The American Red Cross had a big problem. The blogosphere was peppered with negative comments about the organization. So the American Red Cross decided to listen to the conversation taking place on the web.

They soon learned there was a gap between how they positioned themselves and how their stakeholders’ described their experience of the organization. Through daily monitoring of blogs and other Web 2.0 tools, the Red Cross changed the way they engage their advocates and recruit volunteers.

According to Geoff Livingston, author of Now is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs, this is what today’s customers and donors expect: to be listened to and understood.

Here Livingston offers his advice for making new media marketing programs work for your organization:

Brand & Strategy: Does social media increase lead generation?

Geoff Livingston: It really depends on the program. If you don’t integrate calls to action and natural ways for people to engage further, then your effort is for naught; social media is just a hot shiny object.

Your strategy should treat social media like a toolset, with different ways of communicating. Do your homework. By exploring this site, you can research how organizations have used social media successfully.

Can social media help a non-profit organization increase the number of new donors?

Again, if there’s no integration into your plan, then it won’t! If you do integrate, it will. It all gets back to strategy. Are you talking to donors to accomplish something, or are you just Tweeting? Check out Beth Kanter’s blog for more insights.

How do you convince management to engage in conversations with customer-communities without controlling the conversation?

Show them a blog search with all of the conversations about their company. Or even better, point them to the conversations about their competition. But really, at this stage in the game, if they are still not going forward with social media, it may be time to consider a more innovative organization.

How should “social media releases” be fundamentally different than traditional press releases?

They should be more of a story board for bloggers, providing them multimedia tools to create their own story. Rather than a positioning document, it should provide facts and paths for others to figure out the position, so they can tell it their way.

How do you reach out to bloggers, podcasters, and individuals with high-traffic social network profiles?

You get to know them through conversation over time. You definitely don’t pitch them out of the gates. It’s Relationships 101, really. Treat people like you want to be treated.

How should organizations integrate social media on their own web site?

First, they need to get to know their online community and listen for a while. Then once you understand what your stakeholders actually do online–what they talk about–build your strategy. It should flow naturally.

An article in The New York Times recently provided some statistics on the state of blogs on the Internet. The stats originate from Technorati, an Internet search engine that tracks blogs:

•There are roughly 133 million blogs;
•Only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs had been updated in the past 120 days; and
• Between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs generate most of the page views.

Millions and millions of poppies: Which poppy is prettier?

The stats on blogs confirm how cluttered the marketing landscape has become. The herculean challenge is to position your organization accurately and to communicate your message to your prospects with clarity and power.

I say, “Good riddance to the blog fever,” if in fact fewer folks are paying attention to their blogs. Most were lousy writers. Maybe the slow death (or at least slower growth) of blogs will free up some attention for those organizations whose message is worth hearing.

Twittering, social networking, blogging? They’re all the rave—and your company may be ready to jump on the social media bandwagon to promote your organization.

But beware of getting tripped up by the hype; you’ll need to have a little know-how before you start.

Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research Vice President and co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, talks about what you need to think about before you harness these new technologies-and how to make them work best for your organization.

Brand & Strategy: Often organizations considering social media and blogging are hung-up on what platform they will use. Is this where their focus should be?

Josh Bernoff: No. When an organization is considering starting a blog, community, or Twittering, the first question should be, “What problem am I hoping to solve?” Maybe you want to get information spread by word of mouth, or try to generate new product ideas. Based on what you want to accomplish, you can pick the right tools and technologies to best meet that challenge.
Why are organizations fearful of using social media to acquire customer opinion?

They think they are in control of their brands. In reality, the majority of customers increasingly decide what brands stand for. That the groundswell speaks for you is hard to get past.

What’s a good first step for small- to medium-sized nonprofit organizations to take that don’t have the Big Corporate budget but want to engage in two-way dialog with their donors?

First, listen to your customers with blog and Twitter searches. Then, begin to comment and respond. You can do a lot of these things cheaply: free platforms for blogging, Twitter is free, even community platforms like Ning are free. The real question is how much time you can put into it.

How should an organization deal with negative comments?

If your products are no good, you’re doomed. But if your customers are just having some problems, then respond. Comment on their blogs and in their discussion groups. Be honest, and people will respect you. See how the cable company Comcast addressed customer issue with @comcastcares. These days, you can address your customers’ problems by Twittering!

Can you share an example of a smaller organization that has harnessed the groundswell well?

One of this year’s winners of the Forrester Groundswell awards was a small credit union in Alberta, Canada. They held a contest, and a youth spokesperson blogged, uploaded YouTube videos, and participated in Facebook – and they generated 2,300 new account signups. To learn more about how they did it, see their entry here: http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/talking/common_wealth_credit_union.html

What’s a good example of “talking to spread messages” – and how do you identify a “spread message”?

