Web Ink Now

Top 5 corporate blogging mistakes and how to avoid them

Like many of you, I regularly follow a bunch of business-related blogs and check out dozens of others each week. Most of the new ones I check out have no value (for me) so I never return. I've been thinking about why I choose to pay attention to a blog vs. just cruise by after a quick check.

I've come up with my top 5 corporate blogging mistakes. These are the mistakes that I see again and again.

1. Start a blog without first following other similar blogs (and commenting on them)

Many people start a blog for the wrong reasons. They read an article in BusinessWeek or The Wall Street Journal about the power of blogs and want to write one of their own. Or a CEO will hear about someone like Jonathan Schwartz at Sun and want to do the same. These newbies create their own blog before they have read and commented on other similar blogs. That's like trying to write a thriller without having read hundreds of thrillers to see how they are put together.

I suggest a 3-step plan to start a blog. 1) Enthusiastic blogger wannabes should follow a bunch of blogs for a month or two. 2) Then begin commenting on blogs for another month or so to "exercise your blog voice" (using someone else's blog real estate). 3) Finally, and only if you have done steps 1 and 2, you will discover what you like to blog about and you should begin your own blog.

Interestingly, the majority of people who follow my suggested 3-step process quickly learn that blogging is not for them and never start a blog. Good information to know before you actually start a blog!

2. Write excessively about their company's products and services

Many marketers steeped in the tradition of product advertising naturally feel drawn to start a blog to prattle on and on about their damn products and services. But I have news for you. Nobody cares about your products and services (except you). When I visit a product-oriented blog, I immediately leave. And judging from the lack of comments on these blogs, most everyone else leaves too.

You must resist the urge to blog about what your company offers. Instead blog about a subject of interest to the people you are trying to reach. What problems do your buyer have that you can write about? How can you create content that informs and educates and entertains?

3. Focus on one-way propaganda and don't involve other blogs and bloggers

Many corporate blogs are nothing more than an alternative channel for the PR department or product marketers to spew their "messages" and "product vision." Yuk. The telltale signs of this sort of corporate blogging mistake are the lack of links to other blogs. Any links that are there tend to point to stuff on their own site and to articles about them in the media or analysts. It's like going to a cocktail party and only talking to your spouse.

Become part of the online community by linking to other blogs and leaving comments on other blogs. Let someone else start a conversation that you add to in your blog. You'll generate much more interest in what you're doing if you are inclusive.

4. Accept all the defaults in the blogging software package

You know how when you open a new PowerPoint presentation, the software prompts you with a white background and then encourages you to "Click to add title" and "Click to add subtitle"? How boring are the presentations where the presenter actually accepts all those defaults? Well that’s exactly what many bloggers do, establishing their blog look and feel with cookie-cutter blandness. Boring, boring, boring!

You need to pimp out your blog to show your personality. One of the best ways to do this is to hire a great graphic artist to create a killer blog masthead. Once you’ve got a custom masthead, you're totally unique in the world of the web.

5. Fail to realize the importance of the "About" page.

I've found that more than half of the blogs I look at for the first time have a crappy "about" page. That's the place on a blog where you tell the world who you are, what you blog about, your company and job (if appropriate) and contact information. Yet what the majority of bloggers have is something like "I'm Suzie. I'm a Sagittarius and I love to garden." This is just plain silly. (For some reason, I've found that blogs built in Google Blogger have the worst "About" pages.)

If you care enough to blog, you should care about letting people know who you are. At a minimum, you should have your full name, information about what you blog about, and some contact information. Beyond that, you might want a photo, some details on your job, employer, and career as well as other relevant details. When people get to know you, they are more likely to engage.

Learning from the 3M Post-It Note debacle: Social media ethics defined

One of the most amazing things about the Web is that when an idea takes off on the Web, it can propel a brand to fame and fortune. Marketers particularly love when this happens to a product without their influence. There's no better way to get your product out there than to have people talking about it via word-of-mouse. Think iPhone. Remember Mentos and Diet Coke Geysers?

I call it a World Wide Rave.

However, when companies don’t understand social media or those that hide behind legal eagles and public relations experts frequently get tripped up. Then people talk. A lot. And they say lots of unkind things about your brand.

I call that a World Wide Rant.

Consider the 3M Post-It note debacle. Dozens of blogs have covered this in the past few weeks and I had thought it was common knowledge so I had held off writing about it. However, when I mentioned it in a presentation yesterday, only a tiny percentage of people were aware, so here are the basics:

Scott Ableman and some colleagues strategically placed 14,000 3M Post-It Notes onto a co-worker's Jaguar. The photos they took became a phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of people looking at the photos he posted on Flickr. I have a few below, but you can see them all on Ableman's Flickr page.

