This afternoon, with thoughts of the Beyond Blogging 2006 Symposium experience sitll fresh in our minds, I sat down with David Wickenden, Dan Horowitz, Coleman Hutchins and Peter Klaus to discuss the event, the takeaways, the impressions and the next steps.

Since I woke up this morning at 545am EST (which is usually when I go to bed out in San Francisco) I am in need of sleep before writing much more. The good news is that since this resonated with everyone so strongly, that the conversation will continue into the forseeable future. More to share on Monday on the event itself, photos to come over the weekend and the Webcast of the entire event will be posted by the middle of next week.

Thanks to everyone for coming out, and to my friends at Fleishman Hillard for this great opportunity to be a part of the discussion.

Download as MP3 (11MB)

Categories: New Media, Podcasts, Media Relations, Blogger Relations, From Event
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The interest in this topic is simply incredible. There were so many people with questions we did not have enough time to get to them all. If you have any other questions for our panelists, or for other participants, please put them here by posting a comment below.

Categories: From Event
3 Comments »

Good morning. Am sitting in the balcony of the Mayflower Hotel Grand ballroom, blogging live from the Beyond Blogging 2006 symposium. Looking out over the crowd, it looks like there is about 300+ people here (conservative estimate) as a few more continue to trickle in. Apparently this is the largest gaggle of communications professionals that have gathered in DC for one of these events in a long time, perhaps ever.

After some opening remarks from the head of DC Communicator, Paul Duning, and Fleishman’s General Manager for the DC office, Martha Boudreau, Shel Holtz gave some great opening remarks that framed the conversations for the day quite well. Most notably, Shel talked about the shift of authority from institutions to individuals. He said, “Instead of thinking about crafting the message and delivering it to the masses below, marketers need to learn to cede control of the conversation to the people.”

Spot on.

He also talked about how the evolution of the technology has reduced the barriers to entry for participating in the conversation. This has also manifested itself through a desire for individuals to have real engagement with people, as they did in the ‘old days’. It used to be that when you wanted to get new shoes, you went to talk to the shoemaker and he made them for you. Today if you want to talk to the person who makes your shoes, you have to call the Philippines or call an 800# and talk to a representative of the company that does not know how they are made. People want a return to that sort of intimate connection with the people who service them, and Blogs are one way to get this.

I like Shel – and I just found out he is practically a neighbor, living out towards Concord. Will hopefully be seeing him again next Wednesday at the San Francisco Podcasters Meetup.

Categories: Speakers, From Event
5 Comments »

So what does Beyond Blogging actually mean? I have asked a lot of people that and received some very interesting answers. But I think to really get Beyond Blogging is a matter for the framing question. I.e., is the question really about what is Beyond Blogging, as in what does the future hold? Or Is it about going beyond blogging today, to imply that there is much more to this whole phenomenon. From my perspective, Beyond Blogging is about creating a deeper understanding of the best practices that work today while setting a path towards what we need from technology to do a better job for our clients in the future.

As Howard Rheingold says, “What it is -> is up to us”, so let’s get involved in the conversation and start trying things out, seeing what works and sharing what we learn with one another. It’s a about letting go of what you know and how things have been done in the past and looking for better ways to serve our clients - to create the most impact for their organizations, to tell their stories in ways that reach their intended audience. Now more than ever, the people who build these Web tools are open to the process of co-creation - my friends at BuzzLogic have been working very closely with a few key communications firms ever since they began development on their soon to be released software and will likely continue to do so forever. [Disclousure: I am an advisory board member for BuzzLogic]

So why now? What’s really different? Everything - and nothing. As Joe Kraus says, “It is easier than ever to launch a company, but just as hard as ever to build a business.” For me, what is really different is that we are finally in the throws of the Knowledge Economy and on our way to the next evolution, the Wisdom Economy.

