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Sunday, January 31, 2010

HC+T Update: January 2010

The first HC+T Update email newsletter for 2010.

1) Questions Your CEO Should Ask Before Blogging
2) Open Access Is Smart Business, Not An Employee Entitlement
3) Next Webinar: Five New Communication Technologies You Need to Know
4) What Employee Communications Looks Like In The Networked Company
5) The News Industry’s Turmoil Increases The Complexity Of PR
6) Is Your Company Invisible Without An iPhone App?
7) Join Me In Chicago on March 11
8) Site Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information

As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1) Questions Your CEO Should Ask Before Blogging

The question of CEO blogging keeps coming up. Opinions mostly fall in two camps:

All CEOs should blog. As the leaders and chief communicators of their organizations, it is incumbent on CEOs to represent their companies in the social space where so much influence is wielded.
No CEOs should blog. Because of regulations that govern the kinds of statements CEOs can make, and when, there is just too much risk that an innocent remark could result in a fine.

As with most things, though, the question of CEO blogging is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Clearly CEOs can blog, as evidenced by the number of CEOs who do.

If your CEO is considering blogging, have him or her answer these questions before taking the plunge:

Are you the best person in the company to assume this role?

In the early days of corporate blogging, GM launched one of the earliest blogs penned by a senior executive. It wasn’t then-CEO Rick Wagoner, but rather Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. The decision was based on the fact that the most compelling kinds of conversations GM could have would be about cars, not the automotive business. Since Lutz was the most senior executive with direct responsibility for the vehicles GM produced, he became the executive blogger. Wagoner did post from time to time, when it was important for the CEO’s voice to be associated with the message, using a different company blog.

The focus of the blog is also the key to the next question:

Are you willing to blog about what your stakeholders want to talk about?

Far too many corporate and CEO blogs are filled with material the company wants to push to audiences. While this may make leaders feel good about using a blog, odds are that readers won’t flock to it. These messages are being pushed to them through any number of channels. For a blog to succeed, you need to start conversations about topics your stakeholders want to talk about. Do you know what those topics are? And are you prepared to address them, even if they’re not always what you think is important? If you do focus on topics your readers care about, it becomes easier to digress from time to time with topics you want to share with them. The more the blog becomes a locus of conversation and community, the more interested your readers will be in some of the issues you want to put on the table.

Are you ready to engage your stakeholders in conversation?

The point is debatable, but I don’t believe you have a blog unless you’re publishing reader comments. Without comments enabled, you’re just using blogging software to publish a column. Leaders who blog need to be ready to pay attention to reader feedback and input, and even engage in it. This doesn’t mean a CEO needs to actually read every comment left to his blog, particularly if it becomes popular and attracts hundreds of comments for every post. At some companies, a staff reads the comments, aggregates them based on their topics and sentiment, and delivers a summary report to the executive. Some executives engage directly in the comment while others simply write a follow-up post acknowledging what he heard from readers. But to view an executive blog as just one more one-way, top-down channel is to dramatically reduce the likelihood that stakeholders will pay attention to it. These are people who have come to expect interaction as part of the blogging experience.

Are you willing to commit to posting something regularly—that you’ve written yourself?

You can post as often as you like, but you must post at least weekly (three times a week is better) in order to build momentum, to build the expectation that you’re going to be opening discussions.

This is not a task you can offload to a PR staffer, the way you could when your byline appeared under the ghost-written CEO column that appeared on the inside front cover of the employee magazine. The whole idea underlying a blog is that it’s an authentic, honest message that you wanted to deliver and open for conversation. Nothing is more disingenuous than saying, “This is my blog, I’ve started it so we can have a dialogue about our business, but I’m not really writing it; it’s just not important enough for me to commit that kind of time.”

Your blog doesn’t need to take all that much time. In response to CEOs who have told me they don’t have the time to write a 1,500-word blog post, I respond, “That’s good; your readers don’t have time to read a 1,500-word blog post.” Short, pithy observations, explanations, and reports are ideal. What’s more, you don’t have to actually type anything. Marriott International CEO Bill Marriott dictates his posts into a digital recorder, which is transcribed (word for word) by his staff. At HP, a senior executive calls his posts into a voice-mail box established just for that purpose; his messages are also transcribed by staff for posting.

Ultimately, though, your view should be that you don’t have time not to blog. You should recognize what other CEOs—like Thomas Nelson Publishers CEO Michael Hyatt—have realized: that blogging ultimately saves time by reducing the more time-consuming communications that eat into your day. If you blog well, you’ll find that you’ve reallocated much of the time you spent less efficiently with other channels to your blog.

Are you well-schooled in what you can’t say?

Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott International, writes about topics that will never cause regulatory problems. His posts talk about his staff, Marriott’s corporate social responsibility efforts, and other topics that would never raise an eyebrow at the SEC. Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, on the other hand, does blog about the business side of Sun, but is savvy enough about the regulations that govern his words that he is able to avoid writing anything that would cause him trouble. Do you know enough about the regulations, what kinds of off-the-cuff remarks might be viewed as a material forward-looking statement or a revelation about earnings? If not, don’t blog.

Of course, if you’re with a privately held company not subject to SEC rules, this isn’t as important a consideration, although you should keep in mind that there are agencies regulating your business besides the SEC.

Are you prepared to talk about bad news and unpleasant topics?

Your blog cannot be all happy talk, even when your company is hit with bad news. Candor and credibility are contingent upon your being willing to address the issues about which your stakeholders want to hear from you. Are you ready to tackle bad news on your blog and to hear what your stakeholders have to say about it?

If you answer “no” to any of these questions, then you’re not a likely candidate for a CEO blog.

There are alternatives, however, if you’re bound and determined to have your CEO voice heard in the socialmedia space:

Group blogs—Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly posts an occasional item to the Nuts About Southwest blog, but only when the CEO’s voice needs to be heard. The blog is ready and available to him because of the community of Southwest employees who keep it populated with a wide variety of posts.
Facebook—A fan page on Facebook affords you an opportunity to create content stakeholders might be interested in and then add a CEO commentary only when the occasion calls for it.
Video—If your concern is that you’re not the world’s greatest writer, you could always opt for a video blog, speaking (not reading) your comments to a camera. There’s actually a tangible benefit to this approach: Your stakeholders can look into your eyes while you’re talking to them. You can upload your videos to a YouTube channel and embed the YouTube videos in your blog, making it easy for others to spread your words across other channels.

What other criteria should a CEO consider before undertaking a blog?

Here are some other CEOs who blog:

Paul Levy, CEO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
John Mackey, CEO, Whole Foods Markets
Mike Critelli, now-retired Executive Chairman, Pitney Bowes
Richard Edelman, Edelman Public Relations

There are many other CEO bloggers. Whose CEO blog would you point to as an excellent example?

2) Open Access Is Smart Business, Not An Employee Entitlement

At first, I shrugged off the semi-literate comment left to one of my posts over on Stop Blocking, the site I started to advocate for reasonable employee access to the Net, and particularly to social media sites.

The post to which “reason,” as he called himself left a comment reported on a study that showed 54% of companies were blocking access. Here’s his response:

isnt it funny in todays world how everyone thinks they deserve better than what they are getting without haveing to really work for it no job owes you facebook time so feel your rights are being taken for granted grow up you big baby work time is not your fun time so if you block your workers from facebook @ work dont feel that blocking reduces productivity and engagement, limits recruiting capabilities, and denies networking that ultimately benefits the organization. thats a bunch of crap do your job facebook dont pay your bills you lucky to even have a job.

I blew off the comment initially, relegating it to the “just doesn’t get it” dustbin. But I found the comment kept coming back to me, not because reason’s reasoning is right but because he seems to think that I’m advocating for employee rights in my efforts to get companies to stop blocking.

barred gate I’m not an employee rights advocate. If I were, very few of my clients would be interested in my services. My goal is to help organizations succeed. I’ve achieved my goals if companies are more profitable, more competitive, more nimble, more productive. I’m campaigning to get companies to open employee access to social sites because increasingly the networked connectivity of workers is driving competitiveness, productivity and other indicators of improved performance.

The fact is, through all my years working in employee communications, I’ve never been concerned with whether employees are happy. It’s not a company’s job to ensure employee happiness. Employee job satisfaction is another story. It’s tangible, it’s measurable and it has a direct bearing on employee engagement, which is a predictor of organizational growth.

But even job satisfaction is just one return a company gets from networked employees. Zappos encourages its employees to network on the job, resulting in a reputation for stellar customer service. Employees engaged in their social networks can also reduce the cost and improve the quality of recruiting. It can surface issues the company needs to address. It can generate ideas for new products and services. It improves employee productivity.

On that last note, productivity, I came across an item today on TMCnet sporting the provocative headline, “Workplace Productivity at an All-Time Low.” The press release touted the products of a company called Pandora—not the music streaming site, blocked by a number of companies—but rather one that “allows managers to analyze activities performed by employees and the time spent on different work items. It also affords the ability to track computer usage at a group and/or an individual level, cross-reference activities reported by an employee, and access an employee’s desktop in real-time.”

The all-time low productivity claim is based on this calculation:

On average, workers with an Internet connection spend 21 hours per week online while in the office, a little more than four hours per day. And on average, 26% of that time is spent on personal-interest websites. That amounts to roughly an hour per day, or 22 hours per month.

Pandora is just one of many companies that profit from the fear they produce with such outlandish claims. As I’ve repeatedly noted, these calculations don’t account for the benefits such networking brings to the organization, the improved productivity highlighted in a University of Melbourne study, or the amount of work these employees perform outside the 9-to-5 office hours because they’re networked. In fact, another story that crossed my desk today points out that companies in the UK were able to maintain productivity even as snowbound workers were unable to get to the office because their ability to connect with each other and the office let them get their work done from home.

And, as I’ve also noted before, these lost-productivity assertions don’t stand up to statistical scrutiny. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased in the third quarter of 2009 by 8.1%. That’s a far more credible number than the back-of-the-envelope calculations Pandora, Websense and other monitoring-and-blocking companies use in their scare campaigns. In fact, it reveals the productivity claims by these companies as an outright lie.

Yet these tactics continue to influence managers, as evidenced by the fact that most companies block access despite the fact that blocking is contrary to their own self interests.

Leaders need to realize that organizations that encourage their employees to network during work—guided by clear policies and improved business literacy—will experience success that eclipses that of organizations that block access.

It’s not a question of employee entitlements. It’s a question of smart business practices.

3) Next Webinar: Five New Communication Technologies You Need to Know

A five-week Webinar with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, March 1, 2010
Cost: US $195
Register here

It seems that each new year brings communicators the challenge of learning the latest technologies that will affect the way they do their jobs. But 2010 heralds the introduction of several new online technologies that will have a more profound impact than usual. In this illuminating Webinar, online communication expert Shel Holtz will guide you through five of the most important technologies you’ll need to understand as you adapt your communication strategies to the tools embraced by your publics.

During each of the Webinar’s five weeks, Shel will bring you up to speed on a different online trend. These will include:

The real-time web—Since its inception in 1989, the World Wide Web has been a repository of static content. You found updated sites by polling them. The change to a real-time web, with updates pushed to you instantly, heralds a significant change in how the web will impact your organization and how you can use it to your company’s advantage.
Augmented Reality—If you’ve seen a football game in the last few years, you’ve seen Augmented Reality (AR) in the shape of a digital yellow line indicating the spit to be reached for a first down. Now it’s being used for everything from helping you find the nearest subway entrance via your smart phone to promoting music on the web.
HTML 5—We were told HTML 4 would be the last update to the web scripting language, but HTML 5 is here and will significantly alter the way your audiences interact with online content. You need to be ready to adopt it.
The app revolution—When Apple introduced the App Store with the launch of the iPhone, it was empty. Apps were not Apple’s focus, but they have become the driving force behind the iPhone and its competitors. They’ve even extended beyond smart phones to printers and television. Will you know when an app is a requirement to achieve your communication strategy?
GPS and location services—If you haven’t ‘checked in” at a location with the mobile game FourSquare, you know somebody who has. The localization of online content is being aided by the GPS functionality of smart phones, and the business uses are just now being conceived.

When management asks whether you should be using these technologies, you’ll need the answer. Even better will be proposing their use strategically before management is even aware of them.

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

To get an overview of how these Webinars work, visit http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and view the demo video.

Webinar cost: US $195

Register here

4. What Employee Communications Looks Like In The Networked Company

Awareness is rising of the impact on business of networked employees—those workers who are continuously connected to their social circles and can tap into them at will. The discussion seems to be shifting, ever so slowly, to the characteristics of companies that, rather than inhibiting these traits, want to reap the benefits of a networked workforce. Recent posts by Olivier Blanchard and Valeria Maltoni have speculated on the nature of these companies. Olivier calls them P2P companies; Valeria refers to them as connected companies.

They both see the recruiting process changing, for example, to one of inviting people already connected to the company through online and offline social networks to come work for them. The IT department becomes the ET department—Technology Enablement. P2P companies don’t outsource customer service. Collaboration is supported by the use of the best tools available. And, according to Maltoni, “Facilitating conversations inside and outside the connected company means designing business through interactions.”

You’ll recognize more and more of these traits as existing companies evolve into networked companies and startups embrace the P2P model. But succeeding under the P2P model won’t happen just because it seems right. It’ll take work. Companies have to implement systems to support the model.

Employee Communications is a critical function that must adapt in order to accommodate its role in a networked company. Inspired by Valeria and Olivier, I’d like to offer a list of characteristics of the employee communications function in the networked/P2P company.

Ease employee access to social networks. Both Olivier and Valeria have noted that connected companies won’t block access to social networks. Leaving access unfettered is, indeed, a requirement, but companies will need to go a few steps beyond unshackling employees from the restrictions that keep them from connecting. It will be incumbent on the internal communications function to identify communities within social networks where the company’s products, services, operations, and other dimensions are discussed and even summarize the nature of the conversation taking place in this communities. Helping employees identify where the conversation is can help them begin participating in a more meaningful way. After all, it is within some of these communities where employees will establish and build relationships with people who are likely to become candidates for employment. These networks are also where employees will glean insights from customers that could lead to product or service innovation.

Show employees who’s saying what, right now. Employees already participate in the networks and communities aligned with their interests. Some may be interested in engaging elsewhere, such as communities they’ve never heard of where the company or its brands are being discussed. At the least, companies should provide a directory of these communities. Ideally, however, companies will let employees see, in as close to real time as possible, what the members of those communities are saying about the company. You might consider this a curator role for Employee Communications, one that demonstrates the sentiment of real people with real influence who are having real conversations about your organization. I can easily see a dashboard on the intranet portal with the very latest customer sentiments along with a link to more detailed content from these communities.

Communicate research results. Organizations of all stripes spend a ton of money on consumer research. Few share the results of the research with employees company-wide; it’s data that, for one reason or another, is usually made available only to brand team members. With all employees networking with customers, knowledge of the study results can inform the conversation. Internal communications needs to become a channel for sharing the results of market research throughout the organization.

Increase business literacy. Employees need to know the business. It’s a sad fact that most frontline employees couldn’t answer basic questions about the business beyond the work of their own department. It’s equally sad that this is most often true because nobody bothers to teach them about the business and the resources for them to teach themselves aren’t readily available. Employee Communications needs to focus considerable effort on ensuring employees are savvy about the company for which they work.

Build awareness of business initiatives. In addition to general business literacy, employees need to know about specific initiatives. Employees in a hospital that has started marketing its quality ratings should know about the effort. Employees in a manufacturing organization that has taken steps to be more sustainable should be able to talk intelligently about what that means.

Make sure everyone knows the rules of the road. Too often, organizations assume that because a policy has been published, everyone knows what it is. Employee Communications needs to communicate the policies and guidelines that govern employee activity in online communities on an ongoing basis through multiple channels. No employee should ever be surprised to learn they have violated a policy.

Champion and support internal training. Some of the companies that have the most positive employee engagement are ones in which employees can attend classes to learn about how to engage. At Zappos, employees can take classes on Twitter. The Mayo Clinic offers tweetcamps, where doctors and other staff can learn about social media. Ideally, the Internal Communications team will partner with the Training department to develop learning opportunities—face-to-face and online—that will help employees get business-literate and learn about social networking and how their engagement can produce meaningful results for the company.

Enlist company advocates. Best Buy’s Twelpforce is one of the more forward-thinking initiatives for engaging front-line employees with customers. Blueshirts—the employees who work in the retail stores—volunteered to respond to queries sent via Twitter to the Twelpforce account. Companies can take this concept beyond the initiative level, finding those engaged employees—that is, the employees who want to make discretionary efforts on behalf of the company, train them, and get them into vital communities. (This kind of engagement must be disclosed and transparent, of course. I’m not suggesting anything deceptive, just a means of identifying and activating those employees who want to be part of the organization’s organic networking efforts.)

Work with ET to ensure systems support networking. If IT has transformed into Technology Enablement, they are the ideal partner for Employee Communications to identify and launch the tools employees can best use to network with one another. The technology department can also ensure the intranet supports the modules referenced earlier, such as business literacy training, communication of research results, and real-time updates of who’s saying what about the company in key online communities.

All of this has to happen along with much of the traditional work Employee Communications performs, such as letting employees know that benefits enrollment is coming, supporting an internal change process, and informing employees about decisions that will affect them. In a networked company, there’s no question in my mind that the role of Employee Communications becomes bigger and more important.

What other traits should characterize the Employee Communications function in the networked organization?

5. The News Industry’s Turmoil Increases The Complexity Of PR

stack of newspapers There has been a lot of news about news lately and on the surface, none of it bodes well for the traditional newspaper business, regardless of whether you’re talking about paper newspapers or their online cousins. It does, however, reveal opportunities for people working in PR.

It should come as no surprise that readership of newspapers—both print and online—continues to decline. A Harris poll released just yesterday finds that only two out of five Americans read a newspaper every day, while 72% read a newspaper at least weekly. Ten percent never read a newspaper.

I’m not convinced that last number is all that different than it was, say, 30 years ago. I remember the number of people I encountered when I was in journalism school who didn’t read newspapers—and this was back in the days of the manual typewriter. But the size of the traditional news audience is shrinking. In a presentation delivered at Yale, Pew Internet and American Life Project Director Lee Rainie pointed out that 19% of Americans get no daily news at all, up from about 14% a decade ago. What’s more, Rainie pointed out, the people who do consume news daily spend eight fewer minutes with the news than they used to.

If this isn’t dire enough, the population of newspaper reader is aging; the younger you are, the less likely you are to read a newspaper every day. Nearly two-thirds of those 55 and over make daily newspaper reading a habit. (That might explain my own morning routine.)

All of this—and a host of other statistics that seem to predict the ultimate demise of the traditional news business—leads a lot of communicators to wonder if there’s any value in maintaining a traditional media relations function.

But shrinkage isn’t the same as death. There’s no indication that the trend will continue until there are no newspaper readers.

Remaining newspaper readers still matter

Consider this: While less than a quarter of people 18 to 34 read a daily newspaper, that’s not a number to be trifled with. The 18-24-year-old demographic accounts for about 25% of the U.S. population, or about 77 million people. When you have 19 million young people reading newspapers every day, you’d be foolish to ignore the channel when trying to reach that market, especially when you consider that many of them are likely influencers.

Remember, most of the content reported via social media is not original reporting. Bloggers, Twitterers and others are repurposing content that comes primarily from newspapers. The news that so many people get through these other channels originates in newspapers and is reported through social media by people who read newspapers. Having your story told in a newspaper increases the likelihood that it will be seen by people who rely on alternative sources for their news. Just today, PostRank reported that 80% of all audience engagement is offsite. That means even bloggers’ content is being read on Facebook, Digg, and other venues other than the blog where it was originally produced. It isn’t just newspapers that are in this boat.

In a study that focused on the news delivered over a weeklong period in one major city—Baltimore—the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that, far and away, newspapers were responsible for reporting new information. Examining six key story lines, Pew determined that 95% of new information came from a combination of traditional media (newspapers, television and niche media, with newspapers leading the pack) while “new media”—including social media—reported the least new information.

The Pew study also found that the press was responsible for triggering only 15% of the news they covered. The rest came from other sources. If you’ve been thinking the downturn in the news business has signaled the end of any need for traditional media relations, think again. Yes, 10% of people who have social networking profiles get news through those sites. But those sites didn’t originate the news. By and large newspapers did.

This means the the role of the newspaper is shifting. They remain the primary source of first reporting, but now serve as the inadvertent distributor of news to secondary channels through which an increasing number of people get their news.

A study I’d like to see would determine if social media content creators are among the remaining newspaper readers. I’d be willing to bet real money that they are.

Authoritative sources still matter

It’s equally important to have channels that let you get your organization’s news directly to its audiences. While media relations will be important for the foreseeable future, you’re competing for a shrinking amount of news space. The Baltimore Sun, for example, produced 32% fewer news stories in the period of the Pew study than it did 10 years earlier and 73% fewer than it did in 1991.

Some smug new-media pundits may be basking in the warmth of the certain knowledge that blogs and other social channels have taken up the slack. But that’s not so. According to the Pew study—as I suggested above—social media has served mostly to notify readers of the mainstream article’s existence. Social media has a greater impact on the speed with which news breaks than on the overall number of new stories. Citizen journalism has its place to be sure (just look at the iReports CNN is including in its coverage of the Haitian earthquake), it’s not panning out as a replacement for professional journalism. Social media is finding a more comfortable niche in areas such as fundraising (again, look at the Haiti situation, where social media is responsible for raising awareness of the U.S. State Department and Red Cross relief efforts, generating millions of dollars in giving.)

The repetition of news items by social media content producers—from blog posts to tweets—satisfies the growing preference for news grazing, consuming bits of news all the time instead of all at once (whether that’s sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper for half an hour or watching the nightly news). Fewer people get their news at all one regular time than get it from time to time, according to numbers Rainie cited during his Yale talk.

But this repurposing of news creates confusion. As the Project for Excellence in Journalism put it, “As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.”

Blogger Adam Sherk beat me to the punch with the observation that the long-abused press release still has legs: “Companies can increase the likelihood of their press releases being used by bloggers and local news sources by giving them a more news-like tone and dialing down the marketing hype,” he writes. Press releases bearing the company’s official imprint can be authoritative statements of record in the absence of other sources people can trust.

Press releases still matter

That’s a significant change in the press release’s former role as a pitch to mainstream media. That role is dead, but as a channel for getting information directly to people—information they can cite—the press release has new life. (They also do a bang-up job of search engine optimization, when done right.)

You should also read Shannon Cherry’s post extolling the virtues of making your press releases available for subscription via an RSS feed, which contradicts the growing popular belief that RSS has outlived its usefulness. “Many reporters are using RSS feeds to get their releases, because they can customize what they are receiving for their target market,” Cherry writes. “Many of the press release posting sites only have one feed, so journalists avoid them due to all the clutter of releases not pertinent to them. They would certainly rather subscribe to news feeds, like your press release feed, that’s targeted.”

In other words, if you want your company’s or client’s story told, you need to make sure it’s everywhere. To get social media content creators to report it, you need to do your damnedest to get it into the papers. To get it in the papers, you need to maintain a solid media relations effort that accommodates reporters’ preferences (like RSS). You also need to go directly to influencers (through blogger outreach) and directly to the public (through a variety of techniques ranging from a strategic social media presence to tried-and-true SEO practices).

The news space has grown more complex. The sophistication of your efforts to earn coverage need to grow with it.

6. Is Your Company Invisible Without An iPhone App?

Speaking as a CES panelist, NewsGator Media & Consumer Products GM Walker Fenton told the audience, “You’ve got to be on the iPhone; same as you’ve got to be on the Web.” Not having an iPhone app today, he suggested, is like not having a website 10 years ago. Without an iPhone app, you don’t exist.

It’s a sentiment I’m seeing echoed by a lot of observers and analysts. I appreciate the enthusiasm and understand where it’s coming from. And while your organization may well benefit from an iPhone app, it’s not a requirement. What is required is developing a strategy for smart phones.

Marketers and communicators should look at two issues when making plans for their presence in the mobile phone space.

First, is an app the answer at all?

Claiming that apps are a requirement is putting tactics before strategy. Whether to release a smartphone app should be the answer to the question: “What tactics can we employ to achieve the objectives that drive our strategy?” I imagine “We need an iPhone app” is as common an assertion today as “We need a brochure” was 20 years ago. Those who “needed” a brochure had rarely performed the due diligence to determine that a brochure was the most effective means of accomplishing their goals.

photo of smartphone As one commenter noted in response to Fenton’s assertion, “If you have a website, you’re already on every smartphone.” If there’s a requirement for every organization regarding smartphones, it’s to bring their websites up to snuff for viewing on phones.

Having the mobile-ready site is a first step; the next is making sure people can find it. “Make sure that the redirects are in place so that most mobile browsers will end up (at your mobile-ready site),” writes Steve Smith at Mobile Insider. While Smith recognizes that 2010 will be the year of mobile-ready content that employs a lot of creativity,

It is going to have to be creativity with a purpose. I did a quick review of brands’ mobile sites the other day and found that there is a substantial difference between merely having a mobile “presence” and having a mobile purpose.

This is a no-brainer, given the shift of web consumption from the computer to the mobile phone. Morgan Stanley, in "
The Mobile Internet Report” released last month, proclaimed that “More users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.” Yet I’m routinely surprised at the number of companies that haven’t taken even the first tentative steps to address this trend.

Adam Cahill, writing for ClickZ News, suggests a three-phase approach to strategizing your adoption of mobile technology as a marketing/communications channel:

Assess the impact of the persistently connected consumer is on your your industry and your business. “How, when, and where do consumers use mobile to make buying decisions about what you sell?”
Commit a “predictable and sizable” part of your budget to developing the right channels for bringing your brand to the mobile space.
Figure out how you’re going to measure the effectiveness of your mobile efforts.

I have no doubt the m-dot and mobile app space will be littered with a lot of useless crap that satisfies somebody’s insistenhce that “we have a mobile presence.” Those who adopt strategies that satisfy customers’ real needs and desires, solve their problems, simplify their lives or allow them to do something they could never do before (for instance, with location-based phone tools) will actually produce measurable results.

I have to wonder if NewsGator’s Fenton remembers all the terrible, useless websites that sprung up like weeds in response to the mandate, “You’ve got to have a website.”

If an app is an answer, what platforms should you consider?

When the iPhone was released, it was (as Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted) a game-changer. My reaction to the iPhone’s introduction turns out to have been correct: It will force other mobile phone companies to step up their game in order to compete. Initially, in one corner stood the iPhone, simple to use and adaptable to its owners needs. In the other corner were a host of crappy phones everyone hate because they were hard to use and didn’t do what their owners needed them to do.

Today, the marketplace hosts a number of viable competitors to the iPhone, many of which sport features with which the iPhone can’t compete (like multitasking). Even in the rare air of celebrity geek circles, iPhones have been abandoned in favor of the Motorola’s Droid and some other contenders. (Sometimes this is because of the Droid’s features, including a real keyboard; sometimes it’s conceding the iPhone just isn’t worth the problems associated with AT&T’s service.)

In fact, 28% of those who plan to buy a smartphone plan to get Apple’s product, but 21% will buy an Android and 18% a Blackberry. Add the 9% who will opt for a Windows phone or one sporting WebOS (Palm’s platform, currently available on the Pre and the Pixi), nearly half of the smartphones being sold will not be iPhones. It seems to me, then, that if you build only an iPhone app, you’ll be invisible to half your target market.

Gartner expects Android to surpass the iPhone by 2012, while Nokia’s Symbian—currently the market leader—will own 37.4% of the market. The iPhone will be in third place.(As of last August, Symbian commanded about half the market. The BlackBerry had about 20% and the iPhone wasin third place with 13%.)

The analogy of an iPhone app to a website isn’t an apt one because of competing platforms. HTML is an open platform—pages rendered (to varying degrees) on any browser whether it was installed on a Mac, a PC, or a Linux/UNIX box. Smartphone apps, conversely, need to be developed separately for each platform.

If your strategy leads you to conclude that apps are necessary, you’ll need to produce them for each of the key platforms, the cost of which—both time and money—will need to be factored into your planning. That’s part of the serious budgeting Cahill recommends in his three-step planning process.

You’ll also need to figure out how your effort integrates with your communication through all the other channels you’re already using.

The fundamentals apply

Ultimately, communicators should apply the same strategic planning that works for any communication effort:

Identify the need or opportunity
Identify the audiences to reach in order to take advantage of the opportunity or satisfy the need
Articulate the goals and objectives you will have to achieve in order to succeed at the effort
Determine the tactics you’ll implement in support of the goals and objectives. (These would include smartphone apps.)
Measure and evaluate the project outcomes.

While it’s easier to jump up and down like a five-year-old in a toy store shouting, “I want an iPhone app! I want an iPhone app!” it’s smarter to strategize your inevitable adoption of the smartphone as a key communication channel.

7. Join Me In Chicago March 11

Mark Ragan has asked me to lead a workshop dedicated to Social Media and Strategic Internal Communications.

It’s on March 11 in Chicago at the Aon Building. Here’s a link to the online brochure:

http://bit.ly/9EOWzT

Early sales are so strong that Mark thinks this event could sell out. I wanted to give you a heads up in case you were thinking about coming.

I hope to see you there

Site of the Month

GroundMap

A backlash of sorts has been forming against location-based services, one of the hot new social categories. Despite the popularity of services like Foursquare and competitors like Gowalla, some have argued that these tools won’t scale. After all, the argument goes, just how many people do you really want knowing where you are at any given time?

It’s a short-sighted observation. There’s far more to location-based social media than checking in so the world can know you’re at the grocery store. (Besides, who really wants to be the mayor of Safeway?)

Justin Davey, author of the GPS Obsessed blog, joined the throng of bloggers offering up their predictions for 2010, although Davey’s forecast was focused on geospatial industry trends. He sees an explosion in the use augmented reality and mobile coupons. He envisions search engines dishing up location information with search results and the same time of location-based information appearing with videos shot with GPS-enabled devices that you can now find on photos uploaded to sites like Flickr. And, he writes, every gadget—from digital cameras to netbooks (and, presumably, tablets)—will include a GPS chip.

One of the more interesting location-based sites, though, doesn’t take advantage of a GPS chip. At least, not yet. GroundMap was launched by a pair of 20-somethings from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, with an eye toward becoming the next big social media destination. Whether they’ll reach that goal remains to be seen, but GroundMap does point to the growing importance of location-based content.

“The Internet is located somewhere nobody knows, and we’re essentially making it relevant to where people go,” co-founder Matt Boyd said in a Southeast Missourian interview. “We’re almost making digital media tangible.”

GroundMap lets you associate content—tweets, documents, YouTube videos, Google Maps, you name it—with a place. If the location you’re interested in isn’t listed, you can add it. You can also add your opinion to any content that has been contributed.

Checking Rockville, Maryland—one of the most popular places listed, according to the tag cloud that appears on the home page—I found a couple YouTube videos (including one of an all-GM car show that was held in town), a link to the wikipedia listing for Rockville, a photo of city hall and a few other links and opinions.

The site is brand-spanking new, launched the last week of 2009, so there’s not a lot of content yet. But it’s easy to envision city listings loaded with material. The potential for marketers—particularly for small businesses—is huge. I’ve already read one account of the owner of a resort uploading a PDF of information about the facility to the listing for the city where the resort is located.

It makes perfect sense. Given our increased reliance on peer content, this would make it easy to learn what others think about a city to which you plan to travel. Sure, there’s Yelp, but it’s limited to reviews and you have to know the name of the service you’re researching. There’s CitySearch, but it’s limited to the major metropolitan areas and user-generated content is limited to reviews of services already listed. And while much of the content associated with a city in GroundMap already exists elsewhere (such as YouTube), it would take a lot of work to uncover it with a typical web search.

GroundMap will be a lot more useful with a bookmarklet that lets you add content from anywhere on the web, an iPhone app that adds GPS functionality, and other enhancements. But the obvious benefits of the site underscore the growing importance of location-based services. PR and marketing professionals would do well to begin exploring the opportunities these sites have to offer.

9. HC+T Update

I’ve just wrapped up a project to develop a strategic social media plan for an Alabama hospital.
I’ve developed and am about to conduct the first session of an “introduction to Twitter and Facebook” for staff at a California hospital.
I’m presenting a half-day workshop on how to bring social media to the local level for field marketers of a fast-food chain

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

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HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
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Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2010, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 01/31 at 12:17 PM
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Wednesday, October 28, 2009

HC+T Update: October 2009

The October 2009 edition of Shel Holtz’s email newsletter

HC+T Update
October 2009

Companies Invest In Social Media, Block Their Own Workers
Who Should Own Social Media? Everybody And Nobody
Next Webinar: Cut Through The Clutter With Ann Wylie
Death Watch: Static Destination Website
Just how social can you be if your online content is exclusionary?
Recruiters Shouldn’t Care About Your Racy Facebook Picture
I’m Teaching Ragan Webinar On Podcating November 9
Site Of The month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate and subscription information

As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Companies Invest In Social Media, Block Their Own Workers

At least 10 of my colleagues have alerted me to a study released yesterday by Robert Half Technology, in which 54% of the sample of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 or more employees block employees from accessing any social media at work.

Mashable points out the Robert Half study is consistent with other reports. The trend is gaining momentum.

I even received an email today from a communicator who observed that she received a security notice that access to Stop Blocking (http://www.stopblocking.org) was blocked at her organization. Right. God forbid anybody should be able to explore the arguments against this inane and counterproductive practice.

Given the publicity the Half study is getting, it’s worth reiterating the key arguments against blocking.

Well-communicated and consistently enforced policies will deal with most issues. The number of companies blocking access to social media sites is roughly on par with the number of companies without social media policies. Isn’t it possible that employees who knew what the rules were might actually follow them? Especially if they knew there were real and serious consequences for failing to do so?

Access to social media improves productivity. According to Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, “Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access.” But multiple studies prove exactly the opposite.

Productivity concerns are based on fatally flawed assumptions. First, there is research to suggest that every hour an employee spends at work on non-work-related websites is compensated for by an hour spent away from work on work-related activities. Do you check your work-related email on your mobile phone before you even get out of bed? Most knowledge workers say they do. Second, there are work-related benefits to social media activities, including collaboration, mindsharing and professional social networking amongst employees, affiliates and partners, according to David Lavenda of WorkLight (drawing on results from a Gartner study).

Employees don’t need your network. I can access any social network I like on my iPhone and my Palm Pre. I have a laptop with built-in access to the Sprint network that gets me on any site I want. Employees can (and do) bring these tools to the workplace. Your blocks have no impact. Employees can still get to Facebook all they want.

Who died and put CIOs in charge of worker productivity anyway? I’m not sure when supervisors and HR abdicated this responsibility to IT, but IT is simply not qualified to address employee productivity.

Blocking kills engagement. There are plenty of studies that tie high levels of worker engagement to increased growth and profitability. Trust is a pillar of engagement. So what happens to engagement when all employees get the same message, “We don’t trust any of you, not a single damn one of you, as far as we can throw you, so we’re blocking all of you”? Bye bye, engagement.

Access to social media is not an automatic invitation to viruses and malware. Those companies that do permit employee access have found ways to protect their networks. For many of the companies blocking access based on the fear of infection, it’s just easier to block than to find ways to protect the network while providing access. Laziness is not an excuse for blocking.

Millenials will not work for companies that block. These workers—the ones you need to hire to replace the retiring boomers—are networked 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate them. Many simply won’t work for companies that block access, which means you’re left to hire your second and third choices. Is mediocrity actually a hiring goal in your organization?

Bandwidth is a bogus issue. Bandwidth is the paper of the digital era. Can you imagine a company 25 years ago telling workers, “We’d love to get memos and publications to you, but we don’t have enough paper”? The very notion is absurd. They’d buy more paper. Companies pinching pennies on bandwidth are doing themselves a disservice in many more ways than one.

Please support the Stop Blocking initiative. Contribute research you’re aware of to the wiki. Share how your access to social networks and other web content has benefitted you at work. Share how blocking has restricted your ability to be as effective as possible at work. Link to Stop Blocking; feel fee to use the Stop Blocking badges on your blog or site. We must get the word out that blocking is a counterproductive, knee-jerk practice that must be stopped for the sake of the very companies that are implementing it.

2. Who Should Own Social Media? Everybody And Nobody

I thought I had seen all the arguments about which function, within an organization, should “own” social media. I’ve argued that PR or communications is the logical home, since PR/comms is the only function in the organization accountable for the company’s reputation and the only function practiced in building relationships with stakeholders.

Reading Chris Kieff’s post yesterday, though, had me rethinking my position. Kieff—a freelance marketer who rights the 1 Good Reason blog—argues that social media is most properly housed in the Human Resources department.

My first thought on reading the post (which Scott Monty pointed out to me) was that the “who should own social media” meme has jumped the shark. I mean, HR? Really? Or perhaps Kieff tossed out a wholly nonsensical argument as a means of generating link bait.

Since everyone in an organization needs to abide by policies governing their social media activities, Kieff asserts, and HR is the keeper of policies, HR should be responsible for social media implementation.

I know, I know. My head was throbbing, too. Companies have travel policies, too; does that mean HR should manage the travel function? There are expense reimbursement policies. Should HR manage the expense function? And, incidentally, what in the world does HR know about communication with external audiences?

Incidentally, I’m sympathetic to HR staff everywhere. They get knocked about as the epitome of bureaucracy, but I’ve worked in and with HR in many organizations and find the vast majority of HR people to be smart, hard-working souls who are committed to their mission of recruiting and retaining the best possible workforce for their employers.

But HR should not own social media. In fact, reading Kieff’s post and the dozens of comments it inspired—and recalling all of the many arguments over social media ownership—have led me to revise my earlier thinking. No single department should own social media.

I was on the road earlier this week working with a company on the evolution of their intranet. Ownership of the intranet at this organization—as it is in so many others—is split among many departments. IT is responsible for technical implementation, communications for content, HR for self-service, and so on. This model is a recipe for problems. In most companies, each department makes decisions about the intranet based on departmental goals and objectives. No single department is accountable for the intranet’s overall direction. The funds to manage and evolve the intranet are split into many different pots.

Back in 2001, Melcrum Communications surveyed more than 500 intranet managers from around the world and found that the most successful intranets—the ones that achieve company-wide goals and get the most funding—are governed cross-functionally. That is, a collaborative or steering committee, rather than any one department or collection of departments with divided responsibilities—produce the best results.

Since a cross-functional model produced the best intranets, it should be no surprise to learn that—back in 2001—67.5% of intranets were governed this way. These cross-functional teams had CEO-level sponsorship, official charters, and high-level membership with the authority to get things done. They were empowered to convene subcommittees with expertise in technical, editorial, and design matters. They tended to be fairly high-level in their focus, spending their time on matters including…

* intranet mandate and vision
* business objectives
* policies and standardization
* project prioritization
* trouble-shooting and conflict resolution

Membership in this teams generally consisted of IT, internal communications, external communications, HR, and marketing. When the members of the team got together, they checked their departmental goals at the door and worked together for the common good of the company.

One other benefit of the cross-functional model: When the group made a decision, it was easier to get the organization to fall in line becayse the decision was made based on input from every group with a dog in the hunt, as opposed to an edict from a single department.

Every element of intranet governance applies to social media. The best way to stop arguing about who owns it is to make sure no single department dictates policy to the rest of the company and that all departments with a stake in the game can collaborate to come to the best decisions for the entire organization. Look at the list of issues intranet steering committees address—mandate/vision, business objectives, policies, prioritization, etc.—and you’ll see precisely what needs to be addressed for companies to employ social media intelligently and strategically.

It’s time for the power plays to come to an end and departments to work together for the good of the organization. Do you have a cross-function governance model for social media in your organization? How does it work?

3. Next Webinar: Cut Through The Clutter

Make every piece you write easier to read and understand
with Ann Wylie
Beginning Monday, Nov. 9
Webinar Cost: US $195

Register here

Is your copy easy to read? According to communication experts, that’s one of the two key questions people ask to determine whether to read a piece — or toss it.

Fortunately, academics have tested and quantified what makes copy easy to read. Unfortunately, that research virtually never makes it out of the ivory tower and into the hands of writers who could actually apply
it.

But you’ll leave this session with “the numbers” you need to measure and improve your copy’s readability. Specifically, you’ll learn:

* How long is too long: For your paragraphs? Your sentences? Your words?
* Three ways to shorten your copy — and which is the most effective
* How to avoid overwhelming your readers with information — because the more data people get, according to studies, the worse their decisions become
* How to cut your copy before you’ve even written the first word
* How to avoid causing your reader to skip your paragraphs
* How to make your copy look easier to read
* When it makes sense to use jargon — and when to avoid it at all costs
* How to run the “Hey! Did you hear?” test on your copy
* A tool you can use (you probably already have it, but you might not know it) to quantifiably improve your copy’s readability
* About research you can use to sell your approvers on shorter, clearer writing

Once you’ve completed this dynamic, example-packed Webinar, you’ll be prepared to make every piece you write or edit clearer and more concise.

About Ann Wylie

As president of Wylie Communications, Ann Wylie works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. She travels from Hollywood to Helsinki,
presenting writing workshops that help communicators at such organizations as NASA, FedEx and Verizon Wireless polish their skills and find new inspiration for their work.

In addition to writing and editing, Ann helps organizations launch or revitalize their Web sites and publications. She has served as a PR professional in an agency, a corporate communicator at Hallmark Cards,
editor of an executive magazine and consultant in her own firm.

Ann is the author of more than a dozen learning tools, including RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. Her work has earned more than 60 communication awards,
including two IABC Gold Quills.

About Shel Holtz Webinars

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting
in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

If you have not participated in one of Shel’s webinars before, watch the introductory video. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser.

Webinars are asynchronous — that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you — there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

Register: http://bit.ly/4hR0SS

4. Death Watch: Static Destination Websites

I understood Jonathan Schwartz’s enthusiasm when he suggested, during a talk a couple years ago, that a Sun Microsystems intranet really wasn’t necessary with so many employees blogging. It still didn’t make any sense to me, though. Would it really be easier to find benefits information on employee blogs than on an intranet benefits page? And how, exactly, would an employee enroll for benefits on a blog?

The same kinds of thoughts cross my mind as I hear all the claims that static web sites are dead. The rise of social media and the real-time web has certainly shifted the focus of the online community. There is no question: The era of the destination website is ending, if it’s not already over.

But we’re talking about the end of an era, not the death of a tool. The era of the destination webiste has been one in which organizations pumped most of their online efforts into their dot-com sites; their strategies were focused on driving traffic to those sites. With the time people spend online shifting to real-time and social content, companies do need to rethink how (as a post on digitalbuzz put it) they deliver digital experiences to their customers and other stakeholders.

This is one of the reasons lifestreaming could become important to business. A company can publish many forms of content to one place, which in turn distributes it to appropriate channels: photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, commentaries to Twitter, and so on. Microsoft is the first business I’ve seen to launch a Posterous lifestream for its new retail stores. The site owners easily send photos from their phones to the site, where they can in turn be added to a Facebook fan page or just about anywhere else.

This doesn’t mean Microsoft has no need for a destination website, however.

The use of a tool is based on the use to which it’s being put. Yes, a lot of content that has been cloistered on company dot-com sites will—and should—shift to distributed venues where people are spending their online time. But there’s still a need for static content that’s housed in one place. I can’t imagine a time when that need will vanish.

When seeking certain types of information, people will continue to go directly to a company website rather than hoping they can find it somewhere in the social web:

* Contact information
* Investor resources
* Product/service listings
* Company history
* Jobs

In fact, the static company website has a new purpose. More and more organizations are using their website as the home for a directory of links to their Facebook pages and groups, Twitter accounts, blogs, Flickr streams, and YouTube channels. Why hope people will stumble on your content when you can direct them to it?

The idea that the social and real-time web will completely kill off static sites is hardly strategic. Far too many organizations are still focused on driving traffic to their dot-com sites, which will become an increasingly frustrating and unrealistic goal. But having those sites available when they prove to the best resource for the kinds of information to which they lend themselves will remain a pillar of a company’s online presence.

5. Just how social can you be if your online content is exclusionary?

I spent some time while at the IABC Heritage Region Conference, with Amy Salmon. Amy is a business consultant based out of Oklahoma City. She’s wife and a mom to two young children.

She’s also blind, the result of macular degeneration that struck her as a young adult. She gets around with the help of friends and family, and her guide dog, Wilbur.

Amy’s consultancy (she’s part of The Rodgers Group, a longtime communications firm run by Amy’s sister, Vicci Rodgers) works to help companies make their online content accessible to the disabled. According to the U.S. Census, more than 54 million people in the U.S. are disabled, representing about 19% of the population. As baby boomers age, the percentage of people with disabilities—and blindness in particular—is poised to rise dramatically.

For a lot of the disabled, getting through a typical website is beyond challenging. It’s impossible. Amy, for example, prefers to shop for her kids online. It’s easier than getting someone to take her to the store and help her identify the products she needs. On the WalMart site, she is able to find products, but she can’t order; that requires a mouse click. A mouse is an essentially useless tool to a blind person, Amy told me.

(Incidentally, Amy won’t shop at Target at all. The only reason the iconic retailer’s site is compliant with the accessibility standards established by the World Wide Web consortium is that they were ordered to by a federal judge following a lawsuit filed by the National Federation of the Blind.)

In the U.K., a study determined that purchases the blind cannot make on inaccessible website account for tens of millions of pounds. I’d love to know the results of such a study in the U.S. with its considerably larger population.

Amy uses a tool called Wave—not the new Google communication tool everyone’s talking about, but a more established site for evaluating a website’s accessibility. I plugged in the URL for WalMart’s home page; Wave returned 10 accessibility errors, including Javascript that can’t be interpreted by a text-to-voice reader, hidden content, problematic link text (text that “does not make sense out of context”), headings that are not appropriately marked, event handlers, and more. And all this was just on the home page.