Any marketer would be thrilled at this. 3M obviously was, because of what happened next, but instead of celebrating Ableman's cool idea and giving him credit, they messed up.

Ableman writes: "After all the completely free publicity we generated for the folks from 3M Post-Its, they contacted me asking if they could use these photos on their back-to-school store merchandising this summer. When I asked what their budget was, they wrote back and said they didn't want to pay to use the photos. Instead, they copied what we'd done, took their own photos, and used them to create a national marketing campaign. So if you saw this in a store, you saw a copy created by 3M."

According to Melanie Phung in her post 3M Carjacks the Post-It Note Jaguar, the amount of money we're talking is a measly thousand bucks or so.

Here is the 3M copycat campaign, again courtesy of Ableman's Flickr page.

Take a look at all the bloggers with negative posts about the 3M behavior. Yikes. I wouldn't want to be a marketer at 3M right now.

Contrast that to what Pete Healy, vice president of marketing for Perfetti Van Melle USA, makers of Mentos did. They immediately linked to the original, famous video with the Mentos and Diet Coke geysers from the official Mentos site. When I spoke with Healey, he told me that he contacted the guys who made the video and offered the company’s support. "When they appeared on Late Night with David Letterman and The Today Show, we were there," he says.

You need t be social media aware if you want to propel a World Wide Rave and to prevent a World Wide Rant. Here are some ideas.

David Meerman Scott's Social Media Guidelines:

1. Transparency
–Never pretend to be someone you are not

2. Privacy
–Unless given permission, don’t blog about something disclosed to you

3. Disclosure
–Disclose anything people might consider a conflict of interest

4. Truthfulness
–Don’t lie

5. Credit
–Give credit to bloggers (and other sources) whose material you have used in your blog

(Number 5 is the one 3M violated).

When your product itself has potential to go viral, create triggers to push it along

I'm fascinated with Web-based products like Hotmail, Gmail, YouTube, and YouSendIt - products that people share with their friends, colleagues and family members.

When you get an email from someone’s Gmail account or watch a YouTube video or someone sends a large file to you via YouSendIt, that's a trigger for you to potentially sign up and use the product too. These products sell themselves: no coercion required and "advertising campaigns" a waste of money. How cool is that?

Lauren Grunstein and Stephanie Gurtman (the Gigi Girls), both juniors at Boston University College of Communications, are co-founders of InternshipRatings.com, a place for students to reveal and critique the internship world so other potential interns can get the real deal at potential employers.

I've spoken with them several times over the past year as they've developed and launched InternshipRatings.com to learn how they developed the triggers so people share their product. (This photo was taken at the recent HubSpot Inbound Marketing Summit).

They met their freshman year in the College of Communications class and then kept in touch during the application process and internship experiences, which were vastly different than what they had expected. When they spoke during that summer, they realized that if there had been information about the companies where they were slated to intern, their experiences might have been different.

"So we decided to create a site," Grunstein says. "We are used to these kinds of user-driven ratings services because we used RateMyProfessors.com a lot." RateMyProfessors.com currently has 6 million opinions on a million professors who teach at over 6,000 schools. "We saw the opportunity and we created something that we would use ourselves, with a young feel to the site as well as the company name and tagline: Is it worth the coffee?"

To launch InternshipRatings.com, the Gigi Girls focused their efforts on social media sites, sending out personal messages to about 1,000 Facebook friends. They made the messages really short and personal and told people about the site and the InternshipRatings.com Facebook group.

"We used our network in a way where we were letting our friends into our lives. Facebook is how people of our generation communicate, so that’s how we launched," Grunstein says.

In a world where companies spend zillions of dollars on inane advertising, sometimes we forget that a product can be launched via word-of-mouse. How can you tap your network to launch your next product?

Here's a video interview of the Gigi Girls from Bob Collins.

Editorial note: How cool is it that Grunstein and Gurtman, as college undergraduates, created a company. Geez, when I was at Kenyon College, I was more interested in the finer points of partying as well as debating the relative merits of punk, ska, reggae, and new wave bands. Starting a company? Yeah, right… Congratulations to the GiGi Girls for creating success.

Certified organic... water!

I enjoyed a terrific "urban, contemporary, creative French" meal last night at Restaurant Garcon in Montreal.

As usual, I just can't help looking: product labels, menu font choices, meal descriptions, restaurant design, wait staff clothing. Always a marketer, right?