In the knowledge economy, the value is no longer based on what you know, it is created from the unique way in which you apply what you know. It is found in the unique value of your relationships, the richness of your experience and your ability to adapt the insights you have gleaned from past failures and success in new ways for new situations. While we learn much from the patterns and protocols that have worked for us in the past, we need to think like Edwards Demming and Tony Robbins - we need to strive for Constant and Never Ending Improvement - finding better ways to accomplish our client’s goals as Tom Foremski suggests in The New Media Release.

Beyond Blogging is also an understanding that this new era of “social media” and Web 2.0 is about more than a technological revolution - it is about a fundamentally different way of viewing the world. It is a Chaordic world, not one in which the old world “Command and Control” hierarchies will work much longer. It is not a world of lies and cover ups - it is a world of authenticity and impeccable honesty. It is about filling the funnel instead of cllimbing the ladder - it is about helping one another by sharing what we know and being LoveCats. As I have written with The Noble Pursuit, it is also a time when fear and power are losing their grip on much of the modern world, but runs rampant in the unintegrated gap. It is whole brain thinking. It is about love winning out over fear. It is about the abundant capital of knowledge driving the economy forward instead of the scarcity of resources. It is about respecting the “Z-list” Bloggers as much as the A-List ones.

It is about people first and technology second. It is about you and me, in conversation with one another, asking the big questions or the silly one’s - at a conference table, in the hallway or over beer - enjoying the world around us and doing our bit to help make things right in our own unique way, using our own special gifts.

Yep - I know - all that idealism is fine and dandy, but what is Beyond Blogging for the communications industry specifically? What should we be concerned with as professionals? First you must understand how to work with consumer generated media to further your goals. Word of Mouth is a great practice area, but it can not be bought and sold for its full value. Monetizing it in units is just simply wrong from my perspctive - though it may be what the media buyers of the world want to do, it does not make it right. Its real value comes from the hearts of raving fans and the real troubles come from those that are really pissed off.

The trend I have been watching most closely over the past few years since getting into conversational intelligence and word of mouth has been the use of knowledge to further the goals of marketing. As consumers have access to more and more information, they rely on being able to find out what they need to know - they strive to make meaning out of the noise. So why not help make the meaning for them by replacing some of the advertising and communications mix with messages that teach people the important bits instead of always tugging on the emotional heart strings. While it probably won’t work for Coca-Cola, it might for Diet Coke - in a real sense, a nutrional label is a form of knowledge marketing in itself.

What does knowledge marketing mean? What does it look like? AdSense is one example - simple short text blurbs that must avoid hyperbole. It is Campbell’s Soup offering a series of alternative recipes for using its soup in other dishes. It is AdSense sending an email newsletter that helps advertisers better optimize their campaigns, helping them get the most from the service offering. It is American Express offering small business expertise as part of their Open program. It is a hundred other uses of producing media and applications that help people move from being a potential customer to being a loyal one who is selling your products for you and teaching their peers all the tips and tricks that they learned along the way. This approach creates natural word of mouth amongst your most highly valued customers and may take the form of an advertisement, a web site, a brochure, an email newsletter, a non-profit tie-in or any other form.

In short, it is about a fundamental shift in the framework and focus of the traditional communications agency from handling the public relations, Web site content and crisis communications to one that helps companies in all aspects of their outbound communications. It is about helping clients organize their knowledge assetts and figuring out how to best communicate them to the appropriate audiences in the most appropriate manner. It is about working to ensure the congruency of communications across all customer touchpoints - from press relations, to blogger relations, to internal communications, to sales scripts, to advertisements, to customer service centers and everything in between. Most importantly, it is about really listening to your customers and your markets, being engaged in the conversation and just keeping it real.

If you want to know more about this, come talk to me at the event tomorrow morning over at the Mayflower hotel - would be glad to hear your feedback and see what we might figure out together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, New Media, User Generated Content, Media Relations, Blogger Relations, Word of Mouth
2 Comments »

Since I previously wrote about the research report that Todd’s firm BoldMouth released and did a Podcast with him, I won’t bore you with any other background here - let’s get right to the reponses he gave us to his email interview…

Todd Tweedy, CEO
BoldMouth.com
Blog: Word Spreads Quickly

Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?

