proceeds along its evolution into a more real-time network, a idea of a real-time feedback loop is becoming a popular topic of discussion. I attended a panel discussion on Thursday night, part of Social Media Week here in San Francisco, that focused on these loops, defining them as “a method for capturing ideas as they arise and bringing them back into the group for examination through the use of social media.” Promotional copy for the event asserted:

When an idea’s expression generates a creatively relevant or insightful response, a well-organized listening/engagement practitioner captures that flash of brilliance, and feeds it back to the originator as an enriched question, thus creating a real-time feedback loop.  In this transformational moment, a thought-leader may have a second opportunity to be heard and have their expression innovatively re-cast. 

With social media we facilitate this process ever more effectively. It is like cold fusion—when used properly, it creates more value than it consumes, lowering the carbon footprint of innovation.

The idea of real-time feedback loops have been rattling around in my brain since Thursday night’s discussion. Then it occurred to me: What better place to organize my thoughts than my blog?

Where do real-time feedback loops begin?

The Internet didn’t invent real-time feedback loops. The thunderous applause of an audience that leads to a multiple curtain calls is a real-time feedback loop; so is tepid applause followed by a rush for the exits. The Grateful Dead’s symbiotic relationship with its audience influenced the band’s live improvisational music. The crowd’s response almost always affects a standup comic’s routine.

The Net, however, has added two dimensions to real-time feedback loops: specificity and reach.

Specificity—The aggregate response of the crowd is pretty simple. They love it, they’re into it, they disagree, they don’t think it’s funny, they hate it. The Net has provided individuals a voice that allow the performer or communicator to analyze why the crowd is reacting the way it is and respond to specific observations or alter behaviors in order to influence opinions. This is nothing new: For at least a decade, probably longer, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has provided the infrastructure for backchannels, on which conference attendees discuss presentations with one another in real time. In some instances, these backchannels have been projected on a screen where a speaker can see and react to it. Now, Twitter’s hashtag convention—along with some other tools—have made backchannels available to more people than just the geek crowd who knew how to tap into IRC.

Reach—Streaming media and Twitter have expanded the reach of events—from keynotes and panel discussions to product launches and press conferences—to people who can’t be there in person. Again, this is nothing new. The presidential State of the Union address is one example of a speech that is available to larger audiences than just those who can squeeze into the chamber of the House of Representatives. The Net’s streaming capabilities, though, have made it possible to extend this ability to speakers and events that don’t warrant mainstream television network coverage. The most recent LeWeb, for example, was streamed to an audience hungry for presentations they couldn’t see in person due to the event’s cost (expensive) and location (Paris).

Combine these factors and the significance of real-time feedback loops becomes clear. Not only can an executive speaking at a product launch hear specific feedback in real time, but the audience is now expanded to customers or stakeholders from anywhere in the world.

Generally, this feedback comes in two forms: the general chatter of individuals expressing their opinions or talking with one another and targeted questions from individuals to the speaker. Both were in play last Thursday night as people watching a live stream of the presentation (courtesy of Justin.tv) talked among themselves and posed questions for panelists that were relayed by an in-person moderator.

All eyes on real-time

It’s clear that the Net has altered and expanded realt-time feedback loops. Google has incorporated real-time results into its search results. A new category of real-time search engines has emerged sporting names such as Collecta, Topsy and Scoopler.

Prominent people are writing about the real-time web, including the authors of influential outlets like ReadWrite Web, GigaOn, Mashable and TechCrunch. Jeff Pulver, Stowe Boyd and Jeremiah Owyang have written about it. It found its way onto many 2010 prediction lists.

Protocols are being developed to support it. RealTime RSS—from RSS godfather Dave Winer—sends updates when they’re added to a site rather than waiting for an RSS reader or other utility to poll feeds to find what’s new. Google’s PubSubHubbub is similar although not necewssarily a competing standard; the two can work together. Chris Messina described PubSubHubbub’s function this way: “Let’s say (you write) a new blog post; the blogging software then pings any number of hubs with a message: ‘Hey, new content here.’ The hub says, ‘Great thanks,’ grabs the content, and then pushes the content to everyone on its ‘subscriber” list.’

These two protocols expand the opportunity for anyone to get real-time feedback. A marketing executive introducing a new product to a live audience and a virtual one watching the stream can hear back instantly from those engaged over conversational channels (Twitter and IRC, for example) as well as those writing for online news outlets and blogs.

As a result, the focus on real-time feedback has become intense. Some have proclaimed the ability to assess sentiment through real-time search a replacement for costly polling that has been the province of organizations like Harris and Gallup.

But how important is all this real-time feedback?

Is it accurate?

