Jason Billingsley of the Get Elastic blog recorded this interview with Darren Tomey, VP of Sales from Compendium Blogware, at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

I find it interesting that Darren uses organic SEO as the rationale for why big retailers should be blogging. I don’t disagree, but my first reaction would have been to say that retailers should blog in order to build communities.

Then again, if you do build a community around your blog, I suppose the SEO boost naturally follows (you’ve probably heard that search engines love blogs) and you end up in the same place anyway. So, not only is Darren correct, but he cuts to the chase and presents an argument that is more compelling to retailers, who are notoriously numbers oriented.

Incidentally, Connie Benson describes a conversation between her, Lee Odden, Albert Maruggi and Barry Judge about community building and SEO. Connie brings up a good question: If you engage in online community building (which could include blogging among other activities) with SEO in mind, should you make deliberate use of SEO keywords, which might result in stilted and possibly off-putting language? Or do you write au naturel? She seems to come down in favor of the latter and I have to agree.

What probably seemed clever in the mind of a 23-year-old, childless copywriter turned out to be quite offensive to many moms (and dads, to be sure) and unleashed a social media firestorm.

Within a few short hours, a movement was born, complete with its own #motrinmoms hashtag on Twitter, angry blog posts, video rants, CafePress stores, Flickr groups and parody videos. In less than a day, Motrin was forced to take down the ad and apologize.

• Morriss Partee has published a chronology of events.
• Enterprise Social Media has assembled a Harpers-like index of Motrin Moms activity, which also gives a good sense of how quickly, from Motrin’s point of view, this whole thing got out of hand.
• Jack Neff covers the incident in Ad Age.

Update:
My biz partner Dean Gulstad points out an article by Jakob Nielsen on participation inequality, which supports Neff’s view that Motrin acted too hastily in responding to the social media uproar. Nielsen points out that “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” Therefore, he says, “If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.”

Yet another update:
Seth Godin pans Motrin’s apology for its lack of humanity.

Over at myRagan.com, an online community for corporate communicators, lisam recently posted:

Coworkers regularly make me aware of blogs and online media sites that either include negative commentary about our company’s products, or mention all of our competitors but not us. My coworkers ask me, “Can we have someone reply to this blog post telling them how great our products are?” Or something to that effect.

I always hesitate at this, partly because we don’t have a network we can tap into for this purpose… but also because I have ethical reservations about taking such action. That said, I tend to be a conservative communicator. Am I being too timid?

I don’t see anything wrong with commenting on behalf of the company but I think it all depends on how you approach it. I think you’ll be seen as a shill if you post comments that invalidate people’s feelings, go against verifiable facts or defy common sense. Those are the kinds of corporate responses that make many of us cringe and make Lisa understandably gun shy.

I follow @comcastcares on Twitter and I think the way Frank Eliason handles it is perfect. He serves as an ombudsman, listening for mentions of Comcast and then addressing people’s concerns, often hooking them up directly with service reps and then asking for public feedback on how the problem’s being resolved. I’m sure he can only help a handful of people on any given day, but there are tons of us listening in, so the impact is multiplied. For me, as an observer, the takeaway isn’t that the entire Comcast Corporation truly cares (puh-leeze), but I am impressed that they’ve hired at least one very personable guy, who is trying and is willing to be held accountable.

Back to the context Lisa brought up, which is the propriety/effectiveness of commenting on blogs, I think that corporate communicators actually do have the power to make a positive impression, if they are willing to:

1. Identify yourself and your position with the company. Be clear on whether you are commenting in an official capacity or just as a concerned employee. DON’T EVER COMMENT ANONYMOUSLY! You can be found out and much bigger trouble will ensue.
2. Validate the poster’s feelings (”Sorry you had that experience at our store. It must have been frustrating.”) Apologize, if that’s appropriate and at all possible (yes, legal issues abound).
3. Offer the company’s official position in a dispassionate manner.
4. Provide the factual basis or rationale behind the company’s position, so others can at least see why the company might be choosing to handle things a certain way.
5. If possible, describe what the company is working on to address the issue. Be as specific as possible.
6. If the company isn’t doing anything (or doesn’t plan on doing anything) about the poster’s complaint, be honest about it and explain the business reasons behind that decision.
7. Provide links to supporting information.
8. Provide links to additional related information, even information that is not officially supported by the company.
9. Provide specific solutions and help (e.g., the name/number of a CSR, store manager, refund page, etc.) that gives the original poster some options for getting satisfaction.