I was also struck by Amy’s stories about talking to companies about the inaccessability of their sites. She has been told, flat-out, “We don’t care about that part of the market.” A key reason: remediating sites to make them accessible could be costly, particularly for ecommerce-based sites with thousands or pages.

Much of Amy’s consulting business comes her way via legal departments. Businesses are concerned about avoiding lawsuits. Accommodating nearly a fifth of the market? Not so much.

Accessibility is not a new issue. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web back in 1989 and heads up the Worldwide Web Consortium, has said, “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” (Here are more quotes from Berners-Lee about accessibility, an issue he clearly believes in.)

But considering all the proclamations by companies that they want to build relationships through social media, accessibility should be a more prominent goal. When companies establish Twitter and Facebook fan pages in order to be more accessible, isn’t it disingenuous—even hypocritical—to maintain online content that can’t be consumed by those whom life has handed the additional challenge of blindness, deafness, or cognitive or physical limitations?

Just how social can you claim to be if your online content excludes this segment of society, this potentially lucrative slice of your market? It’s hardly sincere to claim to be engaged while simultaneously proclaiming, “Sorry, the blind and deaf are not welcome.”

Part of the problem is that nobody wants to be accountable. Communications professionals tell Amy it’s not their problem; talk to IT, they say. (Wave detected 20 accessibility errors on the PRSA website.) But part of the problem is lack of attention. Tens of thousands of people can protest a Motrin video that offends them, but good luck finding a surge of indignation around a site that denies access to the disabled.

I’ll be talking with Amy for an interview segment on my podcast, “For Immediate Release. In the meantime, I just wanted to make the point: It should give you pause the next time you tout your social efforts if your own online content includes a huge “Go Away” sign for anybody who isn’t fortunate enough to be free of disabilities.

6. Recruiters Shouldn’t Care About Your Racy Facebook Picture

It’s becoming a litany.

In a meeting or during a presentation, somebody—usually an HR rep or recruiter—will tell me how many candidates she has rejected based on something she saw on the candidate’s Facebook or MySpace profile. In every case, it has been something along the lines of a photo taken during a party at college. My response: “If your employer knew what you did during college, would you have been hired?”

College is for two things: Getting an education and being stupid. The only difference between college when I went and college today is that there was no Facebook, or anything remotely like it, during my days at university.

Today, we’re living through one of the most remarkable transitions in history. We’re moving from an era during which people were secretive and kept things close to the vest to an era where everyone is networked and everyone shares everything. And those who grew up in the soon-to-be bygone era are making hiring decisions about people who grew up in the era that is hurtling toward us like an out-of-control freight train.

It has become conventional wisdom for people of my generation to wag their fingers at millenials, warning them of the dangers that await if they’re too open with their extracurricular activities. Even Dan Tapscott, whose “Grown Up Digital” does an admirable job of explaining the Net Generation, insists that the one thing they don’t get is that sharing outrageous behavior today will come back to bite them in the ass a few years down the road when they’re trying to get hired.

That’s true today, with people who kept their late-night fraternity-house drinking binges on the QT. It won’t be so long, though, before the hiring managers have shared just as much of their social lives online as the recruits they’re looking to hire. The fact that people got drunk and engagred in questionable behavior in school just won’t matter.

Consequently, that Animal House behavior really shouldn’t matter to hiring managers today. Like I say, the hiring manager probably engaged in some pretty stupid behavior of his own when he was in college, too. The fact that he did shots off a co-ed’s belly when he was 19 didn’t make him a bad hire when he was 23.

Back in 1987, Judge Douglas Ginsburg didn’t make it onto the U.S. Supreme Court because he’d smoked a little pot when he was in college. Today, denying a job to anybody who ever tried marijuana in college carves a huge slice out of the pool of prospective candidates. A prospect’s social behavior in college is simply not a predictor of their value as an employee.

Recruiters and HR people can even eek out a competitive edge by overlooking a four-year-old picture on a Facebook page and focusing on their qualifications today. After all, that’s what today’s candidates will be doing in five years when they’re the ones making the hiring decisions.

7. I’m Teaching Ragan Webinar On Podcasting November 9

Ready to try podcasting? Already podcasting and wondering what’s new?

Then you’ll want to learn from the best. Shel Holtz, a leader in podcasting, will teach you how to create a podcast that will:

* Influence opinions, attitudes and behaviors of your targeted listeners
* Build community within your company AND with customers
* Build affinity with existing customers
* Heighten C-suite credibility
* Encourage dialogue among employees

You will learn how to:

* Strategize a business podcast: Make sure your message is in line with your communications initiatives
* Produce a podcast: The tools and resources you need to get started—no matter what your budget
* Integrate your online content with your podcast: Match up your online text and
* Produce a podcast with no equipment and no cost: Use new services to record a podcast with nothing more than a telephone.
* Incorporate live call-ins with recorded podcasts: Build an audience with a show that involves your listeners in real time, online and off.
* Build a community of listeners: Draw an audience—both externally and internally
* Promote a successful podcast: Create content that builds a better connection between employees and leaders
* Take advantage of tools you may already own: Produce a podcast—including the upload—with an iPhone? Successful podcasters are already doing it.
* Measure the effectiveness of your podcast: If no one is listening, you’re wasting your time and resources

Podcasting is one of the easiest of social media tools to convince management to use—and the success you have could serve as the gateway to more company engagement with social media. What you need to know is how podcasting can be applied strategically in your organization, how it can support communication efforts and promote the bottom line. (Why do anything if it doesn’t support the bottom line?)

The answers are right here. When you complete this webinar, you’ll know how to produce a podcast, engage your listeners, and increase communication both internally and externally.

Fee: $349 ($249 for RaganSelect members)

Register: http://bit.ly/47CUdi

8. Site of the Month

I’m frequently trying to schedule multiple people for conference calls, which usually involves a lot of back-and-forth emails: “No, I can’t make that date, can you make this one?” “I can but one of the other participants in the call can’t. How about this date?” “That’s good for me, but not at 2 p.m. How about 8 a.m.?” “Is that East Coast time?” And on it goes. Fortunately, I’ve found a free online tool that makes this process a breeze. It’s called Tungle, and if you ever need to schedule a lot of people for any kind of activity, you’ll immediately add it to your list of really, really useful online tools.

http://www.tungle.com

9. HC+T update

I’m participating in a National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) panel at the organization’s Silicon Valley chapter on November 13.

I’m delivering a keynote at the Greystone.net Healthcare Internet conference in Las Vegas on November 3; I’m also presenting a luncheon talk at a pre-conference session on November 2.
I’m speaking at Ragan Communications’ 2009 Employee Communications, PR and Social Media Summit at Microsoft headquarters on November 17.

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 10/28 at 07:40 AM
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Friday, August 28, 2009

HC+T Update: August 2009

The August 2009 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology

HC+T Update
August 2009

Ten Ways PR And Marketing Are Every Bit As Powerful As Trusted Peers
What Should Journalism Schools Be Teaching Their Students?
Next Webinar: Leader Communications
Your Home Page Is Your Home Page
Sorry, Rupert. Pay Walls Won’t Work. But Thanks For Playing
Has Social Media Paid Off With Improved Customer Satisfaction?
Site Of The month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate and subscription information

As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Ten Ways PR and Marketing Are Every Bit As Powerful As Trusted Peers

If your reading was restricted to social media purists, you’d think that PR and marketing had no role left to play, that the rise of the trusted peer has so marginalized the communications profession that agencies everywhere should just fold up their tents and encourage their employees to learn a new trade.

The purists are right, but only if marketing and PR counselors ply their trade exactly as their predecessors did 30 years ago. Most don’t. Gone are the days of expecting a press release to generate media coverage; instead, they’re used primarily for SEO, to reach consumers directly and for a few other reasons that have nothing to do with the reason their original mission. More and more, marketing professionals develop two-way efforts and interact with communities. These days, “spin” is more likely to mean ensuring the story is told in a way that’s meaningful to the audience rather than twisting a client’s response to an issue to make them look good.

And, as word of mouth becomes more dominant, communications professionals are adapting to help their clients and employers succeed in this environment, as well.

That’s right. I’m calling bullshit on the notion that trusted peers are more powerful than marketing and PR. It’s not an either/or situation; it’s not a competition. PR and marketing, done well, inform and influence the conversations trusted peers have with their friends, colleagues and families. The marketplace is an ecosystem and communicators — like all the other players — continue to evolve so they can contribute to the delicate balance.

How can communicators be every bit as powerful as trusted peers? Here are 10 ways:

1. Promote a culture of transparency — Transparency is one of the five dimensions of trust as defined by the 2000 study, “Measuring Organizational Trust,” a comprehensive research project funded by the iABC Research Foundation. How much information is shared, how accurate it is, and how sincerely and appropriately it is communicated will determine the degree to which trusted peers believe what the organization says. This is a communications job.

2. Encourage and equip front-line employee participation — Rank-and-file employees represent the front line of public relations. Their discussions of work and work-related issues in their social networks — online and off — can be random and haphazard or they can reflect a comprehensive understanding of the organization, its initiatives and its positions. This isn’t to suggest that employees be given astroturf-style messages to repeat, but rather that they’re well-informed and business-literate. How much they influence the conversation will depend on how well the organization communicates with them, how much the organization trusts them and the clarity of the organization’s social media policies. That’s a communications job.

3. Find unique ways to tell the company’s story — For your organization’s story to rise above the din, its story needs to be compelling. When people are out there talking about your organization, it’s not in a vacuum; it’s based on the fodder that sparks the conversation in the first place. That’s a communications job.

4. Connect company leadership to the new marketplace realities — There’s a reason PR people are called “counselors”: They counsel their clients on the communications implications of their actions and the best means of telling their stories. The communications function in any organization is the only function that is 100% dedicated to protecting and enhancing the company’s reputation. It can be frustrating and time-consuming, but communicators are in the best position to help leaders understand the consequences of ignoring social media or engaging in it badly. This is a communications job.

5. Recommend corrections based on intelligence gleaned from monitoring — Integrating careful monitoring of social media into existing environmental scanning efforts can reveal customer sentiment and even provide an early warning to emerging issues. Most importantly, it can allow the organization to respond to an issue before it reaches crisis proportions. This is a communications job.

6. Earn the media coverage that gets bloggers’ attention — Mainstream media still matters. I have yet to see a study that suggests people have stopped trusting local newspapers and TV. And if you still think newspapers and TV news organizations have no influence, just select a random sample of 100 blog posts and count how many cite, opine on, analyze or pass along reports from mainstream media. Getting a story into the press can easily create fodder for trusted peers. This is a communications job.

7. Create assets that help trusted peers grow their reputations — The idea of the social media news release is to provide digital assets that help citizen reporters (like bloggers) tell their stories. Images, video, audio, widgets — bloggers and others can easily inject these assets into their conversations in order to help them make a point or stand out. This is a communications job.

8. Guide the company’s adoption of social media tools — Anybody can throw social media tools against the wall and see what sticks. Knowing which channels, which communities, and which approaches will produce results that align with business goals requires a different skill set; knowing how to measure the results adds another dimension that is a communications job.

9. Know when the old rules do apply — The fact that there are new rules for communicating within a networked and social environment means the old rules have been augmented, not replaced. Organizations ignore non-social dimensions of PR at their peril. There is far more to PR than media relations. (If 76% of businesses don’t understand what PR is, how can we expect the average blogger to comprehend what we do?) This is clearly a communications job.

10. Become the trusted peer — A number of organizations have shown that communications staff can be trusted voices just as much as anyone else. There’s the crew from Dell, for example, Scott Monty from Ford and Christopher Barger from GM, and a host of other examples. By being human, involved, candid and interesting, PR people can earn the trust of community members and directly influence purchases. Professional communicators, as much as anyone else, need to understand what it takes to become a trust agent; they should read the book that explains it. This is a communicator’s job.

Of course, dozens of books have been written on the role of PR and marketing in the networked world (To name just a few: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Groundswell, Now Is Gone, Word of Mouth Marketing). It’s funny that the purists praise these books for their insights, then turn around and declare PR and marketing dead. Talk about spin…

What PR and marketing activities would you add to this list?

2. What Should Journalism Schools Be Teaching Their Students?

Last week, I delivered a keynote talk to the faculty of a university Journalism department. “Change” was the theme of the retreat. Some of the change had to do with remaining viable in the face of massive budget cuts. As one participant in the retreat said, “Higher education in California will never be the same.” But an equally important dimension of the change discussion centered around changes to journalism.

I’m experienced in a lot of things, but even though my degree is in Journalism (California State University Northridge, 1976) I haven’t worked as a professional journalist since 1977 when I made the move into organizational communications. So I began the process of fleshing out the presentation by putting the question to my Twitter followers: What should I tell this group?

The answers mostly reinforced what I already thought. Most of the presentation addressed the changes to journalism business models and my own prognostications about the future. My last slide summed everything up with a list of skills and philosophies that should be incorporated into journalism classes.

It’s a relevant discussion because, even as the newspaper business continues its downward spiral, the number of students registering for journalism programs continues to be high. I’ve always believed a journalism degree is useful for any number of career paths — after all, the main thing you get out of journalism training is how to learn (as in, how to learn about the story you’re covering even though you have no background in it) and how to articulate what you have learned.

But you also have to suspect most of these students are working toward a journalism degree because they want to be journalists. The question they’ll face upon graduation is what kinds of journalism jobs will exist?

Whatever those jobs are, journalism students will be better equipped to qualify for them if they have learned the following as part of their education:

o SEO — Most of what I remember about writing a basic news article is consistent with the principles of on-page optimization, but the importance of writing so people can find your articles shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s particularly important since students in journalism classes today don’t have a clue whether they’ll be working for a centralized news organization or some kind of distributed network. This synchs nicely with my next point:

o How to think like a freelancer — With nobody certain what economic model or (more likely) combination of models will pan out for professional news, journalism departments need to instill a mindset in students that will allow them to tap into whatever opportunities arise. That’s quite a shift from the view of professors when I was in journalism school: If it’s not a daily newspaper, major newsmagazine or network TV news channel, it’s not journalism.

o Flexibility — Print, broadcast, radio, online…journalists had better be prepared to report anywhere. When I worked in journalism, I was a print reporter with no interest in electronic journalism, which was a whole different ballgame. Those lines are gone and today’s students need to be prepared to do it all.

o A continuum of reporting — When I was a reporter, I filed a single story following on-site reporting of news or research for an investigative piece. Today, a single report is inadequate.

Take a lead from the Spokane Spokesman-Review, whose reporter covering a sensational murder trial tweeted regular updates from the courtroom, wrote longer blog updates during breaks then filed the complete story from a hotel room after court adjourned for the day. I wrote about this on my blog about a year ago, as it was happening.

The very definition of news is changing. With channels like Twitter and Google News email updates, nobody has to wait for the 6 p.m. newscast or be in front of a TV to get the latest, smallest update to a story. The thirst for these updates is insatiable and it is up to journalists to fill the 140-character news cycle. Tweets from the courtroom included information like, “The prosecution has challenged 16 jurors so far” and “Peremptory challenges have ended. The court is on a 10-minute break.” Such updates feed the hunger for the latest information and give people something authoritative, rather than speculative, to talk about.

o How to be a curator of links — If you haven’t seen the clip of NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen talking about the ethic of the link it’s definitely worth your time. The idea that news operations must contain links to their own content is a bankrupt notion in an environment that thrives on diverse linkages. Becoming a trusted filter of valuable content does not mean you don’t generate your own; you simply analyze and distill the best related content, wherever it may reside, to make it easier for your readers to pursue more reading on the topic. No single news organization contains all relevant knowledge and viewpoints within their staffs. The better you are at curating links, the more readers will want to come back to the well.

o How to develop a digital footprint — Given that reporters are not likely to get a job with a single news outlet, they will want to build enough of a reputation (what some might call a “personal brand,” but not me) that she will be followed and read wherever she goes. Journalists who participate in discussions about their articles, who tweet (assuming their employers are smart enough to allow it) and who are accessible will go a long way toward establishing that identity.

o The Web 2.0 dimensions of reporting — The online dimensions of reporting are relevant to every aspect of journalism education. I cannot think of a class for which issues such as sharing tools, RSS feeds, monitoring feedback, participation in resultant conversation and embed codes, to name just a few, should not be taught.

o The role of news crowdsourcing and citizen journalism — Rather than viewing non-professionals who publish news as competition, teach students to understand their role in an ecosystem of news. There are more non-professionals with mobile phone cameras than photographers on your staff, for one thing. There are more individuals who might be interested in doing a bit of research on a topic of personal interest than there are research assistants in your newsroom. Professional journalists will need to know how to crowdsource some of what they need for their stories.

There is also no reason professional journalists can’t come to the aid of citizen journalists who are on to something good but don’t have the chops to bring it home.

o Ethics, accuracy, and balance — As the ranks of trained, professional journalists thin out, those who remain will be under a greater microscope than ever. Adherence to the highest professional standards won’t be just a good idea; it will be a baseline requirement.

o Transparency — One way for journalists to maintain a high credibility standard is to become far more transparent. I can imagine every reporter maintaining a blog where they catalog the sources for every story and, where appropriate, the full text (or audio files) of their notes.

o Multimedia — During one of my newspaper stints, I would often carry a camera with me. We had only three photographers on staff and they couldn’t go out on every story. Today, carrying audio and video recording equipment should be just as commonplace. These needn’t be complex or expensive. A Flip-like camera and an iPhone with an audio recording app work just fine. The more multimedia a reporter can inject into his coverage, the more compelling it will be for online readers to consume it… and the more likely it will be that the story will spread.

What’s missing? Where do I have it wrong?

3. Next Webinar: Leader Communications

Creating line of sight within your organization (for fun and profit)
with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, September 21
Webinar Cost: US $195

Ample research exists to support the idea that communications from leaders to employees is among the most powerful available. With change initiatives in particular, employees are more likely to follow leaders who engage with them and display genuine interest and concern for their welfare. Even organizational profitability has been tied to how effectively leaders communicate with employees.

Yet in far too many companies, leader communication is an occasional activity, a once-a-month “Breakfast with the CEO” program or a quarterly town hall. While these are important, they are woefully inadequate in today’s fast-moving environment. Leaders msut be a part of the communication process — and in most cases, they need to rely on their professional communication staffs to guide their efforts.

In this introductory course, you’ll learn the fundamentals of leader communication as well as the in-depth, nuanced approaches the best organizations take to creating line of sight between leaders and the rank-and-file. You’ll learn…

o The various ways to get employees face-to-face with leaders
o How to extend face-to-face communication with online resources
o The role of business unit leaders in the leadership communication process
o The role of transparency in leadership communication
o The importance of two-way communication and how to foster a culture that supports it
o Why much leader communication should be visible from outside the company
o How online video can enhance your leadership communications
o How to measure the effectiveness of your leaders’ communications
o The argument to make to your leaders that will convince them to get more involved

Once you have completed this dynamic, example-laden Webinar, you’ll be prepared to guide the leaders of your organization as they take their efforts to communicate with employees to a new level.

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

If you have not participated in one of Shel’s webinars before, visit the site at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and watch the introductory video. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

Register: http://bit.ly/12IPUM

4. Your Home Page Is Your Home Page

These things are true:

o If your website domain isn’t instantly intuitive, people will go to a search engine to find you

o If people are looking for companies that do what your company does, they will go to a search engine to find you

o As people conduct searches about your organization, they’ll find what has risen to the top, whether it’s positive or negative

o With increasing regularity, people visit destinations other than standard websites when trying to learn about an organization

I get all that. And yet I am increasingly irritated when I hear someone utter this nonsense:

Google is your new homepage.

This phrase produces more than 8,500 results in a Google search, mostly blog posts exhorting companies to embrace this belief. Yes, search in general and Google in particular are vitally important. But your homepage is your homepage.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, let’s remember that a homepage is defined as the opening page of a web site. Your index file, not Google, is the opening page to your web site. But this is a bigger issue than just a formal definition.

While the era of the destination website may be over, the corporate website is far from dead. The notion suggests that destination website no longer dominate the customer’s attention online. They once did, mainly because there wasn’t much else online to see. Now, with social networking and online video dominating people’s attention, the importance of the destination website has diminished.

That only means traditional websites are now part of a bigger mix of options online, not that their usefulness has vanished.

The 2009 Trust Barometer from Edelman reiterates that a company’s own website is one of the most credible source of information a company can provide about itself, beating business blogs, social networking sites or advertising. Only corporate communications — such as press releases, white papers and emails — ranked higher, and only by a two percentage points. And while searches of Google News and Yahoo News ranked higher, searches of the core Google search engine didn’t even make the list. At the very top of the list you won’t find any new media at all, but rather the staid and traditional industry analyst report, reinforcing the high levels of trust people place in third-party experts.

Certainly, consumers may glean information that doesn’t help your company’s cause when searching Google. In fact, according to one study, search engines are the most common way consumers find opinions about products, brands and services. But if they’re looking for what you have to say, they’ll still click through to your website, and most often the top search result will connect consumers to your homepage.

Your website is also the home of the static content that still serves a purpose. The bio of your CEO, shareholder information, details of your corporate social responsibility efforts, archives of your news releases (your authoritative statements of record), job listings — all these represent details people need.

And search engine optimization, which has become a core corporate activity as the importance fo search continues to grow, is still about enabling discovery of your content on your site. As this Google-as-home-page notion gains currency, I fear people will spend less resources on the maintenance of their websites — an odd dilemma, since one SEO fundamental is to continuously update your website and infuse it with new content.

Still, according to a study just released today, web content managemente has fallen as an intrinsic component of organizations’ communication efforts. While social networking is part of web-based communications for about 72% of organizations, web content management is an activity among only about 53%. That’s particularly odd given that the study found SEO is an activity at nearly 70% of organizations. What’s more, web content management is declining as a skill companies look for when making a PR hire.

That is, more organizations are optimizing their sites for search than are managing those sites in order to ensure that the sites offer value to those who find them, despite the fact that corporate websites are among the most credible communication a company can produce.

That’s a huge disconnect.

SEO, along with social media engagement, are critical, but let’s not lose sight of the basics as we embrace new media. SEO is a critical skill and companies must do it well. But your homepage is still your homepage.

5. Sorry, Rupert. Pay Walls Won’t Work. But Thanks For Playing

Since Rupert Murdoch announced his plans to eventually charge for all of his newspapers’ online content, a number of opinions have surfaced about the feasibility of the pay wall and the reasons it won’t work.

For example, a MediaPost item by Wendy Davis (free subscription required) suggests that enough people who pay for the content will share it in violation of the publisher’s terms that the content will get out anyway. Others note that for every news site with a pay wall there will be plenty of alternatives that remain free.

From my perspective, the issue isn’t about whether the online content offered by news organizations have any value. Clearly it does, despite all the hand-wringing over “content wants to be free.” (Stewart Brand, remember, said in the same breath that “content wants to be expensive.”) It’s more about the discoverability of the content and the value per article.

The primary difference between the content news organizations publish on the web and that which they publish anywhere else — even if it’s just a repurposing of the same content — is the difference between pull and push. And once you understand that, you understand that it’s all about the package.

Non-web content — whether it’s in print, on TV or aggregated in an email — is pushed at you in a package. I subscribe to The Contra Costa Times. It shows up on my driveway every morning, held together by a rubber band. The newspaper has sections — Sports, Business, Time Out, Morning Report — each one with articles and features that I discover as I methodically turn the pages. I’m not paying for one columnist or one type of story or one set of box scores. I’m paying for the package.

Nobody subscribes to The New York Times just to get David Pogue’s column. (Well, maybe his mom.) Pogue’s column is one of the features you look forward to when you consume the Times.

The same is true of news on TV. It starts at 7 p.m. and ends at 7:30 on the major networks, beginning with the top news and moving through features and commentary. On cable, there’s also a collection of stories contained in the package. If the most interesting item on “Countdown” is the story that starts at 5:40, you just have to wait 40 minutes to get through it (which is fine since the stories preceding it are probably of interest to you, too).

With the pull dynamic of the web, things don’t work that way; the package is so much less important that it’s a non-factor. Too many people ignore the front page of the newspaper website, opting instead to make Google News or Digg or their RSS aggregator or Twitter’s trending topics their front page. Or they see a link tweeted by someone notifying their followers of an intriguing news story.

Or, you like just the David Pogue column; it’s the sole reason you visit The New York Times site.

In any case, it’s the individual items that attract attention.

(On a side note, it’s truly a scary thought that the pay wall will block individual news items from being collected in these third-party channels, isn’t it? How counterintuitive would it be for the only way to find that the story exists at all is to pay your admission fee and slog through all the links on a newspaper site’s home page?)

So I find a link to a story through any of the 10 or 15 channels I use, click to it and discover that a subscription is required. Will I pony up $9.95 per month for every one of the 20 to 30 news sites I wind up visiting? Not likely. I’m not interested in accessing the whole site. I just want the one story, the one column, the one feature that brought me there in the first place. And I’ll skip it before I subscribe.

After all, I only get The Contra Costa Times in print. I don’t pay for subscriptions to 15 or 20 other newspapers. It befuddles me that Murdoch and other publishers think we use the web the same way we use print.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t pay for access to news content, but the news business needs to introduce a new model that just doesn’t exist yet. I’d gladly pay $9.95 per month for access to any news content, with some kind of collection agency — a kind of ASCAP for news organizations — divvying up the proceeds and distributing them to publishers using a formula based on the volume of visits to each of their sites.

Given the results of the recent VSS media study, which shows people are spending more time than ever with paid content, I think an approach like this could work.

But as long as each publication plans to assess a discrete subscription fee to gain access to any of their content, this plan will fail. It has nothing to do with whether the publishers deserve compensation, or whether the content has value. It simply has to do with finding a model consistent with the way people use the content. A monthly per-publication subscription fee isn’t it.

6. Has Social Media Paid Off With Improved Customer Satisfaction?

All this social media must be having a real impact, wouldn’t you think? I’m not talking about cool case studies, but significant trends showing sustainable results that demonstrate a payoff for all the prosletyzing going on (by me, among others).

Look at the story we tell: Companies can’t get away with bad behavior because social media puts them under too much scrutiny; it only takes one blog post or tweet or YouTube video to kick-start a flood of criticism leading to damaged reputations and lost customers. All those conversations are the motivation companies have needed to start providing excellent service, if for no other reason than to avoid fast-spreading conversations about just how bad they are.

If we’re right — if social media is a catalyst for improved business practices — then there should be some evidence. Where’s the evidence?

It could be here: According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has hit an all-time high.

The Index, the result of a survey conducted by the University of Michigan, is not alone. The WSJ article notes that other customer satisfaction studies are also reporting gains. These improvements in customer satisfaction are confounding a lot of the experts, since satisfaction typically plummets during tough economic times. But the numbers aren’t vague. Customers are increasingly happy with the companies with which they do business.

Nobody is crediting social media with these results. In fact, experts are cautioning that the numbers could be deceptive because earlier customer satisfaction numbers were so perilously low; they had nowhere to go but up. And, while the trend is clear, it’s not a tide that lifts all boats. Some companies have seen their numbers dip.

Spokespersons for each of the companies profiled in the article — Sprint, The Cheesecake Factory, Comcast, US Airways and Southwest Airlines — give good, solid reasons for their focus on customer satisfaction. For example, the desire to maintain customer loyalty prompted The Cheescake Factory to enhance a mystery shopper program, resulting in information about customer dissatisfaction with wait times for tables. The restaurant’s CEO, David Overton, said, ““We are carefully balancing our cost containment efforts so as not to reduce the experience that guests have in our restaurants.”

The article also points to handheld scanners US Airways is using to improve baggage tracking. The airline was the target of 35% fewer complaints in the first quarter, and its ACSI rating improved 9.3%.

It’s easy enough to shrug off these results by arguing that most companies want to be profitable and will take the steps necessary to protect and grow their market share. But as I consider what has changed between now and, say, 10 years ago, social media emerges as a significant factor. Complaints about table wait times used to be delivered to the restaurant host and maybe a few close friends and customers kept showing up. Today, those complaints are available for anybody checking out places to eat on Yelp. The population of people talking over the backyard fence, where consumer complaints are a typical subject of conversation, has exploded ever since the fence went digital.

So, while reporting of the ACSI results haven’t singled out social media, I keep thinking about Sherlock Holmesian logic: “henever all other possibilities have been ruled out, the improbable, however unlikely, must be the truth.”

What has changed is the amplification of customer complaints and the credence customers’ peers put in their opinions. If one couple decides never to return to The Cheesecake Factory or defect from Sprint to Verizon, that’s a shame. If hundreds or thousands make the same decision based on the experience the customer shared on Facebook, that’s an entirely different story.

So even though I’m making a very long leap in logic, I say let’s hear it for social media. The social customer has spoken, companies are listening, and everybody wins as a result.

7. Site of the Month

You’ve built a social network. What can you do with it? The idea of a third party providing an interface to your own network so it can be put to use for a specific purpose is an intriguing one. Aardvark.com takes a stab at it but creating a utility that lets you pose a question that goes out to your network. The site owners claim that you’ll get answers in as fast as five minutes. The site, which is free, has earned good reviews from the likes of The New York Times and TechCrunch. If you already have a Facebook account, you register through Facebook Connect.

I tested Aardvark with a question about crisis communications. It was a legit question, one that was posed to me by a Wall Street Journal reporter. The system found five people in my network with crisis communications chops, and in five minutes, I had severak replies. For free, it’s definitely worth a try when you’re in need of answers, fast.

http://www.vark.com

8. HC+T update

>>I’m delivering a keynote and a breakout session at WebCom Montreal on October 22.

>>I’m leading an employee communications audit team for an internationally known medical institution.

>>I’m leading a three-consultant team on an assignment to help a global technology company re-envision its intranet.

>>I’m delivering a keynote to IABC’s Heritage Region conference on October 20.

9. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
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Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 08/28 at 08:39 AM
Permalink

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

HC+T Update: June 2009

HC+T Update: June 2009

HC+T Update
June 2009

GM and social media: damned if you do, damned if you don’t
How the approval process needs to change
Next Webinar: SEO for Communicators
One role for print: making dull messages stand out
Ending the “Deny-delay-defend” crisis strategy
Site Of The month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate and subscription information

As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. GM and social media: damned if you do, damned if you don’t

We hear that most companies still haven’t jumped on the social media bandwagon and we roll our eyes in dismay and maybe even a little contempt. But there are reasons companies resist getting engaged with communities. It can be seriously perilous.

Look at General Motors. The magnitude of the company’s problems have inflamed peoples’ passions; our emotional reactions to its situation—and how GM responds—will forge its reputation for years to come.

In the midst of this classic institutional crisis, GM has committed to engage in social media at virtually every level. Say what you will about other dimensions of General Motors, from labor practices to product innovation to financial management. The companies’ communication efforts have been sincere and wide-ranging:

They were pioneers of the corporate blog. Members of the communications team participate in the auto blog communities. Communication staff have reached out to answer questions and participate in conversations wherever they are found. Employees throughout the organization have been encouraged to talk about the company’s future in conversations they encounter during their day-to-day online activities. The public was invited to join GM leaders in open conversations about controversial issues. They have hosted mommy bloggers and podcasters on a retreat. They’re on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Flickr. To record the company’s 100-year history, they created a wiki to which anybody can contribute.

In other words, GM has put into practice the kinds of actions most social media consultants would have advised. Still, even people engaged in the space are oblivious to those efforts, even as they insist upon them. In a comment to Joe Jaffe’s blog (in response to something I wrote), Viveka Weiley wrote, “People are already having these conversations, we don’t need GM to facilitate, centralise and filter them. It’s up to them to join our conversation, not the other way around.”

Exactly what GM has been doing.

Jaffe’s post about which Viveka and I were commenting, by the way, is a savaging of GM over a 60-second spot the company unveiled concurrent with its bankruptcy filing. In the commercial, the company brands the bankruptcy as a turning point and acknowledges that a massive rethinking of the company is required. It ends with the URL for GM Re: Invention, the repository of all things related to GM’s turnaround effort.

The site shows an understanding of the networked world, with…

Sharing links
RSS feed
Links to Twitter accounts of GM designers, engineers, and other front-line employees
Link to a Facebook fan page where critical comments are a part of the conversation

I saw the video as an invitation to come to the site, one channel for engaging consumers among many. Joe things “Somebody deserves a real hefty bitch-slap” because (among other things) “advertising is not the answer….especially during times where cathartic healing needs to take place via honest…authentic, transparent and open dialogue.”

Which, again, GM has been doing to a degree few other companies—and even fewer outside the technology world—can claim.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Perhaps the best example of this peril comes courtesy of the Huffington Post, months before the bankruptcy filing. Back in February, Huffington blogger Allison Kilkenny tweeted a message to her followers: allisonkilkenny: sees GM is phasing out the small, fuel efficient Saturn. Oil companies: 1, Earth: 0.

Kilkenny was nonplussed when she got a reply: “@allisonkilkenny we don’t have indiv trash cans at ofc cubes at hq, just an ex, not sure total $ saved from small ideas, but likely large”

Kilkenny was bewildered. Why would a company needing to focus on its recovery invest in people who respond to Tweets, especially those that weren’t a specific request for help or information? “No one likes that in your rush to modernize and embrace the technology of the internet (complete with Twitter experts,) you forgot how to compete with foreign car companies,” she wrote.

So Kilkenny’s complaint, on the highly-visible Huffington Post, is that GM is doing exactly what Joe Jaffe and Viveka Weiley (and scores of others) say they must do.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Make no mistake, GM is doing the right thing, even if they’re making mistakes along the way. But knowing the kinds of hits you’ll take from both sides for stepping up as GM has would deter many a CEO from taking the social media plunge.

Measurement is key. If we cannot convince business leaders that the business results of community engagement will outweigh the kinds of risk on display with GM, it’ll be hard to condemn them for their obstinence. I have no doubt that GM’s leaders are getting regular reports on the payoff for their commitment to community engagement. Given the current climate, it’s a good thing they’re in it for the long haul.

2. How the approval process needs to change

Among the tiny early-adopter subset of the total online population, a lot of buzz is dedicated to a perceived shift from blogging to lifestreaming. Edelman Senior VP Steve Rubel, the most widely read of PR’s many participants in social media venues, has shuttered his Micro Persuasion blog in favor of a Posterous lifestream, asserting that “blogging feels old” and “publishing today is all about The Flow.” (More on this in an upcoming post.)

In the real world, though, communicators employed by companies struggle to overcome a phalanx of obstacles to the most basic of online engagement. One such obstacle about which I keep hearing is the institutionalized content approval process. I was with an organization recently in which the simple concept of blogging was confounding in light of the fact that every word that goes public is subject to a daunting round of approvals.

Before most organizations can join Steve and the other innovators and early adopters at the vanguard of social media, they will need to come to terms with era of the 140-character news cycle and establish processes and cultures that allow communicators (and others) to communicate effectively, unhindered by vestiges of outdated and archaic policies.

The approval process that became the standard in most organizations is based on several assumptions:

Employees who are charged with creating content, such as press releases and authoritative statements of record, don’t know enough to avoid saying things that could cause problems for the company. Therefore, those who are in the know must vet the document in order to minimize the risk.
The vetting process is designed to scrub the content clean for external consumption.
Adequate news cycles exist that ensure there is enough time for the document to wend its way through the various layers of approval. A press release updating a crisis, for example, didn’t need to be in the hands of the media until 15 minutes before the 6 p.m. newscast.

Neither of the last two points is valid any longer, which requires organizations to think differently about how they address the first one.

First, the messages delivered internally are subject to external scrutiny, like it or not. While some organizations have awakened to the need for transparency, all organizations are having transparency thrust upon them. The line between internal and external communications is blurring. Communications to any audience need to be considered from this perspective at the time they’re crafted.

Second, there are no more news cycles (or, as I like to say, they’ve been reduced to 140 characters). Given the speed and volume of information filling the conversation space, the time it takes to process content through an approval process is time during which thousands of other messages can define your story and shape the public’s opinion. Especially in a crisis, you need to get your information into the mix now.

Given these realities, how does an organization prevent the communication of a message that contains inaccuracies, regulatory boo-boos and inconsistencies with the official company position? The answer, in most cases, is to alter the thinking about approvals from reactive to proactive. Rather than wait for each bit of content to be created, those tasked with communicating on behalf of the organization need to have a series of sit-downs with Legal, Regulatory Affairs and all the other specialists in order to be trained on the issues that could cause the company grief. Done well, this would leave lawyers and others confident that these communicators will produce problem-free content. They’ll also be confident that communicators will seek out their counsel when they’re not sure whether something they’re planning to say is problematic.

Ultimately, a new view of the role of internal communications can have largely the same result with all employees, not just the communicators.

But make no mistake: Before organizations can catch up to where the Steve Rubels and Stowe Boyds of the world were even two years ago, issues like the approval process will need to be addressed first.

3. Next Webinar: SEO for Communicators

The beginners’ crash course in Search Engine Optimization
with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, July 20
Webinar Cost: US $195

Register: http://bit.ly/38aEit

Highly reputable people are asserting that SEO—search engine optimization—could ultimately replace PR agencies. Meanwile, larger PR agencies and media companies are acquiring SEO boutiques.

At the very least, communicators need to have a foundation in SEO today just as much as they needed to understand desktop publishing two decades ago.

In this introductory course, you’ll learn the basics of SEO as it relates to communications; we’ll focus specifically on the dimensions of SEO that communicators need to incorporate into all their online efforts. You’ll learn…

The importance of keywords and how to choose the right ones
How metadata can drive better search results
Critical elements fore any web page
The ethics of SEO, and how not to violate them
How to use web analytics to improve your SEO efforts
SEO for press releases
SEO behind the firewall, on your intranet

If SEO is brand new territory for you and you want to get up to speed in a hurry, this five-week course is for you! This Webinar will include a variety of multimedia elements including videos, audio, and screencasts, along with text.

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

If you have not participated in one of Shel’s webinars before, visit the site at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and watch the introductory video. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

Register: http://bit.ly/38aEit

4. One role for print: making dull messages stand out

Communicating mundane messages to employees is one of the tasks that has been made harder for internal communicators by the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities on internal networks.

Consider, for example, the communication of a benefits enrollment deadline. There’s little that gets communicated inside companies duller than employee benefits information. But employees still paid attention 20 years ago because the reminder was one of a few messages being broadcast to employees. Back then, the role of communications was to produce one-way, top-down messages to ensure employees knew what they needed to know (like, for instance, not missing the benefits enrollment deadline). With communicators acting as gatekeepers, it was easy to maintain a flow of content that the average employee could digest.

Today, communicators produce only a fraction of the messages through which employees must sift. Depending on the dgree to which the company has embraced the Web 2.0 concept internally, employees consume messages from communities of various stripes, employee blogs, internal RSS feeds, updates on enterprise social networks, employee-generated videos, internal presence networks like Yammer, the list goes on.

Not that this is bad; in fact, it’s great. The more employees can network with each other, the more quickly they’ll find the information they need to do their jobs, get answers to question, connect with others with whom a relationship is beneficial and form ad hoc teams to tackle problems and jump on oportunities.

But still, with all this content, how prominent can you make an email or intranet item on those drab-as-dishwater messages that still need to get out?

The solution is to go analog. While this won’t work where employees are scattered and working from wherever, but for those organizations whose employees still gather in office buildings and manufacturing facilities, analog communications can stand out from the sea of digital messages.

Who’s going to miss a brightly colored poster on an easel by the elevators, in the lobby and in other high-traffic areas? How about table-tent cards in break rooms and the cafeteria? When I worked for ARCO back in the early 1980s, Employee Communications Manager Dave Orman drew attention to a 401(k) plan by hanging mobiles all over the ARCO Towers and other facilities; each of the pieces hanging from the mobile reinforced the enrollment message.

Even a print publication can get attention. One communicator I spoke with several years ago had ceased publication of a company magazine, moving all content to the intranet. But when a critical issue arose, she produced a special print issue that was distributed to employees’ desks. The reaction from employees was, “Wow, if they’ve gone to the trouble to print this, it must be important.”

I remember one boring message that was printed on movie theater-style popcorn boxes, then filled with popcorn and distributed on cafeteria tables for employees of one big manufacturing company. That was a message that employees not only remembered, but talked about.

Not only is print not dead, it’s a means of getting mundane messages to stand out.

5. Ending the “Deny-delay-defend” crisis strategy

In the countless battles between communicators and corporate attorneys over what to say in response to reputation-threatening situations, the lawyers’ advice to say nothing (or little) usually prevails.

The result is often disastrous for the organization, but CEOs and senior leaders presume that mitigation of legal risk is of paramount concern. Industry pundits often agree, arguing that corporations are legal entities, requiring leaders to sweep legal concerns under the rug.

There is no need to characterize this situation as a battle between PR and Legal, however. The fact is that, viewed strictly through the legal prism, the counsel coming from corporate attorneys is frequently bad legal advice. The reasons bad advice comes from the general counsel’s office:

In a crisis, lawyers are no less inclined to jerk their knees and make bad decisions than any other unprepared member of senior management
Law schools do a lousy job of equipping their graduates to address the long-term consequences of short-sighted legal counsel

Still, bad legal advice is followed with barely a thought simply because it’s coming from a lawyer who has a seat at the management table. In far too many organizations, management does not share that same level of built-in trust with its top communicators.

-Bad advice

The typical advice from legal counsel—silence or something close to it—is usually designed to minimize the risk of judgments awarded to plaintiffs in lawsuits filed in the wake of whatever situation prompted the statement in the first place. That same silence, however, is construed as guilt by a risk-averse public, which can have consequences far more dire than a large judgment. Stakeholders are inclined teo assume the worst about companies in a crisis, so they lose confidence when they resort to typical non-responses.

This isn’t opinion. In a study conducted 12 years ago, the year-end closing stock prices of companies that experienced crises were compared. Those that responded well saw their share value 4%, then rebound and remain 7% above their pre-crisis close, while those responded badly (that is, did what their lawyers told them to do) experienced initial declines of 10% with share prices remaining down, closing the year 15% below pre-crisis levels. That’s a 22% difference in year-end share value between companies that responded honestly and candidly versus those lawyered up over the possibility of lawsuits.

(The Oxford Executive Research Briefing that reported these findings is detailed in this Wharton Leadership Digest, a PDF file.)

Another study, this one from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, found that companies taking responsibility in a crisis outperformed those that blamed someone else by 14-19%.

Expressing regret, apologizing, and acknowldging blame (if there’s blame to acknowledge) do more than help a company’s reputation, though. They actually produce better legal results. While this flies in the face of conventional wisdom—that same conventional wisdom that drives CEOs to buy into the say-nothing strategy promoted by their attorneys—just isn’t supported by the facts. Just ask Jim Golden.

Golden served as general counsel for a company in the trucking industry, a litigation-prone business if ever there was one. He practiced what he calls the “deny-delay-defend” approach to crises, but has since concluded tehat the legal results are far better if companies embrace the responses so often advanced by their PR advisers. Golden, now a negotiation counsel for a Tennessee law firm, says that doing the right thing and telling the truth results in fewer cases going to trial and smaller judgments from those cases that do make it to the inside of a courtroom.

In those cases that do go to trial, Golden says, juries believe that justice has already been done and see no bad guys in the case; there’s nothing left to be proven in court. Golden’s clients that have taken this approach have had their insurance premiums reduced by up to 30%.

This isn’t just Golden’s experience. A study of doctors accused of malpractice found that those who apologized for the outcome (without necessary taking blame) experienced fewer trials and lower settlements. That’s counterintuitive to the legal advice most doctors get, to keep their mouths shut so the lawyers can deal with it in court.

Blame law schools

Golden—who recently participated in an FIR Live discussion on lawyers and communicators—blamed law schools for the deny-delay-defend tactic. Corporate counsels, Golden says, “don’t know their options” because law schools aren’t presenting them. Mid-career attorneys, however, are increasingly seeking training on just those options, with bar associations and litigation departments bring the training in-house.

In the meantime, communicators can do a better job of making the case against deny-delay-defend by pointing out that there are more options than saying nothing (what the lawyers prefer) and self-destructive blathering (what the lawyers fear). According to Fred Garcia, founder and president of crisis management firm LOGOS Consulting Group—and another guest on the recent FIR Live—there’s a lot of room to maneuver in between those two extremes.

It would help, though, if the top communicator’s views were held in the same regard as the top legal counsel. A Financial Post article suggests that’s not the case, with communications relegated to middle management where they don’t have leadership’s ear:

“Whether it is due to arrogance, entitlement or a sense of invulnerability among senior executives, as one expert suggests, the reality is that many kings of the corporate world no longer put communications at the top of their agenda. Such isolation has made them more vulnerable to crisis.”

It is this inattention to the reputational issues at the heart of communications’ agenda that has led (at least in part) to “the AIG spa scandal, the car manufacturers’ jet debacle and the bonus blowup,” the Post article concludes.

We in communications have been talking about that seat at the management table for at least as long as I’ve been in the profession—more than 30 years. The obvious approach to securing that seat is to prove the bottom-line value of our counsel. But I’m curious: What’s your approach to being taken as seriously as the lawyers in your organization?

6. Site of the Month

Posterous is getting a fair amount of attention ever since PR uberblogger Steve Rubel decided to abandon his longtime blog, Micro Persuasion, in favor of a Posterous blog. With Posterous, you can post anything from the website or via email—even from your phone. It’s being touted for its ability to let you maintain a “flow,” but I’m skeptical…and planning a blog post about it. Still, it’s worth looking at.

