by Josh Bernoff

In today's post we're showing off our international data capabilities with some data about participation in creating and consuming content in different geographies. This is the first table in Chapter 2 of Groundswell.

I find it amazing what a high degree of variability there is in this data. Note that this reflects percentage of online consumers only. These surveys were done between March and September of 2007.

The blog readership and commenting numbers in Japan and South Korea area astounding. I believe this is where North America is going. I'm at a loss to explain the relatively low level of participation in Germany  and the UK -- any ideas on why this is happening? In the UK, I don't know of any cultural reason why online participants should be reticent to read blogs -- I expect this to reach par with the US (or it may already have done so).

It's an interesting pattern that approximately half of those who read blogs comment on them, with somewhat fewer writing. I'd love to know why readership of blogs is higher in Japan, but writing blogs is more common in South Korea.

The US is the clear leader in both creation and viewing of user-generated video, which is at least partly due to the fact that YouTube is mostly in English. (I refuse to believe we have more idiots making idiotic video in the U.S. -- we don't have a way to survey that!) Given the very high bandwidth available in Japan and Korea I would have expected higher participation there -- is this cultural, or is it because there is more production quality video (on-line television) in these geographies?

Podcasts still haven't caught on the US after years of availability. And they're non-existent in Korea. I am skeptical that these numbers will increase significantly in the U.S. or that other parts of the world will surpass the U.S. number.

One note: we use different survey methodologies around the world (for example, what you see here came from mail surveys in Europe and online surveys in the U.S.) Also, the surveys were not taken in the same month. So direct comparisons are subject to significant variation that's not explained by geography.

If you found this data interesting, you can learn more. We have social technographic profiles from around the world available free. And clients can get access to all of our survey data.

by Charlene Li

In an effort to listen to our readers and to improve this blog, we've created a survey to get feedback on this blog, as well as several other Forrester blogs (Forrester's Marketing Blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang, and Being Peter Kim).

We'd like to get your honest feedback with the survey, and it will take a few minutes of your time. We'll publish the results here, so that you can learn about your fellow readers and also connect via comments.

The feedback will be invaluable to us -- confirming what we think we're doing right and identifying areas where we need to improve.

Please take the Groundswell Blog Survey - we need your feedback!

Thanks!

By Josh Bernoff

It’s a truism in the marketing world that you don’t, in general, talk about your competitors. The apotheosis of this was reached in those silly old soap commercials that compared the company’s product to “Brand X” which it beat hands down. As a consumer, your reaction was “who is this brand X? Of course you’re better than them – that could be anybody. Show me you’re better than the brand I actually use!”

In the social world, and especially among social technology Purists, the wisdom is the opposite. You’re supposed to stop pretending you have no competitors and talk about them whenever they do something interesting. My colleague Jeremiah Owyang (though he’s hardly a Purist) calls this one of the “impossible conversations” in the groundswell and explains that not talking about competitors is "welded deeply into nearly every corporate culture." 

Here’s my problem. One of the other sacred tenets we’re supposed to uphold in the groundswell is to “be authentic.” I strongly agree with this – pretending to be something that you’re not is a big mistake, because you will be found out, and there will be a backlash. But what if you authentically believe your company’s products are the best? Shouldn’t you say so? Why give props to the other guys?

This is real dilemma, especially as more corporations start building social strategies. It’s an archetypal example of the Purist/Corporatist spectrum, with the Purists holding up their competitors and the Corporatists saying “we’re not gonna give those other guys free publicity.”

As usual in these debates, I try to find an appropriate middle ground. And the principle here is “Don’t try to prohibit conversation about your competitors – you’ll lose out. But when speaking yourself, you don’t need to bring up the competition. Just don’t always behave as if they don’t exist."

For example: you run a community of your customers and similar people. People in your community insist on talking about your competitor’s product. What should you do? Certainly, don’t shut them off – they’ll just bug out and talk about the competition somewhere else. Instead, join the conversation, and respectfully offer your perspective.

You write a blog. Should you blog about the competitor’s products or announcements? You don’t have to, but if everyone is talking about it, you might be better off. That’s what HP blogger Eric Kintz did in response to Jonathan Schwartz’ blog post about HP.

Should you twitter about the other guy? Again, only if you’re trying to make a point of your own. 

I agree with Jeremiah (I asked him about this in an email) that talking about the competition shows confidence. People will respect that. But if you really think their announcement isn’t worth commenting on – and nobody else is talking about it either, then don’t bring it up. But if they are talking about it, you'll look silly if you don't give them credit for what they do well, then articulate your own position/

And I think that’s a position people in real companies can live with.

by Josh Bernoff

Thanks to everyone we've been meeting with lately -- bloggers, press, and just interesting people -- for being so interested in Groundswell.

