Corporate Marketing Is a Conversation
| posted by Fast Company staffI'm very impressed that Fast Company is opening up its server space to its audience in celebraton of the blogjam 2005. It represents an openness that we don't see much from business publications, and certainly not from the corporate world. What I find unique about blogjam is how FC now has evangelists who can serve as publicists for their magazine and their blog. Are there any of us who hasn't casually dropped the fact that we're blogging for fastcompany at least once?
It's smart, it's fun -- and it's valuable for companies to learn that their audience has something to say.
As Brian put it earlier, no company wants to get Dell'd. Dell's problem is not something that is easily measured in terms of sales figures for this quarter. How many people stopped buying Dell because of a Jeff Jarvis post?
Probably not that many. A few deals may be lost when a purchasing agent had a bad experience at home and refuses to buy for their corporation, but discounts always make those problems go away. The bigger question is how much in marketing dollars and sweetheart deals (both personal and commercial) Dell is shelling out to maintain its market position -- and is that money spent on marketing preventing them from posting higher profits and reinvesting in their customer service?
Dell (and Kryptonite locks) are high-profile cases, but two others spring to mind in the blogosphere -- and the companies involved did not learn the value of listening to their audience. Anyone here know much about Sony Pictures or Pepsico?
Sony Pictures had a spat with Jason Kottke over Jeopardy footage that was aired, almost driving him out of blogging altogether. In this case, its hard not to be sympathetic to Sony's attempt to make a lesson out of Kottke, who had aired the huge story of Ken Jennings finally losing when he received a tip from someone in the audience. To bloggers, it mattered little, as the story of a giant corporation attacking a little blogger and threatening to use their lawyers to squash him was far more appealing.
Bloggers led a boycott -- which hasn't seemed to be effective -- yet. Again, it's hard to measure, but the story has the potential to become an urban legend affecting all Sony products, not just Sony Pictures. At the very least, aren't there quite a few people enjoying themselves too much about Sony Pictures class action lawsuit for fake advertisements?
What was Sony's mistake? They can't allow people to simply take images amd information and post them whenever they want -- and its easy to make the case that Sony televisions and camcorders have nothing to do with lawyers at Sony Pictures. Their mistake was they don't have a voice in the consumer world. They have marketing pros and multimillion dollar budgets, but the idea of Sony turning over their corporate website for two days to their audience is ludicrous. Its ludicrous because Sony as a property knows they have to control the message for us masses.
Don't get me wrong -- I love Sony -- as a product. I don't know Jason Kottke. I do know that everytime either "Sony" or "Kottke" or even "sue" and "blogger" comes up, I think of this situation.
The second company to have this mistake it Pepsico. The conservative lawyers who helped break the Dan Rather Memogate story latched on to a speech given by a Pepsico executive. Indra Nooyi, the president of PepsiCo, gave a speech where she compared the world to a hand, and the United States to the middle finger.
The gents at Powerline made it clear they were not amused, and the response from Pepsi was, well -- lackluster at best. We all know what the middle finger represents -- and anchoring the hand is not its first function.
Maybe Ms. Nooyi really didn't mean to say that the US was giving the middle finger to the rest of the world. Maybe it was taken in that context and she was unfairly attacked. If that was the case, PepsiCo made the same mistake that Sony did in failing to establish itself with an online presence that could respond to a blog swarm. They failed to see it was a public relations fiasco waiting to happen, and they didn't have the presence online to truly respond.
Instead their announcement was mocked, and the urban legend takes wing of the PepsiCo president who flipped off the Columbia Business School and the US in the process.
The post has gone long -- but the point is a simple one. If Fast Company suffered a Public Relations fiasco tomorrow -- would they be able to get their story out to the blogosphere? Would there be someone who would listen? I'm not sure how many were invited, but I'd bet every poster here in the last two days would at least ask questions directly to FC before they spouted off. We'd listen with an open mind, because FC took the initiative to invite us in and listen to us.
They earned our respect, and over time, our loyalty. In the emerging online market, there is no better coin.