Posterous: http://www.posterous.com
Steve Rubel’s Lifestream: http://www.steverubel.com

7. HC+T update

I have posted two of my recent presentations—both audio and PowerPoint deck, so you can follow along. “Social Media and Crisis Communications” from the SNCR NewComm Forum is here: http://bit.ly/10dOo7. “The News Release in the Social Media Era” from IABC’s 2009 World Conference is here: http://bit.ly/lr2EW

I’ll be helping an internally-known healthcare institution strategize their social media activities over a two-day engagement at the end of July

I’m working with a hospital to develop social media policies and guidelines for employees

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HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
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(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 06/30 at 10:05 AM
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Tuesday, May 05, 2009

HC+T Update: May 2009

The monthly email email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology

HC+T Update
April 2009

I Don’t Care If You Were On Twitter Before Oprah
Cluetrain Thesis #4: A Decade Later
Next Webinar: The New Employee Communications
The Serendipity of the Package
Rock Tour Leads To Evolution Of Print
Site Of The month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate and subscription information

I haven’t hadmuch time for blogging. I know it’s early in the month and I could wait until later, but I’m leaving town and won’t have much time to produce the issue later in the month, so I decided to put one out that’s a little lighter on content than usual rather than miss it altogether. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. I Don’t Care If You Were On Twitter Before Oprah

If you stick around long enough, you get to see history repeat itself. Since history repeats itself when nobody learned from it the first time around, it’s usually not a pretty sight.

The latest example of this is all the righteous indignation by users of Twitter over the surge of newcomers to the service joining in order to follow celebrities like Shaq, Ashton Kutcher, and Oprah Winfrey. With her media power, Oprah has motivated more than 1.5 million people, by some estimates, to sign onto Twitter just since she mentioned on her TV show that she has started to use the service, all before she sent her first tweet. The day she referenced Twitter on the show, 37% of visits to Twitter.com were from first-time visitors and overall traffic surged 43%, according to a USA Today article.

Buzzfeed actually proclaimed that all dates after April 17 shall forever be known as TAO—Twitter After Oprah. Somehow, I doubt that. But of all the ego-boosting nonsense surrounding the objection to the mainstream public joining Twitter, the “Here Before Oprah” website is the most pathetic. Seriously, just how desperately do you need to stand out? (Besides, why isn’t the same crowd whining about Sony’s use of Twitter as the platform for a game in support of its new “Terminator” movie? Could it be because they’re all playing the game?)

Incidentally, you can also use the “Here Before Oprah” site to see if your Twitter account predates anybody else you know, which might, I suppose, possibly have some minor uses.

I do not care who was here before Oprah. I do not care whom I beat to Twitter, or who beat me. It does not matter. The only thing that matters is whether your tweets are interesting or valuable. If they’re not—at least to me—I will not follow you. If they are, I will. Whether you were here on the day of Twitter’s launch or joined yesterday is irrelevant. Only the quality of your content matters. Period.

(Please don’t be offended if I’m not following you. I’m about 1,500 new followers behind in my should-I-or-shouldn’t-I assessment, and I don’t foresee catching up any time soon.)

I can’t possibly be the only person who remembers the same angst-ridden chest-thumping that took place when AOL users began migrating to the Web. “It’s all over,” the early adopters sobbed. “The unwashed masses will forever ruin our pristine geek clubhouse.”

Of course, what the influx of all those AOL newbies really did was create the critical mass that enabled the growth of ecommerce, online communication, and even (dare I say it?) social media. But even that wasn’t the first time the early adopters resisted opening the doors of their cherished private domain to outsiders. When Canadian online expert Michael Strangelove began publishing his (print) “Internet Business Journal” back around 1990, he actually received death threats. That’s right, people would rather send death threats than acknowledge that the Internet might someday play host to anything so base and undignified as business.

These are history lessons from which today’s generation of early adopters clearly have learned nothing. While nobody will ever commemorate the day the first banner ad appeared, business and the mainstream public both proved to be boons for the Net. Many of the online innovations we take for granted were developed to support business’ efforts to reach consumers, after all.

So here’s my advice to everyone wringing their hands over the intrusion by Joe Beercan into the Twitterspace: If you don’t like it, don’t follow them. Other than that, take a deep breath and crack open a history book. Maybe you’ll learn something.

2. Clutrain Thesis #4: A Decade Later

Ten years ago today, The Cluetrain Manifesto was unveiled. Since then, it has been held up by many as truth writ large. Others dismiss it is impractical, unrealistic, unworkable. In the middle are those who find wisdom in the Manifesto but wonder what all the fuss is about.

Lost in the debate about The Cluetrain Manifesto’s value, though, are the 95 theses that comprise it, beginning with the notion that “markets are conversations.” Certainly, it was a bold concept, given that a market, at its core, is a complex environment in which people and institutions exchange goods and services.

Each of the subsequent 94 theses, though, stands or falls on its own merit. And how they were interpreted a decade ago, while of some historical interest, isn’t very relevant in the vastly changed world in which we live today.

Keith MacArthur, a journalist-turned-communicator (currently senior director of social media and digital communication for Canadian megacompany Rogers Communciations), has undertaken an impressive project to explore each of the theses on their collective 10th birthday. I was particularly pleased when Keith reached out to me to offer my thoughts on thesis number four:

Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

Understanding thesis number four requires, as a prerequisite, an agreement with the preceding thesis, which proposes that “conversations among human beings sound human; they are conducted in a human voice.”

The premise here is simple: Conversation is natural, while the function we have come to know as “communication” grew increasingly wordsmithed. It wouldn’t be pretty if an executive spoke to his wife the same way he talks to shareholders about company strategy:

“Life partner, I’m pleased to report that the meal we just concluded conformed to requirements, and the meat loaf exceeded requirements. Now we should shift our competencies from the dining facility to the recreation venue where we can leverage our discretionary time in order to consume some best-in-class entertainment from a wide range of options.”

Fortunately, even the most formal CEO probably tells his wife, “That was a great meal, honey. Let’s go to the living room and find something to watch on TV, unless you’d rather listen to some music and read.”

The growth of social media in the last decade is largely responsible for more and more organizations talking in a human voice. Or, more accurately, the people in organizations have increasingly been talking for themselves, a departure from the carefully crafted statement of record.

At Ernst & Young, a Facebook-based recruiting effort invited employees to converse with prospects in discussion groups, a far cry from the display ads and job descriptions that usually kick off a recruitment drive.

Employees from throughout Embarq, a Fortune 500 telco, have conversations with customers over Twitter and other channels, led by @Embarq_Joey who inaugurates conversations with unhappy customers with language like, “Sorry your DSL is messed up. Can I help? Send me a DM with your DSL # and I can check it out for you.” “Messed up” is hardly corporatese, is it? On the same account, he tweets non-work-related messages, like “Home at last!!! Such much to catch up with on the DVR, man!”

Dave Neeleman, former CEO of JetBlue, spoke from the heart when he recorded YouTube video apologizing for the 2007 Valentine’s Day freeze at New York’s Kennedy Airport. Clearly, no lawyers were involved in prepping Neeleman’s statement.

Alan Mullaly, Ford Motor Company’s CEO, sat and chatted with participants in a blogger dinner, with no handlers in sight, allowing the conversation to be videotaped, an informal chat most CEOs 10 years ago would have seen as undignified and unprofessional. Today, it’s viewed as authentic and real.

Marriott International CEO Bill Marriott tells his stories in his own unedited voice on his blog.

These are just a few examples. Others appear in blog posts and comments, podcasts, videos, and other channels that permeate the Web. It’s a good thing, too. People are sick to death of hearing stilted language churned out by communicators and lawyers that sound like anything but the conversations they want to have. And because leaders are recognizing that their markets are conversations, they are increasingly recognizing the need to participate like real people—and for their employees to engage, as well.

Revisiting the thesis affords an opportunity to see how smart companies are showing their humanity in each of the ways described:

Delivering information — PepsiCo podcasts have featured executives delivering performance results as though they were sitting across the cafeteria table from frontline employees.

Delivering opinions—Michael Hyatt, CEO at Thomas Nelson Publishers, blogs routinely about what he thinks, such as this post about why he believes every traditional publisher should be blogging.

Delivering perspectives—Beth Israel Deconness CEO Paul Levy uses his blog to offer perspectives on healthcare in some of the most forthright posts imaginable.

Delivering dissenting arguments—GM’s Bob Lutz spoke candidly on the Fastlane blog about his own views on global warming. Like them or not, it’s hard to deny that his words were genuine.

(We’ll let the humorous asides go. I’ve never heard one in delivered in corporatese.)

What characterizes each of these examples—and the list that preceds them—is the human voice—open, natural, and uncontrived. Of course, there are plenty of organizations still caught up in the inhuman, forced language of business from a bygone era, but the change is upon us and accelerating; there is no turning back.

None of this would matter if business didn’t benefit from the effort. A recent Heyman Associates study, however, indicated that genuine two-way communication is a more credible way to deliver information. Credibility is a pillar of trust, and trust drives business.

To all those who are weary of shifting paradigms and outside-the-box thinking, nothing could be more welcome.

What examples of authentic human voices from organization employees and leaders impressed you?

3. Next Webinar: The New Employee Communications

The New Employee Communications
with Shel Holtz and Steve Crescenzo
Beginning Monday, May 18
Webinar Cost is US $195

This Webinar was so popular when it ran over a year ago that I’ve decided it’s time to offer it again for those who may have missed it. Plus, it’ll be updated to include the latest information.

The employee communications profession is in turmoil. A function that has thrived on the careful crafting of messages in order to build engagement and support business goals, internal communications is now faced with the infiltration of Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise. Is the job now one of cruise director instead of drill sergeant? And what about the eroding line between internal and external communications as employees increasingly are participating in World Wide Web-based social networks like Facebook? Does employee communications have a role to play in addressing customer service issues that arise in blogs? Should communication to new-hires take place in external social networks? What about employees about to join the company?

In this incisive Webinar, online communication authority Shel Holtz and employee communications guru Steve Crescenzo will explore the various dimensions of internal communications in a dramatically changed world. You’ll learn from Steve, Shel, and from each other…

How to draw the line between formal and informal communication
Where internal communications should participate in online knowledge sharing activities
How to integrate social media into an internal communication strategy
How to prepare employees to serve as brand ambassadors in social networks
Why most traditional internal communication tools are still valid, and how to use them in this new environment

This Webinar will include a variety of multimedia elements (including conversations between Shel and Steve on the lecture topics, videos, and screencasts), along with text.

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

If you have not participated in one of Shel’s webinars before, visit the site at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and watch the introductory video. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

Register here: http://tinyurl.com/d3nt92

4. The Serendipity of the Package

The “print is dead” meme is based on a couple simple assumptions. First, the digital world can do anything print can do, only better. And second, the economics of print—from turning trees into pulp into paper, then managing the distribution channels—just won’t cut it.

The evidence supporting the meme just keeps pouring in, like word today that The New York Times Company plans to shut down The Boston Globe (only to offer a reprieve shortly after the announcement). Layoffs and spending cuts haven’t produced the savings required to keep the paper afloat, so the Times announced it plans to shutter the paper in 60 days after failing to win concessions from the Newspaper Guild.

A lot of people predict the death of the newspaper industry. Steve Rubel has gone so far as to predict the death in the next decade of all tangible media.

As regular readers know, I have a $100 bet with Jose Leal that, in 2018, I’ll be able to buy a newspaper from a rack on the street.

The terms of the bet include nothing about what newspaper I’ll be able to buy. I never asserted it would be a newspaper publishing today. It could well be that somebody starts a print newspaper that captures the public’s attention and imagination after the one-time juggernauts of journalism have faded from the scene.

Ultimately, though, there’s nothing wrong with print. In fact, the best way to revitalize the print business is to recognize print’s strengths over online delivery and be bold in executing them.
The real power of print is in the package.

For all the astounding content on the Web, a hyperlink-mediated environment can actually discourage the serendipitous discovery of content. Consider a visit to a news aggregation site. Your eyes skim over the hyperlinked headlines, but you click only on the items that interest you. While you may have absorbed some information from the headlines you dismissed, you’ll never see the additional links to content that might have been compelling on the pages you opted not to view.

Print, on the other hand, can be the source of endless serendipity, when done well. Turning a page should be an adventure: You have no idea what you’ll find, such as a design that delights you, a photo that wows you, a story that captivates you—none of which you would have searched for or clicked to. Quality printing also provides benefits you can’t get on-screen.

Sadly, as print media retrenches, publishers have gone exactly the opposite direction, embracing timidity instead of boldness. I can’t remember the last time the design of a newspaper page struck me as enticing and the stories are the same ones I read everywhere else, AP and Reuters filler that’s just as easily found in 10,000 online sites, not to mention other newspapers.

Whether the publishers of any surviving newspapers figure this out remains to be seen, but somebody will embrace the idea of the serendipity of the package. Once readers can’t wait to flip through an issue to see what unexpected delights they’ll discover, advertisers will follow. At that point, the fact that putting ink onto paper is an expensive proposition will be incidental—people will pay for products in which they find value.

I’m not suggesting, by the way, that print can regain its market share over digital content, only that print will find a place. But I recall talking to a communicator whose company had dispensed with print, taking its internal communications online. Only rarely—when she needed to make sure something stood out from the rest of the company’s communications—did she produce a printed publication for distribution to employees. When such a publication landed on employees’ desks, their response was, “Wow, it’s in print. It must be important.”

Like I say, it’s all in how well content producers understand the importance of the package.

5. Rock Tour Leads To Evolution Of Print

Print’s not dead. Regardless of what the digital purists say, there are plenty of uses for print. As I’ve noted before, I don’t foresee the complete migration from print to digital for graphic novels and comic books, baseball cards, direct mail pieces, or the brochures they give you when you walk into Disneyland or that you find in racks in front of tourist attractions. I even think you’ll still find paper newspapers 10 years from now and beyond.

Print is evolving, however, and nothing characterizes that evolution quite like print-on-demand (POD). There is no shortage of dunderheads out there who think POD is a new synonym for vanity press, but the two have little in common. Vanity presses did large press runs for wannabe authors who couldn’t find a publisher, while POD lets anyone produce just the number of copies they want, when they want them, of just about anything. The possibilities are unlimited.

Take, for example, the deal that Blurb just inked with The Dead, the current iteration of the The Grateful Dead, featuring all four surviving members of the iconic Bay Area jam band along with a couple friends to fill in the gaps.

The Dead is touring this spring, and the band will produce a book of photography for each of the tour’s 17 stops. The photography will be provided by longtime Grateful Dead photography Jay Blakesberg. And fans will be able to replace the cover image with their own photo. Each book will be available within 72 hours of the end of the show.

Blurb developed the Personal Cover option just for this offering, although undoubtedly it will be extended to other products down the road.

From the press release:
“The band wanted to enable the Dead Heads to visually experience the show in a totally new way,” said Jay Blakesberg, photographer for the upcoming DEAD tour. “Extending the concert experience via personalized, professional-quality photography books, available within days following each show, is unlike any band merchandising I’ve ever seen. The speed of Blurb’s publishing platform meant we could create books with unique content for every tour stop. By also allowing fans to add their own magic to the cover, The DEAD are once again breaking the rules with this awesome new technology!”

“Working with The DEAD presents an exciting opportunity for Blurb to help a band create a new, cool type of merchandise item,” said Robin Goldberg, SVP of Marketing and Business Development, Blurb. “This partnership was attractive to The DEAD and to Blurb because we’ve been able to allow Dead Heads to work with licensed content but still add their own personal touch to each book.”

Since I’ll be at the show in Mountain View on May 14, I’ll just have to bring a camera so I can personalize a cover and order my own copy. It’ll most likely sit on my coffee table, where a digital version could never replace the tactile pleasure of flipping through a book of high-end printed images on high-quality paper.

Now, put on your thinking cap. For your company or clients, to what uses could this kind of near-instant printing, with the personalized touch, be put? The company holiday party? Images from trade shows or product launches? What ideas pop into your mind?

6. Site of the Month

Twitterfall
http://www.twitterfall.com

If you need to see how fast a meme is spreading through Twitter, nothing helps you visualize it like Twitterfall. Rather than relying on a refresh of the page, Twitterfall grabs tweets that match keywords and drops them as fast as it can from the top of the page.

I demo’d this using the #swineflu hashtag, and within minutes had over 30,000 tweets in the queue—even dropping at one every half-second couldn’t clear them. It’s an indicator for you—and management—that a topic is building a head of steme and can help determine whether—and how—you’ll address it.

7. HC+T update

I’m off to Brazil this week to conduct workshops for Petrobras and ABERJE, Brazil’s communications association.

I’m presenting the keynote at Blog Potomac in Washington D.C. next month, right after the IABC conference.

Speaking of IABC, I’ll be presenting in the All-Star track, focused on the Social Media News Release.

8. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 05/05 at 12:44 PM
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Monday, April 13, 2009

HC+T Update: April 2009

1) Mommy Bloggers Are Media Properties
2) Twitter: Gateway To Substantive Content
3) Next Webinar: Micromessaging for Communicators
4) What Are You Willing To Barter In Exchange For Content?
5) Online Americans Are Redefining What It Means To Be Entertained
6) Choose: Free Speech Or Medical Care?
7) A CEO Role Model For Transparency, Engagement, Responsibility
8) Site Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Mommy Bloggers Are Media Properties

I saw a news item reporting on the five winners of the first-ever Mommy Blogger Awards. This is significant on a number of levels, starting with the sponsor of the awards. This isn’t the Webbys or some awards program from new media publisher. It’s Scholastic. The folks who gave us Clifford the Big Red Dog, Harry Potter (in the U.S.), and Captain Underpants, not to mention school book fairs, is the company behind the Mommy Blogger Awards.

More specifically, it’s Scholastic’s Parent and Child Magazine that sponsored voting that wrapped up last Saturday. When an old-guard publishing business recognizes the importance of the blogosphere, it’s time to admit that social media—at least this part of it—has gone mainstream.

It’s a smart move on Scholastic’s part. Parent and Child Magazine targets exactly the same readers who read mommy blogs. Creating a relationship with both the bloggers and their readers is a good idea. Doing it in a non-competitive way—like, say, through a mommy blogger recognition program—is an even better idea.

The winning blogs also point to the mainstreaming of social media. One of the winners, “Salsa in China,” has a store and about 625,000 visits per week. Another, Momisodes, attracts 350,000 visits a week and takes in advertising dollars.

These don’t yet approach the numbers of Better Homes & Gardens (7.6 million) or Good Housekeeping (4.6 million). On the other hand, Salsa in China’s readership every week is roughly the same as the circulation of Men’s Fitness magazine (the print edition). These mommy blogs are not just blogs. They’re media properties. They attract readers, sell advertising, manage e-commerce sites. Their use of blogging platforms is incidental. Salsa in China and other comparable mommy blogs deserve the same respect and status as Barron’s (300,000 subscribers) and Wine Spectator (345,000 subscribers). It’s not silly or pointless for GM to make nice with mommy bloggers when they command readership numbers that rival the magazines in which companies have traditionally advertised.

Of course, that also means that pitching these media properties is every bit as legitimate an activity as it is pitching to Smart Money (820,000 subscribers) or Conde Nast Traveler (780,000 subscribers).

(This doesn’t excuse off-target, lame, clueless pitching. It does kinda irk me that all those bloggers who complain about being inundated with bad pitches seem to suffer under the belief that they are the exclusive recipients of such garbage. Talk to a reporter. They’ve been getting clueless pitches and lame press releases for decades. Hell, I got too much of it when I was a reporter, and that goes back to 1977; I remember stacks and stacks of mail containing unbelievably bad press releases.)

But once your website becomes a full-blown media property, it’s ridiculous to think you should be exempt from outreach by PR people trying to get their clients’ stories told.

2. Twitter: Gateway To Substantive Content

Twitter is all about brevity. One-hundred forty characters in which to condense your most profound thoughts. It’s perfect for the Attention Deficit Disorder crowd, since they can’t focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds anyway.

Everything you read about Twitter—and it’s a lot these days, between blog posts like this and a sudden infatuation by mainstream media—mentions the brevity thing. And I think it’s a load of crap.

Yes, the messages are short. But many tweets are just part of some greater content. Tweets direct you to blog posts, breaking news, videos, photos, just about anything you can find on the Net. Remarking on the brevity of these tweets is like pointing out the terseness of tables of contents. In a sense, a lot of tweets are like the listings in a table of contents, signposts to more information, more content.

On the most recent Media Hacks podcast, someone (it may have been Julien Smith, but I honestly don’t remember for sure) compared it to seeing a billboard for a McDonald’s hamburger. If it looks good, you don’t drive to the billboard and hope to be served a meal. The sign just makes you want to drive to the restaurant.

Other tweets are notifications of some kind, like Jeremy Pepper spreading word of a tweetup in Venice Beach.

Then there are those that are part of a conversation, which is greater than the sum of its tweets. Verbal conversation is mostly brief give-and-take punctuated by a few speeches and lectures. The fact that tweets are brief in a conversation is no big deal.

There are also queries that generate a flurry of interesting, if not useful, information, such as the one to which I recently responded asking our opinions of the greatest rock album ever recorded (I cast my vote for “Dark Side of the Moon”).

Far from a collection of short, standalone messages for the attention-challenged (as many see it) Twitter is frequently a gateway to more, deeper content; in these cases, its role is that of a portal. A social portal, that is, in which the destinations are offered by whomever you choose to follow.

If only there were a way to isolate the tweets of those who only update us on their activities. Then Twitter would be all about brevity. But I scrolled through over 100 tweets from those I’m following and couldn’t find a single simple status update to use as an example. If I had the time, I’d categorize those tweets. Maybe for another day.

3. Next Webinar: Micromessaging for Communicators

A new Webinar featuring Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, April 20, 2009
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Register: http://tinyurl.com/d2k5ts

You can’t open a newspaper, sit in a restaurant, or attend a conference without being inundated with Twitter. The micromessaging tool inspires discussion ranging from “a waste of time for the attention-challenged” to “a key tool for organizations for everything from branding to crisis communication.

The simple fact is that Twitter is hugely important for communicators and will become even more important in the months ahead—both for external and internal communication. But it’s just as important to know that Twitter isn’t the only micromessaging option out there. And how these micromessaging tools are used can have an impact on your engagement in other dimensions of social media.

While there’s a ton of material on the web offering insights into Twitter and its kin, this Webinar offers the context of the organizational communicator, the issues and challenges of implementing the various uses of micromessaging in a corporate environment, the means of assessing the impact of your efforts, and how to use the tools strategically to support communication efforts and have an impact on the organization’s bottom line. It’s also not the same old gushing enthusiasm but rather a hard look at how Twitter can make your life easier in some respects and complicate it in others.

You’ll learn…

- How some companies have used Twitter as an internal communications channel
- The alternatives to Twitter for employee communications, and how to decide which to use
- The approaches to organizational engagement in the Twittersphere
- How brands should be represented
- Using Twitter to provide audiences with a gateway
- How to get the most out of Twitter search
- Using Twitter as a research tool
- Guidelines and rules for employee involvement

...and a lot more!

During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants. All this costs only $195-a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room-and you’ll never have to leave your desk.

Webinars are asynchronous-you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new text-based lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time. Be sure to watch the video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for your professional development needs.

Shel Holtz, the instructor for this session, is one of the world’s recognized leading online communication authorities. He has led internal communications at two Fortune 500 companies and counseled scores of others, including Intel, Sears, Symantec, Aetna, The World Bank, The American Red Cross, The Walt Disney Company, General Mills and PepsiCo. He is a leading advocate for the value and power of communication from your organization’s leaders.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn all you need to know to bring micromessaging into your organization’s communications mix with nothing but positive results.

Register: http://tinyurl.com/d2k5ts

4. What Are You Willing To Barter In Exchange For Content?

Back in 1984, Stewart Brand uttered the words that have become the slogan of the free content movement: “Information wants to be free.”

Those who advocate free content, however, are taking Brand’s statement out of context. At the first Hacker’s conference where he made the statement, he was talking about the tension between the value of content and the vanishing cost associated with distributing it. Here’s what he actually said:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

While the free content movement has embraced the latter part of Brand’s quote, paid content advocates haven’t adopted “information wants to be expensive” as a motto. Maybe they should. At the same time, maybe they should argue that compensation for that content doesn’t have to assume a monetary form. In the world of barter, there are things besides money that have value.

KPMG, the professional services firm, has found—in the UK, at least—that Internet users are willing to tolerate a brief delay in getting to otherwise free content to watch an advertisement. In its third annual Consumers and Convergence study—produced by the company’s Communications and Media practice—KMPG found that more than 60% of British consumers said they were willing to receive the Internet ads as long as the reward of free content awaited them at the other end.

If people are willing to pay for “free” content with their attention, you have to wonder what else they might be willing to give up. Contact information? Participation in a brief survey?

Ultimately, it’s a question of convenience. The free content movement has a point when they argue that there’s so much free content available that nobody has to dig into their wallets to get at it. But there’s plenty of free music available, too; yet people seem more than happy to give Apple (or WalMart or Amazon) 99 cents rather than go through the hassle of finding and downloading illegal music via Bitorrent or Limewire. Convenience makes it worth the 99 cents.

The same concept can easily apply to other kinds of content. Sure, if I dig around long enough, I might find an alternative source for the information I need. But if getting to the easy-to-find, original, authoritative document only costs me my name and email address (for addition to a lead list), four answers to questions on a poll, or 20 seconds with an ad, I’ll be happy to enter into that bargain. It’s more convenient than starting a new Google search and assessing the quality of the resulting links.

In the survey, only 16% of respondents said they would rather pay for the content and avoid the ads. This suggests different views of what it means to pay. Money is the issue, not other kinds of exchanges. Of course, this is the UK we’re talking about. Worldwide, more than 40% said they’d rather pay than receive ads. That’s a lot more than 16%, but it’s still a minority.

Tudor Aw, KPMG’s convergence partner, said, “This willingness to view adverts in exchange for free content is good news for advertisers and is perhaps a pointer in the ongoing debate over whether advertising or subscription is the right revenue model.”

Ultimately, this could be one of those rare cases of having your cake and eating it, too. Content can be free and yet you may still be able to extract something of value in exchange for it.

5. Online Americans Are Redefining What It Means To Be Entertained

f you’re going to capture anybody’s attention, you need to do it where they’re spending their time. Increasingly, that’s social networking sites. According to a study from research company NetPop, time spent social networking has exploded 93% since 2006. That means around a third of the time U.S. Internet users spend online is devoted to communicating, not consuming.

Dig deeper into these social networking activities and you find out that people communicate online each week with, on average, 18 people one-to-one and with 110 people through group interaction. And this isn’t just kids, the usual justification for dismissing the importance of social media. Of active social networkers (those who have estalbished profiles on more than one site) 25.6% are between 18 and 24, 23% are 25 to 35, but nearly half are 35 to 64.

The study, “Online Activities among U.S. Broadband Users, 2006 and 2007 (U.S. $295),” reported that 76% of American broadband users are “joiners,” to use the parlance of Forrester’s technographic ladder. That translates into 105 million people in the U.S. communicating through social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, not to mention niche networks and social networks (like CarSpace and MyRagan) and social networks integrated into broadere sites (like FastCompany).

More time on social networks means less time spent elsewhere, and Netpop’s research suggests that reallocation of time comes at the expense of more traditional online entertainment. Passive consumption of entertainment online droped 29% over the last two years, to just 19% of the time people spend online. Another way to look at this: Peoples’ idea of what constitutes entertainment is shifting from passive consumption of online media to a more active engagement with other people, mostly people they already know. Sharing with others is more fun than kicking back and watching a video.

According to Netpop, the study suggests that companies need to do more to engage consumers and commit more of their online efforts to user-generated content and social media through which people can talk with the company and with each other. If companies don’t provide these opportunities, they will find it harder to track and engage consumers because, Netpop believes, they’ll find other channels through which they can participate in such conversations, even if it means building those communities themselves.

It’s easy to dismiss the notion that cmpanies must build community around their brands, but trying to caputre attention by hitting people with messages in places they’re not spending time is like shoving wads of money into a garbage disposal. I’m currently reading Martin Lindstrom’s excellent book, “Buyology,” in which he provides compelling evidence that people don’t pay attention to brand messages in video games, for example, yet companies are pouring exorbidant sums into in-game marketing. Business needs to understand that consumer habits across a loarge demographic swath are changing, and thus the means by which to reach them have to change as well.

The blog Bohan Style offers a good example with Victoria’s Secret Pink, a Facebook group into which more than 1.1 million people have opted. The post quotes Brad ABettese, executive VP and managing director of a Sanfrancisco marketing agency: “The community is a self-selecting loyalty program. Pink has been careful to provide tools that not only help to manage the brand’s identity, but communicate with loyal ‘friends’ and strengthen the brand’s relevance.”

The decision to deliver value through authentic engagement seems less and less optional in the face of ia growing body of evidence. I’ll be including Netpop’s numbers into my upcoming presentations.

6. Choose: Free Speech Or Medical Care?

Consider this scenario:

You’ve been dying to try out a hot restaurant that’s been generating a lot of buzz. So you make a reservation and, at the appointed time, you head to the eatery. You and your dining partner walk into the restaurant and approach the maitre d’. You give him your name, he finds you on the reservation list, and then hands you a document that looks oddly legalistic with a line at the bottom for your signature. Anxious to get to the appetizers and not interested in reading fine print, you inquire about the document. And the maitre d’ replies:

“Before we serve you, we’ll need your signature on this document agreeing that you won’t write any negative reviews of this restaurant for any online review sites.”

The idea is, of course, outrageous. And it’s all the more outrageous that Jeffrey Segal is hawking a template for just such a document to doctors.

Segal, a North Carolina-based neurosurgeon, is behind a concern called Medical Justice which is focused on shielding doctors from the deliterous effects of social media.

The template for the legal agreement is just part of Medical Justice’s offerings. Segal’s company also monitors review sites—including the growing number of sites dedicated to rating doctors—and using other techniques to prevent patients from posting negative comments to those sites. Some 2,000 doctors have become Medical Justice clients. In return for their fees, Segal’s company will find negative comments from any patients who signed the document and use the threat of legal action to force them to remove the comments.

What about patients who decline to sign on the dotted line? Segal advises the doctors decline to treat them.

John Swapceinski, who founded RateMDs.com, sees Medical Justice’s approach as forcing patients to choose between medical treatment and (in the U.S.) their First Amendment rights. He calls it “repulsive.” According to an AP article, Swapcienski was planning to post a “Wall of Shame,” listing the names of doctors who require patients to sign the waivers. (RateMD’s comments are anonymous anyway, rendering the documents impotent.)

Segal argues that doctors’ reputations are threatened by the uncontrollable reviews patients post to the web. Medical Justice’s web site suggests that “Published comments on Web pages, blogs and/or mass correspondence, however well intended, could severely damage physician’s practice.”

Yeah? So it’s okay that bad reviews of restaurants can destroy a restaurant’s reputation, but doctors should not be subjected to the same kind of critiques? The very notion that doctors should somehow be immunized against word of mouth is reprehensible. Doctors, after all, are paid service providers, just like plumbers (who are also subject to posted reviews on sites like Yelp, among others).

Segal practices the worst kind of spin by arguing that Medical Justice is not trying to restrict patients’ freedom of speech. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he huffs on the company website. His argument: Claims of malpractice can be made by bitter ex-employees and ex-spouses pretending to be patients. Of course, these are not the targets of the waivers that restrict negative posts by patients. Further, most negative doctor reviews I’ve seen have to do with bedside manner, attitude, and behavior. Those that address quality of care generally don’t assert malpractice—just that they didn’t like the results they got.

Even if Segal’s argument made sense, the bottom line seems to be, “Because the consequences to doctors are greater, muzzling your free speech rights is fine and dandy.”

Doctors—like restaurants and plumbers—have never been able to stop the word of mouth that occurs over backyard fences, at PTA meetings, family dinners, and church picnics. (In fact, positive word of mouth can drive business their way. Of course, the waivers don’t restrict patients from posting positive reviews.) Nor should they try, unless the word of mouth descends to the level of slander. The medical profession needs to understand that word of mouth has moved online and seeking to censor it is a very bad idea.

I once suggested to a healthcare client that, if they really wanted to embrace social media, they would offer discharged patients the ability to offer an online five-star rating of the doctors who provided their care. You could feel the foundations of the institution tremble at the mere thought. But it did occur to some communicators that, after the medical staff’s initial outrage faded, the doctors would probably wind up competing with one another for the best ratings. Doctors are, after all, a fairly competitive bunch.

Paul Levy, the poster CEO for transparency and author of the “Running a Hospital” blog, posts clinical outcomes to his blog. During an interview for my book, “Tactical Transparency,” Levy said the initial response from the staff was surprise and trepidation, but the staff ultimately saw the public disclosure of their performance as an impetus to continuously improve…which is eactly what they’ve been doing.

I’ve also noticed several negative doctor reviews that were balanced by opinions from others who thought the doctor was great. As most organizations engaged in social media know, unfair criticisms tend to be self-correcting as those with different experiences weigh in.

So what are the 2,000 doctors who have forked money over to Dr. Segal and his company—and the countless others who would do so if they knew about it—afraid of?

The truth, maybe?

As we who work in this space often insist, control of the message has been lost. Influencing what people think now involves honest engagement, not China-like barriers to the ability of your publics to view information you don’t like.

As for me, if any doctor ever waves a Medical Justice waiver in my face, I’ll find myself another doctor who isn’t afraid of honest opinions. I’m sure there are great doctors out there who will be happy to have my business.

7. A CEO Role Model For Transparency, Engagement, Responsibility

CEO reputations are already in the tank. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, used car salesmen have more cred than CEOs and official corporae spokespersons. Those same CEOs should be looking beyond the current economic crisis. A rehabilitated image will be important once the sting of the recession has faded.

Writing on ReputationXchange.com, Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross pointed out that a CEO’s internal communications stand to have a bigger impact on how a CEO is perceived by external audiences than external marketing or PR efforts. Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for Weber Shandwick, said, “as companies continue to announce layoffs, reputations will be built and destroyed on how well job losses are communicated and how fairly the process is handled.”

Gaines-Ross’ perspective is consistent with the findings of a 2006 study conducted by Fleishman Hillard and the National Consumers League. When asked what how they assess a company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR), most people said it hinged on how well the company treated its employees.

From what we’ve been hearing, the future does not bode well for a lot of CEOs who have taken a slash-and-burn approach to reducing the workforce.

Paul Levy, on the other hand, is one CEO who shouldn’t worry.

Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Massachusetts, has been using his Running a Hospital blog to keep internal and external constituents up to date on his efforts to control expenses while a combination of factors conspire against the hospital’s goal of meeting budget.

Paul reported on a series of quickly-assembled town hall meetings convened to explain the financial situation to employees. An even bigger goal of the meetings, though, was to solicit ideas from employees about how to address the budget gap. The meetings were convened following the distribution of a memo to employees. In a demonstration of what it means to be transparent these days, Paul posted the memo to his blog, a much more above-board approach to sharing internal matters with the public than deliberately leaking a supposedly internal-only document, the approach Citigroup took to get the word out that it had performed well during the first two months of 2009.

Overtly disclosing information will build much greater trust than pretending that an internal memo found its way outside of the company.

The memo included these candid and sobering remarks:

“For BIDMC, our hoped-for 2% FY09 operating margin (about $18 million) has disapeared. The state has reduced Medicaid payments by over $7 million, our major insurerer is paying us less than we had hoped, and reseach funding has also fallen short by several million dollars. In addition, patient volumes are substantially lower than budgeted as people in the community defer or forgo medical visits and treatments.

“Right now, at best, we can break even for the year if patient volumes return to budgeted levels. However, if they stay at current levels, we will face an operating loss of up to $20 million.

“Now, sadly, we have to crank up expense reduction…Part of the solution to this problem will be to lay off people. I’m not sure how many yet, and I am hoping you can help me figure out how to minimize the number by using more creative and less disruptive ways to solve the problem.”

Levy encouraged employees to write him with their ideas, use an electronic chat room he was setting up, or talk to him in person at the town hall meetings. He suggested elimination of pay raises, reduction of future earned time accruals, forfeiture of one or two days of past accruals, voluntary pay cuts, and unpaid leaves of absences.

Then he threw in the zinger:

“The senior managers of the hospital have recognized their personal responsibility to help with this problem. The senior vice presidents, vice presidents, and chief operating officer have been asked to take voluntary 5% pay reductions, and I have eliminated all of their bonuses for 2009, a total potential pay reduction of 15% to 25%. I am personally taking a 10% salary reduction and will forgo my bonus opportunity for this year, a total potential pay reduction of 30%.”

If it wasn’t already clear, Paul articulated the rationale for the measures imposed on senior staff and requested of the rank and file while face-to-face with employees at the town hall meetings: “to protect (BIDMC’s) lower wage earners (e.g., transporters, housekeepers, food service people) from measures we take, even if it means that the other people have to give up more of their salary and benefits.” After all, he explained, it would be harder for these people to find new jobs and the impact of being unemployed would be harsher for them. “A lot of these people work really hard, and I don’t want to put an additional burden on them,” Levy told his employees.

Here’s another surprise: Kevin Cullen, a Boston Globe reporter, was in the room. That’s right; rather than try to keep word of the meetings from leaking, Levy invited the press to attend. Here’s what Cullen wrote: “He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when Sherman Auditorium erupted in applause. Thunderous, heartfelt, sustained applause. Paul Levy stood there and felt the sheer power of it all rush over him, like a wave. His eyes welled and his throat tightened so much that he didn’t think he could go on.”

On a follow-up post, Paul shared some of the emails he received from employees after the meetings, like one from a nurse who wrote, “I would be more than happy to forego a pay raise and reduce my earned time if that would mean another person in the hospital could keep their job. I think this is a great idea and I hope my colleagues feel the same.”

Levy plans to keep reporting on his thinking and inform employees of final decisions by April 1. Those decisions will also, no doubt, appear on his blog for the world to see. In fact, just today he provided an update to employees, posted (of course) to his blog. Among his messages:

“Your participation in this process and your advice to me has succeeded in accomplishing two very important things: First, we have reduced the number of necessary layoffs dramatically, from over 600 to about 150. This is a major victory and will mean a lot to more than 450 families who would otherwise lose their income from BIDMC. Second, we will do this at the same time we provide earnings protection to our 900 lowest wage workers. As you will see, this does come at a higher cost to the rest of us, but you have all made clear to me that this is consistent with our community’s values and expectations. Thank you in advance for your generosity of spirit. “

The entire post is well worth reading, especially for the detailed explanation of how those to be laid off will be selected.

My friend Albert Maruggi, who also blogged this story, sums it up well:

“Much of America has a very long way to go to eliminate the culture of ‘gotcha,’ of confrontation, a culture of ‘keep the info, keep the power.’ All these insecurities and tactics of greed will hinder the benefits of what social media can bring to an organization and our society. With each blog post, each honest answer to a criticism, each good idea raised and implemented, the organization becomes stronger.”

Somehow, I don’t see AIG’s CEO Ed Liddy meeting face-to-face with employees to seek their input on how to turn things around. Even if he did, I don’t see him sharing the experience on a blog or inviting the press to attend the meetings. Instead, I hear the protests, “We’re a financial institution, not a hospital.”

More’s the pity. Liddy’s reputation is most likely beyond redemption, but Levy will long be remembered as a beacon of responsibility, transparency, and engagement.

Hat tips to Ron Shewchuk and Albert Maruggi for some source material for this post.

8. Site of the Month

Real-Time Chatterbox

A lot of marketers probably looked at the Skittles experiment and said, “Damn. Having a link to Twitter chatter about us would be a great idea, but not if it means our brand will be sullied by all that crap.”

What would be great would be the ability to filter out the four-letter words, the sexist and racist comments, even entire tweets by trolls.

Enter Shannon Whitley. It took Shannon—the creator of PRXBuilder (Shannon chairs the technology task force for the Social Media Release Working Group), Chat Catcher, and a bunch of other cool stuff—less than a couple weeks to create Real Time Chatterbox, a utility that lets you apply a variety of filters to a Twitter search so you can include the stream on your website without having to worry about inappropriate content.

The service is free for individuals and non-profits; you can create two Chatterboxes per account. Shannon is working on a subscription pricing model for commercial accounts, but you can try it out now.

http://www.realtimechatterbox.com/chatter.aspx?id=4

9. HC+T update

>>Multiple speaking engagements on the horizon, including the annual conference of the Council for Communication Management and the New Communication Forum.

>>I’m off to Brazil in mid-May to conduct workshops for Petrobras and ABERJE, Brazil’s communications association.

>>I’m presenting the closing keynote at a social media conference Ragan Communications is hosting in June.

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

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Posted by Shel on 04/13 at 04:42 AM
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Friday, March 06, 2009

HC+T Update: March 2009

All in one place, my favorite posts from the last five weeks or so.

HC+T Update
March 2009

Too Crunched for Social Media? Use It To Save Time
Ignoring New Media COuld Mean Ignoring New Markets
Next Webinar: SharePoint for Communicators
Why Bother With An Agency When You Have In-house Staff?
IR Blog Makes IR History
Licensed or Not, Public Relations is a Profession
With Web 2.0 Synonymns, Everything Old Is New Again
Sites Of The month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate and subscription information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Too Crunched for Social Media? Use It To Save Time

When companies lay off employees, the work they performed doesn’t magically evaporate. Those left behind are expected to take up the slack. The stomach-turning phrase usually associated with assuming the work of your now-unemployed colleagues is “do more with less.”

Finding yourself in this position was bad enough 10 or 15 years ago. After all, few of us were strolling into the office at 9 a.m., leaving at 5 p.m., and taking no work home with us. The stress and pressure of having to assume even more responsibility when you’re already pedal-to-the-metal, jamming to get everything done in 14 hours a day, can be overwhelming.

But today, when communicators are also trying to figure out social media and integrate it into their work, the challenge seems even more daunting.

That was the message I got recently from several communicators when I gave a presentation on how social media fits into a corporate communications environment. The communications staff at this company had suffered a 25% reduction; those who remain are already stretched as thin as they can get. Where, they wondered, will they find the time to do the additional work associated with a social media effort?

Fortunately, I have good news. Adopting social media can actually make it easier to do more with less. If you take a strategic approach, you can reallocate to social media some of the work you have been doing using less efficient tools and channels.

In this regard, social media is like any other technology. Its adoption is spurred by the fact that it makes it easier to do things you’ve been doing all along with older, less nimble technologies. As Jared Spool put it when I interviewed him more than a decade ago, new technologies will succeed only if they can do one of three things: solve a problem, improve a process, or let you do something you’ve never dreamed possible before the technology was introduced.

If it can’t do one of these three things, why would anyone use it?

The first time I heard the case for reallocating old tasks to social media, it was from the CEO of computer company who had received a letter from his board of directors expressing their concern for the time he was spending on his blog. His reply to them: He was spending no more time communicating than he had before he began blogging. The blog had simply replaced some phone calls, speeches, meetings, letters, and other channels that he had been using before he discovered blogs.

John C. Havens (my co-author on Tactical Transparency) and I heard similar tales from other CEOs we interviewed for the book. Michael Hyatt, for example, the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, explained how he addressed an error about the publisher’s editorial policies that ran in Publisher’s Weekly. It would have taken hours to negotiate a correction, he said, which would have run deep in the paper, a week after the original error appeared, and would occupy about an inch next to some display ad. It took far less time to simply report the error on his blog. The correction reached all the right people and what could have been a reputational crisis evaporated in a matter of hours.

Here are some other ways you can embrace social media and spend less time than it took you to do things in the days before social media:

Monitoring

PR academics call it “environmental scanning,” the process of keeping your finger on the pulse of references to your organization, industry, products, people, and issues. Setting up a listening post using social media tools (with RSS serving as the infrastructure) will require a one-time investment of time, but after that keeping tabs on what they’re saying about you will take a few minutes a day. The scary-smart Marshall Kirkpatrick offers just one approach to achieving this kind of monitoring nirvana in a post on ReadWriteWeb.

Reach the press

Multiple studies support the fact that mainstream media has glommed onto social media. There are lists of journalists who are on Twitter (for example, here’s a list of journalists just from the Vancouver Sun. You can let reporters with whom you routinely work know you’re on Twitter, then link to the online version of any news you release. Since those journalists have opted in to follow you, the attention they’ll pay to your content will be better than normal (assuming you’re producing content that’s truly useful).

But you can still use older social media to reach reporters. At The Mayo Clinic, Syndication and Social Media Manager Lee Aase set up the Mayo Clinic Newsblog using the free WordPress.com hosted service. For a small fee, he’s able to map the site to the Clinic’s domain. Tweaking of the CSS code has let him skin the blog with the Mayo design scheme. He posts news items here, along with video — usually of doctors talking about new research — that he shoots with a Flip video camera and uploads to the Clinic’s channel on YouTube. The stories get picked up, since it’s easy to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, and the videos have been embedded on sites like The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog.

Bypass the press

Michael Hyatt is hardly the only person to reach an audience directly. Organizations are no longer constrained to the press as a channel to reach publics, and any number of companies have figured this out. A New York Times column by Thomas Friedman provoked a response from General Motors, but the company’s communicators were unable to negotiate a letter to the editor with the paper’s op-ed editor. Instead, they published the letter — along with more detailed explanations — to their FYI blog, which received widespread coverage and succeeded in getting GM’s message out—probably more effectively than a traditional letter to the editor would have.

Get your thought leaders quoted

Most PR professionals are expected to get their companies or clients ink (real or virtual). One way to do this when the company or client has no news worth reporting is to ensure its thought leaders are go-to resources for reporters covering other stories.

Social media has made the task a lot easier than it used to be. Several companies have provided a blogging platform to their thought leaders, like EDS’s “Next Big Thing blog, authored by the company’s fellows. As their observations get traction in the industry, the media covering the industry begins to follow the posts and then reach out to those individuals when they need to interview someone or get a good quote.

Even easier is subscribing to Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Reporters, bloggers, and others seeking people to interview submit their queries to Peter, who blasts them out three times a day in a simple email. If your company or client has someone ideally suited to meet a reporter’s needs, just follow the instructions to reach out to that reporter.

Conduct research

Putting together most communications requires some research. Getting answers has gotten far easier thanks to social media. During a phone call with a client, I was asked if I knew internal communicators using Microsoft Sharepoint. I tweeted the question and got a dozen positive answers in less than a minute, which I was able to report back to my client.

