Corporate blogs are one of the possible meeting points between companies and their customers. We have seen some cases in which such a tool has certainly had very positive effects and has strengthened the relationship between the enterprise and its readers or the brand fans.

But despite this, a recent analysis has shown that most consumers trust the suggestions from corporate blogs only to a very limited degree, which reaches only 16%.
How come?

We have already given an explanation to this in previous posts, but it is important to underline it once more.
Putting yourselves in your customers’ shoes, whom would you trust more, between the unbiased advice of a friend and the suggestions (possibly partial) of a company which is trying to sell its brand in the best way?

The answer is obvious, and the data obtained from the answers of the analyzed sample show that 77% place their trust in the advice they get via email from someone known, followed by online consumers’ ratings (60%), results of search engines (50%), Yellow Pages (48%), print newspapers (46%), friends’ pages in Social Networks, and company blogs in last position.

How can a company win its customers’ trust then, and see that they are not hostile? The keywords are always the same: transparency and practicality.

If the company decides to offer a useful service to its readers through the blog, rather than using it only as a means of advertising to publicize its products, this purpose will surely be perceived and the dialogue will begin. As we have already mentioned, this dialogue requires some effort from both sides, but particularly from the company, which will be available to the citizens to answer their questions and help them overcome possible problems and doubts concerning the brand.

The blog, besides being a way to convey information to the audience, must be first of all a valid support to the customer, without forgetting that every comment expressed by a consumer is an occasion to improve your service and widen the group of your devoted.

As in any healthy relationship, both sides can benefit from a sincere communication.

This video by Johnny Kelly synthesizes the concept of Cloud Seeding. For the web, this idea means seeding the Net, and Social Media in particular, with new contents that can awaken the audience’s attention and creativity in an innovative way, so that new ideas and concepts can be born that are different from the ones we have quickly grown accustomed to seeing.

This expression is taken from the scientific term, where Cloud Seeding refers to the actions that lead to climate changes due to the dispersion in the atmosphere of substances forming clouds and ice nuclei which alter the microphysical processes within the cloud.

If taken to the web, this meaning is very appropriate as well.
How can companies spread their ideas in the web in their turn? How can they start the new evolutions of communication, but also of production? It is difficult to say, but all this can happen following the same technique, that is, taking from the net as much information as possible and transforming it into little or big revolutions.

In these past weeks we have spoken a lot about social networks and how they can be useful to companies to get deeper into the social environment and create relationships with consumers, partners and potential customers.

The communication of a brand, though, cannot be carried out exclusively through “social” means. These are certainly useful to consolidate it, to make it known and to fidelize people. But in order to create word of mouth and let people remember the brand, it is fundamental that there is a work of communication behind, operating in different areas.

The agency Nodpol+ Hamburg, for example, has realized a beautiful video for Asics to present the brand: it is called “Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection”, and you can view it up here.
The history of the Japanese multinational company which produces worldwide famous shoes is told through the stop motion technique in which, with a perfect Japanese style, an origami takes on different forms going back to the first moments and through all the steps that have taken Asics to today’s success.

From the idea that switched on the bulb in the founder’s brains, giving birth to the first trainer, to the final question “What will be the next idea?”, the pursuit of perfection never stops, as the title of the video, not by chance, suggests.

Awarded by Techcrunch as best start-up of 2008, Yammer is very similar to Twitter, but with a different mission and a more structured business model.

Just like its predecessor and, even more, like the microblog we presented yesterday, the mechanism is still based on the frequency of updates by the users who, in this case, answer the question “What are you working on?”.

When a new user answers the question, a feed is created that is passed on to the colleagues who are subscribers, with whom it is possible to exchange opinions and answer problems using the usual system that we all know by now thanks to Twitter.

For every profile it is possible to insert information and details on your professional carrier, the projects you are working on, telephone contacts, etc.
In a way, Yammer replaces the company’s intranet and is similar to a wiki for problem solving or to have an easier communication, when it is not possible to use tools such as Skype, where the communication is not addressed to everybody but rather to a limited number of people, chosen by the user.

