He is one of the wealthiest and most powerful business men on the planet. George Soros now turns to blogging in his quest for regime change in the US.
Via JD Lasica.
Category: Blogging
SvD editorial blog a sandbox for free market think-tank Timbro
Svenska Dagbladet’s editorial blog PJ Just Nu, is turning out to be a sandbox for liberal think-tank Timbro. Yesterday I mentioned the Timbro connections between PJ Anders Linder and the first three blogs he recommends. In today’s paper Svenska Dagbladet comments on yesterday’s succesful blog launch and quotes two people. Who? Timbro thinkers Dick Erixon and Johan Norberg of course.
On the blog today Linder “debunks” Morgan Spurlocks film Supersize me and gets support from Waldemar Ingdahl, president of Swedish think-tank Eudoxa. Ingdahl who by coincidence also has published a book at Timbro.
Both Eudoxa and Timbro are part of International Policy Network. IPN’s main mission is to “support and help establish international, rightwing thinktanks, to organise conferences and campaigns, and to write articles promoting its agenda.”
Also, read this review of Eudoxa’s political connections by Michael H. Chung, Senior Fellow at Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, University of Washington.
IOC video clip policy
Streaming video from the Olympics have been much debated. This FAQ from Swedish Television shows yet another example of IOC’s goofy control policies:
According to IOC rules, in order to view video clips you must:
> You must have Windows 98 SE or a newer version.
> You must have Windows Media Player version 9 installed.
> Your computer must allow cookies.
> You must register with username and password of your own choice, and a valid email address. Then you must log in using this information when you want to watch the clips. Registration is only necessary the first time you want to watch a clip.
> Your bandwitdh must be faster than 100 kbps. A bandwidth test of your connection will be performed.
> Your computer must be located within the Eurovision-area. An IP-test and control of your system clock will be performed to establish your time zone.
Observ that your registration is personal! You cannot send video clips to another computer. Illegitimate use of video clips will result in us blocking your VPN, Proxy and IP-address for use of streaming without notice.
Ouch!
IOC bans blogging
While most organizations are adapting to a world where transparency is the cathword, the IOC is moving in the opposite direction. With an attitude worthy a dictatorship, the IOC tries to control every communicative aspect of the Olympic games in Athens.
First we learned that spectators are banned from the arenas if they bring in products of the wrong brand. Then we all laughed at the moronic linking policy of Athens 2004.
Now USA Today reports that Olympic athletes are largely barred from posting online diaries such as blogs.
“The IOC’s rationale for the restrictions is that athletes and their coaches should not serve as journalists — and that the interests of broadcast rightsholders and accredited media come first.”
“The Olympic guidelines threaten to yank credentials from athletes who are in violation as well as to impose other sanctions or take legal action for any monetary damages.”
The US army tried a control/command approach in Iraq but failed miserably. Why would the IOC succeed in controlling the debate, and for what reason? Today, media consumers are also producers and anyone equipped with a digital camera or an internet connection can scoop big media. Trying to stop people from expressing what they see is a violation of freedom of speech.
In the end, it is we as consumers who pay for this spectacle by bying products from the sponsors, by watching the ads that finance media, by visiting the arenas and so on. We should demand a diversity of voices and not accept propaganda style reporting.
(Link via Micro Persuasion)
Quiet is the new loud
My final thoughts on Global PR Blog Week:
When trying to summarize my impressions of this week, I come to think of the title of an album from the Norwegian lo-fi rock group Kings of Convenience. It is called “Quiet is the new loud”. Is that not what we have been preaching through out this week? That, in times when everyone screams, the solution is not to scream louder but to whisper. It has become incredibly hard to reach consumers via mass communication. Super Bowl ads and sponsorships of the Olympics, millions of dollars are spent on branding activities with questionable results. But with new technology like blogs we have the opportunity to start small conversations – whispers – with tiny groups of people who actually will listen, which if our predicitions are right, in time will spread and our messages will have the chance to reach larger audiences. Quiet is the new loud.
Anyhow, Global PR Blog Week has been a positive and interesting experience. We have learned a lot ourselves, made new contacts and hopefully shared knowledge with people outside our little PR blog community. One thing though that I think have been partly missing from the debate is that we are focusing very much on the distribution of news and not the quality of news today. Sure we like to believe that media consumers are getting more and more of their news online, but at least here in Sweden, it is simply the online versions of the traditional media. Still just a fraction of all people get a fraction of their news intake via blogs or independent online media. Big media rules like never before, in spite of internet. And big media don’t write about stuff that matters anymore.
Media concentration in combination with conglomeration and infotainment journalism prevents vital information from reaching citizens in favour of trivia. And in my eyes is it getting more and more difficult for PR to get the messages out simply because the media are full of non-news and the space PR is fighting for is getting smaller and smaller. Let me give you an example from Sweden.
Last fall, the Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death in the center of Stockholm by a young man named Mijajlo Mijailovic. It was a story that was of vital interest to all citizens of this country. A leading member of the government gets stabbed by a lunatic in broad daylight. The notion shook our socitey and everything Sweden stands for, openess, safety, democracy etc.
