Corporate Eye

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Media

Signing the web

Is your site truly accessible? Are you providing the best possible service to all your visitors?

I expect you’ve taken the first step, and perhaps your site is accessible to level A (or even AA). But have you considered taking the extra step, and providing accessible charting in your investor section, transcripts for all your video or audio sections on site, or providing a sign language translation for your webcasts and videos?

There are up to 70,000 users of British Sign Language (BSL) in the UK, and up to 500,000 users of American Sign Language (ASL) in the US. This is a big constituency which you should perhaps be considering.
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If you build it, they will come – Media (part 3)

I’ve already discussed the basics of a corporate media section, and then how to step it up a gear. So – how do you get to the wow factor?

Bear in mind that this section will attract not only the professional media worker, but also your potential customers and investors, so it is worth some investment. I have noticed that some companies like to verify that a visitor is a genuine media worker before allowing them access to some of the pages – and haven’t really understood the benefits of this. Please don’t require people to sign up to gain access to your media features …
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Getting the basics right – Media Section (part 1)

Despite the importance of the media (both traditional and new) to a corporate brand, some companies don’t seem to cater to the needs of this stakeholder group very well at all. I am always surprised when I can’t even find a company logo for download …

(Yes, the logo is at the top left of every page, but your web design team will probably have optimised it for the web, so it won’t be good quality for printing).

When I last looked, over 5% of the FTSE 100 didn’t provide a section of their site dedicated to journalists at all.
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The Danger in Publishing Bad Information Online

Journalists, bloggers, editors and writers. They all want the same thing and the fame that comes with that thing.

The scoop.

They want the “scoop” on a popular news topic or subject. Perhaps they want to be first to deliver the story. Or maybe they are vying for that position as top editor, and scooping a really good story is the avenue to there. Yes, if they can report it first, they stand to impress their boss, get a (possible) raise and just be generally all around pretty impressive. Being first can be a good thing. Or can it?

There is one thing to make an error when you’re writing an article or making a post. We’ve all done it at least a time or two. But, can’t you feel that twinge of nauseous stomach pains when you find your error after you’ve gone to publish? Or worse yet, what about when someone else brings it to your attention? However, what can be even worse than these things is when you simply report bad or incorrect information without having investigated the story thoroughly or completely.

Just recently, this scenario happened with the infamous Twitter brand when a reporter on the Bloomberg news site pointedly stated in an article that there were over “55 million daily users on Twitter.” Impossible. This figure is not statistically so inconceivable. Although the Bloomberg article’s portion on this large number was retracted, it was too late to reach the other 1,096 Google search results bloggers who wanted eagerly to pick up keyword-rich, news type and financially motivated stories.

But is it to harmful to report incomplete information? Does anyone really suffer because you didn’t give all of the correct information? Is it really a big deal? Will anyone care?

Yes.

Companies spend quite a bit of money to update and maintain their sites. Giving customers incorrect information simply does not do anything for your credibility with them. Companies should take great care and great pains to ensure that they are providing not only the latest and greatest news but correct news for their readership. Check the facts and nuances of your story against other sites that you trust. Make sure that what you’re reporting on is accurate, verifiable and perhaps even blogged by other bloggers.

If it is your company’s goal to publish quality over timing, then yes it does matter. If it is your company’s goal to value substance over fluff, then again, yes it matters. Reporting less-than-accurate information can be excused once or maybe even twice….perhaps. However, it is far more important to check the validity of claims and the realistic nature of your story. It’s also a good idea to “think” about it before publishing it as well. Consider that the article originally said 55 million visitors a day. Again, that’s impossible. Read the reasons in this article written by John Volpe of Social Sphere Strategies on why it is impossible. He basically uses common knowledge and deductive reasoning and a few statistics to prove his point.

What does your company do when there are big errors like this made in their reports? What damage control systems are in place to fix it for you? What could have been done differently in this situation besides doing a follow-up article?

The Social Media Newsroom: X-Factor Style

sony ericsson social media newsroom
Sony Ericsson

Communicate Magazine’s Social Media in a Corporate Context conference yesterday ran a session examining social media newsrooms in the style of The X-Factor. Yes, really!

If we’d been assessing each of the sessions of the day to see whether they should go through to the next stage, this one would have got my vote.

Naturally, nobody was publicly humiliated and bleeped off stage, but the format of the session was entertaining, and enabled us to see 3 corporate social media newsrooms in some detail, with highlights presented by their ‘owner’, with commentary on each from the panel of 3 experts, and then questions from the floor.

First Direct social media newsroom
First Direct

This meant that we could hear from the inside about the issues involved in getting the newsrooms established, which included:

  • meeting the requirements of the Legal and Compliance teams
  • dealing with the difficulties of using legacy IT systems
  • and the organisational difficulties in dealing with large companies with a lot of historical momentum going in the traditional direction.

These issues, which were mentioned several times, received a lot of nods and smiles from the audience, who clearly recognised the situations the speakers had found themselves in.

GM Europe (Opel) social media newsroom
GM Europe

We heard about the intentions of the companies in moving towards a social media newsroom, and some of the benefits they found:

  • projecting good news, and news to interest consumers, not just professional journalists
  • supporting a brand refresh, with new brand values including ‘openness’ requiring that this be demonstrated on the corporate site
  • significant increase in the number of visits per week – from 5 per week to over 2,000
  • decrease in time-to-publish, so they were able to respond faster, which was of particular benefit in managing crises
  • the ability to provide embeddable, sharable content for visitors to reuse, reaching their target influencers and spreading the brand message.

