SNP Communications

Full transcript after the jump

Scott Sigler: I’m Scott Sigler and today we’re talking to client supervisors Mike Manuel and Matthew Podboy from VOCE Communications about how to enhance corporate communication through digital advocacy. VOCE has developed a white paper called “7 Tips for Deploying an Online Communications Program” and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

The advent of blogs and the focus on reaching online communities has brought tremendous opportunity and confusion. Mike and Matt are here to demystify online communities and share their expertise surrounding digital advocacy programs. Gentlemen, it’s great to have you here.

Mike Manuel: Thanks for having us, Scott.

Matthew Podboy: It’s a pleasure to be here, Scott. Thank you.

Scott Sigler: Personal websites, chat rooms, bulletin boards and blogs - they’ve all greatly altered corporate communication strategies. That makes “a word of mouth” now an underlying force that influences public perception perhaps more than ever before. Mike, how do these new mediums create an opportunity for companies and for the customers?

Mike Manuel: There’s all sorts of new tools coming out and we’ve seen a lot of them. Blogs are certainly top of mind. Podcasting, like what we’re doing here, is certainly emerging. Videocastings and all sorts of crazy things that are coming out, that are making it easier to basically share and get involved and participate in online conversations.

For companies, I think there’s an opportunity there to basically engage in that conversation to at least understand what’s being said about your brand, about your products, about your services. And to at least to try and keep, I guess, a pulse of what the conversation is like out there.

There’s obviously great opportunity with the immediate feedback that comes from being able to see how people are experiencing your brand and your service and your products based on what they’re sharing online be it good or bad. So we see that as just an opportunity for our clients and for the companies that we work with.

And we try to look for ways to take what we see there and pipe it back to those companies that we’re working with. And I think on the customer’s side of things, there’s a real opportunity there for them, given that these new technologies are coming out and the barrier of entry is lowering that. They can share their opinions about companies and products and brands in a new way. And connect in a new way, not only with their peers and their other online communities, but also just with the companies and they’ll have a channel to directly talk to them.

Scott Sigler: That channel and that feedback, that’s really helping close the loop between the company and the customer.

Mike Manuel: Exactly.

Scot Sigler: So Mike, companies can deploy online communication programs independently. But there’s a lot of information, a lot of confusion as to what needs to be done and how do you do it?

A company like VOCE Communications who is consulting in this particular field brings a more comprehensive approach. So tell me what kind of value VOCE adds?

Mike Manuel: There’s plenty of discussion happening online right now about all sorts of things. And there’s plenty of tools and themes. There’s no lack of new tools coming out that enable marketers and communicators to basically keep the tab or at least look into the conversations.

I think the tricky part right now is that what do you do with all of that? I think that’s kind of where a firm like ours and what we do really comes into play, it is in taking that information that we’re seeing out there and putting programs in place that allow a company to, at the very least, listen in a better way to what’s being said out there and, in most cases, engage.

There’s all sorts of what you talk about that companies can engage in conversation but I really think that when it comes down to what we do best, it’s taking that next step and it’s trying to figure out how a company can engage better with audiences that are online.

Scott Sigler: More Than Talk’s audience is primarily corporate communicators, and they find themselves thrown feet first into this new world of online communications programs. So Matt, you were the primary author of these ‘7 Tips’ and believe the first step is determining whether or not a company needs an online communication program. So, tell us about that. How do you find out whether they need it or not?

Matthew Podboy: This is a very exciting space and there’s a lot of bugs around it. I think communicators are folks that like to take on new challenges and be a part of the latest trends in their industry. And there’s still the first step of defining whether or not this makes sense to the organization.

There’s a couple of things that we do with our clients. I think the first basic answer is, “What is the goal of having an online presence?” What do the customers look like that you’re trying to communicate with? What does a conversation with those customers do for your company, for your organization, for its executives and for the ultimate goal which is driving revenue.

You look at some of the examples out there. Should GM have its blog in place? Yes, I think we all agree that what it’s done for that organization has been really to open up and personalize the people behind it. Should Al’s Machine Shop on Main Street USA? Maybe.

