My Name is Kate

Promoting Your Corporate Blog Offline

Disclosure: Petro-Canada is a client of mine.

When you have a corporate blog (or any blog, really), you want to find ways to regularly engage new readers.  And it is highly likely that some of those readers will be offline.  Consequently, I was quite pleased to see this recent development from the downstream corporate communications team over at Petro-Canada (now Suncor).  Petro-Canada used to have a decal on their gas station pumps very similar to this pie chart.

It certainly gives you the factual breakdown, but it certainly didn't encourage a conversation.  However, starting this summer, Petro-Canada changed the sticker quite radically.

Now they are using a decal shaped like a gas pump with a link to their blog PumpTalk.ca and an invitation to customers to  join the conversation.  You can see a picture of it to the right.

This is smart because you're alerting your customers to the conversation your hosting right when they care about your product. 

Now, I don't imagine anyone is whipping out their mobile device RIGHT THEN to read the blog and leave a comment.  But people are certainly passionate about gas prices.  And being alerted to there being a place to discuss gas prices is a good thing.

I would think the next step is to include that URL on gas credit card bills - to try to engage customers when they might actually be in front of a computer and would take the time.

Are there other examples you've seen of companies promoting their blogs offline?

Speaking the true FAQs through social media (Thesis #65)

Social media is, as you would expect by its moniker, the media of the people.  To appropriate an Americanism - it is media of, by and for the people.

It is your media. 

It is my media. 

And that simple fact doesn't change whether you are a kid waving a golf club and pretending to save the rebel alliance or a mom who writes about the challenges and rewards of raising twins or an employee who blogs about a company's impactful charitable programs.

Individuals create this media in the hopes of sparking a response, of generating a conversation around their point of view.  And the conversation can take many forms: comments on the media itself, a video in response, or a Twitterstorm.  Regardless of the specific form of the media, it is still a conversation.  You and I. We and me. Us and them. Dialoging. Conversing. Trusting. Respecting. Being human.

My primary interest in (or at least my vocational interest) in social media and the ensuing conversations is those conversations that happen on behalf of the corporation.  Let's be clear - a press release is not a conversation.  Yet most companies continue to issue them and believe that is sufficient for conversation.  And one or two spokespeople get approved and they talk to broadcast media who filter their words and sentiments into the zeitgeist. 

This is not a conversation.

And it is not doing your company any favours - either through the form of your media or its representatives.  The reality is that there are often far more engaging, informed and sociable employees in your fold to start and participate in the conversations that ARE happening around your products/behaviours/politics.  But for varying reasons you don't trust them to engage.  You don't trust them to create media that sparks a conversation.

Because the spark may burst into flame and then what do you do? you say.

I know, I know - I am not so naive as to not understand the myriad of fears and excuses and rationalizations that come to the fore when people like me say "Just empower your employees to talk to your customers".

So let's work through this fear together.

Because frankly, your best shot at engagement and at winning/keeping your customers is by encouraging your employees to speak their minds.  Yes, they see your dirty laundry every day, know your secrets.  But they also know your quiet, small daily triumphs.  And, more importantly, they know the frustrations of a customer; they remember what it is like to be foiled by a corporate voicemail system.  Or to be confronted by a misprinted manual.  Or to read a seemingly counter-intuitive policy and wonder WHY?.

Most importantly, they know that the FAQs that you answer on your website aren't REALLY the FAQs.  They are pretty words that sound soothing to lawyers and executives but in reality enrage any customer who reads them.

Employees need to speak the true FAQs.  They need to socialize the true FAQs.  They need to engage in conversations and give your customers the true FAQs.  And they need to hear and integrate and respond when your customers give them the true FAQs.

Give your employees their voices.  Let them use their media, the people's media, to connect with your customers.  Imagine if every employee were on the customer service team.  What happy (and profitable) customers you would have. 

Go on.  Trust them.  They are your best hope.

NB: this post was written on the 10th anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto as part of the Cluetrain Plus 10 initiative.   My thesis is #65. We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.  Many thanks to Keith McArthur for pulling together this initiative. 

