Digital Influence Mapping Project

Future PR Skills 2008: Advanced Search Engine Optimization

 

As part of a series, I am exploring what skills the next communications professionals need to have in hand to succeed and lead. We once thought search engine optimization (SEO) was a technical, geek activity. Get the guys and gals who talk in 'algorithms' and meta-content together and they'll fix you up. Enter the social web. Now for all the reasons we know too well, SEO is a critical public relations function.

The reasons again:

• 80% of Internet users in developed markets start their online session at a search engine (In North America that is either Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL or Ask.com)
• Put another way: The Google search results page for your brand is your new home page
• Social media - blogs, reviews, Web 2.0 content, social networks - return really well in search engines
• Despite the algorithms behind the scenes, the key to great search results is great content that is socially connected
• SEO is more than technology and 'advanced SEO' is at the heart of brand and reputation management

I now love Tadeusz Szewczyk. His SEO blog is so simple and straightforward - no, not just the design, but his writing too. He defines very clearly a great definition for 'advanced SEO'

"In basic SEO you just want

• to rank
• get found
• or garner huge traffic.

In advanced SEO you make sure the traffic is viewed as people, customers, multipliers.

In SEO 2.0 people out there do not hate SEO, they don’t even notice it because it just perfectly fulfills their wishes. Advanced SEO is not about cool programming skills only, it’s about social skills."

The Future PR Pro has mastered the critical parts of advanced SEO:

• creating content that is authentically valuable to people (stakeholders, audiences, users, publics)
• syndicating, distributing and sharing content to encourage linking and mash-ups
• building partnerships to gain access to new networks
• creating multimedia content for universal search
• engaging with WOM 'relayers' to build more 3rd party content and links
• integrating SEO with SEM efforts for a complimentary 'boost'
• user experience design to ensure owned Web properties follow the prime directive: be useful and in sync with best-practice SEO design

Resources to help understand Search Engines and SEO:

How Search Works

• Google Guide
• Google Technology
• Search Engine Watch: How Search Engines Work
• Search Engine Land Guides
• Yahoo Ranking

How Search Works with Social Media

• Pandia The Year of Social Media and Search Engines
• Dominating with Social Networks
• Leveraging Social Media Sites for Search
• 10 Q's for David Sifry
• Top Web 2.0 Search Engines

The 11 Skills of the Public Relations Practitioner of the Future

The Army has their Soldier of the Future. Why shouldn't the communications (aka public relations) discipline have it's own model for the expert of the future? As marketing and communications continue to merge and change (and the post-industrial, corporate organizational forces that drove them apart continue to fade), as technology injects innovation and uncertainty into our lives, and the demands of increasingly global clients get more and more complex, today's PR professionals must evolve.

It's more than learning the significance of Twitter vs. Friend Feed. It's more than learning that long tail bloggers have different expectations & habits than journalists.

There is a full field of knowledge (things people "know") and skills (things people can "do") that must change to make PR pros relevant going into the next period of change. It still starts with the core attributes of The Trusted Advisor - that model defined by David Maister that remains as relevant today as when he first published it.

Now, the Communications professional must master knowedge in a number of areas and a new set of skills inclusive of new personal behaviors. (I don't want to get hung up in nomenclature but the term "communications" may be a more forgiving and forward thinking term than "public relations." We tend to think of them as synonyms but the latter comes with a lot of earned and unearned reputation 'baggage')

Knowledge

• Communications Strategy & Planning
• Integrated Marketing including Digital Marketing & Word of Mouth Marketing
• Basics of Paid Media Planning & Buying
• Digital Influence
• Change Management
• Marcom Measurement Standards
• Basic Psychology
• Best Practice Research Approaches
• New Media Relations
• Creative & User Experience Design that Activates

Skills

1. Create an integrated marketing and communications strategy
2. Deploy live 'listening posts' online and offline
3. Design and deploy an advanced search engine optimization program
4. Plan and run a new media relations program inclusive of head-of-the-tail and long tail "media"
5. Identify & engage with influencers online and offline
6. Manage communities
7. Integrate new technologies into their own lives
8. Model measurement and performance metrics including new "engagement" metrics
9. Run quick pilot programs  and evaluate on-the-fly
10. Train staff and clients continuously
11. (What am I leaving out)?

