There are still people who doubt that Marketing accountability is a must. Golden rules for 2.0 including disclosure, transparency and openness are not ( repeat not) an option. For those people, here is the living proof that posting fake positive comments (a practice known as astroturfing) about one’s product on other people’s websites is a no-no:

ATTORNEY GENERAL CUOMO SECURES SETTLEMENT WITH PLASTIC SURGERY FRANCHISE THAT FLOODED INTERNET WITH FALSE POSITIVE REVIEWS

Cuomo’s deal is first case in nation against growing practice of “astroturfing” on Internet

’Lifestyle Lift’ Will Pay $300,000 in Penalties and Costs to New York State

NEW YORK, N.Y. (July 14, 2009) – Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today announced a settlement with cosmetic surgery outfit Lifestyle Lift over the publishing of fake consumer reviews on the Internet.

Under the settlement, Lifestyle Lift will stop publishing anonymous positive reviews about the company to Internet message boards and other Web sites, and will pay $300,000 in penalties and costs to the State of New York. The case is believed to be the first in the nation aimed at combating “astroturfing,” a growing problem on the Internet.

Lifestyle Lift employees published positive reviews and comments about the company to trick Web-browsing consumers into believing that satisfied customers were posting their own stories. These tactics constitute deceptive commercial practices, false advertising, and fraudulent and illegal conduct under New York and federal consumer protection law. The settlement marks a strike against the growing practice of “astroturfing,” in which employees pose as independent consumers to post positive reviews and commentary to Web sites and Internet message boards about their own company.

• read on at http://www.oag.state.ny.us/media_center/2009/july/july14b_09.html

important notice: this is the unabridged version of an article which was originally published on the Sterling Performance blog by Bnet.co.uk

Bob Pearson, has just been appointed President of the newly rebranded Social Media Business Council (*) after a successful stint as Vice President, Communities and Conversations at Dell. Bob has been kind enough to agree to answer our few questions on behalf of our BNET readers. My focus in this interview will be on Bob Pearson’s experience, how he plans to use it in his new role, and about his plans for the expansion of the Social Media Business Council.

BNET: you successfully deployed social media initiatives on behalf of a worldwide high-tech company. Is social media only for geeks?

BP: No, social media is about having a conversation directly with your customers. It’s so important that companies take time to see the value in building a long-term relationship with their customers via social media. Many of the initial ideas may have started with “geeks”, who I certainly appreciate, but we live in a world today that has over 1.6 billion people online and more than 500,000 new people going online everyday for the first time in their lives. Social media is becoming mainstream for customers today and should start to become so for companies in the near future.

BNET: what are in your eyes and based on your experience the top three benefits which you, your previous employer and your clients derived from these social media initiatives?

BP: There are many benefits for companies, but gaining ideas, co-shaping your brand and unlocking the value of employees are certainly three important ones.

Social media provides an amazing window into how customers think and what they want. For example, why conduct a focus group with 10 people in a single location when you can build an idea community, ala Dell or Starbucks and receive thousands of ideas and listen to customers discuss them over months? For companies, it’s also important to co-shape your brand and reputation with your customers online. If you conduct strong analytics and you know where your products are being reviewed, you’ll find that a large brand may have as many as 5,000 conversations about itself every day. Ask yourself how many of those conversations you’re participating in or knowledgable of? If you’re not, you’re outsourcing your brand. Powerful thought.

I’ve also seen how social media inside a company enables employees to share their thinking and, quite frankly, let you know if they agree with the direction of the company via their comments or, in some cases, their silence.

BNET: what were the three main successful drivers behind your successful implementation of social media?

BP: I’ve heard people say “make the R small and the I big in ROI”. I like that advice. Social media does not have to cost a lot of money to try. What you need are some courage and a willingness to engage directly with your customers. I like asking people “how many customers do you actually speak with every day”? For too many people in companies, the answer is zero.

Here are three key drivers: #1 – know where conversations are occurring about your brand #2 – have clear rules of the road in how you will conduct social media, including an online policy and #3 – realize that customers want to hear from you, they do not want to hear from “the company”, so personalize your approach. The new formula is “Brand + Personality”.

