Archive for the ‘Particpatory Comms’ Category

I was meant to be at Ad:Tech this week in New York. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be – but the panel I was meant to lead looks like it went really well. Look at some of the things leaders had to say about podcasting:

“Reach is pretty limited right now, but you’re reaching an enthusiast audience,” Ms. Papadopoulos said. She said the Volvo sponsorship on Autoblog.com reached about 120,000 people a month. Ms. Pitcher’s (Citrix) reach ranges from 10,000 to 100,000 monthly.

“People like ads, they don’t like interruptions,” said David Goodman, president-marketing at Infinity Broadcasting. (I really agree with this – the rise of the participatory era is the death of the age of interruption)

From the folks at AdAge, blogging… "goes a long way in personalizing brands and creating one-to-one relationships with customers. While IBM says it does not want to use new media as traditional sales and marketing tools, it has succeeded in opening discussions in health care and video gaming with “outsiders,” which in turn could lead to new business relationships."

“This is a way to get our expertise out there, not by shoving it down people’s throats, but by just starting conversations,” Mr. Barger said. “It expands our reputation, perceptions and reach of IBM, at the same time expanding the number of people we can learn from.”

Where I am not on board with the AdAge story is that technology companies are more advantaged by social networking technologies. As GM and Stoneyfield Farms have demonstrated, the more you think about your customers as participants in your company’s success – and as part of a community – the more participatory communications works for you. It’s not about the technology, it is all about how you view marketing.

Steve has a great post on measuring the chatter using Ice Rocket and other tools. I’m a big fan of Ice Rocket and like Steve tend to use this more than Blogpulse. With tools like these there is no excuse for PR not to start speaking to the conversation in its dashboard.

Our challenge as communicators is to now move to understand the impact of these conversations on purchasing and other customer behaviors. Then we go from speaking about the conversation in the context of communications to demonstrating the value of conversations to the business.

Mark Dill posts a great comment on my entry below on Technology Policies Run Amok. More than often comments get lost unless folks are really inclined to click on through. Here is what Mark had to say:

I’m in the middle of revitalizing an Intranet for a large corporation. We have lots of discussions about content management as well as blogs and wikis. One of the reasons I’m here is that nothing is off the table. Effective companies will understand transparency or what I have called for years now an open system. You can’t be sloppy about these things, and everyone involved needs to understand that freedom demands responsibility. Think about this way. Employees that criticize their leadership in blogs aren’t saying anything they haven’t said in other conversations for years. It’s just now they have an unprecedented public forum. Professionalism will foster policy development. But the reality is that technology is enabling much deeper visibility to management and operations. Like every other pervasive technology change, people that embrace it prosper and those that think they are powerful enough to resist such advances will endure great pain. But just because something is new and different doesn’t mean those basic change management rules don’t apply. It just might mean a company’s executive team needs a history lesson.