B2B blogging: business critical or corporate vanity?

5 December 2006

Here is Stephen Waddington's speech for Business to Business Magazine's blogging debate in full:

"In mid November there were 60 million blogs published on the internet according to Technorati [1]. Google has launched a tool to track them all. Contrary to what some might have you believe, they are not all from Bridget Jones wannabes. Increasingly these modern day bulletin boards are crossing over from popular culture and into the corporate world. If you have any doubts about how blogging can impact your business, then there are four things you need to know:

• First - profile: integrated with your web site, a blog has the potential to catapult it up search engine rankings
• Second - audiences: important new influencers are emerging for your products and services via targeted blogs
• Third - communication: blogs can foster a community and generate a dialogue with your customers, involving them in the development of products and services
• Fourth - brand: blogs can reinforce and act as a powerful extension of your brand for both internal and external communication

I’ll cover off each of these areas during the next 10 minutes or so as we explore why blogs are about creating value rather than vanity.

Alastair Campbell [2] said at a conference recently, “only saddos read blogs”. He’s wrong, but I think we can all relate to his sentiment. Like the first users of email and the web, it’s tech savvy individuals that are reading and contributing to blogs. But it is true that far too many blogs are outlets for moaning old gits who should really head to their local pub and share their view over a pint rather than via their computer.

But the profile is changing, and it’s changing fast. And to be fair to Mr Campbell he did later retract his statement.

Of course, there’s a lot of junk out there, published by old gits. I’d estimate as much as 90 per cent of blogs are driven by self publicists pushing a personal or corporate agenda that is of interest only to themselves, possibly their mothers, and perhaps a minority of readers. And of course this is how the vanity label has arisen. Vanity might even be an overly kind definition – it’s more like digital masturbation.

But there are also plenty of blogs that are driving effective marketing and business initiatives. To prove this let’s consider each of the four blog basics that I highlighted – profile, audiences, communication and brand – in turn.

So – PROFILE.

I’ve got a blog [3]. You can have a look at it when you get home tonight, or in the office tomorrow. Or on your web-enabled mobile if you really want to. It’s accessible anywhere, at anytime.

Stick my name into Google and it will be the first or second hit. I average three posts a week and try and comment on other people’s blogs in my sector whenever I’ve got an opinion that I think is worth sharing or can be used to benefit either our agency or a client.

My agency is a tech PR firm. Stick tech PR into Google. The agency – Rainier PR - is ranked in the top five on the dot com site and in the top three on the dot co dot UK site.

The relationship between blogs, cross postings and search engines is well documented. In fact we’ll probably see Google and other engines modify their algorithms before long. But while the goalposts may move, so can the offensive strategy.

Blogs can also help position an organisation as a thought leader and directly drive traffic to the site. A good example would be that of GreenCine [4], a small online DVD rental service that employed a full time blogger to write about independent films and industry news. It now receives about 80,000 visitors per month, and has doubled sales.

So blogs can help raise the profile of your site and drive traffic to it. If you are sufficiently amusing, outspoken, or share information that has a value to readers, you’ll become a quoted source.

While you could say that this appeals to my personal vanity, the fact that it is driving the profile of my business and is delivering briefs via our web site is a clear benefit to the business. And like an old git I used to mouth off all the time in the office. Now I do it online. So everyone’s happy really.

NEW AUDIENCES – this is my second blogging benefit. The web has enabled an individual’s sphere of influence to increase exponentially. A new audience of blogger influencers is emerging. Paul Gillin first identified this audience in his book the New Influencers [5]. These individuals have established blogs that target micro segments and would not have been economically viable for the traditional publishing model.

A study by Stanley Milgram [6], which supports the notion of ‘New Influencers’, found that not everyone is linked to everyone else in five or six steps along the lines of six degrees of separation. Instead his research concluded that there is a group of individuals, so called connecters, that are power networkers who collect contacts and act as critical intermediaries. Indeed, if you evaluate your circle of friends, you will find that there will be one or two so called connectors that have introduced you to new groups.

Bloggers with high profile sites have the power to advocate or annihilate a particular company's brand or products.

MobHappy [7] is a blog about mobile marketing published by Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino. It has more than 1,000 daily readers worldwide to the extent that these two individuals are now courted by companies and their PR agencies in the mobile space. Another great example of the influence of the blogosphere came from The Wall Street Journal, which recently cited Bag Trends [8], a blog published by Pamela Pakerman. Pamela’s endorsement and approval is sought by fashion houses who wanted her to attend their parties and launches at Fashion Week.

Marketing and PR professionals need to identify key bloggers in their sector using tools such as Technorati, and treat them as a target audience, in the same way as analysts and journalists. A great way of doing this is to invite them to offline events and engaging with them in blogging discussions.

Examples of stories in the mainstream media that started life on a blog aren’t hard to find. During the Iraq conflict a handful of blogs became trusted and quoted sources for journalists worldwide and this phenomenon of ‘citizen reporter’ is only set to increase.

Reaching out to this emerging audience is no more an act of vanity than any other aspect of public relations.

So what about blogs as a COMMUNICATION CHANNEL, the third benefit that I highlighted?

Pioneer [9] promised to investigate the issue and as a result it set up a blog as a forum for customers to ask questions and as a way of sharing information. The blog allows customers to engage in two-way conversation directly between Pioneer technical support and marketing.

