Smart manufacturers use the blogosphere, aren't victimized

Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer US
Zone : Leadership and strategy
Published : 02 Feb 2007 23:22

The old rules for PR, image maintenance, and marketing are being broken down. Up until a few years ago, the standard PR news cycle for IT professionals was measured in weeks (or even months) – it mostly conformed to the publishing cycle of the trade press.

With the advent of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and video blogs, that’s been compressed down to days, or even hours.

What this means to me is the following: PR is now too important to be left solely in the hands of the PR professionals. Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers, and even Product Tech leads now need to keep an eye out for potential problems, and either:

• Address them themselves

• Make sure that the corporate PR group is aware of the looming issue

Which way that gets handled depends on the size of the company and its culture – in some places, having non-PR staff handle such issues would be seen as heresy, while at others, it’s becoming more acceptable – individuals will have to judge for themselves what the right approach is based on how their company works.

Let’s start with a few examples that illustrate the problem: Kryptonite Locks, “Dell Hell”, Sony’s DRM/Rootkit issue.

In 2004, Engadget reported that Kryptonite locks could be opened with a Bic pen. That’s a pretty damaging report for a lock company, and – based on the old rules of engagement – they responded quickly:

• There was a corporate response on their website in five days

• Within a few weeks, a lock replacement plan was rolled out.

A few years ago, that would have been seen as highly responsive. The trouble is, sites like Engadget amplify problems like this and spread them widely, both via their HTML page and via syndication technology (RSS/Atom). Within a day, the story had spread far and wide, and the problem looked far worse than it really was. Additionally, given the compressed news cycle of the web, the response looked slow. The company got beaten up online as it spread – and online searches for Kryptonite locks still pop up the pen story.

Kryptonite followed the old PR rules, they did everything right, based on those old rules – and they got hammered. This demonstrates that you have to be prepared to respond much, much more quickly than you are used to responding. Dell, on the other hand, didn’t respond quickly enough to their problem, and they paid a bigger PR price for that – it’s my opinion that the problem illustrated by this example is a large part of why they have slipped from the top of the PC sales ranks.

Dell has prospered as a low cost PC provider – they build machines from component parts, and try to shave savings at all possible points of the product cycle. One of those areas was support – like many companies, they outsourced support, and did not invest much in training the outsourced staff. Over the last few years, anyone following the Dell forums or the blogosphere in general noticed a rising chorus of complaints. Dell didn’t seem to take any notice though – no public announcements, nothing on their site, no improvements. This went along at a constant background level for quite awhile – until former journalist Jeff Jarvis posted on his “Dell Hell” experience. Jeff’s megaphone was large enough that similar stories suddenly got noticed – the web buzzed with people commiserating over their horrible experiences.

It took Dell awhile to realize the true scope of this problem, but they are dealing with it. They launched a customer relations blog, and they have been open about ongoing issues there. This is a huge step, and it helps mitigate the problem – people like to see companies admit to problems and announce that they are doing something about them. That does run counter to most PR instincts though, which council to never, ever admit to bad news. This kind of response was evident in my next example: the Sony rootkit problem

In 2005, a tech blogger noticed that some Sony music CD’s were shipping with DRM that installed a rootkit – meaning, malicious software that hijacked control of a Windows PC’s CD drive (and also opened the system to other attacks). Sony’s initial PR response was from the classic PR playbook of denial: they went into “damage control attack mode”, with this statement doing the most damage:

Thomas Hesse, the president of SonyBMG’s global digital business division, said in a radio interview last week that its use of rootkits is not an issue to the everyday user. “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” he said in the interview with radio company NPR.

This response simple exacerbated the problem. Instead of apologizing and offering replacements (as Kryptonite did), they denied the problem, and watched as the issue metastasized from the blogosphere out to the mainstream press. State governments in the US took notice, and politically savvy officials sued Sony. Those suits eventually cost Sony a few million dollars, and kept the story in the news for much, much longer than it otherwise would have.

What’s the lesson in all this? Blogs, Wikis, and syndication technology have changed the rules of engagement. PR professionals no longer have weeks to deal with problems – they have days at best, sometimes only hours. That’s going to vary based on the size of the company in question, and the market niche they live in – but not by a lot. The other problem is that public trust in “C” level staff is very, very low. For a variety of reasons (including constant reporting of scandals such as Enron), stock answers from executives and PR staff just aren’t going to cut it. People trust “voices from the trenches” far, far more than they trust anything uttered by the VP of marketing. Witness Microsoft over the last few years: while Robert Scoble was there, he was seen as far more trustworthy than any of the people nominally tasked with public relations. Partly that was because he addressed problems (real and perceived) quickly, and partly it was because he was honest about real problems.

That leads to my main point – you need to track what is being said about your product, services, and company on an ongoing basis. That’s a lot easier than it used to be, due to the plethora of syndication tools that are now available. I use an RSS aggregator (that I wrote myself) to track mentions of Cincom, the Smalltalk products I manage, and various keywords that are likely to contain references to the products. I also have “vanity searches” for mentions of my name, and the name of a few other Cincomers.

Using those tools, I’ve found negative comments about customer experiences with our product within minutes of it hitting the web, and have been able to respond to those issues immediately. How do I respond?

• I leave comments on blogs that bring up issues

• If the author exposes an email address, I send email

• I often respond directly on my blog, http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogview

• I maintain a large (and growing) set of “how to” screencasts on our product website

• With members of our product community, I do a weekly podcast where I’m very open about issues in our products

• I’m open about problems on my blog, and I allow open comments

Through these techniques, I head off potential problems with information, and spot potential negatives before they grow into real problems. I’ve had negative issues turn into positives that can be highlighted, and found positives that could be handed off to our PR people for “success stories”. Ultimately, I act as outreach into our developer community, which is something that couldn’t really be left to PR anyway. The main thing is this: you have to use aggregation tools and search to find product, personal, and corporate mentions. You can use the messaging side of those tools (blogs, podcasts, wikis) to “punch above your weight class”, and get far more search presence than you could by paying an SEO specialist.

by James Robertson, www.cincomsmalltalk.com

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