Mima Summit October 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: marketing social)

I recently presented to the 2008 MIMA Summit on the topic of corporate blogging. Of the many thoughts I presented, which you can view here, I am most interested in your reaction to the following:

• How can you be humanly authentic? (as corporate blogger) - It’s useful when the company knows itself and you can use that as a guideline as to the personality of the business. There needs to be internal/external alignment so that there will be less dissonance between internal and external conversations. The company’s culture is the platform for passion about your business, products and services to shine through. Remember that honesty is the basis for truth.

• Do brands suffer? (when they go from one interaction many times like advertising to many interactions one time like social media) - my thinking is that community conversations strengthen the relationships we form with brands. By being available to many interactions, brand are not locked into one rigid expression or experience - they can become nuanced and personal.

• What is the worst that could happen? (when you open your company to social interaction) - if anyone here has ever tried to map the answers to this question with a full representation of their company, including legal, you have probably a better idea of how you’d moderate a conversation now. What are your thoughts on this one?

• How do you empower your community? - to me this is about enabling comments and staying on top f them, even when you moderate them. Allowing trackbacks and links. The other consideration is one of attitude. Would you leave customer reviews on your site? Even negative ones?

Community is a balancing act. It’s about navigating the fine line between active listening. On one hand it’s advocating for the community, while on the other you become an ambassador for the company.

The reason why corporate communications no longer works is not all that different from why traditional marketing communications no longer works.

Whether your internal culture encourages it or not, there is an emerging infrastructure of participation that enables democratization of participation for all employees - with or without your consent or employee snooping techniques.

They enable conversations that are much more powerful than yesteryears water cooler conversations or the inevitable rumor mills. If your corporate communications slogans don’t live up to reality, as is often the case with employee empowerment stories that are not backed by policies or budgets that truly empower people, they will be outed in an instant.

Thankfully for employees, and especially younger ones, there are some large company visionaries, like BT’s CIO JP Rangaswami, who get that and who encourage the proliferation of the platform of participation, which enables employee empowerment, within their corporate walls.