Yesterday, something happened on Mashable which illustrates one of the biggest threats to the social web, to business, and maybe even democracy.  I’m really interested to see what you have to say about this incident.  Let’s start with the lead paragraph from their post:

The Italian Windows website “Windowsette” somehow managed to get a hold of a super-secret, highly confidential PowerPoint presentation outlining many of Microsoft’s goals and plans for Windows 8. Apparently this sensitive data (complete with UNDER NDA watermarks) was just found sitting around the Internet.

If you haven’t been around the corporate world, NDA stands for “non-disclosure agreement.”  This means that whoever had these slides had signed a legal document to keep them secret.

The Windowsette site said it learned of this leak from “Andrea Martinelli.” I have no idea who that is but it seems unlikely she just found secret internal Microsoft documents “sitting around the Internet.”

So here are the questions I have for you:

• Mashable has become the journal of record for the social web. Maybe they’ve been trained as journalists, maybe they’re not.  Does that make a difference?
• Is it ethical for them to publish a “super-secret, highly confidential” internal document that could be extremely damaging to Microsoft?
• Is it responsible to report on a document whose source was a single associate of an obscure website in Italy?  How can we even know these slides are real? Isn’t it easy to create official-looking PowerPoint slides?
• The Mashable post was tweeted almost 1,000 times and included in about 500 Facebook sites.  For many people, this article has become “the news.” What are the implications when non-journalists create the news?

I’ll tip my hand here and say that my undergrad was in journalism and I believe this institution is essential to democracy.  What’s going on in most blogs today is not journalism.  Usually that’s OK.  But with the dramatic decline of the traditional press, whatever we have left on blogs is going to become our de facto news of record. Like Mashable.

In the end, this incident will have a shelf life of about one day and it’s easy to let a big company like Microsoft be our target. But what if this unsubstantiated piece of news was about your secret new product development?  Your company? Your congressman? A terrorist threat in your community?

What if it was about you?

A communication industry site, ragan.com, picked up my recent post about why it’s “ridiculous to argue about ghost blogging.”  This was cool because it opened the topic to a new set of commenters and perspectives.

However, I was struck by some of the elitist views on blogging and wanted to address the issue here, instead of a long comment on that site.

What I mean by “elitist” is that some folks seem to uphold a narrow, sanctified view of blogging and dismiss those outside that view (i.e. “Blogs are by definition in their own class.”)

One person opined that blogs should be different than any other form of corporate communication because they “grew from people’s personal communications and because the audience for blogs expect it to remain personal.”

Another reader commented that “Blogs are designed to be be participatory and conversational, with a discussion leader and participants in the discussion.”

And, “To use a blog as a personal communication when it’s not genuinely personal is an assault on the purpose of a blog and an intentional deception of readers.”

Excuse me friends, but who is coming up with this definition of a “purpose of a blog?”

There can be MANY purposes for blogs …

• For the highly-interactive, personal, and prolific Chris Brogan, the blog is an engine to build community and ultimately monetize services and affiliate advertising.
• GE’s stellar corporate blog features product ideas and solutions but has almost no reader interaction or community. They rarely even identify a post’s author.
• Caterpillar’s blogs serve as forums for technical problem-solving and have an extremely high level of community sharing.
• The Red Cross blog tells stories of heroes and global crises with authors from all over the world.
• There is a whole science around connecting blogs to keywords and SEO results. In that analytical world, blog content is derived from probabilities, statistics, and a sales funnel. Personality need not apply.
• For my daughter in college, a blog is simply a way to journal and tell her life stories — no strings attached.

All of these blogs are relevant and serve a unique purpose.  They may or may not be personal. They may or may not nurture community. They may or may not be participatory.

And they may or may not be authentic. Here’s what I mean.  This challenge was posed to me on the Ragan site:  “How would people feel if the marketing/PR/comms guru types whose blogs they follow weren’t written by those people. What if Seth Godin ’s blog wasn’t actually written by Seth Godin?  Would you be okay with that?”