You probably need to take a look down and find out what Al’s trying to achieve by putting a blog front end on his company and the inflow that he’s trying to generate. Then we take another look to see what customers are out there? What online personalities already exist? Is there going to be a lone voice in a relatively unchartered part of the online discussion area? Is there already an active thread in place out there that we are going to be able to join and add something unique to?

So like I said, the first step is to check the objective. Make sure it’s a sound one and then take a look at what already is in place and working out there.

Scot Sigler: Okay. So assuming that you do discover that need, where do you go from there? What’s the next step?

Mike Manuel: Well I think the next, and we go through this a little bit in our paper, is to harness the enthusiasm that already exists within the company. And I think a lot of it can come from the communications parts, especially in the Silicon Valley and the technology scene. A lot of times the engineering parts of the organization have already been involved to this as an early adopted part of the organization. Now a lot of the executive teams are giving insights about this. So, harness that, put a rope around that and get those people in places. That is how it’s going to be.

Their primary objective is to field that enthusiasm and go out and be advocates within the organization which leads to collaborations. So we’re going to need to harness what the people there are trying to achieve. And make sure the whole organization is on board or at least that the goal for the organization is understood by all so that they can be their own person and go ahead and add to what’s going on out there.

So what we tell people a lot of times is, “Look around in the organization.” You may already have an online presence that you don’t know about. Like I said, there may be parts of the organization that are already out there talking about the company, talking about the technology, talking about it’s products. And now it’s just time to put a little structure around it. And in the structure that we talked about is just to foster more enthusiasm and growth in the organization. Not to stifle or put tight parameters around what those people are saying and doing.

Scott Sigler: Well you mentioned that you need to go out and find or see if there are online communities already out there that influence their company’s customers. So VOCE would help locate those opinion leaders. And then, as I understand it, you influence the new sources. So Mike, how do you guys go about doing this?

Mike Manuel: I mentioned earlier that listening is a big part of how we approach any online program. It’s really the first big step that we take with any kind of engagement or any kind of project. It’s just to try and take the pulses of what’s out there. I think in that process, if it’s done correctly, you identify not only where the conversations are happening but who is having the conversations.

Listening is a big part of the programs, any project that we start with. And I think, typically what we like to do is spend some time upfront just trying to take a gauge on all of the sorts of just where conversations are happening online. I think it comes from that who’s having the conversations online?

There’s all sorts of analysis and data that we can poll from just from listening to what’s happening out there. All sorts of tools are coming up that enable new types of analysis. Look at tagging, for example. Tagging has been, you know if you look at sites like Flicker and del.icio.us and MyWeb. All these things enable really cool analysis for communicators. I’ve looked at the way that the people are taking information and links on things that they see online. How they tag it, for example, is a really telling part of how they perceive a brand or how they view a product.

The same with blog search. How blog search tools enable communicators to basically find information it’s providing you in these programs. It’s all sorts of new inside analysis in to how people are digesting, consuming and basically viewing your brands. So, we take these tools. We take what we’re seeing online and from that we put together programs that we think help to reach out to these various communities that we’re finding.

Scott Sigler: One of the things I heard and that you pointed out is that listening is a real key component of PR and, likewise, for the digital advocacy programs. Matt explain how VOCE comes to understand a company’s challenges. How do you navigate the online space surrounding their business?

Matthew Podboy: Mike and I both discussed that there needs to be a check on intentions and objectives before getting into this. It is exciting but it’s still not for everybody. So I think that we’re still going to look at what we feel like the company’s missing by not participating in this online discussion. What do we want to gain? And then taking a step further and looking at those that already exist. Those online personalities, the journalists who also blog, the pundits of a particular space or market or product. Who are they? We have ways in which we didn’t have to go in and see and measure their influence by who else is looking at their sites and how often they’re referenced and see what relationships are aiding in this.

