Edelman digital trends series

Edelman’s Steve Rubel is publishing a series of  ‘insights‘ into digital trends.

I’ve read the first one (17 Feb, pdf 2mb) and it’s a pretty good overview.

Corporate blogging

Had to stop and think when I read the corpcomms magazine’s feature story about corporate blogging.

According to the article PR departments don’t get it:

“Blogs are supposed to be personal, opinionated, informal and discursive. The idea is to create a buzz, to start a debate and to stimulate interest. But a lot of buttoned-up, controlling PR departments just fail to understand this.”

What does the article’s author want: corporate courage? For the sake of what? A low-cost marketing tool?

Is there a future for corporate websites?

No.

Well, not as we currently know them.

Site sections devoted to company information such as About Us, Our Business/What we do, Our company, Corporate social responsibility, and so on have no future. The information they do contain that has any use will be pared down (and probably end up as a pdf).

What will remain is recruitment, media and investor information sitting behind product information, such as in the newly relaunched Panasonic dotcom/UK website or at IBM dotcom/UK.

The general model now is that the companyname.com URL (or doteu, dot -fr-uk-de, etc) is the corporate/brand website offering investor, media, regulatory, CSR, governance information, etc.

The dotcom is not a gateway to company products and marketing information.

That model is losing companies money by frustrating consumers and failing to direct them to marketing and product websites.

Can’t get the staff?

Have you ever noticed that sometimes…no, often…companies put out adverts or job specs for a web editorial role that is, more or less, a request for a whole department in one package, rather than just one individual with a specialism?

Here are two corkers.

This job ad (enlarge image) is for a “Web Designer/Editor”. It says:

Web 2.0, social networking, and the rest … not the point

In his Prospect review of Against the Matchine by Lee Siegel, We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen says:

“If this debate between Shirky, Leadbeater and Siegel about the relationship between community and technology sounds familiar that’s because it is. It’s at least version 5.0 of a conversation about industrial society begun by Rousseau and Marx and then, as the Web 2.0 crowd likes to put it, “remixed” by everyone…”*

He ends the article by drawing the focus out a little wider:

Press releases, templates, activity over passivity

Todd Defren, Shift Communications, has posted the company’s updated social media press release.

Helping companies structure their online content is always a good thing. It’s quite generous of Shift to offer the template for free.

One of the template’s strengths is it’s using the medium’s innovative structuring potential and moving beyond the metaphor of the *page* (avoiding using the web as a kind of backlit book).

Royal YouTube

While *Le Web 3* organizers happily parlay about their version of Web 3.0, and while developers continue work to realise Tim Berners Lee’s conception of Web 3.0 (Symantic Web/giant datatbase), Web 2.0 has just received the royal stamp of approval.

The UK’s first Family has dived into YouTube, adding its home videos to hundreds of thousands of other people’s. They’ve called it the The Royal Channel.

Why PR staff will love/hate their corporate websites

Corporate communications websites cost money; they don’t (often) generate revenue (not directly anyway).

That makes them low priority for the marketing people who would ditch all that blather about missions and community commitments if only they could. It also makes it really difficult to justify spending any money on them, which is why some are so poor.

So what do you do if you’re an online communications monkey/web editor/manager and your sites are second, third or fourth tier to the national media coverage that the PR bunnies are all chasing? After all, PR bunnies are cheap compared to a CMS, server space, IT support, content contributors, translations, skilled editors, redesigns, etc.

You could say to your director that you need investment for your corporate sites because they’re really frayed around the edges; they make the company look bad; they don’t reflect the mission statement and commitment to quality every company says it’s got (leaving out that the sites reflect poorly on the staff that run them).

That won’t convince him or her.

What might is turning your corporate site into a revenue stream (ha! fat chance), or its only equivalent for cost centres: saving money.

But that might mean proving some of your PR bunnies are better allocated to other tasks as the websites will be doing part of their jobs for them. Hmmm. That might be good for the ones who are also under-funded and doing two-people’s jobs. But for the others? Well, take that colleague off your Facebook friend list.

Online marcomms and corporate comms: same family, different faces?

Over the past five years I’ve learned a lot about consultancies’ and companies’ approaches to corporate and marketing websites.

It seems to me that the development and performance measures of websites today are dominated by a marketing-communications approach, no matter the type of site or the goals to be met.

By marketing-communications, I mean branded communications that focus on demand and sales of products or services. (Read Wikipedia’s definition.)

Often this means that marketing assumptions are inappropriately applied to corporate websites by both consultancies and the companies they’re developing websites for.

Marketing’s emphasis is to persuade users to buy. Audiences carry out that decision through a measurable checkout process, whether online or in a shop.

Wikipedia, again

Wikiscanner, launched last Monday, allows anyone to retrieve information about anonymous editors of Wikipedia’s pages (see Wired story 14.08.07).

The results show IP addresses and, apparently, the organizations that own them.

David Brain says on his blog, sixtysecondview: “I put Edelman into the Wikiscanner and discovered that of the first 100 results, 58 were from what appear to be . . . . . . Edelman offices.”

The subject of company edits to Wikipedia keeps coming up.