In these matters, I think intent counts for a lot, because it will show in your writing. It shows respect if you don’t try to vigorously convert people to the company’s view, but rather offer another perspective and then demonstrate your desire to be helpful. If you do that, I think few people will object to your presence in their comment section.

I just got wind of a old (Jan. 25, 2007) report by Forrester that takes on a real sticky wicket: calculating the ROI of running a corporate blog.

I’ve ranted on more than one occasion that marketers should use social media, including blogs, as an R&D tool and not to expect a hard return. But, if anyone can build a more hard-core argument for blogging, I’m all for it. After all, these are difficult times, which means money talks.

According to this post on Forrester’s Groundswell blog, if R&D (i.e., gathering customer insight) is one of your goals, you can measure your ROI by figuring what it would cost you to gather those insights via traditional means, such as focus groups, surveys, ethnographic studies, etc. If you can gather comparable or better insights via your blog at a lower cost, the difference is your ROI. If a monthly focus group costs $15k and your blog costs you $10k, your ROI is $5k.

The article makes some interesting points, including:

• There is no standard ROI model for blogs
• Your ROI depends on your metrics, which depend on your specific goals
• Measurable blogging goals might include:

- Increased brand visibility
- Savings on customer insight
- Rduction of impact from negative user-generated blogs
- Increased sales efficiency

Update:

I nearly forgot, but Gary Vaynerchuk recently posted a frantic and entertaining rant on the benefits and ROI of online marketing in a soft business market. Ya gotta check it out!

• Graeme Thickins, of DoApp and Tech~Surf~Blog fame, ponders whether using Twitter is decreasing his blogging activity. He also points to an early post on this topic by Ryan Block of Engadget: Does Twittering mean you blog less? The answer might surprise you. Personally, I’ve been seeing the effect on my own blogging. Heck, it’s way easier to spit out a 140-character tweet than to do the thinking, research and linking required for a readable blog post.

• Best Buy embraces Web 2.0 by announcing its Remix API. If, as Brad Stone’s NYT report suggests, this is part of a larger movement by legacy organizations to make their data publicly available, I think we’re in for some fun. Other recent and notable API releases include National Public Radio’s Open API, MTV’s Content API and Apple’s iPhone API.

• Speaking of the big-box retailer with the yellow, tag-shaped logo… From the irritatingly successful 4-Hour-Workweek author Timothy Ferriss, we learn that Best Buy has implemented a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) with amazing results. Specifically, they claim a 41% increase in productivity at HQ and a 90% reduction in employee attrition in some biz units. What’s ROWE? Ferriss finds out by interviewing Cali Ressler, the 20-something BBY employee who introduced ROWE from the bottom up and went on to write about the concept in Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. Read Tim Ferriss’: “No Schedules, No Meetings — Enter Best Buy’s ROWE”

  Update: Daniel Pink has an interview with Ressler and Thompson (Part 1 | Part 2)

• 3 Tips for a Great Landing Page - Landing page. Now, there’s a term, along with “microsite,” that ushers you right back to the heyday of Web 1.0. But for many marketers in Fortune 500 companies – who need 6 months lead time to put content on the corporate Web site – a microsite is still a valid tactic for supporting online and offline marketing campaigns.

• David Meerman Scott, speaking at the Inbond Marketing Summit, tackles the social media ROI question by asking, “What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?” and “What’s the ROI of the army of Guatemalan landscapers now raking the bushes around the building?” (via @desarev)

• And as long as we’re listening to gurus rip it up at conferences, be sure to check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s short, but intense keynote at the recent Web 2.0 conference in NYC. You might want to your volume down, as Gary gets excited and lets the effenheimers fly now and then.

social media

But despite the mounting curiosity, there’s still not much action on the part of mid-size to large companies.