Actually, I’m guessing Seth doesn’t write his blog all the time.  The fact that he keeps a busy travel schedule, writes every day, posts a short riff from a speech or book, and doesn’t allow comments (which would require a response) on his blog, indicates that it is probably ghost-written by an assistant, at least some of the time.  I don’t KNOW this. It’s a hunch.  But in any event, I am perfectly OK with that. It’s his advice. It’s his brand. It may even be him. Ghost or no, the blog provides value to me as a reader which is why I subscribe.

Bottom line, I believe it’s anachronistic and short-sighted to try to force blogging into somebody’s pre-conceived bucket of expectations.  Instead of trying to define and dictate what our blogs and communities should be, let’s celebrate the amazing diversity of writing, readers and missions on the social web.

Illustration: Comedy Central

The recession has culled the weak from the pack but it’s likely that your competition is still fierce.  Is there a way to attract and retain B2B customers without lowering your price? And is there a way to leverage the social web to keep your customers … even in the extreme case of a commodity market?

Holding onto customers in a buyer’s market is one of the most extraordinary challenges in business, especially if you’re selling a commodity (Commodity = purchasers view suppliers as identical on all factors but price, i.e. common coal, steel, or chemicals).

There is usually only one winner in a commodity market — the lowest cost supplier — except in periods of high demand when supply falls short.  But there are ways to lock-in customers even in ugly downturns.  One strategy I used throughout my career was to create a systematic plan to raise switching costs. By this I mean create obstacles — through valuable benefits — to prevent a customer from leaving you for the competition.

A process to retain customers

This process starts with getting out to your most valued customers and listening. And I mean REALLY listening. We would sometimes have half-day sessions to explore un-met and under-served customer needs that would …

• Improve their competitive position
• Enhance profitability or productivity
• Eliminate waste
• Lower risk
• Increase speed to market

One strategy that uncovered potential points of differentiation was to ask customers what they hated about their job. This always seemed to get people to open up about an idea we could implement to make their life easier!   Some other potential approaches to this challenge:

• Solve a customer problem (reporting, data-gathering, analysis/testing) that might add slightly to your cost, but establishes enough value to create a hurdle to switching
• Create a specialized service that would be difficult for competitors to match (we did a specialized truck-return recycling program, for example)
• Work actively with customers to influence specifications and terms that could advantage my company or disadvantage a competitor
• Focus retention efforts on most profitable customer locations
• Look at eCommerce integration options to enhance retention

Notice that all of these ideas go beyond the basics of price, quality and service. Those aren’t strategic initiatives. Those are competitive tablestakes these days.

When customers don’t play nice

This process of listening, reacting and renewal must be continual and integrated through an effective CRM system. But it doesn’t always work.

In the middle of all this great creative marketing work I just suggested is another dynamic. Purchasing may not want you to implement your ideas – even if there is an advantage – because it reduces their flexibility with suppliers.  They may even force you to hand over your innovations to competitors. I witnessed this in the automotive market in the 1990s.  This ended up hurting customers because when there is no reward for innovation, innovation ends.

Now what about the social web?

Is it possible to develop some distinct value through social media that could create a switching cost? My answer – probably not. The social web might be a tool to listen and tune-in to possible innovations and market needs but I don’t see how social networks can create sustainable switching costs in this part of the sales cycle. It’s free to everyone and easily duplicated by competitors.

However, I do think you can create PRIVATE information networks and communities that create distinct value. For example, one idea that worked really well was a private, unique market information hub for customers who remained in our top tier in revenue.

What are you doing to hold onto your best customers in tough economic conditions?  Can you think of any way to leverage the social web for DISTINCT value in a commodity market?

It seems like “ghost blogging” — the practice of penning posts for others –  is always under attack.

Jon Buscall wrote a fine piece about it recently as did Mitch Joel.

Philosophically I agree with them.  In a pure and perfect world executives should write their own copy.

But practically speaking I don’t agree.

Here’s why.

• It’s not a pure and perfect world. Ghost writing is going to happen and it always has.  Wishing and pontificating will not make it different.  So why not at least do it well?
• Most executives don’t have the time or ability to blog consistently and effectively. So if they don’t get help, it just won’t happen. Isn’t it a good idea to help bring their ideas to life?
• Personal connection and “community” is probably less important to somebody at the “rockstar” level of chairman.  I know this will get hollers from the crowd that community is “everybody’s business” — and to some extent that is true, but again, I’m being practical. Most CEO’s are not being compensated to build community through a blog.
• The chairman does not pen his own speech, yet nobody questions that they own it. They don’t write the shareholder’s letter in the annual report, yet this is deemed as authentic. Do you think Former GE Chairman Jack Welch sat there and pecked out his own book? And yet it is seen as his.

