Brand Humanity Series: What's Covered

“Brand Humanity: How Social Technologies are Changing the Way We Do Business.” Wow, that’s a mouthful, but there’s a lot of ground to cover. Brand Humanity is a series of seminars that will range from high-level strategies to tactical “how-to’s” of opening dialogues with employees and customers using new technologies like blogs, wikis and forums. The series will also help business managers navigate the blogosphere and better manage their brands in a highly networked marketplace.

 All sessions in the upcoming webinar series on social technologies will include 4 basic components:

- Expert views on each particular topic

- Discussion and Q&A

- Ongoing follow-up information including updated examples and links

- Online community about your topic where you can exchange ideas and information with others who have taken the course (this will be ready in about a month)

 The first in the series, titled Brand Humanity, is the 30,000 foot overview of how social technologies are impacting brands. Held on 3/31 and 4/1, the session will cover:

- The societal trends that are fueling the exponential growth of blogs

- The impact of the "blogosphere" on your business, and how to monitor and join the customer conversation that’s already happening

- The various types of social technologies such as blogs, wikis and forums, and the six ways in which they’re being used (including internal usage)

- Culture shifts such as transparency and co-creation that accompany the ‘open business’ trend

- Guidelines for creating and maintaining corporate blogs

 The Small Business version on 4/8 will cover much of the same information, but the focus will be heavier on creating a blog and building traffic. It will not cover internal usage of blogs and wikis.

 Where the intro session will provide a topical map of the territory, subsequent sessions will allow you to delve deeper into specific topics of interest to your business. These include:

- Creating Customer Communities, co-hosted with Jake McKee, who's responsible for the success of Lego's global customer community

- Blogging Basics, co-hosted with Jeremy and Darren of Inside Blogging

- Silo-Busting: Internal Blogs and Wikis, co-hosted with Inside Blogging

 There will be more events as we move forward; future topics will come from suggestions from interested participants. I’d like to get an attorney to do a session on legal issues around corporate blogs; if you’re qualified, please contact me. Any other topic suggestions are welcome. 

You can sign up for the first event here. I'm looking forward to your participation and feedback.

Brand Humanity FAQs: Why, What & How Much

I’ve gotten several questions and comments about the upcoming webinar next week that I wanted to address here. Why I’m doing this, what I’ll talk about, why I’m charging at all when there’s a lot of free information available… or that I’m charging too little, or that I’m charging too much. In this post I’ll give the reasoning behind the webinars. In the next post I’ll provide specific outlines on what will be covered.

 There is a lot of free information out there. The problem is, there’s too much of it scattered throughout the blogosphere. It takes a lot of time and energy to surf through it all, find the good examples and information, and compile it into an easy-to-digest overview. I’m anticipating that the folks who take the webinar will need to sell the idea of a corporate blog or community to their respective bosses, and I’ll provide concise information to help them do that.

 The other problem with reading information on the web is that you don’t have the opportunity to ask questions or hear explanations on why a particular tactic is recommended. The webinars are structured with plenty of discussion and Q&A time; I’ve got a limit of 20 people for precisely this reason. Frankly, that limit may be too high, and I might lower it to 10 to 15.

 Lastly, I’ll be talking about how social technologies like blogs are impacting your brand, methods for tracking the conversations about your brand in the blogosphere, and how to use these technologies to enable customers to better connect with your brand. There are a lot of very good blog experts out there (and I’ll be inviting them as co-hosts for future webinars) but to my knowledge, there’s very little discussion about the strategic implications to your brand.

 And lastly, a small but inescapable point: it actually costs a lot to offer a webinar. It will run @ $50 per person for a 90-minute session. So obviously I need to cover my costs.

 So did I charge too much? Too little? I have no idea. I have to start somewhere. The price might go up or down depending on demand or feedback. If you don’t feel you get a good value for the money, I’ll give you a refund. Or you can take another webinar on another topic free of charge. Hey, if I’m not adding value, I need to get out of the business.  That’s what I’m here for.

 

 

 

Brand Humanity Webinar Series

"What are blogs, and how do they relate to our business?"
"Can you make money blogging?"

