Debut in the US blogosphere September 26, 2009

Questions:

• Should your Client start a corporate blog?
• If so, who would be the best person/people to write the blog?
• What is one guest blogging opportunity that your Client could use to tell its story?

At an early stage of reaching the U.S. audience, blogging will be an important channel for TFT to introduce its mission in a more dynamic way than it does in the official website. The founder and director of the organization, Masa Kogure, has a blog in Japanese, and has authored a book on his personal history and the concept of TFT, which is a good seller and was well covered by the media in Japan. Given that he has many stories to tell and has been a philosophical driving force of the organization, he naturally is the best person to blog as a voice of TFT.

As for guest blogging, I would recommend Mr. Kogure write a guest post on a better-known and more influential blog, so that the post can help bring traffic over to the newly created TFT blog. Since we hope to reach people who are interested in eating healthy and/or concerned with the poverty issue, posting on the blogs with sustainability-conscious audience, such as Tree Hugger and Huffpost Green, would be a great opportunity. Also, as we establish partnership with the food industry in the U.S., I would suggest these partners to write a post about TFT on their blogs.

About my (hypothetical) client September 26, 2009

The client I chose to work in this class is Table For Two (TFT), a non-profit organization aiming to address two health- and food-related problems at the same time: hunger in the developing world and obesity in the developed world. TFT partners with restaurants, cafes, caterers, and food retailers in the developed countries to provide healthy meals, and for each meal sold, 20 cents is donated to fund nutritious school meals in the developing countries.

TFT was founded and started its operation in Japan, where 130 corporations, academic institutions, and government offices participate in the program, but it is currently expanding as an international initiative. It opened the U.S. charter in New York City in 2008, and is now in the process of seeking partnership with the companies and organizations as well as publicizing its activities to the general public in the U.S., where obesity is a serious problem.

I chose this client because TFT is still at an early stage in building a constituency base in the U.S. and has little experience in using social media. I believe social media can be an important and efficient tool to enter a new market, especially internationally. I have a friend who offers pro bono work to TFT in public relations, so I hope to propose her a practical plan the organization can actually implement to utilize social media and achieve its mission in the U.S.

Groundswell by Li and Bernoff September 20, 2009

At the time when Facebook has reached as many users as the U.S. population and Twitter is (said to be) valued at $1B, it is natural for the businesses to be feeling desperate and panicking, fearing they might be left out of this ever-growing world of social media, no matter how much, or how little, they are currently doing to catch up with it. Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies, with a lot of case studies and data, offers a prescription for those who “know they need to get involved, but [...] are nervous about moving forward” (p.66). Chill out, don’t be deluded by the new technologies, the authors say. They encourage to stay focused on the customers and objectives of the business, laying out “how” the new media can be utilized rather than “what” they are.

The authors call a trend of people talking, creating content, and sharing information online “the groundswell,” and warn that it is evolving and should affect every aspect of business in any industries. Threatening as it may sound, the groundswell, if tapped into properly, could be an opportunity.

As a starting point, the authors introduce what they call “the Social Technographics Profile.” It classifies the customer base based on the activities they do online, not just by demographics. People may be creating content by blogging, posting video, etc. (Creators), commenting on the content created by others (Critics), aggregating information (Collectors), participating in social networking sites (Joiners), consuming the content (Spectators), or not using any resources at all (Inactives) .

This classification helps the businesses learn what their customers do online, the first step of the planning process the authors propose called “POST”. Who the customers are (People) and what the company wants to achieve (Objectives) determines how to reach them (Strategy) by which applications (Technology). It is the business and its customers that choose technology, not vice versa, as the authors emphasize.

The authors identify five objectives to pursue in the groundswell.

1. Monitor the groundswell, listen to the customers beyond surveys and focus groups, and identify influencers among the customers.
2. Talk to the customers, instead of shouting to them through mass advertising, and reach them in the middle of the marketing funnel.
3. Energize the customer base by engaging passionate fans among them and create word of mouth.
4. Help the customers support each other.
5. Collaborate with the customers for innovation.

Implementing the groundswell strategy to achieve these goals requires a drastic transformation of the organization. To be successful, the transition should be natural and gradual from one step to the next, and support from executives who appreciate the value of the groundswell is important, the authors suggest.

Overall, the book provides a good summary of the basic philosophy of social media regardless of a variety of emerging technologies. It convincingly argues that the people and objectives, not the tools, are the first to consider, as they have been since before the age of the groundswell. Given that many company executives still fear that they do not know enough about social media, this point cannot be overstressed. Learning what people are doing online would help them understand that it’s still people who are behind all this using the new tools. And the five objectives reduce anxiety of not doing enough—buzz words like “crowdsourcing” sounds like a thing to do, but if your products and customers do not fit that kind of collaborative innovation, you don’t have to. While the authors are excited with this new environment created by the groundswell, they do give cool-headed and practical suggestions.

What I’d like to see more in detail, however, is how to make use of the Social Technographics in designing the groundswell strategy. Two of the categories, Collectors and Inactives, were not very clear to me. Collecting sounds like a different level of activity, overlapping with all the other categories. And I found it odd when they say collecting is less popular in Japan, as I know many people there use blogs and online bulletin boards to paste links for bookmarking and sharing. As for Inactives, if they are online but not even Spectators, what are they doing, then? What if the majority of my customers were Inactives? In fact, in the case study of the American Cancer Society (pp. 58-59), the authors say that the lower scores “don’t doom a community strategy” but do not explain why. These two categories seem to be still half-baked, since they are hardly mentioned in the rest of the book.