Blogging Behind Your Back
Establishing the impact that Blogs and Social Networks
can have on the reputation of your Brand without you even
knowing in order to mitigate the Risks
Roberto Hortal Munoz
Head of eBusiness
MORE TH>N

Topics
• Evaluate just how concerned you should be about what bloggers say about
your company to identify whether you can afford to ignore them
• Examine how blogging and social networking affects corporate reputation to
assess how you should be interacting with citizen journalists
• Explore how to find out what is being said about your brand to determine how
to follow up problem criticism and steer customer feedback
2

Can you afford
to ignore them?

How do people talk online? Blogs
• Short, frequent posts along a timeline
• Categories, tags provide navigation and SEO impact
• Pingbacks, social sharing, social bookmarking encourage distribution
• 113M blogs tracked by Technorati (Feb 08 – English language predominantly)
• Technorati’s highest ranked blog (huffingtonpost.com): 11M visitors/month
• Wordpress network: 160M visitors/month
• Digg (social sharing): 24M visitors/month
• Traditional media reach October 2008
– guardian.co.uk 25M (10M UK)
– Times.co.uk 20M (7M UK)
– Mirror Group 6M (3M UK)
Blog traffic figures from Quantcast, Newspaper traffic figures from ABCe
4

How do people talk online? Forums
• Threaded conversations, low-touch to no moderation
• Strong community feel
– May take some time to become part of for new users
– Reputation usually the main motivator
• Traditional incentives fail – Belkin’s rogue Mechanical Turk episode
• Conversations can remain active for a long time (weeks, months, years)
• Usage
– Support, questions, pre-purchase research
– Product tips, workarounds, modding
– Complaints
– Sharing (tricks, discount codes, links, freebies)
• Moneysavingexpert.com: 6M visitors, 3M email newsletter subscribers
• Review sites are an evolution of forums
Monesyavingexpert traffic figures from www.moneysavingexpert.com
5

How do people talk online? Social networks
• Relatively new, still evolving
• Hugely popular with Internet users
• Users’ expectation of privacy influence receptiveness
MySpace Facebook LinkedIn
• Less privacy • More privacy
• Commercial organizations
– Product/brand integration offering
– Targeted marketing opportunity
• Social aspects present biggest opportunity for brands
– Conversation
– Value-adding (tools, widgets, apps)
– The people behind the brand
6

Typical social media journey
Try to
Ignore Engage
control
7

From Dell Hell to IdeaStorm
• In June 2005, Jeff Jarvis blogs Dell Lies. Dell Sucks on BuzzMachine.com
• Post turns into a saga: thousands of comments, blog posts and forum entries
• Dell ignores blogs. Media cover (Business Week Aug 05, The Guardian Oct 05)
• Initially in denial, Dell took time to react but eventually turned things around
– April 06: Dell dispatched technicians to reach out to bloggers, gaining
positive buzz in return
– July 06: Direct2Dell blog started to address burning battery issue. Lionel
Menchaca appointed Chief Dell Blogger
– February 07: Dell launches IdeaStorm.com, asking for customer advice on
what products and services to develop next. Some ideas make it to the
market (Linux PCs, reduced promotional software on new machines,
customer ratings on product pages on Dell’s site)
– By Oct 2007, Jeff Jarvis wrote a piece for Business Week entitled Dell
learns to listen endorsing Dell’s newfound engagement with customers and
bloggers, their finding ways to listen and following advice from their
customers
8

Corporate reputation
and citizen journalism

The early days – Intel’s Pentium processor
• July 1994: Intel discovers a math error in its new Pentum processors
• November 1994: after approaching Intel and getting no answers, Thomas
Nicely, a math professor at Lynchburg College publicizes the error onemail
lists and early blogs
• Story is picked up by CNN, the New York Times and other media
• Intel's initial position claiming the flaw was not serious used by competitiors
(IBM, AMD) to join the outcry
• Intel forced to offer replacement chips to all buyers results in $500M charge
against 1994 results
10

