Corporate Podcasting Expressway

Knowledge Hemispheres (KH-2 - Knowing How to Enable success) announce 4 new Corporate Podcasting services.

CEO, Dr Savi S Arora outlined that these services will form part of Knowledge Hemispheres Know Now Service range. He suggested that, ‘Sure, anyone can podcast but we have the know-how to develop engaging content together with our professional partners. In addition, our C-POD services offer the ability to develop customised sites that incorporate corporate blogging for effective communication following branding guide-lines and faciliating a greater reach for clients.’

The new C-POD Services offered by Knowledge Hemispheres include: Foundation, Valued content and Custom built. Facilities include:

- at various levels together with the flexibility to either insource or outsource selective elements.

Podcasting in either audio or video form is ideal for marketing, communication programmes, e-Induction and e-Learning. Or, simply building an environment where corporations can share knowledge or know-how with their clients in a most accessible way - data on the move!

For more information contact Knowledge Hemispheres on : +44 20 8 568 5757.

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It was interesting to see a recent article in a national daily that announced a grouping of new political bloggers.Cynics may suggest that this is an attempt to capture a growing movement of new political commentators.In 2002 approximately 100,000 bloggers toiled away at their craft. During the US election campaign (2004) it was reported the blogging (short for web log) phenomena resulted in the development of 8 Million (source: Pew Internet & America) of the 120 million adult American Internet users creating blogs, a 58% increase from the previous year.

During the 2005 UK election campaign it was reported that even Michael Howard’s (opposition contender) wife was blogging daily while she was escorted him on his election trail.The growth in blogging statistics is also true for the United Kingdom - with the current number of bloggers reaching 30Million. The Guardian noted that they had achieved 2Million page prints in their first 2-3 weeks.

Knowledge Hemispheres (their brand is known as KH-2 or Knowing How2) Managing Director Dr Savi S Arora also noticed in January 2005, the Financial Times ran a special section on the growth of Blogging and wiki’ing. ‘I couldn’t go to sleep for consecutive nights as I knew that something new was brewing for the Internet. The scope of what is now known a Web 2.0 was hidden and difficult to size’. I wanted my company to pioneer in this field, its still early days though’. The result is that KH-2 are one of the few company’s that offer corporate podcasting solutions and understand the potential targeted penetration potential of technologies such as Real Simple Syndication (RSS - feeds). KH-2 also have the unique ability to build custom feeds and also aggregate specific content. The technology of Web 2.0 offers the ability to control content deliver for standard newsreader systems.

Is there a place for Corporate Blogging?

With the current growth of those reliant on RSS technology running at 6Million per week, the question to ask is whether there is sufficient interest with corporations to pursue web-blogs / blogs. One of the constraints is the potential breach of confidentiality.There is some good news, www.backbonemedia.com suggests that there are many positives to be achieved by corporations adopting the ‘art of blogging’. Their report was written by Stephen Turcotte. They asked hundreds of companies to participate in an online survey and also conducted in-depth interviews with leading individuals from six corporate blogs - that were selected as representative of the diverse spectrum of the corporate blogging world. What we discovered was that for the majority of our survey sample, corporate blogs are living up to all the hype. We discovered that corporate blogs are giving established corporations and obscure brands the ability to connect with their audiences on a personal level, build trust, collect valuable feedback and foster strengthened relationships while and at the same time benefiting in ways that are tangible to the sales and marketing side of the business. Just like in other aspects of life, success breeds success. What we see with successful blogs is a chain reaction that starts with a sincere interest on the part of the bloggers to provide their audience with great value in terms of useful and engaging content in the form of information, help, discussion and ideas. If a company can harness their customers’ knowledge and ideas, a company will find better ways to satisfy their customer’s needs and wants.

Listening to customers and acting on their suggestions is one of the best ways to build a group of customers who are committed to expressing their goodwill to their community. It is a common practice in blogging to provide a link back to a thought originator, which is valuable because backlinks are a way that search engines distinguish the order of the editorial rankings. When customers start commenting, posting or tracking back to their blogging community it can have a viral effect - spreading the word through other blogs. We discovered that it is a company’s blogging strategy that will produce the strongest community goodwill, and that goodwill brings the most marketing and sales returns.

