Corporate blogging (not as boring as it sounds)

(From yesterday afternoon)

Shari Storm from Verity Credit Union in Washington State took us through her adventures in public blogging. She made the important point that you can’t approach blogging from an ROI perspective; I’d append the comment that as soon as someone starts asking you about ROI you’ll know that they don’t really get it.

She made the valuable point that “social media” is really the collection of interrelated and interconnected stories, and that measuring the impact of that is tough, but it’s there.

Verity assumes that employees are already talking online, and so it encourages participation in such sites as yelp. If you’re a bad employer the risk is big; if you’re a good employer that payoff is big. The point is not to discourage employee participation, but… to be a good employer.

As a sort of off-hand comment Shari noted that, by blogging in a relatively unscripted manner, she as encouraging the creation of a sort-of “free focus group”. It’s a good idea, and she pointed out that Starbucks has a new forum called “My Idea” that basically allows end consumers to suggest changes to the company products or processes. It’s risky, but it’s also a good (and cheap) way to make sure you’re talking with the end user.

I’ve seen the Commonwealth CU Young & Free site before, but Shari pointed it out as an interesting experiment in using ground-level social media to promote a product.

At the end of her presentation Shari summarized what they had learned so far about the social media activities at Verity CU:

• To get people involved you need to invite them. They won’t just show up, unless you’re being controversial (and the people who show up when you do this might not be the people you want).
• People must have a reason for participating. It might be prestige, it might be incentives, but it’s something.
• Take control of your forum/blog. You’re the boss. Don’t let bad participants ruin the tone of the blog, and don’t let your attempts to be transparent and/or authentic distract you from ensuring that the tone of the blog is compromised.
• Don’t overlook one of your most important assets – your employees
• Don’t talk about product. Ever.

Ed’s unscripted take:

• After her presentation I spoke to Shari about quality control: how do you ensure that what gets posted by employees is coherent and reasonably professional (without being stuffy). She mentioned that she does act as editor in some form, without stripping the employees voice.
• I think this has greater relevance internally than externally for WSCU. To do what Shari’s doing would require a wholesale cultural shift. The one thing that might make sense to do publicly is a “webmaster” blog on the site to discuss what we’re doing in the online space only.
• I also like the idea of a blog as an unofficial forum, focus group and feedback space for members. Regular discussion rather than annual surveys seem way more responsive, member-centric and useful. We wouldn’t capture offline users, but it would provide us with a certain online baseline.