eCommunications for global organisations

Last year, I introduce the eBook ‘Your Online Journey Starts here’ at an event in Brussels, with Toyota, Microsoft and VCE (Volvo Construction Equipment) who shared their own experience with online communication.

We have captured a summary of my presentation which gives an overview of some of the key topics of the ebook.  It is intended as a simple introduction to how the internet is changing communication for global communicators, and what they can do about it.  To find out more check the video (below) or download the ebook (below).

Apologies for the poor sound quality!

I am currently stranded in Bangkok - experiencing along with millions of other passengers the joys of our new found Icelandic volcano.  It is, and has been, a fascinating story and there will be a great deal of learning to be dealt with  about how people, organizations and groups communicate in times of crisis. Just to give a few examples, some organizations such as Eurocontrol, have been doing an impressive job at keeping everyone informed by Twitter.  As someone who is in real need of up to date information, I must admit that we can really appreciate the effort made:. My understanding is that Aurelie (member of the IABC group) is involved / behind this effort so it would be great to connect with her after this is over.

On the other hand, it seems that most airlines are doing a disastrous job at keeping their passengers informed about the situation. I am myself flying with Austrian Airlines and they have been slow and unresponsive in communicating.  So in the spirit of engaged online communication, I have formed a passenger group in the hotel where I am staying in Bangkok and they started to post information about developments on a facebook group we created for the occasion: Facebook: Austrian Passengers in Bangkok

Although we only have 22 people from the flight on the group it is the main place to get the latest news from the airline and the manager of Austrian airlines is relying on us to disseminate information to passengers in an effective way.  What makes this even more ironic is that Austrian Airlines has a facebook ‘fan page’ which is, in the spirit of the Nestlé ’social media suicide’ turning into a forum for people with complaints against them.

What makes this worse is that the local manager told us that they are not allowed to go on Facebook as part of their company policy so neither he nor anyone else is able to respond to a group of frustrated passengers.

More on this when (?) I return.

Our team has just recently launched a website on Carbon Aware Travel Choice - a project that is co-financed by the European Union under the 7th Framework Programme for Research.

CATCH brings together government officials, scientists and transport experts of cities in Europe and beyond to communicate on Transport issues. The project specifically aims to support cities to encourage climate-friendly decision-making among their citizens, and to showcase learnings from good and bad examples.

As part of the project the CATCH team is developing an online knowledge engine that will help provide further details on carbon emissions which will also be very interesting tool for legislators on Carbon Emissions aiming to increase awareness of the environmental impacts of mobility, map out potential solutions to their management and to enable travelers to make informed climate-friendly travel choices.

The site includes Web2.0 tools like Youtube channel & Twitter and provides an interactive overview on Stakeholder opinions and current developments around Carbon legislation, climate facts and involvement of local authorities on this issue.

Greenpeace's Nestle Killer campaign logo

From time to time, we come across a story that demonstrates that a worst case scenario can come to life. Nestle is currently going through just that ( http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/social-crm/nestle-debacle-demonstrates-common-social-media-misunderstandings/105610).

The story is that they launched a facebook group which is a general ‘corporate’ one – if you read the information page, it talks about Nestlé, and its Mission is ‘Good Life, Good Food’.

The group has over 93 000 members, so clearly has attracted many people.

As the communication team was getting excited about the success of this open engagement strategy something went badly wrong.

Greenpeace decided to launch a campaign against Nestle called Nestlè Killer – Give the Orang-utan a break, driven from the main UK site: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/. The greenpeace campaign has all the marks of a social media campaign (including a truly gross video – do not watch this before eating!).

But here comes the twist. The greenpeace campaign gradually started to take over the Nestlé facebook group, putting comments, pictures and activating the campaign using the very platform Nestlè had build to show it’s customers how it was delivering ‘Good Life, Good Food’. The result is that currently the site is dominated by posts by anti-Nestlé campaigners. The company is struggling to find the appropriate response – first by deleting comments, then confronting the campaigners and finally apologies and letting all the comments stand. The spirit is one of open and and learning – but it feels a lot like a catastrophic situation out of which there is no easy way out. As this is still unfolding it will be fascinating to observe how this plays out.

Nestle Facebook Fan Page: What should Nestlé do now?

The question is: what should Nestlé do now? Delete? Engage? Change country? Flee the country? They have already said that they had stopped giving business to one the companies that was responsible for the deforestation that is leading to the Orang-utan being threatened.

Yesterday, I made a presentation on the topic of SEO (search engine optimisation) and its relevance to online communication.  It was a challenging subject as the meeting was hosted by IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) so you could expect people to be familiar with the concepts. My focus was to talk about how this very useful ‘tool’ should fit the communication mix – and not to discuss the details of the concept.