I've heard these questions so many times that I've decided to launch a webinar series entitled "Brand Humanity: How Social Technologies are Changing The Way We Do Business." I'm pretty excited about it; I've been wanting to evolve my consulting business into something I'm really passionate about. I love to educate, and I love to evangelize new trends like blogging. Perfect.

UPDATE: For details, go to What's Covered and FAQs.

My master plan is to serve as a social-technology education platform for businesses. Included in social technologies are blogs, wikis, community forums, etc. I'll be leading some of the seminars on big-picture issues, brand strategy implications, etc. and inviting specialists to co-host other sessions.  At this point, future sessions will include Creating Community (co-hosted with Jake McKee, the Community Guy) and Business Blogging 101 (co-hosted with Jeremy Wright and Darren Barefoot from InsideBlogging).   

But for right now...
If you're interested in the 30,000 foot view of how social technologies like blogs are impacting businesses and brands, you can sign up for the first of the series, Brand Humanity, which is designed for mid- to large-size companies (we'll get into culture shifts like transparency and co-creation, plus usage of blogs and wikis internally and externally). There's also a "Small Business" version that focuses more on the nitty-gritty of how to blog and less on corporate issues, internal usage, etc. 

Current schedule is as follows:

Thursday, March 31 from 12 - 1:30 CST (mid- to large-size businesses) 15 seats @ $175 (includes first-session "guinea-pig' discount)
Friday, April 1 from 12 to 1:30 CST (mid- to large-size businesses) 20 seats @ $250
Friday, April 8 from 12 to 1:30 CST (small businesses) 30 seats @ $150

If all sessions are booked, or you're interested in receiving information on upcoming sessions, please sign up for the newsletter by entering your email in the sign-up box in the left-hand column of this blog.

Click here to register for an event. Each event link will give a bit more detailed description of what's covered. Pricing for future events is subject to change based on demand. If you have questions, feel free to email me @ jennifer at mantrabrand.com.

Blog readership

(Via the Center for Media Research; registration required)

According to a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, relatively few Americans are familiar with the phenomenon of blogging.

Although 75% of the U.S. public uses the Internet, only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs (the shortened form of the original "Web logs"). More than half, 56%, have no knowledge of them.

According to a December 2004 Gallup Poll, the percentage of Americans getting their news on a daily basis from the mainstream media is 51% for local television news, 44% for local newspapers, 39% for cable news networks, 36% for the nightly broadcast network news, and 21% for radio talk shows. By contrast, only 3% of Americans say they read Internet blogs every day, and just 2% read politics-focused blogs daily.

Blog readers are younger than the population at large. Although 17% of the public is aged 18 to 29, a quarter of all blog readers (those who read even occasionally) are in this age bracket... Gallup finds no gender differences in blog readership, or according to party affiliation. There are slight differences by political outlook, as about a quarter of liberals (24%) say they read blogs at least monthly, compared with 15% of conservatives and 12% of moderates.

More info at Gallup.com (purchase required)

 

Co-creating with Customers

Reveries has a great article today about several companies that are co-creating products with their customers.

About three-quarters of attempts at innovation fail because of the way corporations go about it, says Eric Von Hippel of M.I.T., as reported by in The Economist (3/10/05). According to Eric, who is also about to publish a book called Democratizing Innovation, the mistake is that the firms typically send market researchers out into the field to identify "unmet needs" and then turn the results over to product-development teams. He says they should instead identify "the few special customers who innovate" and invite them in to brainstorm the possibilities. That's the way GE's healthcare does it. GE calls these special customers "luminaries" and they meet regularly to discuss GE's latest technologies and how to turn them into products.

...Staples held "a competition among customers to come up with new ideas. It got 8,300 submissions.

...Two years ago, BMW "posted a toolkit on its website" that allowed its customers to suggest ways in which the carmaker "could take advantage of advances in telematic and in-car online services." About 15 of the 1,000 customers who used the kit were invited to meet with BMW's engineers in Munich and some of the resulting ideas are now in concept stage.

...Back in 1997, Lego was about three weeks away from launching a "build-it-yourself robot development system" called Mindstorm, when about 1,000 hackers "downloaded its operating system, vastly improved it, and posted their work freely online. After a long stunned silence, Lego appears to have accepted the merits of this community's work: programs written in hacker language may now be uploaded to the Mindstorms, mindstorms.lego.com, website.

