The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

Tom Peters statement at recent INC conference saying “If you’re not blogging, you’re an idiot” maybe a little strong, but we all know what he means. Blogs as a medium of expression have evolved to create a completely new connect with the targeted stakeholders. Blogs not only bring in soft content such as product stories and legends, but can also enable a corporation to handle the hard part – public communication in the time of crisis. Marriott International Chairman Bill Marriott’s blog just stands out on this count, as the hotel chain battles to recover from destruction at its Pakistan property.

By posting a statement and details of the tragedy on the blog within few hours of the attack, Marriott management reached out directly to customers who would perhaps not read a press release by going to the Marriott corporate site. By providing for everyone to comment and express condolences on the site as well as offers to help, it allowed for a two way connect to be established between Marriott and its customers, something no other channel of communication would do so well.

“I am very sad to report a terrible tragedy at our Marriott hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan..”. Opening sentence of Bill Marriott’s blog post.

“Dear Mr. Marriott: Please accept my deepest sympathy to the loss of life that was beyond your control and that of your Staff in Pakistan.As an MVCI owner and a holder of Platinum status with Marriott, your company is more of a second home than just a place to stay….”Comment by a customer on this Bill Marriott’s post.

Bill Marriott’s blog generates confidence and brand experience continuity.For professionals in corporate expressions, this is a case study unfolding.

Corporate Blogs have proliferated like never before (The other day I noticed one of India’s unarguably iconic brand Amul, has a blog too). It is easy to find consultants who can lecture a company for hours on how to get started with a corporate blog and the virtues thereof. Very few such consultants can, with some degree of authority, can talk about some clear does and don’ts to keep the corporate blogs alive.

GM is a great company undergoing a painful time for last few years. It has some great brands and it has been early off the block on the corporate blogging block, perhaps innovation comes easy to them. Its Fast Lane team has identified some clear dos and don’ts on making corporate blogging work which should be read by any marketing professional initiating his/her corporation into Corporate Blogging. Read you must.

Feel free to modify the title and include business network as well and ask the question again.

The proliferation of social platforms on the net and the urge to be seen as connected has created a situation when one keeps on receiving invitations to connect from complete strangers. Many times I ask them back if we met somewhere or were part of any common group activity. Most of the time, there is no answer (indicating a non-serious request) or a bland ‘I saw you are connected to so and so and therefore I want to be connected to you’ or some equally incomprehensible response. And most of the time when you add a person to your network, you have nothing to do with them even for years. In other words, you neither write a mail, not exchange information, nor do any collaboration with them for anything meaningful -Unless taking a movie quiz means productive and meaningful collaboration to you. How are your 30 contacts worse than my 500 and ever growing? Maybe 500 contacts against my name looks good to me, gives me good self-esteem, ads to my prestige in the ‘social’ network. And then?

What very few people understand is that quality, not quantity and focus, not diffusion matters. Seth Godin has a fairly straight take on this and I don’t see how you can disagree to this.

To be fair, social networking can be divided into personal social networking and business social networking both of which have so far served in helping people be loosely connected with each other. That essentially would mean that if I have a goal, I should be able to connect and collaborate with folks who can possibly contribute to that goal. That goal could be business(locating people who serve a certain business purpose), personal ( connecting with real friends and acquaintances- friends who you know in real life), pleasure (travel information, hobby groups). Will it be wrong in suggesting that spending extraordinary effort in growing network is like living life in a party all the time where we get to know and meet people. Or mindlessly adding to your contacts list is like trying to become friends with all people at an an airport or a train station! Most of the time one never meets people again. And certainly not all of them. When we go to conferences, usually we love to exhaust our business cards and bring back one full stack of them from people we met at the conference to really feel mission accomplished! (Most of the time we trash almost all of them immediately, or keep piling them on the desk for few weeks or days and then show them the trash-can!).

What is your social network?

(Post dedicated to Vishal Rana of Klamath Falls, Oregon. Vishal and I reconnected via Facebook recently, 19 years after graduating from school together and loosing contact. Vishal, your voice remains the same, and many thanks for the call this morning).

The term social media and these days tends to be rattled off in every discussion. In fact, I like to relate more to the term Conversational Marketing made famous by Scoble and Shel Israel via their book Naked Conversations. Yet, there are very few sources that can help develop a general understanding of what it is. I came across this absolutely must-see slideshow at Slideshare. It can also help you explain this concept to others.Check out this award winning slideshow below.

Debbie Weil recently posted a list of ‘List of 67+ Big Brand Corporate Blogs’ . You’d be surprised to see how blogs and other social medial have proliferated to engage customers across consumer goods (Coca Cola, Whole Foods, Starbucks,Wal-Mart), Services industry (Marriott CEO Bill Marriott,  Starwood, South West Airlines, Delta ) , Technology (Google, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Nokia , Lenovo, Texas Instruments), Financial Services (Quicken Loans), and as well as Manufacturing (Boeing, General Motors, Pitney Bowes ) and so on (Mario Sundar of Linkedin has published his highly credible list of top 15 corporate blogs for Sep 2008 here ).

