sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Yesterday I read about Jiglu, a plug-in for blogs that reads content and creates tagging data for it, automatically. Tagging is an important, necessary, and occassionally tedious activity that people with blogs carry out, and it’s hard to say whether you’ve done it intelligently or not. Tags are used by people reading sites (for example you might look at all the content I wrote about “web 2.0″) but they’re used a lot by software as well: sites like technorati, Google’s blog search and a host of others use tags as a way to navigate and understand what content is about, and it’s a popular way into websites as a result. So it drives a lot of traffic, which makes it important, and none of us know if we’re doing it well or not.

I therefore installed Jiglu yesterday, and so far I’m pretty impressed. It’s extracted useful tags (more than I would, which I guess is good) about people, things, places, and created a little panel that you can see on the right hand side. But it’s also created active links in my text, so you can go straight from a mention of the word IASH (I do hope it’s highlighted that for me) to all my entries about them.

It looks quite useful, in a geeky kind of way. I’ll keep an eye on how it goes, but if it improves my tagging and traffic numbers, it can’t be bad.

My article for Revolution Magazine has been published. It feels like I wrote it months ago, which I guess is one of the big differences between blogging and writing for a print magazine. Anyway, this is the text of what I wrote:

A couple of recent conversations got me thinking about the potential for business blogging. I was talking to a middle manager in a FTSE 100 company, who was unfamiliar with the term “blog” despite being a fairly heavy Internet user. The term had just passed him by. Then I sat down with a group of digital natives who’d gathered to talk about their Internet usage and interests, who hardly read any blogs at all. Is blogging a minority pursuit, or is it something that companies could make more of?

It would seem like there are plenty of companies that could benefit from a decent blog. Agency.com has certainly had its share of trials over its own corporate blogging efforts. How many organisations today would cite a lack of customer trust as one of their business issues? How many would benefit from a dialogue with their customers about how they’re doing, new product ideas, or their service issues? Blogging is an ideal way to meet these needs, but great examples are few and far between. My friend, who works for Avis, recently wrote a piece from his water-logged Oxfordshire home, sharing his advice on driving in wet conditions. His company’s blog is straightforward, honest, and winning awards. The stories of Wildlife Direct’s workers in the Congo are more dramatic and emotive than any soap opera. But these are rare examples.

When I looked around this week, most companies’ blogs were too boring and corporate for words (I guess that might be expected from Boeing), or disconnected from what the company does - and therefore any reason for having a blog in the first place. Who’s really interested in what the guys at an Spreadshirt watched on TV last night? Is it really a good idea to talk about the staff party on a site that anyone can see, like I saw one top London agency had done? Microsoft putting its employees’ blog URLs on their business cards is trying a bit harder, but are any of them worth reading?

I can see several causes for this disappointment. Some companies get worried about what investors, regulators and competitors are told, and start to control who can speak in public. If they’ve put 3 layers of sign-off in their web editorial process, a tool that allows staff to just start writing and getting published must sound like anarchy. In other companies, the people with interesting things to say are just too busy. The blog is left to the enthusiasts, and most of them are just a little bit on the geeky side. Lack of innovation is another challenge: getting a company blog going is so much more than just installing the software and creating some user accounts. Adding a link to your blog to your website’s page footer does not constitute a strategy.

Perhaps whatever companies do with blogging, most people wouldn’t be that interested in what they have to say, but it feels to me like a lot of companies are missing a trick.

Yesterday I presented at the AdMonsters EU Leadership Forum in London. AdMonsters is an international group of people working in online advertising operations and the group included people from a wide range of online publishers and agencies, including Channel 4, the Guardian, News International, AOL, Harvest Digital and Digitas.

My presentation is on Slideshare and here:

I had a great time, especially enjoying the presentation by Fru Hazlitt, MD of GCap London. Presenting was fun too. I recorded the audio, so I’ll replace the Slideshare with a movie of the slides plus audio soon.

My presentation explored the origins and possible solutions (including the one mooted by IASH) to the problem of how to safely place ads next to user generated content. Essentially, I think a combination of behavioural targeting, automated content analysis and manual publisher classification is probably needed, and that a code of practise based solution like IASH’s won’t solve the problems to the satisfaction of advertisers who need innovation and results.

We’ve made some great tongue-in-cheek video content to help BA with their recruitment of new cabin crew, using the Pam-Ann character. It’s pretty funny, and it’s nice to see so many clients and colleagues in the video itself.

Most importantly from my point of view, BA tend to be quite a serious brand, and it’s good to see them having some fun in this work. The site is here.

Some very nice sites that I saw yesterday (thanks to Scene 7 for the details)

http://www.gucci.com/uk/index2.html

A DHTML storefront with NO FLASH and a very nice experience. Try comparing 2 handbags to see what I mean.

http://shawfloors.com/TryOnaFloor.aspx?mode=gallery

A heavy but powerful Flash storefront, powered by Scene 7 (who Adobe just bought) which allows you to swap floor covering, fabrics, and a bunch of other things, using a very nice layering technique.

http://www.oli.co.uk/
Fashion site - check out the Look Book at the bottom of the home page, which allows you to mix and match, resize and combine items in a very nice way.