So why do so many people seem to want to put blogs in a different class of writing?  In the world of corporate communications it could be argued that blogs are even less important and critical than a major speech or a document being submitted to the SEC.   Why are people on a quixotic mission to fight against reality?

Here’s a better solution. Establish guidelines to have an effective ghost blog in an effective and ethical way.  A few months ago there was a debate on this topic on {grow} that resulted in some guidelines for ghost blogging:

• The host executive should provide general ideas for a ghosted blog post and a few bullet points expressing key thoughts for the writer to work from. Obviously the writer needs to spend as much time as possible with the host to get a feel for their language and opinions.
• The executive should approve every blog post before publishing under their name.
• Content aimed at a personalized connection – such as responses in a blog comment section – ideally should be authored by the executive, not the ghost writer.
• Be sure there is an approval process in place that can handle the need for flexibility, responsiveness and the opportunistic tendencies of the social web.
• Guidelines of the corporate blog process and a list of blog contributors could be contained in an “about” section.

Do these make sense?

With many companies now engaged in social media marketing strategies for nearly two years or more, success stories are starting to emerge, even in the difficult marketing world of industrial B2B.  I discovered a great success story to share with you through a masters thesis being developed by Haakon Jenson of Norway.

The case exemplifies an integrated approach to CRM, customer research, SEO, web design, content development, and social media marketing that I think you’ll enjoy!

BACKGROUND

ShipServ is a leading e-marketplace in the maritime industry providing a portfolio of software, services and hosted applications designed to enable efficient global shipping.   Their core product TradeNet, an e-commerce platform connecting industry buyers and suppliers. Currently ShipServ serves 150 shipping companies managing 5,000 ships and approximately 30,000 suppliers. In 2008 the company turned to the social web to help them through several marketing challenges:

• Image of being an impersonal software company.
• Limited marketing budget and employee resources
• Increase awareness of using eCommerce as a shipping solution — a big change for traditional customers
• Customer base not early technology adopters. A survey showed 65% regarded the social web as a “distracting waste of time”

OBJECTIVES OF THE MARKETING PROGRAM

• Drive 50% more traffic to website in three months
• Raise awareness of brand throughout global shipping industry
• Attract new sales leads through relevant content
• Change focus from “shouting” at customers to “listening, engaging and inspiring”

STRATEGY

The company began with research to find out where customers were receiving their information, their participation in the social web, information needs and the current “state of the conversation” for the ShipServ brand. Key discoveries included that there were very few online communities for their industry and that the mention of their brand was rare. Despite the fact that their historical customer base largely did not use the social web, they saw an opportunity to seize the lead and become a thought leader in their marketplace.

ShipServ partnered with an outside marketing firm and their CRM vendor to create an integrated social media plan that focused on leading the creation of an online community, developing outstanding content and using social media channels to drive new sales leads through their website.

ACTIONS

> Conducted research to determine customer information needs and keyword themes.

> Revamped website to be more customer and content driven — New design was more easy-going and personal. Developed custom landing pages for groups of keywords used to find the company and specific calls to action based on individual customer needs.

> Created a blog that frequently featured their customers. They also used the blog as a way to establish conversations in the industry.

> Established “scorecard” through their CRM system to track lead nurturing progress. All reactions and visitor behavior was examined for possible sales leads.

> Developed quarterly content plan based on themes established from research. Content was leveraged and re-purposed in various ways across all the social media sites.

> Promoted original content through variety of social media channels, which were used as “beacons” to drive traffic back to the main website. These channels included:blog, e-newsletter, Twitter, light-hearted videos, podcasts, Facebook and LinkedIn.

> A series of valuable white papers (like 10 Essentials of Online Marketing in the Shipping Industry) were created and promoted through the social channels, website and newsletter, resulting in 1,000 downloads in seven months.