In any case, as Eric Von Hippel notes, the concept doesn't cost much because many customers consider being "listened to" compensation enough. As BMW's Jeorg Reimann explains: "They were so happy to be invited by us, and that our technical experts were interested in their ideas. They didn't want any money."

For a pretty extensive conversation about co-creation, check out the posts over at Brandshift here, here and here.

Not worthy

Vaspers the Grate has a terrific post on why You are Not a Blog:

You are not a worthy topic for a blog. You are interesting only to yourself, and even to that audience, only interesting intermittently.

This is true for both personal and business blogs. Especially business blogs. Customers will not come back to your blog to hear a bunch of self-important pronouncements about your products, services or company. Talk about something interesting to them. And then listen. Make it a conversation.

Book meme 123.5

Last night I discovered Network(ed) Rhetoric, a blog for a graduate course at Syracuse University. They're looking at how recent trends in network studies and social software connect with issues in rhetoric and composition and vice versa. I found all kinds of thought-provoking goodies that I'll write about when I have a bit more time to percolate on them. This site led me to Theory Canal, which featured a fun little game you can try next time you're lacking inspiration for what to post on your blog.

It's called the Book Meme 123.5 (originally from the chutry experiment). Here's how it works:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

I'm part way through John Winsor's Beyond the Brand, so I picked that up and flipped to p. 123. The fifth sentence isn't inspiring by itself, but -- bending the rules a bit -- the fourth is:

"Trust is a product of active listening."

What a great statement. I was thinking yesterday about "customer relationship management"  and how CRM couldn't come close to actually building relationships. Relationships are built on trust, and trust is a product of active listening. If you're trying to build relationships with customers without listening mechanisms in place (like forums, blogs, users groups, non-focus-group qualitative research, etc.), then you're just spinning your wheels.

So what does 123.5 inspire you to say today?

CMO on Blogging

One of CMO Magazine's  feature stories this month is on corporate blogging. It's a pretty decent overview of the two types of business blogs (corporate and employee) and some of the upsides and perils of the new media. If corporate blogging is new to you, this might give you a good introduction.

Community discussion

We're having a fun discussion about "defining community" over at Corante's Brandshift. Come over and weigh in.

Humane treatment

This is completely off-topic, but I just received this awful petition notice from the Humane Society. If you eat poultry, you may hate me for sharing this. But I think you'd feel better eating your chicken caesar salad if this law were amended. I'm an occasional vegetarian precisely for reasons like this one. (And I know there are those out there who think this is BS... if you feel a burning need to leave a comment, I won't take the time to argue with you.) 

If you read through it, there's a pretty condemning statement about Pilgrim's Pride. Talk about damaging a brand...

Last year nearly nine billion chickens, turkeys, ducks, and other birds were slaughtered in the United States with no requirement that their deaths be humane. Why? Because the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA), which is supposed to ensure that animals are rendered insensible to pain before being slaughtered, does not cover poultry.

That’s right: The federal law designed to protect food animals from suffering during slaughter excludes a shocking 95% of those animals.

Massive Suffering
Because of this exclusion, chickens and turkeys are entirely at the mercy of major poultry processors. After six weeks of being reared in dreadfully overcrowded factory-like conditions with breeding and feeding practices that leave many birds unable to walk naturally, they are shipped off to the slaughterhouse.  There, at a furious pace, they are grabbed and shackled upside down by their legs on a mechanized line. Still conscious, the birds are then dragged through an electrified water bath designed to immobilize them, passed through a neck-slicer, and dropped into scalding water to loosen their feathers. Due to the speed of the assembly line and their own desperate motions, many chickens evade both the immobilization bath and the neck-slicer and are literally scalded to death.

Federal regulations require that the U.S. Department of Agriculture condemn those poultry carcasses that appear to have died from causes other than neck cutting. In 2003, more than 3.4 million carcasses were condemned by the USDA, meaning these birds died either because they were handled roughly during shackling or because they entered the scalder alive.

What Next? 
The industry repeatedly assures the American public that poultry are being treated and killed humanely. Yet the industry has proven incapable of self-regulation; time and time again companies have shown blatant disregard for animal welfare. The horrifying abuses that were exposed in July 2004 at the Pilgrim’s Pride slaughterhouse in West Virginia--in which large numbers of chickens were thrown against walls and stomped by workers--were among the worst known cases of cruelty in the commercial slaughter business.