Clearly this is an incomplete list. What else should be on here?

(thanks to Force of Operations for the awesome illustration)

Battle of the Brands

Noah Brier released Brand Tags back in May. Until it accumulated some usage it was the kind of quick hit that could be forgotten. I presume he has pulled in some decent traffic over the past few months as there seem to be a lot more brands and a lot more tags.

A recent addition and frighteningly entertaining is "battle mode" which pits two well know brands against each other and you decide in a "Blink" who would win. The interactivity is infectious. And while it is easy to dismiss this as trivial and "non-scientic", I was surprised at how insightful it reall can be. Check out the entry for John Deere. I added "sturdy" as that was my association. But how many people must have added "Redneck" to make it so big?

The more people use it, the more insightful it will be. I hope that Noah makes an app or widget - I would definitely add it to my blog!

What else did the crowd do for John Deere?

• JohnDeere in del.icio.us
• John Deere in Wikipedia
• John Deere on Flickr
• John Deere on YouTube

Learning from Product Design

I have always been a fan of product design. While I have spent a lot of my professional career in design - graphic design, user experience design, televsion design - I have never worked in traditonal product design. I admire Ideo and have had a chance to work with them via my client Snap-on. I used to follow frog design back in the day. Now I am becoming a fan of Adaptive Path.

Subject to Change is the "Adaptive Path" book written by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba and Todd Wilkens. They cover a lot of their experiences and methods for product and service design. It's a good read. Part of the time I felt they were corroborating what I already believed. Part of the time they demonstrate a clear POV on develop products and services for clients that is insightful and fresh.

Social Media Engagement is like "Product" Design

One reason I focus on product design (I put "product" in quotes because it is the trade term but as you will see in my post, it is a misleading term) is that the discipline shares some best practices with what I do now with social media programs. There are three things in Subject to Change that stand out and are worth mentioning.

Empathy

The Adaptive Path guys (APgs) spend a lot of time talking about best ways - some new, some old - for understanding people. They stress the importance of empathy and they introduce research methods that can lead to spreading empathy for people (who use services and products) throughout the organization. One way they define empathy is "an understanding of a person or group's subjective experience by sharing that experience vicariously." While I know that the APgs are trying to be very professional - and I agree with them - I cannot help but want to shout - "It's not enough for companies to practice empathy; they should love their customers and want to know them personally." Anyhow, that's just the social media nut job in me. But the world would have a lot better products and services if companies made empathy a priority.

Behaviors, Motivations and Meanings

I am a  champion of usable design. Sounds terrible when I think about it. "Usable design" sounds like such a low bar. When I use it, I mean focusing on being of-use and offering a streamlined user experience. It implies focusing on tasks - what does the user want to accomplish. Just the term "user" says it all. APgs champion a new way which is not so new. It stresses understanding behaviors, motivations and meanings beyond simple tasks. They talk about people, not users. Their field research methods support this.  While APgs are suggesting this is an evolution for interactive and product designers, this is one area where I think the best brand marketers have a leg up. Our agency and many of our clients have long had ethnogarphers and held a deep value behind understanding behaviors. We long to understand the emotional drivers of our fellows by knowing what they do and where they find meaning.

Stop Designing "Products"

There is a huge interest amongst marketers to think about traditional products like services. In APgs case, they use examples like the iPod/ITunes service and the early Kodak film system (camera + development services). Any company ought to be looking at how to expand their view of their product to a potential service. That will be more difficult for simple consumer packaged goods (i.e. toilet paper). But with digital marketing and social media many, if not any, brands can think about being "of-service" in their marketing of their products. Listen to what your customers are saying and observe what they are doing. Find some way that you can enhance their lives that stems from the barnd. If you make Tupperware, help potluck supper enthusiasts. If you make computers for students offer people a companion program from Stephen Covey. If you offer a weight loss product, build your customers a way to track and reward their progress.And build a community of customers who add value to the overall customer experience. Spend more energy on that than on old-school advertising.   In short - design services not products; and market products likee services.

You should pick up Subject to Change. And you could do worse than to start thinking like a "product" designer.

