Buzz Marketing for Technology: February 2007

Safeguarding Corporate IP from the Blogosphere

Blogs are gaining popularity because their speed, ease of use and low cost make them a superior alternative to e-mail for all kinds of communications.

IBM Corp. reportedly has more than 3,000 internal blogs. McDonald's Corp. is making blogging capability available to thousands of employees to file restaurant reports. Procter & Gamble Co. has about 100 internal blogs and is expanding their use to private communications with business partners.

I agree blogs can be great collaboration tools, but they open a can of worms when it comes to intellectual-property and patent rights.

Blogs can release Intellectual Property to unintended parties when an overenthusiastic employee inadvertently discloses a company trade secret on his or her blog. Once that is out there the company loses its rights to it forever! Now any competitor can now legally use your former trade secret.

So where is the Buzz? smart Buzz Marketing firms have learned to stay on the safe side by developing a multilayered security policy, keeping the sensitive data in-house and prescribing communications policies for blogging employees. Open the door — not the vault!

Labels: Blogging

Brands will be defined by the communities they serve

Anyone managing a brand these days had best be thinking about how to engage customers in ways that let them experience the brand. One obvious manifestation of this is to create an online community.

A truly engaged online community can generate a high volume of content. For example, on any given day, the ITtoolbox community creates 1,500 to 2,000 pieces of content through discussion groups, blogs and wikis. Obviously, the audience engagement factor is incredibly high since the audience is not only consuming the information, but taking part in its very creation.

What’s going on here? Well, with the emergence of all the new Web 2.0 technologies, anyone with a computer has the ability to contribute and be a publisher.

But what is interesting to me is the fact that this gives traditional publishers, whose ad revenues have been declining over the last few years, the upper hand. Where else can you find a homogeneous community just waiting to be served? Two examples: InformationWeek, with 500,000 like-minded technology professionals and enthusiasts, and CIO magazine, a community of 150,000 CIOs. Just add water and it makes it own sauce!

Where’s the Buzz? We are still in the early adopter stage of online communities. And their evolution will bring greater value to both community creators and members.

One thing is for sure. Going forward, brands will be defined by the communities they serve. So you better listen to their needs and find a way to serve them. As Bob Dylan once said – “You’re gonna have to serve somebody!”

Labels: Communities

YouTube for President

Candidates for the 2008 presidential election are beginning to scramble to develop rich interactive strategies. And as you might imagine this year, more dollars will be spent on new media than ever before!

Internet video strategies are going to play a large role in this election. And if candidates hope to have their messages distributed virally or even “engage” consumers with their advertising, they are going to need to craft a message that will resonate with viewers which means the placement of advertising is less important than the content.

Another aspect to this is, in light of all User Generated Content (UCG), messages will have to be two-way streets since people more than ever before want in on the conversation. Evidence of this has already shown up on the website of McCain’s exploratory committee, which encourages viewers to create their own site to promote the senator and help raise money for the campaign.

Where is the Buzz? New media like Internet video will allow the public to see for itself who these politicians are and yet understand that they're human, fallible, can mess up too. But for any modern day politician the role of new media is going to play a critical role in their marketing. As marketers we have a ring-side seat for what I am sure will be some serious innovation using new media to drive engagement with an audience, lets pay attention.

Labels: Interactive Marketing

Get Some Buzz from Social Shopping

Online shopping remains a largely solitary act. 60% of

U.S.

adults who plan to shop on the Web view recommendations from friends and family as the top factor when choosing a small online retailer for a holiday gift purchase, according to a November 2006 poll by Harris Interactive for Yahoo! Small Business.

Enter social shopping, which mixes e-commerce and social networking. Names in the space include Crowdstorm targeting shopaholics, Kaboodle for electronic gearheads, Stylehive for fashionistas and ThisNext for highbrow design.

Who cares? Glad you asked. Check out Tony Rekhi, owner of WineGlobe in Redwood City, CA. Last July, Tony began encouraging his customers to make lists on Kaboodle. The result? He was able to realize a “10-15% conversion rate without spending a single dollar.” Compare that to a return of 1-3% on his other marketing activities such as a bimonthly newsletter and paid search!

So where's the Buzz? Ok, this one arguably is way more consumer-side buzz marketing that B2B. But I can’t help myself. The example may be B2C, but look what’s going on behind the scenes on these sites. For the first time, they are able to quantify the influence of social network marketing!

Labels: Social Networking

Who Is the Most Trusted Blogger?

If you are considering rolling out a blog, or you already have one, I think you’ll find this research on the types of blogs that readers visit most frequently very interesting.

MarketingSherpa and CNET’s 2006 Business Technology Buyers’ Survey asked technology buyers about the types of blogs they read. 69% read blogs from independent personalities, 56% read blogs from journalist, 30% read blogs from analysts and 26% read blogs from vendors.

Buyers read them in that order because they are looking for the highest quality content, coupled with the immediacy provided by writers well versed in niche content areas and obsessed with keeping their blogs current.

Ok, so where’s the Buzz? – Smart Buzz Marketers are looking for ways to team with journalists to help spread the word on their product or service. As you can see from the chart, journalist blogs are read twice as much as vendor blogs.

Labels: Blogging

IBM launches Social Networking software

IBM just unveiled a suite of software products called Lotus Connections that includes tools for posting personal profiles, Web logs (or blogs) and lists of Web bookmarks for creating online communities. The suite also has bookmarks for online work collaboration, as well as a collaboration platform that allows plug-ins to popular products such as Cisco IP Telephony, AOL instant messaging, Salesforce.com CRM and Research In Motion BlackBerrys.

The Connections suite will compete with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows SharePoint Services. SharePoint, a five-year-old product with 85 million users, added social-networking features in its latest version, unveiled in November.

Steven Mills, IBM's senior vice president who heads the software group, commented, "We've been pleasantly surprised by how well this has resonated with corporate buyers." He said many companies have seen employees start using free Web-based social-networking software because it makes it easy to share information with colleagues. He said, "Businesses want something that's reliable and recoverable" in case data are lost. In addition, many companies have legal requirements to archive everything written in connection with certain products and financial transactions.

Where’s the Buzz? Web 2.0 tool adoption is showing up in the enterprise. There now are some notable examples in Knowledge Management, Project Management, Collaboration among disparate groups, and efforts to add more value to Business Intelligence. And it makes sense to have it inside your firewall from a legal/compliance perspective.

Labels: Enterprise 2.0