TamTamy Blog

In the previous posts we saw the different possibilities a company has when facing the decision of using a blog to represent it.
There is the corporate blog where each post is signed simply by the brand (as in the case of TamTamy), the blog with more authors from the company, the blog managed by external PR Internet agencies, and finally the blog written directly by some important role of the company, such as the President, the CIO or the CEO.

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.

When we spoke about corporate blogs, we saw how valuable they can be for companies, conveying a message of novelty and revival but, above all, of openness towards the audience, which is at the basis of the enterprise 2.0 attitude.

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.

We have already seen how RSS feeds can be very effective if you want to find news about your company, understand who is talking about it and, above all, keep informed on the evolution of the market.

This presentation highlights how the combined use of RSS feeds and social media can be a perfect mix. Monitoring the conversations on a specific subject and being “social” are easily performed activities that, with the least effort, can help companies widen their horizons and make themselves known among customers and partners.

Paul Bradshaw, journalist and blogger for Online Journalism Blog, lays stress on the new types of information and journalist, which are no more connected only to press and websites, but are rather extended over different media and different characteristics of these media, which should not be overlooked if we want to have a more complete view of what is happening around us, in real time.

When you own a blog, be it personal or corporate, it is useful to make the best use of all possible means to attract traffic, create backlinks, make it known outside and know who talks about it.

Some tools to consider are the Internet Search Engines designed for blogs, such as Technorati, Google Blog Search and Sphere.

Let us talk then about the first which was born and achieved fame: Technorati.

Behind the haughty name, born form the crasis of the two words technological literati, a search engine is hidden that is aimed at tracking blogs.

In the moment when you insert your blog on Technorati and you set the automatic ping (or you do it manually), you ask the search engine to regularly scan your posts so that they are indexed and inserted into the database.

With Technorati it is thus possible to find out which sources are talking about you as a company, brand, competitor, or all the related subjects that you are interested in, often even before such news appears on the “normal” search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
In parallel, also all the information that you publish on your corporate blog will be broadcast real time, once that you have correctly pinged your site or blog.

Founded in 2005 by Dave Sifry, with headquarters in San Francisco in California, the site has passed its highest peak of success and thus its use now no longer provides the great support that it used to give once, but the figures of 2008 report that the blogs indexed by Technorati are more than 112 millions. Numbers that should not be underestimated, considering that it hasn’t been the only one on the market for some years now.

As we said at the beginning, there exist in fact other similar tools aimed at the search and tracking of blogs, such as Google Blog Search and Sphere.

Since it works more or less in the same way, we won’t get into details, but as usual, it is important to understand that a blended use of these tools allows a better control of your presence on the net or of the themes of your interest. So, according to how important you think it is to monitor the rumours that circulate around your brand on the web, every company will have the choice to use one or more of these specific search engines, supporting the other web 2.0 tools that we have already talked about and will continue to analyze.