Actually, I spend more time tracking what’s happening in terms of how blog content is distributed by other bloggers as well as how traditional search engines indexed, score, and rank blog content.

Here are a few blogs I follow:

• Channel 9 – great example of how to establish a corporate blogging movement across an enterprise that’s not full of corporate-speak.
• The Working Model – Back in February 2000, Ford Motor Company wanted to give their global workforce of 350,000 employees an Internet-connected computer. That didn’t go as planned for Ford. Today, imagine 60,000 product managers at Microsoft deepening customer relationship and dialoging with customers via blogs. Very interesting discussions on community and the tools that help create it.
• BrainJams – — I attended the January 30, 2006 event in DC and am hooked. The unconference series is all about co-creation and participation. It’s a great example for enterprises to mirror as they build out corporate communication plans using blogs. How an enterprise humanizes content and facilitate contributions from individuals in a community is often overlooked when creating a blog strategy. [editor’s note: no bribes were paid for the plug of my non-profit, but I will buy him a beer for the kind words at the Geek Dinner tonight]
• The Business Soul – This blog hasn’t officially launched but Black Star, the photojournalism, corporate photography and stock photo company, is going to publish a new blog with a focus on “humanity in corporate communications.” I’m definitely going to blog roll this one.
• Naked Conversations - This is Shel Israel’s blog. Shel is the co-author of Naked Conversations — How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. This is a very interactive book so buy two copies if you don’t have one already cause you’ll want to have at least one copy that isn’t filled with scribbles and underlined sections.

Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.

I got my start in marketing via a stint in politics when I was only 5. My Mom would take me out canvassing neighborhoods to get-out-the-vote with my older brother. I caught the political bug and ended up working in the Legislative and Executive branches of government before spending a number of years doing public affairs marketing and grassroots mobilization – before we labeled it word-of-mouth - on the ad agency side of the isle.

My company, BoldMouth, is all about implementing word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that focus on community participation and co-creation in the development and distribution of product and service recommendations. We implement. We provide enterprises with innovative solutions to initiate, facilitate, and measure the impact of campaigns. We work with VP’s and Director’s of Sales and Marketing as well as Product Managers to integrate web presence strategies, search engine optimization, and community frameworks to support new product and service launches. We just finished a campaign for a publisher that resulted in a diet book making the #5 spot on the New York Times Best Seller List.

Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?

Blogging is relatively simple. Blogging is just publishing – text, audio, video. A “blog” is just another type of website. And, when we “blog” we are simply publishing content that interests us in some personal or professional way. When we start connecting with other individuals that are publishing content that is interesting to us the possibilities are endless. I believe we’re already starting to see the first wave of what is likely to be “Beyond Blogging” as blog tool providers shift their offerings to include content management and community tool offerings. This shift is very important. I believe we’ll see a community portal model emerge in online communications as tool providers try new methods to address the challenges of scaling. The blog provider that can maintain ‘strong ties” between members across an audience, that was at one time a community, will win BIG.

Q4 - Do you have any sage advice for a communications professional trying to work with a client that wants to Blog? What are the 3 most important things they need to look out for?

I generally get asked three questions when we start working on a blog project:

1. How do we start the conversations?
2. How do we keep the conversations going?
3. How do they measure it?

I propose you start by identifying the “excellence in business strategy” success the enterprise has had whether operations, products/services or customer support. This becomes the message platform. Then build from there based on recognized interests of your audience. Be sure to get “Brand Ambassadors” engaged and, active early on too.

Here are a few more tips:

1. Make it easy to publish and, post comments.
2. Pick relevant category descriptions for structuring your content posts and use stemmed tags that map back to Top Tags on Technorati.com. Don’t forget to claim your blog.
3. Use pingbacks as a content distribution tactic and be sure use the direct URL’s for getting your content crawled quickly.
4. Incorporate permanent backlinks (permalinks) in your blog so that your content has a chance of sustained indexing over time.
5. Use RSS feeds to expand distribution.

Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?

