74 of Fortune 500 companies starting to play ball

Good news. Once the big boys start tossing the ball around, the others start to pay attention and will want to play too:

74 of Fortune 500 Use Blogs to Communicate With Customers
Fifteen percent of Fortune 500 companies are blogging, according to a recent study from WOMMA member company Burson-Marsteller. Technology companies were the heaviest bloggers, with the top four industries with blogs listed as: Computers, Office Equipment; Network and Other Communications Equipment; Semiconductors and Other Electrical Components; and Internet Services and Retailing. The study included only external blogs, and indicated a reported 270% increase since Fortune 500 blog tracking began in December 2005. A full 32% of the Fortune 50 have blogs, while the number shrinks to only 2% of the Fortune 451 to 500.

Source : womma

The Shel Holtz Report

Last night, Montreal had the pleasure of welcoming Shel Holtz to its monthly 3e mardi Third Tuesday event. Shel's an interesting speaker and a good storyteller. His talk about the role social media .. particularly blogging .. can play within and beyond the walls of a corporation is certainly timely in a market such as ours, where agencies and CEOs are starting to explore social media strategies.

One story that stuck with me is the following:

On my walk home from elementary school back in the early 1960s, I frequently stopped at the corner liquor store and bought a one-cent Bazooka bubble gum. The gum was usually great (unless it had gone all hard), but what I really wanted was the Bazooka Joe comic that came with it. One of those comics has stuck with me all these years later. I can’t say why, but it has. In that strip, Joe is walking down the street at night when he encounters a fellow on his hands and knees under a street lamp.

“What are you looking for?” Joe asks.
“A quarter,” the character says.
“Where’d you lose it?” Joe queries.
“Across the street,” comes the reply.
“Why are you looking here?” Joe wonders.
The fellow answers, “The light’s better.”

The insistence that organizations cannot embrace social media for one reason or another is the equivalent of looking for the quarter where the light’s better: Companies prefer the comfort of message control over the messiness of conversation.

source: Shel Holtz

Shel's point is well taken. It's certainly not by ignoring conversations that happen online that they don't exist. Companies need to, at minimum, be monitoring what's being said about them using tools like Google Alerts, and talking about whether a more direct use of social media tools for internal or external communications might not be appropriate.

We'd take notice if things were written about us in the paper, wouldn't we? Why not consider keeping an eye out for what's being said ... and archived ... online? After all, Google has a long memory.

Douglas Institute : Making great use of social media

The Douglas is a world-class institute, affiliated with McGill University and the World Health Organisation, which treats people suffering from mental illness and offers them hope and cure. Its teams of specialists and researchers continually advance scientific knowledge, integrate it into patient care, and share it with the community to increase awareness and thereby eliminate stigma around mental illness.

The Douglas Institute has been quietly experimenting with social media in interesting ways. Marie-France Coutu and her team have created what I would consider to be an evolved online media kit, making use of You Tube, flickr, Google video and podcasting to provide media with a dynamic information package relating to Alzheimer's disease. Launched in January, in support of Alzheimer Awareness Month, this social media press kit is a terrific example of how PR specialists and their internal or external clients can make great use of new communications platforms.

The Douglas has also launched a series of blogs and podcasts, with experts providing insight on mental health to the community.

According to the website:

Douglas blogs must meet one of the following objectives:
Educate the public about mental health issues to demystify mental illness.
Share knowledge about mental health (in care, research or teaching) with workers and scientists in the health field.

I can't wait to see where they go with this and I'm hoping the Douglas PR team will accept to share their key learnings at an upcoming 3e mardi Third Tuesday Montreal.

Blogging : Making the world a small place

Ironic, really, that it would be Facebook that would put me in touch with Minter Dial, Managing Director, International Professional Development & Communication at L'Oreal Coiffure. Particularly, since the first post which caught my eye in his blog's archives is entitled Human Touch and the anti-Facebook trend.

Minter found my blog through a degree of separation, appropriately named Mitch Joel (of Six Pixels of Separation fame). He sent me a quick note through Facebook, remarking on the fact that we were two of a rare breed of blogger to pass from French to English and back again. I agree with him that it can be challenging for some of our readers, and can only hope that you find it more intriguing than frustrating.

In his March 9th post, Minter writes about the backlash to our heightened connectivity through platforms like Facebook and the accompanying cry for the 'human touch'. I can certainly empathize. As in many things, I am of two minds. On one hand, I'm thrilled to be able to communicate with people around the world, and draw knowledge from an exponentially larger number of sources than was possible even two or three years ago. On the other hand, like some of the people Minter describes in his post, I dread globalization, with its impact on culture and small-market economies.

This is probably why I try to walk the thin line that separates the two worlds. 3e mardi Third Tuesday Montreal is probably the best example of this. I was drawn to the concept of Third Tuesday and sought to introduce it to Montreal because of the very fact that it drew professionals interested in social media out from behind their keyboards and into a relaxed, convivial ambiance that encourages exchange, debate and face-to-face communication. It essentially does what Minter suggests in his post :

Create or participate in old-fashioned “Salons” (in the 18th century sense) to discuss and debate face-to-face on topics other than your children's school, or your work trials and tribulations...

Who knows what's next for me. A Lettres d'amour fragranced pen, perhaps.