For the corporate blog I manage, I find the key to creating good content is to keep going back to the well, while you’re also always out hunting for new content to put on your blog a bit later down the road.

That”well” for blog content possibilities includes these five familiar buckets for ideas:

What’s in the news?

*Good business blog editors start here, anyway. No matter what industry you are in, there’s always a way to tie-in to an issue or trend. The post can be written by someone within your industry or someone on the outside. Good ol’ fashioned “thought leadership.”

What are your employees up to?

*For fun, or on the job, find out what your workforce is spending their time on. What projects have they started? The blog team I lead recently built a post around an employee who is a roller girl. Someone saw her with her gear on in the office, for a photo shoot for a calendar. Instant blog material, wouldn’t you say?

Every customer has a story

*Go ahead, ask your customers what they’ve been up to. Ask them what keeps them up at night. Not only will you learn something, you can find an opportunity to write about them – giving them some PR – and still not make the post about -you-. Rather, it’s about the issue or problem your customers are dealing with.

The how-to

*Sure, you’ve got products or sell products made by someone else, so showcase them in a way that’s not salesy. It’s easy to create content showing your customers how to use something. A classic example is a hardware store showing how to install or set something up in a home. I’ve also seen numerous posts showing how the iPad can do this or that with a certain app in a certain line of business.

Go to the show

*In the last three years, I’ve traveled to more than a dozen trade shows and conferences where my corporate employer has a presence at, all in the name of blogging and public relations. Travel of this type allows you easy access to great content ideas (educational sessions, customer interviews, etc..) But a “show” doesn’t have to be eight states away. See what’s going on in your own backyard. The small business owner can find blog ideas at chamber of commerce meetings or community festivals. While the corporations can look for local events hosted by trade organizations, organized around a theme in their industry.

Notice none of those are really self-serving, in an obvious way. And, all of them can be supplemented by video, audio and photos.

Create compelling content!

To be relevant, corporate and business blogs can’t be 100% self-serving and marketing-focused.

The sooner businesses with blogs realize that, the better the blogosphere is as a whole.

Are you on a frantic pace to start and maintain blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and more?

I listen to The Advertising Show podcast with Brad Forsythe and Ray Schilens and want to draw your attention to their June 18, 2010 edition for an interesting analysis of the social media landscape in 2010.

The podcast featured an interview with Jonathan Salem Baskin, who manages Futurelab and blogs at Dim Bulb. He offered a view of social media that would probably cause the marketing “experts” on the Web to say “How dare you!” That’s probably why it struck me so much. Anything to bug the “experts.”

To me, Baskin makes perfect sense in a sea of so much do-this and do-that advice offered on a minute-by-minute basis online.

Baskin summed up social media in 2010 this way:

“I think social media generally is an amazing technology in search of meaning an purpose and I’m not certain we’ve really cracked the code yet on it. I think we’ve found a lot of fun ways to occupy people’s time and do entertaining things with it but ultimately the major drivers of social media usage have nothing to do with marketing or the messages that we marketers and brand folks want people to consume.”

Would the expert that your company hired to consult with your marketing and PR team say that?

Maybe not, or maybe.

Another excerpt from the podcast, regarding efforts at using humor and online video caught my ear as well.

“I don’t think the world needs another dancing elf,” Baskin said. “Men and women have proven their capacity to pleasantly waste people’s time. I think that’s great. I’ve elfed myself and elfed my friends. And as I’m talking to you right now I can’t tell you the brand name attached to that campaign… What are we trying to accomplish? Because if the answer is pleasantly waste people’s time, there are many very creative ways to do that.”

Baskin says the strategy for any marketing campaign should be “How the hell do I sell stuff?”

I do think most reasonable people advising businesses on social media matters understand that this is all very much a work-in-progress period. And I am a fan of trying things out, learning-by-doing, and seeing what the real return on social media is, whether you’re in marketing or PR.

Back to his first point about social media, Baskin did go on to say that he does think “there is an immense opportunity to crack the code, I just don’t think anybody knows how.”

Which means we’ve all still got a lot of learning to do, don’t we?

I used that photo in a presentation at my corporate job a couple weeks ago and the eyes of both the communicators and marketers in the auditorium saw the future.

Or did they?

On the one hand, it’s pretty busy to have a zillion screens in your face. How can you possibly see anything or pay attention to what you need to be watching. Why not one screen? Two? Or three?