Photo Credit: a_nep

Client Plug: Osmosus.com - New Sustainability Community Website Launches

Last week I was pleased to be part of the launch of a new website: Osmosus.com.  Osmosus is a social network where people can interact on their journey to sustainability.

A couple of cool things about Osmosus:

• Personal "Green Space" where you can state your "green creed", blog,  track events and connect with others.
• There is an intricate carbon footprint calculator where you can put in your current lifestyle which will calculate your carbon emissions.  You can then model a number of different scenarios for reducing them.
• Osmosus has a news centre which collects enviro and sustainability-related news into one place.

For the launch, Osmosus has partnered with the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation.  For every new member, they are donating $1 (up to $10,000) towards planting a new orchard in a metropolitan area.

Social Media Activities for Launch

I thought I'd capture what we did here for launch - for those of you who have similar situations coming up.

Personal Message to Beta Testers: we had a small group of folks who helped us test various aspects of Osmosus prior to launch.  We sent out a note to them a few days prior, letting them know what was happening and trying to keep them in the loop about development and communication activities.  This kind of personal touch is important.  Your early adopters and beta testers are so valuable and their perspective becomes even more so over the long-haul.  You want folks who were there in the beginning.  Hunch.com just launched (congrats!) and one of the things that they are doing on user profiles is giving early members a special badge to commemorate their early contributions.  Great community fostering, IMHO.

~

Blog: Doran (the founder of Osmosus) started a blog to keep folks up to date on what's happening at Osmosus, particularly from a development perspective.  As we go forward, I hope we can evolve this into more of a team effort (similar to what happens over at FreshBooks' blog - possibly my fav web product blog, though MOO's blog is a close second) as well as a place where we can showcase the great ideas and activities of community members (one of the reasons I love MOO's blog - they do this so well!!)

Hello, CNW Media Breakfast attendees!

If you saw my talk at the CNW Media Breakfast on Thursday (or listened on the webcast), thank you for attending and being such a great audience!  Your attention, energy and questions were fantastic!

Couple of links for you:

• This page has my slides embedded along with links to the resources I mentioned.
• If you are on Twitter (or decide to join), you can follow me as @mynameiskate
• If you want to see the Twitter chatter from yesterday's talk, you can see a Twitter search with the CNW hashtag #CNW. (if you're reading this much after my talk, you'll likely see a different conversation)

Telling Your Company's Story Using Narrative, Video and Expertise (Client Plug)

Not everyone likes to write.  Or, frankly, to read.  Luckily, on the internet, we can use a combination of multimedia elements to tell a story, our story.  I wanted to share how a client of mine, BuildDirect, is starting to use video, in combination with their blogging, to tell their story.

BuildDirect sells high-quality building materials direct to contractors and consumers via the Internet.  They have been blogging for quite a while now - from a CEO blog to expert blogs about a number of topics (bamboo, wood flooring, stone tiles, etc.).  Now, they're smart and haven't been blogging just about their stuff; for example, Rob Jones [twitter], who blogs about bamboo (and who also has a wicked personal blog about music and culture) finds great examples of bamboo  (a green, sustainable flooring material) in use beyond flooring or heck, even beyond building materials - bamboo underwear, anyone?

So far, this has been a pretty good blogging strategy - curating and annotating with personal expertise a collection of articles on topics related to your business.

But BuildDirect (or any business really) has another resource that they could exploit - heavy internal expertise as well as access to places that most of us can't go.

Here's something you may not know about me - I am an ardent fan of shows like Megastructures and Frontiers of Construction.  So when we were talking about what the next step for BuildDirect might be in social media AND I found out they could go to the places where they quarry the travertine - well, I had visions of Travertine Dream coming to the Discovery Channel.

Not surprising, perhaps, the Discovery Channel's production budget was a little out of BuildDirect's league.  However, armed with a couple of Flip video cameras, BuildDirect has started to film their journeys to their manufacturers - first up, the travertine tile manufacturer in Turkey.

