Know your RSS from your elbow

EBay have moved to offer a greater transparency to their business operations; an interview with eBay’s new full-time blogger on CNN money suggests that eBay are truly embracing open communication channels with their customers: 

New eBay recruit and social media veteran Richard Brewer-Hay will launch a blog next month that aims to give eBay’s users a direct, unfiltered communications link with the company. Can he repair the company’s battered relations with its users?

“…My words go straight up onto the blog, unedited.

It’s got to be transparent. There’s got to be an authenticity to it, an honesty to it, otherwise there’s no point in doing it in the first place. I’m going to open up my e-mail to questions from folks. People can comment, too, and comments are going to be open. You’re going to get the good, the bad, and the ugly.” read more…

We like Richard’s blogging ‘ethos‘. EBay already have various channels available for communicating with their customers, but this initiative seems to be different; existing blogs are written by staff members with a history at eBay, Richard has joined eBay solely for this role and appears to be enthused by the prospect of talking about a huge range of eBay’s business.

We’ll be following eBays’ latest conversation-starter with interest, as well as keeping an eye open for other businesses employing full-time bloggers to help them converse with their customers. 

I mentioned Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop site last week. It comes out of beta tomorrow. Mashable’s Kristen Nicole has an interview with Guy, which you can watch on the Mashable site or below. I’m pleased to say that this blog is on the social media page at Alltop, so check it out. And then check out the whole gamut of sites that makes Alltop such a great resource.

Dell continues to invest in it’s direct2dell blogging group, with an announcement that it has launched ‘In the Clouds‘, a blog that discusses the future of cloud computing.

Perhaps the biggest insight into how dell have adopted blogging comes from within the announcement (titled: more conversations…):

“From the beginning, the purpose of Direct2Dell has been to educate and to support our customers on a wide variety of topics that they care about. This blog has grown since those early days. And that growth has encouraged more Dell folks to want to have conversations with our customers.”

Dell’s strategy is also now including other web 2.0 channels - youtube, flickr and twitter to extend their conversation, and reach their customers in new ways.

Wal-Mart have handed over the keys for a shiny new blog to a selection of employees from their product buying department. The result is checkoutblog.com.

Wal-Mart appears to have learned after a previous attempt to enter the blogosphere was met with a negative reaction (Wal-Mart vs. the blogosphere). This time around, Wal-Mart are using real employees (who are real product buyers), asking for real feedback about products they are considering stocking or announcements they would like to make.

A good example of how a large company can develop a personable face for the interactions they want to have with their customers.

Adam pointed in his last post to Scoble’s Corporate Blog Manifesto. For another take on how to get started in corporate blogging, take a look at Todd Defren’s post on Blogger Relations, which should form the basis of any plan to get involved in blogging and, more importantly, engage with other bloggers. There’s a pdf embedded within the post that you can download and read at leisure. And then you can learn it by heart.

So it was written 5 years ago, which is the equivalent to about 57.3 human years on the Internet, but Robert Scoble was clearly on to something when he wrote the corporate blog manifesto. Read it, print it out, pin it above your computer and trust in its wisdom.

It’s what we (passionately) believe should be at the heart of your blogging and marketing strategy. Read it here.

Last week I outlined what a blog is, and began to look at why a business should invest time in developing, writing and promoting their own blog. Here I want to look at 6 key reasons why your company needs to blog:

1. Gathering Feedback - A blog can serve as an essential communication channel with your customers. Customers feedback, critiques, praises and complaints can prove invaluable. How much would you be prepared to spend on customer opinion polls, surveys and focus groups? A blog is a cost-effective way to listen to your customer feedback.

2. Clearer Communication - How would your business deliver relevant, up-to-date messages regarding events in your business or market to a broad audience, instantly? A blog helps you attract new customers and offer a personal touch to your communications with existing customers.

3. Google loves a blogger! - A blog can form a cost-effective, measurable solution to gaining higher rankings in the major search engines. Google loves relevant, updated, ever-changing content - the essence of a good blog, plus, if you’re talking about your market and business, your blog is naturally keyword heavy. (your talking about your products/services/industry after all, right?)

4. Blog for your staff - You value your customers feedback, thoughts and complaints, but how about your most valuable asset: your employees? Offering a channel for airing staff views and offering a virtual ‘water-cooler’ for your staff to discuss ideas, what’s working and what’s not, can provide direct feedback and it can help keep staff motivated and feeling valued.

5. Stay ahead of the competition - A blog allows you to demonstrate your industry expertise. Striking up conversations with potential and existing customers may well set you apart from your dull corporate competitor. If your competitors aren’t blogging, who are your customers listening to?

6. Extend your brand - Don’t just give your company a voice, how about a personality? A blog gives you the opportunity to talk to your customers in whatever accent you choose. The ethos of your company can be projected in the way you communicate, and what you choose to communicate about. A blog gives you the chance to further build on your brand.

Bonus 7. It’s the way you tell ‘em - Say what you want to say, when you want to say it - a blog allows unedited views, announcements or statements without being at the mercy of press editors. Press publications rarely tell it as you see it, so why aren’t you?

So, I believe these are among the most compelling reasons that your business has to join the on-line conversation, but the road to blogging bliss is crawling with considerations: who will write your blog? What will it be about? How often should you blog? Will it be hosted by yourself? Do we moderate comments? And more…

Of course, [warning: blatant service offering ahead] bpodr would be happy to help you implement your new blogging strategy, or just talk you through your options.

There’s a case to be made that, if you can’t get your company’s internal communications right, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to engage with your customers in any authentic, believable, or genuine manner. I chose these three adjectives deliberately. Not that I have a habit of using random words but these three in particular lie at the heart of a December press release for a new report that focuses on what a number of CEOs at high profile organisations consider essential for building trust in their workforce.

All well and good, of course, but what struck me was that the ambitions aired and the desired outcomes of the interviewed CEOs seemed stuck on the workforce. It was as if they couldn’t make the obvious leap from realising that what worked for their workforce would work for their customers. Here’s a typical remark from one of the CEOs: “I think employees are smart enough to understand that things aren’t always going great.” Replace ‘employees’ with ‘customers’ and is the sentence - and sentiment - any less valid. Of course not.

The message from the press release and the report in question is that CEOs are keen to appear more human - but only to their employees. Customers will still be fed the ‘positive message’ and the ‘spin’.

December also saw, coincidentally enough, Todd Defren posting his ‘Open Letter to CEO Bloggers’ on the PR Squared blog. It’s an excellent piece on the necessity of listening as a precusor to joining the conversation. CEOs, like everyone else, can get excited by the possibilities of blogging and the opportunities it can bring personally and for your company. Of course, CEOs can be larger than life and accustomed to being noticed. They might expect their blog to be noticed and praised, simply because of who they are. It’s a hard lesson to learn: the web teaches humility. Before you start saying things, try and discover what your audience are interested in hearing.

So, whether a CEO is communicating internally or on the web through a blog or any other social media, being human, admitting mistakes, showing a little humility and, more than anything, being honest, will reap rewards that bluster and spin can never hope to match.

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For those of you who are already bloggers, Wired has a great ‘interactive’ diagram of what happens to a blog post once you click ‘publish’. You’ll find it here.