Beyond the Blog

Don’t stop at blogging. Once you’ve begun a conversation with your customers, you can’t stop doing it. Look for other ways within your company to involve customers as evangelists, product developers, marketers, spokespeople, and other roles. If there’s one thing blogging will teach you, it’s that people not only want to tell you how to run your company, they also want to tell you how to grow it. Part of learning to listen, then, is learning whom to listen to. We covered the technicalities of searching earlier in this article; having a strategy for searching, and a process for dealing with what you find, are important components of an overall successful blogging strategy.

DEVELOPING COMMENT GUIDELINES

As you begin to blog, you will receive comments to your posts. It’s great to know how to respond to those comments, but at some point you need to lay out the commenting ground rules after all, you don’t want to see comment spam, nor do you want to see distasteful comments on your blog. Aspects of successful comment policies include the following:

• Identify who owns the content. As a foundational legal matter, it is important that you spell out whether the commenter or your company owns his or her content. If the commenter owns it, he or she can ask for comments to be removed at any time, while if the company owns it, your company will likely have to review each individual comment to ensure you aren’t engaging in libel against other companies, for example.

• Establish what types of comments aren’t allowed. Most blogs don’t allow spam (comments that promote a product or service, unless of course it’s related to the discussion at hand). Some blogs don’t allow any comments whatsoever. Others don’t allow links. Figure out what types of comments are or aren’t allowed, keeping your blogging strategy in mind.

• Determine whether or not comments are moderated. Many companies, and an increasing number of bloggers, have begun moderating comments. This means that a comment won’t show up on a blog until a human being at your company reviews it to make sure that it isn’t spam, isn’t vile, or isn’t illegal. A moderator can protect your blog from all of these things. However, using a moderator may slow down the conversation. While this is a choice your company needs to make, it’s also something you can revisit at a later date (for example, you may choose not to moderate comments until you begin to experience issues with spam or inappropriate comments).

• Decide whether or not you will allow anonymous comments. Anonymous comments are an interesting issue in the blogosphere.

Until recently, most blogs allowed anyone to post as anyone, even anonymously. Increasingly, though, as people have begun posting either anonymously or as someone they clearly aren’t (for example, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Michael Jackson), some blogs are beginning to remove comments that are obviously not from the actual person who left them, along with those that are anonymous.

• Decide how you will deal with questionable situations.

If someone posts hateful comments, spam, irrelevant notes, or racist or other inappropriate information, how will your company deal with it? Will you remove these posts? Will you leave them on the blog? Will you edit the comments? A proper set of comment guidelines is important to your blogging strategy, so ensure that as you begin to look at how you’ll accept comments, how you’ll respond to them, and how or if you’ll remove them, you keep your blogging strategy close by to make sure that the comment guidelines match the tone, guidelines, and objectives of your strategy.

SEARCH FOR INFORMATION

When you are conducting searches, whether it’s via Technorati, Pub- Sub, BlogPulse, your web stats, or even new methods that have yet to be invented, it’s important that you search for the right things. Generally speaking, you want to search for four things:

• Positive posts from people who love your company and/or products

• Comments about your competitors

• Overall comments about the state of your industry

• Negative comments about your company and/or your products

Each of these searching goals is a distinct challenge and presents a unique set of opportunities for interacting with your customers and creating positive experiences.

THEY LOVE ME! THEY REALLY LOVE ME!

Searching for people who love you and your company is one of the easiest things to do not because the technology for these searches is unusual, but because all of us love to hear good things said about us and the work we’re doing. It can be exciting, uplifting, and a true joy to hear about how much people admire you and your company. It can be a vindication to hear people say you’re on the right track, and it can make your day when you or your products improve someone’s life.

But don’t let this be the only searching you do. If you hear only the positive comments, nothing about your business will change for the better. Because the blogosphere is enormous, you can easily construct your own little echo chamber by seeking out blogs and running searches based solely on concepts that reflect well on you and your company, on your frame of mind, and on how you see the world. Although it’s important to stay in touch with the people who love your company, you need to get the full spectrum of input to make intelligent business decisions. When you’re searching for information about your company, you need to do three distinct things:

• Read blogs Whether you’re looking for new blogs written by passionate advocates for your company or blogs written by people who hate everything you stand for, subscribing to the feeds of people who are in the trenches is absolutely essential to getting real day-to-day feedback.

• Run searches Using PubSub, Feedster, or other tools discussed in this article, you can search for specific terms, depending on your goals.

• Invite feedback Ask for feedback on your own blogs. Or e-mail bloggers that you know and respect and ask them for feedback. The world of blogging isn’t passive, so get involved in figuring out where your company is at.

Searching Success

Let’s consider two popular consumer companies: General Motors and Starbucks. Each company makes unique products for unique consumers, and the Internet blog search results for either company would therefore be very different. In terms of blogs, try running searches on Starbucks blog and GM blog. Starbucks has a quite popular fan blog called “Starbucks Gossip” (http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/ ), while GM has no single particular fan blog rather, because the company makes a variety of products, its fan blogs tend to be based on specific products, product lines, or types of products.

Starbucks has company fans, while GM has fans of specific products, product lines, or types of products. To find GM’s particular fan blogs, you need to search at the individual product, product line, or type of product level. Search for Corvette Blogs and Chevy Blogs, and you’ll find that each returns a number of results. Next, you can search for particular words with regard to GM and Starbucks. This search is pretty easy; it involves adding the company name, product, or product line name with descriptive words, such as love or great, as well as actions that people do with your product, such as drink and drive (not together, obviously!). Here are some suggested word searches that you could use for GM and Starbucks:

• GM Search for love corvette, corvette rocks, love chevy, drive chevy, car ride, road trip, and test drive. Each of these searches will result in responses that include positive comments about areas in which GM is interested specific products, product lines, and activities people engage in with their vehicles.

• Starbucks Search for love starbucks, venti, morning coffee, drink coffee, and star bucks. Each of these searches tries to find information about the company, products, and activities in which the company is involved. The challenge with running such searches is that many results appear to have nothing to do with what you’re looking for, which is why you need to continue refining the searches so that you get both a wide range of results as well as useful ones. You don’t want to narrow your searches so much that you don’t find all the comments, but you also don’t want to have to sift through hundreds of useless results with every search. Finally, inviting feedback and creating dialogue is an important consideration. GM does this pretty successfully with its existing blogs, though the company could begin branching out to other products and product lines to expand this discussion. Starbucks, however, often relies on other means of direct customer feedback. One of the challenges for a company like Starbucks can be that the actual quality of products and service customers receive is largely dependent on individual stores and store managers. Starbucks needs to reach beyond the individual consumer level to the “passionate coffee drinker” level. Perhaps including searches for addicted to coffee or coffee addict, and regularly talking with people who write reviews at blogs like CaféGeek (www.cafegeek.com) about how the company is doing, what they think of the products, and so forth, would be a good idea.