These days a number of media publications in India have mentioned in their stories that corporates are shying away from blogging because of negative comments, besides others. Let me try to give my point of view why the fear is unfounded.

Before that, let’s revisit a bit on why should a corporate blog? There have been numerous postings on this and I don’t want to repeat much. But primarily, it’s because that a blog can be an effective medium to engage with an organisation’s stakeholders, which in turn provide priceless insights on what their opinions are on that particular organisations and what their expectations are. A blog can also be a good medium to increase brand visibility and attract business leads.

Many global companies have benefitted from blogging. We can take the example of Microsoft and how Robert Scoble has helped give a human face to the software giant. According to one blog post whose url I have lost, ‘General Motor’s FastLane blog delivered an estimated USD 410,470 worth of customer insight and marketing at an approximate cost of USD 255,675. This is a return on investment of 67% according to Forrester Research’. Sun encourages its employees to blog and to use their blogs as a collaboration platform with outside developers. Dell has been using its blog for customer support. We also have Boeing whose blog written by its CEO is very popular.

In India, while some start up companies have adopted blogging, many of established companies that are consider to be the face of India Inc., excepting a few, haven’t. Those that have adopted blogging include companies like Infosys, TCS, Rediff, Milagrow, HCL, Cleartrip, Gridstone, Frito-Lay, and Naukri.

So now coming back to our point of discussion, let’s remember that for any corporation, receiving a negative feedback from customers or business partners is not a new phenomenon, nor is it restricted to the blogosphere. How many times have we written letters to the editors of newspapers giving our client’s point of view on a particular negative reportage. How many times have we engaged with customers who have lodged complaints at consumer forums and at courts for unsatisfactory services meted out to them? But do we stop engaging with the media or the customers for fear of getting negative feedback? We don’t.

Even if we get a negative comment, there is no need to panic and pack up the blogging tools. We need to ask ourselves what is the basis of that comment? If it has a valid reason and what it says is factually true, then there must be a valid answer to that also. If we have wronged, we should be willing to say sorry. Besides, negative comments are not always bad.

Now if a negative comment is a personal attack or without any substantial base, then it can be moderated. There can be a comment policy on the blog.

Let’s ask ourselves now where these personal unfounded negative comments will come from. Not likely from the responsible bloggers. Let’s admit that many bloggers do practice self-censorship. I am a blogger but it doesn’t mean I can write anything and everything that’s not true. My and my blog’s reputation is at stake. Therefore let’s remember that any responsible blogger wouldn’t come out and try to engage in a dirty fight without any valid reason.

Foul comments will most likely come from trolls who get a kick from lambasting any organisation or person. But even when there is troll attack, simply ignoring those particular comments would send out a message. Others reading it will also understand that.

However, if your product is bad, whether you are blogging or not, the negative commentary will come from other blogs. If you have a blog already and you are engaging in a dialogue with many people in the blogosphere, it becomes much easier to reply back and give your point of view.

What do you say? Shall we engage?

Picture credit: Challenge of corporate blogging at ConversationsMatter (I couldn’t help using this)

After doing battle with scaremongering for the last couple of posts, here’s me wimping out and spinning my own doomsday special for you. Unusually I have had more than enough sleep so this is not sleep deprivation either. The media is awash with the Union Budget news and I don’t seem to agree with anything that is being sold by various economists, interest groups, lobbyists and politicians. As is won’t, this promises to be an election budget with populist measures that will whittle away tax payers money (yes this usually represents a third of your income on the pay slip!) in rubbish schemes but nothing can make me unhappy today. I am surprisingly happy considering the fact that there is really no good news!

So to the topic of my post: Is Web 2.0 becoming Bubble 2.0 and Social Networking becoming Social Notworking (sic)? If you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ve probably seen the internet bubble of 2000 and its crazy outlandish pony tail visage. Funny part is, nothing was too freak or outlandish to pitch for a business plan if it included a website in it. The market was awash with venture capital dollars and run rate or burn rate were common place terms in those circles. Not much survived that era and the remnants of this internet bubble largesse did not last.