Sony’s copy protection scandal
• October 31st, 2005: Mark Russinovich blogs a description of software (XCP)
contained on Sony BMG’s music CDs, branding it illegitimate. XCP is
described as a rootkit, a type of virus
• November 4th. After huge online following, NPR is first traditional medium to
report. Sony’s answer: Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is,
so why should they care about it?
• November 8th: the Boston Globe names the software spyware. By Nov 14
Microsoft joins announcing it will provide tools for its removal
• November 15th, Sony announces it will recall unsold CDs carrying XCP. 3 days
later it is forced to swap consumers’ XCP CDs for non-XCP ones and MP3
• Legal proceeding: Texas Attorney General (deceiving consumers), Class-
action in New York and California, EFF, ALCEI (Italy’s EFF), Federal Trade
Commission settlement, Dept of Homeland Security admonishment…
• Sony offered a full list of affected CDs and an explanation only on April 2008
11

MoneySavingExpert.com
• Martin Lewis starts by sending tips to friends by email
• Email list grows. A web site + forum are added
• The site really takes off when it starts campaigning against bank charges
– Offers template letters to ease reclaiming of charges
– Deploys social media expertly to maximise publicity
– 5.5M bank charges templates downloaded
• Free tools, email newsletter charged with social/viral features to encourage
sharing, forwarding
• Probably the most active forum about personal finance in the UK
12

Reputation monitoring
• Essential first step – find out what people say about you
• Commercial offerings provide extra depth, breadth and analysis
• Doing it on a shoestring
– Google News – Google’s idea of news extends beyond traditional media.
Best for finding out about themes gaining significant momentum
– Google Blog Search – Google News for blogs. Automated alerts make it
very easy to discover new conversation
– Technorati – the original blog search engine
– BoardReader – discussion forum search engine, activity graphs show
popularity trends
13

Influencing customer feedback
Identify and
follow-up
criticism

Transforming PR
Source: http://www.antonymayfield.com/
15

How NOT to do it – Jeep on Facebook
• Jeep jumped on Facebook by creating a group
• Group contained and advert and not much else
• Most popular group is user generated by fans of Jeep Wranglers
• Lessons
– Different media require different treatments
– Social media is 2-way
– Engage with existing conversations
16

How to DO it – Jetblue’s apology
17

Social Media in the ecosystem
• Search and social media The Obama inauguration
– Yin and Yang • 600,000 status updates posted through
the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
– Search help people find content
• Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates
– Social media helps them
per minute during the broadcast
• Make sense of it
• 8,500 status updates were posted during
• Make the most of it the first minute of Obama’s speech
• Share the experience • Millions of people logged into Facebook
during the broadcast
• Traditional and social media
– Traditional media provides
information, raw feeds, rich
data, deep analysis
– Social spaces is where events
come alive
Sources: Google, Mashable, http://connect.icrossing.co.uk/
18

Markets as conversations
• Markets are conversations. PR must become the company’s best
conversationalists
– Discern stories the market actually wants to hear
– Help journalists write stories that tell the truth
– Bring people into conversation rather than protect them from it: building
sites that give journalists comprehensive, unfiltered information about the
industry, including unedited material from competitors
• Online, hype blows up in your face and spin gets taken as an insult. The real
work of PR will be more important than ever.
– Everyone can be your most important contact
– Be open, be firm, be transparent
– Participate!
Inspired by The Cluetrain Manifesto: http://www.cluetrain.com/
19

Radical transparency
• Secrecy is dead
– Information once valuable because it was rare. It is plentiful now
– Secrets leak. Email, cameraphones etc lower barries
• Tap the Hivemind
– Throw everything online and invite the world to have a look and feed back
– So much information – you need help to process it all. Let the world help
• Reputation is everything
– Google is not a search engine, is a Reputation Management System
– Searches reveal what do other people think about this stuff?
– Blogs, Flickr, Facebook and good old linking make it easy to find out what
people think about anything. Google offers single interface to all this
– Be open, engaged and active or only what others said will be found
Concept by Clive Thompson, Wired
20

MORE TH>N’s Living
• Engaging with a wide audience
• Starting conversations
• Enriching ongoing debate
• Lessons learned (good and bad)
• Well worth doing but resource intensive
• Niche theme or broad targeting?
• What to do when a theme takes off
(flood advice, long egg)
• Not getting thrown out of your own party
• Business value: measuring and
extracting
• Next steps
• Causes
• Voices and faces
21

MORE TH>N’s Social Media Centre
• Applying the learning from Living
• Online newsroom redesigned to maximise social
and community elements
• Visual design and Tech platform
• SEO optimisation for findability
• Blogroll and outgoing links connect with
community
• Engaging stories that people want to talk about
(i.e. Car Aerobics)
• Every news piece is optimised for use online
• Links
• Tags
• Comments
• Photos, video and podcasts for social
distribution
22

Thank you
23