We're just beginning, but looking at only people who've actually read the book, a few early tidbits have appeared in Dan Greenfield's BernaiseSource and the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology  blog.

The delightful BL Ochman twittered "Reading Groundswell http://tinyurl.com/2tb2gj & think it will become a new media marketing classic. every page is great! do not miss it! " (Thanks BL!)

Social Media Today made us Bloggers of the Week and called us the Steve and Eydie of social media.

Scoble went on and on about all sorts of stuff but mentioned the book a bunch of times in his video on Rodney Rumford's site facereviews.com

And Beet.TV posted their interview with me from Digital Hollywood.

by Charlene Li

I'm often asked if Twitter is important or not, and while I'm not a major booster, I fall on the side that it's an idea and technology to watch closely. A conversation with a colleague yesterday sparked me to write this post, which has been rattling around in my brain for a while. It shows how Twitter connects people in new ways previously not possible. 

Twitter is somewhat of a new thing for me -- I'm what is described  as a "binge twitter-er", in that I go for long periods when I don't tweet anything. I'm getting a little better, using Twitter to ask questions or to share a post or link. But I do think it's particularly interesting in that it's a unique communication tool, and I thought I'd illustrate it with this example.

I'm in the midst of a launching the Groundswell book and realized that given all of the upcoming travel, that I would really benefit from a Clear pass, which allows me to skip to the front of the security lanes. I'm lucky in that the airport closest to me, SFO, has a Clear Lanes at pretty much every security area, so I can fly through. I have to say, I am absolutely loving it.

During the sign-up process (which I did back in January), I noticed an area where I can enter a discount code. A little bit of searching turned up that I could get a referral code from someone who already had a Clear pass, and we would both get a free month of service.

But how to find someone? I figured there had to be someone I knew amongst my frequent flyer friends and colleagues who had a pass....but I didn't have the time to send out an email, nor did I want to spam everyone. That's when I decided to Twitter the following:

charleneli   Signing up for flyclear.com. Does anyone have a referral code I can use? I think you'll get 1 month free. FCFS. 04:53 PM January 16, 2008

My friend, Christopher Carfi, saw my tweet and replied with the following:

 ccarfi   @charleneli: i think @anildash uses flyclear. 04:56 PM January 16, 2008 

So still in Twitter, I sent a direct message to Anil Dash at Six Apart asking him about it. Here's his response:

anildash i *love* Clear. My referrer code is *********, and i blogged about it here: http://tinyurl.com/2fhf9r 05:12 PM January 16, 2008 

(Note: Clear members aren't allowed to broadcast/publish their discount numbers, so I removed it from Anil's reply)

Now this is important to note. The time between when I put out my first tweet and Anil's response was 19 minutes. That's pretty fast, especially considering that I most of that delay was me getting around to sending Anil the direct message in the first place.

Imagine what it would have taken for me to track down, email/spam my contacts to hunt down that code. So the benefit to me was a month of Clear's $100 service, or $8.33.

I'd love to hear how Twitter has helped you get something done -- beyond sharing links, ideas, or communicating with people in your network.

And if you're thinking about getting a Clear pass, let me (or Anil) know and we can "make" another $8.33 together!

by Josh Bernoff

As you can see, we've made a few changes here at the Groundswell blog. As the availability of our book inches ever closer (about two weeks away now) we've put the blog in the context of a broader site with a whole bunch of goodies for you.

Feel free to browse around, but I'd like to draw your attention to one key feature: a free data tool about consumers around the world and their behavior around social technologies.

You may recall that we group people in the social world into six overlapping groups: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. We show these groups as steps on a ladder based on their increasing levels of participation in social technologies. (We've conducted more surveys and refined our definitions since our original post on this topic almost a year ago.) Basically, you're in a group if you participate in one of the behaviors shown in this graphic on that rung, at least once a month.

Now comes the fun part. Forrester painstakingly collects data from countries on four continents: North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. And we can calculate the Social Technographics Profile -- basically, the level of social participation -- for any group of people we can identify in any of those countries.

Chapter 3 in the book is filled with these profiles and we show throughout how they drive strategy, but we wanted to give you a chance to see what we've seen -- just how diverse the world is and how profiles vary based on the country, age, and gender of the participants.

If you play around with this tool, you'll soon see that, as you would expect, there's an inverse relationship between age and level of participation. But would you have guessed that 33% of people in the US age 55 or older are connecting with social applications in some way? Because they are.

Why are the differences between men and women's participation so much greater among people aged 25-34 than among those that are younger? Will those gender differences go away as the Millenials get older?

You might notice that 41% of Koreans are Joiners -- members of social networks -- more than anywhere else in the world.