BNET: how big and how successful is the Blog Council and what sort of a club is it?

BP: Social media is becoming a new discipline within companies that impacts all employees and all departments. As a result, it’s very important for leaders in social media to have a private place to share best practices and learn from each other in real time. There is no better person to learn from then a peer who is figuring out the same thing in a different industry.

The result is the formation of the Blog Council, which now has 60 of the world’s leading brands as members, such as Orange, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Intel, Microsoft and Coca Cola.

BNET: are all companies entitled to join the blog Council, or do they have to meet certain criteria?

BP: The Blog Council is for larger companies, generally over 5,000 employees. The key is that members are actively seeking to improve in social media. We want members who want to learn by asking their peers questions, share ideas and do it all in an “ego-less” environment.

BNET: what are your plans for the development of the Blog Council? Is there anything you’d like to share with our readers? A scoop maybe?

BP: Well, it’s fair to say that our name was ready for a change. In fact, we just changed our name to the Social Media Business Council and you can find us at www.socialmedia.org.

BNET: some of the “bloggers blogging about bloggers” to put it in the words of Andy Sernovitz are sometimes critical of the blog Council, what would you like to say to them?

BP: We welcome everyone’s opinion. We’re focused on building social media as a discipline and helping our members achieve success. It’s all about the conversation and we hope everyone will share how they think we can do better (as an organization and for our members).

BNET: there has been points made by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff and also Seth Godin (in his Meatball Sundae opus) that social media wasn’t for all big companies. What is your opinion about that?

BP: I respect the body of work of both Josh and Seth very much, but I could not disagree more with this particular comment. Social media is for every company that wants to improve how it interacts with its employees and its customers. Internally, a company has a major opportunity to unlock intellectual capital of its employees or gain their ideas more quickly to improve products. Externally, we are scratching the surface on how we can empower customers. Imagine opening up new B2B channels between major companies to communicate more effectively, for example.

I’ve worked inside three Fortune 500 companies and have met with many others, so I’m quite sure of the opportunity ahead of us for companies of all sizes.

BNET: Is the blog Council only about corporate blogging or does it cover a much broader spectrum?

BP: The Blog Council is about social media and how it is utilized to improve communications with employees and customers. Social media represents the most direct way to have a conversation and, in many respects, the most powerful way to learn, share and build relationships. The leading companies of the world are embracing social media and learning how to utilize it effectively. Not every company understands the significance of social media today, but that’s normal for any transformation. They will with time.

Thanks Bob for answering our questions very openly. Our Bnet readers interested in knowing more about the the Social Media Business Council can connect to http://socialmedia.org

(*) note: For the sake of disclosure, it needs to be pointed out that the author is also a member of the Social Media Business Council in which he is the Orange representative.

Of course, we knew already about it, but it’s been made public only recently that the late Blog Council has changed its name to Social Media Business Council (aka SMBC). We are very pleased to be able to relay that information (note: I am a proud member of smbc) and we wish our friend Bob (picture below) and the whole council a lot of successful un-conferences and blogwell meetings.

The aim of the name change is I believe obvious, that is to say to send a clear message to the business community – and the social media community – that social media isn’t just about Corporate blogging, it’s about a much broader range of subjects and tools including micro-blogging, social networking and others. This however – I can almost hear a few giggles here and there – that Corporate blogging is over and that we made a mistake by promoting Corporate blogging. Nothing could be more false. It means that Corporate blogging is one of the tools – and a powerful one at that – and that it cannot stand on its own without a few others on the side.

For your benefit, here’s the press announcement made by the Blog C… sorry, the Social Media Business Council

Blog Council becomes the Social Media Business Council, moves to SocialMedia.org

Posted by on June 30, 2009

Big news from all of us here at GasPedal and the newly renamed Blog Council: Our community for social media leaders at large companies has officially changed its name to the Social Media Business Council and has moved from BlogCouncil.org to SocialMedia.org. Here’s the press release with more details:

Chicago, IL — The Blog Council, a community of social media leaders at large companies, has officially changed its name to the Social Media Business Council and will call SocialMedia.org its new online home.