It clearly represents an evolving change in the ‘format’ of marketing itself, in which lot of things that have been considered strictly no-no in the business of PR and marketing are becoming acceptable. This include casual/informal interactions of the brand ("We need to have all clearances for the message"), over exposure of the brand ambassador ("What, the CEO’s going to talk about the brand and competitors everyday?") and so on. Interesting.

The PR setups of the corporate world taking baby steps to adapt themselves to the reality of blogs, but is Twitter yet another game changer? To those who are yet unaware of this, Twitter allows you to make 140 character ( or less) posts. Others can follow you, react to you and so on. You could also share links. Your tweets are searchable. You float a thought(or Tweets), someone reacts, you react back and so on. It all appears stacked up timestamp wise. Simple.

It so happens that someone started to pretend to be the official spokesman of ExxonMobil and started posting Tweets creating a profile that uses the brand collaterals of Exxon Mobil such pictures, which are purportedly furthering the PR objectives of Exxon Mobil. Only that the publisher of the tweets is not an authorized brand ambassador or spokesperson for Exxon Mobil. Not just that, the person’s id is cloaked behind an alias-Janet.

That raises the question. In olden days, reputation was word of mouth. With advent of mass media, reputation management and PR meat you need to be spoken to on radio and TV in good terms. Likewise in print. And outdoor. Then came the net. Companies discovered the mother of all mass media, and created websites. All looked good and then blogs started coming in. Agencies started monitoring blogs for company sensitive content. Who can forget the famous case of Club Mahindra who had to really struggle hard to counter a possible PR disaster at Shrinidhi’s blog ( Club Mahindra indeed displayed maturity, hats off to you).

And now ‘Tweets’ of 140 characters to be watched too. It will be interesting to see PR agencies making a pitch to potential clients. "We not just scan the websites, and blogs, but also Tweets" ! God!! Where’s the world heading!!!

[Follow me at Twitter, here]

One usually comes across a lot of meaningless ads, creative ads, boring ads, and successful ads etc. Also, there are some ads that don’t leave any impression (a.k.a aftertaste/recall), some do, and some evoke downright revulsion. In this category, I rate the Amul Macho TV ad as the masterpiece of the genre. You are bound to feel compelled to switch off the TV, change the channel, or simple go get a glass of water when this ad shows up on screen. You certainly would’t remember the name of the brand once you see this ad, and even if you do, it would only to make sure one never bought this particular brand. Period.

The Chimp/Orangutan wears this underwear. Would you ape the chimp by wearing this brand?!

Maggi Club, which was a portal targeted at Maggi’s most potent supporters- kids in the pre teens, teens and immediate post teens - has moved from its earlier location to its new one – a discovery I made via a recent pack. Strangely, Nestle India’s website site continues to mention the old site, which is now non-existent, though the domain is registered to Nestle. Maybe they want to use it in some other geography – my guess is USA. The new site has an India specific extension, which means it may come up higher in searches done from India, which is the target market of Nestle India. Smart.

The west had its concept of communities of customers/ influencers from fairly long – who does not recall the Harley Davidson case study. Very few companies in India have created communities around consumers/influencers. Even fewer have successfully harnessed the power of net in doing so. One exception is  Sunsilk using community power  to generate word of mouth activation and to maintain a live recall.

Having lived in hostels for years where Maggi was a refuge from an atrocious meal in the dining room, a quick answer to late night hunger, (and a way to socialize too!) I really wanted to explore Maggi Club – sadly I found I could not register (One has to be between 10 and 23 years of age, I won’t tell you which side I am on!).

The registration is basic, the site asks for your postal address though(‘database’?), and also even before your email id is verified (not a good thing actually), you’re in.

It has some well thought out features such as crossword, quiz-of-the-day, contests, opinion poll, discussion groups, activity book, etc and a hall of fame to highlight those having high points.  The content appears very well thought out and the layout is simple.  I just hope the site owners have a content rotation plan in place, to make sure the users keep coming back.  It also has a way of doing the word of mouth trick by a feature wherein users get points for spread word about the community. Very clever indeed.  The whole thing appears a seamless continuation of the Maggi experience – easy and tasteful.  The content is also diverse and sufficient enough to engage the users for a while. On the whole Maggi Club comes out with a good rating in my view.  The only irritant is that the site does not easily show up in search yet. On the whole Maggi Club is a very smart differentiator for engaging the target segment on an ongoing basis.

Other product sites:

1.        www.meethamoments.com – Cadbury’s – very thin content, falls far short of a ‘community’.

2.       Pepsizone.yahoo.co.in / Pepsibluebillion.com – Not so sure where this is.

3.       Harley Owners Group - You guessed it.

Pessimists may point out about the pathetic net penetration in India, remember that this was the word that could aptly describe the state of telephone infrastructure few years back. No more. Learn, adapt react.Virtual is already real. The world is community before you know it.

PS:

1. All trademark belong to their respective owners. 
2. Yes, you know that already – I love Maggi too, you have a problem?i!