Know your RSS from your elbow

If there is one concept that best defines the benefits of web 2.0 technology, it would be collaboration. So, whether the terms ‘PR 2.0′, ’social media’, or ’social marketing’ rock your boat or, alternatively, have you heaving over the side, it all comes down to whether you believe your internet presence should involve engaging with others for some sort of mutual benefit.

For companies, in particular, this boils down to the question of whether or not they want to collaborate with customers and partners. If a company believes its customers should form no part of a collaborative effort, then however well-dressed any implemented web 2.0 tools may be, they will add nothing but cost and problems. We can call these ’selfish companies’ and they will eventually suffer for their selfishness in the great corporate playground: nobody will want to talk to them; then nobody will bother to talk about them; and finally they’ll turn up at school reunions and nobody will even remember them.

If, on the other hand, a company recognises the true potential of breaking down the ubiquitous barriers between producer and customer - barriers so often created by traditional PR, marketing, and advertising - then the tools available thanks to web 2.0 provide a flexible range of opportunities for creating a host of mutually beneficial relationships. The playground for them will be a much more interesting place: they may even skip to the head of the queue for the tuck shop.

Mike Southon, co-author of “The Beermat Entrepreneur”, has a weekly column in the FT. It forms part of the ‘Entrepreneur’ section, which, in turn, sits at the the back of the Saturday ‘Your Money’ section. This obviously involves some newsprint origami before you reach it but it’s usually worth the effort.

I miss it occasionally and yesterday browsed the column titles on the FT web site to catch up with anything that appeared interesting. The title that immediately got my attention was ‘Reputations precede you‘. Southon rarely discusses the internet per se but here was a subject - the combination of entrepreneurs and reputation - that seemed a perfect fit for an examination of how on-line tools can enhance or damage a brand or its owners.

Here is what Southon said about reputation and the internet:

“Your reputation is defined by your case studies, which should be refreshed on your website and in your literature as often as possible.”

That’s it. Seriously. Over 700 words on reputation and entrepreneurs and not a single mention of a ‘blog’ or a ‘forum’ or a ‘podcast’. Not even a hint that a quick check of Google or Technorati (for instance) could show you what your global reputation might be.

Southon’s starting point for his column is a report issues by Coutts, bankers to the wealthy. It appears they have at least 18,000 entrepreneurs as their customers. It would also appear that those 18,000 care little for what an internet-based network of their partners, colleagues, and customers might be saying about them and their services or products. The thrust of the report is towards being in control of your PR by knowing everything about your company and then controlling the messages you deliver to ‘the media’. By ‘the media’, of course, is meant traditional press outlets. This is inevitable, since the report has been written by a PR professional at a top rank PR company with a web site that you can search for a long time without finding any evidence that the internet could form part of any integrated communications strategy.

But that’s by the way. Stuck like this in the world of reacting to the impact of traditional media means allowing your reputation management to turn like an oil tanker when what you need is the handling of a speed boat. The report’s author ends with a Japanese proverb:

“The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of an hour”.

This was from a period before your company’s share price could be irrevocably damaged in the time it takes to watch the cherry blossom fall. The proverb needs updating:

“The reputation of your brand may be determined by the speed and manner of your reaction to a blog post read by a thousand customers.”

We’ve decided to eat our own dog food, and that’s pretty pointless if we don’t share how sweet it tastes, so here’s a quick overview of how bpodr has been getting it’s fill in the last month…

Popular Posts. Our Google analytics shows us that our two most popular posts of the month were those introducing and discussing Socialprise. We posted these in response to a press release we read, and within 24 hours found ourselves on the front page of Google when searching for Socialprise, which then drove traffic for these posts, and our web site in general. (Notably, our blog attracted over 82% of all our traffic in March)

Extending our Reach. We’ve been busy adding new features to our blog to make it easier for our readers to er, read, and to further our blog tools to broaden our readership. These features include:

• Technorati Tags. We now let Technorati know more about our content, and allow our readers to find similar content of interest.
• Subscribe by Email. We added the ability for our readers to get email alerts when we post new content. Thank you Feedburner.
• More useful RSS feeds. Feedburner has also helped us add more features to our RSS feeds, which allow readers to easily email our posts, digg posts, or add posts to their social bookmarks.
• Wordpress Stats. We have also installed a wordpress stats plugin, which has started gathering accurate information about our post views, we will soon know which are our most popular posts by number of times they have been viewed.
• Graham’s Twitter Feed. You can now catch Graham’s ‘tweets’ (what’s this?) from right here on the blog.

So a lot of house-keeping on our blog, but all should lead to a better experience for our visitors, and wider exposure on the Net for us.

