IMV12 : Business Blogging

The following is a transcript for IMV12 : Business Blogs. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo. I’m your host, Ted Murphy, and with me today is Jeremiah Owyang, he is a Web Strategist. Welcome to the show today, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah Owyang:

Hey, thanks Ted. Thanks for having me.

Ted Murphy:

Jeremiah, I think that our audience would like to know a little bit about your bio, your background, the types of things that you are involved with. I'm certainly very familiar with your blog and I wanted to give everybody a little point of reference before we get into today's discussion.

Jeremiah Owyang:

Thanks. So I'm really passionate about Web and Web being a tool that can enable companies to delight customers. That's really my focus and I talk about that and I think about it and I speak about it and I write about it constantly how to use these tools. And companies have been hiring me to help them. Specifically I am working for Hitachi Data Systems, that's my day job. And my title is…

Ted Murphy:

It's good to have a day job.

Jeremiah Owyang:

Day jobs are great! Keep the day job! And my title is manager of Global Web Marketing and I guess one of things that I'm known for now is bringing in blogging. I've brought business blogging to..I think we are the first division within Hitachi, it is a very large company, we're at Hitachi Data Systems and we have our CTO and other technologist that are blogging and the program has been going really well. But that's not all I do. I'm also focused on podcasting. I podcast at the podcastroundtable.com where we talk about technology, and I'm just getting really involved with the rest of the industry. It's moving so quickly and it's so exciting.

Ted Murphy:

So you mentioned you're efforts at Hitachi to bring business blogging to that company. How do you think that a business blog should be used? Is blogging something that every company should be doing or is it a good fit for some and not a good fit for others?

Jeremiah Owyang:

Right. That's a great question. Business blogging is not really for every company. There are certain types of industries where you are held to certain types of legal limitations or every word that you would say or talk about is going under a review process. The benefit of a business blog or a blog in general is that it is a conversation that builds a relationship between employees and a customer or a prospect. So it's really not something that is intended to be very rigid and formal it is supposed to be casual. Maybe you would see a support blog for a particular product be a little more formalized, but in general it should be for companies that want to reach out or to lead their market as far as talking about best practices or being the thought leader in their industry.

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere lately about Amazon and whether or not they should use blogs. They are not quite sure, but they have an idea. But they are already reaching out to customers and already talking to them with a lot of different other tools and methods: email, feedback, bulletin boards, forums, customer ratings. You know they are really in touch with their customers. So maybe a company that is already very high touch online may not need it. Some particular companies like finance companies or financial institutions or services may not benefit and it could actually be a big problem for them. It really depends on your industry.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, I think that when you are dealing with things like securities or your dealing with things like healthcare those can be areas where you have to have every single word reviewed by a lawyer and it kind of takes some of the essence out of the blog.

Jeremiah Owyang:

Yeah. Well you know Wells Fargo did something pretty interesting. They created a blog. So you can't really talk about financials, right? Or this is how you should spend your money or this is the fund you should be allocating your 401K. So instead they created this blog really around the earthquakes. We are coming up to the centennial anniversary of it in San Francisco. Wells Fargo is a San Francisco company. And so they talk about what is the rich history of the earthquake and how is Wells Fargo there as part of that heritage and how they helped to rebuild the city and funding their growth. But then they also give best practices: how to be a homeowner and to be earthquake prepared. So that's a really interesting way that they are tying that back in to build the community.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, that's a neat approach. So what do you think is the most common mistake among companies who are trying to use blogs in attempt to connect with the customer?

Jeremiah Owyang:

We talked about what is the purpose of or what are the strengths of a blog. It's somewhere between and instant message and an email or technically an email to the whole world. So it’s a little bit more conversational and casual so that's the real strength about it is to build a relationship. So if a blog is not considered casual or real then it is perceived as not being authentic. And as soon as a business blog or a corporate blog is found out to be not authentic, either that they are having somebody ghost write it or heavily edit or it's just becoming a PR tool or it just doesn't resonate with this audience, then they are making a big mistake and they probably should just have benefit from just doing a press release.

