Session: Blogging for Business – 2:30PM-3:15PM
Panelists:
Moderator: Lisa Meyers Brown from the American Cancer Society. Besides being a blogger herself, Lisa has overseen the introduction of both internal and public blogs for the ACS.- Susan Getgood is a marketing consultant who is working with a client to not only introduce a corporate blog, but one that lets customers have authorship rights!
- Christine Halvorson is, of course, well known as the Stonyfield Farms blogger…but did you know that the blogs were their CEO’s idea, and that Marketing were the ones who had to be convinced?
- Mary Smaragdis is a marketing director in the Public Relations department at Sun MicroSystems. She has also been one of the initial bloggers in the company. Sun as a company has a prolific list of bloggers, including the COO (Jonathan Schwartz) and the CTO (Greg Papadopoulos). Another top Sun blogger is Tim Bray.
The panel was actually be self-moderated since Lisa Meyers Brown could not attend to the conference.
The other liveblogger was Nancy Tubbs.
Christine talks her (best in the world job): blogging for a company that has established a communication channel through 4 blogs. The idea came from the CEO (who worked on the Dean campaign) in February 2004, and hired her in March. The blogs launched on April 1st. Christine states that the most important issue for businesses deciding to blog is which audience they want to serve, and how they plan to do so. The most successful blog for Stonyfield Farms is the Bovine Buggle in which the blogger, Jonathan Gates, strikes a personal cord with his readers talking about his farm. The traffic on these blogs took off thanks to 1) the use of banner ads on affiliate sites, and 2) the work of the PR team (who had to be convinced by the CEO) that gave an enormous exposure (coverage by BusinessWeek, WSJ).
The ROI of the campaign is not measured neither in terms of revenue impact or customer satisfaction (which I found surprising), and Stonyfield’s management reportedly does not “care”. They expect that increased goodwill regarding the brand will lead to positive effects (and it seems to have worked on the PR side).
Mary talks about Sun’s blogging infrastructure that was put in place after a number of employee bloggers (who hosted their blogs somewhere else) asked for support from the company. This obviously created a lot of potential issues for Sun (being a public company), especially when it comes to financial disclosure. Their initial blogging policy was (and still is) “Don’t be stupid”, and “don’t put anything out there that can be construed as a forward looking statement”. Sun has decided that they would trust employees to do the right things, and the initiative has been supported by top management. And given the breadth of Sun’s product lines, this was perceived as a great way of serving their large and diverse customer base.
Susan, a consultant, talks about a company blog developed for one of her clients (Software Secure), written at least partially by (happy) customers. A blog was seen as the most appropriate infrastructure to engage with their customers.
What do you need to have a successful customer blog: 1) they need to love, be fans of your products, 2) they need to be online (a good clue is whether there are already fan blogs or buzz in message boards), 3) establish a secure way of engaging with your writers, and 4) let go a bit of control: you can not ask to review posts before they are published.
In this case, there are 5 writers on the blog today – this actually can create the issue of disjointed voice. An important resource is the blog project manager, who administrates the platform. Finding writers implied interviews with clients to identify potential candidates, train them thouroughly, develop FAQs, and get a minimum commitment from them (30 mins per day, with a mimum 6 months involvement ?). Every now and then, the company is sending emails to these writers suggesting some topics, giving them early access to news so that they can blog about these, and commenting on their behalf on other blogs in order to foster a dialogue with the rest of the community (the idea being that they don’t have the time to read other blogs and comment).
Developing a collaborative blog is hard work because of the required involvement of multiple bloggers, and the management of this micro-community.
Q: what sort of guidance does Sun provide to its bloggers.
A: the guidance is still “Don’t be stupid”. Nothing financial-related, or that has not been disclosed by Corporate PR. And write about what you know, i.e what is related to your expertise. In the Business Blogging BOF led by Charlene Li in the morning, Mary explained that Jonathan Schwartz does not seek approval from PR or Legal before publishing on his blog (just spell checking).
Q: How much time can a Sun employee blog ?
A: No limit, but the workload is still the same (i.e Sun does not allocate time for its bloggers to publish)
Q: How do Sun and Storyfield know who their readers are, and which constituency are you addressing ?
A: Christine offers to people the ability to suscribe to her blog(s) posts to receive them by email.
A: Mary’s audience used to be developers, and then realized that Sun execs were reading her as well. And so does a financial analyst covering SUNW, quite critically so.
Q: Blogging as a KM tool ? Do you get pitches from third party companies to write about their products ?
A: Being pitched means that the market has acknowledged you (and your blog) as a reference, and you have to decice whether you want to develop that profile.
Q: How to bootstrap product blogs ?
A: Figure out who is writing about your products, and see whether you can develop a relationship. Example mentioned are Treonauts, published by my friend Andrew Carton, and the Red Room Chronicles, a blog published by Rob Safuto, the producer of Podcast NYC.
Q: Would Mary congratulate competitors on her Sun blog ?
A: Yes. She also talks about the fact that some bloggers are anonymous (such as "ThinGuy" whose blog is reportedly famous for this post), and that Sun supports that.
Q: Why is Sun not “compensating” its bloggers by giving them time to blog, or recognize the benefits ?
A: Mary agrees and talked to her boss about it.
Post-session remarks: Susan was kind enough to detail her experience with the customer blog in two detailed posts on her own blog.
Tags: blogher, bloghercon