For those who are not familiar with the word, SEO (as well as SEM and SEA – search engine marketing and search engine advertising) covers the science and art of using search engines (such as Google, Bing or Yahoo) to get traffic to your website.

My main points on the subject were the following:

1. It’s really easy to get it wrong and most companies do so by default.  They treat SEO as an IT/technical project.  This means they see as a project that needs to be done (because traffic increase MUST be good).
2. They focus only on numbers (how much traffic will get and how many statistics can extract from this exercise)
3. They do it as a standalone project – often a company will choose to do an SEO ‘project’ before they have define what they wanted to online (let alone define a clear business and marketing strategy in which this fits)
4. They think it is the only way to get traffic to your site (or at least the easiest) - this can be plain wrong
5. Finally they feel it simply needs to be done

My suggestions (in a nutshell) to approach and formulate this web strategy (and discussing whether or not to hire an SEO company or do SEO internally) is the following

1. Get the basics right first – don’t start on these activities until you have gone through some key steps
2. Start from a clear business and communication strategy – make sure you have an online strategy that will deliver some clearly defined business goals and fits with your other marcom activities
3. Get the right tools to deliver your stories to your key audiences (is it a website, youtube channel, blog, twitter, event, press release?)
4. Create a content plan – define the key messages, products and the information that you need to communicate to your audience
5. Create an editorial plan – a plan on how to keep your story going over a period of time.  Plan the appropriate team and resources to deliver on this (launching a new site is easy, making it work over the long term is the hard part)
6. Create an activation plan – define a plan in which you define how you will get traffic.  This is the part of the project you look at SEO and how it fits in your campaign.  The first part of this process is to study what is happening online.  What are people searching on Google or Bing, and what are the relevant keywords for your audience.  The insights you can extract from this can be highly relevant to the kind of messages that might resonate with your target audience.
7. Find the right partners (Iprospect and ZN).  Tempting as it may be to learn the skills of SEO by yourself, you need professional help to get good results. Although some simple things can be done in house, to get a really effective SEO programme in place you need experts who know the latest changes to search engines and the best way to integrate the right tags at the right place.
8. Define KPIs (key performance indicators) and use them as a key business tool.  Most people are familiar with KPIs. However, few manage to use these as real business tools, keeping track of them, reviewing them on a regular basis and taking action according to the results found.  The key about setting good KPIs is to align them with your business objectives and to not simply focus on traffic indicators, and then ensuring that the data is useful.
9. Don’t do it if you don’t need to.  Finally and probably most importantly is it vital to ask yourself if you need to undertake such a project.  Often web traffic alone will not really bring value to your business, whereas targeted communication to key customers via email, having good content and relevant hyperlinks is what is needed.

I just read a post from Gitte Gorzelak called You mean..having 57 blogs is not a good idea? and as I found myself commenting on the post it made me think about when is having too many platforms, blogs and social networks running at the same time is a waste of time.  I tried to answer in my comments, but I feel that this question deserves a more thorough examination.

To take ZN as an example we have quite a few ‘digital assets’ running.

First we have the ZN site (www.zn.be).  It has a hyperlink on the homepage to our blog (Hyperthinker.com).  So far, so good.  However we have a page called ‘The Lab’ which links to another initiative which is our NIng platform.  The later platform has links to the blog as it feeds it through an rss feed.  We also are able to import videos from our youtube channel which means that actually there is a lot linked to the ning platform.  We also have two other ’groups’ on Xing.com (actually two: one called hyperthinker and another on emarketing).  Interestingly  the latter has continued to survive despite being neglected (I had some difficulties with lack of applications and the lack of integration with the outside world).  But they both have over 400 members and as I checked earlier, both had posts dated December. 

We also created several facebook groups (some private, some public - but to be honest this generated little impact from a business point of view but it was great to connect with old friends).

Finally we created a platform on linkedin.  This one is very interesting as it well designed, and has a great facility to share articles (automatically creating a clean title and summary from a url).

All these experiments are very useful in approaching clients (we have replicated a ning platform for client recently around a packaging competition) and we have also started many blogs and facebook communications programmes which have met with some success. 

The Xing group actually generated a few leads and some positive referrals and so did some of the other initiatives.

The main puropose of these online ‘assets’ is that they serve as a place of learning.  I am also finding that a good blog serves to focus the mind on key questions (like this one) and helps to share your thoughts and feelings, especially with your own team and clients (and perhaps prospects but I feel this is not the main aim of this).

