Last week I invited two of the smartest people I know - Robert Scoble of Microsoft and Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords - to meet with CooperKatz agency staff, clients and select members of the press. During the two-hour seminar, called "Meet the Bloggers," the technology evangelists shared their insights on how Weblogs, RSS and wikis are reshaping marketing and PR.
I kicked off the session by talking about how a new media ecosystem is emerging. You can view my PowerPoint here (5MB file). In short, I said marketers and PR pros need to "grok" these changes by:
1) Learning how news spreads online
2) Using the tools for monitoring blogs (such as FeedDemon and Feedster)
3) Identifying the most influential and vocal bloggers among our target audiences
4) Studying the different techniques for reaching these influencers
5) Becoming part of the conversation by launching company blogs championed by real people
Next up, Buzz discussed in detail how he effective he is in promoting his product, a utility that automates the Windows operating system, all within a $100/month budget.
Buzz said he focuses on harnessing every productivity tool available to him to court bloggers to try ActiveWords, blog about it and hopefully influence others. Using Feedster, for example, he closely monitors RSS feeds for phrases like "user interface," "Buzz Bruggeman," "innovative," "ActiveWords" and more. "I know 10 minutes after you've written something about that topic. And I'm on it quickly and thoughtfully," said Bruggeman. (For more on Buzz's amazing salesmanship skills, check out this recent post on Scoble's blog.)
The ActiveWords EVP and co-founder also talked about how blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget are disintermediating larger, established news outlets. "I used to read Wired magazine because they wrote about neat stuff…tools that work. All of a sudden now - literally in real time - we have Gizmodo, a blog on gadgets. I don't know what the Popular Science and Popular Mechanics guys are going to do," he said. "The people you’re going to want to pitch your products to are the people who are going to be hanging out at this watering hole. This is where all of the camels are putting their noses in the water."
Finally, the lawyer turned entrepreneur urged PR people to engage webloggers, because they're not going away. "These changes force you to play your 'A game.' If you're not, somebody else will," he said. "Your job, as I see it, is to suggest to (clients) that if they are going to be market leaders in their space they need to be engaged (in the blogosphere). If they choose to ignore this phenomenon and these customers, conversations and ideas, they'll go the way the buggy whip."
Next up, longtime blogger Robert Scoble reminisced about how marketing has changed since the 1980s when he ran a camera store. Back then 80% of Scoble's sales came directly from word of mouth, he said. However, at that time he unable to actually participate in any of these water cooler conversations.
"Today I can be there while those word of mouth conversations are going on. And the conversations are far vastly more efficient. They take place now in matters of minutes, when it use to take years to react," the Scobleizer said.
Scoble also spoke in detail about how Microsoft uses Channel9, the brainchild of Jeff Sandquist, to engage customers. He demoed the site for the group and showed how virtually every thread, profile and section on the site, including customer profiles, have their own RSS feeds. Scoble said that he hopes more companies will start similar "relationship portals" and engage in a permanent dialog with their customer evangelists. (He also recommended visiting the superb Church of the Customer blog, which covers this topic in detail.)
"We get to see what the customers want to show us," the Geek Blogger said. "(Gawker Media's new) Nike weblog missed this. They did a pretty good job of doing a one-way flow of information and having a good design and good writers. But there's no customer involvement at all. It really is stale when you compare it to a site like Channel9 where there's customer involvement in the ability to have their own presence and identity."
He also offered some terrific advice to CEOs who want to blog. He said they need to have voice, be frequent and be engaged. He even offered some words of wisdom for his boss, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who currently does not blog.
"Bill Gates' challenge is to write in a human way given his schedule that doesn't look like a press release," Scoble said. "Linking out to other bloggers is one way. Show that you're part of the community. Be a human voice. (HDnet CEO) Mark Cuban does this often. If you read Mark Cuban's blog you're going to see a human voice come through that that's not designed in a group session."
Scoble also said that although blogging is a big commitment for busy executives, it's well worth the effort.
"Whenever I ask execs why they don't have a blog they always say to me, 'well, I don't have enough time.' But they'll talk to a user group with a 100 people! I have 4,000 people reading me a day. You can't take an hour out of your day to write a blog? I'll even give you a guest blog on my blog. You can have an audience of 4,000 people with doing one hour's worth of work. Is that worth it? It's not just thousands of people. It's journalists, analysts, CEOs."
Finally, Scoble outlined the five key reasons why blogging is important:
1) They’re easy to publish
2) They're discoverable.
3) They're social
4) Every post has perma-linking
5) RSS syndication
Robert, Buzz, thanks so much for sharing your wisdom with us! We're forever in your debt.
UPDATE: Robert notes that Channel9 was the brainchild of Lenn Pryor. Jeff Sandquist came up with the idea to put customers out front. Apologies to all.
