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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

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!

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.

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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!

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 Has

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