Secondly, if the resources in the organization is not fully committed behind the program, so you probably need to have someone evangelize all the way to the top and then also the width of the company the enterprise. And I actually write about these things because I had to go through it. And we can put a link up about that. I have some steps about how you can become a corporate or business blog evangelist to help people understand because it’s a very different medium a two-way transaction on the Web.

Ted Murphy:

What type of maintenance on a very high level you kind of said that you could provide a link to that, but what type of ongoing support and maintenance and efforts from a corporate level are we talking about?

Jeremiah Owyang:

I'm not sure if that's the right word for the efforts that you are going to have to put into it. It's not really like you are maintaining something, its like an active dialogue that an employee is having with the customers. So just as you and I Ted we have a business relationship, we met at Internet Strategies and Symposiums, so we communicate regularly and we talk using different mediums. So we are building this relationship of trust. And now we are here doing this podcast. Which is a milestone for us. The same thing applies for any marketing effort or business effort or an employee talking to a customer. You are building that relationship through an ongoing conversation discussing things back and forth. So, I'm kind of trying to give the high level of that. To get nitty gritty, because I know people want to hear that, what would make a frequency and how much time should somebody spend because that's asked a lot…

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, so I'm just kind of wondering, if I am a CIO at a Hitachi and let's say I've got a customer base of literally thousands of people who are now actively engaged in this dialogue with me…that seems like a lot to juggle.

Jeremiah Owyang:

Right. Well so typically a blog post depending on the writer and the style and what you are talking about can take from 30 minutes to an hour to compose. Reading will actually take a long time to get to know that. So for many corporations they are assigning somebody that can help read and prioritize. And not every single comment needs to be answered. And you know some of the people because it's conversation will help to answer each other. Or maybe product managers can step in and answer some questions on behalf of the CTO and letting them know, "Hey I'm the product manager, the CTO is busy and I'd like to answer some of your questions." So that's some of the work that goes into it but again it goes back to having your whole organization aligned to help support this new communication medium.

Ted Murphy:

And how did you go about that at Hitachi? Getting everybody aligned to back this and to really be excited about it?

Jeremiah Owyang:

Well, I was really fortunate my upper management really grasped the concept quickly and they knew I was already into this new media and community marketing. So they look to me and then helped me draft a strategy and a plan and our bloggers were really excited because they wanted to reach out and touch customers. So I was really fortunate to have everybody already aligned. But I'll have to admit not everybody understands fully or sees the full benefit. So I'm constantly having to, and so are other evangelist, having to explain the value of it and showing them when customers are happy. Literally on the Web, "Hey! These guys are talking to us! Thank God. Finally we have somebody."Well listen to what these guys or they are referencing our blogs in other ways. Those are signs of wins.

Ted Murphy:

And what do you see in terms of the benefit and you know we are talking a lot about creating a dialogue and about creating a relationship. We've seen a lot of the things that we have developed for our clients and also for ourselves that blogs can actually have a really great marketing benefit in terms of visibility on search engines, linking opportunities, opportunities to get exposed to new people. In the industry what are you seeing there in terms of the benefits of marketing versus building relationships with existing customers?

Jeremiah Owyang:

To me those benefits, the marketing benefits are sort of secondary to actually reaching out, but we've already talked about that. It's really amazing when you do Google searches later in how where the blogs have appeared if you are talking about a specific topic or an industry topic or even maybe a competitors product, it's really interesting to see because blogs are so link heavy they quickly rise to the top and Google use is so heavy for those things. That's really interesting. Although we don’t… that's not really what the focus is. I'm not trying to tell people you should try to include this meta-tag or you should have this keyword. That certainly is not natural to me in building a relationship, throwing out specific keywords in your blog.

Ted Murphy:

In your blog you mention that readers are reading your blog before actually contacting you and I'm wondering is this something that sales organizations can also use to help target potential clients?