Yet, I see how a business like Gatorade needs that kind of a setup. Listening, monitoring and engaging customers in social media is critical to their business. If they don’t have someone watching, reading and alerting the right people to real-time mentions of their brand they will miss one opportunity after another to interact with customers and influencers. (The employees tasked with monitoring also have access to the information on their desktops, not just in the room).

The room, and the effort, works for them because they are seeking to be a “participatory brand,” according to the Mashable post.

One other point worth making here… Mission Control sits in marketing. That makes sense, I get that. They’re trying to determine the reach of their ad dollars and translate it into engagement and sales.

But are they sharing the listening info with PR and Corporate Communications? Is there a PR presence in the room? Hard to tell from what I’ve read in the room. But it wouldn’t make sense to spend that money and not involve Corp Comm in some way. Issues involving reputation and business practices need to be monitored in the same way. And, we all know the gold mine those online conversations about your brands can be for giving you ideas for content for blogs, videos, podcasts, etc…

Now that I’ve addressed some reasons why a room like that might not work for everyone, let me take a moment to say why it should be in the future for many businesses.

Take it from someone who tries to monitor the Web as best he can, every day, in the midst of numerous other projects, including internal client PR, content creation and planning, and the dreaded daily overflowing inbox.

If the Corp Comm department I work in had at least one full-time position to do what I and others in my department try to do, and hour or minute here and there from my desktop, it would free up more time for projects aimed at engaging people behind the online conversations and for creating timely, relevant content that they would consume and share.

Every day, I seem to be leaning more and more toward advocating a setup like Gatorade’s, with a specific “social media department” if for nothing else to monitor and listen. I’m not talking about engagement here. Just for listening. And that department could have a manager or even a VP-level person at the top, or could also be placed under the supervision of Corp Comm or Marketing.

The point is monitoring can’t be a part-time job, whether you have a “room” or not.

Maybe a couple years ago. Maybe last week.

Not anymore.

There’s too much “gold” in what people are saying about your brand online to not be able to share it within your business in real-time or help you create content people are talking about, now. And, for some brands, there also are too many fires to put out. You can’t wait a week to turn on the hose and spray them with water.

A “room” helps put a priority on the listening. Finding the right ways and time to engage comes next.

For more on Gatorade’s Mission Control Center, here’s a promotional video they produced. It’s obviously less about the substance of the room, and more of a commercial, but you get the idea of the message they are sending about the importance they’re placing on listening:

While providing some good laughs in the midst of environmental devastation in the Gulf of Mexico, the parody Twitter account for BP (@BPGlobalPR) is just that. A harmless bit of parody.

I love the sarcasm from its writer. Must be my personality. Especially the “free” t-shirts… for $25. (The proceeds are going to help the Gulf).

By the way, here’s a photo of its creator, “Leroy Stick,” who was invited to speak at the TEDx Oil Spill event Monday in Washington, D.C.

And if you’ve got the time, here’s a bootleg-style video of his talk:

But from a social media standpoint, the magic of why @BPGlobalPR is funny and is so effective – and why it is getting widespread attention – is because the scale of the stupidity by BP is so grand. BP is easily mockable. And the interest in the spill is, of course, high. As “Stick” said in his talk Monday, their brand is dead right now. It will be interesting to see how long the account stays active.

BP’s own attempts to use Twitter to combat the sarcasm are even more laughable. (See @BP_America).

Well, their real PR folks have to at least try to get their story out. It’s not their fault their company mucked up the Gulf.

In the meantime, on June 15, a new player in Twitter parody emerged to rip Apple as well as AT&T. @ATT_Wireless_PR even has a great Twitter icon, the AT&T logo as the Death Star from Star Wars. Priceless.

I think the @ATT_Wireless_PR Twitter account also is catching on with followers because of its humorous sarcasm and the easy-to-rip state of Apple and AT&T’s high profile troubles right now. Though, AT&T’s recent history of ineptitude makes it take the brunt of any reputational damage the account can create. Nothing seemingly ever sticks to Apple, even the goofy “Don’t hold your iPhone that way” nonsense and criticism of the iPhone4 of the past week.

My point here is that no company is immune from having somebody create a parody Twitter account.

But now that the fake BP and fake AT&T accounts have gone mainstream. It won’t be so unique, so cool, the next time somebody tries to copy them on behalf of another company.