> Established online industry community by creating a group on LinkedIn. The company introduced this forum to both shipping company suppliers and procurement professionals and had 863 members as of last week.  Content for the community was developed based on the initial research of user needs and included research, surveys, and of course content re-purposed from other sources.

> Search engine optimization campaign, including keyword content planning.

RESULTS

Website

• Website visitors increased by 59 %
• Pageviews increased by 70 %
• Average time on site increased by 25 %
• Generated over 1,000 downloads of a white paper

Community

• 378 members in the ShipServ Maritime Network group on LinkedIn
• 300 visitors to the blog
• Over 600 views of the company videos
• LinkedIn and Twitter have gone from zero to the top 20 traffic sources

Business statistics

• Increased contact-to-lead (landing page contact) conversion by 150%
• Increased lead-to-opportunity conversion by 50%
• Decreased campaign management costs by 80%
• Increased the number of sales-ready leads by 400%
• Measurable increase in brand awareness

Break-even on the $30,000 social marketing media investment was achieved in three months. The company estimated the results they achieved would have cost $150,000 through traditional media.

What are your thoughts on ShipServ’s project?

This is post #300 on {grow} so I thought this would be a good opportunity to pause and just say THANKS!

If you ever want a case study for somebody who has fell in love with his blog community, it would be me. The true friendships, new connections and opportunities that have come through {grow} have been one of the highlights of my career. You take me to school every day.  And if we haven’t connected personally yet, I would love to hear from you by phone, email or maybe even a live visit some time.

We’ve come a long way. Monthly page views have already doubled in 2010 and as you may know, {grow} was nominated for blog of the year in an industry competition.   For me, the true highlight was that we were nominated by a man I admire so much and one of our great community members, Danny Brown (who won the award last year).   In addition to Danny, the other award nominees are Jason Falls, Todd Defren and Gini Dietrich. Are you kidding me? They are all TREMENDOUS!  So if you would like to vote for {grow} or one of these folks, you can do it HERE.

By the way, a sort of extemporaneous “get out the vote” for {grow} campaign broke out on Twitter today.   Thanks for this sentiment and your passionate enthusiasm!   Compared to some of the other communities, we’re still small but hey, we’re mighty!

Thank you for spending your time here so faithfully and for letting me be your “chief conversation starter.”  I never take you for granted and can’t wait to pump up the jams with you on the next 300 posts!

Part ONE.  The curtain rises.

There was a brouhaha on the Twitterstream recently when Spike Jones, a blogger and SVP at Fleishmann-Hilliard, challenged some people by name to delete their huge Twitter accounts and start over.  The original (excellent) article sparking the discussion by Leah Jones can be found HERE and a follow-up post by Spike, HERE.  The idea of eliminating followers created a  … stir.

Part TWO.  What’s the fuss?

I presented this drama because … well, I couldn’t resist it.  Antagonist, protagonist, love, hate, a leading lady, conflict and resolution in 10 tweets? Give me a break. Who doesn’t enjoy a good drama? Plus I found it refreshing that a few folks on Twitter actually showed up as real people.

So besides the question of honor and bileful little men, what raised this ruckus?

The idea that “numbers don’t matter” is one of the most emotional subjects I’ve witnessed on the social web.  It’s our precious little secret: Most people pretend they don’t care, but they do.  Here is the yin and yang of the social media “numbers.”

YIN

The number of friends or followers might be a reasonable indication of a person’s presence on the social web.

… YANG

But for Pete’s sakes, treat EVERYBODY with respect.  All too often I see people forgetting that there is a real person behind that little icon.

YIN

Larger numbers of followers can enhance reputation. I recently saw Chris Brogan present and he admitted honestly that he has 180,000 followers “but half of them are spammers and porn stars.” In some (rare) cases, quality of followers really doesn’t matter. It’s a badge.

… YANG

Quality of followers should matter in most cases. Why would you knowingly surround yourself with porn stars …. unless you’re a porn star? I want to surround myself with relevant, interesting people.  My audience is a public record of who I am.

YIN

In many cases, large number of followers can deliver higher numbers of potential connections, business benefits and information.