And this is where the great storytelling comes in - by illustrating a descriptive blog post with snippets of educational video, BuildDirect now has a comprehensive piece on how travertine tile is made.

So smart!  And this kind of content can be used for customer education, sales team education, show-and-tell at school.  Also, they can take beautiful, personal images (like the one of travertine above) that they can then use online and off - so much better than stock photography.

So ... what aspects of your business can you make visible to your customers?  Where do you have latent expertise that, armed with a camera, could become explict expertise and start to tell the awesome story of your business?

Bamboo Hut Image via Inhabitat
Travertine Image from BuildDirect

Launched: ShareSavvy.ca, Canadian City Guide for Moms (client plug)

Recently, SavvyMom.ca [Sarah and Minnow's blog] (a client of mine) launched ShareSavvy.ca - a community where moms can share local resource recommendations.  So, their favourite restaurants, kid-friendly stores or professionals.  Moms can also ask questions and get answers/recommendations.

I'm a fan for a few reasons.  Personally, I think hyper-local is in.  And these aren't just city-based recommendations, but neighbourhood-based recommendations.  So, I can find a stroller-friendly coffeeshop in the Beaches in Toronto or in Kitslano in Vancouver.

Secondly, SavvyShare.ca is a perfect resource for families who are traveling to cities they aren't familiar with.  Want to know what you and your kids can do while you're visiting Edmonton - check it out on ShareSavvy.ca.

Finally, it's not just for moms (shhh ...).  I'm not a mom, but I found this awesome party spa service here in Vancouver.

Launching ShareSavvy.ca

The launch of ShareSavvy.ca was a soft-launch with some ongoing social media activities and blogger outreach.  One of the pieces that I was most excited about was the social media release that SavvyMom created. The SMR as a tool is still evolving (and should, ultimately, evolve into a digital press room), but there were a couple of interesting elements in this one.  First, we did a Twitter summary.  The idea was first suggested in a post by Jeremiah Owyang (further riffed on by Todd Defren) offering his thoughts on SMRs.  This was the summary:

Just launched for Canadian Moms!  Share your neighbourhood favs and trusted mom resources at ShareSavvy.ca  http://is.gd/2xnQ.

As you can imagine, it was met with some skepticism by the socmed folks on Twitter.  Legitimately, the question was raised about whether or not anyone would use it.  To date, I don't think anyone has; however, that, for me anyway, was not the only goal.  It was a good writing exercise to get the summary of the launch and a link into 140 characters.  And having it, as well as other multi-media chunks, has shaped how we think about the content we provide to the people we'd like to have write stories about us.

A Contest - Win A Range or Groceries

And for those of you who are inclined to write a review or two of your favourite local resources ... there is a contest happening right now on ShareSavvy.ca.  For every review you write, you receive an entry into a draw for either a Whirlpool Gold ® Free-Standing Range worth $1599 courtesy of Whirlpool® Home Appliances or $500 worth of groceries courtesy of President’s Choice.  You can sign up over at ShareSavvy.ca.

An Easy-to-Use, Fast Powerhorse Printer for Small Business - the Brother HL-4070CDW Printer

One of the reasons I like blogging (aside from the nano-celebrity) is that I get the opportunity to review cool stuff (hardware, websites, books), sometimes even before said stuff hits the market.  As a marketer, I am also a firm believer in blogger outreach programs; by participating, in addition to playing with new products, I also get to learn how other companies handle these programs.

Brother started a blogger outreach program late last year - to have select small businesses folks test out a new line of printers designed just  for small and medium size businesses.  I was one of the lucky folks who got to participate, and my test model was the HL-4070CDW (why can't we name printer models cool names like cars?).  I was very excited about this model because it offers printing via WiFi!  Yay - no more cords!

I arrived home from my honeymoon to find this waiting for me (I included the coffee cup for scale).  I wasn't expecting something quite so ... big.  We have been using a relatively small printer from a competitor - this one's footprint is at least twice the size.  So we had to scramble a bit to find an appropriate place for it.

