Social Media

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Ragan spotlights Britannica WebShare

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Ragan Communications—one of my clients—has produced a video of an interview with Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, another one of my clients. I love it when synergies like this happen. How often can you hype two clients in one post?

Ragan also has a write-up on WebShare, Britannica’s initiative to provide bloggers with access to Britannica content. Staff writer Melissa Underwood wonders about the ethics of offering free accounts to bloggers, an issue I haven’t seen surfaced anywhere else. No comments so far, but it’ll be interesting to see what people have to say.

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.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Francois Gossieaux at NCF

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Francois Gossieaux from Emergence Marketing and Corante introduces results from an ongoing study of online communities in business. This is just a brief clip from the beginning of the presentation.

A taste of New Communication Forum

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Here’s a brief clip of Jim Long (some of you may know him from his Twitter id, @newmediajim), who was part of a panel this morning along with Shel Israel and Tom Foremski addressing journalism and social media:

Monday, April 21, 2008

Who should own internal social media?

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I got a call from a Ragan reporter today. She’s writing about the debate evidently going on over at MyRagan, the communicator’s social network, over who should own internal social media.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? There’s still debate raging over who should own the intranet. (This is another topic of discussion I found at MyRagan, just to prove that it hasn’t been resolved yet.)

Specifically, this writer told me, there were three departments vying for control: Communications, Human Resources and IT.

My answer: The employees who use it own it.

That’s not the same answer that I give for intranet ownership, where a cross-functional governance model almost always produces the best results. For enterprise web 2.0, though, we’re not talking about a tool that will be used as a channel for traditional communications. We’re talking about employee social networks, employee blogs, wikis and other tools that allow employees to network among themselves.

Certainly, IT has a major role to play. HR needs to be involved from a policy standpoint, while communicators may have a good handle on how information moves through the organization, insight that would be helpful in putting together an effective suite of tools. All three departments had a hand in the introduction of social media to the intranet at Northwestern Mutual Insurance, with the communicator identifying the need. IT helped determine that an external hosting solution would be the best course, while HR ironed out issues with labor contracts and the like.

But once an enterprise web 2.0 solution is in place, it’s ideally the employees using it who will determine its evolution.

If you have social media behind the firewall at your company, who owns it?

Incidentally, I got a press release today touting a new Forrester study that claims spending on enterprise web 2.0 will grow 43% per year over the next several years, reaching $4.6 billion by 2013. The survey says 56 percent of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority this year.

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.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Overcoming key resistence to adopting social media

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I’ve talked before about the reasons companies resist social media. The Arthur W. Page Society and the Corporate Executive Board are out with a study that puts some numbers behind the top reasons for organizational resistance. The study, which targeted more than 30 chief communications officers who are corporate members of the Page Society, revealed nothing surprising, but still, it’s easier to offer counter-arguments when you know what’s holding companies back.

Resistance from the legal department

Lawyers take too much heat for opposing social media. Their job is to be cautious, to advise their employers/clients against things that pose legal risks. The fault rests with leaders who blindly follow legal advice rather than balancing it against other factors. When faced with lawyers who want to put the brakes on new media, offer the following points:

• Lawyers have okayed blogs of all stripes at 58 of the Fortune 500.
• Sun Microsystems’ general counsel is blogging.
• Few of the legal concerns have materialized among companies with blogs.
• The value of engagement in social media, applied intelligently, will easily outweigh the risks (see next item).

Lack of ROI

There have been a lot of developments in the ability to assess the return on investment for engagement with social media. See Kami Huyse’s example of ROI from a social media effort on behalf of her client, Sea World. PR measurement guru Katie Delahaye Paine also addresses measurement of social media quite nicely in her new book, “Measuring Public Relationships.”

In any case, the days of shrugging off social media because there’s no ROI are over. We need to educate the decision-makers about the kinds of ROI being attained by others and how it can be measured for our organizations.

Too labor-intensive

I remember speaking to the CEO of a Dutch company who said his board was concerned about the amount of time spent blogging. He answered that he wasn’t spending any more time communicating than he was before. However, some of the total time allocated to communicating had shifted to his blog because the blog was a more effective tool, in many circumstances, than phone calls, speeches at industry association meetings, and newspaper interviews. He hadn’t given up on those (and other) older forms of communication, but adding blogs to the mix allowed him to use the most appropriate tool for the job.

On the other hand, some social media will require additional labor. Southwest Airlines had to hire additional staff to monitor and approve comments left to its blog. It wasn’t something Southwest hesitated to do, though, given that they had already concluded that the ROI from the blog would far outweigh the cost of managing it (see previous item). If the company takes a strategic approach to its social media activities, the ROI will already be understood (a far better approach than saying, “Hey, we gotta have a blog!").

It’s also easy to start small in order to get comfortable with social media before diving in. I advised one colleague that his company could start with a blog focused on recruiting (a key issue for his company) rather than a Southwest-like blog or a CEO blog. The audience is more limited and the discussion more focused. When the value of that blog proves itself, additional online social activities simply become the next step.

Lack of expertise

This is actually a valid concern, but shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. The solution is to get some expertise.

There are several ways to do this: Hire someone, start small (see previous item) in order to develop the expertise, find someone in your organization who is already engaged and take advantage of their experience or contract with any of the agencies or individuals out there who can help provide you with the expertise you need.

Challenges, not obstacles

I always rolled my eyes at the corporate-speak that positioned problems as “opportunities.” But we who advocate our companies’ involvement in social media should see the resistance as challenges to overcome rather than roadblocks that send us packing. That’s what Northwest Mutual Life Insurance did, according to the Forrester case study. The conservative, 150-year-old financial services company identified the areas of resistence, then found the means to overcome them, ultimately launching an internal blogging initiative. Applying the principles of sound business management to a company’s entry into the social media space doesn’t have to be an oxymoronic concept.