Thursday, July 03, 2008

Awesome, dude

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by guest blogger Pete Shinbach

What’s with the word “awesome?” I remember when awesome things were.... well, they were awesome. The Egyptian pyramids are awesome.  So’s Peru’s Machu Piccu, the Great Wall in China and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. In my lifetime, landing on the Moon was awesome.  So was the discovery of the polio vaccine and Don Larson’s perfect game.  But today, the bloom’s off the awesome rose. Two examples.

First, a few months ago, I was buying something somewhere and the price for the purchase was something like $1.08.  I gave the kid at the register a dollar bill and, fishing in my pants pocket, said something like, “I think I have the change.” His response: “Awesome.”

Flash forward to this morning. I was on the phone with Wells Fargo Bank, telling them that I wanted to close one of my two accounts, a savings account somehow linked to a checking account. No need to get into why but suffice to say that I ain’t a happy Wells Fargo camper. Anyway, Rachel, the service rep with whom I was talking to close the account, asked me if I wanted to close my checking account as well.  I told here that there were some outstanding transactions that hadn’t cleared yet but that, when they did, I would close that account.  To do that, I told Rachel that I’d call the bank’s customer service number, much as I’d done to get connected with her. Her response: “Awesome.”

So, I’ve two questions:

For the kid at the register: Since when is having change for a dollar awesome?

For Rachel at Wells Fargo: Why do you think that my dissatisfaction with and desire to stop doing business with your company is awesome?

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #359: July 3, 2008

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Content summary: Shel and Ryan Williams have reviewed “Groundswell;” an interview with the Media Bloggers Association’s Robert Cox is set for next Tuesday; Dan York reports on identi.ca, among other things; CustomScoop presents the Media Monitoring Minute; News That Fits: UK opens gigabytes of data to a public mashup competition; UK and US unions merge to form a global “super union,” Rob Paterson uses Ning.com for project management, CIGNA creates a virtual world of health care; listener comments; music from The TVees; and more.

Listen to FIR now:

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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for July 3, 2008: A 61-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #358 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

So, until Monday, July 7…

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Official blogger vs. just plain folks

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A lot of choices have to be made when a company decides to launch an official blog. Among these choices: Who will represent the company on the blog?

If you opt for a single blogger, you need to decide whether to tap someone already working for the company or hire a blogger. eBay opted for the latter, Real Networks for the former. Either way, that individual can potentially become a significant voice for the organization.

Some have argued the danger in this approach: If the blogger leaves the company to join, say, a competitor, the audience goes, too. While this may happen from time to time, I don’t buy it as an argument against an individual blogger. After all, key spokespeople have been changing jobs since long before the birth of the blogosphere. And if readers are as interested in the company as its blogger, they may just find themselves reading two blogs—the original blogger now talking about another company and the new blogger at the original company.

The other approach is a group blog. Some of the best corporate blogs are group blogs, including Direct2Dell, Southwest Airlines’ blog, GM’s Fastlane blog and TSA’s Evolution of Security. FastLane’s key blogger is GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, but other key car executives—mostly people reporting to LUtz—also weigh in. At Southwest Airlines, a number of employees representing the spectrum of jobs at the company were vetted and trained to blog.

Some observers dislike group blogs because they dilute the single voice that can be so compelling on a one-person blog. However, a range of voices from throughout the organization can be equally appealing. There are other benefits to a group blog:

• Nobody is required to spend too much time blogging. A post every couple weeks from each blogger assures a steady stream of fresh content.
• When an issue arises, there is somebody already blogging who is likely to be able to address it based on his or her area of expertise.
• If the blog is determined to be the best channel for a message from the president or CEO, the channel already exists even if the senior executive hasn’t made much use of it. GM’s Rick Wagoner has blogged on GM’s group blog; Gary Kelly at Southwest has done the same.

The most important advantage of a group blog, though, is that it reveals some of the real people in the organization to the public. The blogs listed above have demonstrated the good that comes from letting customer interact directly with employees. There’s also a financial advantage: Define an organization as you will, but without people, it’s nothing. The quality of an organization’s employees will have much to do with the company’s success or failure. Smart people communicating intelligently, candidly, and publicly about their jobs, the company, and the industry can only serve to inspire confidence in investors.

