Madison Who’s Who Blog

Corporations have sound reasons to fear Web 2.0. The consumers voice pitches to a cyber roar when a PR misstep exposes a company’s dishonesty. Transparency and authenticity are the crowns you must wear if you are going to expose your brand on the internet. Yet, slowly but surely companies like Marriott and P&G and Ford are recognizing the necessity of having a strong online presence and stepping up to the plate. Some hit home runs and some incite that referred to roar when they keep striking out.
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According to recent networking news items, Johnson & Johnson has now entered into online global networking with their JNJ BTW blog.

“A little over a month ago J&J started a new corporate blog, written by Marc Monseau, whom Brandweek readers will recognize as one of J&J’s pr execs. It’s been given the snappy title of JNJ BTW.

This effort came shortly after J&J hosted a dinner for bloggers to pick their brains about how the blogosphere works and how J&J should deal with it.

As I reported here, one idea was to give all 120,000 J&J staffer their own blogs on which they could berate and praise their employer as they saw fit.

Instead, unsurprisingly, J&J has given only Monseau a blog. (119,999 blogs to go then!)

So, is it any good?

Short answer: John Mack, Peter Rost, Ed Silverman, Jack Friday, and the folks at Internet Drug News won’t need to worry about losing their jobs any time soon.

Long answer: Monseau’s blog is turning out to be a revealing look at those topics that J&J refuses to reveal.”
(Source)

Network strategies in rolling out your brand on the net best have contingencies for dealing with the inevitable backlash sparked from content that doesn’t meet the online standards for integrity. If a corporate blog consists of rehashed press releases and posts discussing what can’t be said, the best strategy might be to take it down.

Since so many members of Madison Who’s Who are in real estate, the piece excerpted below might be of interest. It appears that a Realtor’s newsletter irritated one homeowner who feels that the manner in which the sales data for her neighborhood was evaluated implied a total lack of respect for the homeowners.

The Realtor states that in summarizing market trends in the neighborhood that she omitted the sales made by FSBOs, stating that “they often do not represent the full value of what they could sell for when properly priced and exposed to a greater number of qualified buyers through a professional real estate agent.”

“…in the case of the flyer I received, real estate agents are careful to exercise every advantage of the information asymmetry they enjoy. Using language to frame the context and position yourself at an advantage is not new. What is new is that more and more consumers are trained to see through it.

Is the list in the property update I received a fair representation of reality? It might be. Since it excludes one piece of information that could weigh in the statistical data, I now question the information.

And there is one other message this flyer sends: I don’t respect you enough to be transparent with you. The other “R” in reputation is respect.”
(Source)

Realtors stand to profit immensely by using all of the tools that Web 2.0 affords them. Business referrals and WOM can grow exponentially if the nature of online marketing is understood.

When marketing experts contend that transparency on the internet is necessary in order to attract customers, they aren’t giving lip service to a passing fad. When information is so readily available for the consumer, transparency and authenticity have become the “natural law” of internet commerce.

Effective global marketing is increasingly involving the use of blogs. Many corporations are hesitant to join in, concerned about allowing consumers to freely comment on their product or service. If transparency is a concern, blogging may not be the best marketing tool to employ. As with all of th new technology, there are pros and cons.

“When a company opens a blog, it opens its corporate front door to anyone who wants to enter. Sometimes, these people don’t like you. Some of them are cyber-whiners, those odd little folk who just want a forum to blow off steam and spread their message, regardless of whether or not it belongs on your blog. Sometimes, they really don’t like what your company does or stands for.

So I advise clients to sit back and think, really think about why they should blog. And I strongly urge them not to make the biggest blog mistake of all: leaving their blog unattended. A watched blog can be a successful way of communicating and even selling to your audience. An unmonitored blog can become either a waste of your message or an open invitation to trouble. Did you know that the vast majority of blogs are abandoned within 30 days of their inception?”
(Source)

Which brings up another obstacle for some companies wishing to blog. If you do not have a person on staff who is a good writer and willing to commit the time to create good engaging content, then you will have to factor in the cost of out sourcing the content of your blog.