So the bottled water was tasty and obviously expensive so I check the label.

Yikes, they're saying the water is organic.

From the site: "llanllyr SOURCE is one of the world's premium quality bottled waters. It comes from our sources beneath certified organic fields in west Wales in the UK.”

OK, I get that sometimes you just have to jump on the latest thing. In food, organic is popular now.

But water?

Weasel words, gobbledygook, jargon, buzzwords, babble, blather, and baloney

I've written about the plague of gobbledygook in business writing for several years now. I first articulated this problem in my Gobbledygook Manifesto, which provided an analysis of gobbledygook in over 388,000 press releases sent in 2006. With the help of Dow Jones we used the Dow Jones Insight product to measure the over-use of phrases like Cutting Edge, Mission Critical, Best-of-Breed, and Next Generation.

People in many organizations are aware of the problem and now actively eliminate gobbledygook. Good for you! However, sadly, ever more industry jargon is being tossed around these days.

In just ten minutes yesterday, I noticed these opening paragraphs from press releases on the wires.

HARTFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 15, 2008 - Aetna (NYSE:AET) has been awarded the prestigious "Recognizing Innovation in Multicultural Health Care Award" by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) for its prospective randomized study to determine if a telephonic culturally competent disease management program can improve the health of African American members with hypertension. Members in the study who received culturally competent disease management outreach and educational materials achieved a higher percentage of clinically acceptable blood pressure levels, increased their frequency of self blood pressure monitoring, and greater medication compliance when compared to a control group of members who received a light support program.

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Campus Advantage, a world-class student housing management and development company, today announced its partnerships with the Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE) and HeadCount, a non-partisan organization dedicated to facilitating voter registration and participation through the power of music, to educate students and their advisors about available voting resources.

DALLAS and DUBLIN, Ireland, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Trintech
Group Plc (Nasdaq: TTPA), a leading global provider of integrated financial governance, transaction risk management, and compliance solutions, today attended the 2008 Sibos Conference in Vienna to promote its innovative LCM Payments solution developed using Microsoft technology.

Its not just press releases of course. Buzzwords, blather, babble and baloney are everywhere: on government forms, company Web sites, owner manuals, marketing materials and so much more.

Consider these examples, which I randomly gathered in just a few minutes:

University of Virginia Darden School of Business mission statement

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Veterinary Medicine Vision Statement

Verizon Commitment to Service

Gartner Says Users Are Becoming Increasingly Confused About the Issues and Solutions Surrounding Gre

The Blizzrd Group home page

I'll admit that I've fallen victim to using nonsense words myself, particularly in my former life when I was VP marketing at several public technology companies. In my case, the problem emerged because I was so focused on company insiders. Like me (at that time of my career), many people never get off their butt and get out into the marketplace to learn how people really talk so they end up using the language of their own R&D labs, CEOs, and the jargon used in conference rooms and internal meetings.

I've discovered two helpful books for those who want to eliminate the corporate-generated blather in their companies.

Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words, and Management-Speak are Strangling Public Language by Don Watson. This is a terrific overview on the problem. Watson served as the Australian prime minister's speechwriter for four years and his take on language is both hysterical and sad. He comes at the issue as someone who knows how to write, but focuses on many things he sees as an ordinary consumer of information in daily life. The book was a bestseller in Australia and is worth a read.

Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty. Grammar Girl is known for her popular weekly podcast that helps smart people tackle some of the most common communication mistakes. The book, like the podcast, is about making the process fun. I'm horrible when it comes to things like "who" vs. "whom." I never know if I'm supposed to write "ten" or write "10"? Hell, I have no clue. But Grammar Girl does. Her clear explanations help me to remember some of the rules. However, like plumbing, car repair, landscaping, and many other things in life, I just want to know enough to not make the big mistakes. I still call in the pros when it really matters. My editors and proofreaders are essential for making my books and magazine articles work.

These two books are very different, but get at the same issue. You can't communicate if people don't understand you.

If you're looking for a paradigm shift in your KPIs and need to benchmark your organization against best practice in generating marketing messaging statements these books are NOT for you.

However, if you want to communicate intelligently, these books are worth the investment.

Don't ruin your great YouTube video with too-slick Madison Avenue packaging

Readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of YouTube videos created to spread an idea or story. When people share your ideas and stories with their friends, family members, and colleagues, and there is a small rub-off on you, that's just terrific. There's no better way to market. (It sure beats advertising).