When Google bought a loss making YouTube for USD 1.65 Billion, followed by the crazy valuations at facebook.com and myspace.com, and a seemingly crazier bid of USD 47 Billion by Microsoft for Yahoo, I knew that Free is Back! Recently AOL decided to offer free e-mail, with many free goodies including XM Radio, Anti Virus, 5 Gig online storage, etc, etc. Incidentally the poor cousin Indian version of AOL does not offer these!

There is more bad news on the horizon as Google stock fell 38 per cent on a report by comscore that AD clicks on Google had been flat in the month of January as compared to last year. This was widely reported across the world and created tremors that were felt far away from its epicentre.

Facebook has recently retreated on its aggressive advertising venture known as the Beacon after howls of protest from its subscribers, numbers which incidentally for the first time started to plateau. Google similarly is showing signs of a slow down. All this coupled with the strong privacy issues that have plagued all large players in the social networking are really a cause for worry where the future of the web 2.0 is concerned.

The benefits that it has bought to the enterprise business in terms of collaboration tools like blogs, widgets, twitters and IM as a result of user generated content can not be ignored but at the same time the impact of social networking has been minimal besides online advertising. This is even more pronounced in India due our insulation from the west both in terms of cultural differences and internet infrastructure bottlenecks across 3G spectrum as well as simple broadband. What it can do is hopelessly mix up your personal and professional life and inadvertently give access to people about your personal information, which you’d much rather keep to yourself and your social ilk.

The other is the time spent wasting company resources while on the job doing what is popularly being referred to as social NOTworking! This is a real concern as, while many managements have draconian solutions but it is important for all CIOs and CTOs to consider how much of the technology and infrastructure that they provide is actual used by employees, and how much is in the nature of freeware which certainly brings a lot of productivity to the enterprise including web based e-mail, instant messaging services as well as social networking tools.

Back into the PR paddock in India, I would love to hear from PR Firms who actually have a social media list they actively use, and dedicated resources who are real practitioners, with real customers without getting my bullshit meter in the red.

If you are bleeding from the budget take hope and have a great weekend!

Online PR is a subset of public relations that uses traditional PR tools and techniques in a new medium – the Internet. Since the Internet has radically changed the way we communicate, source, and use news & information; to reach our public we have to know where they are reading, listening or viewing online.

Online PR is a practice that is fascinating and a personal favorite. Adopting an online PR strategy is a must today if you are handling a technology client. That said it is not restricted to technology companies. There are dozens of lists of companies outside the technology vertical that have successfully benefited from well-planned online PR campaigns. (see blogging case studies)

A few days back when an opportunity presented itself, I quickly bounced off some questions to Sally Falkow, President of Expansion Plus Inc., a renowned Internet marketing and PR company.

Sally is a PR veteran of more than 25 years of experience is a thought leader in Internet marketing strategy and an expert in social media. Her blog ‘Proactive’ was one of the first PR blogs. She is the Co-Founder and Developer of the social media and content syndication tool, PRESSfeed, which was developed specifically for PR use online. Having accorded ‘Expert Author’ status on WebProNews, she has also authored several widely-regarded books on web strategies and online PR. She is a Senior Fellow of the Society for New Communication Research (SNCR) and has just completed a research study on how bloggers source and use news, which will be presented at the SNCR symposium later this year.

Fast 5 Q&A’s with Sally:

Q1. What are some of the challenges that online PR practices are likely to face in the coming years?

The biggest challenge is understanding the social media mores and the tools - and how to be a participant in the conversation, not how to control or spin a message to an audience. Social media participant refer to themselves as ‘the people formerly known as the audience’.

Q2. How should PR professionals/ PR agencies gear up to face these challenges?

Read up, familiarise yourself with the social media, and learn to participate. There are a few good sources of data on social media. Some of these are Social Media Club, Brian Solis (he is one of the founders of social media club, The Leading Edge), and the Bulldog Reporter blog I write.

