Tom Nixon

Curiosity kindles the conversation

Will and I had a meeting yesterday with a nice chap from a very large organisation that suffers a great deal from negative perceptions in the public and amongst their own staff.

Most companies have their naysayers, but for an organisation with tens of thousands of employees and millions of customers, the scale of criticism online can be enormous, with all sorts of blogs dedicated to complaining.

Putting aside the obviously number 1 priority task of dealing with the underlying reasons for the negativity (a massive struggle but well in-hand for this organisation,) how can they take steps to participate and bring some positivity to the conversations going on in the blogosphere?

Setting up a new blog in such a hostile climate is a daunting task with dire consequences if you get it wrong, but there is a low risk way to get a blog started, and take your first steps into the conversation.

The attitude that you need to take on your new blog is not to be defensive or go on a counter-attack, but to be curious and engaging.

In your first few posts you can link to some of the negative comment and attempt to understand and analyse the viewpoints, without ramming your own opinion down anyone's throat. Invite people to comment to check that your understanding is correct. It's amazing how attitudes can change when people know that you are listening.

Gradually you can begin to delicately put forward your own perspective which will be much more well received if you have visibly acknowledged the criticism.

That’s MORE TH>N social

We’ve been keeping this project under our hats for a while, but I can now tell you about a cool new website that the Nixon McInnes team have been working on with our pals over the road at Spannerworks for the UK insurer MORE TH>N.

The MORE TH>N Living website gives the insurer a platform to engage in social media. As our client explains:

“In it, we talk about current issues related to the stuff people value so much that they buy insurance for it; with green motoring and green housing being big themes right now.

Original articles are added several times a day and are available via RSS so you can keep an eye on the pulse of the site from within your news reader of choice. Audience participation is essential, and actively encouraged: we’ll love to see your comments on the site, and as all the content is released under a Creative Commons licence, we’ll also love you to spread the word on your own blogs, on Facebook, on email… wherever you live your digital life..”

The site reinforces the MORE TH>N brand by being useful and interesting to its target market. It’s not full of special offers or advertising for their products – just quality original content that anyone is free to use. As a happy side-effect of this, it’s hoped that the site will add some serious Google juice to the main MORE TH>N website.

We built the site using the open source blogging platform WordPress, and to include news from other blogs we integrated Megite into the site, as used on Mashable’s Mashtracker service.

The site represents a new approach to online marketing where there is no tried and tested best practice and so we adopted a Rapid Prototyping approach to the project to get the site out into the world so we can start to measure the impact that it’s having. We expect the site to evolve considerably and it may well look quite different in a few months time. It’s a fun experiment.

There's more info on Antony's blog.