Someone can try, sure. But no one will really notice it if the company being mocked isn’t a big player in the public eye, one that’s already known for missing the mark more than its hits. And companies themselves won’t care about the accounts if they aren’t getting any real traction or following online.

You see, there’s nothing to stop me from starting a fake account for the neighborhood convenience store chain. But unless there’s some huge issue that the public has with that store, nobody’s gonna read or care about my fake, funny, tweets and – while I might be amusing – I’d be wasting my time trying to repeat the impact of @BPGlobalPR and @ATT_Wireless_PR.

Again, I’m not saying somebody won’t try. But the cat’s out of the bag on the unique factor. Also, isn’t it curious that Twitter shuts down any attempts for people to pretend to be people (celebrities, politicians, etc…) yet they let the fake company accounts continue?

Companies should be on guard if they screw something up, no doubt, but future sarcastic parody accounts will only be noticed if the companies they target are truly public enemy number one.

1. Listen to them, do nothing.

2. Listen to them, do something.

3. Don’t listen, don’t do anything.

Of course, it’s more complicated than three things. For example, by “do something” what do I mean?

Well, you could do a number of things for that “something” like:

*Engage the hater offline

*Engage the hater online

*Don’t engage the hater, write your rebuttal on your blog

*Don’t engage the hater, initiate a campaign to get your rebuttal message out another way

It’s still complicated, isn’t it? Especially when you take into account other factors, the biggest being what influence and reach does that hater have?

Yet, the notion of engaging haters isn’t a complicated one for Dr. Walter Massey of Bank of America.

In a post titled, “Tone From the Top: Open Engagement,” Bob Langert of McDonald’s pointed to a speech back in March by Massey (who also is a member of the McDonald’s Board):

“…nothing is more vital to the long-term health of a business than for boards and senior management to confront and engage, as opposed to obfuscate or deny, seemingly adversarial and hostile points of view. It may be that business is its worst enemy when compelled to dismiss these counter-narratives as the pointless products of wild-eyed radicals, dreamy idealists, or extremists — although in some cases these descriptions may be accurate. In my experience, managements that enter into dialogue with their one-time adversaries often turn former foes into valued partners in progress.”

I love that, the “pointless products of wild-eyed radicals.” Got any of those ripping your business out on the Web?

So what if you do have haters? Should you take Massey’s approach?

Writing on the Journalistics blog, Jeremy Porter’s “Turn Rants Into Raves” post suggests you might have some luck turning the tide in some situations.

But Porter says not all critics deserve a response:

Do you really have to pay attention though? Should you respond to every gripe or complaint a customer has? I don’t think so. Isn’t that the same thing as buying a kid candy every time they start screaming in the checkout line? Don’t you run the risk of conditioning your customers into crybabies? To a certain degree, I think this is the case.

Good point. People are bound to rant on the Web. Just as they’ve done offline for many years.

But, Porter says, every online critic could be turned into a fan, so to speak. With some work, of course:

In these smaller cases, there’s a good chance if you ignore a rogue complaint here or there, the person will go away. But you’d be missing a huge opportunity if you ignored them. Anytime somebody complains, you have an opportunity to turn their rants into raves.

Again, I think you need to carefully evaluate if a particular hater is worth your time. They may hate you so much it’s not worth it to try. However, what if the problem or issue they’re complaining about won’t be going away any time soon? (Think BP oil spill).

So, is it time to treat your haters – at least some of them – a little differently? Should you kill them with kindness?

Maybe, as Massey concludes, because there’s a matter of long-term reputation management at stake:

“…what matters most is not just to be responsive to the current crisis but to be publicly engaged for the long haul. That’s how you build up deposits in the public trust bank, an account you may need to draw on at some future date, during a time of crisis or need.”

As I’ve written about before, I oversee a corporate blog, whose goals are different from what the owner of a neighborhood restaurant is looking for her blog to do.

But there are indeed some universal pieces of advice that any business blog could benefit from, if put to use.

It starts with the blog’s purpose.

I think the purpose of a business blog is to:

*Serve as a site where company information and expertise can be on display every day

*Promote the value of your company and its products, brands and people

*Help form relationships between the business and a group of like-minded constituents (media/bloggers, customers, etc…)

Of course the key to making a blog work, for any size business, is the content.

Think like your customers, what do they want to know from you? Anticipate their questions and answer them.