Can Marketing companies even those already active with the Internet gain any advantages?

Forester Research, in its RSS 101 (One to One) Market report suggest that RSS is a powerful tool, albeit for the technologically advanced today. They also suggest that marketers should test and deploy to proactively maintain relationships with their customers. It currently appears that RSS is morphing into an individually targeted marketing channel capable of off-setting many of the downsides of other channels. This technology allows companies to target, segment and personalise communications, much as the way email does today. Individualised RSS recipients receive text, images and promotional offers uniquely matched to their interests and desires. The individualised feeds enable marketers to communicate with subscribers based on demographics, past behaviour or any other segmenting attributes.Recently it has been suggested that podcasting could be a useful tool, effectively contributing to an ‘attention economy’. Audio on the move that is subscriber based is a powerful ‘tuned’ medium.With the next-generation solutions each recipient gets his or her own unique feed, enabling marketers to understand how many and which recipients are picking up their messages. In addition, because each feed is unique to the individual recipient, marketers can track and measure subscriber actions all the way down to an individual, facilitating the same behavioural targeting and testing possible in other personalised media. This can also provide the potential to create a unique message for each user based upon demographic or behavioural data. Best of all these feeds, once set-up do not require any changes on the part of the recipient - they can use the same reader they use today to get their blogs or news feeds to access a company’s promotional messages. What next ?

Forester’s research reveals that 57% of marketers are interested in adding RSS to their marketing mix. A related reason may be the demographics of those who are online today. Marketers are excited by the possibility of a 100% message deliverability to a desktop via an RSS feed rather than email. There are no email maintenance issues with RSS.

Maybe the potential of RSS is only restricted by our imagination to apply it to commercial contexts.

This article is also available from k-wiki (http://www.k-wiki.com) the free online encylopedia / Wiki for Business.

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It’s one of those sad facts of human nature-bad news spreads a lot faster than good news.
One large corporate study showed than when a customer had a bad experience, they told friends, and friends passed it on to their friends. In one example in the end, up to 100 people heard the story of how a ‘friend’ was dissatisfied with a company’s service.
Bad word-of-mouth (WOM) can be a real problem for a small business especially if it does not have the human power or business esources to put a Customer Relations team or part of the organisation on the trail of dissatisfied customers.

Strategies to avoid bad WOM.

1. Tell customers right up front what you will do to help them if they are not satisfied. Implication - Very few will take un-due advantage.
2. When things go wrong, apologise
   Implication – It will usually diffuse the situation – and the truth may surface from the guilty.
3. Make an effort to work out the problem.
   Implication - Often the effort is more important than the actual solution.

An episode where a complaint was turned around by a PR initiative.

The case in point refers to an article that was written in a leading newspaper. The article was by a journalist that had suffered a bout of food poisoning from a roadside hamburger chain. The chain was not particularly large, focused across just 2 towns, consisting of 3 shops.

Unfortunately, the ‘bad press’ lead to a boycott of the entire chain.

Distressed, the managing director of the chain called-up the journalist. He apologised and suggested that she return to the restaurant for a special treat. In addition, he agreed with the classified section of the associated newspaper to run a special advertisement – consisting of a welcome statement and coupon for a free meal. The story goes that there was a good return to business soon after.

Is there such a thing as a service crisis?
Like most other problems that at first appear complex, there are only a few fundamental reasons for a service crisis. Blame has been positioned or put down to a lack of training, and one aspect of that problem in particular is the need to effectively handle customer complaints.
On suggested approach is to ‘Go the extra mile’. The concept of going the extra mile is especially relevant to handling complaints. Anyone who has ever had to deal with an irate customer knows the job can be just as difficult whether it’s done over the phone or in person. Yet there are some very good reasons to make the extra effort, to rewire the usual attitude towards complaining customers.
Interestingly, research shows us that 95% of all complaining customers will do business with a firm again if they resolve their complaint on the spot. And like “kissing and making up”, these customers feel better about you than they did before their complaint. The resulting “loyalty effect” is not just something touchy-feely either.
If a business occasionally performs below customer expectations, it can still be perceived as reputable if they have stood behind its guarantees and promises - and have handled criticism diplomatically.