… YANG

Even with wonderful utilities like Tweetdeck, it’s a stretch to have a meaningful connection with more than a couple hundred people.

Part THREE. A simple truth about followers.

So, there are arguments both ways.  But let me give you another perspective.

When I became active on Twitter, a young lady followed me with a provocative profile picture. This was at a time when porn folks were absolutely over-running Twitter and I was blocking them as fast as I could. The next day this same young lady wrote to tell me she was a university student in the U.K. and was following me to learn from me. She was disappointed that I had proven to be so elitist by blocking her and not including her in my audience.

Obviously I corrected the situation and apologized, but here’s the lesson I learned — I need to consider it an HONOR to have interested followers.

I realized that Twitter is not necessarily about me, what I gain out of it, and what’s convenient to meet my needs.   Every person on the other end of the tweet has their own reason to connect to me too. Eliminating them wholesale as Leah and Spike suggests seems disrespectful to good people who followed me in good faith.

I realize this is a very personal point of view and may not fit for you, but what are your thoughts about cleaning house on your followers?

I’d like to share with you a paragraph from the New York Times on last week’s public exposure of 114,000 email addresses through an iPad security breach at AT&T:

AT&T Inc., reaching out to iPad users Sunday to explain why their email addresses were released last week, blamed the incident on “computer hackers” who “maliciously exploited” an attempt by the carrier to speed the process of logging in to its website.

The comments were the harshest yet by the carrier, which apologized for the security lapse and said it would cooperate with any efforts to investigate or prosecute the breach.

“AT&T takes your privacy seriously and does not tolerate unauthorized access to its customers’ information or company websites,” the company said.

The article goes on to say that to make matters worse, the breach was discovered by an outside company who claimed that without their disclosure, AT&T “would have never fixed it.”

Is anybody else outraged by this ridiculous statement by AT&T?  Damn it guys — How seriously do you actually take our privacy when the freaking service just went on sale two months ago and it was already hacked?  Do you think you’ve tested this sufficiently to prevent such an obvious problem? Apparently the breach was so easy it should have been quickly detected by your own internal analysts.

Can you believe those nasty ol’ “malicious” hackers would do such a thing to you? Poor babies!  What were you expecting dudes?  Benevolent hackers?  Mother Theresa hackers?  Care Bear hackers? This was your OWN FAULT!

When you observe the recent massive fails at Google, Facebook, and now AT&T, is there any question that it is just a matter of “when,” not “if” that this whole creaky system goes down in the biggest Internet privacy calamity yet?

It’s hard not to draw a comparison to the Internet fails and the disastrous oil spill.  Coming from a manufacturing background, I’m absolutely blown away that BP didn’t monitor and maintain a mission-critical process like the safety procedures on an ocean oil rig.  It’s criminal. If some hackers rubes can get around a few controls to access personal information from my iPad without much trouble, what’s brewing with the real cyber-terrorists out there?

Where are the standard testing procedures? Why aren’t these companies hiring their own hackers to discover flaws? Why is a company with the resources of AT&T taking shortcuts with our privacy?  When will it be time for national regulations and accountability on Internet security? Why wouldn’t AT&T and the others be investigated and fined for privacy breaches?

Sorry to be such a downer today folks and I know I’m opening up Pandora’s box on this issue but when I think about how our way of life on the Internet could be jeopardized by the way these large corporations are managing critical processes I can’t help but be alarmed.

I recently spent a nice evening at a friend’s house as he showed me his favorite YouTube videos (including the Nike soccer video) on a giant high-definition TV.  The videos were being fed into the TV wirelessly through his iPhone. It was a lot of fun until we came to the older, grainy videos which were almost un-watchable on the large-screen format. I started thinking about how much YouTube has changed and the implications for marketing. I’m just weird that way. : )

Our beloved YouTube turned five years old last week and now hosts an incredible 2 billion page views per day (third largest website) and 24 hours of new content is uploaded every minute. It’s hard to ignore, isn’t it?

Some new things to consider:

High def, high expectations –  The little episode at my friend’s house illustrates four important trends:

• The big brands are dominating the channel with blockbuster info-mercials. The bar for quality is being raised for all of us.
• YouTube is becoming mainstream entertainment. Watching on large-format screens is becoming typical, again pointing to a need for quality.
• Videos can now be pretty much accessed anywhere, any time with the advent of smart phones.
• YouTube’s new “high-definition” option is helping to enable the quality revolution.