It gets even better than that. You can put out questions on LinkedIn, which nearly always produces quality answers. And you can check the profile of those who reply in order to assess their qualifications before using their replies. Mahalo offers a similar feature that enables you to offer a monetary “tip” to the best answers, which could motivate the best resource to provide a detailed answer.

Inserting a poll into blog post can be a quick-and-dirty way to get information, while setting up an RSS-based listening post and conducting tag searches of blog search engines can reveal what others have already written about the subject.

Even the comments you get to in response to your blog posts and tweets can prove invaluable. GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has noted that the comments car enthusiasts leave to his Fastlane blog have proven to be the best intelligence he’s seen in his decades in the auto industry.

Reach key stakeholders

Earlier, I noted that technology succeeds when it lets you improve on what you’re already doing. A recent Forrester report suggests that B2B organizations are poised to embrace social media that closely mirrors the more traditional channels they’re already accustomed to using, like online conferences, exhibitions, and buyer guides. According to the Forrester report, “Social media helps open participation to more people, and many don’t have to be physically present to be involved.”

But social media can help reduce the workload in more ways than those Forrester expects B2B companies to embrace. The Dutch computer executive I mentioned earlier was able to use his blog to reduce the amount of time he spent on individual phone calls, preparing and delivering speeches, attending trade shows, and crafting email. He didn’t completely stop these activities, but was able to reduce them dramatically because the blog served to achieve the goals that previously required the use of these older channels.

Generate leads

If your communication role requires you to produce sales leads, social media can help you, too.

Before it was acquired by Forrester, Jupiter Research produced a podcast associated with each of its reports. The principals involved in the research wold chat about the findings. Listeners subscribed to the podcast series would hear about reports that interested them, leading them to make a purchase decision.

Blogger and podcaster outreach can also grease the lead generation skids. Yesterday, for example, I spent about 10 minutes on “For Immediate Release talking about Forrester’s new study on social media in the business-to-business space. I was able to report on the study because a Forrester rep offered me a copy. While I can’t say how many listeners will order the report, I’ve heard from a few that they plan to.

Find new hires

The recruiting process can be expensive and time-consuming, but social media can reduce some of the pain.

Ernst & Young, for example, turned to Facebook to recruit interns and hew-hires based on the knowledge that 80% of college students in the U.S. have Facebook accounts. They were able to target their advertising to students at the three universities that produce the best accounting graduates. Employees in various types of jobs engaged with prospects in forums to talk about what it was like to be an auditor, for example, or an IT person at Ernst & Young. Students were able to get answers to general questions by interacting with recruiters on the recruiting page’s wall.

Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company’s social media manager, put out the word that he was seeking an employee on Twitter and his own personal blog. Sure beats display ads in newspapers.

Collaborate

Business collaborative efforts can also be improved through social media tools. I was working with one company where a communicator shared that her greatest pain was the review process for the annual report. Twenty executives and others received Word versions of the report text. Each one made revisions using the “track changes” and then sent the document back to her. She then had to reconcile 20 different sets of changes and produce a single document. In a number of instances, multiple reviewers made different changes to the same text, complicating this reconciliation process.

She then sent the revised document out to the same group and repeated the same process — multiple times.

To resolve this problem, she moved the text to a wiki, provided password access to the 20 reviewers, then sent them each an email notifying them of the document’s availability and giving them two weeks to have at it before she sent the finished document to the CEO for final input.

More reallocation

If you’re using social media to ease the burden of work that used to require the use of other, less effective tools, share it here. The more ways to use these tools to relieve work burdens rather than complicate them, the more likely communicators will be to embrace social media even if they face the time crunch so common to those working during this tough recessionary times.

2. Ignoring New Media Could Mean Ignoring New Markets

Social media is often about the niche. For a mainstream media outlet to host content that satisfies the interests of a group, that group needs to be large enough to fit the CPM (cost-per-thousand) model. Social media makes it possible to identify and reach groups that fly under mainstream media’s radar.

That’s exactly what Melanie Notkin has done with her online venture, Savvy Auntie.

Melanie candidly explains in a blog post that she is unmarried and has no children of her own (so far). But she adores her siblings’ children (first becoming an aunt in 2001) and lavishes on them the attention most parents devote to their own kids. Melanie also recognized that she isn’t alone. There are, she explains, “cool aunts, great aunts, godmothers and all women who love kids.”

Through her social interactions — on her own site and on Twitter — Melanie has attracted and nurtured a community of this category she calls aunties (along with some uncles, too, I suspect) who look to her and her community for advice on a variety of aunt-related topics, including what to buy for those precious nieces and nephews. Through relationships with companies that sell these products, Melanie has turned Savvy Auntie into a viable business in a short seven months.

Having built a niche community with dollars to spend, however, doesn’t necessarily mean every marketer will recognize the spending power contained within the community.

Take Mattel, for instance. Mattel (in addition to being my former employer; I was a communicator there from 1984 to 1988) is one of the few iconic toy companies, dating back to the 1950s when its Fanner 50 toy gun was a primary sponsor of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club. Over the years, Mattel has been behind brands like Hot Wheels and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. But nothing is linked in consumers’ minds to Mattel like Barbie.

Recently, Mattel hosted one of its premium events at New York’s Fashion Week to celebrate the Barbie doll’s 50th anniversary. Mattel has always had a knack for special events. I remember attending American International Toy Fair where, to celebrate Barbie’s 35th anniversary, Andy Warhol unveiled his portrait of the doll at a top-flight cocktail reception. Mattel paid Warhol a quarter of a million dollars for the portrait which, for all I know, is gathering dust in a storage facility.

The Fashion Week event was as natural an event to cover for the Savvy Auntie as MacWorld is for Calli Lewis and her video podcast, “GeekBrief TV.” Melanie includes Barbie products on her merchandise page and includes video content on the Savvy Auntie site, so she started seeking an invitation to cover the event.

Mattel should have been all over the opportunity to reach a target market traditional marketing just isn’t configured to reach. And it’s not like Melanie has no credentials. She is, for instance, (as her bio notes) a regular panelist on the Strategy Room on FoxNews.com.

Still, Melanie ran into a brick wall.

TWEET: I am trying to get in touch the Mattel Barbie PR. If you’re on Twitter, please connect? Thanks!

I can’t say I was surprised when I saw Melanie tweet her frustration at Mattel’s rejection. When you manage one of the most successful brands in history, you tend to start believing your own press and think nobody can teach you anything. It isn’t that Mattel isn’t on the lookout for new marketing opportunities. While I worked there, the company was just starting to target divorced parents whose children lived with their ex-spouse and grandparents, who were now living long enough to represent some serious dollars spent on their grandchildren.

Aunties who have formed an online community, though, was evidently just not mainstream enough to warrant Mattel’s attention.

Eventually, though, Melanie reported that she received an email invitation to the event from out of the blue. So she gathered her tools and went, only to be turned away.

TWEET: I am leaving Barbie Show. Full and won’t let me in. What was the point of the ticket? Fail.

She wasn’t alone. It turns out, as she said in a tweet, that hundreds of people got the same invitation. Mothers of young Barbie-loving girls dressed their daughters up and made the trek to the event venue, where they, like Melanie, were told they couldn’t get in. Apparently, more VIPs showed up than expected, leading Mattel to reneg on the invitations.

TWEET: Saddes thing abt the incredibly unorganized Barbie show were the little girls who could not get in. all dressed up. I choked up!

Turning away little girls — the end consumer of your product — who were promised they could attend is bad PR. Failing to see the opportunity to reach a new market is dumb marketing. As Melanie put it in a tweet, “You’d think they’d want me in there as CEO of the site that reaches all the Aunts who buy Barbie for nieces.”

I’m not picking on Mattel (which later apologized to Melanie), but I am holding them up as another example of companies that have taken some preliminary steps into social media but still haven’t grasped it enough to recognize, as David Meerman Scott would put it, that the rules of marketing have changed. The retailer Target was an earlier example when it issued a statement asserting that it did not respond to queries from bloggers, including mommy bloggers, who have become a new source of influence over purchases made by mothers who increasingly turn to them for advice and recommendations.

Has your company identified new niche markets for its products within the social media space? What’s the niche and how are you tapping into its potential value?

3. Next Webinar: Crisis Communication And Social Media

A new Webinar featuring Toby Ward
President of Prescient Digital
Beginning Monday, March 16, 2009
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Register: http://tinyurl.com/dh3ef4

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is becoming the dominant intranet technology platform with nearly 40% of large to medium-size organizations using it (or the previous version) to power some or all of an intranet’s components. Many communications professionals have asked, “Is SharePoint good for my company intranet?” This webinar answers the question with advice on how to proceed.

In this five-week online workshop, we’ll examine MOSS as a technology platform, and as a communications platform for managing content including news and social media. MOSS is not known as a strong solution for a large-size enterprise intranet. But it is good starting platform in a Microsoft environment, and is very good for team and group collaboration. This workshop will consider all of the pros and cons of MOSS, with expert opinion and advice for non-techie business users and communicators. Included in this Webinar will be.

Introduction to MOSS — An overview of the technology in non-techie language.
Pros and cons of MOSS for communicators — The good, bad and the things Microsoft won’t always tell you.
MOSS for content management — The elements and functionality of the content management system and how it compares to other systems.
Planning & Governance — MOSS can in fact create more problems without the necessary planning and governance. We’ll tell you what you need to prepare.
Plug-ins and alternatives to MOSS — MOSS is a very complex platform, but there are many additional modules and plug-ins that can enhance it greatly… We’ll also compare MOSS to other alternative solutions.

During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants. All this costs only $195-a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room - and you’ll never have to leave your desk.

Webinars are asynchronous - you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new text-based lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time. Be sure to watch the video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for your professional development needs. (The video is at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com/index.php/site/info/C11#video) If you have questions, contact me at mailto:shel@holtz.com.

Toby Ward, the instructor for this session, is one of the world’s leading authorities on intranets. He has worked for dozens of Fortune 500 companies and big name brands including CBC, HSBC, Intel, Mastercard, Nintendo, PepsiCo and dozens of others. He is a leading advocate for the value and power of communication from your organization’s leaders.

Don’t miss the opportunity to propel your internal communication efforts to new heights.

Register: http://tinyurl.com/dh3ef4

4. Why Bother With An Agency When You Have In-house Staff?

Most organizations — and particularly those funded by taxpayers (whether an essential government agency or a bank that received bailout money) — are under increasing pressure to cut unnecessary expenses. With most people feeling the effects of the recession, ire rises when they see what appears to be profligate spending.

In an increasing number of cases, public relations — notably services provided by outside agencies — is viewed as one of those expenses that ought to be trimmed from the budget.

The latest example comes from Chicago, where the Daley administration earlier this week dropped 11 PR contracts worth $55 million. The contracts were canceled, according to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times, to drive home the point that taxpers can’t afford to supplement the “highly controlled message” coming out of City Hall. Here’s what Mayor Daley’s press secretary, Jacquelyn Heard, said:

“We get it. We absolutely get it. We understand that it would seem absurd at a time like this to be using taxpayer funds for this kind of non-essential service. It’s been made abundantly clear to every department that they are not to use these contracts…The door is locked shut on the use of these kinds of firms at this time.”

The Sun-Times had earlier reported that City Hall signed its 11th contract for $5 million just this week — for translation services designed to get content distributed to neighborhoods into the non-English language spoken in those communities. That contract set off alarm bells, since Heard has promised just last fall to spend nomore money on outside PR until the city dug itself out of its current budget crisis. The attack was led by people like Alderman Scott Waguespack, who called the use of outside PR “wrong-headed.”

None of the 11 agencies involved are big international names. You’ve got Jasculca/Terman Associates, MK Communications, Carolyn Grisko & Associates, Landrum & Brown, Valerie Denney Communications, American Marketing Services, Better World Advertising, Interpro Translation Solutions, Metropolitan Group, Jim Mudd Advertising Agency, and Cultural Communications.

The line in the Sun-Times article that struck me was this one:

Aldermen found the contracts particularly galling because every city department has at least one public information officer. That’s in addition to the mayor’s press office, with a staff of 15 and an annual budget of $1.2 million.

In another Sun-Times article, Waguespack questioned the need for “outside spin doctors,” even during the best of financial times, adding, “I don’t think they provide any more service than the dozens of other PR people we already have in the city.”

My favorite part of Alderman Waguespack’s quote is “I don’t think.” Evidently not. It wouldn’t have taken too much of the alderman’s time to know instead of guess. And I’m certain the people in those 11 firms working hard on the accounts would take exception to the portrayal of their efforts as valueless. In fact, the notion that outside PR isn’t necessary when you have internal staff makes about as much sense as berating an internal legal team for hiring outside counsel. The internal team sets the company’s agenda but is generally not large enough to handle actual litigation duties. This is well understood. Similarly, internal PR staff guides the organization’s communication, but doesn’t have the time to spend days on end on the phone pitching media. That is often what internal PR staffs outsource to external agencies.

Todd Defren wrote a wonderful piece, by the way, extolling the virtues of external agencies. It would make for illuminating reading for Alderman Waguespack.

Be that as it may, the attacks on organizations paying for PR efforts isn’t limited to government. AIG — American International Group, AIG, the company that has taken billions of dollars in federal bailout money — has already been caught engaging in some spendthrift behaviors. But now the company has been caught spending money on PR — what Fortune Magazine has characterized as a “dizzying PR binge.” That’s based on the revelation that AIG has four PR groups on the payroll. And again, the source of angst seems to be the fact that AIG also has an in-house communications team.

In AIG’s case, the outside teams are fairly well-known global brands, including Hill & Knowlton and Burson Marstellar, which are involved in government communication efforts. The Fortune article argues that, despite the money spent on PR, “the company has given little clarity on taxpayer losses to date or indeed much communication directed toward taxpayers at all.”

This could be the fault of the PR staff. It could also be based on counsel from outside PR agencies. Most likely, though, it’s a final decision from company executives who are opting to ignore the advice of its communication advisers to be more transparent and forthcoming. Whoever’s responsible, the situation — like the one in Chicago — is fueling the growing belief that external PR is unnecessary if you have an internal team. And while some external engagements may not be the best use of budget dollars, most inside PR staffs know exactly what they’re doing when they budget for external resources.

It’s worth noting that the recent Annenberg report on the impact of the recession of PR confirms that agencies are being hit much harder than internal staffs.

If the PR profession ever decides to undertake a genuine campaign to address these inaccurate perceptions, the roles of internal and external teams needs to be added to the mix. Otherwise, uninformed pundits like Alderman Waguespack, who have no interest in determining the real value PR agencies provide in exchange for their fees, will be telling our story for us.

And it wouldn’t hurt if agencies as a matter of course produced some kind of ROI metric, even if the client isn’t paying for it, just to have evidence in hand that these pandering attacks just plain have it wrong.

5. IR Blog Makes IR History

It has been a long time — November 1, 2007, to be precise — since I’ve been able to point to an investor relations effort that has embraced social media. That was when I posted an excerpt of an interview Neville Hobson and I conducted with Lynn Tyson, Dell’s VP of investor relations, who had launched the Dell Shares blog. In the interview, Tyson told us there weren’t many blogs to which we could compare Dell Shares; most IR types were too concerned about regulatory issues to even consider blogging about investor issues.

That’s why I was delighted to read a post on Dominic Jones’ IR Web Report that another company — a much smaller one than Dell — has not only launched an investor-focused blog but is using it in a practical manner that promotes transparency.

What’s more, it turns out I had a hand in it.

I referred Tiffany Bradford to Dominic after she contacted me looking for advice on introducing a social media component to her company’s IR efforts. My own IR experience is limited (although I once was a member of the National Investor Relations Institute for a whole year), and I wasn’t comfortable speaking authoritatively with her, so I put her in touch with Dominic, knowing her time would be better spent with him. I’ve never met anybody with as comprehensive an understanding of IR in the current business environment as Dominic has.

Today, Dominic posted the outcome of his conversations with Tiffany. It turns out that, on Dominic’s advice, she she launched a multi-author blog for investor relations and marketing. The blog, Displayground, launched as Microvision‘s official blog at the end of last year.

It’s what Tiffany did with the blog recently, though, that was worthy of Dominic’s praise. “She called for investors to submit questions on the blog so that she could address them on the company’s upcoming earnings conference call,” Dominic wrote. “Even I was surprised by the response from investors. They loved it, and have submitted a total of seventeen comments as I write this, the most comments of any post on the company’s blog to date.” (The emphasis is Dominic’s.) Dominic also points out that investors love being solicited for their input.

During the conference call, which occurred earlier today, various company representatives fielded all the questions that had come in via the blog.

Dominic sums up the history-making event better than I could:

“When I suggested recently that companies open up their earnings calls to bloggers there were grumblings from the old school IR pros about it not being their jobs to talk to “the masses” and that it would lead to a degradation of the discourse on the calls.

“Microvision shows that there are ways to be more open and inclusive in IR and that it doesn’t have to be a free-for-all. Tiffany Bradford isn’t one to seek the limelight, but she deserves a lot of credit for taking the lead in the IR profession to use a blog to open up the lines of communication between management and retail investors.”

Hat tip to Bryan Person, who pointed me to Dominic’s post.

6. Licensed or Not, PR Is A Profession

Every now and then, somebody prominently proclaims that public relations is not a profession. Usually this is based on a single narrow definition of the word that requires practitioners to obtain a license or some other form of legal authorization to engage in the work of a professional.

Even if you acknowledge this as the only definition that matters, PR is a profession in some parts of the world. Licenses are required to practice PR, for example, in Brazil, Panama, and Nigeria.

Even in the US, the idea of licensing public relations gets bandied about every few years. The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, was an advocate of licensing. The movement never goes anywhere, though, because the ability to license is based on a defined set of ways to do things. Passing your dental boards, for example, requires that you know the appropriate treatments for a cavity. To pass the bar and become a lawyer, you need to know the exact precedents to apply in a given situation.

In communications, there are too many variables to produce a set of right-and-wrong approaches. Two well-educated and experienced communicators could take two entirely different approaches to the same challenge and both could be right as long as they both achieved the goals they intended to. The approach taken in a pharmaceutical company may well not work in a snack food company, even if the ultimate goal is to increase market share. An audience of small-town residents in the Bible Belt will drive a different approach than an audience of Manhattanites.

In the world of licensed professions, someone who deviates from the defined right approaches can be censured, even lose their licenses, because the governing body can review standards and declare that injecting a patient with medicine A was not an accepted treatment for condition B. The fact that a governing body could not make the same kind of judgment about whether the use of humor was an appropriate way to communicate with audience A about issue B does not diminish the skills, education, and experience required to practice PR effectively.

This leads to the next argument: Without licensing, any bozo can claim to be a professional; you can be prosecuted for practicing law or medicine without a license. But a license is no guarantee of quality; contractors are licensed but I’d like a dollar for every story I’ve heard of shoddy construction. And there are plenty of people engaged in some tangent of healthcare and law who don’t need licenses but still deceive and mislead — or, in some cases, produce better results than the licensed pros.

All of which assumes that you accept this single definition. If you do, it’s at the expense of several other views of what it means to be part of a profession. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary calls a profession “a paid occupation, especially one involving training and a formal qualification.” That’s especially, but not exclusively. THis is not a distinction the OED would make lightly. Wikideia uses the word “usually” which, again, is decidedly not a black-or-white difference.

Princeton’s definition is even looser, calling a profession an occupation requiring special education. Of Random House Dictionary’s six definitions of “profession,” none make any note of special qualifications or oversight by a regulatory board. One of the key definitions is simply “any vocation or business.”

And of course, there’s the most common definition of a professional: someone who gets paid for what they do. Professional athletes, musicians, and entertainers are those who earn a paycheck. Are bloggers journalists? Sure, a lot of them are, but are they professional journalists? Not unless they’re getting paid for their reporting.

If you look at these definitions, a couple of general requirements emerge. First is the academic angle. There is a huge body of academic research and literature in public relations, a discipline in which you can earn a PhD (just as Dr. James Grunig or read the book that bears his name, “Excellence in Public Relations and Communications Management,” which reviews the literature).

To be sure, there are people working in PR with no formal education. That includes me — my degree is in journalism. In fact, as newspaper reporters find themselves on the street, a lot are looking for work in PR, usually in the media relations corner of the business. I know one outstanding PR practitioner who started out as a chef.

The fact is, though, that you can take the bar without having attended law school. How professional you are depends on how well you understand the business. Balancing the inability to license PR in most countries with the need to assess a practitioner’s professionalism, PR’s professional associations have forged a middle ground: accreditation. Accreditation is the means of ensuring that an individual qualifies under a set of acknowledged standards to perform certain work.

Accreditation, unlike certification, is voluntary, and there are plenty of outstanding, professional PR practitioners who are not accredited. And it’s as likely you’ll find an accredited communicator who behaves badly as you are to find a lawyer who acts less than ethically.

But when faced with two communicators who are unknown to you, but who both seem to be equally capable, you can be more assured that the accredited communicator is going to perform his job based on a thorough understanding of communications’ models and standards because he has gone through a process and judged knowlgeable.

You are, of course, obligated to perform within the ethical codes of the professional body that presented you with your accreditation.

Between accreditation and a body of work that reflects professionalism, it’s not hard to identify communicators who reflect the best of the profession.

The purists can argue all they like, but PR is a profession.

7. With Web 2.0 Synonynms, Everything Old Is New Again

The first time I heard the notion that there’s nothing new under the sun, it was about 30 years ago on my first communications job. Our design goddess was flipping through an issue of Communication Arts magazine looking for layout ideas. Several of us got into some good-natured banter about whether that was copying or adaptation, and that’s when the “under the sun” concept was uttered.

If you spend much time reading social media — blogs, tweets, whatever — you would think the space was loaded with new concepts. I find many of the more popular memes, though, are just old concepts repackaged and relabeled. Three of my favorites: transparency, tribes, and personal branding.

Transparency

As the co-author of a new book on transparency, you’d think I’d be all over this. But it seems most of the time I read someone talking about transparency in business, what they’re really talking about is disclosure.

Take the @thebklounge discussion about the Twitter account used by Burger King’s icon, The King. Because it wasn’t clear who was authoring the tweets — someone from Burger King or someone from the restaurant’s advertising agency. Whether this is actually important (not, in my opinion), making this information available is not a question of transparency. It’s disclosure.

Transparency is access to information publics need to make informed decisions. I’m not sure which public would be unable to make an informed decision because they don’t know who’s tweeting on behalf of a fictional character. If Burger King decided to make that information available, however, it would disclose it.

“Disclosure,” also the name of a Michael Chrichton thriller featuring lawyers, is a legal-sounding term that lacks the hype factor of “transparency,” which cable news commentators are throwing around as an anticipated characteristic of the Obama administration. Hence, “transparency” has become the Web 2.0 synonym for “disclosure.”

Tribes

I like Seth Godin‘s work. I really do. But through my reading of “Tribes” and listening to him speak (thanks to the “Marketing Over Coffee” guys), I had trouble cramming the concepts presented into the definition of a tribe.

Mainly, tribes are generally not groups anybody opts to join because it synchs up with your interests. Tribes are anthropological constructs, usually made up of bands (smaller subgroups), defined by traditions of common descent. They share language, cuilture, and ideology. Someone from the Cheyenne tribe couldn’t decide that those Cherokee do a rockin’ rain dance and join that tribe. I couldn’t turn my back on the Levites and join the Zebuluns.

So when everybody gloms onto the “tribes” notion, what they’re really talking about are “communities.” But community is a concept that has been discussed to death. Call it “tribe” instead and new life is breathed into the notion and we’re off and running with whole new discussions.

Personal brand

I know I’m going to take some heat for this one, but after long consideration, I’ve concluded that “personal brand” is just another synonym for “reputation,” which can be defined simply as what you are known for. As I review the elements of a personal brand, derived from a variety of sources, they all — every single one of them — come down to what you are known for. Whether you’re genuine or artificial, reliable, responsible, innovative, a good listener, a good communicator, funny, a spiffy dresser — that’s all what you’re known for. It’s your reputation.

But, as with “disclosure,” “reputation” has a distinctly corporate smell to it. So Tom Peters introduced the euphemism of “personal brand,” and everybody gets excited.

Understand, this doesn’t mean I have a problem, per se, with the idea of a personal brand. It’s just that your personal brand existed long before the term did.

But I recently heard somebody (I honestly can’t remember who) suggest that Michael Jordan is a personal brand. Well…he has a reputation as a great athlete, a nice guy, a talented individual. He is also, distinctly, a brand — when you see him in an underwear commercial or see his name on a pair of shoes, you react based on your association with the Michael Jordan images and experiences you have collected.

Would Jordan’s “personal brand” lead you to decide to join a pickup game with him? That would be his reputation (he’s going to kick your ass). Would you buy a pair of Nike Air Jordan’s based on his personal brand? Again, it would be the brand (forget personal) that would drive that decision.

Am I picking nits?

Probably. But it gets tiresome hearing some folks talk about these concepts as though they invented them when, in fact, they’re actually age-old concepts that have just been relabeled.

These three aren’t the only ones, of course. What other Web 2.0 concepts are long-standing notions with shiny new names?

8. Site of the Month

Greasemonkey Plugin for Firefox

If you use Firefox and haven’t installed the Greasemonkey add-on, you’re missing out on the power of Firefox.

There are probably ways you’d like to see web pages displayed that the site designer didn’t bother to implement. For instance, rather than have to click to the next page in long search results, you’d rather just scroll. You’d like to sort the results of a delicious.com search by the number of times the page was tagged. Or you just can’t find the RSS feed on a blog to which you’d like to subscribe. Greasemonkey to the rescue!

By itself, Greasemonkey doesn’t do a thing. But there are thousands of scripts created by various people designed to give you more control over pages you see. There’s one that adds an MP3 player wherever an MP3 file is linked on a page. Another lets you expand or contract the size of a text entry box.

You’ll find Greasemonkey here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
http://www.greasespot.net/

Scripts are all listed here:

http://www.userscripts.org

And there’s a great 5-minute tutorial on using Greasemonkey here:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_start_using_greasemonkey.php

9. HC+T update

I will be consulting with two Texas hospital systems on launching a strategic social media effort.
This doesn’t suck: In May, I’ll be teaching at a communications university created specifically for Petrobras. I teach on Thursday and then again on the following Tuesday. The catch? It’s in Rio de Janiero. I’ll just have to cool my heels somewhere Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
I’m delivering the keynote address at Blog Potomac in June.

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

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Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
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Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 03/06 at 06:35 AM
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Thursday, January 29, 2009

HC+T Update: January 2009

HC+T Update: January 2009

HC+T Update
January 2009

1) The Time Has Come: Blogging Is A Business Requirement
2) The Relevance Of Relevance
3) Next Webinar: Crisis Communication And Social Media
4) Is There A Market For Your Message?
5) Communication Students Need Mentors. You Can Be One!
6) The Future Of The Media Embargo
7) Use Ning For Project Management
8) Sites Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. The Time Has Come: Blogging Is A Business Requirement

About 18 or 19 years ago, scorn was heaped upon me when I insisted that pretty much every company would need to adopt email and provide employees with email addresses. I got the same reaction 12 or 13 years ago when I proclaimed all companies would require a presence on the World Wide Web. Today, email and a website are a de facto requirement for most businesses, large or small.

Today, I’m taking the same stand on corporate blogs (a reversal of my earlier position, which suggested that a corporate blog was a strategic decision):
Every business should have an authoritative, official corporate blog.

By “authoritative and official,” I mean that content posted to the blog can be construed as statements of record.

I know that corporate blogs generally aren’t trusted. Some believe blogs have peaked and are being replaced by services like Twitter. (ometimes, you need more than 140 characters to say what you need to say. No more than about 7 million people are on Twitter, which means much of your corporate audience isn’t. Those who are may well miss your tweet if they’re not watching every second and don’t check the history of their friends stream. However, you can certainly take advantage of the service Twitterfeed to automatically alert those who are on Twitter that you have posted an item to your blog.) Others believe corporate blogs are legally risky and of questionable value. But the world of business communication has changed and the blog is the best tool available (when done right) to address the challenges of life in the 140-character news cycle.

Speed of response

While I don’t for a moment believe press releases no longer have value, they are no longer adequate in a crisis situation. Consider the September 2008 incident in which Bloomberg inadvertently issued a six-year-old news item announcing that United Airlines had filed for bankruptcy. If United had a blog (which its competitors Delta and Southwest do), the company could have corrected the misinformation in a matter of minutes instead of the hours it takes to distribute a press release.

MacNeil Laboratories, makers of Motrin, is another company that could have quieted a fast-growing controversy by opening a dialogue with customers on a blog.

This is not an indictment of press release distribution companies, but rather the internal process through which releases typically are subjected before they are ever forwarded to the PR Newswires and Business Wires of the world.

Bypass the press

The press gets something about your company wrong. One of your options is writing a letter to the editor, an exercise that can prove futile, as General Motors learned when responding to an assertion by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. Alternatively, you can demand a retraction or correction, which will occupy four lines adjacent to a furniture ad on the bottom of page 37.

In the first instance, General Motors gave up trying to get the New York Times to run its letter and ran it—and more—on its FYI blog, prompting Friedman himself to acknowledge that organizations no longer need to rely on the press to tell their stories for them. As for seeking retractions and corrections, Thomas Nelson Publishers President and CEO Michael Hyatt simply uses his blog. As he noted in an interview for “Tactical Transparency,” the readership of his blog rivals that of the publication in question (Editor’s Weekly), and those who read his blog represent the audience he needed to reach with information correcting the publication’s mistake.

While there are still some troglodyte critics who believe the role of public relations is limited to answering press questions, the truth is that PR’s role is (in part) to get the company’s story out to its publics. You don’t need the press any longer to accomplish this goal. You do, however, need a blog. As Sun Microsystems President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz put it in an interview for the book, “Tactical Transparency,” “Part of the job of a CEO is to explain your mission and actions to the public. Why wouldn’t you use one of the greatest communication tools that exists (a blog) to do that?”

Reach the press

Readership of blogs is high among journalists, according to any number of studies. One 2008 study, from Brodeur & Partners (a PR agency) and Marketwire (a press release distribution firm), revealed that…

- Over 75% of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.
- 70% of reporters check a blog list on a regular basis.
- 21% of reporters spend over an hour per day reading blogs.
- 57% of reporters read blogs at least two to three times a week.

Seventy percent of journalists responding to a SNCR study from Don Middleberg use blogs to assist in reporting.

It’s a no-brainer these days that a reporter who covers your company will read your corporate blog (even though they may not participate on Twitter or Facebook).

Search engine optimization

Done well, your corporate blog will generate tremendous results on Google and other search engines, driving more traffic to your site.

Corporate blogs done right

As I mentioned at the outset, most corporate blogs are bland and untrusted. This is not a reason to dismiss corporate blogs, but rather a clarion call to do them well.

There is no one way to do a corporate blog right. Among the good ones, some are penned by the CEO (examples: Marriott International, Sun Microsystems), some by a group of employee bloggers that sometimes includes the CEO (examples: Southwest Airlines, Rubbermaid), some by a group of employee bloggers without CEO involvement (example: Transportation Security Administration). You’re not limited to these models; in fact, you can employ any approach that meets your needs as long as you adhere to some basic guidelines:

- Be strategic. Don’t blog because you need a blog. The blog should be aligned with your core business objectives. Consider creating a mission statement for your blog, even if you’re the only one who ever sees it.
- Post regularly. Infrequent posts don’t create community or attract new readers.
- Address controversy and bad news head on.
- Don’t pitch products or engage in happy talk; it’s not why anyone would read your blog.
- Don’t use your blog as another channel for news release distribution. If you have news, the blog is a great venue to offer perspective to your audience not available in the press release.
- Know your audience. If the blog is focused on customers, address customer issues or problems. If your company or its product(s) has fans, skew your blog to those fans.
- Accept comments (based on a comment policy). Address comments that need addressing, either within the comments section or with follow-up blog posts.
- Use a genuine voice. Avoid corporatese.

You can keep track of the Fortune 500 companies with blogs here. The latest to join the list (maintained by John Cass) are FedEx, Ingram Micro, and Safeway.

2. The Relevance Of Relevance

The vast majority of the complaints about PR, marketing, and advertising boil down to a single communication failure: The message is not relevant to the recipient.

The late Ed Robertson, who ran employee communications at FedEx (reporting directly to CEO Fred Smith), developed a model for communication based on Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs. According to Maslow’s model, primitive requirements must be met before people are able to pursue more sophisticated needs. The more abstract the need, the higher up the pyramid the need is situated, with self-actualization at the top. Physiological needs represent the first hurdle to overcome. You gotta eat, after all. If you’re starving, you’re not too worried about group acceptance.

Ed’s model takes the same approach to communication, which ultimately is designed to exert influence. (If you’re not trying to reinforce or change opinions, attitudes, or behaviors, why are you communicating?) In business, too many leaders believe you can influence people simply by telling them what you want from them.

Ed believed people applied the same kind of hierarchy to messages, starting with logistics. If the message was in the wrong language or was illegible, logistics failed and people would go no further. If you ever received employee benefits information after the deadline for benefits enrollment, you’ve experienced a logistics failure.

Next, you had to grab attention. Attention is nearly as big a challenge as relevance, since what will grab the attention of a CEO may hold no interest to a front-line employee who spends his days on an assembly line. As slaves to mass communication techniques, we ignore the fact that different people pay attention to different things and crank out one-size-fits-all communications.

But even if you’re able to capture the attention of your target audience, you won’t keep it long if your message is not relevant. There are two distinct dimensions to relevance:

- What does this have to do with me?
- How will paying attention to what you have to say make my life better?

Consider the howls of protest from scores of bloggers sick of the horrible pitches they receive from clueless PR people. The most vitriolic of these bloggers would still be inclined to write a post about information sent by a PR practitioner if (a) the information was consistent with what he wrote about and (b) the information would reduce hassles or improve opportunities for the blogger and/or his readers.

Madison Avenue used to be adept at relevance. In the 1950s and 1960s, a typical TV commercial would begin with a housewife on her hands and knees in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor with a brush and a bucket of soapy water. As she wipes the sweat from her brow, Mr. Clean magically appears and asks, “Are you sick of that waxy yellow buildup?” The housewife replies, “I sure am.” Suddenly, a push-mop appears and the housewife simply and easily glides the push-mop across the floor, revealing the floor’s beautiful, long-hidden surface beneath the layers of muck that hours of scrubbing couldn’t get to.

This commercial—shown during soap operas in the middle of the day in order to reach the target audience—answered both questions:

- What does it have to do with me? You spend too much time on your hands and knees in puddles of soapy water.
- What’s in it for me to pay attention to you? I’ll get you off your hands and knees and get you through this chore in a fraction of the time you’re spending now and a fraction of the effort.

Madison Avenue has strayed far from this concept, sadly, as have far too many communicators.

When an executive ignores a direct question and instead blurts out the rehearsed sound bite that reinforces a key message, the problem isn’t that messaging doesn’t work. It’s that irrelevant messaging doesn’t work. If what you have to say—in an elevator, a newsletter, an email, a press release, a speech, over Twitter or on the phone—has something to do with my circumstances and paying attention will make my life better, I’m all ears. If it’s relevant enough, I might even start a conversation with my peers about your one-way, top-down message.

There will always be a market for relevant messages.

3. Next Webinar: Crisis Communication And Social Media

A new Webinar featuring Shel Holtz, ABC
Beginning Monday, February 16, 2009
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Register here: http://bit.ly/2PmlQn

One month after it launched a new ad campaign, the makers of Motrin found themselves under assault from mommy bloggers who galvanized their effort in mere hours, attracting the attention of mainstream media. The water ditching of a US Airways flight in the Hudson River was covered by citizen journalists before mainstream media, with images shot on mobile phones and posted to sites like Flickr and circulated on Twitter. One CEO learned from Twitter that his company’s website had been hacked; he dealt with the issue initially by posting a video comment to the report.

The simple fact is that today’s socially-networked world gives you NO TIME for the deliberate, process-oriented steps organizations used to take when faced with a crisis. Your organization or client needs to respond quickly, effectively, and accurately, using the same tools and resources your constituent publics are using. In other words, much of what you knew about crisis communication is wrong because the rules of the game have changed.

This webinar will take a deep dive into strategies and tactics for employing social media in order to ensure the best possible outcome from a crisis. You’ll learn…

- How to monitor social media channels to identify issues that are building into crises and to identify fast-breaking crises
- The tools you should have ready to deploy in a crisis
- The relationships you should already have in place when a crisis strikes
- How your employees can play a key role in getting through the crisis through their participation in online social channels
- Key learnings from case studies

In addition, you’ll hear and see interviews with experts, along with other multimedia presentations integrated into the sessions providing valuable insights and tips you can put into practice right away.

During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants. All this costs only $195 —- a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room -— and you’ll never have to leave your desk.

Shel Holtz Webinars are asynchronous —- you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new lecture featuring a combination of text, graphics, audio and video is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time.

Be sure to watch the video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for your professional development needs.

Shel Holtz, the instructor for this session, is one of the world’s recognized leading online communication authorities. He has led internal communications at two Fortune 500 companies and counseled scores of others, including Intel, Sears, Symantec, Aetna, The World Bank, The American Red Cross, The Walt Disney Company, General Mills and PepsiCo. He is a leading advocate for the value and power of communication from your organization’s leaders.

Don’t miss the opportunity to prepare yourself, your communications team, and your organization to face a crisis in 2009 and beyond.

Register: http://bit.ly/2PmlQn

4. Is There A Market For Your Message?

A few years back, James Carville told a group of communicators during a conference keynote that Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential campaign rested largely on staying on message. The Democratic party strategist noted that candidate Clinton always returned the focus of conversations to the fact that “it’s the economy, stupid.”

In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore had no such focus, and few voters could tell you what the Gore campaign was all about. In 2008, on the other hand, Barack Obama embraced Carville’s approach; if you lived in the U.S. during the campaign, you had to be working hard at ignoring politics to not know that Obama promoted “Change you can believe in.”

Clearly, Obama had a message. Equally clearly, there was a market for that message. And the Obama team employed messaging techniques to make sure that message got across and resonated.

All of which flies in the face of conventional wisdom that asserts “there is no market for your message,” that messages and messaging are dead. In fact, if your message is irrelevant, self-serving, disingenuous or insulting, then there was never a market for your message. On the other hand, if your message is relevant, meaningful, helpful, accurate and/or interesting, then the market for that message is as vibrant today as it ever was. Getting that message into the heads of the people who make up that market requires messaging strategies.

I’ve long been troubled by the enthusiastic agreement to the notion that “there is no market for your message.” But the always-interesting Phil Gomes returned the issue to top of mind with a blog post titled, “Having a ‘message’ is fine, it’s the ‘messaging’ that sucks.” In his post, Phil draws a distinction between messages (it’s important to have them) and messaging, which Phil defines thusly:

“The development and cloying repetition of corporatespeak statements devoid of meaning, rendered in a language that no one uses, delivered without the benefit of listening first, and presented in venues and contexts where they are clearly inappropriate.”

Phil’s absolutely right if, indeed, that were the definition of messaging. It’s not, though. It’s the definition of bad messaging. It logically follows, then, the only bad messaging is bad. Good messaging is simply the strategic use of appropriate channels to make sure the right people—the market for your message—is able to find it and hear it.

“Messaging,” by the way, is a word. A recent podcast discussion suggested it was the inappropriate verbing of a noun, but the word appears in the Random House dictionary, among others, defined as “a system or process of transmitting messages, especially electronically.” There is nothing in this definition that requires corporatespeak, lack of listening, or inappropriate venues and contexts.

Executives and politicians who dodge media or customer questions, opting instead to parrot carefully rehearsed statements, engage in bad messaging. Good messaging is based primarily on an alignment between what you have to offer and the interests and concerns of the market. That is, good messaging begins with listening. You then develop the fundamental concepts you want your market to know.

A good current example of effective messaging is Microsoft’s pitch on Windows 7. At every opportunity, through every appropriate channel (that is, the channels that reach the influencers in the technology marketplace), Microsoft execs tout the fact that Windows 7 is easier to use, less intrusive, runs on older hardware and is compatible with just about everything. In fact, by offering an early beta of the OS to millions of people for free download, Microsoft has effectively boiled the message down to this: “It’s everything Vista should have been; try it yourself and you’ll see.”

So far, it has been an effective message, and one for which there is a well-defined market, evident in the volumes of content that has been created by bloggers, journalists, and others. The channels through which these messages were delivered include live conferences, interviews, briefings, and outreach to influencers. The result has been near-unanimous praise for Windows 7.

So don’t succumb to the popular notion that messaging is dead or that there is no market for your message. There’s no market for your bad message and bad messaging is dead. Good messages are based on…

- Knowing how your message will attract the attention of each appropriate market
- Ensuring the message is relevant to that market (that is, it has something to do with the lives and interests of the marketplace and it offers a way to make life better or easier)
- Clarifying your call to action (what do you want those who have heard your message to do?)

Getting that message into the heads of the intended recipients (i.e., “messaging”) requires the organization to consider all of its various communication opportunities and identify where the message fits—and ensuring anyone who speaks on behalf of the organization knows what the message is so they can adapt it for all appropriate conversations and communications.

It’s amusing when the same people who declare messages and messaging dead ask to hear your elevator pitch. If an elevator pitch isn’t a perfect example of messaging, what is?

5. Communication Students Need Mentors. You Can Be One!

I was a lucky guy when I took my first corporate communications job.

I’d been a newspaper reporter for a couple years when I made the switch. In 1977, few universities offered degrees in communications. At my college, the journalism department offered a single class in PR. So when I made the jump from journalism to communications, I didn’t know much about it. Since I was going to be assistant editor of a weekly employee newspaper, I figured it was just journalism for a different audience.

Fortunately, two of the people to whom I reported became my mentors. The late Ken Estes, editor of the ArcoSpark, and Dave Orman, ARCO’s manager of employee communications, spent the time with me to help me grasp the world of organizational communications. In fact, I recall viewing them as mentors and not as bosses.

Today, universities do offer degrees in communication. Professional associations provide student memberships in student chapters. But there’s nothing like regular contact with an experienced professional who has taken an interest in you and your career. Unfortunately, there are far more students aproaching graduation than there are mentors to help guide them.

That imbalance led Allie Osmar to set up a site designed to match students and professionals. Of course, far more students have applied than pros.

I offered myself as a mentor through Allie’s initiative today. It’s a way to give something back to a profession that has been very good to me, as well as to honor the effort that Ken and Dave made on my behalf more than 30 years ago. I would urge my colleagues in the communication business to do the same.

Sign up here: http://thecreativecareer.com/mentors

6. The Future Of The Media Embargo

Now that the dust has settled over Michael Arrington’s announcement that TechCrunch would agree to honor and then break embargoes from PR contacts, it’s worth taking another look at the issue from a more objective angle.

Like so many other tactics and concepts that have been perverted and abused, the embargo is rooted in a reasonable and useful practice. Jargon such as “paradigm shift,” “world-class” and “best practices”—now the fodder of bullshit bingo games—started out as perfectly legitimate ideas. As they became memes, however, they were mangled and misused with increasing regularity until they evolved into the lingo we roll our eyes over today.

What happened to the embargo is simple enough to explain, with equal blame on both sides of the equation:

- Bloggers have become a news source, but few of them are schooled in the tools of journalism. Reporters know and care that they’ll be blacklisted if they violate an embargo; they know because editors and more senior reporters explain it to them. A lot of bloggers, on the other hand, have no journalism background and are independent, without a senior staff to show them the ropes. They don’t know how embargoes work and don’t care about the consequences for blowing them off.

- In their zeal to reach out to all those bloggers, lazy PR people have ignored the rules and diluted the embargo’s efficacy.

I can’t recall ever being asked to honor an embargo during my brief career as a newspaper reporter. Nor can I recall ever requesting one while I was managing corporate communications for the two Fortune 500 companies where I worked. But I’ve been aware of them my entire career and always viewed them as a practical solution to a genuine need. With that in mind, I searched the various public relations textbooks and references I keep on my shelf. “Embargo” was not to be found in the index of a single one of them. I found that surprising; public relations schools, it seems, no longer teach the concept of the embargo. People joining the ranks of PR practitioners, then, don’t bring an academic concept with them to the job. Instead, they learn by watching what others are doing.

What others are doing, by and large, sucks.

The original notion of the embargo was based on a few basics that have fallen by the wayside:

Genuine news

Most of the unsolicited press releases I get by email that come with an embargo (more on this in a minute) don’t represent real news (that is, it’s not timely or doesn’t have a real impact on the people to whom it is being reported).

A good reason

There needs to be a sound reason for an embargo. Most professionals recognize the primary use of an embargo is to give a reporter a head-start on his reporting, particularly when the announcement is complex and both parties—the organization making the announcement and those reporting on it—will benefit from time to absorb the material, conduct interviews, do research, and produce an accurate story.

Today’s practice is for companies to seek embargoes to a bunch of press will accompany an announcement. That may be great for the company, but there’s nothing in it for the reporter.

Offered to trusted contacts

I have received at least 50 unsolicited press releases by email, sent by people and agencies with whom I have no relationship, each of which included notice of an embargo. I would ignore these without feeling like I had violated any ethical standards. If I have no relationship with these people and have not agreed to an embargo, I am not obliged to honor it.

A true embargo is requested by a PR counselor of media contacts with whom they have established strong, trusted relationships. When that happens, the journalist knows he’s going to get good information on which he’ll want to report, while the PR counselor can count on the reporter honoring the agreement. (Note that I said “contacts,” plural. An embargo never applies to a single reporter. That would be an exclusive, which is different, even though it often requires the reporter to agree to hold the story until a specified date.)

Some examples

Here are a couple examples of embargoes that work, contributed by people I trust:

Sharon Bond—I use an embargo very effectively every year for Giving USA Foundation. I have a core group of philanthropy reporters who depend on getting the information on “who gives what to whom” in America every year in advance of our publication date so that they can prepare their stories. Only once in the known history of the publication of Giving USA (it comes out every June), has the embargo been broken, and that was an honest mistake by the reporter. We’ve been putting out this publication for 50+ years.

