Blog Panel: Negative is the New Positive
Yesterday I spoke in Phoenix (left the house at 4am and didn’t get back to Oakland airport till 9pm) at Frost and Sullivan’s Sales and Marketing conference on a panel about Business Blogging.
Awareness of blogs growing, Adoption still slow in Corporate Sales and Marketing
While the crowd in our panel was beyond the “why blog” or “Why do blogs matter” stage, in a previous session there were some pretty strong hesitations about business blogging. This is pretty bad as I the PR industry, Music Industry, and the next President of the United States is already savvy and deploying. One attendee said “Arn’t blog just bitch sessions for geeks”? I promise to be a resource to these Sales and Marketing folks using my blog, so any questions you have, please leave a comment or send me an email.
There were about 50 people in the room, and we asked them to raise their hand for the following questions:
“How many of your companies read and listen to blogs” (very few hands went up)
“How many of your companies are blogging” (even fewer hands went up)
Our Panel:
Moderator, David Geller, President and CEO of WhatCount
I was among fantastic company on the panel yesterday, it was hosted by David Geller, President and CEO of WhatCounts. David is from the Seattle area is is very in tune to what’s been going on in Social Media and knows my colleague Robert Scoble.Panelist, Angela Vargo, SouthWest Airlines, Sr. Specialist Business Development (Blog Program Manager)
Southwest Airlines is lucky to have Angela Vargo who spearheaded the Southwest Nuts about Southwest group blog all the way to the executives and now has a thriving group blog that even includes customers blogging. At one point, the CEO left a post brainstorming about changing the open seating policy to an assigned seating policy. There were hundreds of comments that rejected the notion and Southwest was able to build better service from listening to this interactive focus group.Panelist, Ben Edwards, IBM Director of New Media Communications
Ben Edwards (A Podtech customer) is a Social Media early adopter and evangelist at the behemoth known as IBM. IBM was an early case study for having internal, external blogs, podcasts and has already created several islands in SecondLife. I used IBM as a case study for my own internal evangelism at Hitachi. Hitachi and IBM have very similar cultures, so if it’s good enough for IBM, it should be good enough for Hitachi. IBM is known for having thousands of blogs, and just yesterday rolled out a Social Networking platform.
Panelist, Jeremiah Owyang, Director of Corporate Media Strategy
The third panelist was me, you can learn about me on my profile page.
Points of Brilliance:
While there were so many interesting and helpful tips, I wrote down while on stage some of the pearls of wisdom from Ben and Angela, here’s what I gleaned:
“Negative is the New positive” was a great quote from Angela. She gave a case study of how public grievances against Southwest are aired on the blog. Southwest listens, acknowledges and attempts to fix he problem in public, showing the world how they care about people. I myself challenged head on a critical attack of my professional and perhaps personal ego a few weeks ago. Lately, when people meet me in person they often ask me about this post. Ryan subscribed, so to me, it was a win. One Southwest blogger shared an experience of a bee nest forming on the tail of a plane. Traditional press picked up on this and even quoted Southwest as “Bees on a plane” Ben gave a great analysis on how Blog are a community tool, he said that “Blogs are about 60% author created and the other 40% is created by the audience in the forms of their blogs and on the comments. Ben has made Marketing more efficient at IBM by shifting the concept of Marketing to Publishing. This new model works. In that note, Blogging reduces marketing costs, as the cost compared to creating brochures, case studies, and customer testimonials is incredibly more expensive than a blog. The audience asked some questions about actual costs, and ROI, we gave them a variety of examples. He also suggests that the blog disclaimer on a blog which usually suggests that “this is a personal opinion, and not that of the company” probably won’t hold up in court. So teaching your corporate bloggers how to best behave in public, on email, in SecondLife, and on their blogs is key. For the thousands of instances of social media deployment at IBM, there’s only been a handful of negative cases. I get the strong sense that IBM trusts it’s employees. Another excellent point by Ben is that traditional media has the megaphones, and often corporations have to cater to their needs to get the word out. The power is shifting to those that participate.
Below are some pictures for Frost and Sullivan’s 2007 Sales and Marketing West conference:
Frost and Sullivan Team
Factiva folks and Ben
My view from the stage
View of Audience
Kelly and I reunite
Ben Edwards, IBM
David Geller, WhatCounts
Angela Vargo, Southwest Airlines
Rapid Vendor event (like speed dating)
Cactus Juice
21 Comments so far
Leave a reply
Hi Jeremiah,
“Negative is the New positive” was a great quote from Angela. She gave a case study of how public grievances against Southwest are aired on the blog. Southwest listens, acknowledges and attempts to fix he problem in public, showing the world how they care about people. ”
If done properly, I think a lot of companies can do good things to address problems via the blog. In addition, it probably helps centralize the complaints somewhat - which would make it easier for the company to monitor and address.
Good job by Southwest…
It always strikes me as funny that we always talk about feedback from customers as complaints and not as praise. I suppose its that nature of our society that nobody really worries about things unless it is about their needs.
Totally Jim.
I’ve given companies lots of great feedback, but the negative ones seem to matter the most.
9 positive for one negative.
Hi Jim,
I think a lot of it has to do with the web making it easier to broadcast an issue with a company. That being said, I think companies could do more to let their customers know that the customers are appreciated in some way.
Great write-up to what was a very satisfying session. Thanks to you, Ben and Edwards the topic was well covered, even if the audience wasn’t as blog-savvy as we would have collectively liked. But, they might genuinely represent the majority of businesses. I had a long conversation with one gentleman representing a company of over 100,000 employes - yet blogging was no where to be found within their organization. Even if companies decide not to begin a public conversation through blogging, it was remarkable to me, and to him, that blogging wasn’t being used to help the emloyees learn about their companies and share information. Thankfully, though, the panel gave him some significant and tangible points to take back and present to his management.
Great pictures too!
I meant to write “thanks to you, Ben and Angela…” What kind of blogging platform is this that I can’t edit my own comments!
No worries David, we know what you mean!
I really liked how you opened the session up with saying that blogs are for conversations.
I’d be happy to be on any of your panels any time in the future, fantastic job.
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What in the name of Jerry Brightonhammer was that all about?
I dont’ know but it doesn’t make sense to me.
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[…] Blog Panel: Negative is the New PositiveJeremiah?s captured notes and thoughts from their Business Blogging panel at Frost and Sullivan?s 2007 Sales and Marketing conference in Phoenix, Ariz. [?] … […]
You’re an amateur when it comes to this topic, Jeremiah. You’re a nice guy and all but you should stick to taking nice photos with other people who’ve learned to clog up the blogosphere with news that really isn’t news.
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