NevOn

Imagine if Chevron had used a blog instead

Listening this morning to a BBC World Service radio interview with Peter Robertson, vice-chairman of the Chevron oil company, I was struck in particular by his commentary about a website where the public can join Chevron in an online discussion about the future of energy.

Overall, I found it a fascinating interview, with its discussion of wide-ranging topics including the future of energy, the evolving role of the energy industry (the oil companies) and corporate social responsibility. From a PR point of view, I think Robertson did a pretty good job for his company.

Concerning the online discussion, Robertson was talking about willyoujoinus.com, a website sponsored by Chevron, that's facilitating some discussion about the future of energy and what people think about it.

From a broad look around the site, and judging from the detailed information in Chevron's Community Guidelines page, this is actually a substantial undertaking (and clearly part of a broad public affairs effort):

The willyoujoinus.com discussion forum was created as a place for individuals and groups to exchange ideas on important energy issues. It is also a place for users to read, consider, respond, and perhaps be inspired to take individual or collective action in an environment of mutual respect.

To contribute your opinions, you have to register. And your comments are moderated:

Experienced outside moderators have been assigned to ensure that postings are relevant and appropriate, and otherwise meet the site’s community guidelines as described below.

All postings will be reviewed by moderators and published on the site within 24 hours if determined to be within these guidelines.

That's fine - comment moderation is hardly unheard of and, as long as the policy is clearly stated, unlikely to confuse participants nor set any wrong expectations.

The concept of this effort by Chevron - provide a place online where people can participate in broadly open discussion on a topical issue - is very good, precisely the kind of thing where a blog could work well as that place for open, even if moderated, discussion.

But willyoujoinus.com is not a blog. Instead it's a beautifully-designed and clearly well thought through corporate website with some blog-like naming (the words 'post' and 'comment' are used, for instance).

It's gatekeeper heaven, too, with its completely un-blog-like methodology of contributing your opinions via a web form that goes off to some unknown person or group of moderators  - what Chevron describes as "experienced outside moderators" (without giving a sense of who these people are: could be the PR agency for all I know) and, elsewhere in the site, as "contracted specialists in community moderation" (sounds scary!).

Imagine if Chevron had used a blog instead. With RSS feeds. With trackback capability. It could certainly still require registration and login in order for anyone to participate, and have comment moderation.

Most important, though, a blog could give this place personality and authenticity - two of the attributes which it currently and starkly lacks. And identify who the moderators are. Build some trust.

You're about 80 percent there with this, Chevron. Why not go the full 100? Put your pedal to the metal!

The richness of blogs

One of the best articles about the value of blogs that I've read in a long time was posted by Robin Good yesterday.

Information Overload: Blogs As Content Navigators, Information Filters, Trusted Niche Guides provides a good perspective on one of the curses of modern life, which isn't how to find information - it's how to find, interpret and trust the information that matters to you.

The bottom line:

[...] Blogs stand to benefit in the present media landscape for a number of reasons:

• Because of the overload of information it is impossible for people to keep up with all of it. Information needs to be sifted through and made sense of.
• Bloggers also add richness to the already established reach of mass media.
• Blogs can cater to niche audiences that mass media cannot because mass media must focus on the most important or biggest issues at hand.
• Because of the Internet a blogger can have a niche audience of 5,000 readers a day from around the world.
• A major factor is that blogs have little to no overhead to set up and run. All that is needed is a computer and an Internet connection and a blogger can be up and running, so the distribution costs are cheap.

[Technorati: blogs, information overload]

Factoring blogs into crisis communication planning

A feature on blogs in the current issue of The Economist hardly adds any value with a subject focus that's been flogged to death by some sections of the mainstream media, notably Forbes magazine last October.

Bloggers can be vicious but they can also help companies avert disaster, says the sub-title as The Economist devotes 10 paragraphs of its 14-paragraph article discussing the negative aspect of blogs and the potential reputation and other damage that a company can suffer at the hands of bloggers.

One reality point, I suppose, is that the article positions blogs among other long-standing social media like online discussion groups (aka forums or chat rooms) and email lists that have been around for years, so a reader of this article would hopefully not form an impression that blogs are just some form of unique evil manifestation of the worst in people.

And there's the rub for me. Yet another article in a mainstream medium where the overall feeling you have after reading it is that blogs and other online communication media are something mostly to be feared and concerned about, so you'd better get your crisis communication plan ready (as the article concludes) for a disaster.

Yes, get your crisis plan ready but not just because, suddenly, there seem to be blogs out there written by bloggers determined only to do you damage!

Let's say you have your crisis communication plan ready to roll so that you are prepared for any eventuality. And that eventuality doesn't necessarily mean a negative thing - the ability to respond quickly and decisively isn't always to do with the negative use of the word 'crisis.'

What's different today  - and this is the real point - is that blogs and other new social media (eg, podcasts) should also be factors you will consider and take into account in your crisis communication planning. Not only from the point of view of what such media are saying about your company, your brand, etc, but also how you can make use of such media.