One of the charming characteristics of the original YouTube was that it actually lowered peoples expectations for quality.  The most popular, funniest videos were usually grainy home-made clips of the “Star Wars Boy” or “Keyboard Cat.” Unfortunately those days are coming to an end.

Small screen is king. The most popular iPhone app is You Tube.  And this presents quite a dilemma. How do you produce a video that will show up well on a large screen … and also a mobile phone (which can effectively present little more than a talking head)? This is a vital consideration, especially if your target market is most likely to be mobile.

Audio quality is also a bigger deal than it used to be, driven by the needs on the high end and the low end. That built-in camera mic might not cut-it any more!

Pay-per-click advertising and promoted videos can now be be part of the search results within YouTube. The promoted videos include a thumbnail of video and drives you to a video, not a website. Participating in the paid videos also allows you to enable text overlays on the video which can be a call-to-action or a simple web address.

Video annotations — Another trend is gimmicks like word balloons on videos. This might be a good promotional tool and an effective way to add depth to your video but it might have limited effectiveness on mobile phones.

What’s not new … but still relevant:

• Blatant advertising doesn’t work.
• If a video is truly interesting and useful, it will be watched. Educate, inform, entertain.
• YouTube is still a high-potential, low-cost marketing opportunity
• Be sure to optimize your video descriptions for keyword search.
• Don’t overlook using YouTube as a way to connect and build community.  Explore the option of providing video comments.  Tagging comments on to more popular videos could drive traffic to your channel.
• While there seems to be an emotional backlash against Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, YouTube doesn’t seem to have the political and privacy baggage of the other guys. YouTube is the teddy bear of the social web.

Cutting through this deluge of content is challenging, especially for a small business. Everybody’s on YouTube now, so you just can’t  just be there. You have to be there and be great.

What are your observations on the new realities of marketing through YouTube? What did I miss?

Seems like everybody wants to produce content that goes viral.  Speaking from experience, you should be careful about what you wish for!

Last week I followed with tradition and posted something light and entertaining on a Friday. In fact I thought it was funny — skewering Guy Kawasaki for his voluminous and sometimes bizarre tweets.

To my surprise and delight, Guy actually found the post and had a great sense of humor about it.  And it must have created some traction for him — his team tweeted it out five times over 24 hours. This is a fellow with nearly 300,000 followers.

The post didn’t set a record for an individual day on my blog, but over three days, it was pretty huge — about 5X the normal rate of page views for a weekend. By some definitions, I guess you could say it went viral.

And then the problems started.

When you go viral, you reach a lot of new people outside the comfortable “normal” audience you’ve built over time.  In fact about 95% of the readers last weekend had never been to the blog before.  This was also a new population who didn’t realize I was trying to be funny. People who don’t even know what funny IS.  So I started getting nasty-grams from folks who thought I was being profane: “Who are you to call somebody a devil? You need to look in the mirror, pick up a Bible and ask this man for forgiveness.”  How do you respond to that?

Next came the imposter. Somebody logged into the comment section with a Guy Kawasaki email address and hijacked the blog. Then the “real” Guy showed up to defend himself … or was it a representative? … or another imposter? … and for awhile I didn’t know which end was up. It took me about an hour to sort through the mess, delete the imposter’s comments, and “stand watch” over new comments coming in.  Up until that day I had only deleted one comment in the history of the blog.

Since I made the choice to not have ads on this site, I don’t receive any financial benefit from thousands of new readers coming to the blog.  What about new RSS subscriptions? As best as I can tell, it was about ZERO.  They were all blog tourists I suppose.

I’m really grateful that Guy took my post in good humor and liked it enough to tweet it out.  From the imposter incident, I have a new appreciation that being a celebrity comes with a target on your back. In the end, I’ll settle for my good ol’ {grow} homeys any day!

I really appreciate the consistent friendship and support from the {grow} community, whether I suck or whether I knock it out of the park.  I don’t need viral. I just need you. Thanks!