What you think at the instant you hear something may not be what you think after you’ve had time to digest it. Consequently, your immediate feedback may not reflect your long-term view.

This is one of the issues many speakers have with members of the audience live-tweeting their talks or with journalists live-tweeting events.

Much of the tweeting of live events is objective, though, rather than subjective. It’s more like note-taking than analysis. And even the opinions tweeted in real time have value. After all, you’re presenting in real time and people are reacting. Before, you could only see them shifting uncomfortably in their seats, or maybe actively booing or walking out. Now you can assess exactly why they’re reacting the way they are.

But in some respects, the critics have a point. Consider the widely-covered Apple iPad announcement. Information from Steve Jobs’ presentation was made available in real time through a number of channels and a lot (though certainly not all) of the real-time feedback suggested Apple had another sure-fire hit on its hands. But then came the analysis. Tech journalists, bloggers and others began producing the more thoughtful, detailed reviews after they had a chance to internalize the information, consider it, chew on it. FOr many members of the audience, digesting these views, then sharing them and discussing them with each other, led to a shift in their opinions. In the end, their early tweets didn’t reflect their ultimate views.

Is it representative?

During Thursday night’s panel, the point was made repeatedly that only about 10 percent of your audience will offer real-time feedback. And your larger audience—the customers for the product you’re launching, for instance—won’t even watch the event.

Reacting to real-time feedback, then, could mean that you’re taking action on information that isn’t representative of your customer base. In fact, those who pay attention to the live stream or real-time tweets of your message could be as far from a statistically valid sample of your population as you can get.

Is it contextual?

As I sat in the room where the panel was presented on Thursday, I was able to take in everything at once. There was the reaction of other panelists to what one panelist was saying, panel moderator Jennifer Lindsay‘s reaction, the panel’s reaction to Lindsay’s questions and the reaqction of the audience.

Those watching the stream, on the other hand, saw only what the camera allowed, and the camera was almost always focused on whoever was speaking. Those watching the stream got only a sliver of the experience had by those in attendance. IT’s even worse with those who see only the 140 characters broadcast by those who are live-tweeting the event. The reactions of those receiving these messages, then, could be based on incomplete or out-of-context information. It could conflict with the opinions of the people whose opinions you’re really trying to understand.

Because of these realities, the rush to embrace the real-time web can easily lead us to overvalue real-time feedback and make inappropriate decisions based on it.

When real-time feedback matters

Of course, recognizing the limits of real-time feedback doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paying attention to it, only that you should be cirumspect in terms of what you do with it.

In a crisis, for example, you’d be foolish to ignore commentary emerging in real time. By monitoring public sentiment, you can determine the depth of reaction to the situation and quickly develop a response strategy. Real-time feedback in response to change initiatives is equally important. People resist change for a variety of reasons and listening to feedback can help you shape your efforts to overcome that resistance.

As for other feedback—to speeches, to announcements, to events—organizations will have to develop processes to determine which feedback requires immediate internalization and action and which becomes just additional information to factor into longer-term thinking. After all, how much can you really do with real-time feedback? We have no brain-implantable chips to help us adjust our comments in real time based on listener feedback. We can’t alter the presentation in mid-course when CNN’s cameras are on you. You can’t redesign the product if it’s already on trucks heading to retail stores. In most instances, real-time feedback won’t be more important than other forms of input, including the articles, reviews, blog posts, tweets and other consumer-generated content that will trickle out over days, weeks and months in response to your company’s message. Your best bet will be to add it to the mix in order to figure out your next steps, whether it’s a version 2.0 of your product, an enhancement to a program or a response to a query or criticism.

None of which means that engaging people through social channels is less important than it was before the real-time web became a hot topic. Engaging individuals through social channels isn’t necessarily the same as participating in a real-time feedback loop. Engaging in conversations, responding to questions and participating in communities is all part of an effort to establish strong relationships that will pay off over the long term.

Nor does this suggest that the real-time web isn’t important. The instant delivery of news means organizations have less time to prepare and more information through which to sift.

But when it comes to taking immediate action on the instant feedback to your message, tread with care. You could be solving a problem that doesn’t really exist.

Related post from Tom Foremski, who was on the panel (and is in the photo above): The Real-Time Web Turns ‘Conversational’ Media Into Noise

Saturday, January 23, 2010

FIR Live #17 - January 23, 2010: The relationship between marketing and PR

Content Summary:A panel of veteran PR and marketing practitioners and academics discuss the relationship between marketing and PR and how it impacts the structure of a communications function within an organization.

