When Bob Lutz of GM or Jonathan Schwartz of Sun set up their blogs, they probably didn’t worry too much about the review with Legal. After all, they “outrank” the senior legal counsel.

But how does, say, a mid-level corporate marketer or product manager set out to create an “official” blog with the blessing and sanction of Legal? It turns out, despite the prevalence of corporate blogging today, that there is still a fair amount of trepidation over the legal review process.

Bloggers need to recognize that “sanctioned corporate” blogging is different from publishing a brochure or issuing a press release. Those documents go through a review process before being set in stone, and sometimes do undergo legal review. Blogs should never go though a “sanitization” step (or they aren’t really blogs and you shouldn’t bother doing them) and a successful blog will usually include largely unmoderated or semi-moderated comments from the public. 

We recently worked with Pete Steege to set up Seagate’s first official corporate blog at storageeffect.com. Pete’s blog is a terrific example of corporate blogging done well, and he fairly sailed through the Legal review process. You can too!

Here are some steps to allay your own fears of Inquisition 2.0 and help your Legal team through their own fear and loathing of Enterprise 2.0 social networking:

1. It’s NOT easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.
   Legal is too often perceived as a roadblock and left out of the process until they discover it post-launch, and then they are obliged to sail down from on high with the wrath of an avenging angel. Understand that Legal’s job is to mitigate risk, not to stand in the way of progress or profit. They know that, and all they usually want is a well-articulated business reason for your blog, and a chance to offer advice on the safest way to conduct it.
2. Don’t gird for battle—just be prepared
   Don’t take an adversarial stance—you will lose. Just make sure you are armed with the business justification. Make sure you can articulate the purpose, topics, and tone of the blog. If you don’t know these, you aren’t ready to blog. Every corporate blog should have a business purpose and a “marketing plan.” That doesn’t mean it needs to be overly “corporate” (or else who would read it?). A corporate blog is the least formal means of corporate communication, and it’s intended to be very human–it should reflect who you are. While the best blogs are “edgy” and compelling, just check in to make sure you’re no more edgy than your company can tolerate.
3. Bring along the boss
   Set up a legal review and bring along your boss (actually, the highest corporate champion of the blog you can collar). Treat Legal as problem-solvers and advisors, not as adversaries. As knowledge workers, chances are they read blogs themselves and they’ve actually been waiting for someone to show up at their doorstep with this very issue.
4. As T.S. Eliot said, “No verse is libre”
   Make it clear that you understand what can and cannot be said in a blog, and if you don’t know this, ask your legal folks for advice. Public companies have very strict SEC guidelines about what can be articulated by a company spokesperson. Private companies can also get into trouble for what their employees publish through a corporate medium. Always protect your employer’s interests! Legal is much more likely to get past the blogging medium if they know you are someone responsible they can trust.

This advice, of course, assumes that your Legal folks are reasonable and knowledgeable and somewhat attuned to the issues of corporate blogging. I work in Silicon Valley and Research Triangle, where the attorneys are pretty savvy in this regard. To be honest, I’d love to hear some juicy or entertaining stories from those of you who have tangled with ignorant, fascist JDs!

Not long ago I spoke at Online Market World about, among other things, social networking in the B2B space. About a week before the event I listened to Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) speak on the MacNeal-Lehrer Hour about the ills of social networking:

“The key argument is that the so-called ‘democratization’ of the Internet is actually undermining reliable information… with user-generated content, we’re actually doing away with information, high-quality information, … and replacing it with user-generated content, which is unreliable, inane, and often rather corrupt.”

In counterpoint is a blog on Enterprise 2.0 from Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee who ended his post with:

“Why are online communities so often so frightening? And when, if ever, are the fears warranted? I have so far seen virtually no evidence, and heard no stories, that corporate digital communities of practice blow up in the faces of those who host them.”

Interesting counterpoints, aren’t they? And of course they’re both right, in a  way.

While McAfee writes about Enterprise 2.0 business communities, Keen is speaking about the Internet in general, and his points are often well taken. Those issues can creep into the business space in unmoderated forums. The issue is, how do you implement corporate social marketing strategies correctly? Here are some tips:

• Don’t just create communities for their own sake. Create a social marketing strategy. Think about how communities will achieve your key business goals. (But to be fair, if you lack Web 2.0 justification today, remember this: 10 years ago people were saying “I don’t know why, but I think we need a web site” — and they were right!)
• Think about how you will both nurture and monitor your Web 2.0 initiatives for quality and accuracy. Don’t expect your community to do your marketing and support work for you.
• Actually use the interactive and collaborative features of blogs and wikis; don’t just use them as simple CMS systems for static content. This especially holds true for interactive online presentations: just making a podcast of a speech isn’t enough.  Break it down into easily consumable segments, and use interactive tools like those built into Webex Event Manager to make it interactive and participatory.
• Consider who will do the work: IT departments aren’t typically tasked with letting barbarians through the gates, and likewise marketing folks are trained to control the messages. One common strategy is to outsource your social marketing forums to collaboration vendors skilled in user experience design, application hosting, and moderating. (Hey, Crimson can do that for you!)
• Develop a set of metrics by which to measure success, and revisit your strategy quarterly, because flexibility is important.