Or that in Metro China (we survey a subset of people in Chinese cities) 36% of people are Creators, creating blogs, maintaining content, or uploading video or music. That's an amazing level of participation.

It's very expensive to collect this data. Why are we giving it away for free? Because we wanted to give you a taste of how real data can open up insights into people's behavior, and to think about it in some of the ways we think about it.

And if you're looking for a group not shown here -- like Toyota owners in the US, or people with Fujitsu PCs in Japan, we've probably got that, too. Go ahead. Ask us.

I'm looking forward to your reactions.

P.S. If you hit a "No Data Available" message, that just means you've asked for a slice of our data so thin we can't show a valid answer. Just set the Age dropdown back to "Not Specified" and you'll see data for the country you've asked about.

by Josh Bernoff

Interested in our report "Objectives: The Key To Creating A Social Strategy?" The report describes the POST method in detail (see previous post).

I'll send a review copy to the first 100 bloggers to email me at groundswell@forrester.com.

Include your blog's URL with your email. Looking forward to hearing your take on this.

by Josh Bernoff

São Paulo, Brazil is the center of much of the business activity in South America's largest economy, and a very intriguing place to visit. I spent a week, in part to participate in JumpEducation and IDG's Digital Age conference, which also featured Martin Lindstrom and John Batelle. Some observations, not all associated with groundswell-type stuff:

CEOs here want to blog. I met with CEOs of companies large and small, and this question kept coming up. "How much time does it take?" "What if someone criticizes us?" I told them what I tell people in the US -- first decide on your goals. But I was intrigued that this idea was so popular. I think businesspeople in Brazil are more used to taking risks.

Some Brazilian companies are leaders in doing well by doing good. I was really impressed with the management at two companies I met with: Natura and ABN Amro. Natura is a huge cosmetics company that uses 680,000 "consultants" (that is, ordinary women) to sell their products throughout Latin America -- and has a sparkling clear brand. Natura includes impact on the environment in its core goals and expects to become carbon neutral by 2008, which is an amazing goal for a manufacturing company. ABN Amro, Brazil's fourth largest bank, stands out for its "sustainability" projects, especially important in this country that has so many poor and such a large part of the world's resources. My impression on meeting these companies' top managers was that they are green because it is part of who they are, not just because it's fashionable. I believe this will create sustainable advantage. American and European companies could learn from this.

Watch for the next stage in the Brazilian Internet phenomenon. Brazilians (at least the professional class) are renowned for the speed with which they take up new technologies -- both MSN Messenger and Google's Orkut social network caught on here like a flash and are now close to universal. My question is: will they change as fast as they took these tools up? Will Facebook displace Orkut with Brazilians, or are they too dedicated to Orkut to change? This should be fascinating to watch.

This is a city of incredible contrasts. Here's what you see right away on the drive into the city from the airport: ugly prisons, dirt-poor favelas, a clearly polluted river, and, as soon as you get closer in to the city, tall apartment buildings that rival the worst of soviet architecture, covered with graffiti. This is such a city of contrasts -- the professionals I met were bright and forward-thinking, and there is so much powerful positive thinking going on here along with the worst of it. I'm not smart enough to predict where this is all going, but it had a powerful effect on me. It does seem clear that the decisions made in Brazil, as well as in other rapidly developing countries, will determine the fate of the planet. Perhaps social networks used by those smart professionals will help find the solutions to these problems.

I may have seen one of the world's great bookstores. Last year I met with Sergio Herz, director of Livraria Cultura, and he showed me the shell of a movie theater that he was turning into the flagship branch of his bookstore chain. This year it was done. What an incredible place! They kept the ramp leading down in the center of the store (it used to be the seats in the theater) so you are naturally drawn into the three floors of the store. There is a stylized dragon skeleton hanging from the ceiling, and another in the children's section -- parents can hang out with their kids inside the dragon's ribs and read. There is the obligatory cafe, which along with the store was buzzing with customers at 6:00 pm. The store also includes a performance space in the back that had just featured a concert. Large and small video screens all over promote upcoming events without being intrusive. I just had to say wow. Too bad (for me) most of the books were in Portuguese, but if I were a Paulista I'd spend a lot of my life there.

I may also have seen some of the world's worst drivers. Like many rapidly growing cities, São Paulo is beset by choking traffic, which is exacerbated by hundreds of thousands of people on scooters who take incredible risks (my hosts told me that one gets into an accident every half hour). I thought the drivers in Boston were aggressive but the Paulistas put them to shame.  Every single person in São Paulo must have decided to leave on Friday afternoon, which unfortunately is when I chose to go back to the airport. The trip, which had taken 45 minutes on the way in, took 2 1/2 hours on the return. I also saw this incredible sight: an ambulance slowly making its way through nearly-stopped traffic on a highway, with a score of scooters in its wake -- they must have sensed a faster escape and grabbed the opening. Once the ambulance ceased to make progress, the scooters zipped around it and continued to move between lanes of stopped cars at an incredible pace, horns beeping. Surreal.