The situation is still being resolved between Sky and Pioneer and as updates occur they are posted onto the blog immediately. This has allowed Pioneer to communicate with all its affected customers at once. There has been no need for recalls or costly customer phone lines. Pioneer’s transparency has turned what could have been a horrific customer relations disaster into a well-modelled exercise of customer relations.

Pioneer also asked affected customers using the blog to register their details for more information. The dialogue and trust that the blog promotes enabled the company to capture customer data that they might not have got otherwise. And of course this information can then be used to improve the effectiveness of future marketing campaigns.

However, this direct means of customer communication can fall foul if corporate pronouncements don’t match-up with corporate action. For a blog to be effective, trust is paramount and to build that trust companies must be transparent. Make no mistake, hollow marketing initiatives will backfire.

Wal-Mart [10] was blasted by its customers and the media in the summer after it created a so-called “flog”, a fake blog in which a couple travelled across the US, parking overnight at Wal-Mart stores.

The trip wasn’t a tale of two campervan travellers as readers were led to believe. Instead it was funded by Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group that highlights Wal-Mart’s positive contribution to its workers.

Fake blogs have been spotted quickly and derided. Organisations that try to promote positions that are different from their corporate behaviour will be criticised via cross postings and comments.

But this transparency works two ways. Blogging in the form of citizen journalism has the potential to have a far faster impact on holding corporations to public account than any of the post-Enron financial legislation.

Where a story breaks on a blog, legal mechanisms are powerless as a response mechanism because debates circulate the internet in hours. For every blog that is closed down there are always dozens of other bloggers willing to champion a cause.

Corporations have no other option but to be good corporate citizens if they want to avoid falling foul of bloggers. In some respects, it could be argued that perhaps blogging will foster a new era of corporate honesty, but that remains to be seen.

This isn’t an issue of vanity. It’s about pragmatic and transparent communication. Companies need to live up to their marketing promises, a trait that may have broad ramifications for marketing strategy in the future.

Finally – let’s consider BRAND, the fourth and final blog benefit that I’ve cited.

An Ipsos MORI poll [11] published last month by PR firm Hotwire found that blogs are a more trusted source of information than TV advertising or email marketing. The survey found a direct link between blogs or user generated content and people’s intentions to buy goods or services.

Blogs are becoming a facet of word of mouth marketing, with bloggers endorsing or condemning a product. Irrespective of your market or brand there will be conversations going on right now about your business.

About a third of Europeans questioned in the Ipsos MORI poll said that they had been put off making a purchase after reading negative comments on the internet from customers or other web users, while 52 per cent said that they had been persuaded to buy after a positive review.

Blogs break the traditional marketing model of centralised communication. Brand reputation is no longer in the hands of corporate marketing departments, instead its ownership lies with third parties. It’s a fact that organisations such as Dell, McDonalds, Ryanair, Sony and Wal-Mart to name a few, are only too well aware.

If you search online for Nike, now considered a leader in managing labour conditions in its factories, high up the natural results rankings is a Boycott Nike web site. Similarly, a search for Ikea leads to articles about the pain of visiting its retail outlets.

Search engines have now become a media in their own right and content such as blog postings and newspaper articles have a shelf life that lasts years beyond publication.

One of the most famous stories showcasing the power of blogging and an organisation’s inept response to it would be when Kryptonite [12], a security lock manufacturer, failed to respond to internet videos showing how the locks could be picked with a ball point pen in seconds. Kryptonite chose to ignore this and now years of building up a strong brand have been left in tatters.

Dell, embraced blogs with its Direct2Dell blog [13] after being criticised for its customer service. It’s a smart move. It gives bloggers a chance to address Dell direct and gives Dell direct customer insight, as powerful as any that a customer CRM system could deliver.

To be successful, corporate blogs [14] need to have a focus and purpose. They need to be more than just another channel through which to pump corporate material. You can immediately spot those that bear the approval of corporate legal departments. Perhaps this is why corporate blogs are finding greatest popularity with small and medium sized businesses where communications can be that bit more relaxed.

I like Branston Pickle. But sticking the marketing director’s face on a jar won’t motivate me to buy more. And likewise if he had a blog, I’m not sure I’d really want to read about his life promoting pickles.

And so we’ve gone full circle. Blogs offer the marketing community the potential to develop a profile, identify new audiences, establish communication and promote and manage a brand.

But ultimately, decent content and personality must lie at the heart of a corporate blog if it is going to work. And your product or service needs to be up to scratch. Only by embracing authenticity will corporate blogs avoid claims of corporate vanity and promote deeper relationships between a company and its customers. Even the old gits."

References

[1] http://www.technorati.com

[2] http://robskinner.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/10/alastair_campbe.html

[3] http://www.rainierpr.co.uk/blog

[4] http://www.greencine.com/main

[5] http://www.paulgillin.com/NewInfluencers

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram

[7] http://www.mobhappy.com/

[8] http://www.bagtrends.com/

[9] http://pioneerhdblog.com/

[10] When blogs put brands at risk, Financial Times, 8 November 2006

[11] Blogs become an advertising force, Reuters, 11 November 2006

[12] http://www.micropersuasion.com/2004/09/kryptonite_lock.html

[13] http://www.direct2dell.com/

[14] Open post to all marketers – why blogging matters, 23 October 2006. http://bernaisesource.blog.com