NetVibes for Marketers

Michael Cohen from Netvibes presented the basics of the customizable interface for the Netvibes service. He is talking to a room full of CRM marketers for a major CPG (consumer packaged goods) in Barcelona. They all want to know how they can brand widegts and pages within the service and then count the hell out of everything. CRM folks are data geeks, data junkies, Ninjas of ROI.

So netvibes remains a small enterprise - 39 employees in Paris - with a deceptively prolific developer core - currently there are over 120,000 widgets created by more than 700 developers. They have 60 million pages created but then comes the kicker that they are trying to remedy: most users are not registered and rely on cookies-only to maintain page-state. They recently released 'Ginger' which prompts you to upgrade (and register). But as an avid Netvibes fan and user, I have't upgraded yet, myself. (Ginger offers a bit of a social network that allows people to "push" changes to their subscribed users - think Facebook.)

Brands can work 2 ways: Premium Universes
There are two ways that brands can "use' Netvibes. The first is to create  a "premium universe" - a branded page that collects widgets together in a private-labeled user experience. If you were Marshalls (disclosure: client of Ogilvy), you might assemble a bunch of bargain hunter widgets - store locator map, Web site homepage, trendspotter blog feeds and more. Anything with an RSS feed or HTML can be embedded in a widget. You market that as a custom url to your customers as an added service (and Google food).

Michael showed examples where Figaro and Tagged have embedded NetVibes customized 'start pages" in their services. He, of course, then demonstrated our client's branded start page. The moment of truth happens when the brand realizes that the user can combine their brand with any other widget content from the library (competing branded content, non complimentary content, etc...).

Widgets
The other way to make use of Netvibes is to create widgets and place them in their library (dollars for premium placement).  1000 brands have created widgets. they come in 76 languages from 69 countries. In this mode, you are leveraging (I said the "L" word) Netvibes user base which they don't know enough about to satisfy even the least disciplined marketer (never mind the CRM folks). For the few that are registered, they know age, gender and town. They could do more but they respect their users privacy.

They have a very versatile approach to widget compatibility (not in the OpenSocial sense). Netvibes Widget Platform (Universal Widget API - UWA) makes widget sportable across OS, device and browser platforms.

Brands track number of downloads and can use their own tracking (like a special Feeburner feed). Netvibes is working on reporting "canceling" or dropping the widget. They have their own CPC-like model = "Cost per installation" (CPI).

He showed examples from NYTimes and CBS (CSI Video widget).

Michael had some good one-liners:

• "The user is your best friend to distribute the brand" - speaking to letting users spread your widget
• "The brand as a service provider" - this is the new mantra from marketers who know that product brands have to think differently now to build stronger relationships with theihr customers. they have to think like service providers.
• "Really Sexy Syndication" - they are enthusiastic about RSS

I love Netvibes

Netvibes has put togther a very useful platform for brands. On the widget side of their business, until they convert more users to registered users, they will attract brands looking to reach the great unwashed (young tech males?). The premium universe offering is a great user experience but relys on the brands existing marketing strategies to drive awareness and usage. Also, it is at the end o fthe day a supercool portal concept. Brands have been trying to capture the start page of their customers for years (most rightly gave up). How many people need a widgetized portal from their favorite soap brand? Still for the right product and service, it is a great solution (slam dunk for any major media company).

Closing Communities: Is There a Better Way?

I was drawn in by Ben McConnell's post about the closing of Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK). The virtual community fueled by Sulake closed one week ago. Lots of coverage from CNN to WSJ. Fans have gone the Jehrico route and set up protest sites. But it's not fair to compare the closing of a community that had been live and active for a couple of years with a passive TV show. Community mmbers feel abaonded, let down or down-right disrespected. Disney claims that the community was part of a limited time celebration of their 50th anniversary and the current message on the url is fairly ubrupt.

John Frost over at the Disney Blog (unofficial) had a terrific post last month about the closing. He considers many angles of the business drivers inside Disney from the decentralized buisness unit structure to the rigorous margin goals shared across the enterprise. Ben takes teh claim that the community was intended for a short term campaign. We wrestle with campaign-mentality in marcom all the time. Only difference is that our campaigns are often a few monmths long whereas this community was up for more than two years. Ben goes on in his post to set up the business rationale for a community to begin with:

"Campaign thinking is a byproduct of the last 25 years of business school education. The formula has been to create a short-term project using established metrics, execute, then start over with a new idea. Move the needle quickly.