And assume the role of a reporter…. Tell stories about your employees and how your customers are using your products. But remember, It’s not a sales pitch.

One final point… No one is going to even know your blog exists unless you make it a priority and post to it frequently.

You’re not doing your business any favors if you start a blog, don’t post to it very much, and give up on it because you don’t give it enough time to take off.

It’s no secret, customers make up the majority of the audience for the content I create.

And those customers might also happen to be bloggers or active on Twitter, giving them a degree of online influence whether they like your brand or not. Or if they don’t blog or tweet, they’re active on Facebook or Linkedin. Or, they also could just be “lurkers” reading, watching and listening to your Web content.

So if you want to spread the good word about your business, how do you develop the right relationships with influential online customers?

Creating these so-called “customer evangelists” isn’t done overnight. The key is to “listen” online first, to identify people who have shown your company support, people who demonstrate affinity for your brand. Then engage with them, show them some appreciation and show them you “see” them.

Linda Rutherford, vice president of Communication and Strategic Outreach at Southwest Airlines, says evangelists are the people who “support your brand and the decisions you have made,” who come to your defense in certain situations and also provide you good feedback and guidance as you develop new products. And, evangelists are not just customers. They can be employees too.

Rutherford recently shared her thoughts when she participated in a Vocus webinar. She also talked about Southwest’s vast social media experience (like its well-known Nuts About Southwest blog).

For Southwest, Rutherford said it is about going where the customers are – and already having conversations about Southwest, mostly positive – and joining in the conversation and engaging with them in meaningful ways.

In social media, Rutherford said, “People are telling stories and they are already gathering around a common interest.”

Rutherford said Southwest knew it had many customer evangelists who were fond of their brand when they first started looking into social media. “These conversations were already happening…” So, Southwest’s leadership said, “Let’s start engaging them more, let’s figure out new tools and new ways to build more communities of people talking about Southwest Airlines.”

Finally, you don’t necessarily start the conversation with a customer online. Sometimes, it happens in the workplace. In Southwest’s case, on a plane.

As an example, Rutherford cited a customer who appreciated how a flight attendant delivered the safety instructions as a song, recorded the video, and put it on YouTube:

(Photo courtesy: All Things D)

From the iPad to Google, Adobe to the iPhone… when Jobs talks people listen.

But he also made some comments about bloggers, and journalism to some extent, that are getting some attention.

According to The Register, Jobs said, “I don’t want us to become a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now… …We have to get ways of people to start paying for this hard earned content… Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other news gathering organizations to find new ways of expression, so they can afford to get paid, to keep their news gathering operations intact, I’m all for.”

So, what exactly is he talking about?

Well, get past the fact that Apple needs newspapers and news organizations to remain strong and vibrant, to provide the kind of content that is showcased well on the iPad. We all get that.

No, let’s focus on the intent of the first part of his statement, “I don’t want us to become a nation of bloggers.”

I like what Ira Stoll wrote on Future of Capitalism:

Imagine if when Apple was founded, some rich and powerful business executive had said, “I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of personal computer users myself…Anything that we can do to help IBM, Digital, Wang and Burroughs keep getting paid, so they can afford to keep their research and development operations and salesforces intact, I’m all for it.”

News flash for Jobs, we already are “a nation of bloggers.” You can’t stop it now.

We already have people without journalism training doing journalism, to some extent. We’ve already created an online world where readers can’t tell mainstream “balanced” news from partisan coverage. And, for better or worse many readers don’t care – they’re drawn to blogs and sites where they expect the news to have the slant they agree with.

But it certainly doesn’t mean journalism is going away. J-schools aren’t shutting down, they’re adapting.

It comes down to trust. And yes, it will require editorial oversight. People need to read and watch with a skeptical eye to know what’s legit and leaning toward a more balanced approach to news.

If anything, the shift that’s underway in content creation and news is creating more opportunities for journalism and story-telling to thrive. Reporters and would-be reporters aren’t just writing for print or the Web. They’re becoming more skilled at the digital ways of telling the story to really impact the reader or viewer, through multimedia, blogs and more.

Yes, there are more voices out there reporting the news as they see it, seemingly oblivious to journalistic principles. But I have faith and trust that most people will gravitate toward the good stuff and know fairly quickly if someone on the Web is full of crap.

Blogger nation, indeed.

But the finale did not disappoint. It was well done, and had me glued to the TV.