Finally I'll leave you with this little picture, which was taken in the lobby at Abril, the media company where I gave a speech. The real people in the picture are Joyce Gomes and Ricardo Franco, two of the Forrester account people who made my trip far more enjoyable. The poster reads, in Portuguese, "Winning in a world transformed by social technologies."

Tags: Sao Paulo, Brazil, Natura, Orkut, ABN AMRO, Livraria Cultura, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

Today Sony Electronics entered the blogosphere.

Sony's blog is written by Rick Clancy, head of corporate communications for Sony Electronics. I know Rick pretty well, having worked with him when I was a TV analyst and he is the ideal choice to blog for Sony.

First of all, he's a straight shooter -- not something you take for granted with PR people. Look at the first post: Sony No Baloney.

Second, he has something to say. Rick has been at Sony a long time. He understand the company and all its parts. This should make for interesting posts.

Third, he has authority. Everything important Sony Electronics says goes through him. If Rick wasn't Sony's top blogger, whoever was would have to go through him anyway.

That said, it's going to be interesting. Sony is a huge, global company in transition. There are big successes, including Sony's line of Bravia TVs and its backing of Blu-Ray, which I (and Forrester) think is going to beat HD-DVD in the movie race eventually. There are also challenges, including what I believe will be a slowing of demand for big expensive TV sets.

While the blog doesn't officially address the larger corporate parent (the blog is for electronics, the parent Sony company includes Sony Pictures and Sony Playstation) it will inevitably attract commentary on the Sony parent company. With the charismatic Sir Howard Stringer, the first westerner to head Sony, continuing to transform the electronics giant, the blog will become a lightning rod for Sony-bashers and Sony-lovers alike.

Sony's blog is using moderated comments. The sister Playstation blog had over 500 comments on a recent posting. I can't wait to see how Sony Electronics' buttoned-down style interacts with the wild west of the blogosphere in a Japanese-founded, multinational company run by a Welshman. This should be fun.

Rick already knows what it's like to deal directly with analysts and reporters. Now he'll get to deal with regular people in a more personal way. The first post is a good sign -- it's personal, not too corporate. Now we'll see if he can keep it up.

Tags: Sony, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

I spent last night in the spin room at the Democratic Presidential debate put on by WMUR-TV and CNN at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. WMUR is a Manchester TV station, owned by Hearst-Argyle.

Gather.com and WMUR teamed up to recruit bloggers to write about the debate. Only about 25 people signed up, probably because they didn't  give the promotion enough time. Gather.com's members chose the 15 best -- five democrats, five republicans, and five independents, all New Hampshire residents.

While this sounded like a good idea to me, when I saw the original blog postings I wasn't all that impressed. But that all changed last night.

I sat in the "spin room" with the bloggers as they covered the debate. First, let me set the stage. The spin room was a college gym with little platforms belonging to each candidate (photos here). During the debate, which happened in a hockey rink right down the street, the bloggers and I watched on a monitor in the spin room. (At one point they showed a shot of us on CNN.)

From the blogging perspective, what I found interesting was how the gather.com bloggers rose to the occasion. These were some pretty typical and ordinary people, moms, a student going back to journalism school -- not your hard-core political types at all. But partly because the spotlight was on them, and partly because they got to react to each other, some nice insights came out. Fred Hollander, an engineer whose question on earmarks was posed to the candidates during the debate, found most of their responses unsatisfying -- "Sounds like the democratic frontrunners would continue with the traditional corruption." (How cool is it that a blogger gets his question answered on national TV?) Rebecca Lavoie has a very  nice summary of the emotional style each candidate demonstrated, which is at least as important as issues and positions. Keith Ballingal pointed out that there seems to be an unnatural affinity between the Edwards and Obama campaigns -- and as soon as I read it, they backed each other up again on another point. And David Mirsky, who sat next me, seemed the most prolific with insights during the event.

Seth Godin has complained about the shortcomings of live blogging and I agree -- there's an inverse relationship between speed and value. But these regular old people that Gather has selected are getting better. I can't wait to see what they do with the Republicans.

After the debate was over, the spinning began. The room, which had been mostly empty, filled up with about thirty or forty film crews along with hundreds of print reporters. These proceeded to swarm around the surrogates on the platforms, giving interviews to "spin" their candidate's performance. Eventually most of the candidates showed up, roughly in reverse order of their popularity. Mike Gravel was first, Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson soon after. Naturally, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards didn't show by the time I left, about 45 minutes after the debate ended.

