IMV33 : Enterprise Blogging

The following is a transcript for IMV33 : Enterprise Blogging. 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, Paul Lewis.

Paul Lewis:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo. I’m your host Paul Lewis and with me today is Robin Hopper, CEO of iUpload. Robin, can you start off by telling us a little bit about your background and about iUpload.

Robin Hopper:

Sure Paul, thank you. I founded iUpload after a seven year stint with a fax on demand company called IBEX Technologies, and I was part of the executive team there. Essentially IBEX was a content management company pre-web, before the web, that delivery vehicle happened to be voice and fax.

After that company was acquired, I really wanted to kind of complete some of the vision that had started there and transform that to web and email type of transactions. So I founded iUpload back in I guess 1999, and we really got our start in web content management and fairly quickly became one of the leaders in at least the hosted approach to content management.

Fairly early on we saw an emerging need within our customer base at iUpload for our clients needing to manage smaller and more discreet pieces of information then they were traditionally handling through web content management. We felt that we could leverage blogs and kind of the drop dead simple authory nature of blogs to accomplish that, and we set about to develop our blogging platform, which now is called the Customer Conversation System.

And if you fast forward to today, we’re now recognized as the leader in the social media blogging solutions for enterprises and publishers. Our customers include the likes of The New York Times, McDonald’s, Coke, Newsweek, Motorola, and what we offer is very different, the individual blogging tools or social media tools to these companies. It’s a comprehensive suite of wikis, social networking and content management capabilities that are married up with all the backend tools, security, editorial control, compliance reporting that are required by these very large enterprise deployments.

So our customers are using the platform to create communities of interest, both in and outside their organization, and it’s really transforming how they communicate with and market to their employees, to their partners, customers, potential customers and other constituents.

Paul Lewis:

You mentioned that there were some challenges, and that’s the first question that’s really on my mind, is what are some of the key challenges when you have a number of people from a company talking on the blog, from the CEO on down? What are some of the challenges that you are seeing on that?

Robin Hopper:

Yeah, a number of challenges. It sort of stems from the approach that the company might take in the first place. One of the challenges that we often hear about and are brought into help fix, is that blogger burnout is a problem. So for companies that have deployed a blog and might have tapped the shoulder of their CEO to be the blogger or have kind of promoted someone as the corporate blogger for them, that’s challenging in that it’s difficult to write really good content every day.

The almost opposite end of that approach that creates its own set of challenges that we hear a lot about is by just giving blogs out to kind of anybody. It almost creates a problem of blog smog, of all kinds of content that lives inside these blogs that not necessarily very many people know about and often is intermixed with some not very relative content.

So those two are probably common challenges that we hear about within companies that have started down some kind of corporate blogging path. Our approach is kind of a marriage between those two approaches where we actually, through our platform, encourage people to widely deploy blogs and other participation points, not necessarily just blogs, but widely deploy all these participation points, but then give them ways to harvest the best content from those individual blogs and those individual participants, and let them bubble up into a variety of venues. One of which might look like the company’s blog so that instead of one person having to write really good content, you’re picking and choosing the best content from hundreds or thousands of potential contributors, or that could be augmenting sections of a website or of the internal intranet site, or all of the above.

Paul Lewis:

You also talked about, as you mentioned, blogger burnout and the CEO having a limited amount of time I’m sure. For most CEOs they’re so busy it’s hard for them to find the spare time on a regular basis to put their thoughts to web. Do you suggest the companies look at ghostwriting or would you say that that’s a step in the wrong direction?

Robin Hopper:

No, we’d certainly try and steer people away from that. That’s kind of the whole opportunity with blogs, is one of authenticity, is one of putting people closer to subject matter experts. So we actually encourage quite the opposite where we would suggest you empower frontline people and empower potentially everybody in your company, and a lot of our customer cases even go a step further and encourage you to empower even your customers and potential customers through blogs so that you get that authentic voice, that frontline voice, or subject matter expect providing the content. And then again, just rather then rely on one person to write it, if you’re able to bubble up the best content from all of these contributors to present back as your “blog” is a recipe for a lot broader acceptance we’ve found.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, I like that approach. It makes a lot of sense. I think what you’re saying is that transparency is very important, authenticity is very important. And what your solution allows is to give that to the largest audience possible, but then to still have some editorial control to bubble up the right view points that you want to present front and center.

Robin Hopper:

Exactly. It can extend all the way out to your customers. A great example just within our client base is a bike manufacturer, Cannondale Bikes, that one of the motivations for a blogging initiative for them is that they are trying to transform their web properties from just a site for information about the bikes that they manufacture, to a destination for everything bike. But there’s no way that they could staff up to write about all the best mountain bike trails in the Toronto area for example.