First prize for a corporate slogan goes to the company (who I won’t name) who said they were all about “data sharing for maximum profit”. In other words, they make as much money as possible by selling your data to other people. As a strap-line, it left me wondering…

My overall feeling about ad:tech 2007, having been to the last 3 London ad:techs, was that 90% of what was on show was the same as at last year’s. The 10% related to video advertising, and products which claim to help advertisers to make the most of social networking, and the wonders of web 2.0.

The highlight for me was a discussion session about strategies for making the most of consumer generated content. The speakers came from 3 technology and service providers (1000 Heads, Milward Brown Precis, and Market Sentinel) and one advertiser: Avis, represented by my good friend Xavier Vallee, who is their UK Head of Marketing.

Distilling the best practice from the discussion, Fergus from Milward Brown put it well when he said advertisers needed to work out what was being said about them online, whether it mattered, what to do about it, and whether the action had worked. Some brands aren’t discussed much online (Flora isn’t, Marmite is) so they may not need to worry so much. Others need to be proactive and engage in the discussion appropriately.

The Avis case study is based on the idea of net promoter ratings, which essentially measure people saying positive things minus people saying negative things, for particular subjects, like “Avis car hire”. Avis has used this model for some time offline, and decided to start using them to weigh online conversation about them and their competitors.

Avis decided to set up the We Try Harder blog to engage in the online conversation, and made some sensible decisions about how they would execute on that idea, working with their partners Web Liquid. They wanted the blog to be authentic and honest, so it’s written by regular staff, and nobody copywrites for them. It sets out to acknowledge problems and discuss them, rather than pretending that a problem doesn’t exist. Comment and input from consumers is being used to refine Avis’s product and service offering in a way that wasn’t possible previously.

The results have been very good. Members of the public are visiting the blog and engaging regularly, and Avis’s measure of net approval has risen considerably, both in its own right and relative to its competitors. Even better, last week they won a prize for innovative use of digital channels in customer service from SOCAP. When you consider some of the statistics about the impact of online review and comment on travel booking decisions, this work must be falling through to Avis’s bottom line.

1000 Heads example of the Nokia N95 product launch showed another innovative approach to making the most of online discussion. They identified some of the key bloggers for mobile telephony in the UK and then approached them to invite them on an expenses-paid trip to New York for the worldwide launch. They were asked to write honestly about what they thought of the product, and lots of coverage and attention was generated as a result. There is an ethical question here. If Xavier was buying me dinner for writing this blog entry, you might be questioning whether I was being impartial in my praise of his efforts. The key thing, I suppose, is that they were asked to write honestly and they did cover their dislikes as well as likes about the product.

To sum up the best practice, the panellists as a group seemed to be saying:

1. Monitor what is being said
2. Analyse what is important about it
3. Plan responses and interventions
4. Test the interventions for their likely value and impact
5. Execute it openly, honestly and transparently
6. Measure whether it worked, and refine as necessary

All this has to be done quite fast, compared to its offline analogues, so it’s critical to have the right technology and people on the job.

My last question to the Market Sentinel guys was about Facebook, and the fact that it’s a largely closed community. Given the amount of discussion and interaction going on inside Facebook, the lack of tools to crawl and analyse that discussion must be a barrier to a reliable analysis.

My Agency.com colleagues who’ve been working on Ikea’s latest microsite are doing great work. It’s an interactive pop-up book, and it’s beautiful.

The same site includes a blog written by the manager of the soon-to-open Coventry store, who’s writing about all the preparations, as the opening date nears. The meatballs are being delivered next week, along with the Daim bars.

On the day that rumours spread about Microsoft taking a $500m stake in Facebook, Nielsen released their latest stats on social networking sites, and it seems I might be right about nothing lasting forever. According to this article at Media Guardian, although Facebook is the most popular social networking site today, it’s growth is slowing, and other sites, including Perfspot, are growing faster.

If I had equity at Facebook, I think I’d be selling it to Microsoft before they read the Nielsen report.

This morning I received yet another of the daily emails ad:tech have been sending me in the build-up to their exhibition and conference, which starts tomorrow. The subject line this time was “Newsletter 6 - see you tomorrow”. Newsletter 6!

I hope that whoever is looking after email at ad:tech is going to find the time to visit the session at 11:45  on Wednesday, titled “email best practice workshop”.  Daily emails about an up-coming conference just seem like they might not be best practice to me. I hope the show lives up to all their pre-marketing.

Based on this article, which says that 31% (of 100 people) lie when they register on websites, I thought I’d do some research of my own. Do you tell the truth when you register?