The formula for evangelism thinking is: Create a project where the community of users become part of the process and most importantly, are considered a tangible asset. The needle may not move as fast because the investment is for the long term, but it's less likely to have wild, up-and-down swings."

Both authors have hit on something important: communities can serve the business goals of a company and their value and the actual value of the community members should be weighed with a business eye. 

Sometimes you have to close

If you valuate the community, you may find it is not a sustainable enterprise. As business people (and community enthusiasts) we cannot say that a business must keep a community going or make any other business decision not in line with their fiscal responsibilities.  I completely respect the investment of the VMK community members.

But it's how you do it that shows what you are made of

As usual, I think the real missed opportuntiy is how they did it. Communities are co-created experiences no matter who licensed the software or created the bitmaps. Inviting members of the community in to discuss what could happen next - where could the community be directed to to reform, how could they stay connected or how they could participate in the next Disney creation - all of these discussions might have helped the community transition. It would certianly telegraph that Disney respects its community members. Still people would be angry. But some would understand. Just look at John Frost's business-like assessment.

So sites like Savevmk crop up and gather petitions. they also collect comments - almost 5000 comments that show the emtional connection as well as the disappointment:

"Flower_KId
What cruel heartless person would want to close vmk. If anyone ever trys to close vmk i will hurt to a point were they can't even breath! If you close vmk then you shut off the love I have for Disney. I will never watch Disney channel again if vmk closes. vmk staff wise up and keep vmk for all the children to enjoy. VMK, VMK, WHAT'S THE NAME IT'S VMK, HOORAY!! "

Would it be a huge risk for someone from Disney to participate in that comment string?

Will EA Do It Better? 

Now SIMS Online from EA is closing. From the sounds of it, they do not have the vibrant community that VMK had. Still, it looks like they may also be tumbling forward in a less than ideal way. They changed the name of the community to EAOnline and then immediately announced it's closure. Someone asked if they did that just so they wouldn't have to say that one of their most prized assets didn't hit a home run. Undoubtedly, they are closing for business reasons - for one reason or another it doesn't make business sense for them to keep going with it. I only hope they are reaching out to their community - what little there may be - and having them contribute to next steps for that community.

If more companies went the extra mile to demonstrate their respect for and their value of their community members (read: customers, evangelists, potential customers), they could make business decisions like closing a community and maintain many of their strong positive relationships with community members.  

Are Social Media-based Programs Scalable?

There is a general perception that advertising is thoroughly scalable and that public relations is not. But how about social media-based word of mouth programs?

You can develop a $5m, $10m and $100m ad program. You will get increasing "returns" for your investment. Reach and frequency can both go up. There are limits but they are pretty out there. It is predictive and incremental. The media relations side of PR can only be dialed up so much before traditional media shuts down on additional coverage for the same brand & message. Now, there is a lot more to public relations that just media relations. The value of public relations goes beyond (yet includes) short term marketing goals to include enduring brand reputation. It seems that PR's role in supporting short term sales such as a new product launch is more limited than the scalable "burst" of awareness available via paid advertising. PR's impact on reputation is almost infinitely scalable. But we are now talking about word of mouth and social media-based word of mouth.

Scalable: Reach

At WOM University, we held a roundtable discussion on the scalability of WOM programs. Keep in mind, my position that most social media-based programs are ultimately WOM programs. The table's focus fell on both online and offline programs. Walter Carl of Northeastern University and Chat Threads presided over the table. He introduce the group to his measurement model which, while complicated, suggests a method for understanding overall performance and then being able to dial it up or down accordingly. Walter modeled out his generational pass-along effect which I will call the 'multiplier effect.' A recent Fast Company article on NING rechristened this a "viral loop." I am not sure that new definition adds anything to our understanding. The multiplier effect tells us how many people we will reach and convert into "relayers" once we give Gen '0' something to talk about. Walter can match back G0 and G1, for instance, to verify that G0 actually passed along their story to 6, 8, or 12 people. It is the same logic he used to support BzzAgent's impact and make it meaningful to the media planners of the world (who rely on scalable "channels").