So what they’ve done is they’ve gone a step beyond just empowering their staff. They actually empower race teams and racers that they sponsor. They empower customers and potential customers by allowing them to get a Cannondale blog, and they encourage those people to write about whatever they want in those blogs. But if they happen to write on particular topics like best mountain bike trails or local race events, then that information is bubbling up into the main Cannondale website and allowing them to become that portal or hub of everything bike. Whereas they couldn’t do that previously.

Paul Lewis:

Great. So that’s actually an example of them extending their voice and really almost forming a partnership with their audience to create their voice and their presence. You mention a lot of large brand names that you’re working with, and I know that when we talk to our clients, blogs are a very common subject to come out these days, and questions about how a company should proceed with this. Tell us a little bit about how you see the current state of the industry, what’s the pace at which the interest is growing, and kind of where this enterprise blogging is going.

Robin Hopper:

It’s been a wild ride over the last 24 months since we introduced the version of the product. At that time we couldn’t use the term blog in a lot of our clients. They wanted us to use the word microsite or some other insert the name here.

Paul Lewis:

It was like a forbidden term.

Robin Hopper:

Exactly. The fear around using the term blogging was that it was going to be the wild west and they would have to be very concerned about content and all of those kinds of things and liabilities, and all of those kinds of things. That’s changed dramatically. Now enterprises large and small, publishers large and small are approaching us and want to promote the fact that they’re embracing Web2.0, and they’re embracing some kind of blog strategy.

Paul Lewis:

Can you also tell us, share with us maybe an example, that was a great Cannondale example, is there some other examples of a success story and some metrics of success that you see companies using as they’ve gone to this new model and opened this dialog with their consumers?

Robin Hopper:

We do a lot of work in the publishing vertical for one, and that’s an easy one for those clients to measure success. We do all of the regional newspapers for The New York Times for example, and we do some other things with AdvanceNet and Conde Nast, and others, and what they use the platform to do is one, create a lot more inventory for ad opportunities. So they encourage not only staff, but just citizens in the community to participate in their web properties by submitting stories and by getting blogs all within our platform.

Of course by getting blogs, as those get deployed throughout the community, it starts to put a very big footprint out in the community. It creates all kinds of additional page views and additional ad opportunities, as well as a way to again, harvest the content gems and turn citizens into authors, and get a lot more local economically in the types of content that they offer.

And they also use it as a new way to engage businesses and citizens in the community. So they’ll actually go out and offer live ads, but what they really are is blog. So an advertiser inside the newspaper, or an advertiser within the community gets a blog, and they can actually control their own ad copy because whenever they write content in this blog on a particular topic, that’s their ad copy that’s rotating throughout the website and throughout all the blogs, and it is that next layer down of content as well.

So somebody clicks on the ad, they’re brought to that advertiser’s blog site, and now they have all the interactive capabilities of engaging potential customers in conversation. Letting them post questions through comments, and all those kinds of things. So the newspapers are really trying to facilitate a new relationship between themselves, advertisers or businesses in the community, and citizens, and a whole new level of advertising revenue that they can generate.

Paul Lewis:

That’s a great example. Obviously a lot of companies are enjoying some success with this new model. We talked also at the concern about compliance and about the information. How can companies safely moderate blogs without making them completely one sided and still allow appropriate discourse? Do you have some guidelines or some solutions that you’ve put in place for clients before?

Robin Hopper:

There’s a kind of a long laundry list that corporations need to know are there in terms of at least tools that can be employed. One of the things we like to remind corporations though as they start to go down the path of embracing some kind of blogging strategy, is that you do definitely need to treat this as a transparent environment to encourage feedback, good and bad. It’s going to go on anyway. So why not encourage it within your community and be able to kind of be on the leading edge of it, hear about it early on so that you can react accordingly.

The other thing that we remind them is that by taking on some kind of blogging strategy it does give them the opportunity to hear about things, whereas they wouldn’t have otherwise. If stuff was being talked about good and bad by people passing around emails, that’s nowhere near as transparent as it living and breathing in a blog and a blog community.

That said, companies need to know that they do have the ability to editorialize when appropriate. So, in the case of someone like McDonald’s where their brand is very important, when staff are blogging and some of those blog posts end up being destined for public facing blogs, those, in their case, have to go through an approval process. So somebody has to approve that content, that blog post before it makes its way out into one of their public destinations. Whereas stuff destined for internal sites doesn’t.

The other thing that they need to know is just simple things like are certain words being monitored so that people can be flagged to either take a look at it or can the communities kind of police themselves. So there’s those kinds of things that they need to know are in place before they can even go down the path.

And then the other big one, especially for our public companies, our public customers, is that compliance wise they need to be able to demonstrate what was on their blog or rolled up version of blogs at any given point in time. That’s not all that easy to do with blogs because they change very frequently and because they’re easy to update, and they have things like comments attached to them that can grow quite rapidly. And they’ll have audio attached sometimes and video, and etc., etc.

