Hello again! I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted but I’m back with some interesting advice from a leader in the Corporate Communication world.
According to Ragan Communications there are many ways to engage your employees in your intranet. Read the article to find out more.
I personally really enjoy the e-newsletters I recieve from Ragan Communications. It’s a great resource for anyone pursuing a career in the communications field. They include various topics that professionals can subscribe to include:
Social Media
Corporate Writing and Editing
Executive Communications and Speachwriting
Face to Face Communications
Government and Non-Profit Communication
PR
If you want to get the inside scoop on interactivity and social media trends and practices, you really should subscribe or just check out their website.
This is my last blog post for a while and therefore I would like to give an overview of interactivity in Web 2.0. Interacting with your public is your number one job if you are a corporate communicator or public relations specialist. New social media and Web 2.0 help create avenues of reaching these publics. Interactivity relies on a dialogue working between the corporation and the consumers/stakeholders. There are two types of interactivity as defined by the book Public Relations Online by Tom Kelleher:
Functional Interactivity: focuses on the features and tools for interacting with your public. Examples] surveys, forums, blogs, RSS feeds, wikis
Contingency Interactivity: describes the process where the sender and receiver in the line of communication have defined roles that are interchangeable. This means that once a message is sent by a company to a consumer, the consumer can send a message back to the company– developing a dialogue.
By interacting with consumers and stakeholders, corporations create and build lasting relationships that hopefully give their company a good reputation and word-of-mouth. With the amount of information that is posted on the Internet, both official and unofficial, it is important that companies know what is being said about their services and products so that they can respond intelligently.
The most important thing to remember about corporate interactivity is that behind all the innovations and gadgetry, at the core the most important thing for a business is their message and that it is being communicated through all mediums they are using. Just because a company can create a blog, wiki, interactive videos, or a social networking account doesn’t mean that it is the best idea. Every company’s social media usage should be determined by a case-by-case basis that emphasizes the corporate business strategy and message.
If you would like to continue learning about new trends in social media and about interactivity, look into Web 2.0 expo’s. The 2009 Expo just took place. Here is a link to the Expo’s blog.
I would love to hear your ideas and closing remarks as to what you think will be in the upcoming future in corporate Web 2.0 interactivity.
As a college student, I find that many of my peers have come across the site Wikipedia. It is an online encyclopedia where anyone with internet access can post information about almost any topic. Wikipedia acts on a much larger scale than the run-of-the-mill wiki but today I am going to tell you how you can use a wiki to better your internal relations.
For a quick overview of what wiki’s are, Plain English has put together a short video about their use.
Wikis can be a brilliant business solution when dealing with employees or within your department. Wiki’s can be updated and written on by any member and can be open to the whole company or segmented into much smaller groups. Once you have created a wiki, you can edit it freely and add content that is easily visible to all the other members. They can be used for sending out memos, working with your team on your latest project, or just to keep up to date on what’s going on around the office. In this capacity, wiki’s are a great idea for corporate communicators working within an organization. In her article, “Collaboration“, Jessica Dye includes a section about wiki’s, their use in the workplace, and an idea what we will see for the future of professional wikis.
That being said, I do not think that corporations should use wikis that are open for public use because information could easily get mixed in with misinformation. However, I find that when working with a smaller group of people with similar goals, a wiki can be a very successful and useful tool to add to a company’s social media repertoire.
I am very interested to know what other people think about wiki’s and their use in the corporate world.
Interactive video is a great way for a company to give visual appeal when interacting when an audience. With this in mind, I became curious as to how something that has already been filmed can interact with its viewers.
According to an article by ReelSEO, a site that explores new online and video trends in marketing, an online survey completed by 400- media executives showed that 67% planned on using online video as a main focus in their digital marketing campaigns for 2009.
One great example of this is the Army. According to an article in the Washington Post the Army was worried about high suicide rates among soldiers. As a response, they created an interactive video where soldiers would be in the place of a distraught infantryman and through choices made during the video would show them how to get help if they were becoming depressed. The video has been distributed for mandatory viewing by infantry since December 2008. In this case, they have used an interactive video to help promote a certain behavior.
On a corporate level, it is great to have videos that consumers can interact with to help enforce brand loyalty. Some ideas would be to have a video where people can make choices which affect how it ends, have videos that ask questions that people can go and vote or submit answers or ideas. Have a video contest for people to submit their ideas for commercials or online videos. By opening up this avenue to work with your publics, it shows that your company is innovative and wants to interact with your audience versus a commercial that speaks at them.