Jeremiah Owyang:

Yeah, just for clarity, I am not an official Hitachi blogger per say. But I do have a personal blog and obviously Web is my passion and I dive pretty deep into it in my personal blog when I talk about Web. But apparently vendors, I guess my reputation, as negative as it must be, is preceding me people are finding my blog. Its been tied to the company name I guess in some cases and people have been starting to read it and vendors have been reading it that are trying to sell web products to us and find out more about me. And I think that is absolutely great. Actually there is one company in particular called Factiva and they have been approaching us and talking to us about our offerings as far as information supply, and there sales team was reading my blog to understand what are my needs because I would be one of the primary decision makers. And sales teams no matter what your industry should start getting inline with your marketing folks, my web guys, some of the product and looking at product sites like Technorati and I'm even seeing things like sentiment measurement things like Opinmind and you can type in a product name and find out what people are saying about it literally in context, this will help you get understandings of what people are thinking about your products and start using it as intelligence. And engaging bloggers at a company, reading comments, reading what they are saying and I think that's a really good thing.

Just to close that off I think Jonathan Schwartz said something very interesting, he is the COO of Sun, that firewalls in the near future will be archaic, that customers and employees will start to communicate openly in the free Web. And we are starting to see that now. Wait till the next generation of bloggers hits the workforce.

Ted Murphy:

Yep. I totally agree with you. We had a question come in from voicemail.

Caller:

"Hey Ted. My name is Drew Richardson and I am from Chicago. First of all, great podcast! I had a quick question for Internet Marketing Voodoo, if corporate blogging is something that will require a lot of dedication and research, how can you measure its success and if it is a profitable investment? Thank you."

Jeremiah Owyang:

Hey Drew, hopefully you are listening in. That's a question people are asking a lot. Basically people are saying, what's the ROI? What's the return for doing this type of thing? Fortunately for blogs and other online tools, they are easier to measure than say advertising on a billboard or a Forbes advertisement in a magazine. How do you measure a conversation in a coffee shop that your sales guy is having with a prospect, how do you measure that?

Fortunately, with blogs because they are online you can measure what I call resonation. And to me I've defined this term resonation kind of like a formula where there is a couple of things you can look at, five actually. These things are called your activity, your web analytics, your linkage, who is linking to you and talking about you or you are linking out, seeing how that is happening, and I guess that can also tie to your Google rankings. Also, user sentiment, what are people saying about you and your blog and your products and you can actually look at that and put instances on a graph if you really need to do that, and also looking back links, who is linking to you and talking about you and referencing you and what are they saying? Finally, word of mouth. What are people saying about your blogs? Let's say a CTO of your company is a blogger and he goes to a customer site what do they say? Do they say they like it or not, but its fully measured when your customers tell you that's great and it helped them to make a decision or has helped them along the process.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, I find that our blogs to us and our sales process are invaluable. We have our sales team that are constantly going back and referencing our blogs and pointing our customers to those blogs to get information about products or services or verticals that we may be targeting to get more information.

Jeremiah Owyang:

Oh absolutely. I've been hearing from others in the industry that blogs from your top level evangelist or your C-levels that are blogging, that those are users' actual sales tools, whether or not you realize that or not. Sales teams are referencing those to start conversations or they are actually using the content in there and inserting it in presentations or saying here is the word of our leaders this is the direction we are headed. And it really helps them.

Ted Murphy:

So, let me jump back real quick. Because you mentioned something earlier, you said, "Okay I'm not an official blogger for Hitachi, this is my own personal blog, but I am now being linked back to the company." Obviously we are both big supporters of blogs, but I think that that could actually be a little concerning for some companies that: here is John Doe employee who has created a blog about who knows what and it is loosely being associated back with the company. What are the concerns there?

Jeremiah Owyang:

I make it very clear, this is my personal blog and these type of thoughts that I have in here to do not represent my company, my current employer or my future employers these are just my thoughts. So I make it very clear. I certainly follow the ethical blogging policies that some of the A-listers have created like Charlene Li and Rebecca Blood on how you can be a good blogger and how you can converse without doing harm. And really what I am trying to do in my personal blog is to share and help others so its not like I am intending to do any damage to any companies or my own company. So, I think that's the first thing is the disclosure. This is my personal blog.