“Every day, our members share advice on how to build successful, scalable and self-sufficient social media programs,” said Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Social Media Business Council and its parent company, GasPedal. “This new name and domain better reflect the wide range of issues our community focuses on.”

The name change was a collaborative effort, with members sharing dozens of name suggestions before selecting Social Media Business Council through a vote at Member Meeting 4 in New York City.

• read more on the blog of the Social Media Business Council

note: picture courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/hyku/ on Flickr, this picture was made available by its author under the Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic creative common licence.

http://media-aces.org blog now open

Media-aces.org is the blog which will underpin our new club of European social media enterprise experts. This isn’t just another blog about web 2.0, but the platform which we will use in order to evangelise about social media and how important it is in the business world.

• read on at http://media-aces.org

6 steps to valuable Internet Content

important notice: this is the unabridged version of a post first published on bnet.co.uk

After a decade and a half of evangelisation by the likes of Seth Godin (re his book entitled: Permission Marketing) and those who followed in his footsteps, Marketers are now finally waking up to the idea that pre-formatted communications aren’t the right way to engage with customers (re Forrester’s Laura Ramos’s report on why Marketers, even in B2B have to get to grips with a new communications paradigm). So now is the time to hone these story-telling skills in your Marketing department and write valuable content for the Web. But what do I mean by valuable content? I mean content that brings value to your visitors, which could possibly initiate discussions, questions and comments (I’m talking about articulate comments, not cyber-babble).

In this article, I have expressed my views about writing for the web (also summed up in a creative commons slideshare presentation per below), based on what I have been able to implement successfully in the field over the past 15 years, in order to find out how that can be done:

Step 1: the idea that web text has to be terse is not a good idea

It is often said that people don’t read on screens and that as a consequence you shouldn’t write long pages and keep long stories short. There are several reasons why this is not relevant:

• If your site is performing well, most of your visits will come from search engines, not from your own links (based on my experience, I would say that ballpark figures range from 40 to 70+% of readers coming from search engines, 70% being applicable to pure content-orientated websites). And text-related search results won’t show pages with no text,
• It is true that people don’t read in the same way on the Internet (see step 3), but it is false to say that they don’t read anything on screens. Besides, when content is good they will probably print it out in order to read it offline. After all, this will not be counted as an additional visit but it is as if not more important than online reading,
• Search engines are fond of text, and indexing is based on keywords, not images, and certainly not hot air. One of the key success factors for your SEO (i.e. search engine optimisation; we’ll get back to this subject in a future post) is that the keywords your visitors will be searching for will be present in your pages more than once. If your text is too short and doesn’t comprise these keywords, it is bound to remain the Internet’s best kept secret,
• A good story doesn’t depend on its length, but on the author’s ability to retain the attention of his readers. Otherwise, many a classic novel would have been banned due to excessive length and numerous repetitions.

To sum it up in a few words, if your text is too concise, it won’t be seen by your visitors because most chances are that they will never even land on your page (QED).

Step 2: spice up your text with images, not the other way round

(note: that is to say if your website isn’t about paintings or photography or luxury goods )

I have often found that people are mesmerised by pictures. Yet, there are a few problems associated with this:

• First and foremost, you might see the pictures but search engines won’t. OK, Google has an image option but the way that images are indexed on Google is dependent on the text that surrounds them (amongst other elements we’ll describe in a post dedicated to search engine optimisation),
• Flash animations aren’t really a good idea. Since the 1990’s I have seen several cyclical trends with regard to Flash technology. Every once in a while, a flurry of flash-based websites will crop up and then disappear because they are mostly irrelevant, unmaintainable and above all unseen by search engines. There are statements all over the Web mantioning that flash animations are indexed but this is only partially true. Lastly, visitors hate flash animations, if I judge by all the comments I see in the surveys I carried out on the subject. I would recommend that you use flash technology only when it’s really needed, for high-end luxury products for instance, or art-related websites, and also for interactive presentations/applications which bring actual value-add to the visit process,
• Large pictures placed on a web page tend to kill the text around and below them (more details on pictures and eye-tracking here). All the eye-tracking tests I have seen performed on this particular subject tend to converge and even e-commerce websites are falling prey to this kind of issues. When asked to click a promotional link for instance, users usually avoid clicking on the large banners that have been installed for that purpose – even very visibly – on the web page. At best they will see that an animation is moving but they will seldom read it and click it. Is this a valid explanation for the very poor ratios delivered by advertising banners? This remains an open question.