So I guess so far we are making slow and steady progress up the learning curve.  I would like to see as much hyperlinking as possible between those different platforms so people can choose how they want to consumer their information, which profile they want to use and what ways they want to choose to express themselves.

The simple blog seems to be the most ‘mature’ of the lot, but it takes hard work and discipline (something that was a missing a little in the past).  However I have seen the various communities serve very effectively the purpose of client if the fit with the campaign was right.   We will continue into 2009, with more experimentation and look forward to meeting you there…

Watch this video and see Tim Brown from Ideo talk about a link between creativity and play at TED. You will get some inspiring ideas to fresh up your next brainstorm session. I personally like the ‘finger blaster’ the audience fires at the speaker but I guess that’s open for discussion.

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This is a cross-post from Steffen’s blog.

Containing well over two and a half million articles in English alone, written and updated by anyone with access to the web, Wikipedia is an amazing resource. It’s also the eighth most visited site on the web, and many people’s first port of call when looking for information on something or anything.

For this reason, I often recommend that clients check the Wikipedia entries relevant to them to make sure the content is objective and fact-based, as it should be (note: I’d never recommend amending an entry so that it is overly supportive of a client’s position, brand etc - 1) it goes against the spirit of Wikipedia, which is to be a balanced and fact-based source of information, and as an avid user, I want everyone to abide by that spirit, otherwise it’d stop working; and 2) content which is not objective or well-referenced is simply removed by other users, so there’s no point).

Many times, clients don’t think it’s important. An article in a trade publication read by 10 people is, but a site with tens of millions of visitors every day isn’t. Go figure. However, I recently discovered a site which gives stats for every wikipedia entry, and since clients have started understanding the numbers at stake, they’re seeing Wikipedia in a different light.

Just take any current controversial topic and you can see just how many people landed on the relevant page on Wikipedia in any given month. Some sample stats for October to whet the appetite:

• Sarah Palin: 2,489,570 visits
• GMOs (article: genetically modified organism): 37,400 visits
• Pesticides: 24,040 visits
• Artificial flavouring (article: flavor): 13,100 visits
• Sub-prime lending: 183,900 visits

This is a cross-post from Steffen’s blog.

It’s often noted that replicating online tools that are mainstream and already perform the functions you need, just for the sake of having something with your own logo on it, is a mistake. In most cases, I’d agree. With social networks in particular, considering the number of existing tools with scores of users - LinkedIn, Facebook, Orkut, hi5, Bebo and so on - if you are looking to create a community, why would you want to create something new? Most networks fail, ROI is hard to measure (you have a load of members - so what?), and as mentioned, existing tools usually have all the functionalities you could ever want (and can even be used easily and cheaply).

All valid points. However, sometimes there’s a case for an organisation, movement, group, party etc. setting up a tailor-made social network:

1. If you want your network to perform a specific function.
2. Most pertinently, when the people who might use it - call it your fan-base or stakeholders or whatever - are numerous, enthusiastic and active, and actually would like a social network that caters for them and them alone.

The success of the US President-elect’s network - my.barackobama.com - confirms both points. The specific functions it performed were a) raising money for the candidate, and b) allowing supporters to mobilise great numbers of people in a very organised manner. And with regards to the second point, I think it goes without saying that Obama supporters were plentiful enough and fired up.

A less conspicuous case-study I’d cite, also from across the pond, is Firefighter Nation, the firefighters’ network, which has 26,000 very active members that are avidly using all the functionalities on the site (e.g. all thirteen forum topics had been active in the last 24 hours when I checked). So why is it working? Primarily because of a very strong dose of point 2 cited above: there are lots of firefighters in the US, they are very passionate about their profession, they have a very strong sense of camaraderie, and they want their own space where they can meet others like them and share their unique experiences. A Facebook group could probably do all the same things, but it just would not feel as special; it would not be a unique platform for them alone.

So the lesson is: if you’re thinking of setting up a network for philatelists or fans of tiddlywinks, use an existing platform (and don’t hold your breath). If you’re interested in something that can really get lots of people fired up (politics, saving wildlife, football) or, say, represent a very active political group or faction, then your own social network could work, if executed and promoted well. And if you really do fancy giving it a go, I’d recommend starting on Ning, which is the platform Firefighter Nation is built on - it’s brilliant, and what’s more, it’s free.

If you watch this space and like what you read here…then maybe you are the new talent we are looking for. ZN is seeking an ambitious, motivated and experienced Account Manager to join our team and help take the company to the next level. Check the profile and fill in our form. Think creative, passion, different…in a word HyperTh!nk & Hyper@ct !!

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