It's great stuff but a little complex. It speaks to the "reach" capacity of a WOM program. I need to simplify the issue to make it useful in my daily life. If there were predictive models for the multiplier effect, that might help.

Scalable: Frequency vs. Multiple Voices

Walter's model is a great way to understand the reach of a WOM program. The problem is that it remains very complex and requires a self-reporting procedure itself needing an incentive to motivate participants ("Tell us who you talked to and you might win an iPhone or we'll give $5 to charity or...").

The best value of a social media-based WOM program is scaling through time combined with the slower growth of more relevant reach. "More relevant reach" is a loaded phrase. I am suggesting that one's 'social graph', is a more powerful channel than the audience of a particular media property (TV channel, show, magazine, newspaper, etc...). I also assume that when I hear something from a colleague, friend, or "stranger with expertise," it sinks in without the same need of message frequency that we expect with advertising (i.e. need to hear something 3-5 times for it to be memorable, never mind actionable). My client, Gerry, recommended a reasonably high-end coffee maker a few weeks back. I Will eventually buy that coffee maker without any other input save for some model-browsing on the Web.

There are plenty of purchases or decisions that I need to make where the number of 'promoters' matter. On most book purchases, I will scan the reviewers to make sure there are more positive reviews than negative. I scan the negative comments quickly to see if the complaints resonate. But I don't let a few negative comments dissuade me from purchase. There is a name for this behavior which I don't remember. I'll call it a simple 'disaster-check.'

It takes fewer positive voices to drive me to purchase consideration and even purchase than the number of ad impressions it takes to persuade me. In fact, beyond direct-response offers, no advertising really gets me to the same deep level of consideration. This begins to speak to WOMs place in the "funnel" - the deeper end of the purchase/advocacy decision.

If I spend $100K more on my WOMM program, what do I get?

Classic marketer question. Will you get more reach? Will you get more brand/product advocates? Will you get a deeper bond with a select group of enthusiast influencers? And the kicker: will it sell more product?

The answer to all questions is yes, yes, yes and yes. The problem is that I need 30 minutes of your time to explain how. If you intuitively believe in the strengths of WOM and the sales impact of a great Net Promoter Score, you will give me that 30 minutes. If all you care about is a proxy metric like site traffic (i.e. cpg brand marketers online), than you will glaze over right after I tell you this is a different measure than traditional advertising.

You can use Walter's model to answer the $100K question. But I have to ask is that model practical and itself, scalable?

We need simplicity based upon reasonable and shared assumptions. How do you show that WOM is scalable?

Relevant Links:

• Walter Carl's Post on "Communication Value"
• WOMMAs Measurement Books
• Jeremiah's Measurement Tag (for good measurement resources)
• Rachel Happe's Long list of Metrics

Stories at the Personality Project

One of my favorite "features" of Rohit's new book, Personality Not Included, is a related Web site he created, The Personality Project. I, along with lots of more luminous luminaries are featured there talking about the importance of personality in marketing. each does it with perosnal stories and examples from their business or their lives. The great thing in most is that there is not a huge division between their POVs as business leaders and their own personaloutlooks on life.

My story is very personal and includes Air Canada. You will find many other stories from the likes of Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. I had the chance to see Tony speak at Community 2.0 this past week. He told the story behind Zappos. At times, it sounded like he aspired to be Amazon (the epitome of customer service, selling everything not just shoes), but he revealed that personality is a big part of their story. You can read his Personality Project post here. I love that his staff will check three competeing web sites to find something for a customer if they, themselves, do not have it and then will drive that customer to a competitor.

Tony, a serial entrepeneur at a disgustingly young age, is serious about the Zappos culture. 'Culture' is the whole point of my post. Culture is real and organic. It is a value system that lets people be themselves (yes, they must share some of teh values to fit in, but unlike our families, we "choose" our job, and can move to one that aligns with enough of our values). Culture promotes someone at Zappos to go the extra 10 miles for a customer not just because it feelsl good but because customer retention is key to profits and to outbound word of mouth.