I’m surprised that blogs aren’t viewed as a “viral marketing” mechanisms to support content distribution. I believe blogs are the ultimate “Tell-a-Friend” form. The secret to encouraging “pass-along” behavior is to focus on interest, not acquaintance, to drive distribution of content.

Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?

I actually blogged a business trip to Argentina in April 2002 and I wish I saved the content somewhere other than just on the service providers system. That ASP, of course, went out of business. Archiving blog content with a reliable third-party is likely to spawn interest in a whole new industry of service providers or perhaps expand the business models of local firms like @BackUp as well as Citrix’s GotoMyPC.com. I wish I secured the domain backupmyblog.com a long time ago! You can still get in on beta test and have your blogged backup for free. Oh, the domain IWishIDidThat.com is still available. Bottom-line, communications professionals need to have their clients archive not only the posts they publish on a blog but also the comments and link pool to the blog.

Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.

My company just published a study last week on Practices, Perceptions and Ethics in Word-of-Mouth Marketing with Osterman Research that has already been download more than 7,000 times. I’m sure I’ll touch on some of the key findings from the study as well as tips and techniques on how to integrate blogs into corporate communications.

Categories: Blogging, Word of Mouth, Speakers
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If you don’t know Corante, you probably have not been online much over the last couple of years. Their blogs have some of the best articles and experts covering a variety of topics that anyone who lives around DC will enjoy reading. Francois Gossieaux has an excellent Blog of his own, Emergence Marketing. You should definitely add it to your feed reader. (’feed reader’ is another term for an RSS Subscription manager - a tool for reading all your favorite news in one location)

Francois Gossieaux, President
Corante
Blog: Emergence Marketing

Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?

(I am obviously biased about the first two)

http://marketing.corante.com/
http://innovation.corante.com/
http://www.hyperorg.com/logger/
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog [editors note: ditto on this, these guys are spot on]

I like blogs that are really well written, funny and also informative. Quality of the writing is my #1 criterion, but that’s just me.

Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.

I am the President of Corante - the first blog-based media company. Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that !s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.

On a personal level I have a passion for marketing, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?

Beyond blogging means two things to me. First, that quality content and opinions from the blogosphere find a way to penetrate other and more traditional distribution channels to reach people who don’t normally read blogs. Second, Beyond Blogging means extending the social networks that develop through blogs to face-to-face environments.

Q4 - Do you have any sage advice for a communications professional trying to work with a client that wants to Blog? What are the 3 most important things they need to look out for?

1. Don’t feel like you have to blog unless you have something really interesting to say. If you want to participate in the conversations about your company, your technologies or your markets and don’t have anything important to say, look at leveraging some existing employee bloggers to help you participate in the conversations you want to participate in.
2. Make sure that as an organization you understand the intricacies of the blogging culture and that you have the right corporate culture to start blogging. If you do not have employee bloggers, encourage some of them to become individual bloggers or hire new ones and put them either in charge of your corporate blog initiative or at least in an advisory position.
3. Develop a blogging landscape that includes the influential and connector blogs that participate in your conversations as well as adjacent conversations. Participate with them by commenting on and linking to their blogs.

Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?

I have two. The first one is that companies can truly no longer “control their message” - the only thing they can do is “attempt to influence” the conversation…

The second one is that most companies overlook one of their primary sources of customer/ brand communications - the customer service center

Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?

(Some of the more popular posts from my blog)

• Can word of mouth marketing be considered a “new” media “channel”?
• What do you do when your brand becomes the target of xenophobic rumors?
• Who needs a CMO anyway?
• Hyper-specialization is not always the right thing to do…

Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.

The challenges and opportunities related to establishing authoritative group voices in the blogosphere. The challenges and opportunities of extending the blogospehere’s virtual social networks to the physical face-to-face world. [Editor’s note: It’s good to see that more and more people are working to get out from behind their screens and spend more time with real people]

Categories: Blogging, Speakers
1 Comment »

Just one day away from the big event and I just got into the offices here at Fleishman Hillard on L Street. Unfortunately, I have been offline for the past 21 hours due to some WiFi issues and the five hours I spent with JetBlue. I have another long post to share with you shortly, but in the meantime, I have just received another reply to our Beyond Email Interview from Debbie Weil who is fresh off a trip to Toronto for Mesh where she spoke on a panel with my friend Tara Hunt of Riya.