Step 3: hypertext, hypertext, hypertext

What Sir Tim Berners Lee has to be remembered for is not the Internet (which was created in the 1960’s) but the http protocol which enables html pages (themselves an evolution of the sgml publication language) to contain rich text for online publication. Most of our readers will probably not know that the ‘ht’ in http is an abbreviation for hypertext, i.e. the ability to transform a text into a hot link which will take you to another page/image/etc. called a URL (unique resource location). Without html, the web wouldn’t exist, so I fail to understand why so many communications and media professionals still want to build websites in which there are no links.

As a consequence, when creating a new web page, one should immediately think about not just adding links to it, but actually shaping the content around those links.

Jakob Nielsen – probably the world’s most revered web usability expert – is proving the point on his page (http://useit.com) on which no images exist but in which all the text of the home page is made of links. Internal links, external links, links to videos, glossaries, resources, partners, podcasts etc. the list of possibilities is endless. And all link-less websites should be ditched immediately.

The web is not a place for a cut and paste from your Corporate paper brochures, there is no value for your visitors in doing that, and they won’t come back to your website if you do this.

Step 4: Good content shows in the title

Often I see product managers coming to me with requests about their web page and when talking to them I realise that they haven’t really thought of the people who will be visiting these pages. They keep their minds focused on their product names but they fail to ask themselves two important questions:

1. What is the generic terminology for my product vs the product name which net users will only use if they know it,
2. What is the problem that my product is trying to solve (Michael Bosworth would have used the term ‘painpoint’) which I could describe here (see step 6 for details).

And most of the time, I can tell from the title of the page that these elements, and possibly many other Marketing aspects which have nothing to do with the web, have been overlooked.

So working on the title of your page is a good place to start your Internet Marketing work for shaping web content. Please note that a good title is usually made of a combination of three keywords separated with hyphens or commas.

(note: As understanding SEO means knowing how to search for information, I would recommend that you read this article about information tracking on the Internet).

Step 5: Keywords mean a lot

Once a good title has been found, one can start working on the keywords that we would like to see indexed by Google. If those keywords are nowhere to be found in the page, then you stand absolutely no chance of being indexed properly by Google and other search engines (keyword tracking tool available here, courtesy of Google).

A keyword is a combination of words, in which the order will matter (as an aside, foreigners using accented words will face another challenge, for accented words are indexed separately from non-accented ones. e.g. “café” is not identical to “cafe” for a search engine).

And keywords mean a lot, not just about what you are describing, but about what net users are searching, the problems they have, the solutions they are looking for and even who they are. Keywords will tell you a lot about your users/visitors.

Step 6: Creating valuable content

So now that we have taken all first 5 steps into account, it is now possible for us to work on building valuable content for our web pages and to focus on our visitors. We can split the latter into 3 different categories:

