Fedex doesn’t get blogging? or is just not right for them?

Categories: Community Marketing, Social MediaPosted on July 19th, 2007

We’re here in Portland at the Internet Strategy Forum: Web 2.0 Social Strategies, and the focus for this conference is exactly what I talk about most of the time: Corporate + Social Media.

Apparently after Robert’s presentation on Facebook, and it’s a Google world the VP of Electronic Channels and Strategic Marketing of FedEx says that they’re not going to do blogging. A few other people told me that he was criticizing blogging.

Scoble writes:

“He took quite a bit of heated questioning from the audience because he came out strongly as being anti-blog and anti-participation in online communities. Lots of people came up to me after Mark was done and asked what I thought, because he basically was saying that FedEx has chosen to not participate in online communities, rather relying on their brand to speak for the company.”

Blogs don’t impact search results?
Apparently, he didn’t believe that blogs can impact search engine results. That’s not true, because if you do a Google search for “Dell Support” Jeremy Zawodny’s (the top blogger at Yahoo) post comes up very high. In fact, at one time, it came up higher than the official Dell support site.

To be fair, I wasn’t in the room during the presentation, but I found it odd to hear these thoughts at a conference focused on Social Media Strategies for corporations. If this was taken out of context, please let me know. As a lot of this, I’m just hearing from others. I’ll be fair.

Update: Mario Sundar, a corporate blogger and community evangelist at LinkedInhas done some research about the feedback (in numbers) that bloggers have written about FedEx. Josh Bancroft, the Intel Blogger micro-blogged on Twitter that FedEx’s bad service was even on popular news site Digg. Other ISF attendees are commenting on what happened with Mark Colombo.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 11:52 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Do you blame them, for the way that the blogosphere took immediate sides in FedEx Furniture without any real information?

Posted by Jeremy Pepper on July 19th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

[...] describes the reaction of FedEx’s marketing executive Mark Columbo and his aversion to corporate blogging per se. Here is a first-hand account from [...]

Posted by Should FedEx have a community blog? « Marketing Nirvana by Mario Sundar on July 19th, 2007 at 11:40 pm

Blogging always is helpfull but about what topic should a FedEx employee blog? How he delivered his last package?

IMHO blogging always should be worth talking about it. I can’t image what is worth on talking about FedEx …

Posted by Espresso Junkie on July 20th, 2007 at 1:14 am

Espresso

There’s a ton of things that can be done.

Go check out the SouthWest airlines blog.

How are packages routed, how are the packages made, talk about the culture, show behind the scenes.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 20th, 2007 at 10:24 am

I personally don’t see how blogging would help FedEx a great deal. Why:

1. They already have a brand that is recognized on a global scale.
2. Bad comments on the internet, at least for FedEx, probably don’t indicate serious issues for the company (if memory is correct, the FedEx stock has gone up about 30.00-40.00 over the past 2-3 years).

Sorry, I have to disagree with ya on this one. I don’t know if many customers care *how* their packages get there…they just want it to get there.

Posted by Damon Billian on July 21st, 2007 at 2:23 am

It’s not just story telling to Damon. As you know companies that build repoire with their community using social media tools, have a greater chance of having an authentic conversation during a crises.

I personally would be facinated to know how the packages shift about, travel the globe.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 21st, 2007 at 6:17 am

This reminds me of “FedEx Stories” about how regular FedEx employees go above and beyond the call of duty. They have a web site, FedExStories.com with all three of the ads, which are also running on TV.

It struck me that the ads would have been much more effective if they weren’t narrated, and instead were just interviews of the employees involved- authenticity is power.

I remember seeing an Obama viideo on Youtube that featured their staffers sending out a massive shipment of campaign materials,looking at the packages and chatting a bit with their DHL courier- it (probably unintentionally) made DHL seem pretty human. Try again, FedEx.