In January 2004, there was a murder in Knutby, a small community north of Uppsala in Sweden. The story had all kinds of nasty ingredients, including sex, murder, religion and technology. A perfect news story, but one that had nothing to do with ordinary people’s lives, and should not be very interesting.
Not surprisingly though, Swedish media has to this date written 7291 articles about the Knutby murder and just under 6000 articles about Mijailovic. Both incredibly high numbers, but still, shouldn’t the murder of our Foreign Minister be more important to cover than a local murder? Why are our media full of trivia and nonsense like all these reality show “news”? These stories are like a balloon you try to flush down the toilet. It is just air, but it still keeps floating up to the surface over and over again. Even serious news tend to turn into mega events. One month it is the Iraq war, the next it is all about the European Championships in football or the Olympics. News are blown out of proportion and no other stories can be told.
This is what we are up against and what I think is the most important challenge for the new PR, to find ways to increase diversity of voices and to get a multitude of messages. Blogs, wikis and so on are a very good start and I have high hopes for the future. Let’s continue to build on the knowledge we’ve gained during Global PR Blog Week and make it an annual event.
How to launch a corporate blog for a professional services organization
I just posted this on the event site of Global PR Blog Week 1.0.
Traditionally, branding is associated with physical products and consumer packaged goods. But branding has become a crucial part of business for the service industry who today employs more people than all other industries combined. And mergers and acquisitions in combination with global deregulation has seen the rise of many powerful global brands in the service industry. Financial services has been in the forefront of this development and four of the 30 most valuable brands (according to Interbrand) in the world are financial services brands (Citibank, American Express, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch).
Branding is increasingly important for professional services companies for several reasons. You can not store a service, it is consumed at the same time as it is produced. If you are going to buy a new digital camera, you can go to the store and look at it, feel it and try it out before you buy. You can’t do that with a service which means that your impressions of the brand are extremely important. You buy a service on trust, this company will best fulfill my expectations.
Services are also hard to show. How do you illustrate management consulting?
In a professional services company, like a law firm, a PR agency or a management consultancy, you sell competence. The most important and most expensive asset is your employees. Since services are hard to illustrate, much of the brand is built in the meeting between your employees and the customers. And the more frequent and qualitative conversation you have with your clients, the better. Corporate blogs can play a vital part of that conversation.
We can assume that the harder it is to evaluate a service before it is bought, the more important it is that the customer has favorable associations to the brand. And the more knowledge-intensive and less standardized the service is, the harder it is for a customer to evaluate the service prior to purchase. It might be easier to evaluate a cleaning company than a PR agency. Another factor is the risk involved in the purchase. The higher the risk, the more importance is placed on the brand.
Few things are more effective in marketing a professional services company than establishing experts or thought leaders who act as speakers at seminars, get publicity when quoted in media and in general act as the face of the brand. And one of the most obvious advantages of corporate blogs is that they fairly quickly can build industry experts and corporate stars. That said, it should be clear that professional services brands are among those that can benefit most from starting corporate blogs.
Corporate blogs can help professional services companies, well, any company, to improve different aspects of its communications, not just in brand building. Before starting a blog, ask yourself:
What areas of communication needs improvement in your organization?
External communication
* Brand awareness/Brand positioning
* Business development
* Issues management/lobbying
* Crisis communication
* Media relations
* Recruitment marketing
* Customer support
* Reseller/dealer support
* Community relations
Internal communication
* Knowledge management
* Sales support
* Project communication
I have researched as many case studies and articles about corporate blogging as possible during the last months in order to list some of the arguments why blogs should belong in the arsenal of the marketing departement.
External communication
Brand awareness/Brand positioning
– Build awareness of the company and the nature of its business.
– Change the positioning of your brand.
– Influence the influencers – “Nike is talking to the right people — instead of the most people — who happen to be the influencers”.
– Marketing your expertise – “As with conventional publishing, bloggers get their names out there and can carve out niches as experts.”
– Improve search engine ranking. A few days after the Stockholm Spectator had an article about plagiarism at Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter, 5 of the 10 first results of the journalists name in Google came from blogs.
– To drive traffic to your company web page. New content makes readers come back, and the effect will spill over to your corporate web site, which probably is not updated as often.
– Reach new audiences. RSS and news aggregators allow people to ”subscribe” to words or phrases which in turn makes it possible for your messages to find new audiences.
Business development
– To launch a product or service – “Oxygen Media launched a blog to promote its new show Good Girls Don’t.”
– Gaining new clients. “Today’s “tech-friendly” (law) students will become tomorrow’s corporate counsels. Indeed, the idea that these students will ignore technology and revert to paper-driven processes becomes the increasingly ridiculous conclusion. More specifically … these decision makers of tomorrow may also immediately think of the web as a logical place to start looking for a lawyer.”
Issues management/lobbying
– Many politicians use blogs for opinion building. Organizations and
corporations can too.