YouTube is a website where members can post original videos and clips to be viewed by the public. This site can be a very worthwhile social media tool because when you put in a search item into Google, some of the first options are YouTube videos (if they exist on the subject). Interactive video is a great way to create a dialogue with and inform your public. A company can put up banned commercials, video news releases, promotional videos, and messages from the CEO. Visual elements help grab and keep your audience’s attention so creating videos that will get your company’s name out there is a very smart decision.
YouTube even has a feature now which allows viewers to click below a video and purchase the item mentioned in the video. This is very useful because before people would have to go searching for a website after seeing a video for it on YouTube. Now it is made even easier by having the link at the bottom where it is easily accessible.
You can even have your own channel. E*Trade has it’s own channel where it posts all the commercials for it’s current campaign including a funny talking baby. Also joining into this media sphere is The White House who has a YouTube channel posting weekly videos of President Obama addressing the public as well as
Another great thing about YouTube is that you can just syndicate previous materials and get them up on the internet. A commercial can easily be posted up for people to look at and instead of just waiting on statistics and market research, you can get instant feedback from viewers about there opinion of the film or clip. They can even subscribe to your videos so that whenever you put up new content they know about it.
To introduce my next few posts dealing with interactivity and videos I would like to bring up a company that took interactivity to a new level in the entertainment business: New Line Cinema.
The cult-classic “Snakes on a Plane” starring Samuel L. Jackson was set to be released in the summer of 2006. Snakes on a Plane became known on the internet after a screenwriter, Josh Friedman, posted a blog entry about the film. This inspired bloggers to write songs, design clothing, and even make funny videos and spoof trailer competitions. Due to this online publicity, the film gained an incredibly large fan base due to the film’s premise of a bunch of snakes terrorizing passengers on a plane. It quickly became an internet phenomenon and instead of just enjoying the pre-emptive success, New Line Cinema decided to take another route. Using an online forum, New Line Cinema asked for fans to submit ideas and lines to be used in the film. From this feedback, New Line Cinema decided to add five extra days of shooting to incorporate it into the movie. The following news video discusses the film and it’s unique fan base.
Despite the internet phenomenon “Snakes on a Plane” created, it was not the blockbuster blowout that it was previously anticipated to be. However, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who has not seen the movie, heard of its campy premise, or at least seen some of the spoof videos.
Check back for my next blog discussing another internet video phenomenon, YouTube.
Today I will be following up with my post about Twitter by briefly discussing a few other social networking sites that businesses are using to network and connect to shareholders and consumers. The three social networking sites I am referring to are Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn.
Facebook is a website where users can easily create a profile, add friends, become fans of various products and people and interact with each other. Over the past few years its popularity has grown exponentially. Originally a site for college students to stay connected, Facebook now is open to the public. Businesses can use this site to create fan pages for their company, recruit college grads for jobs, or even create applications that get their company’s name out there.
Myspace is very similar to Facebook. The main difference in my opinion is that Myspace gives the user much more freedom with their layout when it comes to appealing graphics. While Facebook is more in an automated format that companies can just go in and enter in their information.
LinkedIn is slightly different from the last two social networking sites I have mentioned because it is used for networking for jobs and is a professional venue. Users can post their resume, add references, get business contacts, etc. on LinkedIn. Here are a few videos on how LinkedIn works.
All three of these sites can be very beneficial to a business by bringing the organization down to the level of it’s consumer in a place that is easy to reach for them. It also is a great way of gaining linkability because once you connect with a user, all their friends are also connected to you as well, increasing your public sphere.
Twitter is an easy way to interact through short 140-word postings. The brief nature of Twitter classifies it as a microblog. Users can “follow” other people or corporations at a more personal level than other social networking sites such as Facebook or Myspace. Professionals say that this is the new trend in Web 2.0. However, I found myself doubting it as a business tool and believe it to be more of a stalking device.
After much skepticism about the practicality of using Twitter as a business tool, I decided to do some research and find out what it’s really all about. My observations concluded that when used properly, Twitter can give corporations an innovative edge with their various publics. If you would like to learn more in-depth information about using Twitter for your business check out media mogul, Rodney Rumford’s blog titled “Twitter As a Business Tool”.
Rumford offers great advice as to how to maintain a Twitter microblog. He also shows how other businesses utilize Twitter to get their news and information out to the public. I found a great video on his site that discusses how Ford maintains various forms of social media in order to reach various publics. One of these media tools is Twitter.