So, I love The Personality Project because of all of the original stories from a collection of not-the-usual personalities. And I also love it as a great example of what I will now call "transmedia" - a term that first noticed last week in an article (where was that article?) about the new generation of Hollywood science fiction geeks - the creators of Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Gallactica. These followers of Joss Whedon are super sharp about extending the experience of their stories and characters into different mediums without resorting to indiscriminate license deals. No lunchboxes. They only do what will extend the story. That is what Rohit has done with the Personality Project. It complements the book but takes it further in a new direction (not to mention that it's a great way to invite people in to whitewash the fence with you a la Tom Sawyer).

There are a hundred slots. Let's see who shows up next. 

Social Media at Verge Toronto

I spoke about Word of Mouth Marketing at this year's Verge Toronto - Ogilvy's digital confab for clients (thanks to Guy!). Paul Beck, Digital Strategist at Ogilvy and all around smart evangelist, delivered a great snapshot of innovative digital programs - many of them anchored in social media - in the B2B and B2C space. He has been a tremendous ally within Ogilvy from the advertising side and is pushing some terrific "social" programs with clients like American Express.

I shared about choosing a new coffee making solution (thanks Gerry!).

Paul shared about his "Cell Phone Experience." Paul dropped his phone in a puddle. He went online to research the right replacement. He started at Google (only customer acquisition links there), to Technorati, to YouTube. He bought the LG Envy based upon cgm videos and positive mentions from "strangers with experience." He wanted to do what many of us want to do now - hear what others have to say about their exeprience with the product. 

This category - "Strangers with Experience" - has grown as a source for product referral more than any other source from 1997-2007. This starts to speak to the idea of who we find influential amongst people we do not directly know.

Paul has a very clear and strong POV about transforming the marketing process. He describes this as "Flipping the Long Tail." It's simple really. Find and connect with your advocates and fans, engage with them, amplify what they say or do and then market around that to ultimately reach a mass audience.  This is the true promise behind word of mouth programs.

Paul's 3 point program
1. Listening as a disciplined marketing practice: Don't listen once. Don't just do focus groups. Make listening a fundamental and ongoing practice.

2. Advocacy as a deliberate marketing channel: Don't just tack on a WOMM program. Make it core and make the discipline of making it work central to your team.

3. Unlock and unleash the content: Once you have engaged consumers to create cgm - work it, merchandise it, get it into search engines

Cardmembersvoice.com
He shared a great program he leads with American Express which just launched. Cardmembersvoice.com asks members for their input and feedback. Using our 'Voice of the Customer' platform, they solicit ideas and report back to customers what they may do with that good thinking. I know this was a journey of internal evangelism and education to get to this point. It's a great program and reflective of what experts like Paul - real practitioners, not pundits - can do to transform marketing.

My favorite Paul quotes from his session:
"Open source problem solving - don't ask broad questions - invite them to help solve a specific problem."

"Community is not a place. It is a shared set of values"

He also left the audience with four related imperatives:

• try it
• experiment now
• it does not have to be pristine
• learning will lead the way

Corporate Blogging Grown Up

I guest-lectured at a colleague's graduate class at Johns Hopkins where I also teach a class. One of her students - a young man in his twenties studying to enter marketing and/or communications - asked seriously, "Can I just wait out the whole blog-thing, wait till it fades away or do I have to pay attention to what's happening?"

Didn't expect that question from him, a digital native. But I do hear it a lot from business "gray-hairs"  - the digital immigrants. The short answer is that blogging will not fade away like a fad. I certainly believe there will be a "leveling off" of the explosive growth we have seen. But too many people have found a voice and a reward for publishing their POV to expect that to recede  It is part of a movement that will continue to grow and change affecting how we market from this moment forward.

It's Not All About Blogs

My team focuses on the larger realm of social media and the word of mouth marketing it makes possible. We find ourselves constantly telling curious clients, "It's not all about blogs." (nor, is it all about Facebook or running ads on Federated Media). And while the options for a comprehensive social media strategy are broad, it's interesting to see how the tactic of starting a brand blog(s) is maturing, becoming a sensible part of a marcom effort, and being applied by various brands.

I wanted to examine how three contemporary brands are using blogs today. You can get a pretty good list of business blogs here. I wanted to look beyond the stalwart examples: the GM blog(s), the Southwest Airlines blog, even the Direct2Dell blog. Each of these remain great examples and enduring efforts. I wanted to examine some new ones or some of which remain less spotlighted.