Messages can be specifically designed so that people will spread them. See a great example at www.willitblend.com. The Blendtec company is selling a lot more blenders by having a message that people found amusing and powerful, which prompted them to pass it along to others.

Next thing you know, your grandma will want her own blog. My grandma is 94. She hasn’t ask for one yet, but …

Blogging is not only mainstream these days, it’s become almost as annoying as email (in the sense that everyone seems to have one, even if they have nothing to say). Today’s web tools enables anyone with a computer and Internet-access to blog.

A blog is, basically, an online diary or journal that allows other folks to post responses – essentially, to talk back to you. It’s two-way communication. No, it’s 100- or 1000-way communication, depending upon how many folks are talking back to you.

Blogging is only one small part of the phenomena of social media, which many traditional organizations struggle to integrate into their marketing.

In fact, social media and marketing may be an oxymoron. In social media, the moment you start selling, you lose your audience. Why? Because the audience can talk back to you. And, worse, ignore you altogether.

We recently started another business, creating a social media web site for new nurses (www.RealityRN.com). We also created a parallel RealityRN strategy for Facebook. We launched a group on Facebook using an account of one of our nurse advisors to promote the main site.

We have on staff a young woman whose expertise in Facebook – as a user – is unparalleled, and she kept us from making many of the stupid mistakes that someone like me (middle-aged white guy) would tend to make when trying to “do social media.”

The biggest lesson: you can promote to a social media group, but you can’t sell. People will only join a group if it connects emotionally with who they are. They will never join a group that is thinly designed to sell something. If you are on Facebook, type in “Hey Docs, Nurses Are Not Nurse Maids” and you’ll pull up our group. I think more than half of the group (700-plus members) is from Europe, Australia, and Canada.

Social media has largely unwritten rules of social etiquette. The most important strategy in social media is this: just do something. And begin to make mistakes so that you can learn as quickly as possible. Don’t feel as if you have to get it right the first time.

And maybe not every organization should make a foray into social media. My favorite line of all times came from an old mentor: an opportunity is not a mandate. Stated another way: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I often write about how to rise above the noise in how you communciate with your clients or customers. This time, I thought I’d give you 4 ways to train your folks to ignore you:

1. Think along the lines of 1966: “We just need to send something out, it doesn’t matter what.” You would have thought this thinking would have died around the time of the Bay of Pigs debacle. It hasn’t.

2. Everything is important. That is, you refuse to prioritize what you want to communicate to your constitutency, so every message has the same sense of urgency. Or, rather, every message has the same non-urgency.

3. Use the web like it’s still 1996. Ignore more than 10 years of knowledge about how and why people use the web. A good example of this is adding a blog to your web site when you have nothing interesting to say. Gulp.

4. Expect branding to generate sales. Branding and positioning can give you focus. But you still have to do something. You still have to create a marketing plan. Hopefully, your new branding strategy will translate into DOING something differently. Branding alone, without a strategy to do something new, is an excercise in narcissism. Branding is a word that means nothing these days.

In the old world, you landed customers if you could cause them to salivate for your product, and your product alone. Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, authors of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? liken it to Pavlov’s model. You instill a desired reaction to stimuli. But increasingly, media fragmentation prevents advertisers from creating a conditioned response. Customers are more like cats, somewhat distractible, but notably independent-minded.

The solution?

In a recent interview with CZ, Bryan Eisenberg talks about how to engage customers and ensure you’re creating an experience that resonates in the marketplace.

CZ: How has the Internet changed marketing strategies?
Bryan Eisenberg: Technology—especially the ease of communication—has moved the mentality of marketing from “Customers are the recipients of the message” to a mentality of “Customers are participants.”

Customers use the Internet to block things that don’t interest them and to focus in on those things that do. They participate in the marketing conversation through technologies like blogs, online reviews, and flicker photos.

So how do you give customers opportunities to participate?
Bryan Eisenberg: Blogs. A blog allows you to have a conversation with your clients. And really, markets are conversations. HP recently launched product reviews on their web site—where they receive both positive and negative reviews.

Do companies lose control if they allow blogging?
Bryan Eisenberg: No, because customers will find a way to blog about your service on someone else’s blog if not yours.

A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, says you can’t control the conversation, so let it happen. Support it. It’ll happen on other people’s blogs, if not on yours. When things go wrong and negative comments arise, address the problem, reconcile it—just deal with it.

What businesses can control is how good an experience is. Focusing on this will trigger positive word-of-mouth.

How can you build a good web experience for each site visitor?
Bryan Eisenberg: People find what is relevant to them and ignore everything else. They will funnel themselves through your web site as long as there is something relevant to them.

It’s a rigorous process, figuring out how each recipient will respond to each step. It demands that you plan each and every click.