Discussion participants were FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz, and our panelists:

• Deirdre Breakenridge
• Beth Harte
• Mitch Joel
• Valeria Maltoni
• Bill Sledzik

Plus, our listeners who called in to the live show with commentary as well as those in conversation in the FIR Live chat room at BlogTalk Radio: see those additional perspective on the discussion in the conversation and questions (plain-text file, opens in new tab/window) from the chat room.

Get FIR Live:

• Download the MP3 file (24.7Mb, 61:38)
• Subscribe to the FIR RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com.

You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show. To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full RSS feed.

This FIR Live Call-In episode is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Beware brand fragmentation

Google Wave, wikis, Basecamp, Ning, Zoho…

With all the collaboration tools the whole social media phenomonen has ushered in, you’d think the people who tout them would make better use of them. But one of the consequences of the fragmentation of communication activities is that the various departments, agencies and boutiques assigned to segments of communication operate in a near vacuum. The resulting communication from the organization winds up as splintered as the the various teams producing it.

This situation isn’t new to social media. In fact, it’s as old as the web. One of my favorite examples involves Ragu spaghetti sauce, which launched a site in 1999 called Mama’s Cucina. You could get to it via either ragu.com or eat.com. Both URLs still get you to Ragu’s site, but Mama is long gone. During her reign, though, Mama represented a very early example of innovation on the web.

Mama was a grandmotherly Italian with attitude. The balloon that appeared beside her head changed each time you visited the site, with statements like, “Get your laptop off the table, it’s time to eat” and “How come you only come by when you’re hungry, eh?” Mama’s personality drove the content. Even the legal disclaimer read, “Mama’s nephew, Peter, the lawyer, wrote this next part.”

The site let you enter an ingredient that drove a database search for recipes that contained that item. You could learn to speak Italian, complete with audio, which was nowhere near as common in 2000 as it is today. (This wasn’t Berlitz Italian, either, but phrases Mama would utter.) There was a message board and a variety of other features designed to engage visitors.

The problem with the site was Mama herself. For those who returned to the site to see what Mama was saying, to search for recipes, to play the audio clips for friends or to grab coupons, Mama became emblematic of the brand. But the website was the only place where Mama resided. She wasn’t part of the print advertising campaign. Her face didn’t appear on television commercials. And a trip to the grocery store would reveal Paul Newman’s face on jars of spaghetti sauce while Mama’s was nowhere to be found.

Mama’s Cucina existed in a vacuum, fragmenting brand recognition. It was a great site and a lousy addition to the brand marketing effort.

Despite the fact that Mama was gone by 2002 and the ultra-bland site that replaced her is a mirror of the well-recognized brand.

Yet now that anybody who has ever created a Facebook page feels qualified to promote themselves as a social media expert, companies are embarking on all manner of social media efforts that are, at best, inconsistent with the brand and, at worst, counterproductive. (Just how, for example, did the Amp energy drink iPhone app support the carefully-crafted brand identity?)

As communication gets more and more fragmented, with the growing number of boutiques specializing in social media, SEO, digital marketing and a host of other niches, silo messaging is bound to get worse. Here’s how to avoid it:

• Hire an agency that does it all—Rather than pick a little bit of your marketing work from here, a bit more from there, find an agency with the skills and experience to manage the whole thing. By the way, this is one of the most compelling reasons for large agencies to get their act together and incorporate such no-brainer skills as search engine optimization.
• Coordinate from within—Scott Monty at Ford and Christopher Barger at General Motors are examples of social media managers who are also part of their organizations’ larger communications departments. When they launch a social initiative, even when they contract with specialized boutiques to help out, they are fully aware of the context of the larger branding effort.
• Create a consortium—Using some of those collaboration tools, pull the various boutiques you’re using into a common area where they can work together or, at least, share enough information to make sure everyone’s supporting the brand.
• Check the boutique’s credentials—If they know Facebook but don’t understand organizational communications, it’s time to renew your search for help.

How does your company ensure that mainstream and social media efforts don’t work at cross-purposes?

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Industries holding off on interactive marketing are poised to spend a lot more

One of the most interesting observations I gleaned from Forrester’s recent projections is that some of the greatest growth in interactive marketing is likely to come from industries that have been slow to adopt it so far.

I would classify this under “blinding flashes of the obvious,” but it still jumped out at me because Forrester is suggesting that these industries—which include heavily regulated businesses like pharmaceuticals—will get the experience they need and move forward.

