FreshNetworks Blog

A few tips from Xavier des Horts at Nokia about how to grow a blogging culture, and particularly how to make sure that any external social media marketing or communications that a business does is as successful as possible.

Nokia have just launched their new public facing social media site (Nokia Conversations). For Xavier, social media like this is communications as opposed to advertising. He thinks that the success of an external use of blogs, for example, relies on successful internal use of such tools. You need to build a blogging culture in the business, a four-part process:

1. Encourage and enable people internally to blog themselves – this can be internal and is also a great way of dealing with knowledge sharing problems.
2. Build external social media relationships – Xavier admitted to searching every couple of hours on Google Blog Search for Nokia to see what was being discussed. He responds to these personally where relevant as part of the process of building strong relationships with others externally.
3. Build networks of contacts – just as traditional PR would brief press, you should find who the influential bloggers, writers and commentators are in your area and feed them news and developments.
4. Do all of this honestly – as a business, to be successful with social media you need to be open honest and respectful. Otherwise people will find you out and that will have the counter-effect of what you set out to do (remember Wal-Marting Across America)

Finally – where does blogging and social media sit in a firm’s communication’s strategy? For Xavier there are three main parts to a firm’s external voice. The formal statements (such as on a press site), the marketing message (on the main corporate website) and the stories. It is the latter which blogging can do so well, and that many firms are yet to realise the benefits of.