Scott Monty—The way I’ve seen embargoes handled around various auto shows that we participate in at Ford is a little different than the “send & ask” technique I’ve seen at large. We have lots of information about new products—including specs, videos and photos—and our journalists want to have time to write about them and post a comprehensive review as soon as they possibly can. I know they appreciate having a head start and I’m not aware of any egregious breach of the embargoes. We create an embargo web site and grant access to it (via passwords) to those who would like to have it. While we have a regular group of writers we automatically include, we also accept requests from those interested in getting access. This way, it’s an opt-in system, rather than the email blast and request to hold the information until the appropriate time.

Paula Symons—An example would be a leading employer in a community closing its doors, resulting in hundreds or thousands of people losing their jobs. An embargo on this announcement would allow reporters to gather background information and interview management to prepare their stories in advance so the news could break shortly after the embargo lifts.

Wendie Owen—I’ve used embargoes many times when reporters needed an embargoed advance copy of product information (when I was in the private sector), or the embargoed advance copy of the text of a speech (when I was serving in the Carter Administration as Advisor on Communications Policy to the Secretary of Energy).

TechCrunch’s response

I feel Michael Arrington’s pain. Honoring embargoes has enabled competitors to ignore the embargo and break news first. But Arrington’s response reflects a disturbing trend: People who don’t like the behavior of PR people and respond by deliberately doing something worse. Chris Anderson did it when he published the email addresses of PR people who had spammed him. Now Arrington has done it by asserting that he will promise to honor an embargo when he has no intention of keeping the promise. In other words, he has publicly stated that you cannot trust his word.

As Wendie Owen put it, “No reputable reporter would break an embargo. That kind of behavior would get him or her kicked off the distribution list the next time. Not honoring embargoes is unethical, unprofessional and unwise, and I’m sure that practice will not spread beyond TechCrunch.” (I wonder about Arrington’s claim at the very beginning of his post that “PR firms are out of control” when it’s bloggers and journalists who are violating the agreements.)

No PR person in his right mind would offer a story to TechCrunch with an embargo attached. Real news with a legitimate reason for an embargo will now go to competitors.

It could be that the TechCrunch staff believes they have become so dominant in their market that they don’t need PR people to provide them with news. Anything’s possible, but I just laugh when I hear assertions that social media have destroyed mainstream media. (There’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that there’s still a huge demand for mainstream media.) But if I were a working journalist or a blogger working in the news arena, I sure wouldn’t want to be scratched off the distribution lists of multiple news sources.

Ultimately it’s just sad all the way around—sad that the PR profession has allowed the embargo to become what it has and sad that some bloggers and journalists have chosen to prove their word worthless. I suspect, however, that journalists/bloggers and PR counselors with trusted relationships will continue to use genuine embargoes to achieve what they were designed for. With luck, they’ll start teaching embargoes again as part of an academic PR curriculum and the guardians of the profession will begin

Note: In the absence of literature on media embargoes, I queried my community on LinkedIn and got some great answers, which have been incorporated into this post. Hat tip to Sharon Bond, Leo Bottary, Gerard Braud, Michael Driehorst, Lloyd Grosse, Doug Haslam, Sebastien Keil, Michael Miller, Scott Monty, Mike Nicholson, Wendie Owen, David Parmet, Peggy Schoen, Angela Sinickas, and Paula Smith Symons.

7. Use Ning For Project Management

Krishna De gives a nice overview of SaaS project management services in the latest episode of “The Podcast Sisters.” In her quest for the perfect service, Krishna queried her Twitter community and looked at the various suggestions they sent her against her well-thought-out list of criteria. She settled on Basecamp.

I’ve used Basecamp and have tried a couple other options, but have gone a completely different direction for project management. I’m using Ning.

Ning was not designed to be a project management tool. It is a DIY social network, giving anybody the ability to build a Facebook-like site dedicated to a specific topic. (For an example of a well-executed and populated Ning network, take a look at PR Open Mic, set up by Auburn PR professor Robert French to support dialogue between PR professors, students, and practitioners. Another is the Pickens Plan, with nearly 200,000 members.)

But as I began working on a communications audit managed by my friend Tudor Williams, it occurred to me that Ning’s features fit our project management needs quite well. First of all, I could opt to invite members of the project team and the client to the private network. In this case, the client was not included because audio and text transcripts of focus groups are included for team members’ review; focus group participants were promised their comments would be confidential. (More on audio in a bit.)

One of Krishna’s criteria for a project management tool was the ability to create multiple projects. Since Ning is free, this isn’t important; you just set up a new network for each project.

One of the best features of Ning (and Facebook and other social networks) that I haven’t seen implemented nearly as well (if at all) on other project tools is a “latest activity” block on the home page as well as your own personal page. Just as Facebook will let you know that Tom has added a photo and Mary has posted something to Bill’s wall, the “latest activity” listing on our Ning network provides a chronological listing of the latest project activities (e.g., “Joe replied to the discussion, “Lastest Version of Managers Survey.”

Team notifications are handled through broadcast messages. One-to-one communication is easy—just leave a note on the wall of the appropriate team member. Not only is that note waiting for him when he returns to the site, he’ll be notified of the message by email. Every member gets an inbox to retain project-specific messaging.

While there is no calendaring per se in Ning, there is an event function that works just as well. We’re using events to list meetings, deadlines, conference calls, and anything else with a time-or-date component to it.

Ning supports the creation of groups, which makes it easy to break out the work of sub-teams and to house content in easy-to-find places. On our project site, we have a group for executive interviews, another for focus groups, and one for weekly team meetings.

There’s one more group I set up to contain links to all audio files. We’ve been using digital recorders to capture the audio from executive interviews and focus groups, and my first thought was simply to upload them to a LibSyn account I set up for project audio. Shortly afterwards, though, I found that you can add an audio module to a Ning network, so each audio file now simply gets added to an audio player that occupies a spot on the home page.

Forums allow for discussions on specific topics, such as each focus group, interviews, and the like. And, to seal the deal, you can attach documents to your forum contributions. So one of our project team members conducted a focus group, set up a forum for the that particular group, and attached her Word notes to the post. (Next time, we’ll probably use one forum for all focus groups, which each separate focus group listed as a topic within the forum.)

We’re using the photos module for official artwork (like the company’s logo, which we’re using on presentations and documents). There’s even a “notes” page.

There are more features we’re not using but that could prove valuable, such as live chat among project team members who are live on the site at the same time, blogs for recording observations maintaining status reports (far better than sending Word documents around), and an RSS feed of site activity (both of which, I suspect, would be more useful for larger teams (there are only six of us on this particular project).

I mentioned that setting up networks is free. If you invite clients to the site and they’re sensitive to such things, you might want to consider spending $19.95 per month to get rid of the ads that provide Ning with its revenue. It’s also $4.95 per month to map the network to a unique URL and $9.95 per month for each 10 GB of storage and 100 GB of bandwidth (that’s how much comes with your free account).

After my experience with Ning as a project management tool for this project, I plan to use it for all upcoming projects with multiple participants. Its familiar interface (to anyone who has ever used Facebook, MySpace, or any other social network), its full suite of features, its flexibility and its price make it my top choice over any software designed for project purposes.

8. Sites of the Month

Microsoft Tag

This could be a game-changer, and it’s free while it’s in beta. On his ZDNet blog, Zack Whittaker calls Tags Microsoft’s most crucial technology to date. It is poised to make propel mobile computing to the next level.

And it’s pretty simple. You create a tag using a (free) account which produces a small, colorful square graphic you download and then publish—on a magazine ad, a movie poster, a bus advertisement, a business card, you name it. Somebody sees the ad and uses his or her cell phone camera to “snap” it. This opens content on the smartphone, anything from a video movie trailer to driving directions to more information on a company, product, or service. The app for your smartphone is free (and always will be).

http://www.microsoft.com/tag/

9. HC+T update

>>Lots of speaking engagements coming up, starting with a talk next week at PRSA Las Vegas.

>>I’m keynoting Blog Potomac in Washington, D.C. in June.

>>I’m helping a major packaged goods company with its intranet.

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

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Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
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Posted by Shel on 01/29 at 12:15 PM
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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

HC+T Update: November 2008

HC+T Update: November 2008

HC+T Update
November 2008

AIG’s Executives: A Confederacy Of Dunces
Nine Tips For Communicating Layoffs
My New Book Is Out; Downloads Are Available
How Many Execs Really Leave To Pursue Other Opportunities?
Moving The Needle Is The Ultimate Measure Of Online Influence
Technology Is A Slave To Me
Death Watch
Site Of The month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate and subscription information

Wow—a newsletter one short month after the last one! That shouldn’t be a big deal, since this was originally a monthly newsletter, but given my erratic production for the last year or so, I guess it is worthy of note.

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. and don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. AIG’s Executives: A Confederacy Of Dunces

I have come to the sad conclusion that the people running AIG are idiots. Dolts. Complete and irredeemable morons.

I defended the Southern California retreat for which AIG took so much heat. That event was an incentive for top-performing life insurance salespeople. It was part of the compensation for their contributions and necessary to keep the company’s top performers from defecting to the competition. If anything is going to help AIG get out of its hole and repay the taxpayer bailout it received, it will be top performers selling their asses off. Instead of criticizing the event, I suggested AIG should have foreseen how the retreat would be perceived and been proactive in communicating what the event was, who it was for, and why it was an investment in future sales.

Today, it has been revealed that AIG held another event at a posh Arizona resort. The rationale for the event makes perfect sense. AIG’s CEO Edward Liddy explained the rationale after the event was exposed by local TV news reporter Josh Bernstein. Exposed because AIG made every effort to keep the event a secret.

Brilliant planning there, Fast Eddie. Like nobody’s paying careful attention to every minuscule move your company makes. (News flash, Ed: You’re under the world’s biggest freaking microscope.)

I can just imagine the conversation among the reality-challenged executives who made this monumentally stupid decision:

Executive #1: We need to train the independent, non-employee financial planners who recommend our products to their clients. The more knowledgable these planners are about our products, the more inclined they’ll be to recommend them, and to the right clients. We rely on these guys for sales; the training is a necessary investment in those sales.

Executive #2: Well, yeah, all the companies in our line of business do this as a matter of routine. But we have a problem most of our competitors don’t have. The public couldn’t possibly understand this and, because of that bailout thing, if they see us sponsoring an event like this, they’ll crucify us.

Executive #3: Why don’t we just host the event at some Ramada Inn in East Bumcrap, and instead of sending our top execs for the planners to meet, we’ll send mid-level sales support staff?

Executive #2: Are you nuts? What financial planner would invest his own money and time to come to a meeting in a Ramada Inn in East Bumcrap? We’ll end up with three has-been B-list football players who got mail-order degrees in financial planning. We need to train 150 of the best, most sought-after financial planners in the country if we’re going to produce the kind of sales we need.

Executive #1: He’s right, you know. These guys are high-powered players. They only turn out for top-drawer events. And they expect to hobnob with the top brass.

Executive #3: Hey, I have an idea. We’ll do it in secret. We’ll make sure the hotel staff is in on it, we’ll come up with a fake company name and a fake logo. It’ll be cool, just like an undercover operation. I’ll be Jack Bauer. You can be James Bond.

Executive #1: I love this plan. But I wanna be Jack Bauer.

After his company was caught—hidden camera and all—Liddy went public and made a number of points:

Most of the tab was picked up by sponsors and participants (the company even released a list of the partners who covered the costs)
The company has canceled some 160 planned events; the ones kept on the company’s calendars were deemed mission-critical (like training independent planners to sell your products so you can make a ton of money and repay your debt)
The fancy hotel rooms in which AIG execs stayed were comped by the hotel as part of the total $360,000 package (90% of which, remember, was paid for by partners and participants)

Anybody who has spent time in business recognizes these as legitimate points. But it’s hard to convince anybody you’re telling the truth after you’ve been caught in a cover-up. Footage shown by the Phoenix ABC-TV affiliate included the KNXV reporter confronting a couple AIG execs as they hurried, tight-lipped, onto their flight.

After a performance like that—along with other damning footage on top of the revelation that AIG tried to pull this off covertly—few are inclined to believe a word Liddy says. His quote—“We appreciate what the taxpayer and the federal government has done for us…We intend to pay back every penny we’ve borrowed”—rings especially hollow after being caught in a premeditated, willful effort to deceive. Sure, Liddy did the right thing by appearing on CNN’s Larry King to personally address the charges, and a press release was issued defending the event. But it was way too little, way, way too late.

So now AIG has federal legislators calling for Liddy’s head on a platter and taxpayers itching to form a lynch mob, pitchforks and torches at the ready. All of which could have been avoided if AIG had just been transparent. Rather than assume the public is too stupid to understand its business, AIG should have explained up front the realities of the financial services market, how companies like AIG rely on independent agents to sell their products, how training these agents is what generates sales, and how these sessions need to be upscale or the agents won’t come and your product won’t sell. Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t have liked it, but AIG would be in a lot less trouble than they are now.

If this is the kind of leadership Liddy has to offer, maybe he should resign. But unless AIG’s top PR counselor (I have to assume this is Communications Senior Vice President Nicholas J. Ashooh) advised against this fiasco and was overruled, he definitely needs to go. (Besides, any PR counselor with an ounce of ethics would have resigned before engaging in such an ill-advised cover-up.)

AIG’s predicament should serve as an object lesson for executives at other companies who may still believe that opacity is a viable business strategy in today’s environment.

2. Nine Tips For Communicating Layoffs

All the job cutback news from the last several weeks, culminating in American Express’s announcement that it will cut 10% of its workforce—7,000 jobs—has me thinking about communicating layoffs. Sadly, it’s a chore I’ve had to perform several times in my career.

My worst experience—which was also my first—goes back a long time ago in a Fortune 500 company far, far away. (Well…Los Angeles.) As the internal communications manager, I learned of a 10% reduction in headquarters staff about 48 hours before the ax would fall. I lobbied for some kind of communication to employees, which wasn’t part of the plan because the president unrealistically hoped to keep news of the layoff out of the media. The best we were able to do was desk-to-desk distribution of a letter under the president’s signature; the letter would be waiting for employees as they arrived on the day of the layoff. (Email wouldn’t be an alternative for another five or six years.)

Of course, one of the affected employees sent the letter to the local daily; it was the lead headline in the business section the next morning. Infuriated, the president stormed into my office and slammed the newspaper on my desk. “I told you this would get into the press,” he fumed.

True, I said, but because they reported on the layoff based on our perspective as outlined in the letter, our message infused the story. Had there been no letter, the employee would have called and the story would have been presented from the distressed employee’s point of view. He accepted that and went sulking back to the C-suite. But the worst fallout came months later at am IABC chapter meeting when I was sitting next to the guest speaker, the regional bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. He saw my name and company on my name tag, and told me, “The next time you want something from the Journal, you can go f**k yourself.” Stunned, I asked what had brought this on. “The Wall Street Journal,” he said, “does not appreciate being scooped by a small local daily.”

Today, given the glass houses in which businesses exist, it’s even dicier than it was back in those pre-Internet days. I recall the story earlier this year of a laid-off Yahoo employee who Twittered his termination. Emerging from a layoff as a healthy organization with a focused workforce is more challenging than ever.

Having been through at least half a dozen layoffs since then, I’ve learned a lot about layoff communications. Here’s a rundown of some of the most important considerations:

Involve company communicators in layoff planning. Too many companies view communicators as the hired guns brought in to clean up the town after the mess has been made. Communications counsel at the earliest stages of planning can be invaluable. I worked at one company where performance was not a factor in determining which employees would be cut. Instead, the decision was based on the amount of time spent on defined tasks and the value attributed to each task. The survivors, then, were left with the knowledge that strong performance wouldn’t count the next time cuts were needed. Productivity plummeted and paralysis set in. Sound communications counsel would have identified how employees would react to the message, leading to an alternate approach.

Communicate clearly to all interested stakeholders. Distinct audiences exist within the employee population: Those affected, those remaining (addressed in more detail below), and supervisors. Communicate through your usual media channels. Get in touch with the analysts covering the company. And if you’re really smart, you’ll reach out to activists targeting your company to give them a candid explanation, blunting the criticism they’re inclined to levy against you.

Be human. The most beloved and effective generals in the military felt the loss of each casualty suffered under their command. Leaders acknowledge the human toll, whether that’s counted in lives lost on a battlefield or jobs lost in a tough economy. The rise of social media has magnified the importance of authenticity, so be authentic. Explain how employees’ welfare was a factor in the decision-making process and outline what’s being done for those who are leaving.

Don’t make promises you may not be able to keep. Don’t tell employees this round of cuts will be all that’s needed if there’s the remotest possibility of doing it again one or two quarters down the road. Also, don’t be specific if you can’t be. If you promise that the layoffs will be over on November 15 but pinks slips are handed out for three days after that, employees will never believe you again.

Focus on the survivors. It’s easy to gloss over the employees left behind while lamenting the loss of those who have gone. After all, they still have jobs. But the victims are gone; it’s the remaining employees you’re counting on to drive the business forward. If they’re paralyzed in the aftermath of the layoff, everything from productivity and innovation to engagement will take a hit. One concern all layoff survivors share is the expectation that they’ll shoulder the work that had been done by those have have left in addition to their existing responsibilities. Explain honestly how the slack will be taken up and what kind of sacrifices will be expected.

Articulate the end state of the process. The fastest way to move beyond a layoff is to treat it as a change process—which is exactly what it is. Employees need to know what the payoff will be for suffering through all this misery. What will the company look like if it’s successful? This vision needs to be expressed at the highest levels of the organization for the big picture, right down to the team level for the impact on individual employees.

Pay special attention to top performers. Your top performers, the indispensable assets to the organization, are also the ones who have the least trouble securing other employment, no matter how bad the economy may be. Odds are they were getting calls from headhunters before the job cuts. If things get too grim, they’ll bolt.

Don’t spin it. Layoffs are ugly, unpleasant, and emotional. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous. The best you can do is minimize the pain. Call it what it is—it’s a layoff, not a RIF or an exercise in “rightsizing.” (I hate “rightsizing.” If you didn’t need all those extra people, why’d you hire them in the first place?)

Be transparent. If you know the conditions that could derail your recovery plans, share them with employees so there are no surprises. Share the process that led to the layoff decision, the alternatives that were explored, and why those alternatives were dismissed.

What lessons have you learned from your experiences commicating layoffs?

3. My New Book Is Out; Downloads Are Available

My new book, co-authored with John C. Havens, is now available. The title: “Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media To Maximize Value and Build Their Brand.” (Don’t you love these business titles?)

For the next month or so, you can visit a special site—http://www.ttoffer.com—and enter your online order receipt number and get access to a variety of downloads as well as a free subscription to Fast Company magazine (the subscription offer is available in the U.S. only; sorry about that). Among the downloads available are sample chapters from new books by Roger D’Aprix and Mike Robbins, an e-book by Chris Brogan on personal branding, Jason Van Orden’s e-magnet series, a Forrester report on staffing for social computing by Jeremiah Owyang, and more.

4. How Many Execs Really Leave To Pursue Other Opportunities?

At one of the Fortune 500 companies where I directed corporate communications, many years ago, a reorganization consolidated some of the company’s business units. In a game of executive musical chairs, one high-ranking exec was left without a job.

The press release the company issued used the typical jargon claiming that the poor fellow was leaving the company “to pursue other opportunities.” I suppose that was true. The interesting he was leaving to pursue was finding a job after being dumped from the organization.

Journalists are wise to this kind of euphemism. A night copy editor at one of the dailies covering the company ran the story under the headline, “So long, pal.” The clueless leaders of this company—my bosses—reacted to the headline by insisting that I call the lead business reporter who covered the company and inform him that we weren’t going to deal with him any longer.

The headline may have been snarky, but the “pursuing other opportunities” phrase, along with the lack of any substantive information at all, invited that snarkiness. Of course, the reason companies resort to such vague, non-communicative lingo is that the separation agreement reached with the departing executive insists on it, presumably because they don’t want anybody to learn the truth of the matter. I’ve often wondered how people can rise to such lofty positions in big companies with such thin skins.

This experience leapt to mind as I read a post by PR luminary Jim Horton about a similar announcement from iRobot announcing that its co-founder, Helen Greiner, had resigned as the company’s chairman to be replaced by her fellow co-founder Colin Aigle, who was serving as CEO.

The most Greiner or iRobot have had to say about the reason for the former chairman’s departure is that it was a mutual decision. This, according to the C|Net report, has fueled speculation about what really happened, suggesting that Greiner’s departure was not entirely voluntary. This will come as no surprise to people working in corporate communications who know that, in the absence of authoritative information, second-tier sources and gossip-mongers will rush in to fill the void. Information abhors a vacuum.

As Horton notes, it is the lack of transparency that sparked the rumor. “Wouldn’t it be better just to say that X left because she had a disagreement with the board, or she is tired and wants to move on, or she has another opportunity she wishes to pursue? That, at least, provides a context for stakeholders,” he says, adding, “Silence speaks louder than words.”

The next time an executive leaves your company’s ranks, consider the novel approach of just truthfully telling what happened. It may cause some discomfort, but that’s better than inaccurate speculation affecting perceptions of the organization.

5. Moving The Needle Is The Ultimate Measure Of Online Influence

What is influence?

I’ve been mulling over this question since reading Steve Rubel’s post asserting the Google Page Rank is the ultimate measure of online influence. I drr Steve’s point, particularly when comparing Google Page Rank to other metrics that draw on server-based data.

Like Technorati’s authority rankings, your Google Page Rank improves the more people link to you. There’s a nuts-and-bolts problem with this as a measure of influence: You don’t know why people are linking to you. Sure, you hope they’re directing their own readers to what they consider to be high-quality content. In any given case, though, it’s also possible that they’re linking to you while telling their readers, “You won’t believe what this idiot has written now.” I frequently follow links deliberately directing me to examples of bad content.

Another problem with page rank is the ease with which the unscrupulous can game the system. Not too long ago, I started moderating comments to this blog so I could reject Akismet-proof comment spam that includes a link designed to boost a site’s Google Page Rank.

But these technical issues aren’t at the core of my discomfort with Page Rank as a measure of influence. It’s the definition of influence, which has nothing to do with your popularity. Influence happens when you cause something to happen. Page Rank is an outcome of your efforts, the social media equivalent of counting the number of newspapers that pick up your press release. Influence occurs when you produce outcomes, not outputs.

Katie Paine, in her excellent book, “Measuring Public Relationships,” defines outcomes as “quantifiable changes in attitudes, behaviors, or opinions that occur as end results of a PR program.” It’s a definition I agree with. The highest possible Google Page Rank cannot determine whether your site has produced such a quantifiable change. That’s what influence is—the ability to alter someone’s attitudes, behaviors, or opinions.

Measuring your ouputs—along with outtakes (the perceptions or understanding created by your work)—is important, but it’s a communication goal, not a business goal; you measure it to determine how effective your tactics have been at meeting the business goal. Ultimately, companies have business goals in mind when they employ PR.

Unfortunately, the ultimate measure of online influence isn’t accessible from any of the online metrics or analytics available. You can’t plug a URL into a search field and produce the answer. There are three basic ways to assess your influence online:

Read and analyze what people are saying about you to determine whether attitudes or opinions have changed as a result of your online efforts
Apply some kind of survey mechanism to ask people whether your content drove some kind of change in the people who consumed it
If a direct link can be made, measure the impact of your content on the business goal; for example, where the goal is to get people to sign up for an online service, you could show that a blogger outreach effort produced a measurable increase in signups

The difference between Page Rank and these three approaches should be pretty clear when you look at what you report to your client. Which would you rather say?

Option #1: Sixty-seven percent of the people who read your blog were more likely to do business with than they were before they started reading it, and 28% said they’ve already done business with you because of the thought leadership you’ve established on the blog. That’s significant, given that our online efforts have generated a Google Page Rank of 7, which means a lot of people are linking to the blog, dramatically boosting the number of customers and prospective customers.

Option #2: We’ve generated a Google Page Rank of 7. That means a lot of people are linking to the site. Isn’t that awesome?

If we’re not working to achieve our clients’ or employers’ business objectives, there’s no reason for our clients or employers to pay us. If that’s not what we’re measuring, we’re not demonstrating the value of our work. Yes, assess your Page Rank. But for goodness’ sake, don’t stop there.

6. Technology Is A Slave To Me

I’ve been thinking about three deals I’ve closed over the last week or so. I arranged a media interview for a client. I arranged a speaking gig. And I got a consulting assignment.

All three deals were done entirely by email, with no phone calls.

The fact that email served as the communication channel for these deals normally wouldn’t have entered my mind, but I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to a recent post by Jeremy Pepper titled “Slave to Technology” in which he exhorted PR professionals to put down their email, IM, and other technology-based communication tools and return to the phone.

There’s no question that some people become overly-dependent on technology, a phenomenon that’s not limited to PR practitioners. I hear way too many stories about people who have been laid off by email, which provides those uncomfortable in confrontational situations with a means of doing what’s required of them without looking into the eyes of the target of their actions. People need to know when to use each tool based on what it’s good at, and the importance of face-to-face should never been underestimated.

But I just can’t agree with Jeremy when he suggests that deals get done on the phone and not by email. It’s just not true. Nor can I agree with Jeremy when he suggests that we should simply force ourselves to stop using technology altogether for some period of time (like one day a week). Sorry, but if a reporter calls to let me know he’s tied up in traffic and will be 10 minutes late to lunch, I’m not going to resist checking email just because I’ve bought into some insipid “no email day” concept.

Besides, we easily forget that the phone is technology, too.

Several years ago, a colleague who worked for Exxon (now retired) sent me a PDF of a page from a 1930s edition of Humble Oil’s salesforce publication, “The Lubricator.” (No jokes, please, this is serious.) The article addressed the introduction of telephones to Humble’s workplace. It offered tips on how far from the mouth to hold the mouthpiece and what to say when answering the phone. It explained why the company was placing only one phone in each department rather than providing one to every employee (people will talk on the phone instead of getting their work done). But the bit that jumped out at me instructed employees that the telephone was not a replacement for the accepted tool for communication: the letter.

The article conveyed management’s fear that the phone would encourage employees to procrastinate until the last minute, not write the business letter, then just pick up the phone instead, a practice the company found unacceptable. Writing the letter was the way things got done and the phone was, well, technology.

So, Jeremy. If you’d been blogging in 1932, would you have told people to put down the phone and pointed them to that typewriter thingy on their desks?

The letter has gone the way of the dinosaur; the U.S. mail is now made up almost entirely of bills, packages, and direct mail marketing pieces. Letter-writing—once the primary means of conducting business—has given way to the email. Not the phone, mind you—plenty of letters were being delivered by mail over the decades during which the phone has been a standard tool. But the phone is a real-time tool (annoying political recordings left as voice mail notwithstanding). Email is asynchronous, one of its greatest strengths.

Is it, then, a stretch to suggest that newer technologies have superceded the use of an older technology, that phone thingy on your desk (as Jeremy put it)?

(Note: This isn’t an attack on Jeremy, whom I like, respect, and admire and almost always agree with. If you’re not reading his blog, you should. I was motivated to write this counterpoint only because so many people commented, “Right on, Jeremy” that I wanted to offer the flip side of the argument.)

To be sure, there is value in a phone call. Your voice conveys sincerity and warmth that is far more difficult to communicate with text. (How many times has an innocent joke in an email been misinterpreted, causing grief for both sender and recipient?) It’s easy to digress into off-topic conversation that can build closer bonds.

But if each tool is used based on its strengths, then it becomes a matter of thoughtful integration of all the tools, not an artificial abandonment of a tool that has become a vital part of a PR practitioner’s communication mix.

I also wondered if, as Jeremy also asserts, PR people have, in fact, abandoned the phone. Jeremy wrote in response to my query that a stroll into just about any agency is greeted by silence instead of the chatter of practitioners on the phone with journalists. That’s not my experience in several agencies I visit when I visit agencies, and I get calls from agency reps almost daily, pitching me on one story or another. But I decided to ask PR people, via Twitter, how much they rely on the phone. It’s certainly not scientific, but out of 23 replies I received, only a few dismissed the phone as a critical tool:

the phone is my worst enemy…I <3 email and texts…fast and I can respond when I have the time; phone is too intrusive
I rarely use others in favor of in-person mtgs, IM. IM’s the channel of choice - we’re always connected. e-Mail is a relic.
mostly EM, IM, Twitter, FB—even email is dying off; phone calls are mostly sales calls
Absolutely. Hate phone calls. Love e-mail/IM. It’s quick, easy, and people actually stop to think before communicating. Win, win, win.
I don’t use my phone that much. Seems I can get lots done and get to the point in email conversations best.

I see two results from this quick-and-dirty poll. Most PR people are using the phone and those who aren’t seem to be achieving results anyway (that is, closing deals). You have to wonder how long they’d keep their jobs if they weren’t. Instead, I have no doubt that they are closing deals and achieving other vital goals. They’ve just found that the phone maybe isn’t always the best tool for closing those deals and achieving their goals. One thing connected each of the three deals I closed by email: I knew the people I was dealing with. I had relationships with them. We could communicate by email easily based on that relationship, rather than play the voice-mail-phone-tag game. It’s also important to consider how the people you’re contacting (reporters, bloggers, whatever) want to be contacted. Contrary to Jeremy’s assertion that you need to use the phone, there are a lot of reporters out there who’d rather you didn’t. Consider the following passage from “Care and Feeding of the Press,” an online document from the Internet Press Guild:
Don’t call. Really. You should not call us to find out if we received your press release. We realize that follow-ups are part of many PR organizations’ normal operating procedure, but in many cases it’s more likely to create resentment. It is appropriate to follow up on requested information, such as a sent press kit or product, but not on a blind mailing. If we’re interested, you’ll hear from us. If we’ve already established an ongoing relationship because I’ve covered your products earlier, it’s okay to send a follow-up e-mail a few days later to ask if I have any questions; but that’s it. Now, I know this next point goes against a lot of your training; but take our word for it: Nothing sets a writer or editor’s teeth on edge more than an eager young voice saying, “I’m calling to see if you got the press release we sent.” (It is, alas, common practice to have follow-up calls made by the most junior [read: clueless] members of an agency.) When we’re in the middle of a tight deadline, the last thing we want is a phone call that contains no new or useful information whatsoever. Thus, by making such calls, you’re harming both clients’ and your own reputations. If you actually have something substantive to add, such as pointing out an error in a press release, that’s another story; but you’re still better off sending us an e-mail about it than calling us.
What? How can it be that a reporter tells us, “You’re…better off sending us an email…than calling us?” if the only way to achieve results is on the phone? Simple. The phone is not necessarily the best way to achieve results, meet a reporter’s needs, or close a deal. The best tool is, well, the best tool at the time and under the circumstances. Ultimately, most of us aren’t slaves to technology. Technology is a slave to our needs. 7. Death Watch Last Thursday, blogging’s father Dave Winer suggested that online advertising is dead. “Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it’s in now,” Dave writes, “when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.” That’s a scary thought for all those online properties whose business models revolve around online advertising. Think Facebook, MySpace, blog networks like Gawker, and a little company you may have heard of called Google. I’ve caught no wind of Google scrambling to identify a new business model. That is, no doubt, because online advertising isn’t dead. It is, however, just one of the many targets of such proclamations, many of which crop up every so often when somebody revisits the meme. According to the oh-so-prescient pundits among us…
PR is dead (killed by social media)
Blogs are dead (replaced by Twitter and other channels)
Press releases are dead (replaced by blogs—but wait, aren’t blogs dead?)
Journalism is dead (replaced by user-generated content)
Encyclopedias are dead (replaced by Wikipedia)
Newspapers are dead (replaced by citizen journalism and, um, online newspapers)
Print is dead (people will page through the paintings of Michelangelo on their laptops instead of high-quality coffee table books)
Terrestrial radio is dead (whew! I won’t have to listen to any more Raiders debacles in my car)
Anything not digital is dead (replaced by, well, everything digital)
Microsoft Office is dead (everyone’s switching to SaaS and OpenOffice)
I’m sure I’ve missed a few predictions of the demise of anything that isn’t digital/social/populist. (Send them along; I’ll add them to the list.) Of course, none of these things are dead, or even dying. Some are scaling back as alternatives enter the marketplace. Some are struggling to identify a new business model. But none of these will have completely vanished by 2012, or even by 2018. Or 2100. I plan to cover each of these as time allows in a series on why the death of (fill in the blank) has been, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated. Stand by. 8. Site of the Month Society for New Communication Research Okay, I’m a founding fellow of this group, but there are a couple pages on the nascent society’s site you can use without ponying up a nickel in membership fees or any other costs. The first is the research page, where you’ll find some material you can actually use in making a social media case to your company. One of the most useful looks at the uptake of social media among the Inc. 500, a dramatically different group from the Fortune 500. There’s also a fantastic study, “The Tribalization of Business,” that explore the value of company-sponsored online customer communities. Then there are the tip sheets. These PDF documents cover best practices for a variety of activities, from developing social media politics to blogging and blogger relations. Research publications: http://sncr.org/2008/08/06/research-publications/ Tip sheets: http://sncr.org/bestpractices/ 9. HC+T Update
I’m helping a state hospital association employ social media as a means of mobilizing its supporters to advocate for increasing funding for emergency rooms.
I’m conducting an online workshop tomorrow on how to profit from social network marketing. Details are at http://www.whatsworkingnow.net/
I’m working on an internal communication audit for a major Canadian retailer
10. Boilerplate and subscription information You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you. Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like! HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology. You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader. Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts. (C) 2008, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.
Posted by Shel on 11/18 at 05:56 AM
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Monday, October 20, 2008

HC+T Update: October 2008

HC+T Update: October 2008

HC+T Update
October 2008

Next Webinar: Intranet Communication Strategies
Marriott Blogs Pakistan Devastation
Don’t Give Apple A Pass
A Misdirected Email Leads To A Company Crisis
Lessons For Non-Profits From The Grass Roots
Flash Quiz For PR People: What Is A News Release?
No Time For Blogging
Sites Of The month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate and subscription information

The last update went out in late July. As much as it may seem that this bulletin has become a quarterly, I’ll continue to crank it out as I find time.

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Next Webinar: Intranet Communication Strategies

A new Webinar featuring Shel Holtz, ABC
Beginning Monday, October 27, 2008
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar
Register at http://tinyurl.com/3ugp4n

Solid internal communications achieve business goals, but most communication on most intranets is just the publication of news and features, harkening back to the old days of company publications. Some are even starting to question the link between a company’s commitment to effective employee communications and their intranets.

In this five-week online workshop, we’ll explore five distinct classes of internal communication that can be supported on an intranet that go far beyond the simple publication of articles. The approaches examined will include those you can adopt right now, without the introduction of new software or technology, as well as some that require the use of new communication channels. Included in this webinar will be…

* Corporate initiatives—From organizational change to quality improvement, we’ll look at how the intranet can support a company’s efforts to introduce a new approach to employees.

* Business literacy—Intranets can serve as a dynamic tool for bringing employees up to speed about customers, competitors, the marketplace and a company’s own products and services.

* Line of sight—Research makes it clear that companies perform better when employees can connect the dots between top-level decisions and their own day-to-day work. Learn how intranets can strengthen that connection.

* Bad news—Companies are being snatched up and melded together at an increasing pace. Employees are receiving layoff notices at an alarming rate. Rumors swirl about the future of businesses. We’ll look at approaches to helping employees get through periods when the news is bad enough to distract people from their work.

* Benefits and open enrollment—It may be the dullest part of an internal communicator’s job, but benefits are a vital part of what attracts people to work at a company. While open enrollment takes place on intranets, these networks are woefully underused when it comes to benefits.

During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants.

If you haven’t participated in one of these webinars—which take place entirely online over a five-week period (they are NOT 90-minute teleseminars with PowerPoint pushed over the Web), watch the brief video introduction at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com/index.php/site/info/C11#video

2. Marriott Blogs Pakistan Devastation

The power of a corporate blog is nowhere more evident than on “Marriott on the Move,” the blog from the hotel chain’s CEO, Bill Marriott.

Responding to the horrific terrorist act that levelled the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, the company posted a statement on Saturday, the day of the attack, followed in less than five hours by Bill Marriott’s personal post titled, ”This Senseless Tragedy…”

In the post, Marriott notes that most of the bombing victims were hotel employees. He gives special attention to security staff who died while examining the suicide bomber’s truck. “These guys were defending the lives of hotel guests and their fellow co-workers,” he writes. “They were killed in the line of their duty.”

The post does not include the usual audio file. Marriott records his posts into a digital recorder, which his communication staff transcribes for the blog. Visitors can choose to read or listen. The absence of the audio file for this particular post is curious. If ever people—especially employees—would want to hear the voice of their CEO, this is the time. I have no doubt, however, that the words are Marriott’s -— communicators preparing a statement would never use informal language like “these guys.”

Without a blog, the organization would have been restricted to traditional channels for expressing itself. These channels don’t come close to providing a leader with the ability to convey his own reaction, or to providing stakeholders a channel through which to react. Nearly 170 comments append the post as of right now, most offering condolences and expressing outrage and shock. There are comments from people who have been injured in other attacks on hotels, from former employees, and from loyal customers. Some address Marriott’s business specifically, such as these:

—“I am confident that you will make the right decisions to take care of the Marriott associates’ families in the tragedy and to keep the trust of your loyal customers to continue to want to stay at Marriotts.”

—“Mr. Marriott: As a Silver level member and a regular traveling business customer, I will now change my stays from Hilton to Marriott for the rest of this year. I can’t help but see that the militant Islamic forces target your establishment due to its Christian heritage. I appreciate your candor and certainly, your hotel staff’s service.”

—“When I saw this horrid news, I went straight to the Marriott website to see how the company would be handling it. I appreciate your directness, and extend my deepest condolences to the families of those who lost their lives. I for one would feel perfectly safe at one of your hotels, despite this tragedy.”

In the face of such horrible devastation and loss of life, the Marriott blog—which already had an established voice a leadership—gave the company…

The means to reach out to customers and employees with an authentic expression of grief
The ability to react almost instantly
An opportunity for stakeholders to offer their own thoughts, serving as a form of catharsis
The ability for Bill Marriott to assume leadership during the crisis

There are plenty of reasons for organizations to maintain a corporate blog, from search engine optimization to addressing business issues head-on. But if Marriott’s experience isn’t enough to make other organizations consider adopting a corporate blog, nothing is.

3. Don’t Give Apple A Pass

I was embarrassed back in August during my presentation at New Media Expo in Las Vegas. John C. Havens, the co-author of my new book , and I were delivering a talk on the the theme of the book, “Tactical Transparency.” When discussing the notion of being transparent about business processes and problems, I used Apple’s Mobile Me as an example, showing a screen shot of the MobileMe Status page on the Apple website.

As soon as I started talking about it, a hand shot up. Allison Sheridan said the MobileMe status page was a terrible example.

I was confounded. After all, the inaugural post to the MobileMe status page made my point precisely:

“Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date.”

But Allison explained that updates to the site had stopped. David G., the site’s author, did not make good on his promise. Her husband, she said lost weeks worth of email and looked to the status page for information that was never posted. I had added the screenshot shortly after the third update was posted because John and I were required to meet a deadline for delivering a copy of the presentation. I hadn’t checked the site since then. Big mistake.

When I got back to my room, I visited the site. There are still only three posts there, the most recent from July 29. That final post concludes with these words:

“Next post later this week.”

Is David willing to blow off Jobs’ instructions to “write a posting every other day or so?” (That would take some chutzpah.) Has Jobs decided to return to Apple’s traditional opacity when it comes to communicating with customers? I can think of a dozen or so other reasons the updates may have been suspended, none of which excuse the shrugging off of a commitment made to customers to keep them informed. To make matters, worse, there have been continued problems with the service. Still, no updates.

But, hey, that’s just Apple. We’ll let it go because they make such cool products, right?

In fact, Apple frequently gets a pass for atrocious communication practices (among other things) because the manufacturer of such cool products can do no wrong. The Apple faithful turn a blind eye to any flaws, excusing the company because, well, we all just love our Macs and iPods.

Personally, I prefer Windows to the Mac. I had a Mac for 15 months and wound up giving it to my daughter and returning happily to the Windows world. But I have several other Apple products that I do love. And I still don’t think that makes the Mobile Me situation acceptable. Any organization that makes a public commitment to communicate and then clams up is, more than likely, hiding something. Even if they’re not, that’s the perception that will be created by their sudden silence.

MobileMe was (and continues to be) an unmitigated disaster (particularly compared to the relative trouble-free launch of Microsoft’s Live Mesh). The company launched a status page and promised updates “every day or so.” The company provided three updates, then went silent. And there has been barely a whisper of protest. (I say “barely” because there have been some reports of the sudden halt to updates, but not many…certainly not nearly as many as there would have been had it been Microsoft in the hot seat.)

Yeah, Apple’s products are cool. But it’s time to stop giving them a pass.

4. A Misdirected Email Leads To A Company Crisis

In the days before email, someone at a company where I worked inadvertently pushed the wrong speed-dial number on a fax machine. Instead of faxing a draft press release to outside counsel, he sent the release to a newspaper reporter who covered the company as part of his beat.

It was fear of this kind of all-too-human mistake that led attorneys in organizations everywhere to resist the introduction of fax machines to the workplace. The same paranoia accompanied earlier communication technologies, including photocopiers and telephones.

More recently, lawyers lobbied against email, worried about the ease with which company-confidential information could escape the ever more porous walls of the organization. There is good reason for lawyers to worry. More than one email has been sent mistakenly to external addresses from within IBM, one about a switch to Linux for employee desktops, another from an executive telling employees about the company’s woes. There are hundreds of such stories from companies, but few as chilling as the tale plaguing Carat, a media agency owned by Aegis Group, as reported yesterday in AdvertisingAge.

Faced with an impending round of layoffs, Carat’s HR staff prepared an email for those tasked with notifying affecting employees. The email was accompanied by PowerPoint and Word attachments that covered key talking points for those to be laid off, those remaining, clients and vendors. The email also telegraphs the extent of the layoffs by talking about consolidation of business units, although actual numbers aren’t included.

Rather than send the email to the intended audience of senior managers, though, the company’s top HR executive inadvertently sent it to all employees.

The AdAge piece will give you all the details about the layoff itself, along with a quote from John Hollon, editor of Workforce Management (an AdAge sister publication), who said:

“It seems to me the issue here is one of a dumb, stupid error that just about everyone who uses e-mail does from time to time. You would think that the chief people officer would be more careful given their position in the company—a reasonable assumption to make—but that’s not always the case. Owning up to the problem, apologizing and emphasizing it was a terrible mistake won’t solve this or make it better but can go a long way toward getting beyond it quickly.

“Still, if I were the CEO, I might want to start looking for a new chief people officer. You pay those people to step up in these situations, not make it worse.”

Over on David Murray’s blog, comments revolve around whether it makes sense for Carat to can Rose Zory, the chief people officer. On the one hand, it seems like a PR move designed to pacify without really addressing the issue. On the other hand, as one commenter put it, “I still really question how effective that HR person will/can be moving forward after a fiasco like this.”

(I learned about the story from a reader who read about it on David’s blog.)

A series of questions beyond that of Rose’s fate arise from Carat’s unfortunate experience, key among them…

How do you deal with layoffs now that employees have had sneak peeks at all the layoff materials?
How do you handle the reputational damage outside the organization?
What steps do you take to minimize the risk of this happening again?

The first decision the company should make is to take the hits. Being defensive won’t help. Admit this was a horrible mistake and just deal with—even agree with—the criticism.

Next, acknowledge that nothing is going to fix the situation. It will take time—and positive action—to rebuild the company’s damaged reputation.

Be utterly transparent about all this. No equivocation, no hunkering down. Admit and elaborate on plans that were exposed in the email, even if your original intent was to keep them quiet.

Dealing with employees is tougher, but not impossible. An apology from the highest levels of the organization is a good start, followed by a conversation about how the process for managing the layoff unfolded. There’s not much you can do for employees who will lose their jobs, but plenty for those who are staying, including becoming more open in your ongoing communication with them about the state of the business and the forces at work on the organization, as well as the previously-hidden internal workings of HR. Employees are never surprised by a layoff when they work for companies that keep them well informed.

Finally, don’t jerk that knee and restrict the ability to send email. Rose’s mistake was a bad one, but it was a mistake. Organizations are made up of humans; we are all inherently imperfect. I doubt there’s even a need to reinforce the need to be careful when pushing that “send” button—no message could be stronger than the one that has already been sent.

If you were counseling Carat, what advice would you have?
5. Lessons For Non-Profits From The Grass Roots

These are tough times for non-profits, especially those looking for the contributions required to fulfill their missions. It’s hard enough asking for people to part with their money, but high energy costs and an uncertain economic outlook make it even tougher than usual.

Non-profits can learn a lot from some of the organic, grass-roots efforts that have received attention in the social media space over the last several months. In the case of the Frozen Pea Fund, the American Cancer Society did not launch a campaign to raise money. Instead, those who knew Susan Reynolds, who blogged that she was afflicted with breast cancer, undertook to raise money as a means of expressing their support for Susan, with the funds they collected earmarked for the American Cancer Society. The Austin blood drive tweetup produced a record number of first-time blood donors, but not based on any call to action from the blood center. Instead, it was a program launched by the Austin Social Media Club and promoted by interested individuals through tweets and blog posts.

People listen to each other thse days more than organizations. That’s precisely why a bunch of people on Twitter raised money from people who would not have otherwise donated to the American Cancer Society. It’s why people gave blood in response to an appeal from others in their network when they had never responded to a direct appeal from the Red Cross or their local blood center.

The lesson for the non-profits is to turn some of their donation efforts over to their most passionate advocates. Rather than hold out their hands and ask for money, they can make information available about the needs the donations will address. Get this information into the hands of people who will use it, from those you have already identified as your biggest supporters to those whose current social media activities indicate they’d be highly sympathetic to your cause.

