The article makes the point that companies need to make their brand websites more social, personal, human and interactive. We’re already seeing a lot of brands moving in this direction with corporate blogs and  community content built into their branded website experience.

I think this trend will continue.

Some may argue that social media fulfils the need for interactivity and conversational marketing;  they’re right but I do believe that we’ll see the balance equalise for the following reasons:

• Brands know that social network users are fickle and that sites can quickly fall out of favour. This makes it a risky place to invest in order to establish your social presence online
• Branding is about differentiation – social networks inhibit differentiation by forcing brands to work within templates.  Brands owners will want to regain control of the way they are presented
• The conversations that make up social media will become core to business – the emphasis will shift from social networks back to the branded website
• Brands will become leaders and not followers in social media as they become content producers & media companies in their own right
• Brands will allow the user to create their own experience within the confines of the branded website by adding or removing social objects, content and apps, which the user can then bring into their social network.  The brand website will act as a social hub.

The article ran in today’s Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age: Building a better relationship with online customers

Julian posed the question: Is Google Sidewiki a threat or an opportunity? I think that it is both and made the point that active participation in conversation via Sidewiki provided another PR opportunity for organisations to communicate with their customers.

I also suggested that businesses develop a policy for Sidewiki and that they publish this so that customers know what to expect when using this form of feedback. Brian Giesen makes a great suggestion when he says that companies should ‘claim’ their Sidewiki by making the first comment (if possible).

A quick scan of major corporate websites highlights the fact that Sidewiki is yet to take off in a big way. Potential commenters need the latest version of the Google Toolbar and they also need to be aware of the service. The digerati set will be well aware of this but I am not convinced that Joe Bloggs has this on their radar. There is more activity around social media related news sites and social networks, check out Facebook as an example of a active Sidewiki.

Google Sidewiki is an extension of an existing service from Google; which is the ability to place comments on search results.  This didn’t take off or hasn’t taken off as yet (it continues to be available – check out the speech bubble icon below organic search results in Google).

Radian6 announced last week that it now offers the ability to monitor Sidewiki, an important development for businesses that need now to be aware of conversation in a wide range of digital tools.

I think Sidewiki represents a major PR opportunity for small businesses, who may not necessarily want to invest in discussion boards, recommendation and feedback mechanisms for their websites but are provided a free infrastructure for exactly that via Google Sidewiki.

Sidewiki causes a PR headache

ALREADY struggling with the mountain of blogs, forums and social networks, public relations consultants are weighing up whether a new Google tool that enables consumers to leave comments next to a brand’s website is a threat or a challenge.

Google Sidewiki gives a new and very transparent avenue for disgruntled customers to air their grievances against companies.

Travel websites already carry customer reviews of hotels and resorts.

Google says it is all about ”facilitating the conversation on the internet” between general users and experts but the PR industry is watching closely to see if Sidewiki will become as popular and as powerful a tool for opinionated internet users as Twitter and Facebook.

Gabriel McDowell, the managing director of Res Publica, said companies that failed to understand Sidewiki risked damage to their image and reputation. ”This is going to sort out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to managing corporate reputation,” Mr McDowell said.

Although Sidewiki presented ”yet another channel for them [corporations] to manage”, Daniel Young, the digital director of Burson-Marsteller, said it could be a useful tool. ”If one person has a complaint and you respond to it then, in a way you are answering others before the question has even been asked,” he says.

Brian Giesen, who heads the digital consultancy in the Asia-Pacific for Ogilvy PR, says Sidewiki could prove to be a handy way to spot potentially hot issues and the pressure groups pushing them.

”It just reinforces the need for brands to listen to such media. This is also a useful way for companies to find out who are the people who are making the comments and then to reach out to them,” said Mr Giesen, who recommends companies race to be the first to make a Sidewiki comment on a page, a privilege Google extends to website owners.

Mr McDowell said Sidewiki could also provide an avenue of redress by corporations that felt they misrepresented in the mainstream media. For example, a public relations consultant could post the entire statement given to a journalist, rather than the truncated version that might appear in an article. ”One of the major complaints about the media is the time it takes to get a correction up. This could go some way to rectifying that.”

But there are concerns that because Sidewiki is ”completely unregulated and uncontrollable”, as Mr Young put it, it will be harder for companies to sort out the legitimate complaints from the serial sledgers. Deciding on whether to answer was going to be key, he said.

Mr Giesen said Google ”needs to take greater responsibility for the comments that appear on Sidewiki”.

A spokeswoman for Google Australia said it had not received any concerns from Australian publishers. ”Website owners and publishers here and abroad have told us that they see this as another way to connect with their users, similar to conversations they’re already having on their blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.”

Links have been added for the benefit of this posting.