Many times, when a client comes in and they want to begin with these programs, we identify to people that are out there. A lot of times, there are people in the organization that already have a relationship there or feel like they can get a relationship started there. So it would be very similar to what PR people have been doing for a long time. And that may be a company introducing a new product into a new market and needing to go out and build those relationships with the journalists and the analysts. They cover that space and they shouldn’t be seen as anything too different than that.

I think one misconception is that this is a radical shift from traditional PR tactics and it really shouldn’t be without understanding the audience. And once you can understand the audience, you can figure out where there is overlap between your story, your methods, what you’re trying to do and what that target audience is interested in. And when you find that shaded grey then you have a program that takes form.

Scott Sigler: So it’s the same method, analogy, just in new space so to speak.

Matthew Podboy: Absolutely. There’s a lot of chatter out there around bloggers who get pitched. And they get pitched on the things they’re not interested in. It shouldn’t be any different. If you identify a blogger out there, someone with a presence online. And you want to make that introduction by virtue of just reading their content you’re going to know if that’s an appropriate target or not.

Just in the same way we pick up and read a target journalist in a newspaper or magazine that they write for. The reason this is working and the reason this is giving the PR people a new way to communicate is that we get to just deploy skills that we’ve been developing for a long, long time in the new area.

Scott Sigler: Okay, so from what you guys have told us so far, you’re going to establish your company’s needs. You’re going to set goals. You’re going to deploy a program. And now we’ve come to the heart of our listener’s weak spot - measurements and potentially return on investment.

So they get this great program going, throughout they’re influencing in the digital space. How do you gauge website traffic? How do you determine whether the information is getting out there? How do you determine whether you’re getting a return on your investment?

Matthew Podboy: The question makes me think of a story that recently came out in the Economist and it talks about Procter and Gamble who people pay attention to in the advertising and PR space. They have $4 billion budget. So when they spend money, they touch a lot of places. And they did an internal study and found that a quality PR Campaign returned better results than an advertising campaign. They see that the spending in PR in America is going to grow. It reached $3.7 billion last year in 2005. They think it’s going to increase by about 9% a year. And we certainly think that some of these new tools are contributing to that growth.

And, one of the inherent benefits of these online programs is you do have better measurement and tracking. Some of the hard metrics that come along with these programs are built into the platforms that are used to establish an online program. And what I mean by that is if you’re going to build a blog for a company or in individuals within a company, those platforms from Six Apart, Blogger, Yahoo 360 there’s a lot of them out there, they have built in metrics. You can see who’s coming to the sites, where they’re coming from, how often they’re coming, averages for the day. It really gives you a nice look at what that spider web of influence, how it starts to shape up.

And then we can also add to that. We can look at each of those inbounds and find out who these people are by way of their own metrics. Who reads them? Who is linking back to them? How many comments do these people generate when they say something out there? And you start to assess their ‘influence’ and that is certainly something that should be defined regularly.

And then there’s, the kind of the soft, a brand, an individual, a program. What is the reception by the online community, by the influencer community, as it relates into your program that you’re trying to set up?

It’s certainly is a more hands on, I think, kind of a gut check assessment that PR people and people that hire PR folks and more used to, taking a look at what’s being said, the context on what you’ve said, and getting a feel for the sentiment out there. We have clients where we check those sentiments as the communication exists. So we do it daily and we let them know that there’s new communication threads out there. And that it’s positive, neutral, or negative. Here’s what should be done about it.

Sometimes it’s really easier to summarize it weekly or monthly or even across a quarter, where you’ll take a look at it and build that trend analysis to say, “Look there is, based on this announcement we had or this move we made, the initial reception was X. And over the 3 month quarter period, the community really started to warm up and understand what we were trying to achieve.”

So, it’s both hard and soft and I think the tools give you some easy hard metrics to look at. And then you’ve got to have the understanding of the space to come in on the back and know what it all means.

Scott Sigler: One of the things that I heard in there, correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand this you actually are tracking the traffic coming in. And that lets you go out and see where they’re coming from. Does that also give you a secondary level of analysis? Where else are these people going? Does it actually let you draw back farther to find other targets for influencing?