Q3. Suppose today, a prominent blog has written something negative about your client, what is the best way to go about addressing this?

First and foremost – be sure you have online reputation monitoring in place so that you catch any comments like this right away. Getting to it early is vital.

Contact the blogger offline if possible and see if you can give them your side of the story. Be aware that whatever you say or email them will be ‘on the record’ and will probably be used in the blog. So think it through carefully before you respond.

If it is a genuine situation – the comment is verified and correct – you have to address how you will handle the issue. If it is not true you have to get your side of the story out as fast as possible in as many credible online news sources as you can. Be open and willing to talk to the blogger/s.

Q4. Some tips on developing a online crisis communications plan?

Have a fully functional online news room. Use RSS feeds. As with any crisis plan think it all through and plan for the worst possible scenario. Have you friends/allies/safe points in place before you need them. Identify the influencers in your space. Make contact and get to know then long before you need them in a crisis. Find the evangelists who love your products. Support them and help them to get their message out. Provide online tools for them to create positive content about you.

Q5. How do you measure the effectiveness of an online PR campaign?

As with any campaign you measure against your objectives:

- Search visibility

- Thought leadership

- Traffic to the site/newsroom

- Referred traffic from your RSS feeds

- Articles picked up on other sites

- Is your news being featured in online News engines like Yahoo News

- Is it showing up in Google in their Universal search results

- Online news coverage in other sites

- Social media coverage – digg, del.icio.us, etc.

- Blog coverage – positive

- Reaches from journalists – print and online

Download to read a case study on a successful online PR campaign.

Sally Falkow will facilitate a Workshop on ‘Strategic Online PR’, which will be held in Singapore from 20 - 21 September, 2007, and organised by Universal Network Intelligence. Those interested to have more information can email with subject code ‘SOPR-I’.

Often we are at a need of corporate blogging case studies for research purposes or sharing with our clients.

So this is a compilation of such corporate blogging success stories available online - there would be more:

1. Microsoft’s Scobleizer blog– Since he set up his blog in 2000 he has been seen as the ultimate geek blogger, an accolade which has apparently helped give a more human face to the software giant. The blog, called Scobleizer, contained all sorts of informal and even highly personal information, such as family details and bereavements, information that his salary was ‘less than $100,000′, as well as what came to be closely-followed observations on Microsoft’s products. Sometimes these were less than flattering, but Scoble’s writings started attracting such high volumes of traffic that any attempts by the software company to shut him down were quickly abandoned. (Scoble has now quit Microsoft after many years to join a startup business in the area of video blogging.)

2. Microsoft’s Operation Channel 9 - Lenn Pryor knew his little project was going to upset some of his colleagues at Microsoft. And sure enough, when the junior exec unveiled a Web site called Channel 9 in April 2004, the organization reacted like a dog whose tail had been stepped on.Executives in PR, marketing, and legal reacted with alarm.Today, Channel 9 is one of the few things at Microsoft that company image mavens love to talk about. Google is kicking Microsoft’s butt in search; Vista, its new operating system, is getting tepid reviews. Zune, its iPod killer, can’t kill a flea. And Nintendo’s Wii, not the Xbox 360, is the hottest game console in town. Channel 9, on the other hand, makes Microsoft look downright visionary.The goal is clear: Reestablish Microsoft as a cool, progressive enterprise that appeals to customers, investors, and top job prospects.

3. IBM DeveloperWorks – According the IBM blogger Bill Higgins, IBM DeveloperWorks just does not a have lot of feedback from its blogs as companies such as Microsoft, and Macromedia have in terms customer responses. IBM developerWorks bloggers are not seeking feedback on product development and customer service issues.Bill Higgins’ goals as a blogger are to build a community and achieve thought leadership in his space. He believes he is getting good results in this area.