Whether you are interested in Ford trucks, going green, or customer service, there is a Twitter account for it. By segmenting into different Twitter accounts, Ford can more directly reach and interact with their audiences. Business should take a tip from them and consider splitting up into multiple, more concentrated accounts if using Twitter is a route it decides to take. This split will help define how best to interact, what type of voice, and who connect with.
As I mentioned in the previous post “Interactive Corporate Blogs” feedback is a key aspect when discussing interactivity on blogs. However, this feedback is not always positive. There are various ways a corporation can approach unfavorable comments. If your corporation is receiving negative feedback you just need to remember one important thing: THIS FEEDBACK IS MEANT TO IMPROVE YOUR COMPANY. Whether it’s service or product related, people will not take the time to give feedback if they do not want to see some type of improvement. The way you respond to this is crucial in keeping your publics loyal.
As a corporate communicator dealing with social media, it is a good idea to outline how your company will approach censoring comments. What works for one company does not always work for another. While most corporations have some type of comment-monitoring system, some do not believe in removing comments no matter what they say. For example, Disney has a forum called “Mom’s Panel” with advice on hotels, restaurants, and theme parks for Disney’s Walt Disney World Resort. They let these individuals speak freely and candidly about these topics. While this is great to establish transparency and trust between consumers and an organization, it does not work for every company.
Other companies have formatted a filter system where comments with profanity and other phrases are removed before being posted. Dell chooses not to censor out negative comments and monitors feedback based on relevance. If the response makes sense, it is allowed on the site.
Whatever your corporation decides, it is important to think about your public and what they expect from you. Use the negative comments to better your corporation and take care not to ignore sage advice from the people using your products or services. These are the people who support your company and expect you to take action on their behalf. With feedback, the ideas come straight to you!
Now let us begin our journey into corporate media with Corporate Blogging. Blogs are not just useful tools for updating your friends and family about your life or ranting about the state of the world. They can be a very effective communication tool for businesses for many reasons:
Comments: readers can comment on posts. This is a great way to get free and quick feedback. However, with this ease comes a great responsibility on the part of the corporation. People reading and responding to blogs expect to be heard and that action will be taken to remedy any issues even if it is in the form of a response back from the company. Companies should monitor comments but not censor them. It is important to take the good comments with the bad and not to ignore negative comments but address them.
Polls: instead of sending out surveys, why not just make a weekly poll on your corporate blog? Polls are an easy way to get information about your readership with just the click of a button.
Blogroll: A blogroll is a great way to interact with readers and other corporations. The more blogs that are linked to yours, the more likely people are to stop by and check it out. One blogroll I especially like is on Google’s Official Blog. They have a list of blogs created and maintained by their users. This shows that they take the time to pay attention to their readership in the blogging community and allows interaction and linkativity between Google and it’s readers.
RSS Feeds: People can subscribe to get updates on your corporate blog instantly. Without even having to search your site every day to see if anything has gone up on it they can get updates on their Google or Yahoo! Reader.
These are just a few ways blogs work interactively with their publics to reach and keep consumers.
For more information about the benefits of corporate blogging, check out this article by IT Business Edge.
Feedback: Friend or Foe?
5 03 2009As I mentioned in the previous post “Interactive Corporate Blogs” feedback is a key aspect when discussing interactivity on blogs. However, this feedback is not always positive. There are various ways a corporation can approach unfavorable comments. If your corporation is receiving negative feedback you just need to remember one important thing: THIS FEEDBACK IS MEANT TO IMPROVE YOUR COMPANY. Whether it’s service or product related, people will not take the time to give feedback if they do not want to see some type of improvement. The way you respond to this is crucial in keeping your publics loyal.
As a corporate communicator dealing with social media, it is a good idea to outline how your company will approach censoring comments. What works for one company does not always work for another. While most corporations have some type of comment-monitoring system, some do not believe in removing comments no matter what they say. For example, Disney has a forum called “Mom’s Panel” with advice on hotels, restaurants, and theme parks for Disney’s Walt Disney World Resort. They let these individuals speak freely and candidly about these topics. While this is great to establish transparency and trust between consumers and an organization, it does not work for every company.
Other companies have formatted a filter system where comments with profanity and other phrases are removed before being posted. Dell chooses not to censor out negative comments and monitors feedback based on relevance. If the response makes sense, it is allowed on the site.
Whatever your corporation decides, it is important to think about your public and what they expect from you. Use the negative comments to better your corporation and take care not to ignore sage advice from the people using your products or services. These are the people who support your company and expect you to take action on their behalf. With feedback, the ideas come straight to you!
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Tags: Blogs, Comments, Dell, Feedback, Mom's Panel
Categories : Blogs