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Nortel’s Social Media Embrace: Part II
By Mark Evans | May 30, 2008
Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with Ronald Alepian, VP, corporate communications with Nortel, who talked about why and how the company is using social media tools such as blogs, podcasts and streaming video.
Below, you’ll find part II. What’s particularly interesting is how Alepian and Nortel differentiate between journalists and bloggers - once again raising the question about whether bloggers are journalists. In Alepian’s mind, bloggers are not journalists because they mostly write opinions, while journalists stick to the facts. He’s certainly entitled to his opinion but I think Alepian is wrong to draw distinctions between the two camps given there’s more blurring of the lines every day.
Can you talk about education and structure when it comes to social media. Do you have policies, for example, about how can blog and what they can blog about?
We do have a blog policy within the company that basically here are the dos and don’t. It’s not rocket science or different from any other companies blog policies. One is don’t talk about forward looking projects and financial things like that because it opens whole complications for a publicly traded company. The second one is I personally hate anonymous blogging when done by employees of a corporation. It contravenes the unwritten rule. We are out there as front as we can be.
Do you encourage internal bloggers?
Yes, although upi will never a see a communication from us to 30,000 employees, “Ladies and gentleman start your engines and go blog”. I have no issue and quietly encourage it. We certainly can’t stop it. Good luck to the company that tries to stop it. People are aware of our policies – they’re straightforward. They are aware of the fundamental principles: don’t talk about financial and don’t pretend to be someone who you aren’t.
As this world progressively moves forward and as we put in place programs internally to get employee be educated about the direction of the company, I hope to see that type of conversation online. If you try to impose censorship or control in that environment, it’s a losing battle so you try to guide people to do it responsibility. People in the rank and file organization, in the business that gets the product and speaks to customers are best positioned to talk about it. I think the number of people that do it will continue to grow.
How to you reach out to bloggers and other social media people?
There is a general premise in the blog world that is different than the media world. Journalists are bound to great extent - and we hope they remain bound - by fact. There needs to be a source or proof point of reference to what they are talking about. It needs to be based as much as possible in fact, records and sources, etc. That means there are different rules boo on how you speak to media because you can engage people based on factual conversations. In the blog word, it is an editorial world, a commentary world where people express opinion. They don’t necessary need to be based on concrete resources, they can express things an opinion. The engagement with that environment needs to be more about debate, argument and more about delivering compelling thinking than arguing fact. When we go on those sites, and people I argue whether Nortel will make it or not, or whether Nortel will be worth $50, they are expressing an opinion. We need to come to the table with compelling arguments.
Finally, when Mike Zafirovski start blogging?
He did blog on an internal [blog], and he did a video blog where he talked to employees that got a lot of good feedback. He did a second one when we launched our advertising campaign. Our executives are using the platform to engage employees. We are letting those folks blog internally. Externally, it will come down to commitment. We would love [Zafirovski] to blog, if only a couple times a week. His engagement with customers is very direct – he will speak to hundreds of customers in a given year, and right now, that is the best place for him to be. I don’t think you need a CEO blogging for a company to be credible if that person has embraced it internally in terms of having a dialogue.
Technorati Tags: Blogs, Mike Zafirovski, Nortel, Podcasts
Topics: Executive Suite |