Waiting and seeing
I can see why some folks are taking a wait-and-see approach to social media. If you wait, other folks will figure out some things for you. One or two leaders in your industry will make a big move and you’ll be able to see whether they fail or succeed. And eventually, some kind of broad consensus will emerge regarding how companies should engage with the user-generated Web.

I believe a consensus already is coalescing, but it exists mostly among brand-me and small-business owners, technology gurus, forward-thinking marketers and their followers – some of the same people who advised us that businesses should embrace the Web way back in the mid 90s. And boy were they right, even if we had a bubble and a hiccup along the way.

An emerging consensus
The emerging consensus on social media simply says that now is the time to jump in. Now is the time to play, to experiment, to make your mistakes and start to form your own professional opinions about which domains (blogging or microblogging, podcasting, wikis, social-networking, etc.) are the most productive and instructive for your company. All while it costs you next to nothing. Think of it as a free or cheap form of education, since very few of these mediums require a huge investment.

In the same way that nobody questions the need for a company to have its own Web site anymore, I believe in a couple years we’ll be at the point where nobody will question the need for companies to be engaged, in some form, in the millions of conversations taking place every minute on the social Web. Not just because a growing number of customers will expect it, but because it could come to represent one of the lowest-cost means of connecting with people who are predisposed toward your products and services.

Price to play
What might you expect to spend getting your feet wet in social media? The good news is that participation is free. It doesn’t cost you a thing to set up a blog (start with Blogger), a Flickr account, a Facebook or MySpace account or a Twitter account. If you’re reluctant to put your company’s name out on Facebook, just set up your own personal account first and see how it goes. Oh, did I mention? Unlike some forms of marketing research, it’s lots of fun!

Now, if you think you’re ready to dip your toes in the tub, but you can’t spare any FTEs, or even a portion of an FTE, consider sloshing over just a little of the cash you’re blowing on TV, radio and print ads.

• For the cost of producing and buying a print ad in a trade pub, you could hire a consultant to establish a passive presence on all the major social networks – or, better yet, an active presence on a couple of select networks!
• For the cost of a radio spot, you could hire a team to build and help you feed your blog for a year.

If you want to get serious and be prepared for the media of the future, you just might have to borrow a little from the media of the past.

Yeah, but what’s my ROI?
With some companies spending money is not the issue, but justifying the spend is. Consequently, I hear a lot about ROI: “What’s the ROI of blogging?” “What’s the ROI of being on Twitter?” And quite honestly, that’s a tough one. For instance, I can’t tell you if this blog has literally resulted in revenue for my business. But I do know that in some cases, we couldn’t have won the job without it. The blog was one of seveal critical pieces that contributed to the sale.

As you think about what kind of return you might expect from social media, keep in mind that the ROI could be entirely qualitative. Comcast maintains a Twitter account, @Comcastcares, staffed by a real guy, Frank Eliason, which they use to monitor conversations about Comcast and then to intervene when a disgruntled customer needs personal service. The ROI? Probably pretty lackluster from a pure financial point of view. But then again, what is their reputation worth to them? And how is that reputation built, if not one conversation at a time. So, what is it worth to Comcast to have thousands of influential technology aficionados – the same people you ask for help when your computer or high-speed Internet goes on the blink – see that Comcast is staffed by real people who actually appear to care?

Give ROI a vacation
Ultimately, it’s not for me or any other consultant to predict what ROI you should expect. The whole question of ROI is an evolving conversation that I believe needs to be left as a big question mark – for now. And given how cheap it is to do social media, why put so much pressure on it to earn its keep? Your company’s potted plant budget is probably ten times more than what you’ll spend on social media…and what’s the ROI on that?