Paying a further monthly fee of $1 for every employee, the companies which have decided to adopt it can use a series of extra services such as the control of users, the cancellation of subscriptions and messages, the inclusion of the company’s brand, and above all the creation of a network reserved only to the employees through the authorization of specific IP addresses. This is exactly what the business model of social networks (designed by the same creators of Geni) is based upon, which would otherwise be completely free and with no income.

Yammer is available also as widget desktop and for iPhone and the more popular Blackberry, at least in the Italian business world. Its success is decreasing compared to when it was launched, when a lot of companies took part at once, reaching the number of 2.000 organizations and more than 10.000 users, but it is still quite a populous community.

A new social network for the business world has just been created. It is Blellow, a microblogging system similar to Twitter which, instead of asking its users the general question “What are you doing?”, asks “What are you working on?”

Although it is addressed mainly to freelancers, Blellow can easily be used also by companies. Its objective is to help people solve problems connected to their work with the collaboration of other users.

Through the creation of groups or, even better, by navigating in them or in the social network in general, companies can use the database of professionals it contains for recruiting.
It is a system that, in a way, is similar to the valid and reliable LinkedIn which is now, in my opinion, still one of the most useful and effective networks for business.

Together with this, just as it happens on Twitter, Blellow is used as a support when you have a problem working on a project. The number of users in the community can answer and help anybody who has already build his or her own network of contacts.

Finally, it is possible to post jobs, that is, create a sort of announcement with an optional sum offered, as in this case.
As I said at the beginning of this post, the service is mainly addressed to freelancers and, consequently, the kind of collaborations required usually refers to temporary or occasional jobs and not to open-ended hiring, also because this would change the essence of the project.
Blellow is not meant to be simply a site for job announcements, such as Monster, but rather it is a way to establish a network of professional contacts to interact with or rely on.

But still, once a certain harmony has been created with one or more contacts and their skills have been proved, companies can decide to establish with them a more durable relationship.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the discipline that analyzes and measures social relations and flows

In a graphical visualization, social networks are all the relationships made up of knots that represent people and groups, and lines that represent the interactions between them. These maps are thus called sociograms.

SNA is a relatively recent discipline that was first applied in sociological and anthropological sciences, as well as in psychology and economics. Even if it was born and developed in universities, it is today applied also in business in order to better understand different, quite interesting aspects which would hardly emerge otherwise.

Companies can get several benefits if they use work tools for Social Network Analysis. When a company decides to make a merger or a joint venture, it can be an effective support and facilitate the settling that follows an aggregation. In general, it is widely used in organizational restructurings with other partners, but not only. An analysis of the internal dynamics of a structure can in fact greatly facilitate work, better understand the connections among people and departments and help their flows.

Through the study of sociograms, company analysts can find answers to questions that, even if they seem banal, are often exposed to mistaken judgements based on prejudice.
Some of the information that emerges from such diagrams certainly concerns the relations among people, but also the composition of groups: who possesses a higher number of contacts in an organization or a network, how the subgroups are divided, how many units belong to a network, what the relationship between managers is and in which ways and how often the exchanges among them happen.

The potentialities of the tools that highlight SNAs are clear, and the results that emerge can be very important for the success of a company in the financial market, independent of the sector.

As Laurence Lock Lee, one of the most important Australian experts of Social Network Analysis for organization development, explained in an interview, the work tools aimed at SNA are several: in the commercial field there are, among others, Inflow and NetMiner, in the academic sector the most popular are Netdraw and Pajek. An interesting solution is offered by Condor View, which Lock Lee describes as “a tool based on the digital data available on intranets”.

The word podcasting is born from the joint of iPod with broadcasting, and defines the action of automatically downloading audio or video files from clients, which are often free, through a feed aggregator, a system that was used for the first time by Adam Curry, an MTV America veejay. The downloaded files are thus called podcasts.
Basically, it works in the same way as the aggregation of news through RSS feeds, that we have already seen, with the only difference that this material is listened to rather than read.

In order to listen to a podcast, you have to subscribe to a broadcast inserting it into your feed reader. Once you have downloaded it, you can listen to it with an audio player or synchronizing your iPod.
A very rich and interesting source is iTunes Store where, in a dedicated section, you can find a long list of podcasts, both audio and video. A lot of companies and their representatives have made a clever use of it. If you want to have an idea of how many contents are already available on iTunes, just make a search on a keyword and you will get a shower of results.

