"Mommy bloggers" spice up comms campaigns

By Annie Waite, North American Editor of the Internal Comms Hub, Melcrum

"In 2 years, most people will have a 'Commenter I.D' for leaving messages on blogs or other online sites."

- Dick Costolo, group project manager, Google, (former CEO of Feedburner)

This was one of the predictions made during a PRSA-hosted panel discussion from social media experts, designed to share the secrets of successful social media strategies.

Among the panelists were Costolo, quoted above, plus:

• Stephanie Moritz, director of PR at ConAgra Foods;
• Cristina Lawrence, vice president of digital media at Fleishman-Hillard;
• Heather Oldani, director of US communications at McDonald's; and
• Eric Benderoff, technology reporter at the Chicago Tribune.

Although this year we've all had discussions about how difficult it is to measure the ROI of social media tools, some of the panelists explained how they've done just that.

Cristina Lawrence said that by spreading the word for one of her clients among mommy bloggers, a 2-week Christmas campaign to promote a train set that cost  $6000 reaped a $78,000 profit. Read how on the Hub.

Also, Heather Oldani spoke about how McDonald's has been using the Duchess of York, (a.k.a. "Fergie" to us Brits, at least) to engage moms in dialogue about what McDonald's stands for, via her Duchess Diaries blog hosted on clubmom.com.

McDonald's has now launched Station M, a password-protected social networking internet site (note, not intranet), which allows McDonald's "crew members" (employees) to blog about the company, share photos and vote on company issues on this dedicated site. These activities, said Heather, are all done by employees willingly accessing the site in their own time. Despite the risk of the password being leaked to the public, she seemed confident it wouldn't be a problem.

Syncing comments
Back to Dick Costolo's prediction: A commenter I.D. would mean a blog respondent, social networking site participant, online shopper and so on would choose, or be assigned, the same name to use across all of their online discussions or transactions.

“You’ll be able to sync comments across sites,” Costolo said.

Remember, you heard it here first.

But this poses a question in terms of the future of employee privacy – if the commenter I.D. idea takes off, will companies that currently allow anonymous comments on internal blogs (to encourage employees to pose questions or make comments without fear of reproach), in order to mimic external online "transparency", follow suit and ban or restrict anonymous posts?

What do you reckon? Got any predicitions for the future of internal or external communications? Or have you used mommy bloggers to successfully to market your brand?

Soundtrack to the blog: Bennet - Mum's gone to Iceland

Comments

[spectacle chippendales]

géniale !
je decouvre votre blog avec grand interet merci et bonne continuation

anna