Tags: WMUR, Democratic debate, liveblogging, gather.com, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

By now many of you are aware of the threats that Kathy Sierra is receiving on her blog Creating Passionate Users -- sufficiently nasty that she has decided not to present at the ETech conference as originally scheduled. Steve Rubel and Seth Godin have already weighed in on the issue along with dozens of others.

I don't know Kathy but I feel for her -- partly because I suffered an onslaught of criticism myself in the wake of a post I did on Apple iTunes. If you want to read hundreds of nasty, nasty comments, look   here. And this doesn't even include the worst and most personal ones, which I moderated out. The whole experience left me shaken, and it's not even a shadow if what's happening to Kathy. People said I should be fired and I should be shot, and I brushed it off figuring, that's what people do on the net, because they can.

As a researcher, I deal with this partly by stepping back and asking, "how big is this problem?" And you can help with that. A smarter guy would set up a poll but I'm just looking for an unscientific sampling. So please comment here and if you wouldn't mind, answer these questions in your comments:

1. How bad are the worst comments on your blog?
a. death threats
b. really nasty
c. pretty bad
d. Not so bad

2. Do you ever take them seriously?
a. Yes
b. No, but I'm thinking differently after today
c. No

3. Have you considered giving up blogging as a result?

Then tell us your story.

Update (March 30): LA Times coverage of the issues here. Quotes me, but comes to no conclusion, since there is no simple solution. I'm concerned more high profile bloggers will turn off comments.

Tags: blogging, trolls, death threats, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

Dan Buczaczer of Denuo (a Publicis unit) and his client, DuPont had a problem. How do you take a corporate brand with a 200-year history and remind consumers what it stands for?

DuPont is responsible for brands like Teflon, Kevlar, Tyvek and, as you can see in this clip, Nomex, which helps prevent firefighters from overcooking. These are ingredient brands -- you don't buy them, you buy stuff that incorporates them. And these brands already have decent name recognition, but DuPont has a lot less. You could do a bunch of TV ads like GE and BASF do, but that's expensive. And if you remember DuPont at all -- if you're over 45 like I am -- you may remember "Better Things For Better Living Through Chemistry," a tagline that has developed some unfortunate resonances in the last half-decade.

DuPont's solution, which I like, was to hire Amanda Congdon (ex of RocketBoom) and a bunch of indie film types and make some mini-documentaries they call "DuPoint Science Stories." I don't even know what to call these things -- they're not quite ads, not infomercials, hell, you can shoot me but maybe brandumentaries? (Ick.) Anyway, they're entertaining enough to watch for a few minutes, especially with the bits of retro footage they unearthed from the lab.

The key from here is, they were smart enough not to take the astroturf route and pretend this stuff was homegrown. Instead, they're actually paying for ad space on blogs like Boing-Boing. But these fun little bits will doubtless get picked up by other blogs (like this one), cross-posted on YouTube, and develop a second little life beyond the site where they live, stories.dupont.com. This only works if they get spread around.

Now like the Chevy Tahoe folks, DuPont is going to be in for some spoofs -- there's plenty of parody potential here. But the next step is when Ad Age or the Wall St. Journal starts writing about the strategy behind the idea. Which will get people looking at and spreading the videos. Which will boost DuPont's association with these "miracles of science." Which is what they were looking for in the first place . . . without spending $10 million for ad avails on CBS or Fox. Nice work.

Tags: DuPont, brandumentary, DuPont Science Storiesonline video, Denuo, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Charlene Li

You may have noticed that the tag line for this blog has changed – a key goal is to help people do their jobs better, to “win” so to speak with social technologies.

To that end, I thought you’d like to know about a few upcoming boot camps Forrester is running. These events are different from large scale conferences – they are typically 1-2 Forrester analysts with a small group of participants, usually around 20 people. We spend an entire day discussing the strategy and tactics needed to win with new technologies. And I personally love the format because it’s a great way for me to immerse myself in the day to day issues that people are facing.

So here are a few highlights of upcoming boot camps – there is also a complete list of all boot camps being offered. I hope you can join us, and please contact me if you have any questions.

Emerging Interactive Marketing Channels Boot Camp
Wednesday, March 21, 2007 in Cambridge, MA 
Analysts: Brian Haven & Christine Overby

This Boot Camp will introduce new marketing channels and provide techniques for successfully exploring and leveraging the marketing opportunities that each offers. Marketers will learn how to determine if each channel is right for their brand and develop a plan for how to get started.