CEO as Chief Communicator

Current economic challenges have lead to intense scrutiny of executive decision making, corporate culture, compensation, risk management and due diligence in business. 

This close examination by Government and the media of corporate largesse has highlighted a vast chasm between senior executives and the general workforce leading to unprecedented levels of mistrust towards the business sector.  It has highlighted the urgent need for cultural change within the corporate sector in the developed world. 

 A January 2009 survey by a rival PR firm – Edelman – found that 38 percent of American respondents between the ages of 35 and 64 said they trust business.  This is the lowest rating in the survey’s 10-year history.  The corporate sector must act quickly and decisively to address deteriorating levels of trust between itself and the pool from which it must draw its customers and employees.

The question is: whose responsibility is it?

The buck must surely stop with the CEO.  Research conducted by Burson-Marsteller in 2005 found that perceptions of the CEO represent 65 percent of a corporate reputation. 

The role of the company CEO is to set the company vision, values and direction.  They then must develop the plan of actions.  The critical step lies in the effective communication of the strategy, and the consistent demonstration and reinforcement of the stated values. 

The rise of digital media has had a major impact on corporate communications since 2005.  It has provided the opportunity for corporations to establish an ‘authentic voice’.  This singular, human voice enables corporations to engage in meaningful two way conversation with individuals in the media, customer base, bloggersphere and so on. 

Interestingly, that authentic voice is rarely if ever the voice of the CEO.  A 2008 research project by Burson-Marsteller found that just 18% of CEOs have used social media to communicate with stakeholder groups.

There are exceptions, most notably in the technology sector, but typically the engineer, product strategist, technician or designer is perceived as the authentic voice. 

CEOs are overlooked for a wide variety of reasons; they don’t have time; they are not close enough to the detail; they are generalists; they don’t see the value in mass-communication; they are constrained by corporate disclosure guidelines.

This must change.

Businesses find themselves less trusted than ever before.  This fact is a critical business issue and will be a major inhibitor for many companies in the years to come, more pressing in some industries than others.  One time, one directional communications will not re-build trust.  Businesses need to engage in a continuous dialogue. 

The good news is that CEOs today have a wide variety of communications tools at their disposal and these tools will be second nature to the next generation of CEOs.  These individuals assisted by corporate communications experts will recognise the need to  communicate their vision and values for the company as well as encouraging and facilitating transparency across all operations.  

There will continue to be a place for the ‘at the coal face’ bloggers within organisations – those individuals that discuss their daily challenges, share insights and generate ideas with likeminded people.  In doing so, they generate goodwill, enhance reputations and engage various audience groups.

The organisations that recognise the need to re-instate and re-equip the CEO as the Chief Communicator will be the first to begin the process of re-building trust.  Those businesses that deploy a strategy and the tools that enable continuous CEO communications will invigorate their reputation and establish refreshed relationships based on trust.

Where the bleeding hell are you?

Examples include – wikis at Janssen-Cilag, BlueTube for the Victorian Police Force and the ever present case study: Now We Are Talking.

And I have worked with companies in this sphere.

As a side note: It seems to me that Telstra entered the social media space with a very specific agenda (T3) and objective. The approach delivered value and has since permeated other areas of their business in a positive way.

For the purposes of this post, I want to focus on externally facing social media projects by Australian corporates.

Laurel Papworth recently posted on the topic of CEOs that use twitter, as a follow up to a BusinessWeek story about tweeting chief execs in the US. The list is made up by the leaders of web 2 and tech companies on both sides of the Pacific.

Talk to any PR in Australia and they’ll tell you that the corporate sector remains unwilling to dip its toe into social media in a meaningful or strategic way. Maybe that’s an exercise in PR business development, either way I’d like to suggest a few reasons why this might be the case.

1. A small corporate sector which remains well connected via traditional offline networks
That sense of the old boys network in Australian business still feels very prevalent to me. That concept of mateship and personal connections comes through quite strongly. The people that run Australian businesses are not using social media as a prmary means of communication.

2. The retail sector has not led the way
Amazon and eBay were the Web pioneers in many ways. Their success gave the Web a lot of credibility in a market (the US) which has a very rich catalogue mail order retail culture. The Australian retail sector on the other hand has been very cautious and reticent when it comes to establishing an online presence, resulting in a lack of leadership.

Too many cultural stereotypes for one post?

4. Abscence of high speed national broadband
Internationally, Japan leads the way when it comes to national broadband speeds. The NBN project in Australia has a long way to go still – a nationwide broadband network in Australia is five years away, at the very least. This has impacted the sophistication, the uptake of Web applications, interaction etc. Australia is way down the rankings in terms of broadband quality, as this study shows.

5. There has been no high profile reputational crisis on the Web in Australia
Corporates will only recognise the power of the Web when they see one of their peers suffer major reputational damage as a result of online activity. Until then, corporates will sit back and focus on the risk of getting involved.