So at least in our case we’ve had to implement full versioning and compliance reporting so that these companies can go in and punch in a date and time and have full access to what was live and available at any given time. So they do have that kind of audit trail. We learned pretty early on that without that that was an impediment for a lot of companies to be able to deploy some kind of blogging strategy.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, just from a compliance issue I can see that. I like what you said also about transparency, and I think one of the things that we talk to our clients about now, while they have sometimes some trepidation about what this means, they have to understand that we’re living in an age of transparency and better that people are talking on your blogs then they’re talking elsewhere, because that information is going to come out. It’s going to be on the web. Better that you are involved in the dialog then it’s happening without you.

Robin Hopper:

Absolutely. Historically it was only the very positive and the very negative that anybody ever found out about and with consumer generated content and media, now it’s all out there. So much wiser to be part of those conversations and engaged in those conversations then sitting on the sidelines and just hearing what’s being talked about.

Paul Lewis:

As we talk about these different elements, obviously there are some risks for companies. Could you talk either about some risks that companies need to weigh out or do you have an example possibly of a company who has gone into blogging and made a mistake that we can all learn from?

Robin Hopper:

Certainly on some of the risks that some of our clients have thrown out there, to set that up it’s not uncommon for our sales team to have a company’s legal team show up to even a first speaking with us. There definitely are some concerns over some of the risks that might be associated with kind of opening up the floodgates to consumer-generated content.

One of the best examples of some of the costs associated with those risks and why those are important to consider, Motorola is a client of ours, and one of the things that they have to be careful of or certainly make their employees aware of, is that there are potential even patent liabilities that go along with some of the content that gets written about.

So if one of their engineers happens to write a post about a phone that they’re trying to get a patent on or post a picture of that phone on his blog or on the company blog, then that might impact their ability to get their patent on that particular product. They needed to know that approval mechanisms were something that they could evoke. Not because they were concerned about anything malicious or people trying to post bad content on purpose, but just for those inadvertent types of post that could, in their case, cost the company significant dollars.

Paul Lewis:

Sure, and I notice you used the term his blog, so I think that what you’re talking about is guidelines that not only pertain to the corporate blog or any sponsored company blogs, but actually what employees and personnel are posting other places on the web. Do I understand you correctly on that?

Robin Hopper:

True. Yeah, all the way down to maybe even their personal publishing activities that might be happening outside the company.

Paul Lewis:

From the marketing department, that might actually be an issue for HR, is there might need to be guidelines that are distributed throughout the organization about what people are allowed to say and certain precautions that they should consider.

Robin Hopper:

Very true, and guidelines are important. What’s interesting though is that in watching companies publish these guidelines, they’re already in place. It is your guidelines on email use and those kind of things. So it’s not a big undertaking to come up with these blogging policies. Companies like McDonald’s, it actually was just a couple of keywords replaced in their existing policy and making sure that people understood what the medium was all about moreso then the guidelines themselves.

Paul Lewis:

Great. Robin, as we wrap up the show here, could you share with the audience maybe your top two or three tips that if there is a company right now thinking about jumping into creating a corporate blog, the top two or three things that they should be evaluating and discussing before they launch that initiative.

Robin Hopper:

Sure. I guess the first one is to think about the problems that could be solved by deploying some kind of blog strategy versus just blogging for the sake of having a blog because it’s a buzz right now and you’re supposed to have a blog. These are something that can be deployed tactically to solve some very specific communication problems that you might be having. That communication problem might be declining metrics around email marketing that you’re trying to do, and it might take on the public facing blog look in terms of how you go about deploying it.

The first thing that we like to guide people to is to think about how you can address some specific problems with this kind of technology because at the end of the day they really are a tactic that allow you to engage a whole new type of author that you probably couldn’t engage before. So now you can get content from people that you couldn’t easily get before. What problems can you leverage and solve by that capability?

The other big one that we like to encourage, and certainly in terms of a tip, is get started. Get it wrong. It’s okay to jump in and get it wrong. It’s much better to be engaged and involved in the conversation then to be sitting and waiting. So probably tip number one we tell people is get started. It’s not a big undertaking to get started and use the successes and mistakes that you made to help you define and develop a full blown blog strategy from there.

Paul Lewis:

Well Robin, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show today. If you and the audience have any questions, you can find those on our website at internetmarketingvoodoo.com. Robin has been gracious enough to supply us with a top ten list for rules and suggestions on enterprise blogging and that will also be on the website or you can go directly to iUpload.com to learn more about their company. Thanks again.

Robin Hopper:

Take care. Bye bye.

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
Listen to the Enteprise Blogging podcast.

Contact MindComet for more information on business blogging.

Subscribe to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast in iTunes.

Technorati Tags
business blogging, corporate blogging, enterprise blogging, online marketing, marketing podcast