There’s no single right answer, of course; the choice between an individual and a group blog depends on what your company is trying to achieve with an official corporate blog. Weigh your options and choose what’s best for your company, but don’t automatically assume one approach is intrinsically better than the other.

FIR Book Review - Groundswell: July 2, 2008

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Groundswell is the highly-anticipated book by Forrester Research vice presidents and principal analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Subtitled “Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies,” the book seeks to show organizations how to tap into the power of customers connecting with one another.

The book includes 25 case studies from around the world. Focused almost entirely on customers and marketing, the book is supported by a considerable amount of data produced by Forrester’s research efforts.

In this FIR Book Review, FIR co-host Shel Holtz and TWI Surveys President Ryan Williams discuss their take on the new book, addressing their misgivings and ultimately recommending Groundswell.

Listen to this podcast now:

Get this podcast:

• Download the MP3 file (13.4Mb, 29:22)
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About our Co-Reviewer

Ryan Williams is President of TWI Surveys Inc. He specializes in behavioural and organizational research. He has ten years of experience with corporate, government and not-for-profit clients. Ryan recently completed his MA in Leadership studies at Trinity Western University. His thesis is explored the use of surveys as a leadership strategy and tool. He has spoken internationally, nationally and at local Universities and Colleges.

He has received a number of awards for his client work. In 2004 he was recognized by the International Public Relations Institute with their Golden Ruler Award of Excellence for Measurement 2005. Ryan has won three International Association of Business Communicators’ Gold Quill Awards, the most recent being in 2007 for the benchmarking and tracking the effectiveness of a series of leadership town hall meeting with employees at Suncor Energy.

Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Hardcover: 224 pages
Published May 2008
ISBN-10: 1422125009
ISBN-13: 978-1422125007

Purchase at Amazon US, Amazon Canada, or Amazon UK.

Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future reviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full RSS feed.

This FIR Book Review is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

LinkedIn in Plain English

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The CommonCraft blog today unveiled a new PaperWorks video: LinkedIn in Plain English. As usual, Lee and Saschi LeFever have done a first-rate job. At presentations, it’s become typical for me to hear from people who have LinkedIn accounts but aren’t sure what to do with them. This video—which CommonCraft produced as an assignment for LinkedIn—does a bang-up job answering that question.

Non-threatening ways to get your company started with social media

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As organizations seek to expand their communication efforts to include social media, they often find themselves facing the same hurdles that were faced and ultimately overcome by earlier adopters. Efforts to introduce social media have been hamstrung by questions of time commitment, IT issues, and legal concerns.

Usually, blogs are the tactic that face these obstacles (although I have also heard of other challenges, such as a legal objection to the construction of a special-purpose Facebook page). The assumption that blogs must be the company’s point of entry into social media is most likely based on the fact that blogs were the first social media tool. By the time other tools, like Twitter, came along, tens of millions of blogs already populated the Web and companies from Sun Microsystems to McDonald’s were already showing results from their blogging efforts.

While there are plenty of good reasons for a company to blog, there’s no rule that says blogs must kick off a company’s foray into social media. In fact, if you start with something that isn’t threatening to the lawyers or likely to raise much concern among IT staff, the successful implementation of smaller, less flashy tools can pave the way for more involved engagement.

If your company hasn’t touched social media yet, consider starting with these approaches:

• For your external communications, add a “share this” link to every article or page
• For internal communication, add a rating-and-comment feature to every page

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People increasingly use aggregation tools to find interestithe websites of media outlets like The New York Times or CNN. (Max Kalehoff says he visits the Times site only to read particular blogs.) Democratized content sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and NewsVine -- where the users determine what’s important rather than a gatekeeper—are also growing in popularity. Even in the world of search, it’s not unusual to hear someone suggest that they get more targeted results by searching Delicious or Furl than Google.