6. Corporates aren’t being sold on the benefits effectively
Marketers, consultants, PRs have to accept some responsibilty for the current state of affairs. It’s their job to educate decision makers. It’s their job to prove the business case. Marketers and communicators in Australia aren’t strong on this stuff.

As I said at the beginning, there is activity out there. It’s happening but Australia continues to lag behind the rest of the world. My sense is that the multi-nationals operating in Australia are leading the way. It can only be a matter of time until we see the large corporates follow Telstra and usurp the telco as the outstanding Australian corporate in social media.

By Newsroom, I mean the area within a corporate Website that hosts press announcements and other types of news content – Just to be clear.

You’re probably asking yourself why?  

The Newsroom is a basic, low maintenance and inexpensive way for corporations to share content with journalists, analysts and bloggers, so you’d think that the most successful companies in America would make it as easy as possible to get access to the information, right?  

Second, the Internet has placed pressure on corporate communications to engage in a conversation with the audience and this, in turn, places pressure on newsrooms to change. The one directional communication (i.e. the press release) is increasingly irrelevant. As a result, the traditional newsroom is out of sync with what most major corporations are doing now in social and digital media. 

Out of the top 50 corporations in the Fortune 500, 42 do have a direct link to their newsroom i.e. it’s one click away.

Of the 42, ten have direct links to their most recent media announcements.

The ten are:

Ford Motor (Fortune 500 rank: 7); Bank of America (9); JP Morgan Chase & Co (12); Verizon (17); Goldman Sachs (20); United Health Group (25); Boeing (27); United Parcel Services (46); Time Warner (49).

These companies have brought news to their home page.

The eight that don’t have a direct link and which force users to go via the ‘About Us’ section (as an example) are:

AT&T (10); Hewlett-Packard (14); Home Depot (22); Costco Wholesale (29); Dell (34); Wells Fargo (41); Microsoft (44); Lowe’s (48).

These companies are effectively hiding their news from journalists, bloggers and also their customers.

It seems odd that only a small number of companies are bringing their news to the forefront of their Web presence, since this is the content that changes most often.

One of the disconnects that I see in corporate communications is between the conversational and authentic voice that companies are adopting in social networks and social media channels and their persistent use of gobbledygook in news announcements.

I continually see examples of big corporations putting out media releases, which flout the basics of press releases writing and are more or less meaningless due to the heavy use of marketing speak and jargon.

Some organisations are responding to this disconnect and re-working their newsroom in way that becomes more useful for bloggers and journalist. 

Ford is a high profile example of this. For major products, Ford is breaking content into snippets which can be re-purposed and re-compiled by the receiver in any way they like. You can find out more from Ford here; commentary from Geoff Livingston and Jason Falls.

The newsroom is going to change shape and form in the years to come as it gels with and responds to the demands of social media and an ongoing increase in rich media, such as video. The companies that take the lead will be desirable places for corporate communications execs to work and they’ll more effectively engage their audience groups, resulting in better exposure.

I think we’ll see News content move up the site map to corporate home pages in the years to come. 

Finally, there are some noteworthy sites within the Fortune 50. 

I think the Goldman Sachs site is outstanding, it very succintly tells a story and has a clear message unlike many corporate home pages. 

At the other end of the spectrum, Berkshire Hathway with a market valuation of $206,976 million dollars has a Website that would do my local community centre proud. I’m guessing they don’t pick up a lot of clients via the Web.

This is a unreasonable fee in my opinion, especially as I went into the red as a result of an account fee and interest charge. It’s not as if I was flashing the Visa card around. I was just over 20 pounds into the red!

The fee is totally disproportionate!

I contacted the call centre to voice my concern and appeal for the removal of the fee or at the very least a reduction in this harsh penalty. I spoke to two operators but the charges will apply. I was told I could write a letter.

I later discovered that the UK Office of Fair Trading has launched a test case against banks on the topic of overdraft fees.

The BBC explains that: The OFT is asking the court to support its view that it has the right, under the 1999 Unfair Terms and Consumer Contracts Regulations, to decide if banks overdraft charges are unfair.

The banks have managed to secure an injunction which means that they do not have to respond to any appeals from customers until the case against the OFT has been decided – which could be more than 12 months away.

LloydsTSB announced 3.7billion pounds in pre-tax profits in 2007. None of the seven banks involved in the test case will disclose the amount that they generate from account charges on personal accounts but this is expected to be in the region of 4 billion pounds in 2007 alone!!

The Bank Action Group has been formed to help consumers re-claim these unfair charges. The group has been successful in claiming re-funds.

Like most people, I will have to take this charge on the chin, I don’t have time to go through the appeal process. I will pay the fee and close my account and never have anything to do with LloydsTSB again.