However, this wasn’t the first outrageous case, and it won’t be the last--unless strong action is taken to change the attitude of the industry and to require new procedures to prevent such abuses. It’s time that the HMSA bring poultry under its protective wing.

Sign the petition here, and pass on the word. There are a lot of relatively meaningless things that spread through the blogosphere... it would be nice if the power of the blogosphere was used to make a difference on something important. Many thanks.

Link policy and building traffic

I'm getting enough emails for reciprocal link exchanges that I thought I'd take a moment to write out my link policy here on my blog. I'll also discuss what I think it takes to create a successful blog. Comments and suggestions from other bloggers are very welcome!

I believe that my blogroll is a reflection of my brand. The people on my blogroll have one of the following characteristics:

1. They participated on my blog through comments and trackbacks. They already established themselves as part of my community, and I thought they had some smart things to say. I've met many of them in person, and have probably had email exchanges with almost all of them. (or even hired them, as was the case with Johnnie). Or,
2. I somehow stumbled across their blog and was blown away by the originality of voice and smartness of content (like Headrush). Or,
3. They're highly trafficked blogs that refer a decent number of visitors to my site (like Fast Company and Tom Peters). And I also read them.

If you leave a comment or a trackback, you can be assured that I will click over and look at your blog. If I like what I see, it's likely that I'll add you to my blogroll. Probably not right away, but if you're persistent, it increases your odds. I'm not terribly good about managing my blogroll... I've got several people in mind to add, and I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

There are a lot of well-written blogs with decent content that I probably won't add to my blogroll. No offense, but there are too many blogs out there right now and I don't want a blogroll that's 10 miles long. At this point, I'm only adding blogs that are really original. They've got a viral component. They either have unique content (tough to do) or they're talking about it in a fresh and different way. They inspire me to look at the world through a new lens.

So I suppose this is a long-winded way of saying that I don't do reciprocal link exchanges. When I started my blog over a year ago, I did exactly what I'm suggesting here in this post... I found blogs that I liked, wrote comments on their posts, did trackbacks and commentary on my own blog, and linked to them voluntarily without asking them to return the favor. I was fortunate that those people visited my blog, liked what they saw and added my link voluntarily to their blogroll. I felt good knowing that I was being added because they thought my blog had value... not because I asked them to add me.

True, it was easier a year ago to get visibility; there were a LOT fewer business blogs. I could count most of the marketing blogs on two hands, and we formed a small community. Unfortunately for blog newcomers, it's harder to break through the clutter. And it will be even harder for those who don't start for another 6 months.

Bloggers who break through the clutter say what's on their mind and have learned to remove the "political-correctness" filter. But most importantly, they actively participate in the blogosphere through links, trackbacks and comments. It is a very time-intensive process to do; I probably spent 3 to 4 hours a day when I started my blog. Part of that time was  trying to think of something original to say; the rest of the time was spent finding like-minded blogs and participating on their sites. When you engage in dialogue, your visibility will increase. Unfortunately I've gotten lazy... there are a lot of great discussions that I could be having, but I've gotten busy with other things.

Maintaining a blog is a lot like having a child (I don't have one, but I can imagine.) It takes a lot of time, nurturing and care. It's not as easy as asking a bunch of bloggers if they'd put your link on their site. So I suppose to sum up this post on driving traffic:
1. Compare your blog to others in your space... do your posts sound distinctly "you"? Or could they appear on someone else's blog and no one would know the difference? What unique value are you adding to the blogosphere? This is the "product development" phase.
2. Participate, participate, participate. Give first in order to receive. This is the "marketing" phase.

If you check off on these two items, you should do fine. If you're not getting links, think about a way to boost the value of your content... don't resort to link exchanges. That's like relying on advertising instead of creating a buzzworthy product. In blogging, like in business and life, there are no effective short-cuts.

Ice cream in March?

Yahoo!'s 10th birthday is today. To celebrate, they're giving away... a scoop of ice cream, courtesy of Baskin Robbins (link will only work today). I don't know about the rest of the country, but right now in Dallas it's 45 degrees.

Was this a promotion cooked up by Baskin Robbins to boost sales during a slow month? Does anyone else think this is weird?