This falls into the category of “topics I should have blogged about weeks ago”…  This past October I was interviewed on the topic of “Web Design From a Usability Perspective” by RSS Ray, whose syndicated show “Online Marketing with RSS Ray” airs on wsRadio.com.

If you’re into online marketing, Ray’s show airs Wednesdays at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific time. But like all wsRadio.com shows (and this is the great thing about Internet radio), it’s available any time thereafter via downloadable podcast. So this blog post isn’t late after all!

Apparently I’m one of the few people who has had the pleasure of meeting RSS Ray in person—our show went out live from the floor of Online Market World in San Francisco. He’s a terrific guy and a real pro. Our media and PR agent arranged the show while I was on a plane, and we literally had 15 minutes to prepare—no rehearsal and no notes. And yet “Ray” (not his real name; he’s actually noted online marketer Brian Offenberger) was relaxed and personable and really put me at my ease. 

I want to encourage you to check out wsRadio.com if you haven’t already.  And Ray’s own web site offers a complete archive with podcast feeds and subscription to his online newsletter. There’s really terrific stuff there: wsRadio hails it as “the World’s Largest Directory of business blogging, podcasting, RSS and videocasting tools and resources.”  

From Ray’s site: Online Marketing with RSS Ray is a one hour weekly radio program broadcast on wsRadio.com, the internet’s talk radio leader with over 1.4 million monthly listeners. Each show brings online marketing experts to Ray’s audience for sales growth, profit improvement and increased customer loyalty.

The primary difference between Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer eCommerce is that B2C companies tend to view their customers as contacts, whereas B2B companies tend to manage their businesses as accounts. In effective B2B, accounts are essentially larger relationship units, where a back-end CRM system manages multiple contacts, contracts, projects, support cases, purchase history, special pricing, and all the sales and account intelligence that can be stored for effective account management.

There is a significant effort required to treat online customers as accounts rather than as contacts. Contact management is relatively straightforward, but account management requires a committed investment from both parties; the customer needs to trust the seller enough to register in the seller’s systems, and the seller needs to store much more than transactional information about a sale. But B2B companies reap significant rewards through account management: higher conversion, increased impulse buying, increased customer loyalty, and reduced support costs (especially through self-service online solutions).

Extremely successful B2C companies like eBay, NetFlix, and Amazon have implemented account-centric systems for the consumer, because the relationship is critical to their success: each consumer must become a repeat customer. But in order to increase consumer loyalty, B2C companies have also turned to social networking and communities to cement the bond.

Seeing the success that social networking has had in B2C eCommerce, B2B companies are now looking at social networking even in the enterprise, where command-and-control is giving way to participation and collaboration. Today, B2C companies are sponsoring online communities and opening up their doors (their blogs) to customers, resulting in open communications based on transparency and trust.

This movement has long been heralded by John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems:

“While first-generation Internet developments were driven by enterprises down into the consumer market, the reverse is now true, with consumer technologies such as social networking driving fundamental changes into the business market, Chambers said in an interview with CRN TV.” –“Chambers Advises Partners To Embrace Web 2.0” ChannelWeb Network, April 7 2007)

Crimson is seeing a rise in enterprise community systems among its clients. Hosting a venue for your community—often outsourced to collaboration vendors skilled in moderating and monitoring—comes with all the usual disclaimers and demonstrates, among other virtues, that the B2B enterprise is willing to be more open with its partners and customers.

As the voices of customers and partners begin to be heard alongside the company’s own marketing messages, we’ll see social networking become as important as brand loyalty in the fight to retain customers.

For years I’ve cautioned against using web statistics as a web marketing measurement tool. The truth is, most web statistics aren’t actionable, and what isn’t actionable is fairly useless.

You can GET more now from stats …

In the old days, a web statistics report gave you a bit of demographic information about browsers, countries, and those ubiquitous “top 20 entry pages” and “top 20 exit pages.” Marketers, whose job is to know how their online campaigns are faring, used to be obsessed with “hits” and other equally useless numbers. And that was fair enough, since that was all they got.

Today’s web statistics packages are much better, in that you can point to specific landing pages and watch the traffic on them, and more or less count the number of unique bodies that hit each page. Of course, this assumes that you use unique landing pages for each campaign, which I would argue is a requirement in today’s interactive marketing world.

