Notes from the opening panel:
AOL is trying to internationalise and focus on community, says Stephanie Bergman, who evangelises open blogging within the company.
Cisco sued Apple for publicity apparently, suggests Jeanette Gibson from the company… Legal link bait?
Captain Morgan: an example of how the Blogosphere doesn't have a sense of humour, suggests moderator Elisa Camahort.
Rachel Clarke was involved in a marketing campaign with an five week character blog based around the Captain Morgan character. And the blogosphere hated it. But they still got comments and interaction from the audience they were looking for. Character blogs can work.
Moderation is an issue. External agencies are expensive, and tend to lead to limited run blogs. Everyone advocated creating a comments policy and making sure that it matched up to legal and marketing needs.
Lots of discussion about the future of the press release and whether it can ever be replaced by blogging. People are cynical about both press releases and about the journalists who report them, but they're ignoring the legal status of press releases for stock market listed companies. Blogs are seen by many as a more authentic way of communicating, but I suspect their role is ion following and contextualising the press release, not replacing it.
Cisco's entry into Second Life came through engineers. They started having serendipitous meetings with major company representatives in Second Life. That lead to a virtual demo space where they can now show off products to consumers.
Can real change come from grassroots? AOL launched Ficlets a couple of weeks ago. It was built in Ruby in two months, it supports OpenID, and it has no AOL branding. And it's free. That was a project driven by one person.
Rachel brings some reality to it: "It's very difficult to get anything done in social media without board buy-in."
Jeanette Gibson of Cisco has a different experience: there are rogue installations everywhere!
Back to Ficlets - someone in the audience asked why the lack of branding. Well, there is branding, but it's subtle. Enough that people can find it if they want it, but not enough that it's shoved in people's faces.
The audience are very concerned about how long it takes corporate structures to accept new tools. It feels like the answer is back in Rachel's earlier remark. Unless you have board buy-in for really fast decisions and launches, you have problems.
Cisco has not seen many negative comments, but has seen journalists routing around the PR team direct to the bloggers for stories, which is changing the way PR operating. For example, during the Apple vrs Cisco spat, they encouraged senior people to blog in and honest way about what was happening, and got good response for that. In fact, there's an internal competition for the most popular bloggers and podcasters and it's proving to be very, very competitive…