The danger is that if you approach this medium with an immediate need for gain, or to monetize it somehow, you might not have the sensitivity to see how online communities are driven not by taking so much as giving. Yes, it’s a very hippie sentiment, but guess who’s running Web 2.0? Grown up hippies and their philosophical offspring! The point is that in order to thrive in any medium, you need to understand that medium’s unique rules and mores. If you don’t your marketing could come off as clumsy and self-serving and you won’t be able to build a community around your product or service.

One way forward
I know a number of marketing managers who are already familiar with social media and are eager to jump in, but they want to do so thoughtfully. They’re looking for a framework that will lend some sense of professionalism and planfulness to their social media efforts. Fair enough.

If that’s you, let me suggest that your initial success and longer term ROI on the social web will hinge on these three things:

1. Your social media persona – Do you have a clear understanding of who your company is and what it stands for in word and deed? Perhaps you’ve explored this territory in a recent branding effort. If so, dig up the dusty brand book and see what it tells you. Ultimately, you want to determine whether your company is a teacher, a helper, a connector or a [insert a personality type here].
2. Your imagination and sense of play – This is all fairly uncharted territory with very few precedents and formulas to latch onto. You might see that as a curse. I see it as a blessing. It means that the playing field is fairly level. Are you a small bank? You have just as good odds of beating out the top banks to become a real player in social media. There are many right answers and many ways to capitalize on this sea change in online behavior. But you’ve got to explore and find them.
3. Trial and error – Since there’s no script or formula to guide you, it’s reasonable to expect that some things you try might fail or succeed underwhelmingly. Maybe you’ll build an application on Facebook that attracts just 50 installs. Don’t fret. Tweak it and see what happens. With your social media persona as your guide, look for another way to act out your company’s role oline. You’re making omelets, so just commit up-front to breaking some eggs!

Get help if you need it
Of course, you’re not entirely on your own. Without spending a fortune, you could hire a social media consultant to shortcut your learning curve. A consultant could help you clarify your company’s social media persona and explore the many ways that could translate into actions. Or simply help you narrow the field and point you to some sites or networks that your company should consider first.

But ultimately, you have to take a first step, which might be as simple as bringing up the topic with your boss. Perhaps you need to lay out the alternatives:

• Your can jump into social media now while there’s still time to experiment, learn and lead.

OR

• You can wait until everyone else does it and be forced to jump in with little forethought. Because the landscape will be more defined and some of your competitors may have already set a high barrier to entry, you may not have the luxury of picking your battles. When we do achieve this “critical mass” I believe it’s going to be a mad rush. To paraphrase wine and marketing celeb Gary Vaynerchuck: You think social media is big now? Just wait until Oprah gets on Twitter!

Have you heard? Corporate blogging may soon be pushing up daisies. Or so reads the provocative description for Corporate Blogging Myths & Realities, a session at Blogworld & New Media Expo, by Paula Berg, Manager of Emerging Media at Southwest Airlines.

“A recent report from Forrester suggests that corporate blogging has had its day, the craze has passed and, frankly, companies don’t blog very well. Corporate blogs can’t drop corporate-speak, they fail to build up an audience and they’re just plain boring.

Another new report says that 39% of the Inc. 500 are blogging. And nearly 12% of the Fortune 500 have blogs, double the number of three years ago. So which is it: Myth or Reality?”

It’s true that most corporate blogs are boring and nobody reads them. And that’s because many corporate communicators either don’t get blogging or, if they do, are having a heck of a time inspiring Glasnost in the executive suite. What’s the ROI? Who has time to blog? What will Legal say?

To be fair, I think it’s much easier for some companies to blog, particularly if they are in dynamic industries, such as consumer electronics (see Garmin), travel (see Southwest), Web services (see Zillow), technology (see Google) or consumer goods (see Zappos). But what do you do if you’re a bureaucratic beast like Exxon or the U.S. Postal Service? To my knowledge, they don’t have blogs, which might be an indication of just what a challenge it is!

What would you do if you worked at a large, blogless corporation and were tapped to head up the company’s blogging effort? How would you make it a blog worth reading? Who would contribute? Would your blog have a marketing or customer service focus? How would you if you were being successful?