We should not overlook how handling complaints better, an integral part of delivering excellent customer service this can also help to develop respect and the organisation’s reputation.
Another reason to welcome customer complaints is suggested by Rosabeth Moss Kanter who, in “The Art of Innovation” contends that complaints can be an untapped source of new and profitable ideas:
“That’s why the CEO of Procter and Gamble listens to the ‘800 number’…(where customers call in complaints)… so often. It’s from the complaints that you hear where the change is needed. It’s from the complaints where you get the new idea for a valuable new product.”
Some innovative companies go so far as to recruit complaining customers into focus groups, using the dissatisfaction to brainstorm new products and services that can put these companies more in tune with their market.
In summary, none of the suggestions in this article suggest that handling customer complaints is easy. There are, however, many benefits to those who are willing to endure the wrath of an angry customer.

1. It’s a good defensive strategy to help reduce customer fallout and loss of market share;
2. It’s a good offensive strategy to help increase your market share, top line sales and bottom line profits;
3. It can serve as a valuable source of new ideas and products.

So consider the next customer complaint you get for what it really is.

Read more and similar articles from Knowledge Hemispheres wiki: http://www.k-wiki.com - The free online Business Consultancy encylopedia.

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Also known as CSR it comprises of 10 areas:

- Reputation and Trust
- Values
- The environment (climate change, pollution and resource use)
- Health and well being (decease, malnutrition and quality of life)
- Population and Demographics (affluence, education and consumer trends)
- Human rights and diversity (labour standards, working conditions)
- Transparency and accountability (reporting and engagement)
- Governance (leadership, function of board)
- Shareholder activism and pressure groups
- Regulation

This list of 10 unfortunately misses out on the need to address global issues such as hunger and disease. One may argue that these standards could be applied to global organisations but the reality is that those multi-nationals that are strong are quite prominent in the West.

Corporaions have an opportunity to view spare capacity, establish secondments and also provide greater opportunities to give to charity. Again, none of these feature in the list.

Take for example, the last world soccer cup. It was revealed that a certain goods manufacturer was exploiting child labour to produce sporting merchandise!

In the past the anti-sweatshop movement succeeded the campaign to divest from Apartheid South Africa. The latter, also premised on Western corporate social responsibility, preoccupied the concerns of many grassroots protest activists of the developed world from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. The movement was global but was targeted at only one country – South Africa. In contrast, the new movement, dating back to the early nineties, is truly globalised. The concern is no longer just on one country but many—those that export labour-intensive goods to the developed world. This includes, in particular, several countries that are located in Asia, the fastest developing region in the world over the past decade.

The anti-sweatshop movement has introduced a new player into the traditional paradigm of industrial relations as a tripartite structure constituting the state, employers and labour. Grassroots non-government organizations (NGOs) such as student groups, religious groups, environmental groups, labour organisations, consumer groups and community groups have become players that can no longer be dismissed as fringe. The movement has taken the moral high ground, and today a large number of transnational corporations (TNCs) have openly accepted that they hold a responsibility to upgrade labour standards in the factories that produce merchandise bearing their names. Many TNCs have now hired a corps of staff to handle labour rights/human rights issues. In the mid-1990s a flurry of internal and external social monitoring, auditing and verification activities to ensure improvement of labour standards gave birth to a flourishing new monitoring and auditing business, but only limited improvements in labour conditions have ensued.

In summary, there is much to do - As individuals we need to be more aware / alert and ensure that as soon as we find out about people being exploited, we avoid their products.

Four years on and the world soccer cup looming, one needs to wonder if any improvements have been made (?) – Maybe the football players need to be more involved with their sponsors in ’striking out’ human exploitation!

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