Mike Manuel: Yeah. What you can do with a lot of these programs is you can pull up all the hits you’ve had over a period of time and see the referring addresses or where they’re coming in from. And a lot of times what you’ll see is that somebody conducted a search on a topic and that your blog or your bulletin board or your message board turned up as a result. Again, that’s search terms.

And you can go back and see that somebody else read another blog out there. And in that blog was a link back to yours. And in the course of reading that blog they clicked on the link and that’s what sent them in. So it does allow you to start to connect some of the dots and see where those voices are that exist and which ones are real catalysts for traffic on their own site.

[Theme Music]

Scott Sigler: You’re listening to More than Talk. I’m Scott Sigler. We’ll be right back with more of our interview with Mike Manuel and Matthew Podboy of VOCE Communications after a quick communications tip from Renn Vara.

[Theme Music]

Renn Vara: And now for this weeks communication tip. How do you know if someone’s listening to you? People would often give you visual cues when in fact they’re actually not listening. And unfortunately many listen either lightly or passively. We give people the visual cues that we’re listening but in fact we’re probably thinking of something totally different.

The solution to this problem is to become what we call ‘active listeners’. And one way to do this is to utilize a technique called playbacks. A playback is either to paraphrase what they’ve said or even repeat what they’ve said.

It works something like this. So let’s assume that you’re talking to someone who’s giving you a whole litany of things that they want you to know or to think about. In your mind you should be building a list. And then once they’re done, you use words like “Let me see if I have this right” and then repeat the list or “so what you’re saying is” and then repeat the list.

The idea here is, it’s not which of these phrases you use that’s really important. It’s conveying to the speaker that you are, in fact, listening and paying attention. So the next time you find yourself in a conversation, try using playbacks and show them that you’re an active listener.

[Theme Music]

Renn Vara: Be sure to join us next time on More Than Talk and our guest will be Jane Sparrow. Jane is the head of Employee Communications for Sony Europe. Jane will be talking to us about annual IABC Conference that will be happening in Vancouver on June 4th to the 7th. IABC is the International Association for Business Communicators. Be sure to join us for More Than Talk.

Scott Sigler: Your listening to More than Talk and I’m Scott Sigler. We’re back with Mike Manuel and Matthew Podboy of VOCE Communications talking about digital advocacy.

One of the fears attached to online communications is increased transparency and accountability. Whatever information the company provides, it’s available everywhere, all across the world to existing and prospective customers. So people put out these communication programs. Mike how do they ensure that they’ve got good contact that’s going to be actually sticking, engaging, and accomplishing the job?

Mike Manuel: I think the easiest way to, I guess, because there’s no guarantee about the easiest. I think the approach there is if we make sure that you’re very authentic and genuine and that the content you do put out there is good content. It sounds simple to say that but when it comes to creating a corporate blog, the blog with the best content is going to be the blog that has the highest readership and the most subscribers and the most linking to it or from it. The same with the podcast, I think. The podcast that has the greatest interviews and the greatest content, again, will win out over the stuff that is less compelling.

We talked to clients and we talked to the companies we were working with. The focus really is on creating really compelling content and from there, audiences will grow. There is obviously some marketing and some strategy that comes on top of that. But having really good compelling content is important. And to have really good compelling content, I think, companies need to be very comfortable with being authentic and genuine with how they share their opinions and their insights and do this on these platforms.

Scott Sigler: So this is part of the service that a company like VOCE provides. So you talked about having that good content. The good content is going to bring the listenership or bring the viewership. How do you go about helping the company create that good content?

Mike Manuel: Part of it is looking at the content that already exists within the company. Something that we’ve had a lot of success with is looking at, just for example, some podcasting and blogs where there’s some customer’s testimonial that they’ve already done. Kind of really dissecting the customer programs to see where there’s already compelling information that’s been created as part of that customer project.