Twitter, Twitter. Grahams Twitter activity has led to him being quoted by a well known Social Media thought-leader from the States. Although of no direct benefit, each referral helps us in building credibility for bpodr as a valuable resource for businesses here in the UK. (Follow Graham on Twitter here)

LinkedIn. Graham’s LinkedIn profile lead to an old work colleague who was interested in how our services could help them re-invigorate his business, which led to a business meeting, which led to drinks, which may lead to…

We may share future success - both ours, and our customers’ - in this series of ’should-be-about-once-a-month-but-may-not-be’ posts. If you want to stay tuned, easily, then just subscribe to our RSS feed on the right-hand side (that little orange icon… up a bit… that’s it!) and have future posts delivered to you.

You don’t have to eat any dog food, but you may develop a taste for engaging with your customers - and the Web - in new and exciting ways.

Adam posted a few days ago about the new Starbucks initiative. An excellent post from Todd Defren highlighted some of the ways in which Starbucks will be gaining even greater customer loyalty from something that I bet some execs inside the company felt was a risky operation. To be fair, given its history and background, Starbucks is perhaps more open to this sort of project than many companies. But there would still have been the ‘wise heads’ warning of doom and destruction as people weighed in with complaints and gripes, moans and abuse.

The plan, of course, is not to encourage new customers directly but, as Todd implies, to increase existing customer loyalty. However, a serious by-product of eliciting comments from your best customers will be a raft of suggestions that will make the ‘product’ more appealing to a wider range of people. So, new customers will arrive and become loyal customers. Try mapping that process out in a spreadsheet for ROI.

I’m not sure why but Starbucks here in the UK is a second best to coffee shops like Costa and Caffe Nero. Most of the Starbucks I visit are soulless, the tables full of used cups and plates, the food unappealing, and, worst of all, the coffee generally tastes weak and has little flavour. I’ll gladly walk another half mile to reach a Costa or Caffe Nero. Both Starbucks and Caffe Nero have recently opened in my high street. The Starbucks had a head start of about three months and was packed every day. Since Caffe Nero opened, Starbucks staff walk the street with free samples to try to get customers to return. Tells you something.

However, it’s not all good news for Caffe Nero. Although I was pleased to see them opening locally, simply from the point of view of coffee quality, I was also keen to use their wi-fi service, which I’ve always been able to use ‘free’ as part of my Skype Zones subscription. Disaster struck, however, when I discovered that they have gone over to the BT enemy. No more cheap and cheerful wi-fi. Why they can’t provide free wi-fi, I don’t know. Buy a Fon, for goodness’ sake.

At the moment, there is no way to let Caffe Nero know how I feel. As a loyal customer, this doesn’t exactly make me feel great. Perhaps if I complain to a barista, I’ll get an extra stamp on my wee loyalty card. Mmm, that should do it.

Starbucks may be losing the coffee taste battle but should they install free wi-fi on the back of their social initiative, I may just have to switch to hot chocolate while working.

Social media can seem extremely anti-social at times. For those looking in from the outside who have yet to fully comprehend the benefits or who simply choose not to ‘get it’, messiahs of connectivity and conversation can often appear lost with their heads buried up to their shoulders in their lower intestines. That’s not a position that inspires confidence.

The tsunami of blog posts and a Karakatoa of social networking tools - accompanied by commentary and e-books aplenty - can leave even those most tempted by the apparent common-sense approach of engaging your customers feeling alienated and most definitely running well behind the curve. When the word ‘conversation’ starts coming up repeatedly in what, at first sight, appear to be monologues, accompanying social media terminolgy starts to lose its credibility.

These feelings can be exacerbated here in the UK. It’s partly a cultural thing, which still rewards reticence over ebullience even at the CEO level, and partly a market thing: viewed parochially, the market size for any UK-focused business is vastly smaller than the equivalent US market. Add to this an inbuilt distrust of anything that smacks of ‘relationships’ and ‘getting to know the customer’, and pitching social media to an established enterprise here in the UK can seem a Sisyphean task.

So what to do?

Clarify the message, for a start. That’s hard, though. Why? Because the social media solution for every business is as unique as the combination of that business and its audience. Sure, the overarching sentiment and the ultimate aim may be common but nobody makes a sale by talking generics.

Then we need to show social media in action. Case studies are good. But better still is being able to say, ‘this is what we did for ourselves and look what happened!’

We’ve been lucky since we started bpodr at the end of last year. We’re involved with a number of start-ups who already knew they wanted what we were selling. On top of that, we have a couple of clients who already knew that without change they would stall. Stall and disappear. So, in a way, we haven’t had to sell too hard. We just turned up and made the most of contacts. Nice work if you can get it, of course but it leads to complacency.