4. General Motors’ Fastlane blog - In 2006, the company’s FastLane blog delivered an estimated US$410,470 worth of customer insight and marketing at an approximate cost of USD 255,675 - a return on investment of 67 percent - according to a newly released report from Forrester Research. Compare that to 2005, when GM’s blog generated an estimated US$578,374 worth of information and publicity at an approximate cost of US$291,196. That’s a 99 percent return on investment.

5. Southwest Airlines corporate blog - The Southwest Airlines blog was conceived a year ago and presented to the Airline’s executives as “just another communications tool” and one that could be handled by the existing staff at no additional operational cost. According to Paula there was little resistance, and three months after the idea was pitched the blog was live.The blog’s audience was slow to build, but nine months after launch the site has more than 200 posts and 4,000 public comments and is viewed within Southwest as a success.

6. Macromedia’s blogs - Macromedia’s blogs were started three years ago to build a better community and send information to customers more quickly than existing channels. Over time, Macromedia discovered that blogs could be used for the development of their products. This shift in product development thinking was gradual, and eventually a big change in thinking about the Macromedia product development happened. Blogging has completely changed the way in which Macromedia conducts its software development process. Before blogs, Macromedia would not release any product information until two to three weeks before the release day. (This was how most of the software industry worked.) Software development was a relatively closed process for Macromedia: some feedback was gathered from customers, but a lot of the work was completed inside the company.Now Macromedia is using blogs to query customers on product feedback.

7. Sun Microsystems - Sun is said to promote employee blogging more than any other technology firm and is the largest company with a CEO who blogs. Sun’s slightly unconventional CEO Jonathan Schwartz, one of only a couple Fortune 500 CEOs with blogs, was an early advocate of executive blogging. Hundreds of thousands of visitors read Schwartz’ blog each month and on a recent day it had received over 6,000 hits.

Sun’s blog was created to improve both communications with the public and collaboration with outside developers and programmers who author third-party applications for Sun’s systems.Today over 3,000 of Sun’s 32,000 employees have corporate blogs, many receiving thousands of hits per day.

Some more great corporate blogging case studies and lists:

1.Northeaetern university and Backbone media - Blogging Success Study: Interviews of 20 corporate bloggers. The objective of this research was to determine the reasons, conditions and factors that make a blog successful, and to create a list of criteria to help companies assess whether and how they should engage in blogging.

2. Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki: Directory of Fortune 500 companies that have business blogs, defined as: active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products.

3. The New PR Wiki - Corporate blogs list

Indian corporates are increasingly getting into blogging as it seems so with the increasing number of requests coming to PR agencies for counsel in this endeavour. Rajesh at Blogworks also gave reference to an ET story on how motorcycle manufacturers are studying blogs to gain customer insights. While this may be a progress we are seeing, venturing into the blogosphere might not be so smooth-sailing for all the corporates everytime. Kami Huyse jotted down 10 risks that corporates are likely to run into when they decide to enter the blogosphere.

These include:

1. Negative Comments
2. Loss of Control Over the Message
3. Neglect
4. Misunderstanding the Culture of the Blogosphere
5. Unprepared or Loose - Cannon Employees
6. Fueling a firememe of Criticism
7. Legal Liabilities
8. Losing the Farm
9. Negative Impact on Stock Price
10. Tort Lawsuits

In India, maybe finding the right audience for your corporate blog might be another challenge. It might be easy if your company sells products for the youth like bikes, gizmoz or skin care items, since there are a lot of the potential customers surfing the net and participating in online communities. Getting industry professionals to read and engage them in a dialogue might not be so easy.

Well, these pointers are not meant to start a debate that whether corporates should blog or not, but should serve as guidelines in understanding the blogosphere better. As Rajesh said, the blogosphere is quite fair and transparent and real users, if happy with your brand, will counter any biased/ malicious campaign with true feedback.

Should your organisation blog? Can you benefit from engaging with the emerging social media? Should your engagement be proactive or reactive? Or should your blogging plans be put on hold as yet?