If you want to see some really thoughtful commentary on how blogs fit into overall communication planning, crisis and otherwise, take a look at the posts in the Challenges of Corporate Blogging section in Global PR Blog Week 2.0.

Beta view of what start-ups look like

Click on the image to see the slightly larger (and better in-focus) original on Flickr. And take a look at the comments there to get a sense of who's missing from this visual list. I love the creator's response to some comments: "the logo map's a beta, too."

A number of these logos are of names that are already getting quite well known among a broader and more mainstream audience beyond the tech evangelist arena. Names like Blogger, FeedBurner, NewsGator and Delicious. Which of the others will become as familiar, I wonder, and how soon.

(Via CNET News.)

SAP enters SaaS market

Yesterday, the German enterprise software vendor SAP announced it is entering the hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) market with the expansion of its mySAP CRM offering to include a hosted option.

The first service SAP will offer as a subscription is its sales-on-demand solution, with pricing from $75/user a month, and with hosting services from IBM.

In a Business Week article yesterday discussing SAP's move, market researcher IDC estimates that, while on-demand sales made up only about 6 percent of the roughly $9 billion CRM market last year, that percentage could rise to as much as 25 percent in five years. A commentary by Line56 also yesterday says SAP's announcement illustrates a convergence of interests and models as the 1990s best-of-breed concept fades further into the distance.

DestinationCRM.com's report on the CRM market leaders in 2005 says a recent AMR Research report indicated that 47 percent of large enterprises, or companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, were going to look at the hosted model as part of their "going forward CRM strategy." If there is a single one-to-watch on-demand provider, destinationCRM says, it's Salesforce.com.

One to watch right now clearly is SAP. The obvious new-customer target for SAP would be Saleforce.com (whose CRM SaaS pricing starts at $65/user a month). That's not quite how Business Week sees it, though:

[...] While SAP's battle with Salesforce.com is lively, its most ferocious competition is with Oracle, the No. 2 corporate applications company. With the completion of its $5.58 billion takeover of Siebel Systems on Feb. 1, Oracle overtook SAP to become the leading traditional CRM software supplier.

Oracle already has both traditional and on-demand CRM products, as does Siebel. Now, with the combination, it expects to make headway against SAP in both spheres. That's partly because the uncertainty about Siebel's future has been resolved and customers are feeling more comfortable about buying its software again. Juergen Rottler, executive vice-president of Oracle On Demand, says Oracle will be much more aggressive about pushing on-demand services than SAP. "We believe that on-demand is the future of our business," he says.

Ones to watch.

[Technorati: oracle, saas, sap]

Intelliseek acquired, forms part of new VNU-backed company as VNU looks to be acquired

Two of the leading companies in tracking and analysing what consumers are talking about online have joined forces to create, in the words of the formal press release, the new global standard for measuring and understanding word-of-mouth behavior and influence.

Market intelligence firm Intelliseek has been acquired by word-of-mouth research and planning company Buzzmetrics. The new combination will be known as Buzzmetrics Inc and operate under the Neilsen Buzzmetrics brand, backed by Dutch media group VNU who will own a majority stake in the new company.

Of additional interest to this deal is news today that VNU itself is in the final stages of being acquired by a consortium including some of the world's biggest private equity groups who made a non-binding offer for VNU yesterday, valuing the company at up to €7.3 billion ($8.8 billion).

The Financial Times reports that the bid comes from a group comprising Blackstone, Carlyle, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Permira, Hellman & Friedman, Alpinvest and Thomas H. Lee.

The FT said that a sale of VNU may prompt trade buyers to express interest in parts of the business. VNU comprises AC Nielsen, the market researcher, Nielsen Media Research, which monitors television ratings, and a smaller trade show and magazine division publishing titles including Hollywood Reporter and Billboard.

VNU said it expects to provide more information within three to four weeks, the FT reported.

Related NevOn post:

• FIR Interview - Pete Blackshaw, Intelliseek, August 16, 2005

[Update] Shel and I managed to grab an interview with Pete Blackshaw this evening (my time) to talk about today's announcement.

Book, blook and podcasts

Here's a neat idea - post the chapters of your book to your blog (sound familiar?) and record each chapter as a podcast.

The book in question is hackoff.com: An Historic Murder Mystery set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble, a novel by Tom Evslin, who started posting chapters last September under a Creative Commons license.

Evslin started the podcasts last week and I've listened to a couple of episodes so far, from the first chapter. The sound quality's not terrific (a bit echo-y) but they're a great listen. I listened on my PC although I think I'd get a better experience listening on my iPod.

Incidentally, Evslin's book blog is known as a blook which, according to the Wikipedia entry, was popularized by his very book, er, blook.

Some book publishers are embracing new media like podcasting. My current favourite - The Penguin Podcast, a podcast every couple of weeks with book extracts, author interviews and features from Penguin Books UK. Innovation in book marketing.