The Forrester report—US Interactive Marketing Forecast by Industry, 2009 to 2014 (which’ll set you back $1,749)—projects most growth coming from big offline advertisers, including media and entertainment, consumer goods, automotive, and healthcare. The report projects an 18% compound annual growth rate for healthcare and pharmaceuticals, which (along with the other offline advertisers) are currently being outspent by industries that routinely market directly to consumers. But the online experience these companies are gaining in their early experimentations with interactive marketing will drive future growth, according to Shar VanBoskirk, the report’s author. VanBoskirk notes:

Early social media trials for NEXIUM, Prilosec OTC, and AMBIEN CR have exceeded AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals’ Procter & Gamble’s, and sanofi-aventis’ expectations, respectively, paving the way for more investment.

The report also predicts that business-to-business investment in interactive marketing will remain strong, which flies in the face of all the naysayers who insist that social media works best in the B2C marketplace. Interactive marketing in the B2B space will grow from $2.3 billion now to $4.8 billion in 2014, with adoption of newer techniques and improved sophistication of the efforts already underway, the report says. (Social media, of course, is just one of the categories of interactive marketing, which also includes search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, and mobile marketing.)

Overall, interactive marketing will account for nearly one-fifth of all marketing dollars by 2014, representing $55 billion worth of marketing budgets. The consequences of this shift from traditional to interactive marketing include smaller budgets in general and the demise of agencies that haven’t kept pace, according to the report.

Friday, October 09, 2009

The irony of investing in social marketing while blocking your own employees

Cross-posted from Stop Blocking.

Social media as a marketing mechanism is clearly hot. I can’t scan my feeds without finding yet another report of yet another study detailing companies’ increased commitment to and investment in social media. Here are just a few:

• eMarketer reports on an The Aberdeen Group study that found 63% of companies planned to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2009. Twenty-one percent were set to boost their budgets by more than 25%. And worldwide social media advertising was expected to grow 17.3% this year to $2.35 billion.
• A study from the Association of National Advertisers revealed that 66% of marketers have used social media in some capacity this year, with Facebook being tapped by 74% of them, YouTube by 65%, and Twitter by 63%.
• Twitter is the social media channel of choice among Fortune 100 companies, according to a Burson-Marsteller study, which found 54% of these organizations active on Twitter, compared with 32% using blogs and 29% with active Facebook fan pages.
• There is a correlation between financial performance and engagement in social media among the world’s top brands, according to a study conducted by Altimeter Group and WetPaint. Simply stated, socially engaged companies are more financially successful.
• And most recently, a study from SNCR, Deloitte, and Beeline Labs released just the other day reports that 94% of respondents said that they plan to maintain or increase investment in their online communities. The investment pays off, they said, in word of mouth, customer loyalty, brand awareness, idea generation, and improved quality of customer support.

The fact that businesses are seeing tangible benefits from social media explains why investment continues to rise among most companies, even when budget belts are being tightened. Driving these results is the competitive advantage that comes from real people connecting with each another in spaces where they share mutual interests. Companies are smart enough to know that (according to research) customers want the companies with which they do business should be present in these spaces.

So it is all the more confounding that these very same companies won’t let their own employees engage on these sites.

As reported here and elsewhere, a survey of CIOs found that 54% of companies block all employees from visiting any social sites. It’s deliciously ironic that 54% is exactly the same percentage of Fortune 100 companies that are active on Twitter.

If companies block their employees from engaging, who do they think their fan pages and Twitter accounts are attracting? Think about it. If every company prohibited employees from visiting Facebook, then the only time anybody could visit the company Facebook fan page would be when they’re not at work. Given the hours most companies require of their employees, that’s not a heck of a lot of time to interact with customers.

What’s more, if the fan pages of those 54% of companies are being viewed by employees from the 46% of companies that still allow some kind of access, none of the companies’ employees are able to interact with those visitors. They can’t. They’ve been blocked.

American Airlines announced just the other day that it’s launching BlackAtlas.com, a travel-focused social network for African Americans. According to one report, “The site will feature discussion boards and blogs on which users can share pictures, video and travel stories and tips, along with rating and recommending businesses and travel destinations.”

I don’t know whether American Airlines allows its own employees to visit social sites, but with more than half of companies in the blocking camp, odds are American’s own black employees will be barred from a site where they could interact with BlackAtlas.com members and personify the airline’s culture.

Gartner, in fact, projects that 60% of the Fortune 1000 will host online communities by 2010 so they can gain information from their customer base “which can be used for short-and long-term customer relationships,” according to Garner researcher Adam Sarner.

Employees at more than half of them, though, are not allowed.

Organizations need to think more like Dell, which realized its roadblock to Facebook made no sense when it launched a green initiative on the social networking site so employees could engage and participate.

The presumption of most companies blocking access is that employees are being unproductive, wasting time. In fact, the lines have blurred so much that even an employee spending a few minutes online to take a break from work could wind up having an interaction that benefits the company.

How have your non-work social interactions wound up serving your organization?