Thursdays with Morri…

…and Corinne, and Norma, and Caitlin, and Tom, and Jen (help me out with the rest of the names, dudes.) Some of you have handwriting on the sign-up sheet that indicates you may have a future in medicine.

Morri is Morri Chowaiki from San Diego, and he is working on an interesting vitamin site. He mentioned that he’s been on the web ever since Al Gore invented the internet. He has some other interesting projects in the works, and I’ve got another suggestion for him: the Chowaiki Wiki.

Our Dine-Around session at A. SaBella’s was a good time for all, I think. We discussed our airline horror stories, children and the expectation thereof, and when ingestion of contaminated seafood makes it wise to seek immediate medical attention.

Thanks to all of you for your company and conversation. And thanks to Melissa and Amy for making the reservation and offering the opportunity.

Jeanette Gibson (Cisco) Presentation

Here is Cisco’s on-line press room.

Jeanette cited a September 2006 report about the influence of blogs on purchase decisions.

Cisco provides some corporate blogs with approval of the company. Otherwise people can go to Blogger or WordPress to do their own blogs. One example of their Cisco-hosted blogs is the one on High Tech Policy. They want to have at least 3-5 members of a team to ensure that the blog won’t die on the vine. Here is the complete list of Cisco blogs.

Event blogging is an interesting concept, which they have put up for two weeks around an event. The limited time frame is appealing to the legal group, and the blog is promoted at the event. I don’t know if I like this idea. It seems like an anti-Long Tail concept, if what goes up there disappears after just a couple of weeks.

Having a blog in the newsroom, on the other hand, seems like a great idea.

Jeanette’s Key Takeaways:

    Include blogs as part of your communications strategy
    Spread workload amongst a team
    Be ready to address risks – have your policy at hand
    Inform and involve your executive team
    Add RSS feeds
    Be yourself and have fun

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CENTCOM on Engaging the Blogosphere

Captain Anthony Deiss is the Electronic Media Engagement Officer for U.S. Central Command. CENTCOM doesn’t have a blog, but is engaging with bloggers to communicate.

He highlighted the Little Green Footballs site and its role in watching the media, both in the Reuters Photoshop controversy and the Green Helmet Guy story.

Capt. Davis went through the process his three-member team uses to identify receptive bloggers and approach them to consider adding links to the CENTCOM web site.

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The American Family Podcast

Dan Cooke from Whirlpool presented the case study of this podcast, which is aimed at breaking out of the “sea of white” customers face when they go to buy major appliances.

Whirlpool’s target is the psychographic segment called the “active balancer,” someone who is “time-starved, willing to delegate household chores to others, open to new technology and change, and for whom quality and brand are extremely important.”

One point I think is important here is that they see this as “not as polished as other consumer-facing efforts.” It doesn’t have to be fully produced. These are done as phone interviews, so it’s not CD-quality sound.

This strategy also appealed to Whirlpool’s conservative nature, as it seemed less risky than blogging, because they could control the message.

Results: It has grown from 800 downloads a month in the first quarter to > 30,000 per month.

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Mark Jen Presentation

Mark Jen is a product line manager for Plaxo. His personal blog is Plaxoed.

Here’s his quick case study of Plaxo, which is an on-line smart address book. It lets users of Plaxo update their address book automatically instead of having to gather business cards.

Mark Jen

Concerns have been privacy, security and that they used to send lots of e-mails. They allayed the first two relatively easily, but the third was harder: a perception problem among people who have been on the receiving end of their e-mails. They started a blog, but it wasn’t a silver bullet. They needed to get employees blogging so people knew there were real people behind the company, and then also started communicating with bloggers directly via e-mail, at events and through the blogosphere.

He told his story of being fired from Google for blogging. He had only been at the company for 11 days. At Google there was secrecy built into the corporate culture, but they didn’t want to be transparent. Google had originally caused his blog to go dark, which led to some controversy, but when they fired him it led to a huge PR hit traffic (and monster traffic to his blog).

At Plaxo the policy is pretty straightforward.

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