1. Your client/visitor understands his/her problem, and has identified a solution: detailed, straightforward product/solutions descriptions should be made available to address this requirement. Diagrams should be plentiful, descriptions should be clear, technical terms defined in a glossary. Interactive applications can also be developed so as to facilitate clients’ choices and search when there are many devices for instance,
2. Your client/visitor knows he has a problem but isn’t aware that a solution exists, in which case his/her point of entry will be the focus on the problem via a search engine. Your buyer or influencer will browse the web in order to find information relevant to his/her problem and he/she will use the keywords that are relevant to this particular problem. Putting yourself in the shoes of your client/visitor will help you guess what these keywords could be,
3. Your client/buyer doesn’t even know that he/she has a problem, let alone that a solution exists and that you are selling it. Attracting buyers and influencers of that kind to your website will require more effort than just shifting your boxes. Most ICT vendors know this situation, since type 3 customers are probably the most numerous, and it’s often dubbed evangelisation. Evangelisation is when you have to prove to your client that this solution he/she hadn’t thought about is bound to solve a problem he/she didn’t know he/she had. And the best way to do that is to demonstrate the problem, either through ROI analysis, consulting, or even what is called opportunity assessments (engagements in which clients are shown that a problem exists and that solutions can be found). Your website can also act as an opportunity assessment (see outsourcing example available here) if you build your pages in order to target this population and demonstrate that the problem exists. Those pages will mostly be aimed at the ecosystem of your clients, and your content will have to be usable by this ecosystem (namely by consultants) who can in their turn use it to advise their clients.

3D animations from photos by motion portrait

We have already covered the subject of 3D avatars aka IVA’s (Intelligent Virtual Agents) for business on this blog.

Motion Portrait in Japan is taking this one step further with the ability to turn a 2D picture into a fully-fledged 3D intelligent animation. The result is awesome and can be seen on their home page at  http://www.motionportrait.com/e/. If you refresh that page you’ll see different versions of the same avatar, with different accessories (fuzzy-haired wig, moustache and thick eyebrows,  spectacles or plain 3D animation).

Very impressive indeed, and also a bit weird to a certain extent in so far as it is very close to a real person and therefore very strange. Motion Portrait also offer manga-style IVA’s or other formats. Their IVA’s aren’t just made for web pages but can be adapted for mobile phones, TV programmes and game consoles.

The second blogwell presentation at Blogwell #3 which took place on April 29 in NYC, was that of Molly Schonthal from Nokia, who is in charge of social media for the Finnish cell phone manufacturer in the US, and also one of our representatives of the blog Council.

Molly’s presentation was truly outstanding, there were so many questions and answers at the end of the presentation that I’ve had a hard time trying to keep track of them all, but a good many of them will be transcribed in this post anyway.

The presentation was entitled “from broadcast to social media”. And it started with references to Tara Hunt’s latest book, “the Whuffie factor”, on which we have already had an opportunity to comment on this very blog (click here for an interview of Tara Hunt about her new book).

Molly insisted on the fact that “what is difficult for a big company is ‘listening’, participating openly and respectfully.” It might in fact sound to be an obvious thing to do, but it’s not always for a large organisation, for it is so easy to be concentrated on one’s internal organisational issues and forget about one’s clients. So what are the changes as a big organisation is facing when trying to engage in different kinds of relationships with its customers and ecosystem?

1.  One has to think, Molly says, not in terms of technological adoption, but of “psychological adoption”. Web 2.0, she says, is not difficult from a technical point of view, and it can be set up in a matter of seconds. But working with communities can take a lot longer than that.

2.  Her second point is just about that, when she says that “building networks take time”. And, “it does not follow the principles of normal press relations”. She even coined the phrase “social release” which she opposed to press release. What it takes is actually creating messages that are relevant to influencers. And to stop and listen and engage. And she also insisted upon the fact that collaboration is about “cross functional interactions which are at the heart of success”.

What Molly and Nokia’s teams have been able to achieve in the field of social media is just awesome. Here are just a few examples which I have been able to catch up on the catch on the fly:

1. Nokia encouraged the widespread adoption of 2.0 tools internally,
2. Nokia developed what they called an “infopedia” internally. This is some sort of Wikipedia, but it is internal. It was actually instrumental in getting Nokia employees to understand what a wiki is what a blog is etc.,
3. Nokia also created a blog hub: all internal blog content was focussed in one place that is to say that access is granted to what employees are talking about, sharing thoughts and ideas,
4. An internal webTV was also created, which is some sort of youtube which enables employees to upload, invent and discuss,
5. externally, blogs have also been rolled out, therefore enabling conversations about Nokia products. They also created a platform called “blogbites”, which enables them to generate three-minute podcasts from existing text.”