Contemporary Corporate Blogs: Lenovo, WellsFargo, Starbucks
They are each very different businesses with very different needs and situations. (Full disclosure: We started Lenovo blogs with David Churbuck. Our company also does work with WellsFargo but I have no connection with that business.)

In the case of Lenovo and Wells Fargo, I talked with some of the folks running those blogs. I did reach out to Starbucks but haven't heard back yet.

For Wells Fargo, I connected with Staci Schiller, Wells Fargo Education Financial Services. Staci runs the Student Loans Blog.

For Lenovo, I reached out to David Churbuck, VP of Global Web Marketing

Here's what I wanted to understand: 

• What are they actually doing on the blog? What are they publishing about?
• Who is writing/producing the blog?
• How shareable, findable and ultimately "social" is the blog? (Things that Rohit coined the term "Social Media Optimization" to describe)
• How are they measuring "performance" or success?

Lenovo

The Skinny (short description of the blog)
A series of blogs from different leaders & managers within Lenovo. Currently the blogs are in English. They are aggregated into a single url and bundled with their Flickr feed, del.cio.us tags and it links through to Lenovo Communities which feature user message boards. 

When asked what surprised him about the blogs, David Churbuck said,

"The quick acceptance and genuine good will throughout the organization was inspiring. The greatest surprise came when a blogger complimented a competitor for a design choice, received some internal criticism for "aiding the enemy" but then turned that negativity to positive feelings when one writer said it made Lenovo blogs more authentic and genuine than the typical company PR blog."

The Bloggers (who is writing or producing the material)
Various personalities within the company from David Hill, who runs their global product design team, to Bill Stephenson, who heads up CSR. They are not all senior leaders but they are people with a POV.

The Purpose (what is the marketing or communications purpose)

• Build a direct relationship with people inside Lenovo and publics
• Improve overall customer service and relationships
• Enhance the brand reputation of the company

David Churbuck: "To provide an interesting experience to the readers worthy of their time and to persuade them that the passion of the company for its products and customers is genuine."

The Measurement (how do they measure success)

David Churbuck: "Metrics are not closely followed in terms of traditional page views, RSS subscriptions, or other quant measures. Primary justification is enthusiasm of readers, customers, press and the bloggers themselves. Success is the ability to publish, with near instantaneous execution, information vital to the business."

David and his team measure overall Web metrics for the blogs but look for those qualitative wins - customer service "fixes", innovative suggestions from customers, their ability to address concerns and communicate what they are doing inside Lenovo. 

The Social Score (how connected are they: 1 to 5)

Lenovo gets a 4.5

Lenovo Blogs is growing in depth and breadth. That means they continue to add bloggs and bloggers. Unlike Wells Fargo, they tend to limit the number of bloggers on a single blog to somewhere between 1 and 4. The breadth part includes adding other social features like the Flickr gallery and del.icio.us feeds. I would guess we will see a YouTube gallery soon, Dopplr and other features.

No appreciable blogrolls anywhere. That seems to be a common issue with "official" corporate blogs. Linking feels like endorsement no doubt and that causes anxiety. Also, corporate blogs don't jockey for popularity the way personal blogs do through link-baiting and eventual link-love. They rely more clearly on search results to connect with readers. Lenovo blogs shows up on the first two pages of Google results for Lenovo (but not ThinkPad).

Wells Fargo

The Skinny (short description of the blog)
Wells Fargo currently runs 4 group blogs with more than 30 bloggers contributing. These include Guided By History which talks about the heritage of the company, The Student LoanDown and a SecondLife-inspired Stagecoach Island (all their names are service marks so don't steal them). The blogs feel collegial and informal enough. We have pictures of all the contributors to bring the personality to life. No multimedia yet.

I asked Staci Schiller, blogger at The Student LoanDown, to summarize their approach to blogging.

Staci Schiller: "The banking industry is heavily regulated, and for good reasons, so we carefully consider how we interact with users and what kinds of topics we discuss. Also, most of our bloggers are team members who have full time jobs, and to add blogging--writing, posting, reading, replying--on top of those jobs takes dedication and discipline. The culture of blogging is unique and we strive to connect with that culture in the way we communicate and interact in the blogosphere."