But this is not the only source to draw from. The presence of podcasts is more and more important also in several web sites, in information sites and particularly in journalism, in the US above all.
You can find a good example in this ZDNet post, where the passage from web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0 is discussed but, instead of being reported with words, it is with a 25 minute long podcast.

In this period, everybody talks about the crisis, about its possible consequences in Italy and the impacts that it has already had in the rest of Europe and in the United States. But what has happened exactly?

This video by Jonathan Jarvis explains - simply and in detail, through some pictures - what has happened, the behaviour of the banks and the effects on the economy which led to a point that now seems irreversible.

We still don’t know what will happen next, but meanwhile having a clearer view of what has happened can be the first step to overcome this catastrophic situation, hopefully as soon as possible.

But what happens when one or all the authors of the blog leave the company and start collaborating with other organizations? What is the blog’s destiny?

Going back to the Ducati case we talked about yesterday, let us see how Federico Minoli, the former CEO, behaved when he decided to go another way after a long and fruitful collaboration with the motorcycle company.

The relationship between Minoli and his readers/customers had reached such good terms that it would have been difficult to replace it in any case. It would be as if you are reading a book you love and, half the way, once you turn the page you find that the style, the plot and the characters have completely changed. We should not think that the situation is irreparable, but it is surely not a good idea to change out of the blue without warning your audience. This is exactly what Minoli and Ducati did.

With a “farewell post”, dating back to 21 May 2007, the CEO said goodbye to his “fans” in an affectionate and generous way, considering his choice to sell every antique collected in years and years of races at a charitable auction, open to all fans and blog readers.

A very hearty goodbye from both sides, if we take a look at the flood of comments that the post generated (over 270), where the readers expressed their liking for Minoli to the point of naming a Ducati motorcycle “Mino” in his honour.

Clearly, in this case it is not only a matter of a good author, but also of a leader who could very well manage the company to which he gave himself heart and soul, changing and renewing it completely. And it is through the blog that people could express their voice, giving their support and warmth because they felt important for the brand in which they already believed and for which their affection had grown more and more.

But what happened to Desmoblog afterwards?

The new CEO, Gabriele del Torchio, made his entrance with a post of introduction, in which more than 200 people welcomed him.
The passage was not painless, this is for sure, but even with some moments of faltering the blog still exists today and has a lot of fans.

So we can affirm that, when companies decide to use a blog in order to open a communication channel with their customers, they have to make sure that it is written with passion and real interest. The greater the author’s involvement, the more effective its catch on people. And who in the company can do this better than the president himself? You decide.

As we have underlined, it is not only a matter of appearance. The corporate blog helps facilitate a biunique information flow, enriching both consumers and companies.

In this exchange, not only the single employees or those in charge of external relationships are the ones who play an active part. Going up at all levels, sometimes it is the CEO himself who creates a blog representing his own company.

Some of the first and most popular cases of blogs created and supervised directly by CEOs are those of Sun Microsystems and General Motors, both American. In Italy, even if it came a bit later – due also to the fact that the web developed earlier in the US – it is important to talk about Ducati.

The Ducati case

Federico Minoli, former CEO of Ducati for over 10 years, when he was still in charge in the motorcycle company, managed to perfectly understand the spirit and the importance of blogs, and he created Desmoblog.

Through this tool, first of all he managed to overcome all the filters that were at the time present between a role like his and the consumers. He didn’t need to rely only on what the marketing department or the other sectors of his structure reported to him.
Minoli got into direct contact with his customers and directly exchanged opinions and comments with them concretely, involving them so much that they collaborated in very important choices in which up to that point no consumers – or at least never through such channels – had ever been involved.

Two striking examples of how the blog readers had become a decisive part were the moment when they were asked their opinion about the selection of the pilot for the moto GP championship of the following season, or when through their comments and opinions – gathered and filtered by the technical team – they had the opportunity to participate in the choice of some components for a new model of GP motorcycle.

It is now difficult to define which of the two parts – the company and the consumers – gets the higher benefit from such a collaboration, because in fact both are satisfied: the objective has been achieved.