If I were in your shoes, I’d start here:

• Find out which of your fellow Megacorps are blogging by visiting Fortune 500 Blogging Wiki.
• Read Dawn Foster’s helpful tips for corporate bloggers.
• Memorize Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond.

The moment of confrontation. Simon Blint (blue shirt, center left) takes on Thomas Hawk and loses. Photo by Thomas Hawk.

There can be little doubt about the Web’s ability to promote reputations. But what about its ability to destroy?

Consider the case of Simon Blint, director of visitor relations at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA). Earlier this month, Blint had a run-in with a photo-taking guest and had the guest forcably ejected from the museum. According to the account posted by the guest, Thomas Hawk, Blint was out of order and abusive. This SF MOMA press release claims otherwise.

Blint might have been acting on museum policies. But just as Hawk warned him would happen, his name has since been dragged through the virtual mud (along with the good name of SF MOMA).

It turns out that Hawk is rather well connected on the Web. Thanks to his blog, his flickr site and the help of others (notably Digg and Boing Boing), Simon Blint is now stuck with a pretty serious reputation problem. Words like “douchebag,” “pariah,” “*sshole” stand out like sore thumbs on the first results page for a Google search on “Simon Blint.”

While I’m inclined to side with Hawk in this whole affair, I feel somewhat sorry for Blint. Even if he overreacted in the heat of the moment and now regrets how he handled the situation, it’s too late. Unless he saves a drowning baby or donates millions to charity — anything that will replace the current invective with praise — his name is now linked, via powerful search engine algorithms, to some pretty scathing descriptions.

Jeremiah Owyang, in his post The Long Term Impacts of Online Critics on Personal Brands (a great analysis, btw), points out that when you consider how 77% of recruiters use online search to dig up background information on candidates, and how 35% of them eliminate candidates based on what they find, it’s fair to say that Blint could have employability issues for some time.

The smearing is so thorough that I’m inclined to use “blint” as a verb to describe what happens when one’s online reputation is effectively scuttled by the collective efforts of members of the socialweb. As in, “Dude, you’ve been totally blinted!”

Just recently, I, too had a hand in “blinting” someone. If you recall, I blogged about a frightening experience with a desert guide in Peru. Within two weeks of the experience, a search on this guide’s name began to turn up some disturbing items, most notably a photo I had posted on flickr of the guide passed out and partially disrobed, which was coming up twice on the first results page.

For the guide, who was just beginning to enjoy a flood of business from a favorable writeup in the New York times, this came as a serious blow. A few days ago, I received both email and voicemail from the guide, asking me to stop.

I’ve since removed that incriminating photo, as I quickly realized that I had no right to humiliate the man. The blog post will persist, however. It currently shows up on page 2 of the Google search results and could easily climb higher. I hope that it will serve, not as punishment or revenge, but as a warning to other tourists of the risks of booking with this guide.

• Hunting for megalodon teeth with Desert Man of Ica, who was recently written up in the New York Times. (Fortunately, we made our reservation before he became famous!)
• Shooting video in some remote (as in no electricity and little Spanish spoken) Quechua villages above Ayacucho for Fundación Comunidad.
• Meeting with Minka Fair Trade to see what interesting and marketable fair-trade products Peru might have to offer.
• Above all, showing my 10-year-old son, Sam, why the ancestral lands keep calling me back.

To that last point, below are a few glimpses of Peru’s many landcapes. For a really nice slideshow, I recommend searching on “Peru landscape” at Compfight, a great tool for searching on Flickr.

Sunrise in Machu Picchu, by thecsman

Lago Huacarpay, by Don Ball

Dunes outside Ica, by Don Ball

Streets of Pisaq, by Don Ball

Islas Ballestas, by Don Ball

Miraflores by night, by Don Ball

Paccha River Valley from above, by Fundación Comunidad

Nanay, rio Nanay, by pierre pouliquin

Cordillera Central, by La Cronista de los Andes

“..free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money. [snip] To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.”