Clueless BrandWeek magazine

Are blogs a waste of your time and that of your business or clients? Indeed they are, according to BrandWeek magazine in the US:

Blogs provide almost no new information. They’re frequently inaccurate. They contribute to the hysterical polarization of our nation’s political discourse. And they’re often written by people who can’t, you know, write. So naturally marketers have flocked to associate their brands with them. Seriously, it’s not entirely clear why so many marketers have rushed to get themselves name-dropped in one of the most unreliable media environments yet invented.

What a credibility-sapping commentary in an otherwise entertaining and well-written special report on the "Best and Worst Marketing Ideas of 2005" (PDF; see #23 on page 5), published by BrandWeek last month.

Show this commentary to someone like Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems and ask him what he thinks. A waste of time? He says otherwise. Or just look through the blogs of any of the 100+ companies listed in The New PR Wiki corporate blogs list or any of those in the new Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. Do they think it's all a waste of time? Hardly.

Looks like the BrandWeek author is more of a Forbes reader than a Business Week one. Glass half empty type of approach.

A clueless commentary.

(Via Blog Business Summit.)

GM videocasts new concept car

"What do you think of it?" asks General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz in a post yesterday on the GM FastLane Blog.

At the last count, over 225 customers and car enthusiasts have told Lutz precisely what they think of the Chevrolet Camaro concept car, the vast majority of comments overwhelmingly positive. "Build this and I'll buy one!" would be a good summary of the informal feedback GM has received so far.

Yesterday's post was followed by a 10-minute videocast - a first from GM - with Lutz at the North American International Auto Show being interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The video shows Lutz walking round the concept car with the interviewer, speaking enthusiastically (and with knowledge) about the car and its connectivity with models from previous years - important points for Camaro fans in particular.

With this videocast, the GM FastLane Blog clearly continues to play a significant role in GM's overall communication activities. As Lutz is on record as saying: "The blog has become an important unfiltered (emphasis on unfiltered) voice for the company, our customers and auto enthusiasts."

I like the videocast. Compared to the formal communication about the Camaro and the glitzy Flash-based website, the informality of Lutz' 'video tour' sets a terrific tone. An effective use of the medium, I'd say. A great balance to the staged webcast.

GM needs to do a great deal of effective communication right now. The word's biggest car maker posted a loss of nearly $5 billion in its North American automotive operations in the first nine months of 2005, according to the Wall Street Journal today in a story reporting that GM will slash prices across the board on most of its models.

Related NevOn posts:

• GM's Bob Lutz: The disruptive communicator
• GM: Poster child for the executive blog

Transforming corporate identities beyond the razzle dazzle

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas certainly was the place this week for many companies to announce a dazzling array of new tech products, alliances and ventures.

The best place I found to keep up with what was going on was the excellent Engadget CES blog which had a non-stop stream of posts. Another good resource - CES Blog 2006 from VNU. Certainly far better efforts than the CES' rather lame blog.

Amongst all the new products and cool things being talked about, I found two corporate announcements of particular interest, one from Eastman Kodak Company and the other from Intel Corporation.

A press release (reg required) on Thursday afternoon from Kodak has Antonio M. Perez, Chairman and CEO, talking about the future of digital imaging and a new alliance with Motorola. Buried down in the body text is this small paragraph:

[...] Perez also unveiled the latest evolution of Kodak’s brand logo. This new look moves the Kodak name out of the traditional yellow box; giving it a more contemporary design, a streamlined rounded look and distinctive letters. This introduction is the latest step in the company’s broad brand transformation effort, which reflects the multi-industry, digital imaging leader Kodak has become.

And here's that new logo alongside the one that's familiar worldwide.

For such a major transformation goal, I found it surprising that Kodak revealed their new brand image in such an understated way. Little specific information in their online press center to give you real insight into their strategic thinking and what this means for organizational change other than the corporate-speak in the press release (so you could think it's no more than a bit of razzle dazzle) and a page about the evolution of the logo over the years.

Perhaps this is indicative of Kodak's corporate style and the way they do things. I found much more information in a feature yesterday in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle (where the image above comes from) which gives you quite a bit more insight:

[...] The new mark, based on a customized typeface, is designed to give the company a contemporary look but be flexible enough to apply in new ways and new venues across Kodak's varied businesses - everything from tiny handheld digital cameras to computer software to the letters on Kodak buildings around the world.

The logo is one part of Kodak's larger effort to redefine its brand-name identity, through advertising, public relations, supplier and partner relationships and other in areas. "We want to break out of the box, in a lot of ways," says Betty Noonan, director of brand management and marketing services at Kodak.

While this gives you some more knowledge, it doesn't give you any sense of how Kodak plan to break out of the box or in what ways.

Contrast this approach with that of Intel, who pulled out all the communication stops to get their new message out to the world.