Whether you are looking at adding blogging to your site or moving an old-style portal to a new platform with RSS, blogging, podcasting, polling and other Web 2.0 engagement mechanisms, Tom Parish Inc. has the experience to help. Social media is on the rise, and it's time for companies to bring their platforms up to speed.

One example comes from a recent client who asked for our advice on how to take their global consulting business and create an internal social media-based system so they communicate and share with each other more consistently. In other words, demote e-mail as their only path for communication, which was overloaded and ignored, and get the coaches more directly involved in reading and contributing knowledge amongst themselves.  And promote internal blogging, podcasting and polling. This also provided a way for new coaches to get up to speed in a cost-effective manner.

Here is a short story on what we've done for BMC Software out of Houston, Texas.

BMC Software Becomes Early Adaptor of Social Media Strategies

Contributed by Rod Amis of LSM

( Screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2 )

BMC Software is an international leader in business service management, with corporate headquarters in Houston, Texas, USA, international headquarters in Amsterdam and Singapore, and operational offices in thirty countries spanning every region of the world. Founded in 1980, the company created a strategy in mid-2005 about how to make the best leap in gaining better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and greater awareness of its brand among Information Technology (IT) groups of Fortune 1000 companies. Little did they know that their strategy would lead to their becoming pioneers in the Social Media Optimization (SMO) space instead.

Mike Smith, Director for Web Strategy, was in charge of a group to look at how the company could achieve its business objective. Tom Parish Inc., a consultancy firm, proposed that BMC deploy an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) called Plone to build a platform for a blogging community and begin a series of weekly Podcasts to be called "TalkBMC."  Parish says he recommended Plone because it could offer the look and feel of the original company Web site and thus provide users with a familiar-looking space. Parish's consultancy went on to mentor the company on how to partner with a community of IT bloggers.

The results were impressive. Within six weeks the blog-publishing platform was ready to go live. Since that time 170 Podcasts have been produced. Traffic to the site continues to grow every month, as have the number of calls and emails from people wanting to know more about BMC. Because of these added SMO features and the accompanying RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds that all the search engines spider, the company's SEO strategy can be considered a success using any metric.

BMC Software's management had envisioned this as a pilot project. Within two years it had become an established segment of their public relations and marketing arsenal, its blog postings and Podcasts mentioned by IT bloggers throughout the Web, its inquiry email boxes normally full.

Smith told LSM that TalkBMC topped 50,000 unique monthly visitors to its site after only a year and a half online. Between 120,000 and 130,000 people have downloaded its podcasts. Smith said that the value of this project, once considered a mere pilot, is that it has enhanced the communication voice of BMC's brand.

"One of the insights BMC gained is how to use blogging and podcasts for their yearly User Group event," Parish says. "This was an added benefit after the event to further engage people who didn't get to attend. And finally, with video Podcasting now so popular, there is some consideration being given to testing that kind of media to enhance TalkBMC."

In an interview with Smith in March 2007, LSM asked what working with Tom Parish Inc. brought to the table for this enterprise.

"Tom is exceptional at bringing a strategic approach on the technical side, to implementing a social media deployment," Smith told us. "What he is very good at is developing a plan that allows you to launch a pilot with a low budget, so that you can quantify results before expanding. Tom is extremely creative at how to implement projects with almost no money.

"When the pilot became aggressively successful for us, we ended up with a program that went huge, corporation-wide."

Because of these results, when Smith decided to launch a Chief Information Officer (CIO) Web site, now known as Enterprise Leadership, he went back to Parish to talk about strategy and deployment. The Plone CMS system seemed a good way to go, and focusing more on the value of the content for busy executives, rather than direct community-building, also seemed apt.

The results, again, were impressive. Enterprise Leadership, under Smith's guidance, is now an established source for CIOs interested in staying on top of the important concerns in the industry. It is also read by IT professionals interested in building successful organizations.

Social Media Lesson: Taking the first step in any process of experimentation — risky and unfamiliar as it might be — often leads to favorable, though unexpected, outcomes that increase an enterprise's visibility and enhance brand loyalty.

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