IABC Café

Can you see the circular nature of it? I’m sitting in on the blogging panel right now, and the first thought is … ironic that on a panel on blogs, it was the least interactive…

The panel was moderated by Debbie Weil – an online marketing and blogging expert, as noted by the introduction.

There are two ways to go with the blogging session – and it’s not easy. You can go with the newbie approach, and explain what a blog is and how they are changing public relations and communications. Or, you can go with a higher level and assume that the audience knows about corporate blogging, and go cerebral. Or, you can find a way to go with the middle ground, having a presentation for all levels. This panel went both routes, and did a pretty good job on trying to keep a balance.

Weil started with what is a blog – an interactive Website. Web log – readers can leave comments. GM is blogging. Boeing is blogging. Sun is blogging – all techy companies are blogging. Edelman is blogging.

Why are these companies blogging? Word-of-mouth marketing – it’s not a wave, but a snowball effect. The comments, the trackbacks, and the conversation keeps expanding.

Weil stated that this is “no cost marketing” – I find this hard to believe. Well, a little harsher is that it’s not true. Time is money, and in PR or communications we have hourly billing rates.

Reporters are going to the GM blog to quote Bob Lutz, but are ignoring the quotes from press releases. It’s a positive branding strategy – the whole transparency issue.

However, this is counter to corporate culture. Is blogging a viable corporate communications tool? Who are reading the blogs? Companies need to get over the fear of blogging…

Gary Grates, vice president - communications of General Motors, North America. He contributes to GM’s Fastlane blog.

We have every reason to be afraid, we are a corporation that controlled the information that went out. We have been using the Web to get out information. We did assess the risks – but didn’t consult legal – and started with the Smallblock blog. And then expanded it to the Fastlane for the Detroit auto show, and brought in Bob Lutz.

Word of mouth is a huge impact in marketing. Grassroots communications in blogs. We have great products, but we are a company in trouble, and the blog allows Lutz to vent on what the media does and does not report. The blog invites comments, and there is a side benefit to more media activity directly with Lutz with reporters emailing.

We went for something at the grassroots level. Revive the Saturn brand was the first few posts – staying focused on the products. Filter the comments for inappropriateness, but not for content. We do post the criticisms and the positive comments.

The media is reading it on a regular basis.

One note is that without Bob Lutz, there would be no Fast Lane - there’s no leading face that could have pulled it off like Bob. We have engaged others, but Lutz needed to be the driver.

It is time intensive - you need to set aside time to moderate and comment on the blog, as well as writing for it. We have a fulltime person for our blog, who is from our agency, and is like a regular employee. She publishes, moderates the comments.

One other thing noted by GM is that there are a lot of readers of the blog. Not sure what that has translated to, beyond transparency.

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Kevin Holland is vice president for communications, membership & corporate development of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA). He launched ACCABuzz, ACCA’s blog, in 2004.

Why does ACCA blog? We had content no where else to put, so we launched the blog to keep information out there: industry news, chapter news – the blog was a simple way to launch it.

Our blog is to build confidence with prospects and customers by being transparent. Share what we do, what we are and the problems we are encountering. The blog has been a great marketing and communications tool for us, where it has helped us in Google and lead to more queries.

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Paul Rosenfeld is General Manager of Intuit’s QuickBooks Online Edition and the evangelist behind Intuit’s first blog, the Official QuickBooks Online Weblog.

The blog started out during a lunch with others at Intuit, and the next day the blog was up. Here I was excited to be blogging, and getting a voice out there. Then, we had our first big meeting with the PR department on blogging, and I was invited. The meeting was why not to do it, with the legal team there to provide counsel. It was looking at reasons why not to do the blog, but I then pushed to why we should be blogging.

The blog started to be a blog about Quickbooks, then it snowballed from there…

The audience started to trickle out at 11.20 AM, possibly due to the lack of interactivity and the lecturing nature of the panel. The audience had questions - I had questions - and there was a limited amount of time express them. Just what blogs are supposed to be about, an open conversation.

For next year, this session might have worked better as workshops capped at 20-30 people, a few times during the conference, that would have given people more of a hands-on experience. I can think of a handful of IABC bloggers that would be happy to lead such workshops.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2005 at 7:06 am and is filed under IABC International Conference 2005. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.