Debbie is the author of the forthcoming “The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right” to be published on Aug. 3rd, 2006 by Penguin Portfolio. You can download a free chapter from the book’s blog.

Debbie Weil
Author ~ Consultant ~ Blogger
New meta site! http://www.debbieweil.com
Book: http://www.TheCorporateBloggingBook.com
Blog: http://www.BlogWriteForCEOs.com
Newsletter: http://www.WordBiz.com/signup.php

Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?

Steve Rubel’s www.MicroPersuasion.com
BusinessWeek’s www.BlogSpotting.net
Halley Suitt: http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/
Dilbert Blog: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/
Hugh MacLeod’s Gaping Void: http://www.gapingvoid.com/

I like blogs that are really well written, funny and also informative. Quality of the writing is my #1 criterion, but that’s just me.

Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.

I’m a corporate blogging consultant and a new author. My favorite gigs are in-house training for big companies like Edward Jones and Wells Fargo. It was gratifying to see Wells Fargo take one of my recommendations — to launch a blog related to history — and run with it. Their blog commemorating the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake & Fire is here.

Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?

Beyond Blogging means getting beyond “cool.”

It’s a way of saying that social media is going to seep into our lives on a daily, practical level. We’ll have a computer built into the door of the fridge and we’ll scan our RSS feeds telling us which local store has the best price today on fresh shrimp. Or where to nab a cheap ticket for a quick trip to the Caribbean.

We’ll search blogs and podcasts and wikis before making any big purchase decision. It’ll just be second nature. I guess that’s what Web 2.0 really means. We’re still in the early adopter phase. It will take a few years. We have to get beyond “cool.”

Q4 - Do you have any sage advice for a communications professional trying to work with a client that wants to Blog? What are the 3 most important things they need to look out for?

1. Does the client have a genuine desire to maintain a quality blog with interesting writing and useful information. In other words, can they convince the client that this is another way of marketing - not a publicity stunt or a new publishing channel for press releases.

2. The client wants someone else to “do it for them.” Long-term you’ve gotta write your own blog. If it’s not a senior exec who can be a thought leader, the client may have a really smart, connected employee who can do it.

3. This doesn’t require a nine-month project plan to get started. Just do it.

Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?

Not sure what you mean by mainstream communicators. MSM? The biggest trend I see is that great content, commentary, ideas, creativity, etc. are bubbling up from below. I.e. from nonpaid professionals. Some of them are 17-year-olds publishing clever videos to YouTube. One example is the bowiechick video demonstrating the cool things she can do with her Logitech webcam:

This bottom-up explosion of creativity is threatening both mainstream media’s control of news delivery as well as our traditional model of packaged, controlled advertising. The line between editorial, advertising and entertainment is getting blurred. And it sure is more fun and interesting.

Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?

Bill Gates hires me for CEO blog coaching and to ghostwrite his blog! (My best April Fool’s joke ever)

Time still the top Fear Factor when it comes to corporate blogging (Based on a survey I did of the 17,500 subscribers to my e-newsletter)

What REALLY happened behind Kryptonite’s blogging fiasco and what it means for corporate blogging (My interview with Kryptonite’s PR manager debunking the notion that Kryptonite ignored the buzz in the blogosphere and gotten bitten badly because of it)

Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.

- That the term “corporate blogging” is not an oxymoron.
- That blogs are really just next-generation Web sites
- That corporate blogs have lots of practical applications. Google uses its official corporate blog at as a complement to traditional PR, for example.

Categories: Blogging, Speakers, Corporate Blogging
No Comments »

On Tuesday I spent part of the afternoon with Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher at the beautiful DeYoung Museum, talking about everything from lanyap to domaineering. With no room at the wildly busy museum for a couple of podcasters on this sunny San Francisco afternoon in Golden Gate Park, we headed to my house to setup Greg Narain’s old podcast rig on the backdeck (in the backyard as I unfortunately say).