We think we need to start eating our own dog food. In bigger amounts. To a certain extent we have, of course because we embrace many of the ‘typical’ social media tools. But it’s time to talk directly about results and how they could relate to situations within your business. That’s what this new series of posts will be about. Whenever you see a [Dog Food] prefix, you’ll know what’s coming: a story about a success - or failure - in our own use of the tools out there. With a bit of luck, the successes will outnumber the failures or it could be a short series!

Meanwhile, if there are social media tools you’re struggling to come to terms with or which you cannot see offering any advantage to your business whatsoever, leave a comment or send us an email at ask AT bpodr DOT co DOT uk.

On the back of Adam’s post about Socialprise, I read the white paper from InsideView. Like Adam, I was attracted to the term Socialprise. Unfortunately, after reading the white paper, I’m a little less enthusiastic. Here’s why.

I believe that social media and social networking are about engagement. More than anything, they provide the opportunity for conversation. In many cases, the true value lies in the fact that these conversations can now happen between people who would never have been able to converse before. Boundaries have disappeared: geographical; earnings levels; skills levels; subject matter. To name just four.

Engagement in social media is always two-way. You give; you recieve. Receiving may be take a number of forms, from learning through to making a sale. To approach it solely from an ‘I want’ point of view, however, not only leads eventually to talking to yourself in a closed room but is also a wasted opportunity. For you. For your company.

So where does InsideView’s Socialprise application SalesView fit in? Well, for a start, it’s an application, which doesn’t bode well for engagement. It sits on top of a company’s CRM system, too, which immediately rings alarm bells. Why? Because CRM is an interruptive database. (Many individual sales people will tell you that CRM is not a sales tool; that CRM is something imposed on the sales process by company financial departments. Colin Wilson at FirstBorder writes often and well about how CRM is actually part of what he calls the ‘Sales Prevention Zone’ in many companies. Disclaimer: I used to work with Colin.)

So, you have an application doing something with social media interacting with a CRM system. That smells like a Meatball Sundae to me.

I think the fundamental problem is that InsideView have started at the corporate level and don’t see sale people as indivdiuals. They use an individual sales guy in their white paper but he’s presented really as a face for CRM. He’s also called Bob, which will bring back memories of a misguided application created by Microsoft some years ago. If Bob was a real salesman trying to make his number - treating every sales period as a new start-up - he would understand that the value of the social aspect of ’socialprise’ was paramount: the social prize.

I get the feeling that SalesView is a territory management tool that gives the sales person one more reason not to engage in the conversation. It’s like a get-rich-quick scheme for sales professionals: “You know social media is out there but you don’t have the time or the wherewithal to get involved. Plug in our magical bots and alerts and you’ll be making bigger sales more often. Buy one today.” Snake oil.

If the interactions of social media were static and consisted merely of people posting their needs and wants, a Socialprise application could work. But then social media would not be social media but simply a collection of web-based wish lists that sales people could plunder for opportunities. Either InsideView is missing something or I am.

For a rather more positive outlook on Socialprise applications and SalesView, I think it’s only fair that I point you to Sarah Perez’s post at ReadWriteWeb.

We love a good portmanteau, especially when it’s relevant to the web, and even more so when it’s relevant to the web and to businesses working with the web - so you can imagine our satisfaction when we had a whole new word to play with after Inside View announced it’s latest on-line venture - Sales View™.

“Enterprises are inherently social because they are comprised of relationships between employees, and among sales people, customers and partners,” said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer of InsideView. “As social applications are reaching critical mass both in users and content, it is not a matter of if but when they will mature into becoming a core part of every enterprise application. InsideView recognizes this inevitability by introducing SalesView, the first Socialprise application designed to capture the burgeoning social data inherent within the enterprise.”

Sales View™ will allow CRM (customer relationship management) users to utilize the power of the web to deliver more information about potential customers and sales-leads, scouring blogs, social media applications and the like for the latest customer data.

I can see many businesses donning their trunks to ride this wave over the coming months - unlocking the wealth of information held by the individuals who feed social networking, blog and publish themselves on-line. The power of collaboration for whoever wants to harness it.

‘Socialprise’ represents more than just a catchy, nice-ring-to-it, word-2.0-type phrase - It represents the fact that the web 2.0 and social media applications (like facebook, linkedin, jigsaw) are being leveraged to help businesses of all sizes improve their efficiency, better understand their customer and ultimately, drive profits.

No matter what you call it, businesses embracing the social web is an exciting prospect.

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. 

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.

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.