Irreverent Thinking

I’m really very fortunate to work with some of the most forward-thinking companies in the UK, but sometimes they just plain don’t understand this Net thing.

This week I had a meeting with a large client who has spent over £10m on his web strategy since 2005. Big money, big ideas and huge amounts of success. Ace.

As part of the (large) strategy is a very successful forum, it’s the only one in their space and it stands large and dominating. They rarely have to moderate it and have a great community of about 6,000 registered users and around 50,000 lurkers every year reading 20,000 posts. It cost less than £5,000 to setup in 2003 - what a bargain!

It’s a great opportunity to communicate to their ‘family’, their customers, their messengers. It could be the most influential element of their brand. In the world of semantic trust, social networking, link-sharing and search engines it offers a unique (in their marketplace) opportunity.

Last year they spent less than £500 and 1hr a week looking after it. Not surprisingly it’s dying. That is dysfunctional marketing.

Put simply, they just don’t get it. What a waste.

I do love the way the web is moving - I’m now a full-time convert to Mahalo, why not add me if you sign up to the social bit of it (you can find me here). It does nicely show how the world is moving on and our measurement of trust is changing. I wrote back in September about trusting your Pod, or group of “knowns” (you can read my original post here) and with the emergence of social bookmarking we can see that take another step. I recently joined Diigo, which offers a way to not only bookmark pages but also annotate those pages both for yourself and for anyone who trusts you.

You can see my profile easily and see what I have saved and tagged, or at least the public version of what I have tagged. Diigo call it social annotation which is an interesting concept as it opens the world, and specifically the corporate world, to semantic trust. I keep harping on about e-PR but I wonder if KFC know that I have commented on their “dietary guide” in a less than positive way? The reality of this open (trust) network is that the large corporate animals either better be on their best behaviour or better keep their eyes wide open.

(Thanks to Dan Otterburn for putting me onto Diigo)