Google Analytics is one of the best statistical packages I have used, so I’m not shy about plugging them. They bridged two key gaps:

• Making the analytical reports reasonably easy to set up
• Providing results that are fairly easy to interpret

They also integrated with AdWords, providing additional insights about your pay-per-click campaigns.

These are key issues—there is no point in collecting metrics if no one knows what data to collect, no one can interpret the reports, and no one will act on the results. IT folks don’t always know what the questions are that the data needs to answer. Marketing folks don’t always understand how to translate their analytical needs into click-paths and meta-data. Sometimes you need an information architect to act as a go-between.

… But STATS alone aren’t the answer.

The real question is, are your web site visitors just statistics? Or are they people and accounts you actually care about? Do you want to know what they are doing on your site? Do you know why they abandoned that cart, where they need support, and why they just left for a competitor’s site?

Statistics software will tell you about general trends, and are useful in the face of nothing else, but they provide very little that you can base a decision on. They may suffice for mass-marketing, but for B2B and account-centric B2C businesses, they are all but useless. (Ever wonder why your sales force doesn’t ask for web stats?)

So, what is my audience really doing? New trends in webstats.

For many years I have relied on “page dotting,” a technology that lets you identify each visitor to a site, watch their movements through the site, and track their actions even on future visits. This is built into StageOne, my favorite web CMS system, and provides terrific insights into how pages and campaigns are functioning.

At Online Market World last week I came across a company called TeaLeaf that does Customer Experience Management. While I don’t know much about their product (yet), I certainly appreciated their core message: you need to know what visitors to your site are experiencing, and in order to do this you need to track the actions of individuals. TeaLeaf tracks pages and application logic to discover every obstacle—they can place a “trace” on tasks a user performs to see what is and isn’t working.

Bottom line – you need to know what your audience does, not how many of them there are.

Knowing what your users are experiencing is knowledge that you really can’t afford to live without. As Richard Saul Wurman (the “father” of information architecture) wrote in Information Anxiety, “Facts in themselves don’t solve the problem.” You need knowledge to solve problems, and knowledge comes from:

1. understanding what it is you want to measure,
2. creating the systems to measure it, and
3. reporting back the results in a way that you can understand what happened.

Only then can you make course corrections to improve the user experience and achieve higher business goals.

Last week for my visit to Online Market World I tried to book a car, choosing my favorite rental agency (one of the major players). I was dismayed to learn that my club membership number was no longer recognized. I suppose it had been two years since my last rental in the States–most of my travel for the past two years has been in Europe, where I use a different agency.

Now, I’ve had that membership number since 1993, and it’s recorded in all my travel profiles (Orbitz, Travelocity, etc.). Along with my number, the car company maintains all my personal preferences, my address, my credit card number–everything that makes it convenient for me to use them over another agency, even if they’re not the cheapest.

That’s the point of a loyalty program; in a sense it’s a compact between two parties. The customer agrees to submit their personal information to the vendor, and the vendor in turn provides additional services to that customer. Any marketing and sales professional will tell you that loyalty programs and customer relationship management are key to retaining customers and increasing market share.

So why was my customer number and personal profile deleted? The message is clear; they must not value me as a customer.  I should go somewhere else.

Of course it’s not that simple. I do consulting is an area where marketing meets IT, so I can guess what really happened. I know that if the sales or marketing manager were questioned about the need for obsoleting such data, they would say “Don’t ever do it! Disk space is cheap, and our customers, even occasional customers, are important to us.”

But some well-meaning person in IT decided that they needed to “clean out” old records from their customer care system, so they instituted a policy of cleaning out idle records every two years. It may even reduce the task of backing up data, and increase the speed of lookups within their online systems. There was probably a good reason for it.

The real question is, who should be making these decisions about customer relationship data? The answer is that Sales and Marketing should work with IT not just to define marketing programs and get them online, but to think about the ongoing maintenance and IT policies, and how they might affect the company’s bottom line.

Loyalty programs shouldn’t have the effect, as this one did, of disenfranchising customers and turning them away if they haven’t made a purchase in a while. That’s like saying “if you don’t do regular business with us then we don’t want your business.” That’s a Disloyalty program!

Sales and marketing program managers aren’t IT specialists; IT professionals aren’t marketers. That’s why any such sales and marketing program needs open communication between the two groups, especially a discussion of the ramifications of IT policies and procedures and how they will effect the customer experience.

It may come down to hiring a specialist who has experience brokering between IT and marketing–an information architecture or a user experience professional who can “see around corners” and detect issues and the gaps between marketing’s program plan and IT’s subsequent deployment. The investment in good advice is small when compared to the alternative : losing customers.