Interest for corporate blogging catching up
The interest for corporate blogging in India seems to be catching up. Many PR clients are increasingly asking for blog exposures, in addition to exposures in the mainstream media. Then there are large MNCs looking at India closely in terms of engaging the social media structure here.

Considering that many of the global Fortune 500 companies and many other smaller companies across the globe are already on the blogging circuit and are benefiting from it, it is high time the India corporates learn how to leverage the social media.

Issues
One of the pertinent issues today seem to be that many of the brands & corporates in India are still not clear on how to engage the blogging environment. Even if companies decide to set up a blog or have a policy to engage with bloggers, they might not know what to do some months down the line. They think of the blogosphere and the whole social media environment as unmanageable and therefore prefer to keep away. Then there are company regulations and employees are not clear whether they can blog openly or not. Sharing of industry and business knowledge openly by an employee can be a concern for an employer.

Then another problem could be that there was no professional consultant who corporates could consult before they venture into blogging. Corporate marketing teams need to figure out clearly what will be the ROI, and what they are getting into. Blogging should come to them as a strategic decision and not because some employees feel like blogging. What should they blog about? What can they share? Who will be the author? Who might be the potential readers, or who they want to be the readers?

Getting professional consultancy on blogging in India
New social media management firms like BlogWorks are now engaged in helping corporates make social-media decisions by first analysing their marketing requirements, and by mapping what engaging with the new media environment can do for their companies. Once a blog is set up, a measurement matrix can be followed to help track how the initiative is going in tune with their marketing. The firm has been holding workshops for small and large groups across India for corporates and PR agencies interested in learning more about blogging and benefiting from the social media environment.

How much does corporate blogging pays?
To quote an example, in 2006, General Motors FastLane blog delivered an estimated US$410,470 worth of customer insight and marketing at an approximate cost of US$255,675 - a return on investment of 67 percent - according to a newly released report from Forrester Research. Compare that to 2005, when GM’s blog generated an estimated US$578,374 worth of information and publicity at an approximate cost of US$291,196. That’s a 99 percent return on investment.

Useful links on corporate blogging
1. Corporate blog- wikipedia
2. Sample corporate blogging policies
3. The Corporate Blogging book
4. Welcome to Blogosphere: An Executive Blogger’s Guide

Corporate blogging and PR 2.0 is a much discussed topic elsewhere. However in India, will we get to see PR professionals offering consultancy on such topics to their clients this year - in reality, rather than only a mention on the credentials? The Economic Times says in 2007 ‘public relations will enjoy another great year thanks to the growing number of media channels, a continuing emphasis on reputation, and a more pressing need to manage brands and crisis across blogs and other online media.’ To make things more curious, there was a recent announcement about The Flea and immediate future tying up for online PR and Web2.0 services in UK and India.

Indian corporates are increasingly blogging

According to an article in Rediff.com, it is estimated globally that 40 Fortune 500 companies publish corporate blogs, allowing CEOs, employees to bypass the public relations department, journalists and industry analysts and speak directly to the public. Amazon, Cisco and Oracle were early adopters with AMD, Dell, Kodak, GE, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Yahoo and Xerox following suit.

In India, we all know about Hindustan Lever and its Sunsilk Gang of Girls. Apart from it, we have Infosys, Tata, and Rajesh Jain, among others. Indian subsidiaries of JWT, Frito-Lay, Motorola and a few others are planning blogs that talk about career options and employee experiences in the organisations (according to a September 2006 article of The Economic Times).

Other sectors in India where blogging seemed to have found good audience are travel and tourism, and the stock markets. I read a news article in The Economic times recently about how travelers are sharing tips and reading experiences of other travelers before traveling to a particular region. Similarly, there are many blogs out there giving stock market and other investment tips, with good number of readers. Blogging is a ready opportunity available to companies in these sectors.

Why are companies adopting these new tools?