We’ve looked at things like white papers and case studies and things that already exist within the organization that has great content there. It’s just a matter of mining it and pulling it out and maybe, in some cases, just repurposing a little bit with these new platforms.

I think the other big part of it is just looking at the brains within a company and the really smart people that typically may not operate in a spokesperson fashion. I mean they may not be a company’s spokesperson but are still, kind of, the brains and the engine behind the company. And so these people become the voices and the faces, in some cases, of the organization. These tools are a great way for getting them out and sharing them with the outside world.

Scott Sigler: You know a lot of these tools are easily accessible. You can go online and you can take it. You can start up a blog. You can start up a podcast. There’s a lot of things that somebody, if they had they had the bandwidth, they could put some of these things together themselves. But then you get back over to some of the traditional PR roles that people can’t do themselves.

And Matt, we were talking before the interview about some of the key relationships. The business media, trade media and market financial analysis, people of that nature. That’s something that a company like VOCE brings to the table that the end company can’t do on their own. So how do you leverage those relationships and how do you get the insight they provide to benefit the customer?

Matthew Podboy: The answer is that the content is king and the good content that’s brought to these targets, and a target audience could, as we’ve discussed, could be a journalist, an analyst, a pundit. These could be offline targets that don’t necessarily communicate in an online fashion. It could be a journalist who’s got a blog. It could be a blogger with no journalist training. And any one of these has a subject matter. Some content that they’re interested in and I think that’s where a lot of these fundamentals come back into play. That it’s our job to find the match between what they’re interested in and what we story we have to tell.

What’s real interesting is that you have this area of crossover and we will refer to it here internally as the J-Bloggers. J standing for journalists. The journalist bloggers. And these are folks that have a responsibility to publish stories in whatever format: a daily newspaper, a weekly magazine, a monthly magazine.

And now they’ve got this whole new influence developing around a blog, in some cases. And some examples of that is Om Malik who has the blog GigaOm that he writes for Business 2.0. His blog GigaOm is doing north of 20,000 hits a day. And you’ve got guys out of San Jose Mercury News, Matt Marshall and Mike Bazeley who have a blog called Silicon Beat. They’re doing upwards of 15,000 hits a day. That’s a tremendous audience to tap into.

And to do it, just like any relationship if you’re going to hire a communication consultant, is to understand what they’re doing and understand what our client has to offer and look for that synergy in it.

It sounds simple. We all know it’s not that simple. But it also shouldn’t be overplayed into something that is any different or challenges anything that we’ve been doing for years and years. We’ve got to develop good methods, produce good stories, good content. And then when we do that, it’s going to be easy to find the right target audience.

Scott Sigler: And those blogs that you’re talking about, it’s really important for people to understand the shift in the playing field that’s going on. That’s not, say a paper with a 20,000 circulation or a magazine with a 15,000 circulation. That’s 20,000 people that are tuning in specifically to hear that type of content. How does that impact that influence if a company can get into one of those blogs?

Matthew Podboy: It’s tremendous. And the writing style is what really sets this apart. When the Silicon Beat guys or home at GigaOm write a post on their blog, and they’re pulling in 15,000 or 20,000 hits a day. That’s some kind of traffic.

They way they write and the way that these blogs, and a lot of these online content is written now, is with hyperlinks. So the words and the text within are embedded with URLs out to other sources. That could be a source over your company. It could be to a press release you’ve put out. It could be to a podcast that an executive made from a show several months ago.

So what you’ve got here is not only are you tapping into the audience that they bring in there for you, but you’ve got much more of content around the story that is brought into the picture. In a way it really does round out the story and tells the story in a different way that what might be told in just a print form.

Scott Sigler: So going through these ‘7 points’ and all the other tangents that we got off on, you guys have shown that there’s quite an intricate process. It’s very impressive. What can be done and it shows the value of those online communication programs. So what would your recommendations be? Mike, why don’t you speak to this. What would your recommendations be for how a company would engage VOCE or another consultant that’s in this space.