This Boot Camp will include:
•    Interactive sessions covering how consumers have adopted each channel, how marketers use each channel today, and how to best leverage each to target consumers.
•    Sessions covering rich media (video, podcasting, gaming), user-generated content, social media (social networks, wikis, widgets, tagging, etc.), word-of-mouth marketing, mobile marketing, and others.
•    Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public      relations firms have used these emerging marketing channels.

Social Computing Boot Camp: Tapping Into The Power Of Connect Consumers
Tuesday, April 10, 2007 in Miami, Florida
Analysts: Charlene Li & Brian Haven

New technologies like blogs, social networking, and RSS are changing the media and marketing landscape. This Boot Camp will not only introduce these new tools, it will also move you quickly into being an active participant in social media and marketing. You'll go home with a better understanding of how to use social marketing — and more importantly, a workable plan for what to do today. Marketers will learn when it is appropriate to use these tools, how to overcome internal resistance to deployment, and how to measure the results.

This Boot Camp will include:
•    Interactive sessions on consumer adoption and behaviors toward blogs, RSS, social networking,      word-of-mouth marketing, and podcasting.
•    Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public relations firms have used social marketing — and how to avoid the pitfalls.
•    Hands-on training on how to create blogs and RSS feeds, as well as podcasts. In addition to a      technical overview, the training will include best practices on how to manage the internal process of setting up these social marketing tools.
•    A best practices panel of marketers, agencies, and technology providers.

Blogging Fundamentals: Building A Business Strategy
Friday, April 13, 2007 in Miami, Florida
Analysts: Charlene Li & Brian Haven

Blogs are evolving quickly as a communication medium and influencing the development of communications and marketing strategy. With more than 27 million blogs being written today, it is impossible not to find a niche community that can influence customer perceptions of a brand.

As customers increasingly tune out traditional advertising and turn to new communication channels to fill the void, companies must learn how to join in the conversation. Moreover, besides connecting companies and their customers, blogs are also becoming an invaluable collaboration tool within companies to facilitate knowledge management and cross-functional communications.

This Boot Camp will focus on the fundamentals of blogging from a corporate perspective, helping companies develop a blog strategy and implementation plan, including discussion of policy, technology, and process. It will have a heavy focus on hands-on exercises that will complement in-depth presentations on these issues.

by Josh Bernoff

Postscript to the story about The Lactivist, Jennifer Laycock who was asked to stop selling a T-shirt featuring the slogan "The Other White Milk" by a lawyer for the National Pork Board.

The National Pork Board recognized it made a mistake and reversed course instantly. You don't mess with motherhood! Because of its corporate structure the Pork Board can't donate to charities but its employees are now supporting Jennifer's charity, a human milk bank in Ohio. Which is why she was selling the shirts in the first place.

And Laycock, who "respects copyrights" according to her latest blog post, will no longer sell the infringing T-shirt. Her substitute is shown here.

Is there a lesson? Sure. First, everything you do is now public. Every customer support call. Every lawyer's letter. Every sleeping cable guy.

Second, you can make amends if you move quickly. Kudos to the Pork Board for doing so. Now that Laycock isn't in the crosshairs anymore, she's unlikely to try to make this any bigger.

Tags: PR, breastfeeding, lactivist, National Pork Board, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff
I'm sorry. I couldn't resist. I had to weigh in on this one simply because it's such a mismatch.

Jennifer Laycock, a mom and blogger in Ohio, is a "Lactivist" -- that is, a mother who wants to support and promote breastfeeding. I know a litte bit about this -- I've been helping out La Leche League, an international organization that promotes breastfeeding because it's better for babies.

To raise money, Jennifer made a promotional T-shirt for "The Other White Milk." I'd like to show you a-picture but I can't find one. Why? Because the National Pork Board sent her a cease and desist letter because they felt she was infringing their slogan, "The Other White Meat."

My colleague (and book co-author) Josh Bernoff is at DEMO 07 this week covering the happenings there on our book blog. In four different posts, he provides quick reviews (done in real time) of 33 companies. It's quite the feat!!

Some things that caught my eye from Josh's posts (see the individual posts for Josh's take on these companies):

From Post #1: Worklight: Secure RSS for the enterprise that pulls information out of enterprise applications. This sounds very much like what KnowNow does with its RSS/alert service. Josh also saw a product called Reqall from Qtech that turns phone messages into text and delivers it via email. Reminds me of another start-up, Jott that does almost exactly the same thing.

From Post #2: Josh has a short-hand way of thinking about the widgets/gadgets someone can insert into Web pages like MySpace -- he calls it "MySpace furniture" which is very appropriate. I can build and insert these widgets into my page, arrange them to my liking, and invite my "friends" over to check it out.

In one afternoon at DEMO, Josh saw five companies that fits this definition: panjea.tv, Yodio, VUVOX, Splashcast, and MixPro. I've used several Web page widgets like these and while each offering has it's cool, neat spin, I can't help but feel that this is turning quickly into the "me too" category in much the same way that photo sharing sites are variations on the same theme. Just how much traction can any player get?

