Blogworld Expo 07 - Blogging and Your Brand

I'm here at Blogworld Expo this week and will be posting notes from the sessions I attend. This one was about brand management in the age of the online community.

Here are my notes from the session. I'll be happy to respond with greater detail in the comments of this post if anyone is interested.

• The panelists asked what everyone was interested in discussing before they began the session. At a later talk, a different panelist made the shrewd observation that the act of the panel having a discussion with the audience was the essence of online communities. It's not a broadcast, it's a conversation. In any case, in this session there were several suggestions. How do you keep a consistent Public Affairs message coming through your corporate bloggers as they blog? I asked how individual employees could use blogs to brand themselves within the organization in order to promote themselves and their own skills.


• It’s all about making connections; it is no longer about selling and telling. Communications are more bidirectional.


• From an external point of view, the blog allows you to respond to the posts and news and consumer reviews of your products. It allows you coordinate your organizational message because you have an online presence that can be inserted as URLs into the discussions on other sites and forums where you are already being discussed.


• Marketers and publicity departments can no longer control their brand, they can only help guide the discussion.


• The ROI is difficult to measure for online community participation compared to traditional marketing. (I thought it was really the other way around because you can track referring URLs for visitors to your site.)


• Individuals on the outside have an easier time creating content about you because they do not have an approval chain to go through.


• The Internet has already surpassed television as the “most essential” medium by people 12-44 - Edison Media Research. For example, Sermo.com is an online group of 31,000 MDs sharing information. Wow!


• "Whether or not we choose to be a part of the dialogue, the dialogue is going to happen” – Coca Cola’s Tim Kopp.


• Because the engagement is a dialogue, the discussion has to be an honest one. You can’t maintain a relationship and continue as a total honk for your organization. You have to recognize and be able to discuss your shortcomings.


• The 80-20 rule applies here, too. 20% of all content authors cause 80% of your problems. Dealing with the 20% who are natural grumblers can end up as an isometric exercise. Some of these grumblers inhabit blogs and forums and you just have to live with their rantings. You can't let them blast you on the Internet with impunity, but you have to recognize that there are those who will never be satisfied with you no matter what.


• The speakers showed a pretty cool social network connection map of blogs discussing your products and gave them red, yellow and green icons for a measure of how positive they were about the stuff. I need to find the link to that and insert it here.


• By blogging you are increasing the number of people who will be talking about your products. Imagine this as a project that you are trying to sell. By having a lot of people know about it, you can generate buzz about it at many levels and many locations.


• Check out the Autodesk communities website. They’ve got some great communities going on.

For me, the theme of this discussion was that you cannot control the discussions about you, you can only guide and correct them. If I can, I'll find links to other bloggers who attended this session and post them here.