Your own employees can even promote the issues, as long as they’re transparent about it and remain focus on the results the donations will produce instead of requesting money.

This notion isn’t dissimilar to something I head of Christopher S. Penn and John Wall’s “Marketing Over Coffee” podcast, the idea that if you ask a venture capitalist for money, you’ll get advice, but if you ask for advice, you’ll get advice and money. Translated to non-profit donation efforts, ask for money and you’ll get an excuse, but if you can make the need resonate with the right people, you’ll get money (or blood, if that’s the goal).

Non-profits can grease the skids by making material available for people to use in their efforts. How much easier would the Frozen Peas donations have been if the American Cancer Society had a place where the grassroots activists could have created a landing page that included a donation button and a place for the effort’s leaders to tell their story?

This is about more than just engaging in conversation. It’s about enabling people who care—people with networks—to have the conversation on your behalf.

6. Flash Quiz For PR People: What Is A News Release?

Ah ha, caught you, didn’t I? You started to blurt out an answer, then stopped. I know I did, when I read a “Big Idea” post on FastCompany with the provocative title, ”Text messaging has become a likely alternative to traditional media releases.”

Barack Obama will announce his vice-presidential running mate on Twitter. People who follow Obama on Twitter will be the first to learn who will round out the Democratic ticket (including journalists). Who needs a press release?

Obama’s move is great on a number of levels, but I’ve no doubt the Obama campaign will still issue a release articulating all the right talking points. So, I thought to myself, a Twitter-first strategy isn’t really an alternative to a news release, because a news release is…

And I stopped.

To define what a news release is today, it’s useful to revisit what it used to be. There are three important points to keep in mind:

The publics organizations wanted to reach relied on mainstream media to deliver content. There was no “pull.”
There were two ways to get a message out through the mainstream media: Buy it (advertising) or earn the coverage (PR).
Journalists—the gatekeepers—had limited channels through which they could receive organizations’ news: phone, fax, wire services, the postal system and (more recently) email.

News releases worked all the way around. Organizations could distribute them by fax, wire service, the mail and email. Reporters learned about news to cover and got a kick-start on their reporting. Publics had access to this information. (Yes, a lot of what was and is communicated in press releases is crap. But a lot of useful and important news and information has also been conveyed in press releases.)

Fast-forward to today. To begin with, the publics organizations want to reach are made up of individuals who are able to choose one or several channels to receive information. They can choose what to read and they are not forced to rely on any single medium or gatekeeper to get it.

The media are not limited to old channels for story leads or research. A study by Brodeur revealed a growing reliance on blogs by journalists as sources of information.

Finally, organizations are not limited to the media in order to convey information and make announcements.

But—and here’s the kicker—organizations still have to communicate news and information and there are people who still have an interest in knowing what that news and information is.

So, in this environment, what is a news release? It is not any one thing. There is no single bolt-from-the-sky alternative; you can’t “kill traditional releases and just blog it.”

I submit that a news release is the communication of an organization’s news or other announcements through all appropriate channels in a transparent manner using tools that work in harmony and open the door to further conversation on the information released.

Let’s say, for example, you’re announcing a new product line. A news release would include…

Blog posts from the CEO, the brand manager, and anybody else in the company that has a perspective on the news.
A tweet of the news through appropriate Twitter accounts, including any “official” company account as well as employees who have established themselves as company representatives (think RichardatDell). The official company tweet can include a link to the authoritative statement of record, while the tweets of the individual employees can link to their own blog posts.
It most likely happens as a matter of course, but the company’s official RSS feeds should include the announcement. All content—from individual blogs to traditional press releases—should be distributed by RSS.
Any company podcasts can include interviews or other appropriate content related to the product. The show notes can link to other content, including, for example, the brand manager’s blog posts if the brand manager was the interview guest.
Company pages on social networks like Facebook can be updated as appropriate.
A traditional press release crosses the “wires” for inclusion in places like Yahoo! News and Google News. Mainstream journalists—particularly in smaller markets and trade publications—can also make good use of worthwhile, well-crafted releases.
Appropriate multimedia should be uploaded to company channels on media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr. This could be a general company channel or one dedicated to the brand, if the launch is a big enough deal. You can link to any of these assets in tweets and blog posts.
Establish a Delicious account or two (or more) to house links to related content and/or coverage of the announcement
Create a social media release

This is not a comprehensive list, of course; there are other channels I haven’t mentioned that could be entirely appropriate, depending on the news and the audience. New channels are opening up all the time. But the core idea is to release the news through all the channels the public and journalists use to receive and share it. (Note there is no pitching involved in any of this. Whether pitching is done well or badly, or should even be called “pitching,” t’s still a separate activity from the release of news itself.)

I remain committed to the social media release because of the role it plays in the symbiotic world of the multi-channel news release. It is the one source that contains everything else. The social media release is one-stop shopping, an aggregator of all content related to the news, organized in a digestable, objective, and usable format. If you read the tweet and want more information, where do you go? If you read the CEO’s blog and want more details on the product, where do you go? If you get the news because you’re a friend of the company’s Facebook page and want more information, where do you go? That’s the role the social media release fulfills.

So the news release is no longer a single thing, nor can any single thing ever accomplish what the traditional release used to. The biggest objection most PR practitioners will raise is thats a multi-channel release takes a lot more work. That’s true. But even some old-guard newspapers, like the Spokane Spokesman Review, are figuring out that tweets, blog posts, and traditional reporting are all now part of a news continuum.

So no, a text message is not an alternative to a news release. It’s part of one.

7. No Time For Blogging

I was running a daylong seminar that led one of the participants to fire off a blogging proposal to her CEO via her Blackberry. She shared with me the two-word answer that came back within minutes:

“No time.”

It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard this issue raised; I’m certain it won’t be the last. Whether it’s a CEO or any other employee, if it makes sense for that individual to communicate by blogging, time shouldn’t be a problem. Here are some thoughts on getting around the “no time” argument.

==Reallocating resources==

One executive with whom I spoke recalled receiving a communique from his company’s board of directors. The board took issue with the amount of time this CEO was committing to his blog. His answer was succinct: He wasn’t spending any more time communicating now than he was before he took up blogging.

Blogging is a new communication channel. Before blogs became widely available and accepted, executives made do with the channels available to them: one-on-one phone calls, conference calls, speeches, road shows, letters, email and so on. I have heard from a number of CEOs that blogs are more effective than any of these tools for a variety of communications. Therefore, they have replaced the use of such channels with blogging. In aggregate, though, they’re spending just as much time fulfilling their role as the company’s chief communicator.

As Thomas Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt put it (in an interview for my forthcoming book), ““At least a third of my job needs to be spent on communication. There are a lot of ways to do that, (such as) emails, phone calls, and speaking publicly. A blog is just another tool to do what a good CEO does: communicate.” (Hyatt addressed the time he commits to blogging in this post.)

Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Massachussettes (also interviewed for the book), concurs: “Part of the job of a CEO is to explain your mission and actions to the public. Why wouldn’t you use one of the greatest communication tools that exists to do that?”

==It’s not an essay==

A lot of leaders think anything they write needs to be a 1,500-word masterpiece. They’re accustomed to these missives from their annual shareholder letters and those columns that used to appear on the inside front cover of employee magazines.

Readers of blogs, however, don’t want 1,500-word posts. If every post were that long, people would probably stop reading blogs. Short, pithy observastions, quick questions (such as the time Michael Hyatt asked for feedback on his proposed employee blogging policy), brief activity updates and terse reactions to news and issues are all preferable to essay-length posts. A typical post from Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott International, runs under 500 words.

==Writing (per se) not required==

Speaking of Bill Marriott, he doesn’t write his blog at all. No, it’s not ghost-written. He records his posts into a digital recorder, which is transcribed (word for word) by his communication staff. On the blog, you have the option of reading the post or listening to it. An HP executive calls his posts into a voice mail line set up just for that purpose; the communications staff transcribes it for his intranet-based blog. There’s no need for any executive to sit at a keyboard and pound out a post.

==Group blogs==

Southwest Airlines’ Nuts About Southwest blog is a perfect example of a group blog to which company leaders can contribute when it’s appropriate. Authored by a group of employees, Nuts About Southwest has featured only a few posts by CEO Gary Kelly, who writes on the blog when the voice of the CEO is the appropriate one to address a specific issue. Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, has taken the same approach on GM’s blogs.

==ROI==

Tom Lehrer noted that life is like a sewer. What you get out of it, he said, depends upon what you put into it. Any number of executives who have undertaken blogging have been rewarded with a return on the investment in their time. This ROI can take the shape of improved relationships with key publics, better innovation, heightened employee commitment, conversation that leads to tangible actions and results (such as Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog-based conversation with SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, leading to changes in Reg FD), and even direct sales (Bill Marriott credits a link from his blog to Marriott’s reservations system with producing hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue).

==Should a CEO blog?==

It depends. There are certainly plenty of good reasons CEOs can cite for not blogging. In fact, there are CEOs I wouldn’t let anywhere near a blog. They don’t have the conversational manner required of blogging, they don’t have anything interesting to say, or they’re flashpoints for controversy. Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman, is the company’s principal blogger because the Fastlane blog is about cars, not the vehicle business (including labor, finance, and other non-car topics). CEOs who won’t maintain the commitment to blog regularly should not start one. And, frankly, a CEO is like anyone else: She has to want to blog. If she doesn’t, drop it.

But for CEOs otherwise inclined to blog if not for the time commitment shouldn’t let that stand in their way.

8. Site of the Month

Web 2.0 in the Workplace

This is the first time I’ve used the “Site of the Month” slot to promote something of my own. But what the heck, it’s free and I can’t just put it in a text email. It’s a video I recorded that explains the key benefits of Web 2.0 in the workplace. It runs about 25 minutes. I hope you find it useful.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/shelholtz/videos/1/

9. HC+T update

I’m off this week to speak several times at the Ragan communications summit at SAS headquarters near Raleigh, North Carolina.
It’s less than a month before my new book is released. I co-wrote “Tactical Transparency” with John C. Havens. It’s being published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.
I’m involved in several consulting projects, including working with a blood donation organization to make donating blood more appealing to high school and college students through social media.

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2008, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 10/20 at 08:55 AM
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Saturday, July 26, 2008

HC+T Update: July 2008

HC+T Update: July 2008

1) Next Webinar: Bring Your Intranet Into The 21st Century
2) The Future of Print Journalism
3) Official Blogger vs. Just Plain Folks
4) Non-Threatening Ways To Get Your Company Started With Social Media
5) Social Media and B-to-B: Made For Each Other
6) Weighing Legal Counsel Against Other Issues
7) Yes, Virginia, There Is An Audience
8) Sites Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information

I only missed two months…not bad!

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should
seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader:

http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Next Webinar: Bring Your Intranet Into The 21st Century

When I first presented “Bring Your Intranet into the 21st Century” in early 2007, it turned out to be the most popular five-week course since we introduced Shel Holtz Webinars back in 2002. Nearly 200 people participated, and the reviews that came back were glowing.

Since then, we’ve heard regularly from people wondering when the session would be repeated. Now, nearly 18 months later, a lot has changed in the world of intranets. Research suggests that more and more companies are seeking to implement Web 2.0 technologies and approaching it from a variety of angles. It’s time to update and repeat this wildly popular Webinar.

During the five-week online session, you’ll learn…

How your intranet can become a source of improved productivity, commitment, engagement and profitability
How to open the intranet to employee publishing via new media tools like blogs and wikis
How to replace your outdated employee directory with a vibrant employee social network
How finding media on the intranet can be as easy as it is on Websites like Flickr and YouTube
How to get employees engaged with the intranet so they use it—and read it—several times a day
Techniques for making the intranet easily accessible to employees who don’t work at computers, including factory workers and field staff

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a collection of online resources and downloadable handouts. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures include a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous—that is, they do not take place in real time. You can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you—there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

To get an overview of how these Webinars work, visit http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and view the demo video.

Want a taste of Shel before deciding? Visit his blog and listen to his podcast.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

Register here

2. The Future of Print Journalism

I have a bet.

For some time now, at least a year, I’ve been offering this wager: $100 says 10 years from now, I’ll be able to buy a newspaper out of a rack on the street. Jose Leal has taken me up on the bet, and this post will serve as the record. I also have it marked on calendar: July 21, 2018.

This all came about when I left a comment to a post by Mitch Joel. Mitch reported on Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s grave forecast for the newspaper business. It has become a given in some circles that newspapers will soon be a relic of a bygone era. To me, that’s just another variation on the never-ending stream of “(fill in the blank) is dead” pronouncements.

The newspaper business is, to be sure, on the ropes. It has never been a business prone to adaptation under new circumstances: The print media turned its nose up at television, certain that real journalism could not be practiced on TV. It was a decision that resulted in reduced newspapers’ market share as TV news provided an appealing alternative.

Today, news organizations are hamstrung by changing news consumption habits. Among those who get their news online, aggregators like Yahoo and Google News are more likely to serve as your gateway to the news than your local or metropolitan daily newspaper. Classified advertising, once the lifeblood of newspapers’ finances, have moved online to Craig’s List and eBay. Circulation rates are dropping. Papers are taking axes to their editorial staffs, reducing size of the paper, and taking other drastic measures.

All of which makes it pretty tempting to jump on the “newspapers are dead” bandwagon.

Print, however, still has strengths. While many newspapers will perish before the industry figures out how to turn things around by playing to those strengths, print journalism will adapt. Print newspapers in 10 years won’t much resemble a newspaper today. My guess is that their focus will be hyperlocal. How good is the web for finding out about the dry clearners opening up down the street or the outcome of the town hall meeting? It doesn’t pay for Joe’s Tavern to advertise on the web when Joe’s customer base is limited to people who live within a two-mile radius. It does pay to advertise in a newspaper that lands on everybody’s front door, that people pick up before they board the train for the city.

Or newspapers could go in some other direction altogether. We’ll see. In the end, there will be considerably less print journalism (somne newspapers will experience considerable success on the web), but print journalism will survive and possibly even thrive again.

Of course, the industry has to endure until the bureaucracies that control them suck it up and change course. There is plenty of evidence to support print media’s survival:

Most of the 10 largest newspapers are gaining, not losing, circulation. Nationwide, daily newspaper circulation is 50,827,454, down .1% from a year ago, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Details
A Readership Institute poll finds that only one-fifth of people who subscribe to newspapers visit the newspaper’s website in a month, and 60% never.
While readership is declining among 18-24-year-olds, it is declining slowly. The age group may place less value overall in print newspapers, but some will continue to read them. (There are even young people who prefer listening to vinyl instead of CDs.)
Readers of print engage more with the printed newspaper than with the Web site. “Ratings for four experiences – ‘gives me something to talk about,’ ‘looks out for my interests,’ ‘ad usefulness’ and ‘touches and inspires me’ were significantly higher for the newspaper than for the site,” according to the Readership Institute study.
While readership of local newspapers has declined, local newspapers remain the second most consumed medium in the U.S. after major network TV news, according to Ketchum’s “Media: Myths and Realities” survey.
Local and national newspapers are also trusted more than web resources, the Ketchum study reveals.
Personal observation counts for a lot, too. Riding on BART, I find far more people of all ages reading newspapers than their iPhones or laptops. The same is true on the subways and trains of New York. (And when I pick up the newspaper somebody has left behind, odds are they’ve done the crossword or the Soduko puzzle.)

The readership decline is gradual and there are plenty of people who will continue reading newspapers, at least long enough for newspapers to make the adjustments necessary to find their new niche in the mostly-digital media landscape.

So I’m happy to take Jose up on the bet.

In his note to me, he added a couple other reasons he thinks newspapers will be fully extinct in a decade. First he sees print as a leading factor in “the rape of our forests.” Most paper companies these days are replanting, though; trees are a renewable resource and paper companies know how to renew it. Second, he points to the energy required to produce newspapers. Fewer newspapers, though, will mean less of an environmental footprint, and we’re likely to see advances in ecological-friendly printing. (Soy-based inks are already popular, for instance.)

But Jose mostly believes that the role of journalism is archaic in a world in which anybody can publish, taking “control away from the media organizations and puts it squarely in the hands of the people.” Professional journalism is not about control, however. It’s about the skill and the resources required to track down a story and convey it in a compelling and understandable way. Journalist-reported news is the catalyst for an awful lot of blogging, and the U.S. Army isn’t going to embed somebody with a cool MySpace profile into the 1st Mountain Division on its next mission. Professional journalism will most certainly co-exist with citizen-reported news. Most of it will move online; I heard a Houston Chronicle editor say that the website comes first.

Jose has further articulated his position in a post to his blog. Others, like Jay Moonah, have a more balanced view (as evidenced by a post from Jay’s blog back in March). In his comment on Mitch’s post, Jay wrote:

As I often do I’ll lean on McLuhan who said “people don’t read newspapers, they get into them like a warm bath.” The impact of media forms like paper cannot be displaced simply by displaying the same information in another form because it’s about more than the information. Much, MUCH more. That’s not going to change in 10 years, hell that’s not going to change in a few generations. My 9 month old daughter _might_ not be able to get a newspaper off the stand by the time she’s a grandmother… maybe. But I wouldn’t bet a $100 on that, either.

Jay’s right. I expect I’ll still get USA Today delivered to my hotel rooms and have access to plenty of other forms of print journalism, including reporting included in reinvigorated daily newspapers, free giveaway newspapers that are getting more and more popular, and community weekly newspapers.

So, Jose, I fully expect to take $100 from you a decade from now. Of course, given the way other things are going, that’ll probably be worth about a Euro-and-a-half…or $3.50 Canadian.

3. Official Blogger vs. Just Plain Folks

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.

4. Non-Threatening Ways To Get Your Company Started With Social Media

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

Share this

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.

5. Social Media and B-to-B: Made For Each Other

Of all the questions I’m asked about social media, its applicability in business-to-business companies is probably the most common. Come to think of it, it’s not always posed in the form of a question. Just as often, it’s a statement: “There’s no role for social media in B-to-B.”

Social media actually makes more sense in B-to-B companies than business-to-consumer firms.

A lot of B-to-B companies evidently agree. In a 2007 report by Forrester, researcher Laura Ramos found that, as of the end of 2006, nearly 40% of B2B marketers surveyed used blogs, social networks, or user-generated content in their efforts.

The benefits of social media to B-to-B companies is simple: It’s all about relationships. B-to-C companies nearly always need to get their messages to large, amorphous groups of people; the companies have no relationship with the vast majority of those people. In most B-to-B environments, companies know exactly who their customers and prospective customers are. Social media provides B-to-B companies with a channel to have conversations that you’d like to have one-on-one with every customer and prospect, but just can’t.

Sun Microsystems, a social media poster child, gets this. (Most people don’t think about it, but Sun is primarily a B-to-B company; you’re not likely to find a rackmount server at Best Buy and the average customer isn’t likely to download and install Solaris.) Commenting about the value of having his employees blogging about their work, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said…

I don’t have the advertising budget to get our message to, for instance, Java developers working on handset applications for the medical industry. But one of our developers, just be taking time to write a blog, can do a great job getting our message out to a fanatic readership.

Hat tip to Phil Gomes for that quote, by the way.

During an interview for my upcoming book (Tactical Transparency, co-authored by John C. Havens), Schwartz offered additional insight into the value of engaging B-to-B customers through social media:

I don’t just sell to my customers, I love my customers. I embrace my customers and ask them to embrace me, . I ask them for their insights and input. As a result, the products we build become assets of those communities. Somebody who feels part of a community is going to be a much more aggressive evangelist for our products than someone who just paid $29.95 for it at a big-box retailer.

Those customers become “aggressive evangelists” because Sun—using social media as a channel for transparency—shares with customers “what’s next for a product, how we are going to manage our relationship with them, how we are going to treat them.”

That’s exactly the kind of insight that can be shared on a B-to-B blog, along with other carefully-chosen social media tools.

Is there really a reason to worry about the competition?

Some worry that such open, transparent communication can give too much away to the competition. I view this worry from two angles. First, if it really is something the competition shouldn’t see, don’t communicate it—not on a blog, not in a press release, not in any venue that can result in unintended disclosure. But I do have to wonder how much of this concern targets information from which competitors couldn’t really benefit. After all, if you’re already talking about it, how quickly could a competitor catch up with you? (I once read a quote about excessive focus on the competition that stuck with me: “Nobody ever won a tennis match by keeping their eye on the scoreboard.”)

Again, Sun’s Schwartz makes it clear that there is a difference between open discussion with customers and the need to keep secret things secret:

We also have a responsibility to our customers not to leak what they’ve shared with us. We have legal obligations because we’re subject to Reg FD, which says we have to share with everybody at the same time information that might be deemed material to our performance. For folks to violate those principles because it’s convenient or expeditious isn’t a good thing. Everybody can talk to everybody, I don’t have any problem with that, but everybody should remember that we have signed confidentiality agreements with folks and we have to honor them. There are a lot of people who do business with us because they know we can keep a secret.

In other words, open conversation via social media and confidentiality are not mutually exclusive.

B-to-B and blogs

There are more practical uses of B-to-B blogging than discussing company plans. At EDS, for example, the Next Big Thing blog, authored by EDS’s fellows, explores the future of technology from the perspective of the company’s brightest minds. The topics addressed by EDS’a bloggers are higher-level discussion topics that affect companies and the world strategically; there is no focus by the fellows on day-to-day operational issues.

Johnson Controls blogs for reputational reasons, a B-to-B company aiming its messages at consumers with its Your Energy Forum blog, which focuses on the smart use of energy at home, at work, and on the road. A blurb on the blog touts it as “a way for those in the energy efficiency movement to discuss how we’re working to reduce energy consumption. Visit to give or share your perspective.”

Architectural firms, general contractors, and (of course) PR agencies—along with a host of other B-to-BN companies—are all blogging.

Social Media Today puts another spin on B-to-B blogging. The company manages sites populated by posts from prominent bloggers in related fields; readers can not only comment on the posts but use a Digg-like function to vote for posts they like. The sites are B-to-B focused and sponsored by companies anxious for the insights not only from the bloggers, but from the comments and votes they inspire. The Customer Collective—focused on B-too-B sales and marketing—is sponsored by Oracle, for example.

(You can hear an interview I recently interviewed Robin Fray Carey for IABC’s conference podcast on BlogTalk Radio; Social Media Today is a conference sponsor.)

B-to-B beyond blogging

But there’s more to social media than just blogs. Many of the channels presumed to cater exclusively to consumers can serve B-to-B communications. A search of YouTube revealed more than 2,000 videos tagged “software as service” many focused on B-to-B companies like Salesforce.com. By putting B-to-B-related videos on YouTube, you make them embedable elsewhere and increase the likelihood that they’ll be discovered and talked about by your target market.

IBM recently re-launched its IBM and the Future Of podcast series. Here, thought leaders within the company, often joined by outside experts, examine how technology will impact a wide variety of activities. Recent topics have included shopping, movies, water management, data security, mobile phones, Africa and medical imaging.

Interviewed for “Tactical Transparency, investor relations expert Domnic Jones explained the value of blogs like EDS’s and podcasts like IBM’s, which offer insight into the depth of the company’s expertise by shining a light on the people who will bring profitable new services to life. ““Past performance is one thing, but investors are placing their bets on the future of the company,” Jones said, and employee talent will drive much of that future.

IBM has found other ways to tap into social media. The company’s developerWorks site allows customers to network with each other. IBM also uses the site to share information and bookmarks of interest with customers. Gartner Group’s Nikos Drakos, commenting on developerWorks, said, “If you create a place where engineers can find peer support, learning, and provide feedback to vendors, you are ultimately providing better customer care.”

More traditional social networks represent another avenue for B-to-B companies. Ernst & Young, for instance, executed a recruiting campaign on Facebook that captured the attention of The Wall Street Journal, among others. Deloitte used YouTube as a channel for recruiting with its Deloitte Film Festival, featuring employee-produced videos.

If this post weren’t already running ridiculously long, I’d talk about the use of widgets by B-to-B companies, LinkedIn networks blog network advertising potential, the list goes on. And what’s the potential for emerging channels like Twitter and FriendFeed?

With so many B-to-B companies engaged in social computing—an so many demonstrating solid business results from lead generation to bolstered reputations to strengthened customer loyalty—why do so many people continue to insist that social media has no place in the B-to-B world?

6. Weighing Legal Counsel Against Other Issues

A significant portion of my family is made up of lawyers. My brother, an uncle, several cousins all practice law of one type or another. I’ve also worked closely with corporate attorneys over the course of my career, and I can’t think of one who wasn’t a good, decent person. So I don’t view lawyers through the stereotypical filter that has produced volumes of lawyer jokes. They’re real people and most of them work hard to do a good job for their clients.

That doesn’t always mean their advice is always best. In the business world, a lawyer’s job is, in large part, the mitigation of risk. That’s why so many communicators seeking to implement social media in their organizations run into legal roadblocks. It’s not that launching a blog or participating in social networks is illegal per se, but rather that the lawyers—who are only doing their jobs—are obliged to report the potentially negative consequences that could result from such activities.

Some would have us believe that companies must—are required to—comply with every recommendation from the legal team. The fact that every corporation came into being as a legally-based form of organization does not mean that its purpose is legal in nature. As Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, a corporation is a “specific legal form of organization of persons and material resources, chartered by the state, for the purpose of conducting business.”

So a corporation is born of legal standing but its reason for existence is the conduct of business.

That’s why the general counsel reports to the CEO, not the other way around. It is the job of the CEO to weigh legal counsel against other counsel and make a decision about what is best for the business. Of course, no CEO in his right mind (and there evidently are plenty who are not) would embark on any venture that is illegal. Conversely, a CEO can decide that the benefits of an activity outweigh the risk that a law might, maybe, be violated, particularly if safeguards are put in place to minimize that risk.

Such is the case with organizational engagement in social media. There are some leaders who simply bow to the legal department and reject blogging or other online social engagement. Then there are legal teams—like the one at Dell—that wholeheartedly support company blogging, even by the top investor relations official. In between, there are organizations whose leaders make judgments based on the company’s best interests.

Michael Hyatt, president and CEO of Thomas Nelson (one of the largest trade publishers in the U.S.), is one of these. Interviewed for the new book I have co-written with John C. Havens, “Tactical Transparency.” Hyatt’s outside counsel advised against his plan to encourage employees to blog, citing several risks. Hyatt thanked them for their input and went ahead with his plan which, he says, has produced none of the risks but has returned huge dividends to the company. When asked how he could reject the lawyers’ counsel, Hyatt said:

Leadership, whatever else it takes, it takes courage. You’ve got to be willing, as a leader, to set the pace, to be the example, to model what you’re asking others to do and to be courageous in the face of people who might be fearful or are only looking at the downside. You have to focus also on what’s the upside, and with very, very modest investments, the returns are huge.

(You can listen to the entire interview here.)

History validates Hyatt’s view. The let’s-mitigate-risk approach led legal teams to advise companies against adopting fax machines and email and instant messaging for many of the same reasons they are advising against social media today. Imagine business today if CEOs had listened to their lawyers and rejected email and fax machines! Besides, the lawyers are looking only at what could happen, not necessarily what is inevitable. The development and communication of policies has been incredibly effective at keeping company representatives from stepping on legal landmines. Besides, as Lynn Tyson—Dell’s vice president of investor relations—put it:

The ability for an investor relations department to execute this and do it well quite frankly is predicated on how well they do their jobs every day. And if there’s confidence in their ability to exercise sound situational judgment over the phone or over e-mails or in one-on-one meetings with investors or group meetings with investors or drafting press releases, then there should be that same level of confidence by the company in their ability to have a dialogue over the Internet.

The same goes for an engineer, a human resources manager, or a front-line employee.

As a senior communicator in two Fortune 500 companies, I worked hand-in-hand with the companies’ general counsels. Given their druthers, these top lawyers would have preferred the company didn’t communicate at all. The absence of communication means the absence of legal risk associated with communication. But, of course, these same lawyers recognized that the non-legal risks of not communicating were far greater. That’s why we worked together: to ensure solid communication while also minimizing the potential legal consequences of a misstatement.

I even worked with one associate general counsel who was very clear in a meeting where we were each making our case to management: “My advice is just the legal perspective. There are always other considerations.”

Every now and then, though, a leader had to intervene. In my first job, as an internal communications representative at ARCO in the mid-1970s, I wrote an article based on an interview with the president of the company’s minerals division. At that time, the threat of Congressionally-mandated vertical divestiture was looming, which caused the lawyers to excise a quote in which the president insisted that, should divestiture occur, the minerals division would be able to survive as an independent company.

In a meeting, the president listened respectfully to the lawyers’ arguments. When they were finished, he asked, “But is it true?” The lawyers agreed it was true. The president turned to me and said, “So print it.”

That’s courage. The lawyers did their job and the president made a decision based on all the factors. And wouldn’t you know, none of the lawyers’ concerns ever materialized.

There’s a reason, after all, that lawyers are called “counselors.” I have no issue with lawyers invoking legal risks when advising on social media. I just have problems with leaders who fail to weigh those risks against all other factors to make a decision based on the best interests of the business.

7. Yes, Virginia, There Is An Audience

While working on a proposal for a consulting project, I’ve had an opportunity to give a lot of thought to some of the most dearly held notions of organizational communication in the era of social computing: There are no more audiences and there is no market for your message.

As with any popular belief, there are grains of truth to these, but by and large they don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Audiences have supposedly vanished because everybody now creates content. A lot of people promoting this notion point to Jay Rosen’s phrase, “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” when making their case. However, on this blog Rosen commented:

Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.

Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business.

There are two problems with the assumption that audiences have evaporated because everybody is now engaged:

The presumption that all audiences are passive
The disconnect between the way communicators use the word and how others define it

The powerful force of passive media has made it easy for audiences to evolve quickly into something else, into groups that share and collaborate. But some people don’t want to make that transition and some audiences never evolve beyond audiences. Like so many things, it’s not an either-or proposition.

The myth of the passive audience

The image that propels the belief that audiences have vanished is one of masses of passive recipients of content. The truth is, there is no such thing. Even as Jay Rosen notes that we won’t storm the theater stage to demand our own production, neither do we sit silently. The enthusiasm of our applause determines the number of curtain calls, for example. Certain types of audiences have even more impact. Try telling a European soccer (er…football) audience that they’re passive. The quality of a Grateful Dead concert was directly proportional to the give-and-take with the audience.

Newspaper and magazines send letters to the editor. People offended or upset by advertising write letters to the offending company. I could go on, but you get the idea. Not everybody in pre-social media audiences engaged in these ways, but neither does everybody today. The percentage of people creating new content is low; the percentage of people either passively consuming content is high, as is the percentage of people who are not consuming social media at all. Look at the technographic statistics compiled by Forrester Research: 48% of the global online population are spectators. Wouldn’t that be synonymous with “people currently known as the audience”?

The communicator’s definition

Whether or not you agree with the idea that audiences still exist is moot, however, when you consider that the argument is a semantic one. “Audience” is just a term to define the target. In the proposal I’m writing, the client’s goal is to get high school and college-aged individuals engaged with its altruistic, non-profit goals. We can talk all we want about the sanctity of the individual, but my proposal still has to reach a target population, a demographic (or technographic) group, a collection of people who share common characteristics. If the proposal is accepted, then I have to show that the new media approaches I have recommended succeeded in producing that heightened level of awareness and engagement. Yes, the effort must engage individuals. But I have to approach those individuals through channels that are most likely to reach them. And let’s face it, even old-style advertising blasted over television ultimately had to translate into one person plunking down cold cash for one bottle of shampoo.

Understanding social media means recognizing the dynamics that can propel willing members of an audience into group mode, where they become more actively engaged and can have far greater impact. But we do still hear radio commercials while driving (nobody has figured out a way to let us fast-forward through those yet), see billboards, view product placements in movies and video games, and view display ads while flipping through paper magazines. If there were no market for messages, 10 million people would not have viewed Dove’s “Evolution” video. Clearly, there was a market for that message.

Look no further than the poster child for business engagement in social media for an example of integration of old and new media. Dell learned the hard way that some members of an audience can become a dynamic group, leading Dell to dive into social media. But they still send me direct mail, advertise in magazines, and produce television commercials. They recognize the rise of the individual while at the same time acknowledging that there are audiences to whom a message can be delivered.

Bottom line: Target audiences continue to be a critical dimension of communication. But we must understand that individual members of those audiences can form into groups in a heartbeat. That’s what social media has changed. But any communicator who starts planning without identifying the audience is headed down a road to failure.

8. Sites Of The Month

Two services that let you paste content into a form and get some interesting feedback:

Press Release Grader

Paste a press release into this form and you’ll get graded on a variety of factors, including the release’s readability (including the grade level a reader must have achieved in order to understand the release), the use of gobbledygook words, the use of hyperlinks for search-engine optimization, contact information, “about” sections, end-of-release markers, and more. The results also produce a word cloud to show you the words used most frequently in the release. I recommend using the free service before issuing a release.

http://www.pressreleasegrader.com

Sentiment Analyser

One of the great challenges of public relations is determining whether the coverage you’re getting—in the mainstream press, the blogosphere, or anywhere else—is positive or negative. The only way to be sure is through content analysis, which requires you to read each item. That hasn’t changed, but there are tools that can give you a head start, like the Sentiment Analyser. Paste the item into the analyzer and find out what’s positive, what’s negative, and whether the document is predominently one or the other.

http://netreputation.co.uk/sentiment/

9. HC+T Update

I’ve just wrapped up proofreading the galleys for the new book I co-authored with John C. Havens. “Tactical Transparency” will be available from Jossey-Bass (a Wiley imprint) in early November.
John and I are presenting a session addressing social media and organizational transparency at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas on August 15.
I’m thrilled to be working with Chris Heuer, founder of The Social Media Club, on a social media plan for Blood Centers of the Pacific to try to encourage young people to make blood donations.

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Posted by Shel on 07/26 at 10:13 AM
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Sunday, May 18, 2008

HC+T Update: May 2008

HC+T Update: December 2007

1) I’m On The Road With A Two-Day Social Media Workshop
2) Communicators, Prepare: 3D Communications Is Coming
3) One Message Does Not Fit All
4) Britannica Initiative Gets A Boost From TechCrunch
5) Overcoming Key Resistance To Adopting Social Media
6) Blogging Is So Not Dead
7) Survey Says A-Listers Have No Influence. Doesn’t Reach Count?
8) Sites Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information

Wow…it’s mid-May and I realize I haven’t produced an issue of HC+T Update since December! We’ve got a lot of catching up to do…

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. I’m On The Road With A Two-Day Social Media Workshop

I’m beginning a six-city tour with my two-day workshop, “Integrating Social Media and Corporate Communication.” Sponsored by Ragan Communications, the workshop goes well beyond the typical Social Media 101 sessions currently cluttering the landscape, delving into ways to apply the various tools to communication strategies. Heres’ the rundown, minus the San Francisco workshop that runs tomorrow and Tuesday, May 19 and 20:

Minneapolis: June 5-6
New York: June 19-20
Chicago: Julyu 14-15
Toronto: July 24-25
Washington, D.C.: August 4-5

You can read more and register at the Ragan website.

2. Communicators, Prepare: 3D Communications Is Coming

In Chicago a week or so ago I got together with a friend; we both live in the Bay Area, but it’s one of those quirks of travel that we could only get together when we were in another city at the same time). Gabe is working for a company that is developing a new virtual world. The company hasn’t announced the nature of its venture and I’m under what Scott Monty calls a “frieNDA,” so I can’t go into any details. But imagine using Second Life-like technology to build a replica of a city as it existed during, say, colonial American times, the reign of Elizabeth I, or ancient Rome. Some people could open shops in these cities, others could take up residence. Then, teachers could bring classes to the city to help them experience what life was like in pre-eruption Pompeii or imperial China.

It’s certainly a long distance traveled from early 3D experiments like VRML.

The uses to which virtual worlds are being put is impressive. The initial push to market products in Second Life were mostly ill-fated, but forward-thinking organizations have realized that there are other, better ways to tap into virtual worlds for business purposes. Some organizations, like Gabe’s, are thinking about commercial uses while other companies see the value of transfering some real-world activities to virtual worlds.

All this is happening relatively quietly, without the hoopla of those early marketing experiments. They’re based on the notion that virtual worlds are really nothing more than three-dimensional social networks. Think about it: If Facebook were 3D, you wouldn’t form groups on pages, but let everyone know that the group will be meeting at Pavilion B on Island X on Thursday at 2 p.m. And rather than post messages to forums and walls, people would engage in virtual face-to-face conversations.

So it’s no surprise to see Forrester Research proclaiming that virtual worlds will dominate the Web within the next five to seven years. That, at least, is the projection Erica Driver makes in the Forrester white paper, “Web3D: The Next Major Internet Wave (24 pages, $279):”

Web3D will deliver an interactive, immersive experience much richer than the static, text-oriented or even interactive graphical interfaces of today’s Web. In the new rold of work that Web3d will enable, people will be represented visually by avatars that can move in space, communicate with others, and interact with objects and information—making the digital world seem more like the real world. Yet Web3D won’t leave the old world behind; it will integrate with the Web technologies we use today as well as existing and not yet invented business applications. Workers will use Web3D to teach and learn, innovate collaboratively, communicate and network, interact with and present information, and manage real-world systems.

Driver and her team of co-authors are not alone; several business publications—BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, and others—have also foretold the inevitable integration of virtual worlds into the online experience. The Forrester report, though, offers plenty of evidence to back up the prediction. Driving the march toward the 3D experience, according to the report, are…

A focus on innovation.
The trend toward workers employing tools that work, whether they’re offered by the company or not. “A confluence of forces—including ubiquitous broadband, a growing technology-native workforce, wide availability of cheap or even free Social Computing tools, and increased mobility—drives this trend.”
The evolving nature of the workforce.
Activity among investors, vendors, and early adopters, with some $1.5 billion invested in virtual world companies between Q3 2006 and Q4 2007. Since then, hundreds of millions have been invested in startups and companies that support virtual worlds.

Much has to happen between now and the Web3D world Forrester and others envision. The standards need to evolve that will let you move your avatar from one 3D world to another—from Second Life, for example, to a private, secure company environment and then from there to a historical city before winding up in a shopping mall. The ability to create objects and other content must be easier than it is today. But these are initiatives that are underway. The only question really is which developer will create the standards that gain widespread adoption.

Ultimately, though, the engagement that a 3D web will produce is the next logical step beyond the social networks that are set to become an integral part of the web thanks to initiatives like data portability and Google’s recently announced Friend Connect. Rather than simply interact with someone’s profile on a site, you’ll be able to interact with that individual directly; you’ll see other people visiting the site the same time you’re there, and interaction will be more natural and intuitive.

The Forrester report outlines the business potential for a 3D web:

Training and education will be more effective.
Business process rehearsal will be cheaper and more realistic. The report points to BP, which is already experimenting with virtual worlds and sees the value of “practicing the management of events that can’t easily be practiced in real life…from practicing hands-on personal skills in standalone learning environments to group interactive teaming skills in unstructured scenarios.”
Meetings in virtual workspaces.
Virtual conferences and trade shows.
Face-to-face customer service and support.
The use of digital 3D models, not unlike Boeing’s use of a 3D virtual environment in the design and manufacturing of its new 787 Dreamliner.
A replacement for PowerPoint, as 3D tours do a better job of grabbing attention.

Driver’s report isn’t all optimistic. She and her team present a detailed timeline, identifying the “gating factors,” the issues that must be overcome in order to arrive at a fully integrated 3D environment. They identify the technology advances that are required (such as a next-generation browser, which Forrester has dubbed an “engager” because it’s not passive like a web browser). They even explore alternative scenarios should certain milestones not be met.

Under any scenario, though, the 3D online experience is coming. Its inevitability is the reason I encourage people to try out Second Life now: Learn the ins and outs of 3D social networks while most people aren’t watching. It’s far better to have developed your 3D chops now than to wait until it has become the de facto nature of the Web and everybody can see you make your organization make its newbie mistakes.

Communicators shouldn’t sit on the sidelines and wait for the fulfillment of the prediction, either. As Driver notes in the report, Web3D will lead to new ways to representat and communicate of information. “In Web3D, people will create avatars and build objects and worlds that inform, persuade, explain, and represent important concepts in highly visual and interactive ways.” You can chuckle and chortle all you like at the idea that the company’s media center might someday exist in a highly stylized 3D room in a virtual environment. But trust me: If you’re not ready to create that virtual media center when the time comes, your company will find someone who can.

3. One Message Does Not Fit All

On episode 335 of The Hobson and Holtz Report, Eric Schwartzman shared bits of an interview he conducted with Maureen Kasper, senior director of communication at Cisco Systems. In the interview, Maureen addressed an issue that I’ll be talking about during my session tomorrow at the New Communications Forum: the blurring of the line between internal and external communications.

We did create content that was different—here’s the external face to something and here’s the internal face to something. I don’t think you can do that any more. It’s the same. It’s better communication. You’re not worrying about, “Am I thinking externally or am I thinking internally?” What you’re thinking about is, “What’s our message?”

Maureen noted that Cisco employees once criticized the company when they perceived they were getting the same spin on messages as external audiences. Now, she says, it’s a strength. “It goes back to transparency. What you say externally has to be the same as what you say internally, and vice-versa. If not, you’ll get found out very quickly.”

I agree—and I disagree. The core message absolutely must be consistent. The days are long gone (not that this was prudent or ethical behavior when those days still existed) when you could deliver one message to employees and another to, say, investment analysts:

Employees: We’re merging with Acme in order to absorb a major competitor and bolster our earnings.
Analysts: We’re merging with Acme because of the natural synergies between the two organizations and because we’ll be able to better serve the marketplace working together.

However, I don’t agree with the notion that you can craft a single communication for each audience. Whether or not you share your external communications with employees, they’ll see it—or, at least, have access to it. The message to analysts ends in analyst reports which find their way into investment blogs, the media message is published on news sites and from there into the blogosphere.

But employees still need the internal spin, and I’m using that word in the constructive sense. In a merger, analysts care about the impact on value and share price. Employees may also care about that—particularly if they own stock—but they have more immediate concerns that aren’t on the minds of other publics (including local communities, NGOs, activist groups, the government, and so on). They want to know about the security of their jobs, the status of existing projects, where they’ll wind up in the revamped structure of the new company and whether their benefits will change.

Spinning stories (in the good way) to accommodate the unique interests of each constituency is at the heart of effective communication. It’s why we research the audiences before we craft the communications.

By the way, I’m absolutely certain they do this at Cisco Systems and that Maureen didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Her remarks just led me to want to articulate this point of view, which also argues for the continued need for some traditional communication. A single blog post from the CEO about the merger just won’t get the right information into the right hands. Targeted communication can start targeted conversations among publics with different interests.

4. Britannica Initiative Gets A Boost From TechCrunch

What a weekend I had in late April.

It started quietly enough. I’ve been working with my client, Encyclopaedia Britannica, to prepare for the hard launch of its WebShare program, set for next Monday with the distribution of the official press release (to be accompanied, of course, by a social media version).

Tom Panelas, the director of Corporate Communications at Britannica, brought me in to help promote WebShare, which has two distinct purposes:

Give free Britannica accounts to bloggers and other web publishers so they can use the site in their research, cite Britannica articles and provide selective access to Britannica through links in their posts to Britannica articles and widgets.
Provide readers of these articles with access to Britannica articles without needing an account at all.

The program includes a variety of elements that strengthen the venerable encyclopedia’s first significant foray into the social media space. In addition to the linking program, there’s a blog, a Twitter account (to include a link of the day), widgets and “topic clusters,” collections of links to Britannica articles that relate to a current news story. For example, we put together a list of links that would be useful to anybody covering the Delta-Northwest airline merger the day that story broke.

Leading up to the launch, we’ve been quietly alerting people to the availability of the WebShare website and giving out some free accounts. Anybody visiting the site could register for a free account, as well. The primary targets of our outreach effort (Neville Hobson is helping me out with this) have been (and will continue to be) education-focused bloggers, library bloggers, and journalists. Many who live and work in these disciplines are restricted, right or wrong, from citing Wikipedia articles in their work, which led us to believe they would constitute a very interested group.

Some popular bloggers were also on my list, and on Friday evening, I went ahead and sent off a note to the first of these to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch. Mike reported on WebShare almost immediately, including some criticisms, and attracting over 100 comments (as of this writing). But positive or negative, Mike’s post opened the floodgates. Stories suddenly appeared in Mashable, C|Net, and some other top-flight blogs, as well as blogs written by librarians we had not yet contacted and scads of others. So far, 156 posts have been written about WebShare that link to the site; Technorati has assigned the site an authority of 80 and a rank of 110,846. Not bad for a site that had no links to it at all on Friday afternoon.

I’ve been archiving significant articles addressing the program on del.icio.us.

Tom and the folks at Britannica were prepared. They have received well over 1,000 registrations so far, and have been handling them all quickly. It’s a manual process, since each registration needs to be approved. We also put in work upfront to identify the inevitable criticisms Britannica would face:

Britannica, with its 56,000 articles, can’t compete with Wikipedia, with over 100 million.
Britannica’s business model is obsolete. The company must ultimately move to a wiki-based, open-source model.
Despite the entry into social media, Britannica is still a one-way resource, not engaged in the conversation.
WebShare is really just about getting lots of link love to boost Britannica’s visibility on Google.

The folks at Britannica are ready for these, and will be using the blog on the WebShare site to address these issues. The company’s president, Jorge Cauz, will be doing interviews with some bloggers, as well. It’s also nice that some comments—and some posts—take issue with these arguments and applaud Britannica’s efforts. (I was delighted to see my friend Brian Solis lauding the program, even though he had no idea I was working on it). And Tom has been jumping in as well, participating in some of the comment threads. (Tom, I’m sure, is exercising some restraint to avoid correcting people who are just wrong, like the one blogger who said that the company uses the old spelling of encyclopaedia in order to “sound more authoritative.” In fact, that’s been the spelling of the company’s name since it was founded in 1768.)