I wanted to talk with Tom about his somewhat infamous blog post called “Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!“. In this podcast interview, Tom shares some very, very important insights on the future of public relations and we joke about starting a company to help begin the transformation. Most importantly though, Tom provides some great ideas on how to improve relations with both journalists and bloggers. He really gets this stuff, you should listen in and find out for yourself.

The New Media Release is an evolution of the current industry practices, designed to make it easier for journalists to tell the important stories by focusing on their own insights. This follows up on some of the ideas Coleman Hutchins wrote the other day in his post “The Press Release Isn’t Dead - It’s Multipurpose, Evolving.”

Photo Credit: Kristie Wells
Download the MP3 (9.2MB)

Categories: Media Relations, Blogger Relations, Word of Mouth
5 Comments »

For those of you who know me, you have probably heard me talk about how blessed I am to get such great gigs as this one, writing for this terriffic event. I knew that writing here would be a great opportunity for me, but I could not have imagined how much I would learn from the great people who are involved with Beyond Blogging 2006. Learning of Yvonne DiVita’s work is another one of the great benefits I have received as a result of supporting this event - in her responses to this email interview, you will find out why. She is another one of those cool people who just ‘get it’.

Yvonne DiVita
President and Founder
WME Books
Blog: http://www.lipsticking.com
Blog: http://www.ahablog.com
Blog: http://www.wmeblogs.com
Blog: http://blog.thirdage.com

Q1 - What are the 5 Blogs you can’t live without?

How can I pick only 5? Okay, TODAY, these are my 5. Tomorrow, it could be different.

1. Diva Marketing - Toby Bloomberg keeps me on my toes. She covers the right stuff at the right time.
2. Crossroads Dispatches - Where Evelyn Rodriquez offers insightful thoughts on women, men, world peace and the emerging creative class centers of the world.
3. Talking Story - Rosa Say manages to gather the great minds in marketing and business all in one place - here’s where I go for my daily dose of innovation.
4. Hispanic Trending - Where Juan Guillermo keeps me up to snuff on the Latino community. Since Hispanics are a strong, growing business community, and they have such a rich culture, I find this blog not only informative, but enjoyable as a nice read. I don’t get to read it nearly enough, however.
5. Ageless Marketing - David Wolfe has some interesting work on his blog - relevant to the baby boomer community and why businesses shouldn’t ignore us. [Editor Note: I used to love talking to David when I lived in DC - he was one of the sharpest knives in the local Company of Friends drawer]

Q2 - Tell us a little more about you and your company.

What’s to say about me? I wrote Dick*less Marketing to get some attention for the women’s market online, and it succeeded fairly well. It almost seems as if the world is more interested in ME, though. How could I give my book such an outrageous title? is a favorite question. To which I answer: I didn’t. A man did - and convinced me to keep it. The book begat the blog, and the rest is history. I write several blogs, and contribute to others, because I think the voice of the blogger is what’s important. It’s the chatty nature of getting together around a virtual table in a virtual café, sharing stories. It’s about bringing people together - to learn more about each other. To that end, WME Blogs (part of Windsor Media Enterprises, LLC), works with the people to teach them HOW to blog, so their blog will be as effective as they hope. There’s so much more to it than just throwing up a header and typing in a few paragraphs. And yes, blogs are search engine magnets…or, they can be, done right.

Q3 - What does Beyond Blogging mean to you? What does it look like?

What is Beyond Blogging about? It’s about women. I am confident enough of that to predict that over the next 5 years, more and more women all over the world will embrace blogging (in all of its shapes and forms - which is a topic for another discussion) to join hands, stand shoulder to shoulder, and share stories of their lives. These stories will bring our collective voices to the forefront - women will dominate blogging because it’s a social media, because women are social creatures. Because women are the ones in charge of hearth and home, husband and child, the collective voices of our stories will ultimately change the social contructs of the world around us.

Q4 - Do you have any sage advice for a communications professional trying to work with a client that wants to Blog? What are the 3 most important things they need to look out for?