From Post #3: At the end of the post, Josh raises two questions about new mobile applications like BUZ Interactive and Jyngle:

The main question is 1) are the mobile operators going to allow, encourage, or block any of these, and 2) how will the user determine what's actually useful to him or her?

From Post #4: (As I'm reading the last post from Josh, I have to wonder how he's doing it -- I'm tired just reading his posts!) Lots of good stuff here -- groups get more firepower with CircleUp and Nexo, but I have to wonder if they will be pushed aside once Yahoo! redesigns Yahoo! Groups.

ZoomInfo caught Josh's eye because of it's core and expanded people search capabilities. I've been following ZoomInfo for quite a while and it's good to see them at DEMO (disclosure: I did a Webinar for them last February on the future of online recruitment.)

Lastly, Helium joins players like gather.com, agoravox.fr, and associatedcontent.com to pay contributors of user-generated content for their work, based on how much traffic and advertising views they generate. Helium's twist: it ranks the comments and articles based on what users find the most interesting, relevant, and helpful.

Back in October, I posted our initial research on the ROI of blogging. Many of you contributed your ideas, thoughts, and criticisms – thanks so much as it was extremely helpful.

We’ve (finally) published the report – and actually, there are two of them. The first is “The ROI Of Blogging: The “Why” And “How” Of External Blog Accountability”. It’s available at URL for Forrester clients and also for purchase. I’ve included the excerpt below:

Many large companies stand on the brink of blogging, yet they are unwilling to take the plunge. Others, having dove in early, now face the challenge of managing existing blogs without the ability to show that they effectively support business goals. While blogging’s value can’t be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.

We also published another piece of research, “Calculating The ROI Of Blogging: A Case Study, A Look At The ROI of General Motor’s FastLane Blog” which applies the framework we describe above. Again, here's the excerpt:

Forrester used the process outlined in the first document in this series to calculate the ROI of General Motors’ FastLane blog; but, this is not merely an exercise to generate a number. Using scenarios, General Motors can understand the risk and impact of increases and decreases of a key metric — the number of press mentions — on the value of the blog. With this knowledge in hand, General Motors can make critical businesses decisions, such as whether to invest heavily in innovations that will rekindle press attention.

We developed a framework that allows companies to track and measure the benefits of external blogs. From the companies and individuals we spoke with, the most common benefits are; increased brand visibility, savings from customer insights, reduced impact from negative user-generated content, and increased sales efficiency. The hard part is coming up with metrics that reflect these benefits, and more importantly, how to value those metrics.  Here's the graphic from the report:

Let’s take for example the FastLane blog. One of the key goals of that blog was “to share information about its products and to start a dialogue between GM leaders and customers”. So a key metric would be to see how many times customers wrote a comment. FastLane has about 100 people commenting on the blog each month, which is equivalent to gaining customer insight on products and brands from a traditional focus group. We estimated that the value of this was equivalent to running a focus group every month at the cost of $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year. Voila – there’s the value of the blogging benefit laid out in black and white. The case study contains a full-blown Excel model (Update: this is available only to clients) showing how we calculated the FastLane blog ROI in excruciating detail.

But the key metric that we think drives the value of the FastLane blog was the number of press mentions it received, which we valued on the basis of "advertising equivalence" -- how much would it have cost GM to buy an ad in the same news outlet? This is a long standing metric used by the public relations industry to measure its value. We found that this metric drove a significant amount part of the FastLane blog's value -- and that press mentions were decreasing significantly over the last two years. With this knowledge, GM can decide whether to take steps to increase press activity -- or to de-emphasize this metric in favor of other ones in the calculation of the blog's ROI.

As you can see, this process and framework is not cut and dry, black and white. Rather, it’s highly subjective, requires tremendous judgment, and is open to interpretation. But it is a starting point for an otherwise nebulous activity.

We invite you to provide your ideas and feedback as this is an ongoing exercise -- we believe we're just starting to scratch the surface when it comes to blog measurement. As the number of companies with blogs grows, we'll be able to add to and refine the framework.

Finally, here are some frequently asked questions that I’m getting about the ROI of blogging, which I thought would be helpful.

Q: Is there a standard ROI for blogs? A: Nope – sorry, it isn’t that easy! Just as there isn’t a standard ROI for a Web site, there’s no standard for a blog. It depends on what the goal of the blog is and also how much investment the company (and the blogger) puts into it.

Q: What’s the best way to measure the effectiveness of a blog? A: Again, it starts with the goal of the blog. I strongly suggest that companies start with the goal, develop metrics that measure the attainment of that goal, and find ways to assign value to those metrics.