Meanwhile, I’ve spent much of my weekend identifying new posts and making recommendations about which ones should be addressed by a comment and which by a follow-up post on the Britannica site. A few follow-up posts will appear over the next few days.

A couple of key observations come out of the weekend experience:

The A-listers count. Regardless of how much people say they trust friends, family members, and participants in their networks, people like Mike Arrington can still create a huge amount of awareness and generate a lot of buzz.
It makes sense for companies to start small with initiatives in mind, but it pays to get the first bits right before moving on to others.
If you’re going to do social media, do it. Rather than simply roll out the linking program, Britannica was very agreeable to adding dimensions of participation to the mix, including the blog and the Twitter account. This provides a platform for listening to feedback and participating in a conversation about the initiative, and maybe even tweaking it where it makes sense.

5. Overcoming Key Resistance To Adopting Social Media

I’ve talked before about the reasons companies resist social media. The Arthur W. Page Society and the Corporate Executive Board are out with a study that puts some numbers behind the top reasons for organizational resistance. The study, which targeted more than 30 chief communications officers who are corporate members of the Page Society, revealed nothing surprising, but still, it’s easier to offer counter-arguments when you know what’s holding companies back.

Resistance from the legal department

Lawyers take too much heat for opposing social media. Their job is to be cautious, to advise their employers/clients against things that pose legal risks. The fault rests with leaders who blindly follow legal advice rather than balancing it against other factors. When faced with lawyers who want to put the brakes on new media, offer the following points:

Lawyers have okayed blogs of all stripes at 58 of the Fortune 500.
Sun Microsystems’ general counsel is blogging.
Few of the legal concerns have materialized among companies with blogs.
The value of engagement in social media, applied intelligently, will easily outweigh the risks (see next item).

Lack of ROI

There have been a lot of developments in the ability to assess the return on investment for engagement with social media. See Kami Huyse’s example of ROI from a social media effort on behalf of her client, Sea World. PR measurement guru Katie Delahaye Paine also addresses measurement of social media quite nicely in her new book, “Measuring Public Relationships.”

In any case, the days of shrugging off social media because there’s no ROI are over. We need to educate the decision-makers about the kinds of ROI being attained by others and how it can be measured for our organizations.

Too labor-intensive

I remember speaking to the CEO of a Dutch company who said his board was concerned about the amount of time spent blogging. He answered that he wasn’t spending any more time communicating than he was before. However, some of the total time allocated to communicating had shifted to his blog because the blog was a more effective tool, in many circumstances, than phone calls, speeches at industry association meetings, and newspaper interviews. He hadn’t given up on those (and other) older forms of communication, but adding blogs to the mix allowed him to use the most appropriate tool for the job.

On the other hand, some social media will require additional labor. Southwest Airlines had to hire additional staff to monitor and approve comments left to its blog. It wasn’t something Southwest hesitated to do, though, given that they had already concluded that the ROI from the blog would far outweigh the cost of managing it (see previous item). If the company takes a strategic approach to its social media activities, the ROI will already be understood (a far better approach than saying, “Hey, we gotta have a blog!”).

It’s also easy to start small in order to get comfortable with social media before diving in. I advised one colleague that his company could start with a blog focused on recruiting (a key issue for his company) rather than a Southwest-like blog or a CEO blog. The audience is more limited and the discussion more focused. When the value of that blog proves itself, additional online social activities simply become the next step.

Lack of expertise

This is actually a valid concern, but shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. The solution is to get some expertise.

There are several ways to do this: Hire someone, start small (see previous item) in order to develop the expertise, find someone in your organization who is already engaged and take advantage of their experience or contract with any of the agencies or individuals out there who can help provide you with the expertise you need.

Challenges, not obstacles

I always rolled my eyes at the corporate-speak that positioned problems as “opportunities.” But we who advocate our companies’ involvement in social media should see the resistance as challenges to overcome rather than roadblocks that send us packing. That’s what Northwest Mutual Life Insurance did, according to the Forrester case study. The conservative, 150-year-old financial services company identified the areas of resistence, then found the means to overcome them, ultimately launching an internal blogging initiative. Applying the principles of sound business management to a company’s entry into the social media space doesn’t have to be an oxymoronic concept.

6. Blogging Is So Not Dead

I can’t open my feed reader these days without at least one article proclaiming the long, slow death of blogging. Bloggers, we are told, are switching to other channels, notably the more conversational microblogging characterized by Twitter. Bloggers are getting burned out trying to keep up with regular posts, no less an authority than The New York Times tells us. Some point to the numbers: The adoption rate has been plateauing, statistical evidence that the end is near.

It’s time for a reality check.

New blogs continue to appear

A few posts ago, I referenced Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption curve, which applies to blogs as much as anything else. When blogs first hit the scene—particularly the free, hosted ones, like Blogger.com and WordPress.com—the innovators couldn’t wait to get their hands one one…or more than one. I happily count myself in this group. Many of us didn’t know what we wanted to do with a blog. We just had to have one. We’d figure out the content bit later. In fact, my first blog died a quick and fairly painless death because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

I was more comfortable as an early adopter. For years, I had been writing a monthly email newsletter. During the course of the month, I would write articles. At the end of the month, I would collect them, format them, and send them to my distribution list (entirely opt-in, of course). After noodling around with my first blog for a while, it struck me: I can publish my articles as soon as they’re done. “a shel of my former self” was born. I was part of the group of early adopters who simply figured out what to do with blogs early on.

Once the innovators and early adopters had started their blogs, the growth curve began to flatten. Today, people who start blogs, for the most part, aren’t doing so just to have one. They have something specific in mind for which a blog is an appropriate vehicle. These are the early majority, and their more practical approach to blogging is the reason the blogosphere doubles in size about once a year instead of every 55 days or so, as it did during the innovator/early adopter phase. That kind of growth will continue as the late adopters and maybe even some laggards start blogging.

Business is just catching on

We tend to talk a lot about businesses that have blogs, mostly because they are exceptions, not the rule. Those of us in the consulting world hear “my leadership is afraid of it” far more often than “my management can’t wait to start one.” But as companies learn that blogs are effective tools for engaging customers and other publics, and for addressing issues, they will continue to adopt them. Only 57 of the Fortune 500 have blogs today, according to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, but I have no doubt that number will grow over the next months and even years.

Twitter won’t replace blogs

While some of the content that populates blogs can naturally be moved to Twitter (and Jaiku and Pownce and Seesmic and Utterz), some content cries out for more than 140 characters. This post, for instance, would make a terrible tweet. Note, however, how many Twitters direct their followers to blog their posts by sending tweets containing links. Twitter is the best thing that ever happened to TinyURL.

Twitter is also more conducive to dynamic conversation. Blogs are not; the nexus of control in blogging rests with the blogger. I post; you comment on what I posted.

Who notices you on Twitter is limited to those who choose to follow you and those who find you because you’re the second half of a conversation taking place with someone they already follow. When was the last time you saw somebody point to a tweet and say, “I read this great tweet today?”

And the kinds of issues that drive businesses to embrace blogging cannot be addressed with Twitter. Explaining policies, addressing crises, exploring issues—these are not natural themes for tweets. Has anybody heard of Twitter outreach (or, more crudely, pitching Twitterers)? Didn’t think so.

Let’s face it: Jonathan Schwartz, Bob Lutz, and the TSA could not accomplish with a Seesmic account what they do with their blogs.

People still read blogs

A study by PR agency Brodeur & Partners reveals that mainstream journalists are heavily influenced by blogs. How crazy would it be for companies to abandon blogs when not only can they build communities of customers but shape the kind of coverage they get in the still-important press?

The action is everywhere

A bazillion years ago—2003 or so—social media meant blogging. Since then, there has been an explosion of social media, from Digg and YouTube to Facebook and Second Life. You can slide them and dice them, label them and categorize these many tools however you want, but like anything else, people will use them mostly because they satisfy a particular need. Twitter doesn’t satisfy the desire to create videos any more than YouTube satisfies the desire to have burst-like conversations with lots of people. We use tools based on their strengths, and each of the entries in the social media space offers its own strengths and weaknesses, possibilities and limitations.

While we are seeing a reduction in short, pithy blog posts because Twitter makes it easier and provides more immediate gratification, blogs will continue to be an important tool, used based on their strengths. Understanding the strengths, weaknesses, potential and limitations of each tool is what it means to be strategic in our approach to communication. And while I’m a happy Twitterer and a proud early adopter, I’ll continue to counsel my clients to use the right tool to achieve their objectives. That includes blogs, which aren’t going anywhere.

7. Survey Says A-Listers Have No Influence. Doesn’t Reach Count?

There’s a fair amount of buzz over a study issued recently from the Canadian research firm Pollara that supports the notion that influential bloggers aren’t really so influential. Eighty percent of the 1,100 adults polled in December reported that they would be more inclined to make a purchase recommended by friends and family compared to only 23% who would consider recommendations from “well-known bloggers.”

Why this comes as a surprise to anybody escapes me. I would have bet real money on this. After all, would you buy a particular new car based on what a well-known auto critic wrote in a daily newspaper or what Uncle Marvin told you after he’d been driving one for six months?

The study reinforces Duncan Watts’ assertions in a recent FastCompany article. Steve Rubel points out that it also supports the findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer, in which most people put their trust in “a person like me” while only 14% trust boggers. Edelman’s results also mirror those from Ketchum’s Media, Myths & Realities study.

What’s more surprising to me is the conclusions people are drawing from the study. Rubel, for instance, suggests that outreach efforts that focus on reach miss the big picture. “Trust is by far a more important metric.”

Really? Whatever happened to the importance of building awareness? While the influential bloggers—the so-called “A-listers”—may not have influence, they do have eyeballs. They are A-listers, after all, because people read them. I may have greater trust in my friend in the next cube, but where did he hear about it? And if he heard about it from a trusted friend or family member, they read about it from a source that gets broad distrtibution. The information has to start somewhere.

My goal in reaching out to widely-read bloggers is not to trick them into using their influence to get other people to buy the product. It is, rather, to create awareness and get people talking. Once it trickles down to Uncle Marvin, that’s when the trust factor kicks in. Or are we supposed to just wait for Uncle Marvin to discover the product while poking around in Best Buy?

Has the application of PR in the social media space led us to forget the objectives we’re trying to achieve in the first place? Is it always influence? Or is is sometimes just getting the message out? If a sympathetic blogger agrees with the message and chooses to help distribute it, that’s great. Should I no longer take that approach because a poll states the obvious, that friends and family have a greater impact on a purchase decision? Nonsense.

Rubel notes that Louis Gray found that top bloggers extend their reach among people who subscribe to their feeds (beyond those who just read their blogs), but he opines, “Who cares?”

I do, Steve, and any good communicator should. Reach increases awareness, driving more people to take a look and, if they like what they see, make the recommendation to friends and family. That’s why so many tech companies try to get their products into the hands of The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and The New York Times’ David Pogue. Same idea: I may not buy a product based on their recommendation, but their reach and influence will lead me to see what my friends and family—and the bloggers I do trust have to say about it.

In her outstanding book, “Measuring Public Relationships,” Katie Paine repeatedly points to awareness as a key measure of the effectiveness of a public relations effort. “If your objective is exposure and communication of key messages, measuring media content is by far the cheapest, easiest, and fastest form of measurement,” Katie notes in one chapter.

Why does outreach have to be either/or? There is a strong case for targeting B-list and C-list bloggers. Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington get hundreds, maybe thousands, of pitches every day, good ones and bad ones. The odds of yours finding its way into their blogs isn’t great. B- and C-list bloggers, on the other hand, are a bit more hungry for good, relevant content in which their audiences will be interested. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, assuming your information is genuinely relevant and would be of real interest to Scoble or Arrington.

There are a number of dimensions to outreach, a lot of nuances, many shades of grey. Does the Pollara study mean there’s no value in reaching out to bloggers with high levels of readership along with smaller groups where there are higher levels of trust? Nope. Those blogs with high levels of readership are one way to kick-start the conversation among the groups of trusted individuals in the first place.

8. Sites of the Month

Tweetscan

Enter a search term and find all the Twitter “tweets” that contain the term. Comcast and Southwest Airlines are among the company using Tweetscan to find references to their organizations, then responding with offers to help resolve problems.

http://www.tweetscan.com

Sentiment Analyzer

Enter the text of an article and watch the Sentiment Analyzer parse the document and then let you know whether it was mostly positive or negative, highlighting the elements that fall into each category. Notes David Phillips, “This kind of development is useful for analysing sentiment of news articles, blogs and other content, which is its primary purpose but it also has applications in evaluating style and and bias all of which are very useful to the PR industry, regulators and watchers of political sentinemt on and off line.”

http://netreputation.co.uk/sentiment/

9. HC+T update

I’m presenting a session at the IABC International Conference on communication via social networks. It’s part of the All-Star Track on the last day of the conference.
I have been co-hosting a live Net-based call-in show leading up to the IABC International Conference. John C. Havens (who is also the co-author of my new book) and I are interviewing speakers and others involved with the conference every Wednedsay at noon Eastern. Listeners can call in or listen later on the site or by subscribing to the podcast. The show is on BlogTalk Radio at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/iabc.
Speaking of my new book, it’s due out in October from Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, as part of the IABC series of books. “Tactical Transparency” is about the use of communication tools and channels to promote a culture of transparency in your organization.
I was delighted to get coverage on page 2 of the May 12 issue of PRWeek for the work I’ve been doing with Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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Posted by Shel on 05/18 at 10:34 AM
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Sunday, December 23, 2007

HC+T Update: December 2007

HC+T Update: December 2007

HC+T Update
December 2007

First 2008 Webinar: Social Networks Inside and Out
It’s Time to Break the Broadcast Habit
Three Year-End Signs of Change
PR is Prominent in Money’s List of Dumbest Moments
The Great Communications Disconnect
Chrysler Devalues Communications; a Journalists Admires It
The Growing Social Media Contradiction
Sites Of The month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate and subscription information

Happy holidays and a prosperous New Year to you all!

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. First 2008 Webinar: Social Networks Inside and Out

We are pleased to announce the first Shel Holtz Webinar of 2008!

Social Networks, Inside and Out
with Shel Holtz

Beginning Monday, January 7

TO REGISTER, VISIT WWW.SHELHOLTZWEBINARS.COM

NOTE: Shel Holtz Webinars are five-week-long online seminars that take place 100% asynchronously and 100% on the Web. They are NOT short phone-based sessions.

While “social networking” has been around as an academic concept since the 1970s, today it is almost always equated with online resources through which people can connect with other people. Since MySpace exploded on the scene, social networking has expanded at an unprecedented pace. Today there are pure social networks like MySpace and Facebook, presence-based networks like Twitter and Jaiku, build-it-yourself networks, intranet network suites, wikis-as-networks, networks integrated into other resources and more. Everyone, it seems, is launching one. There’s even new jargon associated the connections within these networks: The Social Graph.

Your customers, employees, and other audiences are participating in these networks at an alarming rate. Communication and influence are happening within the networks. Some companies are using external networks for internal communication; others find them to be ideal recruiting tools.

One this is for sure: You can’t afford to be left behind. During this five-week online webinar, you’ll learn…

* The differences between the various types of social networks
* How social networks can serve as an effective communication channel
* How to set up your own social network
* Using internal social networks as an employee communication channel
* How to monitor social networks for communication issues
* ...and a lot more

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a collection of online resources and downloadable handouts. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures include a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous—that is, they do not take place in real time. You can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you—there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

To get an overview of how these Webinars work, visit http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and view the demo video.

Want a taste of Shel before deciding? Visit his blog at http://blog.holtz.com and listen to his podcast at http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

TO REGISTER, VISIT WWW.SHELHOLTZWEBINARS.COM

2. It’s Time to Break the Broadcast Habit

The habit of communicating via broadcast is hard to break. Even as some companies embrace the ethos of social media, they employ broadcast models in their efforts to participate in it. Facebook apps, for example, are a means of injecting a message into a medium used primarily for conversation. There’s nothing wrong with that; in fact, a study from the American Marketing Association suggests a lot of people like ads and apps in social networks: 47% of social network users would use their network to download coupons and 45% would be happy to get information about store promotions.

But getting a message in front of people in a manner that appeals to them isn’t the same as participating in the conversation. And even when companies do participate, a lot of that participation is forced even if it is sincere. Blogger outreach campaigns, for example, broadcast invitations to carefully selected bloggers in the hopes that they’ll help create buzz, get people talking. Again, that’s fine, and there are plenty of case studies that show blogger outreach can be done right.

Jonathan Crow’s experiment in driving messages through social media got me thinking about these things. Crow joined one social network after another, rapidly populating them with contacts, then tried to push out three messages through those networks. First, he wanted to identify a case study to include in a magazine interview. Second, he wanted to distribute a press release along with some blog posts. Finally, he wanted to establish some connections in Latin America in hopes of driving some business.

The results, Crow reports, were not encouraging. The first two, he says, “were unqualified failures.” He did make some Latin American contacts, thanks to the more influential members of the circles he had joined.

Crow has assembled a panel of communicators to evaluate five aspects of his experiment. Their commentary makes for good reading.

I’m not surprised that Crow’s experiment mostly failed. The whole basis of the experiment was broadcasting to an audience of contacts through the networks to which they belonged. Meanwhile, the members of those various networks aren’t engaged in a lot of individual broadcasting. They’re engaged with one another in an ongoing relationship. How much better would Crow’s results have been had he been a long-standing member of the community sharing things that interested him rather than an online Johnny Appleseed, dropping by every network he could find to try planting seeds?

While organizations do need to convey messages, broadcast is becoming a less and less effective way to get them across. Influence happens in conversations these days. Organizations’ best chance to ensure messages are consistent and understandable is through engagement. Albert Schweitzer wrote, “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” A more organic business approach to participating with customers and others online affords companies the opportunity to influence through example.

Here’s what I mean: About a year ago I posted an item to my travel blog about Park ‘N Fly, the off-airport parking service I patronize. I was not a happy guy, left standing at the curb after midnight waiting nearly an hour for a shuttle that was supposed to pick me up within five minutes of calling. The first comment to the post was from Caryn Healy, who works in sales and marketing at Park ‘N Fly. She apologized, insisted that the company was working hard to get its customer service act together, offered some free parking coupons and asked for a second chance. The comment was sincere; it was a real person talking with me. When I talk about Park ‘N Fly these days, I talk about Caryn, not my hour in the cold. And if Caryn happened to reach out to me now with information about new customer service initiatives, I’d be very receptive to them—far more so than if she cold-friended me on Facebook, the hit me with a press release.

Another example: Years ago, Adobe employed a group of tech support specialists whose job was to troll forums and message boards looking for people having problems with their Adobe products, then jump in with the solution. (I don’t know if the group still exists, but I can hope.)

Still, even among most of the companies involved in social media through blogs and other networks, broadcast prevails. At Southwest Airlines, for example—a company with a very good blog, an apparent solid understanding of social media, and employees who are passionate about their employer—employee access to YouTube is blocked. That prevents employees from (among other things) commenting on videos about air travel. (A search of “Southwest Airlines” turns up 728 videos.) That’s a wasted opportunity.

This doesn’t mean companies should just turn employees loose. In fact, it means there is a critical new role for employee communications professionals to play. Internal communicators need to…

Help employees understand the scope and nature of the social media space and the kind of impact their participation can have
Ensure employees have access to information and resources that help them share accurate information in their posts and comments
Clarify the organization’s positions and priorities
Keep employees up to speed on news and issues people outside the company may be interested in or talk about

While it’s impossible to control conversations employees are engaged in, their authentic participation is what customers and others are looking for and ultimately will have a greater impact than the broadcast approach at the heart of Crow’s experiment. Organizations are made up of people and it is people who are exchanging information and ideas online. The organizations that succeed in social networks will be those that view themselves as participants, not interlopers. It’s a significant mindshift for organizations, requiring them to trust their employees and encourage access to social networks rather than block it. Even those companies not ready for that leap need to encourage those who do represent the company online to do less distribution of information in favor of dialogue. Those organizations that make the shift while still applying traditional communication models that still work, however, will be poised to win.

3. Three Year-End Signs of Change

The end of the year brings three profound examples of the mainstreaming of social media.

First, there’s the Frozen Pea Fund and all related conversation around Susan Reynolds’ battle with breast cancer. Thousands of dollars have been raised through ad hoc campaign that cost essentially nothing, based on a connection made with people who had never met Susan personally. The grass roots campaign involved blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Seesmic and heaven knows how many other social media channels. All but absent so far: mainstream media (There was a report on BBC Online). (Chris Brogan has written great summary of the whole effort, which Neville and I will cover on Monday’s FIR.

Next, Buckhgham Palace announced the launch of a Royal Channel on YouTube. Queen Elizabeth will use the channel to distribute her annual Christmas message. It’s worth noting that Dwight Eisenhouser was president of the United States when the Queen issued her first Christmas message. At that time, the usefulness of television was still an open discussion topic. Now, Elizabeth has moved beyond TV, reaching directly to the people using a medium that may well get more attention than a traditional TV message might. (The BBC has this story. Neville will add his thoughts on Monday’s FIR.)

And speaking of YouTube, it has also become a preferred channel for everything from mea culpas to public responses. All-Star pitcher Roger Clemens has taken to YouTube to issue a denial that he used steroids (he was listed in the Mitchell Report). As recently as a year or two ago, Clemens would have made his statement on TV, probably in an interview (he’s still planning an interview with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes”).

That’s the thread the connects each of these stories. Clemens, in order to reach his fans, would have had to seek out an interview or issue a formal statement to the press; Queen Elizabeth would have had to go on TV and hope people would watch the live address; and the backers of the Frozen Pea effort would have had to spend a fortune on promotional materials to get the word out. Today, they can reach their audiences directly and effectively. In 2008, expect more mainstream figures and organizations to communicate directly through these channels as a supplement to or instead of traditional media.

4. PR is Prominent in Money’s List of Dumbest Moments

Money magazine is out with its annual ”101 Dumbest Moments in Business,” and PR/marketing gaffes get their fair share of representation in the list. (I’m not including advertising in this review, since I generally don’t cover advertising on this blog.) The vast majority of the lapses in judgment covered in the list created PR issues for the organizations involved, but the following were created by bad communications or had unusually horrific PR consequences:

#8—A YouTube video of rats frolicking in a New York Taco Bell gets millions of views.

#16—Microsoft PR agency Waggener Edstrom sends a 12-page dossier on a Wired contributing editor to the Wired contributing editor. The less-than-flattering dossier, calling the editor “tricky” and “sensational,” was meant to go to Microsoft executives.

#17—Redux is warned by the FDA to rename its energy drink, which was called Cocaine. It was renamed to Censored, then NoName.

#21—The Cartoon Network hires a marketing agency to place electronic lightboards promoting its characters. In Boston, they’re mistaken for bombs, creating a crisis.

#36—Best Buy is sued by the Connecticut attorney general over its in-store, kiosk-baed intranet, which employees reportedly used to display prices higher than those advertised on the external website.

#46—Johnson & Johnson sues the American Red Cross over the use of its Red Cross logo.

#51—Nine-year-old Shea O’Gorman writes a letter to Apple making suggestions about how to improve his iPod Nano. In response, the legal department sends him a letter telling him outside recommendations are not accepted and telling him not to write any more letters. (I guess Apple won’t be launching its own version of Dell’s IdeaStorm any time soon.)

#65—Verizon refuses to distribute text messages for the abortion rights organizaton NARAL to people who opt in to receive the messages. They had to reverse themselves later, claiming they had “great respect for the free flow of ideas.”

#67—McDonald’s launches a campaign to get the Oxford English Dictionary to change its less-than-flattering definition of “McJob.”

#81—Internet hosting company 365 Main issues a press release touting its 24/7 reliability. The same day, a power failure takes out three of its generators, knocking out Red Envelope, Technorati, and CraigsList.

#84—Southwest makes passenger Kyla Ebbert cover her legs after initially throwing her off the plane over her short skirt. She winds up promoting new airline Virgin America.

#89—British Airways edits out Virgin’s logo on airplane tails and also edits out Richard Branson’s cameo when showing “Casino Royale” in flight.

#90—Southwest Airlines, fresh from trying to recover from the Kyla Ebbert debacle, makes a fellow wearing a t-shirt that reads “Master Baiter” change his shirt before allowing him to board. This leads to another apology.

#96—Reports emerge everywhere of illicit changes to Wikipeda when Wikiscanner launches. Wikiscanner connects changes to the people making them.
5. The Great Communications Disconnect

On my walk home from elementary school back in the early 1960s, I frequently stopped at the corner liquor store and bought a one-cent Bazooka bubble gum. The gum was usually great (unless it had gone all hard), but what I really wanted was the Bazooka Joe comic that came with it. One of those comics has stuck with me all these years later. I can’t say why, but it has. In that strip, Joe is walking down the street at night when he encounters a fellow on his hands and knees under a street lamp.

“What are you looking for?” Joe asks.

“A quarter,” the character says.

“Where’d you lose it?” Joe queries.

“Across the street,” comes the reply.

“Why are you looking here?” Joe wonders.

The fellow answers, “The light’s better.”

The insistence that organizations cannot embrace social media for one reason or another is the equivalent of looking for the quarter where the light’s better: Companies prefer the comfort of message control over the messiness of conversation. We hear Dave Taylor, for example, insist that “modern American corporations, publicly traded companies, cannot change their internal DNA and ‘let go’ of the message to the point where their online ‘word of mouth’ efforts will have any traction or be at all interesting.” And another prominent PR-focused blogger argues that “contracts are the language of corporations,” making it insanity to try to communicate in an authentic human voice.

(The latter is a theory, not a fact, first presented in 1937—Coase, R. 1937, “The nature of the firm”, Economica, Vol. 4. There are alternate theories. Thanks to David Phillips for that clarification.)

The simple fact is, however, that businesses that adhere to the principles of these naysayers are more than likely doomed to extinction as their customer base evaporates because they’re not conveniently under the street lamp. They’re across the street.

This point has been driven home by the results of ”Media, Myths and Realities,” the second annual study from Ketchum Communication and the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center. The study found that friends and family are the top source of advice for people making decisions ranging from vacation planning to electronics purchases. Advice from an expert ranks highest for decisions around healthcare and the environment.

In other words, word of mouth is the dominant source of impact. Yet most organizations adhere to old models, evidenced by the fact that only 24% of communicators reported having a word-of-mouth program operating in their organizations.

Here’s more:

Communicators rate their companies’ own Web sites as the most effective way to share news or respond to a crisis, while their audiences score company Web sites sixth among sources for corporate news and seventh for crisis information.
In the U.S. consumers increasingly dismiss all mainstream media. Even though local TV news continues to rank highest for credibility (consistent with many other surveys), its credibility has dropped from 7.4 (on a 0-to-10 scale) last year to 6.9 in the current study.
As trust in traditional media wanes, use of social media continues to skyrocket. In the U.S., there has been a 6-point increase in the use of social networking sites over the course of a year, from 17% to 22%. Blog use has also risen 6 points, from 13% to 19%. The use of social media more than doubled among people over 55, suggesting it’s time to stop dismissing social media because “my audience is made up of older people.”

Ketchum and the Annenberg Center offer takeaways from the study, including…

Treat audiences as groupings of individuals rather than faceless masses
Put word-of-mouth and search-engine-optimization strategies in place or miss out on tremendous potential for audience reach and sales
Be wary of the communication flavor of the month
A company’s own Web site should not be the primary choice when communicating to stakeholders

I’d sum it up this way: Communicate to people where they are, not where the light’s better.

6. Chrysler Devalues Communications; a Journalist Admires It

There were positive signs out of the reborn automaker Chrysler, which was acquired by a private company from Daimler. A blog was one of the first visible signs of change at the company.

But news this week from Chrysler casts a different light on the degree to which it values communications. The company’s communications VP, Jason Vines, resigned and the entire communications function was shifted to report to—are you sitting down?—Human Resources.

An article in the Detroit Free Press quotes Chairman and CEO Bob Nardelli suggesting that the realignment is all about being more “holistic” in order to “more effectively drive company strategy.”

I might chortle over Nardelli dropping the word “holistic” to explain a reorganization, but the demotion of an entire communications function—internal and external—to a unit of HR is disturbing. At its core, HR has defined goals and objectives that are likely to taint external communication efforts. Further, HR executives have little, if any, understanding of media relations, either tactically or strategically. Personally, I even oppose internal communications reporting to HR, which prefers to address benefits and wellness issues over corporate strategy and other subjects that are likely to create higher levels of employee commitment and engagement. And most HR leaders are loathe to address bad news.

But there’s a bigger issue at play here. Nardelli clearly hasn’t seen enough value in communications to be bothered with it as a direct report; he has opted to sweep it under the rug and left his personnel manager to deal with it.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen communications relegated to a trivial stature. I seem to recall that GM once had communications reporting to (urgh) Legal.

Chrysler’s action certainly doesn’t speak well of Nardelli’s view of communications’ importance as a management function. I can only hope it isn’t the start of a trend.

Reporting in Sunday’s Detroit Free Press, columnist Mark Phelan slammed the move. Excerpts:

“Communications must have a seat at the grownups’ table, with direct access to Chrysler’s bosses as the company develops and executes its turnaround strategy. Somebody in communications must be able to walk into the CEO’s office and say “There’s a crisis. Here’s what we have to do,” and the boss must trust that person enough to listen.

“Done right, communications shapes corporate strategy, influences whether a company has a good or bad reputation and serves as a reality-check for managers who can easily lose touch with how the outside world perceives them.

“A really good communications executive is less a spokesperson than a consigliere, the trusted counselor the boss listens to in a crisis.”

While expressing dismay over Chrysler’s move, he applauded GM for its “masterful handling of the Chevrolet Volt concept car,” among other things, then told this story:

“John Mueller, a retired GM communications executive, worked closely with chairman Rick Wagoner when Wagoner ran GM’s North American operations. One day, he suggested Wagoner do an interview with a journalist from a leading newspaper. Wagoner said that his schedule was full.

“Mueller picked up the phone and called Wagoner’s assistant. “Tell him I’ll be right up,” he said. As Mueller stepped into Wagoner’s office, the future leader of the world’s largest automaker smiled.

“‘If you think it’s important, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever quit challenging me when you believe you’re right.’”

That, Phelan wrote, is the approach Chrysler should take, rather than relegating communications to a corner of Human Resources.

As my friend Pete Shinbach noted in the email that alerted me to the Free Press story, “How many times have you read a journalist writing about the value of PR other than as a purely media relations function?” Too true: It’s refreshing, amidst all the bickering between PR and journalists, to see a reporter who appreciates the value of effective communications.

7. The Growing Social Media Contradiction

Rob Cottingham pointed me to a Canadian study that suggests business and marketing leaders believe the importance of social media is eclipsing that of traditional media. The study determined that 46% of respondents say that social media is more important than TV, radio, newspapers and magazines; 85% believe social media have become vital elements of the communication mix.

At the same time, though, 66% don’t think employees should be using it at work.

The study of 444 business and marketing leaders was conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights for Veritas Communications’ new com.motion unit.

Consider that, according to the study, 43% of business and marketing leaders have profiles on MySpace or Facebook. That would include a significant number who believe their own employees shouldn’t be able to access that profile or interact with the business leader—or other employees, customers, or others in their business network—during company time.

If social media are critical elements of the communication mix, shouldn’t employees be exposed to it? Participate in it? Shouldn’t the organization help employees figure out how to represent the organization in their online dealings, the way some companies are?

Rob also wondered (in his note to me), “So… Which group of employers is going to be more attractive to a young, entrepreneurial workforce in an era of skills shortages? And which group stands the better chance of being alive, vibrant and growing in ten years’ time?”

At least we’re starting to witness some chinks in the armor. A few days back, I heard the usual report from job placement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas warning companies that productivity would suffer on Black MondayWall-Street-Crash Oct-07 , the first Monday after Thanksgiving when online retailers offered deep discounts. Their estimate: $488 million in lost productivity, based on 68.6 million American workers spending an average of 12 minutes on the Net. The company also pointed out that those 12 minutes result in $700 million in online sales, which is positive for the economy. But in the radio interview I heard, John Challenger also said that employees are increasingly expected to work when they’re away from the office, which balances things out.

Challenger also offered this, from a report in the Kansas City Star:

“While employers shouldn’t be surprised to see distracted employees on Monday, Challenger, Gray said it is hard to measure productivity using a traditional “widgets per hour” formula.

“The consulting firm said that while some productivity will be lost, employers should not fret because, realistically, workers are not paid by the minute and are not expected to be productive every minute of their work day.

“Overall, “… unless online shopping causes deadlines to be missed or Internet performance to suffer, companies should not attempt to crack down on the practice. Doing so could negatively affect moral and loyalty, which ultimately will have a greater impact on the bottom line than a few minutes of cyber shopping,” said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray.”

Challenger, Gray & Christmas has been releasing these productivity calculations for some time, around everything from Black Monday to the NCAA Final Four. This is the first time I’ve seen an admission that the numbers don’t mean very much.

8. Sites of the Month

Social Media Training Wiki

Dave Fleet has started a wiki over at WetPaint, the ”Social Media Training Wiki.” The wiki’s contents represent a good start; it has the potential to become a valuable resource, a valuable supplement to the hodgepodge of resources over at Constantin Bastureau’s “The New PR Wiki.” The wiki—appropriatetly headlined “Using Social Media to Create Social Media Training” -— features 10 top-level topics so far:

Fundamentals (“ethics” is featured as a sub-category)
Blogs (“blogger relations” is a sub-category)
Micro-blogs
Podcasts
Social bookmarking
Social browsing
Social media news release
Social networks
wikis
Useful social media tools

http://socialtraining.wetpaint.com/

Media Bullseye

Chip Griffin of CustomScoop, the media monitoring service, has launched an online magazine called Media Bullseye, designed to “provide media, public relations, and marketing professionals with news and commentary about the modern communications landscape.”

Articles are authored by Chip and members of his staff (notably the clearly prolific Sarah Wurrey) as well as by guest authors like Chris Brogan and Chris Thilk. Features are tagged and categorized under labels like advertising, ethics, mobile media, privacy and public relations. Each article includes commenting functionality. In addition to features, the online magazine features news briefs and CustomScoop’s PR BlogJots and PR PodJots blogs. Most of the content so far is text; however, there’s a video introduction and more video is planned.

http://www.mediabullseye.com

9. HC+T update

I’ll conduct a six-city tour with a two-day Ragan workshop on social media. Included will be a talk by a communicator using social media effectively in each city. Details aren’t available yet, but the workshops begin in May and run through July; cities include San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, Washington D.C. and Toronto.
Now that a contract is signed, I can make it official: I’m co-authoring a book on communications and business transparency. My co-author, John C. Havens, and I will turn a manuscript in to Jossey-Bass by mid-March. You can follow interviews and get more information at http://www.transparencybook.com.
I’m presenting a session at the annual conference of the Nuclear Energy Institute in March.

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

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HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
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(C) 2007, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 12/23 at 02:05 PM
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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

HC+T Update: November 2007

HC+T Update, November 2007

HC+T Update
November 2007

1) A Proposal for Raising the Profile of Ethical PR
2) Who Should “Own” Social Media?
3) Jeremy Burton Is My New Hero
4) Dell Launches Investor Relations Blog
5) Northwestern Mutual Launches Internal Social Media
6) Announcing the “Stop Blocking” Campaign
7) Dark Blogs: A Bad Idea for Crisis Communications
8) The Flaws in Back-of-the-Envelope Productivity Calculations
9) Why Hasn’t Audio Podcasting Gone Mainstream?
10) Sites Of The month
11) HC+T Update
12) Boilerplate and subscription information

I figured it was time to produce a new “HC+T Update” when I noticed my last issue came out in August. AUGUST! Time certainly flies!

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. A proposal for raising the profile of ethical PR

The latest controversy over deceptive and unethical PR practices doesn’t even involve a public relations agency. No, this time Dan Ackerman Greenberg is in the hot seat after posting the steps he and his company, The Commotion Group (which describes itself as “New Media and Marketing and Consulting”) take to improve the chances a YouTube video will go viral. These include having staff members post heated comments to the videos they’re promoting and using misleading titles to draw viewers to the video.

The fact that The Commotion Group doesn’t tout itself as a PR firm won’t help offset the damage the firm’s revelations has caused. Once again, the behaviors of those who seem untroubled by deceptive tactics are tainting everybody working on similar projects regardless of the steps they have taken to ensure they are behaving ethically.

Sadly, this will continue to be the case. Those too lazy to employ ethical techniques, those who delight in misleading consumers, and those who will do anything for a buck will always be with us. The question, then, is this: How do the rest of us differentiate ourselves and deflect the bad rap PR and marketing are getting thanks to the actions of the bottom-feeders?

The idea of a code of ethics has surfaced several times, but it’s a non-starter. The codes of ethics already in place are having no significant impact; PRSA goes so far as to insist there is no enforcement behind its code. A code without teeth is hollow, since only those inclined to behave ethically in the first place will abide by it while others may claim to embrace it while simultaneously violating it since they will suffer no consequences for doing so.

I’ve been toying with a possible solution that I’m ready to propose. This idea has been percolating in my head for a while and I can’t find a downside.

Companies or agencies engaged in a PR or marketing effort should create a page that outlines the elements of the assignment. The page would include the goal, objectives, strategies and tactics. Objectives should include any metrics the project is designed to achieve. Each tactic would include the specifics about approaches taken. For example, if blogger outreach is one tactic, the outline would cover the steps taken, from how bloggers are identified to how they are contacted.

Call it disclosure. Call in transparency. It would end speculation about how a company or agency goes about its communications. Those who adopt the practice should stand apart from the rest of the herd, assuming they are honest and forthright in their reporting. If enough organizations adopt this idea, those who do not share their project plans may be perceived as having something to hide. If you’re looking for a template for the contents of such a page, look no further than the evaluation form for IABC Gold Quill judging. If you can answer all of these questions on your project pages, you’ll be in good shape. (The link is to a PDF of the form.)

It seems to me an ideal way to draw a line between ethical and unethical practitioners.

For those who would shy away from such transparency, it’s an idea you’d best get used to. After all, deceptive project plans are being revealed all the time. Why not expose your approaches to the light of day? It could wind up being the best PR you could possibly produce for your agency. And for those who see this is extra unbillable work, look at the bright side: Your IABC or PRSA award competition entries will already be completed.

2. Who Should Own Social Media?

Mitch Joel’s item on “ownership” of social media (on his blog, “Six Pixels of Separation”) has generated some interesting comments. Joel suggests digital marketing agencies should “own” organizations’ social media efforts:

“I think it’s Digital Marketing agencies who need to step up and own the Social Media marketing landscape. Agencies who are primed in the interactive marketing space start off with a core understanding of how people connect online, and how different users interact within online communities. Traditional advertising firms constantly struggle with how to add interactive into the mix. The fact that this still happens in the Marketing world makes me squirm. Interactive is still an after-thought to many agencies. Public Relations firms have the communications and conversations component down, but (usually) lack in the Web development department in terms of producing and marketing the initiative.”

The ensuing comments (including several replies from Mitch) raise a variety of issues. Mitch points out, for example, that he’s not talking about how a company department uses social media to achieve its goals, but rather who in the organization will make decisions about platforms, policies, and other tactical aspects of social media.

Even with this explanation, I’m troubled by the “ownership” issue. Few of the clients with whom I’ve worked engage a digital marketing agency. They wouldn’t be inclined to start working with one just so they can abdicate ownership of their social media activities to an outside organization. Even those organizations that have turned “ownership” over to a PR, marketing, advertising or some other kind of vendor have, I think, made a mistake. Nobody can develop an organization’s approach to social media better than the people inside the organization. Vendors can provide tremendous, invaluable advice, but ultimately, it’s the company that must be accountable for its own participation in the conversation.

Intranets provide a nice analogy: Who should own the company’s intranet? In many organizations, it’s the IT department. In others, it’s Employee Communications. A smattering of other departments own the intranet in some other companies. But, according to research conducted a few years back by Melcrum, the most effective intranets were those governed by a cross-functional team…that is, the company owned the intranet with representatives from across the spectrum of content owners guiding its evolution.

A cross-functional social media team isn’t a bad idea for companies. I know of one large organization in which Knowledge Management has assumed ownership of social media. But this has only delayed the use of social media tools by departments who have other goals in mind (e.g., project management, communication). In the cross-functdional model, task forces can be assigned specific work. For example, the IT task force can do the homework on appropriate platforms, then report back to the team for a decision made in the best interests of the organization. That’s a lot better than a decision that satisfies the MBOs of a single department.

Ultimately, though, how a company engages in social media should be part of something larger: how a company manages its reputation. I fully support the idea of a Chief Reputation Officer, an idea first put forward (as far as I know) by Charles Fombrun in his excellent book, ”Reputation: Realizing Value from the Corporate Image.” Here’s how Fombrun explains it:

Much as companies appoint a chief financial officer to safeguard financial capital, a chief operating officer to monitor operations, and a chief information officer to control and manipulate corporate databases, so might they benefit from appointing a chief reputation officer (CRO) to watch over the company’s intangible assets. As PR consultant Alan Towers suggests:

“The CRO’s tactical responsibilities would include oversight of pricing, advertising, quality, environmental compliance, investor relations, public affairs, corporate contributions, and employee, customer and media relations Rather than litterally do each of these jobs, the CRO would act as a corporate guide, working with specialists in each area to help them see the reputation consequences of their decisions. If necessary, the CRO could impose an opinion…”

With or without the title, sucha position would help to signal the importance and make explicit the hidden value of the company’s reputation. It would also encourage other managers to more systematically relate knowledge drawn from brand marketing, public relations organizational theory and strategic management.

The book was written in 1996, long before social media—or the Internet at all—had an impact on reputation. It’s still a sound idea and easy enough to drop social media into the list of the CRO’s tactical responsibilities.

With or without a CRO, though, the accountability for a company’s social media belongs inside the organization.

3. Jeremy Burton Is My New Hero

Jeremy Burton is my new hero. The guy deserves a medal. At least some recognition.

Burton is CEO of Serena Software, a 800-employee company not too far from here in San Mateo, California. Serena provides a platform that lets businesses create application mashups without writing code or relying on IT. On November 2, Serena issued press release introducing “Facebook Fridays, which encourages employees to find fun and personal connections in the workplace. Each Friday, employees are granted one hour of personal time to spend on their Facebook profiles and connect with co-workers, customers, family and friends.”

The press release is at:
http://www.serena.com/company/news/pr/sPR_11022007.html

I commented on this enlighted approach over on the Stop Blocking blog, which drew a response from Serena CorpComm VP Kyle Arteaga directing me to an article Burton wrote for ZDNet Asia. In it, he makes the case for encouraging employee interaction on social networks instead of blocking them. The article is at:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/insight/internet/0,39044877,62034135,00.htm

For most people, the human drive to connect and share is stronger than the duty to spend every possible moment “being productive”. No matter what, people will find ways to socialize and share during work hours. It might be best to treat this like sex education: If your employees are going to “do it” anyway, why not encourage them to channel their social-media impulses in smart, safe ways that can potentially help your business?

Burton provides concrete examples of how employees can help the business through their social networking activities and suggests that even though some problems are likely to arise, they’re minor compared to the benefits to the company.

I interviewed Burton for a “For Immediate Release” interview segment, which you can listen to here:

http://tinyurl.com/2s588z

In the meantime, read this article. Print it out and pass it along. Email the link to people. If we can spread the smarts of enlightened people like this, maybe we can turn the tide on the current trend of blocking access, building employee resentment, curtailing trust and squashing employee engagement.

4. Dell Launches Investor Relations Blog

Dell Inc. embraced social media in a big way with the launch of Direct2Dell, its customer focused blog. Greeted originally with catcalls by many observers, the blog—under the guidance of Lionel Menchaca and other members of Dell’s communications and customer service team—has been a cornerstone in the computer maker’s reputational turnaround success story. Direct2Dell was followed by the Dell Idea Storm, introducing elements of co-creation to the social media mix.

Now Dell takes another bold step—one sure to raise eyebrows—with the introduction just minutes ago of DellShares, a blog focused on investor relations authored by Lynn Tyson, Dell’s IR veep.

Neville and I had the privilege of interviewing Tyson for a For Immediate Release interview, which is now available for your listening pleasure (in fact, it’s the post just below this one on this blog). You can listen to the interview here:

http://tinyurl.com/359f8y

Few companies have employed social media for investor relations purposes, hindered mainly by qualms about onerous regulations that govern IR activities. But Dell’s experience with Direct2Dell has quieted any concerns, even among the company’s lawyers, according to Tyson, who tossed off a great quote in the interview:

People have learned that there is little downside to having conversations.

The blog was part of a broader initiative for implementing a “21st Century IR Plan,” Tyson says. The plan—and the blog—are based on two key principles. First is the democratization of information; second is the ubiquity of information. Tyson suggests that making information available on a blog where people can find it and having a conversation about that information is nothing different from her department’s normal day-to-day activities:

“The ability for an investor relations department to execute this and do it well quite frankly is predicated on how well they do their jobs every day. And if there’s confidence in their ability to exercise sound situational judgement over the phone or over emails or in one-on-one meetings with investors or group meetings with investors or drafting press releases, then there should be that same level of confidence by the company in their ability to have a dialogue over the Internet.”

I would cast my vote in a heartbeat for Tyson to serve as a key spokesperson for the adoption of social media in business. Her pointed statements—that fears don’t come to fruition and having a conversation online is no different than having one anywhere else (in terms of your ability to reap value and avoid problems)—stand in stark contrast to the naysayers who insist that closely controlled, one-way, top-down communication should continue to characterize corporate interaction with constituent audiences. These forces fear dire consequences of business adoption of social media. Dell has had the opposite experience, a practical, real-world case study of how engaging in conversation serves the company’s goals.