It’s altogether possible that a reader will submit a news item or press release from your website to one of these services. It’s far more likely, though, if you make it easy by giving them the utility to submit with just two clicks (one to open the “share this” box, the other to submit). Consider the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A search of Digg produces several pages of results, most of which are less than flattering with headlines like “FDA’s handling of proposed cancer drug defies compassion” and “Shame on the FDA.” There is, however, a link to an FDA press release about the formation of a nanotechnology task force. The press release itself features no links at all. A “share this” link would certainly lead far more people to do so—people to whom it might never occur to share at all without the nudge.

In fact, if all of the FDA’s press releases contained “Share This” links, it’s likely that more positive material would find its way to Digg, Delicious, and other sites where they would be visible to people who would otherwise never see it, providing some balance to content submitted by the agency’s critics.

It’s important for organizations to get their messages out to where people are spending their time and consuming their information (which is not your dot-com website).

Rate-and-comment

Most intranets are hard to navigate and contain content of questionable value. The simple act of letting employees comment on and rate a page can make good content easier to find and increase the usefulness of a lot of that material.

A simple YouTube-like five-star rating system serves a number of purposes. It gets employees accustomed to interacting. It provides an at-a-glance indication of how valuable other employees have found a page (assuming it has amassed enough votes). And a “highest-rated pages” listing can help direct employees to useful content (as opposed to most-viewed).

Enabling comments on pages lets employees enhance the content with their own experiences and observations. Consider the page containing the travel policy. An employee might add a comment noting that his expense report was kicked back multiple times because currency conversions were wrong, then directing employees to the right resource for calcuating conversions.

In both the external and internal cases, the value of social media should become evident in relatively short order and serve as a basis for introducing those blogs, Facebook pages, and other tools that help organizations engage in dialogues with their publics.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Word games with AP content

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On the one hand, Associated Press asserts that it wants to protect its content from abuse by bloggers. On the other hand, they’re willing to sell their content by the word to anyone willing to pay. All of which makes you wonder if the venerable AP has taken any issue at all with the manipulation of its content by one of its customers, the American Family Association.

The organization is using software to automatically replace the word “gay” with “homosexual” in all of the AP stories selected to appear on the organization’s news site, OneNews Now. (This has led to the renaming of Olympics-bound track star Tyson Gay into Tyson Homosexual; pro basketball player Rudy Gay got the same treatment.)

The blog where I learned about this is as politically-minded as the American Family Association, the 31-year-old organization founded and still run by Rev. Donald Wildmon. The AFA is focused on “traditional family values” and wields considerable clout because of its large, voting constituency. But while I am troubled by the message the search-and-replace effort is meant to convey—I’m equally dismayed at the wanton abuse of content. Presenting AP-branded content without disclosing that it has been altered is plainly immoral

Personally, I find the AFA’s actions deplorable on a number of levels. My friend Pete Shinbach, who directed me to the story, reminded me of the time AOL blocked the word “breast” as part of a decency filter, denying women access to breast cancer support groups and content (not to mention blocking access to recipes for chicken breasts). You would think we learned back then, wouldn’t you?

But this blog is about the communication business, not my personal political or ethical views, and in that context, it’s the AP I wonder about. If it’s an abuse of intellectual property to run more than four words without anteing up, isn’t it an abuse for somebody to buy the content and then rewrite it to serve partisan purposes?

I don’t know that the AP is not taking any action to curtail the AFA’s practices. But I have done some searching and haven’t yet found any evidence to suggest the AP has ever commented publicly on the issue. The right move would be to pull the plug; stop providing the AFA with content based on a flagrant breech of contract.

But then again, times are tough for the print journalism business, and if the AP is looking to bloggers to pay by the word to quote their content, how anxious would they be to turn away a paying customer?

Given the recent dustup in the blogosphere AP could do itself a lot of reputational good by taking a stand. While the politics of the AFA would undoubtedly wind up being a significant factor, it’s really not about that; I would hope AP would take just as strong a stand if it were a left-wing organization replacing the word “Republicans” with “Right-Wing Extremists.”

No, it’s not about politics; it’s about principle. If AP wants us to believe its pratices are all about protecting intellectual property, the same standard should apply here.

Over to you, AP.