Engaging with influencers is also a very important item on the Nokia agenda, and they are engaging with them on events, such as SXSW09.

Molly also insisted on what she called the blogger test centre tour which actually consisted in sending bloggers to two different countries. The stories were published in leading blogs such as Gizmodo, Techcrunch, the BBC etc. A 500,000 audience reach was achieved for that event in 2 geographical areas (the UK and Australia).

As a conclusion Molly insisted upon the fact that one had to allow company culture to evolve, beyond “PowerPoint slides with bullets in them”. (Reminiscent of an article I published a long time ago with the help of Giancarlo, and which was entitled PowerPointitis)

questions and answers

1. how are you selecting bloggers for your events?

Few people can be admitted in the test centre. Loads of explanations about temperatures were given (Nokia phones had to resist all kinds of temperatures, perform the lowest to the highest). The Nokia lab folks were also very excited about the idea and about the ability to interact with real people. The way that Nokia organised this was very straightforward. All Nokia had to do was to “invite them and be nice with them”.

2. measurements?

It is very hard to track results back to sales, Molly says. They do do some monitoring at Nokia, and then look at the number of people and followers (Nokia has more than 500 followers on twitter). Another question was, “how did you convince managers?” Molly responded to that: “our company understands the value of social media”, which is great support what she and her teams are doing at Nokia across the world for social media. She also insisted that social media produces soft numbers, which do not have to be linked to sales automatically.

3. what is the hardest thing?

The most difficult thing according to Molly Schonthal is to “listen well all the time”. It is hard to get an e-mail from a blogger/influencer, she says, because it always has to be taken as an emergency. “One has to stop,” she adds, it’s a “personal challenge”. Raising expectations is an issue (a phrase which I heard often times pronounced during this blogwell session). Planning is also a major issue: “one has to avoid formatting” she adds (mainly on twitter)

4. what are your worries about accountability?

Molly says that Nokia never “discloses private information, earnings, confidential information etc.” But that in the long run, some “of that could happen with maturity” and that “Nokia’s people and managers are not hindered by fear”. (I take this opportunity to link back to the minutes of a previous blogwell session in San Jose which was facilitated by Ken Kaplan from Intel about fear and social media)

5. how do you handle comments?

“You cannot say you’re open and honest and stop people from saying things” Molly rightfully points out. So, you will have to assume that some of the comments won’t always be coming your way and you’ll have to take it like a man.

6. what is the difference between press and social media release?

Molly says that social media release comes with some video plus a bunch of pictures and multimedia files to download and text which is more appropriate for blogs. It is true that more and more packages such as these are made available on the market by agencies on behalf of big businesses.

8. what about smaller bloggers?

There is more than one approach, Molly says, and we hope to do it again with more folks.

9. responding to external comments?

Molly says that you have to ask yourself two questions:

• one: do you have to respond to it? The answer may not always be yes
• two: disclosure: “this is Molly from Nokia, and this is my personal opinion.” Is the phrase which should be used (I would also recommend that you go back to and these recommendations on disclosure)

 

Kogart House in Andrassy Ut in Budapest - Digital Marketing Forum 2009

On May 5, 2009 I was invited to deliver a presentation at the Digital Marketing Forum in Budapest, Hungary. The seminar was chaired and facilitated by fellow LinkedIn networker, Marketing expert and professional presenter Davig Hughes (apparently an amateur surfboarder too). 

The presentation is also made available online at Slideshare.net:

Tara Hunt (pic Lane Hartwell, all rights reserved)

Tara Hunt is a name that means a lot to Social Media experts but not only. Enterprise marketers are also – or should be – familiar with her earlier attempts at promoting a new form of marketing philosophy entitled Pinko Marketing, the aim of which was to prolong the work that had been initiated by the cluetrain manifesto team at the end of the 1990’s.

Beside her involvement in Barcamp and the coworking project, the San Francisco-based Canadian online marketer has got back to writing a new book The Whuffie Factor which is now available in the UK. I have asked Tara to present her new opus to our BNET readers in this interview.

Read on at http://blogs.orange-business.com