Ted Murphy:

What about, lets not look at your particular situation, but lets say if we had a situation that was similar to that and we were looking at it and I say okay gosh I've got this really great smart individual who is working for me who is creating this blog that has now got some following and is respected in the industry, should I look at bringing that into my organization and making that part of my organization, and basically allocating some time to this guy to be able to go out and to do this and to spread the word under the company name?

Jeremiah Owyang:

Yeah that's a good question. I think the question that we're asking is: do you have emergent talent within your corporation? Maybe the blog is there only outreach where they can actually publish their thoughts. I mean you'd really have to look at your company DNA and say, "Oh there is somebody that is talented" and that is like a vocal point. Pull them in and let's talk to them. I'm not sure if it's just really about the blogs because it sounds like, if that was the case, it sounds like you have somebody that is talented and should be elevated to another position.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, I think it would be interesting for a lot of companies to reach out the people in there company and find out how many people are blogging, because probably a lot of the managers and people running the company aren't even aware of those.

Jeremiah Owyang:

Yeah, that's a good point. And it is something that is happening more and more. I mean with the Technorati stats showing that blogs are doubling every five and a half months and we know that 11% of Internet users are bloggers right now; it's just going to happen very quickly that employees are going to be blogging.

Ted Murphy:

I know that there are a lot of people that are very skeptical of business blogs. And you and I feel one way and they feel another. But tell me why business blogging isn't just a fad.

Jeremiah Owyang:

Well yes we are still going up the curve where it is going to become a mainstream part of communication. I think the same type of individuals that are naysayers now may be the same type that also said the Internet and Web sites were just a fad in the late 90's. I'm sure that is probably going to jab somebody right now in the ribs, but now with blogs everyone can be a publisher and everyone can read, granted that you have Internet access. This is actually a really big change that we have never seen in the world, everybody can publish. This is actually a really big change as far as I'm concerned in history.

But most importantly I think the stats are way in the 90% of individuals in North America that are under age 25 are using social Web sites or blogs such as MySpace or Xanga or Facebook. They are going to hit the workforce in the next five years and they are already blogging and they are going to be blogging. This is something that is definitely going to be here. It's going to be persistent. This is how consumers are going to communicate to each other. You know employers are going to communicate to consumers. It's here. And it's going to be here. That's what I really see is when this next generation hits the workforce. Business blogging is not a fad.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, I agree with you. I think you really have two choices: you can either fight it or you can embrace it now and figure out how you can leverage this and maybe get a jump on your competition. So what are the top three things marketers should now about creating developing a corporate blog and business blogging in general?

Jeremiah Owyang:

I think that there are multiple points that you can give. The first one is it doesn’t just have to be marketers who are involved. The first thing you should do is read blogs. Read blogs in your industry and read blogs by experts, also referred to as A-listers. Some have written books out there that give the best practices or what has worked for them or how to be a good blogger. And then maybe create a practice blog. It doesn't have to be in your industry. In talking about maybe just set something up on blogspot or LiveJournal and just talk about something that you are passionate about just to get to understanding of the medium. And then give it a shot. Find some right people in your organization that are already vocal and care about customers and start empowering them and give them some best practices. And I actually list out a lot of things on my personal blog about how business can harness this, especially large ones that don’t yet have an evangelist.

Ted Murphy:

Why don’t you give everybody that URL for your blog?

Jeremiah Owyang:

Sure. So my personal blog is at Jermiahthewebprophet.blogspot.com.

Ted Murphy:

Great. Well if you have any questions for Internet marketing Voodoo you can call us 866-206-4461 or email me directly at ted.voodoo@mindcomet.com. Of course you can always visit us on the web at Internetmarketingvoodoo.com. Jeremiah it has been a pleasure talking with you today. I love what you are doing with your blog. I love what you are doing at the podcastroundtable.com. You are certainly a leader in Web strategy and I think our audience is really going to appreciate the input that you have had today.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

Marketing Resources
Download Top Ten Business Blogging Best Practices (PDF - 671.5KB)

Listen to the Business Blogging podcast.

Contact MindComet about integrating business blogs into your marketing mix.

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