Couple this with the Northwestern Mutual case study from Forrester (in which intranet blogging boosted productivity) and other success stories. Weigh them against the few tales in which the adoption of a social media strategy has backfired on a company. It’s clear that social media will play a critical part in the fortunes of any company planning to do business in the new-media environment.

DellShares opens with an introductory welcome post. Tyson plans to coordinate posts with key investor events (earnings announcements, conference calls, and the like) and to use it to discuss issues with shareholders large and small. I’ll be watching. Hell, I may buy a few shares just so I can participate as a genuine member of the investing audience.
5. Northwestern Mutual Launches Internal Social Media

Jeremy Burton (referenced above) is one of my heroes. G. Oliver Young is fast becoming another one. Every time this Forrester analyst puts out a paper, it provides me with fodder to support my arguments supporting social media in the enterprise.

The latest, a case study detailing the efforts by financial services company Northwestern Mutual to take advantage of social media on its intranet, is particularly important because the company under the microscope isn’t high-tech. In fact, insurance companies are traditionally among the most conservative organizations when it comes to embracing new media.

But Norwestern Mutual jumped into social media with both feet, first invetigating the potential in 2005 and then deploying both employee blogs and RSS.

The company’s blogging effort was designed to achieve three specific goals:

Efficient and accurate communication from management to employees
A feedback loop from employees to management.
Inter-employee communication.

The initiative was pushed by Northwestern Mutual’s Assistant Director of Corporate Relations, Andrea Austin, and taken up by the cross-functional Public Affairs Committee. Several concerns needed to be overcome, though, including fears that internal blogging would sap employee productivity (where have we heard that one before?), issues raised by Human Resources, and security concerns, among others.

Once these were addressed, the blogging platform—Mutualblog—was rolled out. It became evident quickly, though, that RSS would be required to make blogging practical. NewsGator provided RSS functionality for the company.

While the bloging initiative was designed to improve the culture of openness and honesty, the biggest benefits were seen in project and team management. About 70% of the active blogs at Northwestern Mutual focus on project management.

Nobody doubts that the blogging and RSS effort has produced business value but, not surprisingly, it isn’t easy to measure. Still, there is strong evidence that communication has improved and team and individual productivity have increased. Contrary to the concerns expressed by some that employee blogging will drain productivity, Northwestern Mutual’s experiment has shown that it helps address information overload. According to the case study:

“Blogging has provided a partial solution to the (information overload) problem, allowing employees —- especially the geographically distributed field force —- to engage new content at their leisure, cutting down on conference calls, meetings, and email overload. The firm has even higher hopes for the recently launched RSS solution, which it expects to help cut down information overload as opt-in emails, newsletters, and corporate portal content transition into the RSS channel.”

Next up for Northwestern mutual are efforts to drive greater employee adoption of blogs, bringing wikis and podcasting into the mix, and applying the social media efforts that have worked behind the firewall onto the World Wide Web for external communciation purposes.

The full study goes into considerable detail on Northwestern Mutual’s social media efforts. It costs $279, which is pretty damn cheap for any communicator looking for evidence to convince the powers that be that the naysayers are wrong and, when executed strategically, social media on the intranet produces real bottom-line business value.

6. Annoucing the “Stop Blocking” Campaign

I have never been a fan of the business practice of blocking employee access to online content (as you know if you read this blog). I believe the practice kills trust and prevents employee engagement. Prospective employees see it as a big sign that says, “Don’t work here.” The issues that lead companies to block access are better addressed by strong supervision and effective management instead of technical restrictions. Much of the content that is blocked is valuable from a business standpoint; that value just hasn’t been recognized by those who make the kneejerk decision to block. The arguments that support blocking are based on flawed calculations and distorted reporting. And the investment required to block access can better be invested in anything from customer service to corporate social responsibility initiatives.

I have finally decided to do more than just gripe about blocking practices on my blog and podcast. Effective today, I have launched a blog and wiki as the foundation of a campaign to educate the business world about the arguments against wholesale blocking of online content. These arguments don’t get a lot of publicity; they’re not as sensational as “studies” from organizations that benefit from the fear they produce with headlines like “$5 billion in lost productivity attributed to Facebook.” It is my hope that the “Stop Blocking” campaign will serve as a resource to those who want to make a business case supporting open access.

The blog—which serves as the campaign home page—will report on goings-on in the blocking realm. The wiki, though, is the heart of the effort, where anyone interested in participating can contribute arguments, evidence, case studies, research, links to articles, anything that helps make the case that the benefits of open access far outweigh the risks, and that there are better ways to address the prospect of employees who abuse the privilege. In order to manage wiki spam, I’ve set up the MediaWiki to require you to register in order to contribute or edit content. I encourage you to take the minute or so required to create an account so you can become part of the movement.

There’s also a petition associated with the campaign. Your signature is appreciated. I won’t link to it here in the hopes that you’ll visit the campaign site in order to find it.

I’m also interested in anyone who can produce better graphics for the badges than I have (I’m no designer), as well as WordPress and MediaWiki talent who can improve the design and functionality of these tools.

And, of course, since this is a new site, I’d be grateful for any reports of anything that doesn’t work right. (It’s my very first experience using the MediaWiki platform.)

So please visit the site, contribute to the wiki, display one of the badges (linking to the Stop Blocking campaign) on your blog, and do what you can to take advantage of social media and word-of-mouth to spread the Stop Blocking message that the mainstream media has been ignoring. I am grateful for your support and anxious to see where this goes.

The site is at:
http://www.stopblocking.org

7. Dark Blogs: A Bad Idea for Crisis Communications

More and more, I hear communicators counsel their organizations and clients to maintain a “dark blog” in the wings, ready to be activated in the event of a crisis. Whether this is actually a good idea falls into that “it depends” category.

Blogging software, stripped of the elements that make it a blog (like comments and trackbacks), can be used to provide rapid updates as the crisis progresses through its various stages. If that’s the intent of a dark blog, fine.

If, however, the dark blog is designed to provide a genuine, authentic voice engaged in conversation about the crisis, this is an awful idea. The blog will have absolutely no credibility. It will have no established voice. No community will have formed around it.

Establishing a corporate blog before a crisis, on the other hand, allows an organization to build community along with some banked goodwill and trust —- assuming the blog is done right in the first place. That storehouse of goodwill and trust can be used in a crisis with an audience already inclined to believe what the corporate blogger says and, to some extent, to support the organization in its trying time.

Consider the minor crisis Southwest Airlines experienced when the ejection of a scantily-clad passenger from a flight became public. Imagine starting a blog in order to engage in a dialogue with the customer base and the flying public over the issue.

Instead, Southwest Airlines President Colleen Barrett used the existing “Nuts About Southwest” blog—with its regular core group of readers and its established credibility—to issue an apology:

We always want to apologize if we offend any of our Customers, and we also support our Employees abilities to make decisions. We are apologizing to Kyla, in typical Southwest style, and I hope you will click here to read about it.

The post was greeted with hundreds of comments. While the comments represented a mix of opinions, they were mostly courteous and well-thought-out, the way people talk when they are engaged in a conversation with someone they know. The ability to engage directly with those whose opinions are strongest can defuse a lot of the hostility some people may feel. The fact that they can do so on a company blog makes people feel like their opinions matter to the company. And a number of the comments do applaud Barrett for the apology, like this one:

“While I think this apology should have come much earlier than it did, I’m glad to see that SWA has apologized for it’s error, and publicly admitted to the mistake.

Good job!”

It does make sense to include social media—and, at this stage, blogs in particular—in your crisis communication planning. If you’re looking for an argument to support introducing a corporate blog, the benefits of two-way communication with critical audiences during a crisis could help you sell the idea. But don’t fall prey to the suggestion that launching a blog at the time of a crisis is a sound strategy.

8. The Flaws in Back-of-the-Envelope Productivity Calculations

Upon returning to Apple in 1997 after years of exile (or so the story goes), Steve Jobs observed that employees were hunkering down in their offices. Wanting a more free-flowing exchange of knowledge, Jobs ordered urns of coffee and boxes of donuts delivered to Apple’s buildings on Fridays. Employees emerged from their offices to enjoy the caffeine and sugar but, while there, they began talking to other employees with whom they normally wouldn’t exchange a word. The notion is similar to what one CEO told me a few years back: “If you want to know what’s going on in this company, step outside and hang out with the smokers.”

No matter how many organizations struggle to resist it, work is social. (The very definition of the word organization is “a group of people who work together” or “a group of people with one or more shared goals.” Note the emphasis on “a group of people.” In an organization (as anywhere else) knowledge transfers from person to person, not machine to person. Computer networks are most valuable when they facilitate that exchange. And social networks have emerged as the best set of tools for facilitating the person-to-person exchange of knowledge. Why wouldn’t a company want to take advantage of that?

Admitting that he is a “wet blanket,” internal communications guru Roger D’Aprix has written one of his “Inside Out” columns for the “Ragan Report” offering employee productivity as a key reason for companies to be wary of enterprise social media. D’Aprix is one of the sharpest minds in the internal communications business; in fact, his early thinking on employee communications in the 1960s and 70s has shaped many of the principles employed today. His book, ”Communicating for Change,” should be required reading for business leaders and communicators.

His take on internal social media, however, deserves some scrutiny. D’Aprix begins by reminding us that workers already face an ever-worsening information overload problem:

“To get some idea of the overload problem’s severity, consider that The Henley College in England has just conducted a study which shows European managers are spending two hours a day dealing with e-mails. The study’s authors calculate that that adds up to a staggering 10 years of a worker’s life! Of that number three and a half years are seen as a complete waste of time since 32 percent of the messages are deemed irrelevant. The cause (which to be fair is obviously out of our control as communication professionals) is that each e-mail message typically spawns four to six additional ones in the user’s inbox.”

The problem with lumping social media into the message meltdown issue is that the messages contributing to the overload are pushed at employees. Employees don’t ask for most email they get. But employees will not read blogs, listen to podcasts, or participate in social networks they don’t find valuable; these are all channels that employees pull based on interest and need.

“Consider this. In a company of 15,000 employees if just 1 percent of the work force succumbs to the invitation to begin a personal blog, the productivity and cost consequences are huge.”

D’Aprix applies the same math to employee blogging that organizations like Websense and Challenger, Gray & Christmas use when making the case for blocking employee access to external content: 1,500 minutes equals 25 hours of productivity at $100 per hour, totaling $2,500 in production costs. The time invested by the 30% of the workforce that reads one blog for five minutes comes to 22,500 minutes, totaling 375 hours of reading time per post, or $37,500 per blog in lost productivity. “Now multiply that number by the number of blogs that attract large readerships.” It’s the same kind of calculation that led to the belief that Facebook is costing Australian businesses $5 billion in lost productivity.

As I have noted before, such calculations fly in the face of evidence that worker productivity in the U.S. is on the rise and is the best in the world. D’Aprix admits that his calculations don’t account for a number of factors:

“Not everyone can be productive every minute of the day. The actual productivity per worker is probably closer to 60 percent of his or her working day. So lost productivity is inevitable anyway.”

“Not every worker represents $100 an hour in company costs.”

“Some of those 150 blogs could well be part of a valuable information exchange that might even lead to a productivity gain.”

Despite these factors, however, D’Aprix remains unconvinced:

But who can tell which ones are valuable and which ones are a waste of time without inspecting them? So the productivity losses still add up. The pro-bloggers will hate it, but maybe we need some good gate keeping to filter out the inevitable junk.

D’Aprix misses some critical points in his call to “give careful thought before you succumb to the hype and recommend any activity that adds to an already maddening overload problem.” At the risk of repeating myself (since this is a hot-button issue for me), let’s undertake a quick review:

Employees who blog on the intranet do so primarily about work. They are codifying their thoughts and efforts, often as a means of creating a record for their own reference.
Employees will read blogs they find worthwhile and ignore those they don’t. Ditto podcasts. Ditto social network profiles and groups.
Companies that implement RSS make it easier for employees to manage most of the content they consume, helping them focus their attention on what’s important and ignore what’s not. Using an RSS news reader, employees can subscribe to all manner of content, from policy updates posted to the intranet to company news releases to internal blogs to external web sites, all of which can be scanned and consumed in one compact place.

Even if an internal blog doesn’t provide immediate benefit to a reader, it does create knowledge touch points in the organization that never would have existed before. It may be two years before Mary realizes that the author of the internal blog she’s been reading has the skills required to kick-start a stalled project.
Even though Tim may not benefit directly by reading Jennifer’s internal blog, he could leave a comment to a post that helps Jennifer (or any of her other readers) solve a problem or do their jobs better.
Trusting employees with internal blogging increases job satisfaction, trust, and engagement. It also becomes a recruiting tool.

Most employees will not risk their jobs to do anything non-work-related, whether that’s blogging, web surfing, or working crossword puzzles. The measure of productivity is whether work is getting done, not the minutes spent on non-work activities. Consider how much work you do when you’re not in the office (at home, on the road, on vacation). Where does that factor into these calculations?

Employee blogs also create a permanent record of employee knowledge that remains in the organization after they leave.

Clearly communicated and enforced policies can address most of the problems internal blogging might create. As for employees who are bound and determined to waste time, they’ll waste time with or without computers and should be managed by exception.
Ultimately, though—as the leaders of companies like Siemens USA have suggested—anything that gets employees to share knowledge with one another is a good thing; the benefits far outweigh the risks. Instead of back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’d like to see real evidence that internal blogging is costing a company in terms of sales, innovation, product (or service) introduction, time-to-market, the ability to attract and retain employees, market share or any of the other factors that keep executives awake at night. That’s evidence I’m just not seeing. Instead, I have found only reports of how these networks have increased organizational nimbleness and competitiveness.

The sooner we can move beyond the superficial objections to internal social media, the sooner organizations can begin reaping the benefits of a culture in which knowledge flows freely from employee to employee.

9. Why Hasn’t Audio Podcasting Gone Mainstream?

I’ve had this post in mind for a couple months now. I’ve put it off due in part to my travel schedule and in part because I wanted to chew on it a bit more. It’s certainly not a new topic; in fact, it’s well-worn territory:

Why hasn’t audio podcasting become mainstream?

I utterly reject the argument posited by some very smart people that the explosion of online video is to blame. With respect to those who have made this case, I have to shake my head in disbelief. If the popularity of video could stifle the growth of audio, why didn’t the introduction of television kill radio? There certainly were enough pundits in the 1940s who believed TV spelled doom for radio, but in fact radio thrived and grew to become more profitable than ever. It did so by adapting based on its remaining strengths.

The appeal of watching Don Imus (before his fall from grace) on MSNBC. What was visually appealing about watching a guy sit behind a desk with studio monitors over his ears talking into a microphone? Radio is much better at talk and music than TV is. And when people couldn’t focus 100% of their attention on a video screen, radio entertained them while they kept their eyes elsewhere (like the road, for instance; people who read while they drive scare the shit out of me).

Some also suggest that the incursion of traditional radio into the audio podcasting space is detrimental. But look at the most viewed videos on YouTube. How much there is original content? The list I’m looking at includes Saturday Night Live clips, scenes from soccer games, Japanese soap operas and other appropriated content.

Another point in favor of audio podcasting comes from Rob Walch, host of “Podcast 411,” in an email exchange we had on the subject:

“It is much easier to compete against a Radio station - there is not much difference in Audio quality when you listen on your iPod between a “Professional” recording and one done by us indie podcasters.”

Personally, I find most of the video podcasts to be worthless as video; I’d much rather listen to them. What’s the appeal of watching some guy talk into his webcam? Why should I have to watch that? If you’re going to produce something as video, for God’s sake please make it visually compelling. That’s what I love about shows like Geek Brief TV and Rocketboom: There’s something to actually look at.

And let’s not forget that video requires your complete attention. Audio is the only medium to which we can pay attention while we’re doing something else.

So if Internet video’s phenomenonal rise isn’t to blaim for the stagnation in podcasting’s growth, what is? The answer, I believe, is infrastructure. There is not a simple infrastructure common across the podcasting world that makes it drop-dead easy to download podcasts and transfer them to a portable device.

Offloading video isn’t that big an issue. Most people watch online videos (whether they’re podcasts or not) on their computers. The appeal of podcasting is the ability to listen while you’re walking the dog, mowing the lawn, or (as I am right now) sitting on another tedious goddam cross-country flight.

How you subscribe is not standardized. How podcatchers and MP3 devices work is not standardized. While most people who read this blog have probably figured out how to deal with podcasts and RSS feeds and the like, my mom would be completely lost. I guarantee you she would listen to FIR if she could; she reads my books, after all, even though she has no clue what they’re talking about. But books all work alike. Bookstores work alike.

I’m not expecting a resolution to this situation any time soon because there is no profit-motivated industry that would benefit through the cooperative development of a consistent, standardized infrastructure. In the book ”The Death of Competition,” which I read several years ago, author James F. Moore talks about “coopetition,” competing companies working together to create an ecosystem that supports the growth of all players. Moore points to the videogame industry as an example. Companies like Ninentendo, SEGA, and Atari joined forces to create the gaming infrastructure. No, an Atari game wouldn’t play in a Nintendo device, but the distribution channels and other aspects of the infrastructure needed to exist before the various platforms could prosper.

There is no similar profit-motivated ecosystem in podcasting, and I don’t believe one is on the horizon. So podcasting’s growth will continue to be incremental—volunteers take more time to promote an infrastructure than businesses—but continue to grow it will.

10. Sites of the Month

At the recommendation of my friend Pete Shinbach, I’ve been playing with Jott, a new online service currently in public beta. So far, I love this service both for its simplicity and the fact that it meets a real need.

Once you have an account, which synchs with your cell phone number, you set up lists of people with whom you want to communicate. Let’s say you work for a department that meets each Tuesday at 8 a.m., but you’re stuck in traffic. Call Jott and record a message saying, “I’m late, but start the meeting without me.” That message will be transcribed and sent as a text message and/or email to the other members of the department.

You’re automatically set up as a group yourself. I can easily see myself driving somewhere and suddenly remembering something I need to do. I call Jott (which is already in my cell phone autodial listing), speak the message, and within seconds, it has arrived as a text message and an email, serving as a reminder once I get back to the office.

Jott has launched new functionality this week, allowing you to send your messages to services like Twitter and Jaiku. I tested it on Twitter, and it worked reasonably well, although it misspelled “Cisco.” Fortunatley, if you think the transcribing might err in spelling what you’ve said correctly, you can spell it out instead of simply speak it.

The service is free and, so far, I think it rocks.

http://www.jott.com

So how did I miss Utterz? Jeez, you spend a few weeks on the road and you’re out of the loop!

I first saw the site referenced this morning in a post by Robert Scoble, which directed me over to Jeremiah Owyan’s blog, where he had posted his first Utterz. It looked simple enough, so I did one of my own. You’ll be able to hear any I do in the future in the widget over in the right-hand column of the page, although if they’re interesting enough, I’ll also post them as blog items, like this one.

Utterz lets you post any audio, test, photo or video via your cell phone or email (or direct upload, for that matter). You can put what you’ve posted on your blog or people can access it from your Utterz profile (mine is here and looks like this (only bigger):

The content in an Utterz profile can be shared just like a YouTube video, via an embed code. You can also listen to Utterz over your cell phone. I haven’t explored the full potential of Utterz yet, but will over the next few days as discretionary time allows. But this tool definitely looks like it has potential. Now, if only I could direct my Utterz to my Twitter stream…

http://www.utterz.com

11. HC+T update

vering the morning keynote on the last day of the Ragan Communications Web Content Management conference next week.
working with an international PR agency to develop a social media curriculum for the agency’s employees.
helping a global consumer products company redesign its internal portal.
about intimidating! I’m speaking on social media in February at the annual conference of the National Speakers Association.

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Posted by Shel on 11/27 at 06:50 AM
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

HC+T Update: August 2007

HC+T Update: August 2007

HC+T Update
August 2007

Wikipedia Scanner: Open Season On Companies
Facebook Blocking Doesn’t Add Up
Two New Webinars Coming Up
Blog Launches Along With The New Chrysler
A New ROI Calculator For Social Network Campaigns
Company Leaders: Lousy Internal Communicators
Second Life Criticism Based On Faulty Assumptions
Widgets Go Mainstream
Sites Of The month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate and subscription information
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Wikipedia Scanner: Open Season On Companies

Since Virgil Griffith launched Wikipedia Scanner, it’s been open season on organizations whose IP addresses are linked to changes made to entries on the popular DIY encyclopedia. For example…

PRWeek’s UK edition notes that “PR agencies are flouting Wikipedia rules demanding they do not edit the site. At least six of the PRWeek top ten UK agencies have edited the site in the past year…FD is the biggest offender filing 25 edits, primarily concerning clients Russ DeLeon and Ruth Parasol—founders of the online gambling company PartyGaming.”
Wired is taking and publishing submissions in a posting titled “Vote on the Most Shameful wikipedia Spin Jobs.”
Over 750 blog posts have been contributed on the topic, and a Google search produces 342,000-plus results.

Cumulatively, the number of organizations being outed for making changes is staggering. Rarely does a single tool produce such an overwhelming indictment of institutions’ predlicition for spinning facts and history.

But a little perspective is in order.

I’ve been visiting the Scanner over the last few days, spending time in the “Editor’s Picks.” For example, I spent a fair amount of time clicking through edits made from Exxon Mobil’s IP addresses. As of right now, there is a whopping 1,205 edits made by Exxon Mobil. Outrageous, right? Well, no. In fact, only about 20 of the edits seem to have anything to do with entries related to Exxon Mobil.

What, then, were all these other edits? Here’s a very small sampling:

Correction of a typo (“choose” instead of “chose”) in an entry about Disneyland’s Autopia ride
Addition of a paragraph about how refrigeration cycles work in an entry about air conditioners
Removal of an offensive addition to the biography of country singer/actress Dolly Parton
Removal of a gratuitous addition (I LOVE YOU JENNY) to a listing on the history of American Football
A section on “Economy” was added to the listing for the city of Natchitoches, Louisiana, suggesting that the city’s tourism industry needs little promotion.

Are these blatant abuses by Exxon Mobil? Clearly not. These are employees who also happen to be Wikipedia fans; they don’t care whether they’re at home or at work when they make their corrections and additions. But because their entries from work computers get aggregated with all other revisions from the company’s range of IP addresses, they get added to the total. Without these entries, Exxon Mobil probably wouldn’t have attracted the editor’s attention and become an editor’s pick.

A look at Amgen’s results shows a similar pattern. Most changes were made to entires dealing with a band called Caustic, the late Monty Python alum Graham Chapman, the term “mnemonic,” the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the like. Reviews of other companies produced the same kinds of results.

And what about the edits to Exxon Mobil entries, the ones that clearly violate Wikipedia’s policy? While some are egregious (deletion of content about the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for instance), others simply correct facts. For example, the entry about Mobil 1motor oil originally stated that Mobil 1 was introduced two years after Amsoil “marketed the first API certified synthetic engine oil.” The change reflects the fact that Mobil 1 was, in fact, the first API (American Petroleum Institute) certified synthetic motor oil.

At this point, you also have to wonder how many of the edits to company-specific content were business-motivated -— that is, deliberately executed by the PR staff—and how many were individual employees who visited the company’s listing and said, “Hey, that’s not right,” and made the change without understanding the consequences. Companies now need policies that limit employee edits to company listings in Wikipedia.

I’ve been on the record opposing the Wikipedia rule that bars companies and their agents from editing company content. Honest efforts to correct mistatements of fact are prohibited by the rule (such as changing the number of employees from 500,000 to 50,000 because the original author added an extra zero) while unethical companies will simply make their inappropriate changes from non-work computers or use proxy services that mask their identities. Meanwhile, thousands of people who don’t work for the company but do have a biased point of view merrily post entries that obviously were never crafted with objectivity in mind.

But my objection doesn’t matter. The rule is the rule and if companies can’t play by it, they deserve whatever heat they take as a result of being outed courtesy of the Wikipedia Scanner. And, to be fair, most of the companies that have been the subject of news reports since the Scanner opened for business have been caught trying to rewrite history.

Still, it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff, and not much of an effort has been made so far to draw the distinction between truly unethical manipulation of content, minor factual revisions, changes made unwittingly by front-line employees and changes to non-company content by employees accessing Wikipedia from work computers.

2. Facebook Blocking Doesn’t Add Up

Tony Molloy, from the Bolton Citizens Advice Bureau in the UK, forwarded the latest issue of ILM Newsroom, the online publication from the UK’s Institute of Leadership & Management. The juxtaposition of three articles grabbed my attention.

The first one -— the article that prompted Tony to send the site my way —- reports that “More than two thirds of employers have banned or restricted the use of Facebook and other social networking sites amid fears that staff are wasting time at work.”

More Londoners (826,000) are registered as Facebook members than any other city, and one study found that British users spend 191 minutes per month on the site. That averages out to less than 6.5 minutes per day. Still, Transport for London, British Gas, the Metropolitan Police, Lloyds TSB and Scotland Yard are among the organizations that have put filters in place to keep employees from visiting the site. A Scotland Yard representative said, “Access to some of these sites is blocked as there is no business need for employees to visit them.”

Well, except for the ability to network with other employees, potential customers, strategic partners, and people whose knowledge can prove an advantage in your work. Other than that, there’s no business need for employees to visit them.

Which leads to the second article, which reports on a survey that found nearly half of UK employees believe their managers make poor decisions. They blame incompetence and lack of confidence for the bad decisions.

Bad decisions like, maybe, blocking Facebook and other social networks?

The survey respondents thought their own bosses were fine; it’s the higher-ups that earned their derision. One particularly interesting finding revealed that 51% of senior managers believe they solicit employee input before making a decision, only 22% of employees agreed.

Perhaps soliciting employee decisions about blocking social networks would have uncovered business reasons to leave the sites unblocked. Alas, it’s easier to jerk one’s knee.

Neville reported today on a study suggesting that Facebook is costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year in lost productivity. Of course, these numbers are calculated using the same absurd approach that companies like Websense use to heighten paranoia in support of the purchase of their site-blocking software. Here’s the formula:

Hours spent on Facebook x average hourly per-employee pay x working Facebook population

So let’s say the average worker is earning $25 per hour (for a salary of about $50,000 per year—I’m not going to mess with conversion to British pounds for this speculative argument). Multiply that by the number of Londoners with Facebook accounts (which is ridiculous, since not all of them are employees, but this is just for the sake of argument), and you come up with $20,650,000 in “lost productivity” for businesses in the city of London for every hour employees spend on Facebook. Multiply that by the total number of hours they spend on Facebook (assuming all those hours are spent at work), and you wind up with “lost productivity” approaching half a billion dollars a year.

One of my big questions in these decisions to block social networks, blogs, and other sites is whether time is, in fact, being wasted. The measure of productivity, particularly in knowledge jobs, is whether work is getting done, whether it’s getting done on time, and whether the quality of the work meets or exceeds the employer’s expectations. If I spend 20 minutes on Facebook at work, then spend an hour doing work in my living room in the evening or stay an hour late at work, the net result is still the same. (We won’t get into the effect of lack of management trust in employees on levels of employee engagement.)

All of which may be supported by yet another survey: Brits evidently believe time at work should be used primarily for work purposes. The third article from the ILM Newsroom looks at a study that determined “almost one in five employees think lunch breaks are for wimps with some not even taking any time out during their working day.”

The ILM Newsroom reports “that while this might appear to be a bonus for Britain’s bosses, working without any breaks can prove detrimental to employees’ health and wellbeing.”

God forbid that break should take place on Facebook or another social network where employees might actually bring the benefits of networking back to the workplace. And God further forbid that supervisors should deal with employees wasting time; it’s so much easier to simply not trust everybody, isn’t it?

So let’s review:

Companies are blocking employee access to social networks without doing the homework required to determine whether their fears of wasted time are justified
Most employees think it’s important to work hard to the point that they skip lunch in order to get more work done and not be viewed as a wimp
Most employees think their leaders make stupid decisions
Yep, that about covers it.

3. Two New Webinars Coming Up

Two Webinars are starting up in the next couple of months.

First up, I’m VERY excited to have Bryan Person (http://www.bryper.com and http://www.newcommroad.com) presenting a Webinar on hot to monitor and engage in the the collaborative, consumer-generated media space. This Webinar will take a very close look at how to interact with bloggers and engage in blogger outreach (also known as blogger relations). This Webinar begins Sept. 10. Register at http://tinyurl.com/2n39rm.

Next, I’m repeating my Human Resources Communications Webinar, which attracted well over 100 participants the first time around. This one starts October 1. Register at http://tinyurl.com/2pdfup.

As always more information is available at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com.

4. Press Releases vs. News Releases

My post on August 2 about a news release (sorry, you’ll just have to go read the blog post) issued by the Adfero Group has prompted some discussion about some of the fundamentals of the social media release. Adfero’s “interactive” news release embraces some of the elements of the social media release, but retains the narrative style of traditional releases.

Adfero representatives offered well-thought-out arguments for rejecting the bullet-listed “Core News Facts” section of the social media release. In a comment to my post, Adfero’s Jeff Mascott wrote, “The best approach for a news release is still the narrative format –- it the easiest to read by reporters, bloggers and interested citizens alike.”

The rationale for the bullet approach comes directly from the Tom Foremski post that launched the social media release effort to begin with. Foremski wanted companies to “deconstruct the press release into special sections and tag the information so that as a publisher, I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.”

The social media releases I have crafted have, in every instance, been paired with a traditional release (as in this example, but Adfero doesn’t like that approach, according to a comment from Chris Battle: “While I respect your idea of sending two news releases -– one with the narrative and one without -– our goal was to create a release that accomplishes our goals in one document.” Others have rejected the dual release concept simply because it takes too much time.

I respect the positions Adfero and others have taken on these issues. But I don’t buy ‘em. Communications shouldn’t be about consolidation. We should target the message to the audience (a term I use advisedly). I see three distinct audiences, each with unique needs:

Traditional media
Online media (including bloggers)
The general public

Let’s tackle the public/press issue first. Battle writes:

“we are not writing solely for journalists. One of the things that makes the new media environment so much more productive is that organizations can issue their news releases directly to the public. The goal is go convince the mainstream media and the blogosphere to pick up the release and run a story about it, but it is not the only goal. Equally important is to deliver that information directly into the hands of target audiences in the public.”

The first time I heard the idea that press releases need to accommodate both the media and the general public, it came up twice in one day. The first was a high-tech company that asserted the need to write releases that might be too technical for the average journalist because the release would be read by sophisticated IT types. The second was a telecommunications company that insisted it needed to dumb down its releases because Joe Beercan might wind up reading it on the web.

We need to make a distinction between press releases and news releases. A press release is targeted at the press and should be crafted to meet the needs of a reporter or editor. A news release is for general distribution to the public. While this is not the approach taken by many PR practitioners, it’s one that makes more and more sense.

As for the traditional vs. social media release, it’s important to remember that some publications don’t have the resources to turn a release into a story. Early in my career, I worked for both trade and public publications where I was one of two writers/editors. Much of the editorial was made up of press releases, run just as we got them. There are still a lot of outlets in that position. For them, a traditional release is the answer.

For online journalists and bloggers, however, a social media release—one that makes it easy to grab elements and insert them, whether they’re text or multimedia—is in order. The idea is to make the information easy to adapt to social media tools, like blogs and websites. And here, I have to return to Foremski’s original rant:

Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on…

Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists.

This madness has to end. It is wasted time and effort by hundreds of thousands of professionals.

Formeski’s solution to the narrative approach (what Tom calls “topspin”)—the solution embraced by the social media release working group: “Provide a brief description of what the announcement is, but leave the spin to the journalists. The journalists are going to go with their own spin on the story anyway, so why bother? Keep it straightforward rather than spintastic.”

And what of the time it takes to produce two or even three versions of a release, each targeted to the appropriate audience? I don’t buy that, either. Start with the traditional, narrative release, then use it as the basis for the others. It has never taken me more than an hour to create a social media release from a traditional release.

Finally, there’s the worry that the wrong audience will see the wrong release, given that any release will wind up in places like Yahoo’s finance site. But it’s easy to begin any release with a line like this:

This is a press release intended for use by the news media. A general news release can be found here and a social media release is available here.

As communicators working in an increasingly fragmented world, we should not strive to make one size fit all. We should target our messages for maximum effectiveness. If that means an extra hour or two to produce niche-focused versions of releases, then that’s what we should do.

5. Blog Launches Along With The “New” Chrysler

The “new” Chrysler officially launched yesterday as most of the transition of ownership from Daimler to the private Cerberus has been wrapped up. A day earlier, though, the company unveiled a blog prominently accessible from the company’s business home page.

Called “Voices of Chrysler,” the blog has featured several senior-level posts, including a welcome from Vice Chairman and President Tom Lasorda who wrote:

“We will continue our strong tradition of communicating with our stakeholders, employees, dealers, suppliers, community leaders, and most importantly, our customers. That’s one of the reasons for this blog…We also want to start a conversation with you and keep it going, so please feel free to add your two cents in the comment section.”

The invitation was greeted by 22 comments to date, including a few wishes for success along with some concerns. One noted that the new CEO, Bob Nartelli, was removed from his position at Home Depot where his leadership had led to demoralization of the workforce and customer base. “Please tell me that things will be different at Chrysler LLC. I am a lifetime Mopar fan and do not want to see a hacksaw job done on my favorite car company. Just worried, that’s all.” Another complained about the lack of lifetime warranties in Canada.

(The new CEO’s name is spelled Nardelli, but I left the spelling as it was in the comment.)

Other posts have addressed innovation and a look back at the design of the Chrysler logo (by its original creator). There’s also an introductory note from Jackie Headapohl, the editor of the blog. Headapohl spoke to Toby Bloomberg and told her the blog’s goal is to “share the many voices associated with Chrysler that give it its unique “mojo” and provide customers a behind-the-scenes look at our company.” Toby promises a full-blown interview with Headapohl soon.

So far, comments have appeared with each post and it doesn’t appear that there’s any effort by the company to filter out the negative. I may have missed it, but I haven’t seen any of the blog authors participating in the comments section. So far, the writing is a bit stilted and the topics are fairly broad -— not unexpected for a brand new corporate blog launched to coincide with the launch of a new company. The blog should find its footing right alongside the organization.

Overall, though, launching a blog along with the company is a smart move, providing that window inside and the opportunity for the authentic voices of company leaders to be heard and for them to engage with customers (and other constituents).

One interesting note: Accompanying the RSS feed for the blog is a link that reads, “Podcast feed.” This leads to a 404/page-not-found, but suggests that a podcast is in the works.

6. A New ROI Calculator For Social Network Campaigns

Measurement of social media’s value continues to be a hot issue, and now another group has taken a stab at developing a calculation to make that assessment. In this case, it’s “a tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like FAcebook and Myspace.” The calculator comes from Care2, which describes itself (in its press release boilerplate) as “the largest online progressive network, bringing together socially and environmentally responsible nonprofits, businesses and its 7 million members.”

The calculator is posted to Care2’s Frogloop blog and is focused on not-for-profit campaigns, but a lot of thought went into the calculator that communicators in the for-profit world can easily adapt.

The first step asks you to determine the metrics by entering goals or results, such as…

Staff/volunteer hours per week
Cost per hour of staff and volunteer time
Social network “friends” recruited per week
Average direct donation per friend from the social network site
Net churn rate per year for your email list

A total of 15 metrics are listed. Step 2 involves calculating the resulting revenue and costs for each of the metrics; step 3 involves projecting the response rates for email advocacy and outreach to social network recruits over a four-year period by entering data such as the total number of emails opened per mailing. Step 4 projects the results of the effort. It’s a detailed calculator with some serious math involved. Author Justin Perkins also suggests that, if your results are based strictly on advocacy or branding, you could limit your use of the calculator to “cost per friend” or “cost per email name” to get a comparison of the cost of recruiting people elsewhere.

Take a look; how might it apply to any organization’s efforts to quantify the impact of a social media outreach effort?

7. Company Leaders: Lousy Internal Communicators

It will come as no surprise to anybody who has ever held a job that managers are often lousy communicators. Even if you have leaders who communicated well, you undoubtedly had co-workers who weren’t so lucky.

Employees are not promoted into jobs with supervisory responsibility based on their communication skills. Rather, the promotion track eventually leads to a job with managerial responsibilities, after which few companies require managers to complete any kind of communication skills training.

A human resources consulting firm called Novations has surveyed 2,046 senior HR and training and development executives to assess the degree of the problem. “HR people have a unique vantage on employee opinions and attitudes, and are ideally placed to evaluate the communications effectiveness of top management,” according to Rebecca Hefter, Novations’ Senior VP for Training.

On the one hand, I laughed out loud when I read that quote. I’ve known plenty of HR people who were among the worst communicators I’ve ever experienced. I’ve also worked with companies where HR was an obstacle to effective communication. On the other hand, HR is one of the few departments in any company that touches every other department; it’s also the place employees go to complain.

Hefter continued: “The survey results aren’t just disturbing, they’re also startling, given the time and money devoted to internal communication.”

Again, I had to chortle a bit, given the scant resources most internal communicators have to work with. Most communication resources are shoveled at marketing and external PR. Employee communicators are often left with the droppings.

The survey results are startling, though. Asked to grade the effectiveness of senior management’s communications with employees, HR and T&D executives broke it out this way:

A: 14%
B: 39%
C: 32%
D: 13%
F: 02%

That’s nearly half of senior executives earning a grade of C or less. Even more interesting are the reasons given for such lousy performance:

35%—Senior management relies too much on email (and not enough on face-to-face communication)
30%—Senior management assumes a single message is adequate
28%—Senior management has no feedback loop in place
24%—Senior management’s messages often lack clarity
03%—Senior management communicates too much, too often

The last one is odd, since the benefits of over-communication dramatically outweight the risks of under-communication. The rest, though, resonate. Hefter’s most salient comment:

What stands out is the inherent weakness of email for employee communications. The Internet is used more and more, but there seems to be a point of diminishing returns when email is relied upon so much. Employees like to see and hear their management and may feel depersonalized by too much email messaging, instead of direct contact.”

I suspect email is also being used ineffectively in a lot of cases, but Hefter’s right: We have come to rely far too heavily on email as a means of reaching employees (who, incidentally, are already buried in email).

Part of the problem is that many employee communication departments have little influence over what senior leaders do (hence the quest for that elusive seat at the management table). And, of course, there are those who would argue that senior leader communication is irrelevant anyway.

The fact is that trust is a critical component of engagement and commitment, and trust evolves from (among other things) clear line of sight between the senior-most levels of the organization and the front line. The folks in the C-suite make decisions that determine whether front-line employees will have a job in the future. Strong leader communication is a vital element of any internal communication effort, and therefore needs to be strategized like any other aspect of employee communications.

With luck, the ability to share this data with senior leaders will produce some results. It would have been nice, though, if the research had been able to to tie bad leader communication to disappointing business results. Change is most easily initiated when the organization can ease some pain.

8. Second Life Criticisms Based On Faulty Assumptions

I’ve just gotten around to reading some of the many blog posts that gleefully point to Frank Rose’s Wired piece about real-world businesses failing in Second Life and proclaiming, “I told you so.”

A lot of what Rose writes is true; companies are, indeed, blowing it in Second Life. I have long maintained that the goal of getting into Second Life is to figure out how a company can engage with avatar communities since it’ll only be a few more years before the World Wide Web is pretty much one big avatar community. Plenty of mainstream business publications and analysts have agreed over the last several months that the Web is destined to go 3D, and it just makes sense for companies to make their mistakes now when the consequences are so much lighter than five or seven years from now when the entire online population will witness your screw-ups.

That means that raking in big bucks shouldn’t be a key objective for any company’s Second Life activities (even if the American Cancer Society can raise real money in a virtual fundraiser).

But there’s another part of the story that bugs me. It’s characterized by statements like this, from a blog called Team Spirit:

“I think spending valuable budget on Second Life is a huge mistake. Finally, here’s the proof: Coca-Cola’s ‘Virtual Thirst’ pavilion receiving just 27 visits on “a random day in June…” Just so you know, there are now over 7 million avatars in Second Life.”

and this, from The Brand Wiki:

“The story goes on to detail how Michael Donnelly, Coke’s head of interactive marketing, went through all the steps to create a Second Life avatar and set up a Virtual Thirst pavillion only to find that ‘you can long linger without encountering another avatar.’”

Don’t you just love it when people reach conclusions based on assumptions that are profoundly incorrect? I was with crayon when we were working on the Virtual Thirst project, so I’m well aware that the Coca Cola Pavilion was not built in hopes that avatars would drop on by for a visit whenever the hell the felt like it. Rather, it was built as a venue for special, scheduled, promoted events. These included the project launch and a series of dance parties, all of which were perfectly well attended, thank you very much.

In fact, the Pavilion was built on crayon’s island in Second Life specifically so Coca Cola would not have to invest in an island, a terrible mistake many companies have made. crayon’s advice (led by the brilliant C.C. Chapman, was for Coca Cola not to construct an edifice to itself, but rather to engage the population as part of an effort to learn how to market in virtual worlds. That’s why the Virtual Thirst effort wound up as a design competition with information in a variety of places, including MySpace and YouTube.

It’s not just the bloggers who have made the mistake of equating low random traffic to the Pavilion with failure. Rose did, too:

On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM’s Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke’s Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27.

Well, um, yeah. There was nothing scheduled and promoted at the Pavilion on that “random day in June.”

Journalists and bloggers alike would be well served to make sure they’re drawing conclusions from facts and not assumptions.

(By way of disclosure, I should note that I’m not a huge Second Life user or booster. I’m just a realist about where things are headed.)

9. Widgets Go Mainstream

There was little agreement when, at the New Communications Forum in February, I declared 2007 “the year of the widget” (although it was covered in a few places, like here and here). Bryan Person figured I might be on to something when he reported on the first conference dedicated to widgets, WidgetCon, held last month in New York.

But surfing through TV channels last night, I saw the definitive proof that widgets have arrived.

Burned out from staring at the computer monitor all day, I took a half hour to kick back on the couch and relax. Nothing I usually like to watch was on, so I settled for Discovery Channel’s recurring event, Shark Week. I sat up when I saw a crawl on the bottom of the screen letting viewers know they could get the Shark Week widget.

The widget includes three shark-related headlines (updated to stay current), links to a couple Shark Week online features (“Ask a Conservationist” and a feature that lets you assemble your own shark documentary, along the lines of the misguided Chevy Tahoe experiment but without the risk), a link to the Shark Week site, and a link that lets you add the widget to your own blog or website.

The widget is huge, as widgets go, expanding to fill whatever space is available, which may discourage some shark fantatics from adding it to their sites. Still, a Technorati search revealed 423 blogs specifically about sharks. I’d be willing to bet the widget has found its way onto some of those sites, among others. In any case, it’s a sign—to me, at least—that widgets can be a relatively cheap way to get your content out onto the edge where your target audiences will be likely to see it.

You can see the Shark Week widget on my blog post: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/widgets_go_mainstream/

10. Sites of the Month

There is no doubt in my mind that tagging is going to grow in importance. It will become a dominant element of online search; I was not surprised to see the number of people confounded by changes to Techorati‘s interface, which made it more difficult to search by tag. Microformats will become more pervasive. Social bookmarking will grow in popularity. Tagging content, as you can on sites like Flickr and YouTube will become someething we can take for granted on any site that offers uploads.

So it makes perfect sense that we’re seeing the introduction of products that allow you to carry the tagging concept to your desktop. I’ve been playing with two of them, Taglocity and Attensa, both of which have considerable potential.

Both Taglocity and Attensa are Microsoft Outlook add-ins. Taglocity allows you to tag email messages for discovery later. It includes a tag cloud so you can simply click to your most commonly used tags. Your most commonly-used tags are also available in a toolbar. Several techniques are available to allow you to tag your email as well as to find emails you have tagged.

Outlook 2007 has vastly improved keyword search compared to earlier versions of Outlook, yet I still have found myself using Taglocity to find all the emails I have deliberately tagged a certain way. For example, emails from people discussing various aspects of my podcast don’t always include the name of the show, but tagging these emails “FIR” makes it drop-dead easy to retrieve them.

Taglocity offers a personal edition for free and a professional version for US $39 (there’s a 30-day free trial of the professional edition). The free version is for those who don’t use a lot of email (which wouldn’t include any readers of this blog, I suspect). A video demo does a nice job of explaining the features and how they work. I’ve been using the 30-day free trial, but plan to pony up the $39 once it expires.

Attensa is an Outlook-based RSS reader/aggregator. Since Outlook 2007 already supports RSS feeds, you might wonder why anybody would install an alternative. Not surprisingly, Attensa has done a better job with RSS than Microsoft has. Attensa is feature-rich, offering the ability to read feeds in a “river of news” style for either all your feeds or those within a folder. Any item can be tagged, and you can configure Attensa to automatically add tagged items from you feeds to your del.icio.us bookmarks, which I find to be an incredibly cool and useful feature. Attensa also handles downloads and plays videos and audio, so it can serve as a podcatcher. You can designate that audio and video files automatically get added to iTunes or Windows Media Player and put in an appropriate playlist.

I am running into one problem with Attensa: marking folders as read or deleting all items in a folder can take a long, long time, during which Outlook is unavailable. Version 2.5 is the first to support Vista, though, so I suspect this is a problem Attensa will iron out.

There are video demos that show how the various features work.

Attensa for Outlook is free (Attensa also makes fee-based enterprise RSS products); personalized support is $24.95 per year.

Taglocity: http://www.taglocity.com
Attensa: http://www.attensa.com

11. HC+T update

I’ll be conducting two days of workshops for a pharmaceutical company in Copenhagen; this is coming up in October.
I’m helping a major global consumer goods company “refresh” its intranet.
I’m set to speak at the Greystone.net Internet healthcare conference in Vegas in November; it’s my second appearance in two years.
I’ll be at Social Media and Podcast Expo in Ontario, California for just one of three days; I’m doing a talk for an aerospace company the day before and leave for the U.K. the day after.

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Posted by Shel on 08/29 at 11:08 AM
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