I was particularly impressed by the astonishing increase in the number of visits to the newsroom achieved by going social. This, together with the statistics presented by Simon Henderson from Centrica in a later session – that visitors to their CSR blogs visited 11 more pages than the average visitor, spent 8 minutes longer on site and were 10% more likely to return – makes a good argument for moving in this direction.

The experts appeared to be enthusiastic about all the sites, picking up on different good features of each. There did seem to be a slight divergence among the three on whether or not it was a good thing to merge news intended for consumers, news intended for the professional journalist, and content intended for reuse or sharing, with a suggestion that it could be of benefit to have a dedicated area for the professional in case of crisis. Two of the responses that I noted to these questions were:

  • the ‘contestant’ (in this case Merran Wriggley from Sony Ericsson) responded that they didn’t mind who was visiting (that is, whether it was a traditional journalist or a blogger) but were much more interested in where their material was used
  • one of the judges (Stuart Bruce from Wolfstar Consultancy) later pointed out that one option could be a popup mini-site triggered in case of need, and available from the social media newsroom, to provide a dedicated area for crisis communications.

For me, this was the standout session of the conference, and it’s well worth looking at all three of the newsrooms examined. I’ve included images (just click the image to see a bigger version), but they don’t really do them justice. Why not have a look at the newsrooms (links under each image above), and then let us know which you’d vote for – and why?

Video Blogging: The New Corporate Social Media – Part I

WILL VIDEO BLOGGING REPLACE REGULAR BLOGGING?

As popular as blogging has become for most companies and especially for corporate America, there are still new advances in social marketing that have yet to reach the phenomenal reputation that blogging has. Some companies are still playing catch-up to the idea of blogging, wondering what to blog about and when is a good time to blog. This is in no way indicative of the quality or potential that these companies or entrepreneurs have to offer, but while they’re strategizing their next blog content article, other corporations are in their home office studios or warehouse flats making their next vlog.

YouTube might very well be one of the most popular ideas of vlogging since it’s users can upload a myriad of videos ranging from music, business pitches, corporate developments, politics and news. Youtube’s variety of genres makes it one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the internet.

Vlogging is an interesting animal because of the technical requirements that it takes to orchestrate such a thing and the ability to include the business nature of blogging. In video blogging, the author has to not only create fresh, compelling content, but also has to have and exude a film-face and voice in order to attract and keep the listener’s attention. No, they don’t have to be os supermodel or GQ quality, but they do have to be able to engage the camera, speak to the listener in a friendly tone and present themselves well on camera. Fortunately, in this type of content sharing, you can speak off the cuff, even occasionally throwing a few uhm’s and ahh’s for good measure. Unfortunately, you cannot go back and edit, erase or remove any subject or content ideas because once your idea is spoken, it’s gone. You can edit and splice parts of the presentation, but the topic remains the same. In standard blogging, you can go back several times and edit, re-word sentences, change thought patterns, etc. Case in point: while writing this blog entry, I’ve already done just that several times before you read the final piece. That’s part of the beauty of basic blogging.

Video blogging can be done by almost anyone in the corporation, provided that they have an understanding or even experience with filming, being filmed, editing and presentation. It can be as simple or as sophisticated as the author wants it to be. However, because it is a different kind of social media outreach, it has to align with regular blogging by offering listeners something of value that will enhance their business or personal lives. But, will it work for your company? Check back with me on my next post as we discuss the benefits (or detriments) that vlogging can be to your corporation.

Here is a list derived from the Wikipedia source that shows what companies are vlogging, events that involved vlogging and important dates in this social media venue.

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  • 2000, January 2 – Adam Kontras launches the first (known) video blog,[8] The Journey, detailing his move to Los Angeles and his attempt at showbusiness. He would later host a segment on The Early Show.[9]
  • 2003, June 15 – Nacho Durán launches the first (known) South American (Sao Paulo, Brazil) videoblog based on soundless loops made out of sequences of pictures daily taken from a portable webcam.[10]
  • 2004, January 1 – Steve Garfield launches his videoblog and declares that 2004 would be the year of the video blog.[11][12]
  • 2004, June 1 – Peter Van Dijck and Jay Dedman start the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group, which becomes the center of a community of vloggers[13][14]
  • 2005, January – Vloggercon, the first videoblogger conference, is held in New York City.[15]
  • 2005, July 20 – The Yahoo! Videoblogging Group grows to over 1,000 members.[16][5]
  • 2006, July – YouTube has become the 5th most popular web destination, with 100 million videos viewed daily, and 65,000 new uploads per day.[17]
  • 2006, July 5 – Host Amanda Congdon leaves Rocketboom over differences with her business partner Andrew Baron.[18][19]
  • 2006, November – The Vloggies, the first annual videoblogging awards, is held in San Francisco.[20]
  • 2007, May and August – The Wall Street Journal places a grandmother on the front page of its Personal Journal section.[21] In August she is featured on an ABC World News Tonight segment[22] showing the elderly now becoming involved in the online video world.

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