Today the media is not only about a dozen media houses generating news contents and reviews. Information, news, reviews, and discussions are being generated and shared online increasingly by consumers (in what is emerging as a new form of media called social media). So if we are talking about thousands of consumers here, what they are sharing matters a lot to companies selling products or providing services to them. So companies need to a) keep a tab on what the consumers are saying about their products and services so that they can take further action based on this feedback, and b) share their thoughts and messages to the consumers and be in touch with them directly as one of them.

Why do they need to be in touch with consumers directly this way? Rohit Bhargava in his post ‘Top 7 marketing trends for 2007′ reasons that for years, large organisations have focused much of their marketing and communications on becoming ‘faceless’ - yet the danger of facelessness is now becoming better understood. In short, companies cannot connect with customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality. As more organisations realise this fact, we will continue to see more ‘corporate bloggers‘ and more touch points for customers to interact with the true personality of a brand. Look for social media to play a bigger part in overall marketing strategy as a result.

Is the Indian PR industry ready?

How many agencies in India are geared up to answer questions on PR 2.0, Web 2.0 and provide consultancy to clients if they ever come up with such a question? Recently, I sent a few questions to the Asia-Pacific Corp.Comm lady of a top IT company on a blogging survey they did in Asia. She forwarded the questions to their Indian PR agency, marking me a copy of her mail. I didn’t hear from the agency after that, nor did I follow up. No offense, but I couldn’t have expected much either.

However impractical it sounds, I think it’s time now for Indian PR professionals to gear up fast in providing PR 2.0 services. We are servicing numerous MNCs who are used to getting this service in other parts of the world and soon they are going to demand our knowledge in the Indian blogosphere and ask similar services too. It’s true that unlike the west, blogs here do not enjoy more readers than the morning papers; and they are perceived by many people, falsely or otherwise, as personal rantings of some youths. Our clients will tomorrow still prefer a newspaper or a TV coverage than on a blog. Coverage in the traditional media will continue to be the reason why companies will continue to hire PR agencies for many years in India.

That said, if we are looking to differentiate ourselves, provide a value-added service to our clients, or seeking to master every new communication and news medium as PR professionals; it’s high time we gear up. If we can’t, then one possible trend I can expect is to hire professional bloggers as consultants and take them during client meetings. This is not entirely impossible as well.

Role of PR

Alright, enough talk, What do we do exactly? To me, it is making our clients understand about PR2.0 and the importance of blogging. Then help them establish their blogs. And when the blogs are up and running, what then? I posted the question to Richard Edelman in a recent FT.com online blog Q&A. He replied - We should be looking at blog research tools such as Technorati which follow the blogosphere. We should suggest new topics for posts. We can also recommend new bloggers such as director of R&D or others as credible speakers for the company. So, well?

Tread carefully

The social media is different from the traditional media. There are few editorial policies, moderators, and self censoring. It can be ruthless at times. Therefore, our approach to dealing with it has to be different. A blogger can well write about how many times you called and irritated him in a day.

We need to understand how the social media work by being inside it. We cannot be outside viewers and seek to use it to our advantage. Kami Huyse talks about five social media trends that will impact PR in 2007. These trends include the rise of user-generated videos like Youtube, virtual reality like SecondLife (SL), misuse and abuse of social media channels, increasing rejection of PR folks by several social media communities, and the rise of a real discussion about the future of the press release e.g. social media press release, etc.

I found the fourth trend most interesting and dangerous. Kami referred about how a section of the residents in Second Life voted to ban PR folks in Dreamland, which represents 10 percent of the landmass in Second Life. The residents were apparently incensed by the recent spate of ‘false first claims’ by PR people of things many SL residents have done long before them like ‘1st radio station in SL‘, ‘1st fashion brand’, ‘1st tabloid’. She predicted more bad PR for public relations in 2007. I tend to agree with her. Talking to the social media, we cannot continue with our ‘biggest’ and ‘for the first time’ adjectives that we so profoundly and freely use in our press releases. By the way, it seldom work with the traditional media also. There used to be always some journalist who would point out that ‘it was not’.

Then the biggest debate is whether PR professionals should interfere at all in corporate blogging. Well, let’s keep ourselves open.