Consider the video called The BBQ Song, sponsored by Alka-Seltzer and performed by Rhett & Link (with backing from the Homestead Pickers). Kyle Matthew Oliver, who pointed me to this soon-to-be-classic calls it the "funniest and most delicious-looking music video I've seen in a long time."

What a hoot. Check it out now and then read the rest of this post…

Did you watch it? Cool, right?

What I like is that it has a homemade sort of feel even though it was probably professionally shot. And, although the Alka-Seltzer brand is in there three times, I think it is not too heavy handed. (We saw the Alka-Seltzer name on the sign in the very beginning, then "Speedy" makes a very brief appearance for a moment in the middle and finally less than ten seconds from the end we see Speedy again.)

Imagine how crappy the video would be if the Alka-Seltzer name was in the song itself like a jingle or if Speedy was seen throughout or some other forced branding method.

Anyway, as great The BBQ Song is as stand alone YouTube video, I think The Alka-Seltzer Great American Road Trip site that houses the "campaign" is just too slick and predictable and therefore probably a failure for Alka-Seltzer. Some well-paid Madison Avenue advertising agency likely built the site for Bayer Health Care (do we really care that Alka-Selzer is owned by Bayer by the way...). This Web site "campaign" digs deep into the standard playbook and thus falls flat.

In my opinion, one of the reasons that videos spread is the homemade quality. (There are other reasons YouTube videos spread and I share some here.)

People are advertised to thousands of times a day. We see countless commercial messages all the time. We crave authenticity. We want to get away from advertising to something interesting and real.

The BBQ Song video is terrific but the site is not.

What do you think?

Social media (finally) makes its way (slowly) into the closeted world of Investor Relations

I've written a great deal about how social media has gradually become an important aspect of public relations. For example, smart PR people at companies and agencies have created terrific online media rooms, delivered online video and podcasts, written blogs, and reached buyers directly with news releases.

The Investor Relations people have been much slower to adopt social media strategies, partly because most forms of social media had not been considered disclosure methods by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

One of the first experiments (that I know of at least) was Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) reporting results on July 30, 2007 for its fourth quarter and full fiscal year ending June 30, 2007, releasing the news first via the company IR website and RSS feeds and then ten minutes later through a news release sent to one of the press release distribution services. This was revolutionary at the time and shook up the world of IR disclosure.

A bit later that year, Robert L. Williams, Director of Investor Relations for Dell was among the first Investor Relations Officers to start a blog. Called DellShares, Williams offers information and insight for the investor community.

Now things are starting to change more rapidly. In January 2008, The SEC amended the federal proxy rules under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to facilitate the use of electronic shareholder forums. This regulatory change allows shareholder forums to emerge as a way for companies (and their boards) to efficiently reach shareholders and analysts.

Mike O'Brien at iMiners has been blogging about what some are calling IR 2.0, and his company is one of the first out of the gate with a product – called eShareholderForum - to make it easy for companies to plug in a ready made social media site into their company IR site.

While the IR world has been painfully slow to adapt to the world of social media, my guess is that a great deal of progress will come in the next year or so. As a result IR Officers will need to adapt. I fear that most are unprepared for how their job is likely to change with these new disclosure methods.

I'd suggest that IROs study the (equally slow) progress of the PR business. Although many PR departments are still living in the 1990s when it comes to electronic communications, on average the PR types are a few years ahead of the IR department.

Do you work for a public company? Are you an agency staffer? If so, your job is to educate the IR department about social media.

All kinds of people visit your online media room, not just journalists

Your buyers are snooping around your organization by visiting the media pages on your Web site. Your current customers, partners, investors, suppliers, and employees all visit those pages. Why is that? I'm convinced that when people want to know what’s current about an organization, they go to an online media room.

People expect that the main parts of a typical site will contain hype-driven, gobbledygook-laden, product-centric sales pitches. However, if they REALLY want to get the lowdown on your company, they'll visit your online media room.

So I want you to do something that many traditional PR people think is nuts. I want you to design your online media room for your buyers. By building a media room that targets buyers, you will not only enhance those pages as a powerful marketing tool, you will also make a better media site for journalists. I've reviewed hundreds of online media rooms, and the best ones are built with buyers in mind. This approach may sound a bit radical, but believe me, it works.

For an example, check out the outstanding Neighborhood America online media room. This media room from a small innovative company puts Fortune 500 company media rooms to shame. I particularly like the customer videos (you’ll find them in the middle column.

Consider this: If you were a potential customer of Neighborhood America, wouldn't this content compel you to take the next step in the sales process?

What about your company – is your online media room a compelling place for your buyers?