Mike Manuel: I think that easiest thing is that, we have a lot of companies that we talk to. And really our first step is just to talk with them and to assess what their needs are and understand what their goals are and to sit down and really try to figure out if it actually makes sense for them to have more of an online presence or to have a dedicated online program.

For some companies, and to some industries, it makes a lot of sense. Increasingly, I think, there’s going to be a stronger need, a higher need for that. For some companies, truthfully, it doesn’t make sense. And I think we try to be really honest with the companies that we meet with here and particularly in the Valley, about where we think we can help and where we think we can bring value and add value to their programs and where ultimately, just give them by virtue of what they do, it may not make sense.

So I think our best first step is just to meet and talk with the company and really get an understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish and then take it from there.

Scott Sigler: Okay. Finally guys, let’s talk to the future of online communities. In some regards, this has been burning for quite sometime. In others, the advent of blogs and podcasting and online communities and social networking has really, in the past couple of years, tend to come out of nowhere and had a huge massive impact on things. Is this a fad or is this a whole new world?

Mike Manuel: I don’t think it’s a fad. I know, I have certainly read a lot about opinions out there being that, you know, blogging and podcasting is just kind of a ‘flash in a pan’. It’s all part of the bubble. I don’t buy that for a minute. I think this is all here to stay. I think participation is going to be a big part of how audiences engage with each other and with the companies online. And I think we’re already seeing just a slew of new tools that make that participation easier and I don’t think that’s going to change. What I do think is going to happen and is already happening is that it’s getting very, very noisy.

And I think the challenge the companies have is trying to determine what can they realistically do based on what’s being said out there about this new audience, this new world of communication. I think that’s where a firm like ours could help. It’s trying to determine what they can realistically do. I think there’s going to be new tools that would come out that we haven’t even thought of yet. New ways of communicating that we’re not just touching on but are all going to present unique challenges to companies and communicators much in the same way that in the last several years blogging and podcasting as such have as well.

So,a big challenge for companies and for communicators is how quickly they can adapt to new audiences and new tools and new ways of communicating their message in an environment that is just rapidly evolving.

Scott Sigler: So that being able to adapt quickly, being pretty nimble, cause like you say podcasting, really is only about a year old and look at the impact it’s having already.

Matthew Podboy: Right. Right.

Scott Sigler: So Matt can you speak to this too? What is your vision of the future for online communities and for digital advocacy?

Matthew Podboy: One of the things we try and talk to around VOCE and really get into our minds, our client’s minds, is that this should not be seen as a stand alone service, something that has to reside some other place, some other team and start to create these disparate programs.

I think the future is that this will be brought into a fold of the communicator’s bag of goods. And what we tend to talk to around here is that this adds tools to our tool shed. We are not building another tool shed. What we have now are more tools to get our job done. And so that’s one of the areas that I see in the future is that communicators are going to be forced, if they haven’t done so already on their own terms, they’re going to be forced to understand it.

And that’s a good thing. This is something to get excited about. We have more audiences, more ways to reach those audiences, more ways to communicate our stories, better metrics so that we can provide feedback and validate what we’re doing.

This is a good thing. It has made communications exciting and I think the reason this is taking off is because of that enthusiasm. And all of us are going to have to course correct. What’s nice about this space, when you invite more participants in is I think it allows for a quick course correction. If tactics are used that don’t jive with the rest of the community, it’s going to be called out and it’s going to be fixed on the fly. And that’s exciting.

So I think this is something that’s fluid. It’s correctable and over time we’re going to have these best practices developed. And Mike, I’m going to borrow something that Mike has told us a lot around here and that is with these programs you get to tap into the world’s largest focus group. Companies get to go out there and see, by navigating this new area, direct access to opinions and thoughts and feelings around brands and executives and company initiatives and a lot of that information wasn’t there before.

So it should raise the bar. It should raise the bar on everything. It should keep companies focused on what they’re doing. It should give us better products to play with and it should make communicators do their job better.

Scott Sigler: Mike, Matt, thanks for joining us on More Than Talk. I really appreciate your time.

Mike Manuel: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.