Here are the 3 things communications professionals need to look out for, when working with clients who want to blog:

1. Thinking a blog is the be-all and end-all of marketing communications. A blog is a conversation - not a dialogue. A blog is a connection to real people - not a place to pontificate. A blog is a piece of the whole. I think most of the roundtable members are saying the same thing, in different words. Because, of course, it’s true.
2. A quick, excited beginning that gradually drifts off into - nothingness. Blogs are a lot of work. Too many people lose interest when they don’t get immediate feedback (comments and trackbacks). You have to give yourself at least 6 months to build a community of interested readers.
3. An inability to be flexible. During that six months I mentioned in #2, you need to be flexible enough to change focus, design, categories, even goals. You need to keep an open mind, allow the blog readers to lead you where they want to go. ROI is not always measured in $$ - sometimes it’s measured in the voices of your readers. Keep that in mind.

Q5 - What’s the one trend in communications that isn’t being picked up on, or understood, by mainstream communicators?

What’s being missed? The connective/collective power of women bloggers. But, don’t worry. We’re quietly in the background taking care of that.

Q6 - What are some of your past Blog posts you would like to highlight for our audience? Why?

First: Yvonne Discovers the Power of We - because of the words — power and we.

Next: Where in the World are the Women?- because women are the architects of society (so said Harriet Beecher Stowe)

And: I can’t choose any others…there are a lot of posts about other bloggers, cause that’s what women do - we support our friends, so, I leave the choice of which posts are worthwhile to the readers.

Q7 - Discuss briefly what you’ll be sharing with our audience at the Beyond Blogging event.

What am I going to talk about at Beyond Blogging? I’m going to go beyond blogging to show everyone that the talkers of the world, women, are also the bloggers of the world. I’m going to give folks reasons to start paying more attention. Stay tuned…

Categories: Blogging, Speakers
3 Comments »

For at least 7 years I have been railing against CRM’s claims to provide a 360 degree view of each customer. When I initially started working with conversational intelligence back in 1999, I was talking to a few key people about the fact that CRM systems did not accurately account for any given customer’s online behaviour and their offline conversations - but we could fix that with some software I was striving to create. Even after it was built though, we would still be missing a good chunk of understanding concerning the potential impact of any given customer for good or bad. This was because we had no way of knowing what exactly people were talking about with their family, friends and co-workers… until now at least.

Our keynote speaker for the event on Friday, Ed Keller of the KellerFay Group, has just released some of his firm’s TalkTrack research findings regarding consumer’s real world conversations about brands. According to the company’s press release, TalkTrack is “the first continuous monitoring system of all marketing relevant conversations in America, in whatever form they occur, including face-to-face, telephone and internet.”

Ed will be talking about the results and some of the surprising insights they found in their research on Friday morning at Beyond Blogging 2006. We have included the official press release here for you to download as part of this blog post, so I won’t get into too much detail here - however, I do want to speak to a couple of particularly poignant aspects of their findings.

• The survey included conversations from 1,507 Americans ages 13-69 relating to 11,000 conversations and over 6,000 mentions of specific brands
• 92% of marketing-relevant word of mouth takes place “offline” (71% in person and 21% via telephone)
• 62% of marketing-relevant discussion is described as “mostly positive,” while only 9% is described as “mostly negative”
• The average American discusses specific brands in ordinary discussion 56 times per week
• Email, instant message and online chat rooms/blogs comprise 6% of word of mouth

While this seems to finally provide the statistical proof that Word of Mouth Marketers have long sought, the relatively low impact of the Internet is a surprise, especially given the fact that The Internet was the most frequently cited media channel referenced in brand-related buzz. I for one am interested in getting more of the details of the report and asking Ed some more questions about the findings. On both a personal and professional level this is very exciting for me. It is something I have always had to make assumptions about in my discussions with others - now I can cite real research that is ongoing and will improve greatly over time, providing even greater insights along the way.