Right up until Jack Shephard shut his eyes. It was a creative ending, for sure.

Given, oh, about an hour now to process it I’m not among the many people online tonight who feel cheated. I think the producers told a good story, plain and simple, and with the way it ended the pressure’s off them on having to answer all the many unanswered questions.

None of those questions matter anymore, do they Lost fans?

It’s just a TV show, people.

But this isn’t a post about the show’s plot.

I was a latecomer to Lost. Didn’t watch the pilot episode. Instead, I started watching the show on DVDs about a year-and-a-half in and got sucked in by the mysteries and intriguing reveals show-by-show to see what would happen next. What the heck was going on, on that island?

It was a show like none other.

But somewhere along the way – okay the confusing time travel in Season 5 last year – Lost did finally lose me, but I kept watching just to see how goofy it could get. I was too invested in the characters. And, let’s face it, Lost had great characters. But Lost worked, even if there are still so many things that just don’t make sense. I got it though, and understood that many of the questions raised by the show would never be answered. A lot of people had trouble with that.

In an article he wrote for The Washington Post before the Lost finale, summing up the appeal of Lost, Hank Stuever said:

The right way to experience “Lost” was on a vast Internet archipelago of fan sites. You couldn’t just watch a TV show; to truly experience it, you also had to do all the auxiliary “Lost” homework and reading assignments.

This is where many people checked out — the show eventually shed 6 million of the 16 million viewers it had averaged in its first season. But with each season, something more important went up: a feeling of belonging to a club.

So, I want to explore that “club” notion a bit. Lost came along at the right time for that. Social media was taking off and diehard fans turned to blogs and podcasts dedicated to Lost – and eventually YouTube, Twitter and Facebook – to share theories and discuss the plot and “clues” from the episodes.

I got sucked into it and started listening to a couple podcasts that popped up – Lost podcast: The Transmission and LOSTCasts were my favorites, and of course the official Lost podcast from ABC.

So, while Lost is now TV history, it showed how social media and podcasting, in particular – in its literal infancy of the 2000s – could rally people around a TV show and turn fans into content creators and help make and keep the show popular. What TV network wouldn’t want to see that happen?

As frustrating as it was at times, if you didn’t watch Lost as it unfolded over the last six years I would encourage you to watch all the shows on DVD on your own time, all 120-some hours. As frustrating as it got for me to try and figure out, it was groundbreaking TV.

And, with the benefit of the Web… You can go back and listen to the podcasts dedicated to each episode, to see how the hosts talked about his show at the time, not knowing how it would all end.

Even if you now know the ending.

His talk gave me a lot of fodder for my work as a corporate communicator and for this blog, more to come here as I digest it all, but I wanted to at least post a few thoughts based on one of his items.

That is, the difference between an “encounter” with a brand and a “relationship.”

As we live in a time when “destination websites” are declining in importance as a go-to site for consumers looking for information about a brand. The era is not over, Holtz pointed out, but more people are increasingly getting brand information from word-of-mouth, their social networks, or YouTube, blogs, etc… Not just AcmeBrand.com.

Knowing that, how can a business “be there”?

Consumers are basically saying, if I can’t engage with the brand I won’t go there, said Holtz. A static website that you’ve had in place for years, with no opportunity for interaction, feedback or comments is not going to cut it. Companies need to be where the people are. If that’s Facebook or Twitter, for example, that’s where the interactions will take place.

So that’s where an “encounter” and a “relationship” can happen.

As Holtz explained, an “encounter” can be as simple as someone from a retail store reaching out to you on Facebook, to make a comment about your status update about what you bought in their store. Much the same way you’d have a conversation in the actual, physical store with a clerk. Your opinion of that brand can be shaped by that encounter, so for businesses, it’s important that those encounters go well and provide the customer with a positive experience.

But that’s far from a “relationship.” Holtz says there are very few instances of real relationships with brands. That retailer reaching out to you was a one time deal, there’s nothing more to it than that. That person from Acme reaching out to you on Twitter when you ask a question about a product, for example, is initiating an encounter with you.

Yet, encounters may lead that consumer to build a relationship with the brand by loyally and repeatedly seeking out its page on Facebook for deals, coupons… and then telling their friends about those things, essentially spreading the word for a brand they feel a connection to.

Marketers and communicators involved in social media should start with encounters, do them well, and the relationships with the business and brand will come.