Now I'm a documentation gal.  I loves me some good documentation.  And Brother delivered!  Right in the top of the box was a big friendly manual with lots of illustrations, numbered steps and friendly arrows.  So, I read through the steps for unpacking the printer.  My fav was the diagram showing TWO people setting it up.  So, I recruited Rosemary and we managed to get the thing out of the box without too many tears.

Now, Brother wants to help you protect your investment.  So they have a really big section on how to unpack, including info on how to remove all the various bits of plastic and tape that they have stuck in nooks and crannies in your printer that will melt if you use your printer while they are still attached.  Some of them are easy to find because they look like this:

Others take a little longer to dig out.  All in all, it took me 24 minutes to get the printer from being sealed in the box to being unpacked and ready to turn on.

OK, now to hook up the Wifi.  We're a mixed office - we have both Mac and PC users.  I decided to try to configure it using my Mac.  Again, the documentation was really easy to use.  And my favourite part: when I had to do some networking trick that wasn't part of Brother's software config, they STILL included directions on how to do it, including screenshots of what should appear on my Mac. Now that is thinking ahead!  I'll bet a lot of folks get frustrated at points like that - where they need to mess with something in their operating system and don't know how and there is no one to ask (because most small businesses don't have dedicated IT guys).  Way to go, Brother!

It took me 19 minutes to configure the WIFI interface and get this:

Petro-Canada launches Gas Price and Fuel Efficiency Blog!

(I was going to try to come up with a wittier title, but sometimes, straight-forward is the way to go.)

I'm thrilled to share that Petro-Canada (disclosure: Petro-Canada is a client of my company, reinvent! communications) has stepped into the blogospheric fray and launched their first blog - Pump Talk (and Pleins gaz, en francais).  It's written by three members of their corporate communications team: Jon Hamilton, Sneh Seetal and Michael Southern, and focuses on gas price issues and fuel efficiency ideas.  The Pump Talk blog builds on their video series on YouTube last year which showcased two Petro-Canada employees talking about gas prices -- attempting to make the issue more accessible and relevant to consumers.

Personally, I am so proud of Petro-Canada for really wanting to engage with customers around this incredibly thorny issue.  We all *know* that social media (blogs, etc.) is the way to go, but I think it takes a lot of courage for a company to actually put themselves out there. 

Yes, yes .. I know what you're thinking: "Big oil and gas company, billions of dollars ... courage?  Kate, you're just saying that because they're your client!"

Actually, I'm not.

Because this is not about a big faceless billion dollar public company.  This is about 3 people - Jon, Sneh and Michael - who a) believe in the power of the medium and b) want to participate in a conversation with their customers.  I've sat in the meetings where they asked amazing questions about blogging and engagement and etiquette and standards.  We've discussed writing styles and comments-approval and bi-lingualism and legalese.  They've learned about tagging and authority and creative commons and the right way to attribute a photo from flickr.  We've discussed blogrolls and trackbacks and the evil vagaries of trying to get CSS to appear the same in multiple browsers.

So what I mean by "courage" is three-fold:

First, when we (as social media experts/critics) discuss the attempts of companies to enter the conversation, we often forget that real people are behind it.  People with genuine motives and the authentic desire to do their jobs better ... and knowing that social media is one way to do that.  It has been good for me to be reminded of that.  And I remind you.  This isn't to say that you or others shouldn't critique this initiative (I do secretly wonder how we would fare in one of Mack Collier's Company Blog Checkups!), but to know that a corporate blog isn't written by a logo, but people just like us.

Second, we take for granted how to start a blog.  We've either been doing this for a while or had a technical bent to begin with.  But for professionals for whom communication, rather than technology, is the passion, there is still a lot to absorb.  Web 2.0 and its ilk may be better at bringing us together, but there are still a lot of fiddly bits to contend with.  Steve Rubel has an article in this week's AdAge about the Geek Marketer:

These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media. Armed with these insights, they regularly apply them in a marketing context by working closely with brand teams to codify new best practices.