For some reason, reading the press release made me think about a very small nuance of Word of Mouth that has a huge potential impact to the nature of the industry. For some reason Word of Mouth is seemingly more associated with Marketing than communications. In asking Ed about this, he felt strongly that the reference to marketing in this context includes communications professionals as well as advertisers and other folks in the different arenas of the marketing tent.

When I read that MediaVest EVP Jim Kite had said “that word of mouth represents a very big opportunity for marketers, with significant implications for both media buying and creative strategies” it made me look at the WOM industry in a different light. It became clear for me that the big problem with WOM was one of perspective. Most notably from those who hold the still eroneous belief that conversations can be controlled like a carefully crafted piece of marketing communications. In reality, we are able to inform, influence and persuade people, but ultimately the product/service is what really creates word of mouth.

No matter what many very bright people in the industry tell me, I just don’t see a media buyer purchasing 5,000 word of mouth units for a campaign as being a realistic practice (though I undersand that people are doing this today). While the results of WOM campaigns are clearly trackable, which is a key benefit, the consumer’s demand for authenticity within the broader conversation creates an environment that will reject any efforts to control a conversation and generate undeserved buzz. Many of the brightest minds I know have been thinking about what makes one brand take off as another comparable brand stagnates - no one has really come up with any insights of note as far as I know.

The TalkTrack findings point to the power of media and advertising to influence the nature of conversations, which is a key strength of communications firms and one of the main reasons my money is on the Communications agencies over advertising agencies as the industry matures. The core disciplines of traditional Public Relations (such as writing articles and talking to journalists) have more relevancy in my view than the ability to segment audiences and determine pricing strategies. Ultimately though, the real winners will be those professionals who have a cross-disciplinary understanding of all the relevant skill-sets with a solid foundation built on understanding and interacting with people.

Yes, marketing programs can incentivize and reward desired behaviour as IMG Direct does with its referral program paying bounties to the new customer and the customer who referred them, but it would seem to me that more people share their brand related stories in response to a positive and unexpected product or customer service experience. How many people really become ‘raving fans’ because of a bounty program or loyalty rewards? My guess is that more customers become raving fans because of the experience they have with the company (ie, its products, services and people) then those that are driven by the financial reward. This is ostensibly the biggest problem with hiring agents to artificially create buzz - if the product or service experience is not congruent with the buzz, you can’t get very far over the long term.

You may be able to make some short term impact with WOM programs, but unless you really understand your customers and have met one or more of their real needs, it will only be a flash in the pan. Most people today are seeking more reality and less Corporate speak. More high touch and less high tech. Organization’s clearly need to embrace communications strategies that account for word of mouth and try to influence the conversation in positive ways in regards to their organization. I am 100% in favor of continuing to experiment with different techniques and protocols with regards to finding WOM programs that work. Still, I am worried by what I perceive to be the potential for using WOM tools for inappropriate or unethical purposes.

I guess I am really advocating a very simple, but very important value based ideology when it comes to WOM - just keep it real. Don’t just monitor conversations and react, really listen and respond as you would to help a friend. Perhaps the one’s you listen to will become friends, or even ‘raving fans’. Don’t just try to get more ‘mentions’ to increase the quantity of buzz out there, cultivate quality contributions to the conversation from the real ‘Influentials’.

Perhaps it would be interesting to get a sense from future TalkTrack survey participants in regards to their perceptions of the trustworthiness of the organizations they talk about. How much they believe what the company has to say and also perhaps what they think of other consumers who relate to those brands. Regardless of my personal perspective on the nature of WOM, I know I am going to be paying closer attention to Ed Keller’s work in this arena. He clearly has developed something that provides immense value for modern communications and marketing professionals. To quote Ed,

“The fact that the average American talks about brands more than 50 times per week — which is a huge number — signals to marketers that it would be wise to seek ways to join in these conversations.”

While many of us have been encouraging just such an approach for many years - Ed has set out to prove the value and importance of getting involved - this could be the turning point for many executives in charge of big brands. For this and so many other reasons, I am happy to have this opportunity to meet Ed Keller and learn even more from him this Friday.