Crisis communication
– I have yet not met a PR Manager that honestly can say that he quickly can post messages on the company web site himself on a Saturday afternoon, without having to call some site owner in a central position within the company. A crisis blog could be a quick way to post information in times of crisis, from remote places and on odd hours.
Media relations
– Companies are beginning to experiment with sending press releases via RSS. Predictions are that journalists will start using news aggregators and RSS readers to avoid being dependent on a mail box full of spam. So far, we have no indications that this actually works, rather we can see that the news stories sent out via RSS are being picked up by bloggers who spread the news. For example, the 8 press releases distributed by Apple via RSS between June 8 and June 23, 2004, were all picked up by blogs. In the Bloglines monitoring system, all press releases were picked up, the most popular one with 15 references (certainly more bloggers wrote about the topics without posting a direct link)
Recruitment marketing
– Today’s students are more used to finding information online, and via blogs, and they will become tomorrow’s employees (and clients, competitors etc).
Customer support
– RSS can replace email as communications channel. The number of e-mail
newsletters is increasing, so is spam. Many newsletters get caught in the spam filters. Syndicating your communication via RSS can be more effective, or at least as a support to the regular newsletters. “At the height of the spread of the Sobig.F virus (…), PaidContent.org publisher Rafat Ali suspended publication of his daily e-mail newsletter and opted for an RSS version instead.”
Reseller/dealer support
– Blogs can be used to distribute information about new campaigns, new products, FAQs, to your resellers and dealers.
Community relations
– To engage in a more direct conversation with customers, users, developers, employees etc. “Sun sees its Blogs.sun.com web site as a possible model for a new type of grassroots corporate communication.”
Internal communication
– Motivate present employees. Lets them show their expertise.
– Encourages dialogue, in contrast to ordinary top-down “weekly newsletters from the boss”.
Knowledge management
– Act as a learning tool internally.
– Blogs as research tool. Feeds offer an efficient and inexpensive means to notify a large audience of a research question or need.
Sales support
– Competetive intelligence. “Information about new campaigns or new products. Verizon is reportedly using commercial blog technology within its competitive intelligence and market research group.”
Project communication
– Improve information sharing within projects. The Navy’s eBusiness Operations Office is using blogs to improve information sharing for program managers, project experts, contractors, sponsors, and war-fighters.
Now that you have the arguments for starting a corporate blog I will share some thoughts on how to get started. Since I am in the starting phase of launching a corporate blog for the law firm I am working for, this corporate blog roadmap is written with the eyes of a PR practitioner in a global professional services firm, but can be useful for most organizations. My top priority with a blog is to build brand recognition and promote experts in different fields of law, so if your purpose differs, there might be other factors to consider.
But first we must distinguish between
– Corporate blog: an official blog from a company, which signals that the blog is an official communications channel for the company
– Employee blog: a blog run by one or several employees of a company, with or without the endorsement of the company, about the company or business related to it
How to start a corporate blog:
1. Identify what area of communications you want to improve.
2. Choose to start a corporate blog or to encourage an employee blog.
3. Should you start a group blog or an individual blog?
4. What geographic area should the blog cover (global or should one country begin as a trial project?) and what language should you use (if you start in one country and think of replicating to more countries, should you have all in English or should they be local)
5. Company wide blog or blog per practice group, market unit, product group, industry sector?
6. Find evangelists who are good communicators and willing to spend the time posting on the blog.
7. Get the accept from your CEO or whoever has the final say.
8. Create an editorial policy about who gets to blog, tone of voice, areas to cover, length and frequency of posts, information sources to cover, copyright aspects, target audience, do’s and dont’s.
9. Get accept from your IT department. They will worry about security and the risks of having several individuals post information live on a website. Get their help in selecting admin software and setting up the blog, domain, RSS feeds and tracking/measurement capabilities.
10. Create a corporate blog with the correct graphic profile according to your brand guidelines. Include biographies and photos of the bloggers.
11. Create an extensive list of information sources for the bloggers to cover in order to get information to comment on. Include official news sources, media, other blogs, press releases etc.
12. Give your bloggers access to a news aggregator so that they get the feel of RSS feeds and how it works.
13. Give your bloggers a list of blogs to read. Most people are not used to reading blogs and need to become familiar with blogging style writing and netiquette (linking policies etc).
14. Allow a trial period for some weeks, to be able to fine tune and make adjustments.
15. Start an RSS-feed and make the blog public.
16. Begin marketing your blog. List the blog in blog directories.
Link to the blog in your email signature and from your corporate webpage. Tell your customers and your employees. Don’t send out a press release about it, to get credit let blogs market your blog.
17. Evaluate, adjust and evaluate again.
Corporate blogs are not a universal solution to all communications problems, but used correctly they can be a perfect tool to improve external or internal communications. Law firms in the US have come a long way in using blogs, or “blawgs” as a tool for branding. Many other professional services firms will follow in their footsteps.
Footnote: Since I am offline for the first part of this week, I will not be able to answer questions or comments until Friday.