The Bloggers (who is writing or producing the material)
One thing I noticed is that Wells Fargo seems to have a staff of historians. Charles Riggs, who is featured on the Guided by History blog is a researcher with Wells Fargo Historical Services since 1995.  John Stumpf, President and CEO appears on that blog's masthead. Many of the other bloggers within Guided by History are in some way connected to archives, museum or history business functions. 

The Student LoanDown features more of a marketing/communications staff (approximately 8)as bloggers.

The Commercial Electronic Blog requires log-in and Stagecoach Island positions itself as  a community with 3D graphics that you might associate with a Second Life-type virtual world

The Purpose (what is the marketing or communications purpose)
With this variety, each of the blogs serves a different audience and potentially a different purpose. The Guided By History blog is all about bringing the heritage of teh company to life and therefore to support the corporate brand position.

Student LoanDown is more directly targeting customers.

Staci Schiller: "Our goal is to serve customers when, where and how they want to be served. People get their information in many different ways, and social media offers us a new opportunity to have a dialogue with our customers, learn from them, and provide information and advice on topics that are important to them. We're reaching new audiences in a personal way when our team members share their thoughts and experiences on blogs."

The Measurement (how do they measure success)

Staci Schiller: "Blogging is about engaging in conversations, so we measure success based upon the number of readers we attract, as well as their interaction with us through email feedback, comments, and reader posts on their own blogs or sites about our blogs."

The Social Score (how connected are they)

Wells Fargo gets a 4

Like most corporate blogs, the Wells Fargo blogs don't feature BlogRolls per se. While the bloggers seem to do plenty of crosslinking from with posts, the site itself does not leverage many of the social media tools that others do: bookmark icons, send-this-to-a-friend links, YouTube or Flickr galleries.

They have more bloggers per blog than Lenovo. But fewer blogs. And there is no sign yet that they are implementing any other social media content or features that might expand how people connect with them. Still, their experimentation with formats - the virtual community - demonstrates they are trying different things.

Starbucks

The Skinny (short description of the blog)
Unlike the others, the Starbuck's blog is part of a larger co-creation that has gotten a lot of coverage lately, My Starbuck's Idea. Like Dell's Ideastorm, the overall site solicits Starbuck's product and service ideas from customers on the Web. The blog is called Ideas in Action. It's where they report back on the ideas submitted.

The Bloggers (who is writing or producing the material)
There seem to be quite a few bloggers including Brad Stevens Vice President of Marketing. many are identified with name and picture, some have cryptic user names like Sbx_bean. Makes you wonder who these folks are. There seem to be almost 14 different bloggers with only one or two posting more than once. 

The Purpose (what is the marketing or communications purpose)
The blog is focused on responding to the user ideas submitted in My Starbuck's Idea. It is part of a co-creation activity and meant to build a strong relationship with those folks motivated to post and read this experience. The feedback alone in the core co-creation space is priceless.

The Measurement (how do they guage success)
While I haven't spoken to Starbuck's, the blog's performance is so integrated into the co-creation that beyond Web traffic, they must report number of ideas submitted, votes and comments per idea (the suggestion that the difference between Venti and Grande should me more than more milk received 177 comments to date). They are focused on reaping product and service innovation benefits.

The Social Score (how connected are they)

The whole thing gets a 4.5. (If you just carved off the "blog" element, that would only get a 3 or so)

Yes, the co-creation idea thing has been done. But it's a great social media experience that more brands would benefit from. While the blog proper does not allow for comments, there are plenty of comments in the idea space. Starbuck's lets its fans and regular customers take centerstage and as in many communities, it's the community that comes to the defense of the brand when critical comments are posted.

Summary
Both Lenovo Blogs and Wells Fargo are great examples of blogging growing up into a real communication activity. Still, both organizations are bootstrapping the effort - all of the bloggers have day jobs.

While Lenovo is embracing more of what's available in social media, Wells Fargo seems to have more of the rank and file involved as bloggers. In both cases, they have opted for special interest blogs - from student loan conversations to product design. They are letting those with a voice and POV within the company develop an audience (a community of readers/commenters) around more focused topics.