Q: But aren't blogs risky? How do you take that into account? A: We definitely take risk into account by generating scenarios that show the impact of low-likelihood but high impact events -- such as a lawsuit.

Q: Our CMO/CEO/CFO won't let us have a blog until we can show him/her the definitive ROI of a blog. Help!! A: It's not an unreasonable request -- they don't really understand the value of a blog and see just the potential cost and risk. By going through the exercise of defining and quantifying the benefits, costs, and risks of a blog, you'll be educating your C-level executives while also demonstrating the discipline that they expect.

Q: But this is heresy - you can't put the benefits of a blog on a spreadsheet! You've just got to believe that blogs are a good thing because they develop conversations with customers. A: At the core of my bleeding heart pumps the soul of a pragmatist. Sure, I buy into all of the positive, feel good reasons to have a blog. But when your manager asks why the company has a blog versus spending more time and resources on XYZ initiatives, it sure would be helpful to be able to show a spreadsheet of those blogging benefits in dollars and cents.

Verizon quietly launched its new telecomm & telecommunications policy blog yesterday. The focus is on policy issues, and Tom Tauke, Executive VP of Public Affairs, Policy and Communications, writes:

The intent of PoliBlog is to present perspectives on issues of importance that intersect public policy, politics, markets, and business in the broadband world...It’s my hope that PoliBlog will be most focused on the emerging issues that policy makers and consumers and businesses must start dealing with now to ensure the future of converged communications and broadband deployment. Those issues include privacy and security, data rights management and intellectual property protection, and access to broadband networks. And there are whole new perspectives and opportunities that the widespread deployment of broadband will bring to other important challenges facing our society, including the delivery of health care, education, and government services. None of these topics are out of bounds on PoliBlog.

I thought this was quite smart of Verizon -- to start blogging in an area where it has a clear position on a topic, and where there will be plenty of discussion and engagement. It remains to be seen how the blog will shape up, as there are initially nine bloggers on the profile page.

I'm sure product-oriented blogs will be forthcoming (or at least, they should) but getting started in a relatively "safe" area where customer service and satisfaction is less of an issue is a wise.

So welcome Verizon to the blogosphere and I hope you'll prove to be a good example for your fellow corporate counterparts.

Aside: I can't resist adding Verizon Wireless's famous tagline, "Can you hear me?" Well, yes, Verizon can hear us now -- and even better, they are listening.

One issue that keeps coming up over and over again is how to measure the ROI of blogs. I’ve written about this in the past and have been stewing over how to go beyond the intangible “blogging is good for your business” exhortations to quantify blogging’s benefit to organizations.

Well, we’re getting close but we could use some help. My colleague, Chloe Stromberg, and I have been interviewing companies about how they measure ROI and realized that we needed to throw the net wider – this is where you come in!

The working idea is to create a framework for measuring the ROI of external blogging efforts for medium- and large-sized companies. Below is an outline of ingredients for the framework.  Please help us by fleshing out sources, providing examples, and adding/editing our ROI factors – feel free to add comments to this post or to email us directly (if you’d prefer, we’ll keep specific numbers and examples confidential and use them only as background).

In turn, we’ll cite significant contributors in the upcoming report and will also send the contributors a copy when it is published. The report will also include information we’ve gathered from our research, as well as our synthesis and analysis. I’ve also included a few links to resources we’ve found helpful so far.

The ROI Of External Blogging Framework

The ROI of blogs can be broken down into three components: 1) Benefits; 2) Costs; 3) Risks

Potential Benefits & Measurement

One of the hardest things to do with blogs is to quantify the benefits, mainly because there’s a blog for almost everything under the sun. For example, you can’t compare the ROI of Direct2Dell.com to Microsoft’s Jobsblog as they have completely different goals. Hence, measuring just traffic to a blog or the number of comments on a post means little unless the traffic or the comments are linked to value creation. This gets at the task of measuring intangibles – what does it mean for an additional visitor to come to the blog or contribute a comment?

One parallel to consider – how do companies measure the value of public relations? We found one paper by Fraser Likel, et. al. “Perspectives on the ROI of Media Relations Publicity Efforts” that was helpful in this area. Likel, et. al. break down the ROI of PR into four approaches: 1) return on impressions; 2) return on media impact (akin to market mix modeling); 3) return on target influence; and 4) return on earned media

I currently suggest that companies start with metrics that they already use within the company so that 1) the metrics are familiar; and 2) it makes it easier to compare the blog’s value to other marketing and communication channels. So here’s an attempt at some of the ways intangible value can be quantified. I’d love to get your thoughts on how feasible it is to actually measure these things and also, how your company measures blogging’s benefits.