We can't expect that our clients are all geek marketers (yet ;) ).  So when we want to tell them ALL THE STUFF THEY HAVE TO DO to get their blog started, it can be overwhelming.  It's good to remind our clients, and ourselves, that a blog is not a finished product.  It will never be *done*; it will likely never be perfect.  It's a different kind of thing than a TV ad or a print piece.  Patience and prudence are good things to remember when you're helping a client who wants to start and launch a corporate blog.

Thirdly, most of us have no real idea of the number and diameter of the hoops that must be jumped through so that a project like a corporate blog for a publicly traded company can be launched.  Sure, we all intellectually acknowledge it (yes, yes .. someone has to check with legal) ... but living it, breathing it - totally different thing.  So, to use a really bad metaphor ... a corporate blog is like an iceberg; what everyone sees is only 10% of the effort and work that went into making it happen. 

What did I learn when working with Petro on Pump Talk?  A few things ...

• Passion (and a sense of humour) is essential. If your client doesn't REALLY want to make this happen, it won't.  Your client needs to be super-charged about creating a blog for the company.  Think energizer bunny type of charged.  But if that passion *does* exist and is shared across the team?  Dream client!
• Executive support is essential.  And framing the context, benefit and risks of your blogging project in the way that executives of billlion dollar companies can relate to is even more essential. Keep it short, sweet and focused, people.
• Compromise is not a dirty word.  Yes, *we* are all enthusiastic about this medium and (over-focus) that things should be done a certain way to satisfy the blogosphere.  But the blogosphere is only one part of the equation.  If you're not prepared to acknowledge that and accept it, you'll have a tough time with your client. You've done your job if you've helped them weigh the pros and cons of taking certain decisions, not if you've *won* every decision.

So, this post is possibly a little saccharine and certainly a little Pollyanna-esque, but as CC Chapman and I have discussed before, I think it's important to acknowledge when a corporation has made an authentic effort.  Yes, there will be mistakes or missteps or simply decisions taken that not everyone agrees with.  But I am in the privileged position of being there from the beginning, and I know the intention of the people who are now, and hereafter, known as bloggers.

Jon, Michael, Sneh and Corinn (who has become a master at content management, html, feeds and other bloggy delights) ... welcome to the blogosphere!  It is guaranteed to be a exhilarating ride!

Time for a change .. New challenge, new city!

The rumours are true.  I am leaving Petro-Canada and the Big Smoke for the balmy left-coast shores of Vancouver.  The time has come to try my hand a taking a product to market, and the good folks at Uniserve are just crazy enough to give me that chance.  I'll be heading up the product management team as well as leading the community building around new products.

I can't give you all the details on our first (very cool) social networking, family-oriented product just yet, but stay tuned!

I'm thrilled to be joining Uniserve at this exciting time of transformation and working with some outstanding people.  Uniservers ... I'll see you in a few weeks.  Petro-Canada - it's been a great two years; I've learned a lot and hopefully been able to leave a positive legacy.  And especially to the EBDT fishbowl -- thank you!

And don't worry, I'll still be writing for One Degree (yes, Ken ... I know I owe you a story) and of course, blogging here at MNIK.  And after meeting a few at the last TorCamp, I am definitely looking forward to getting to know even more of the cool kids and thought leaders out of Vancouver.

Tags: kate trgovac, vancouver, uniserve, mynameiskate

Photo Credits: vancouver from false creek Uploaded by jawcey on 16 Jun '06, 12.27pm EDT.

Launched! Snow for the Gold

We just launched Snow for the Gold, a site where you can create a snowflake and send it, with your best wishes, to Canadian Olympic and Paralympic athletes.  For my French readers, there is an en francais version of the site: Tourbillon de Souhaits.  For the non-French speaking, that's a "Whirlwind of Wishes" which I think is just lovely! 

Technorati Tags: olympics, marketing, Torino2006, Canada, bobsleigh, snowflake