start of blogging4business

I managed to find the bloggers corner with little difficulty.

The bloggers always seek out power pionts and, in this particular instance, it’s at the back left corner of the venue. The wifi is costly rather than free. Well, I blagged my access but others haven’t been so lucky. Spotted so far are Oliver Luft (journalism.co.uk) and Robert Andrews who is writing the official conference blog. I’ll do a round up of who’s blogging once their posts start to appear…

I missed the opening remarks and morning keynote due to the joy that is London transport, so first up for me is the “Massaging the Message” panel with Darren Strange (Microsoft), Tamara Littleton (eModeration) and some other guy I have yet to identify.

According to Darren Strange, 4500 Microsoft employees are bloggers – that’s around 1 in 15 of their employees and, in his view, Microsoft has one of the best corporate blogging policies there is.

Tamara, from eModeration, is talking about one of the client communities that they manage – a heavily branded Budweiser community for Nascar racing fans. “They have some control issues over images that depict their brand in a bad way, but as far as language… they’re much more relaxed… we’ve seen an industry trend towards this anyway… towards allowing and encouraging a more open dialogue…”

The third guy, who must, through process of elimination, be Paul Munford from Player X is saying that within any organisation of more than about 10 people there must be someone who can engage openly, with the right tone of voice, and act as a brand evangelist. “Passion needs to be authentic… they need to be able to hold their hand up when, for example, a question about moderation comes in, and to say ‘I don’t know the answer to this, but I’ll find out who does’.” Of his clients, quite a few have bloggers whilst others aren’t allowed to do so because they do business in highly regulated markets BUT “it is certainly becoming the norm.” One issue that will need to be dealt with is people blogging stuff from within the organisation that other members of staff wouldn’t want them to.

The moderator of the panel discussion asks Darren Strange if he’s ever made any mistakes on his blog. “Microsoft has the view that we do far more good than damage… I’ve got to try to find something to write about everyday that will be of interest to my readers, it’s like a daily column… If something comes across the desk that would be interesting, I might blog it. One or two times I’ve said stuff that maybe should have been kept confidential and the head of corporate communications pops up on my messenger within about 30 minutes… the great thing about blogs is that you can correct it… a lot of employees already talk to journalists, to friends down at the pub, but stuff that’s marked confidential should stay confidential… Microsoft doesn’t have a blogging policy… i don’t think there will ever be one and if there is I think a lot of us will just leave…. the best way to train good bloggers is to train good bloggers…”

Darren Strange, Microsoft: “What is slightly annoying is when journalists try to hijack my blog… I see my blog as my house… I’ve had journalists… this one instance an analyst was trying to get ahold of a free copy of the new MS office. Instead of just emailing me, he posted a comment on a post about something entirely different… that’s very rude. He’s doing that because he hopes it will make me send it faster. I didn’t even respond… it’s a very strange dynamic now… journalists who see themselvs as technologists will go off and complain about our products, now I can reply. I go off at night, read on technorati what they say about me and my products and I turn up on their blog and respond. It’s a very helpful thing. The journalists don’t always like that now we can say something back. Now I can put my commen to what they said directly on what they said.”

Tamara (eModeration) points to the Times Online’s recent redesign, where comments were enabled on every piece of content, as an example of how being open and honest with audience members can turn out well – there were problems, the Times linked out to blogs that criticised the Times relaunch and engaged with that criticism.

Darren is complaining that this isn’t a blog. “A blog has to be personal… comments isn’t the same as having feeds… another thing I object to is having to give them all sorts of information before I post a comment… this should be about the debate first…”

Kryptonite locks being opened with a pen used as an example – how do you respond?>

Paul: Kryptonite did all the right things at the start – the were monitoring the blogs, the noticed what had been said, saw the film and replicated the problem in house. They also came up with the solution and communicated that to their factory. Unfortunately, they didn’t tell people what they were doing, didn’t keep the dialogue open and they were hung out to dry by people who thought they were unresponsive.

Darren Strange: If they would have had bloggers, then the response from Kryptonite would have got lots of hits and links, which helps with the way the results are displayed in google. “Search is a lot to do with how many sites are linking to you… if lots of people are linking to you, it’s probably good content… it’s worth investing in that to have it as an almost defense mechanism”.

Tamara: “It’s more to do with getting the sport more talked about, visiting the site… the use ambassadors and reward people with merchandise, carrying on that sponsorship theme…” It’s all about brand reinforcement through the social software site, and by creating evangelists off the site itself, rather than getting people to go out and blog about Budweiser.

Paul: Sun Microsystems, particularly the work Jonathon Schwartz has done to give credibility back to the company… a lot of people are using it to engage further with audiences they already have… to encourage dialogue, feedback on new products or builds, etc.

Tamara: “Hijacking blogs can be a real faux paux… I personally see it more and more that our clients are putting their mesages onto social networking sites…”

Darren: “On a weekly basis I have PRs and others who want to send me things… lots of those things are very good things… if I were to do that, I’d look like a PR spin machine… I welcome people sending me things but I have to look at it and ask if I’m interested in it, if my audience will be interested in it…lots of other times I just [don’t]…”