Friday, August 27, 2004
HC+T Update: August 2004
The August 2004 issue of HC+T Update, the monthly newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology
The August 2004 issue of HC+T Update features a report on an Accenture study that shows internal communications has failed at some of the things it’s supposed to be best at. Other items look at whether actual intranet portal implementation lives up to the hype, an effort to create a PR project that emulates the open-source software movement, and a report on how the Net has become a part of most Americans’ day-to-day lives. Be sure to post your comments about any of these items—that’s one of the advantages of using blogging software to deliver Update!
HC+T Update:
August 2004
In This Issue:
1. New Option for HC+T Update: RSS Feed
2. Workforces Disappoint. Can Communicators Respond?
3. Intranet Portals: More Hype Than Reality
4. You Got This Newsletter on the internet, with a lower-case i
5. Read My Blog…Really
6. TheNewPR/Wiki Part I: Can An Open-Source PR Project Work?
7. TheNewPR/Wiki Part II: CEOs with blogs
8. The Net As Utility
9. America Is Increasingly Wireless-Ready
10. Change Communication is the Focus of our Next Webinar
11. New Realities: IM in the Workplace, Broadband Everywhere
12. Author Gives Away New Book about Participatory Journalism
13. ChangeThis: A Site of Business Manifestos
14. “Bring ‘em On” Still Available
15. Sites of the Month
16. HC+T Update
17. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
1. A New Option for HC+T: RSS Feed
A few months back I reported that Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, would soon tell his PR contacts that he would no longer accept press releases and pitches by e-mail. Spam, he said, has killed e-mail’s appeal. Instead, he’ll subscribe to RSS feeds that contain press releases and pitches. So far, he hasn’t made the announcement, but it’s coming. (More on Gillmor in item 12.)
A couple days ago, my colleague Neville Hobson called from his home in Amsterdam (the call was free, thanks to Skype) to chat about this and that, including his decision to drop all e-mail newsletter subscriptions and opt instead for RSS feeds.
That did it. I couldn’t ignore this any longer. So as of now—right now—you can choose to get this newsletter the way you do now, as an e-mail, or you can opt to get it as an RSS feed.
I’ll be fascinated to see how many of you opt for the RSS. So far, others who have done that haven’t reported much take-up. But I’ve been harping on RSS for a while now and I’m hopeful that many of you have gotten a news reader and are ready to take this plunge with me.
To get the HC+T Update feed, just set up a new feed in your news reader and enter this URL:
http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml
Alternatively, you can use a FeedBurner link:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/HctUpdate
If you opt for the RSS feed, your reader will pick up the alert whenever a new issue comes out. Click the link and you’ll get to the newsletter. Simple as that.
If you don’t have a news reader, here are a few to consider:
* NewesGator (integrates with Outlook, $29): http://www.newsgator.com
* SharpReader (very nice and free): http://www.sharpreader.com/
* NewzCrawler (I love this one, $24.95): http://www.newzcrawler.com
* Bloomba (an e-mail client alternative to Outlook that integrates RSS): http://www.statalabs.com
2. Workforces Disappoint. Can Communicators Respond?
I’ve been working in employee communications, one way or another, for over 25 years. I have come to believe that effective communication can affect the bottom line by aligning employee efforts with organizational goals. I believe communication can improve productivity. I believe communication can improve employee commitment to the organization and improve job satisfaction. I believe these things wholly and unconditionally.
Why, then, am I so alarmed over the study released by Accenture that finds high-level executives are increasingly worried that their workforces aren’t up to the challenges on the horizon?
If my beliefs are unshaken, then there’s only one remaining explanation. Employee communicators are doing a lousy job.
Some 244 high-level executives participated in the study, and only 17% of them said the skill level of their entire workforce was “industry-leading.” The rest, anticipating an upturn in the economy and an improved business climate, are worried that their people just won’t be able to help their companies compete. Or, to put it another way, employees are not prepared to deal with the change that executives believe is coming. For all that talk about communications aligning employees with business goals, only 11% of the surveyed executives said they were satisfied with progress in that direction, even though 77% rated it as important.
Execs are also disappointed with change management processes, worker productivity initiatives and workers’ ability to adapt to new business opportunities.
Depressed? Brace yourselves, there’s more. When asked if three-quarters of their employees understand the company’s strategic goals, 74% said no. When asked if three-quarters of their employees understand how their jobs contribute to the company’s ability to achieve its strategic goals, 70% said no.
Oh, my God! These are the primary tasks of an employee communication function! These are the very foundations of our claims that employee communication has value and why we deserve a seat at the management table!
But wait, it gets worse. Execs not only believe their employees aren’t prepared to contribute to company goals, they know that the blame rests with Human Resources, which is home to most employee communications departments. Fortunately, the study focuses on trainng departments, which don’t come off looking too good. But we know better. We know that achieving these kinds of results reflect a failure of internal communication.
I hope you’re as distressed as I am. Business has no problem discarding what doesn’t work and finding something else that does. If we cannot produce these results, why should organizations continue to pay for what we do? The Accenture study should serve as a dire warning. Now, what are we going to do about it?
Your thoughts are most appreciated. I’m serious; this is one of the most disturbing reports I’ve ever read. Let me know what you think needs to happen in order to turn this around. I’ll print your replies in the September issue.
More information on the study:
http://www.clickz.com/stats/markets/professional/article.php/3388601
3. Intranet Portals: More Hype Than Reality
I’m off soon to facilitate a meeting to kick-start a portal implementation project for a big utility. Over the last couple years, I’ve done a fair amount of this kind of consulting, getting organizations pointed down the right path toward portal nirvana.
But portal nirvana exists, apparently, for very few organizations. While many have acquired the infrastructure, they’re not using it. More and more, the focus is returning to the intranet basics of HR content and self-service.
At least, that’s what Michael Rudnick says. Michael is national intranet and portal leader for Watson Wyatt, one of the big HR consulting firms. Michael and I go way back. He’s been involved in intranets as long as I have, since around 1994, and as the top intranet guy at Watson Wyatt, he definitely has his finger on the pulse. So I paid attention when I saw Michael interviewed in an article in Portals magazine (http://www.portalsmag.com).
Michael suggests that, despite the acquisition of portal technology, companies haven’t really leveraged it “either because they were not ready, they didn’t have clean data or the concept was overwhelming to the content owners.” Few of these organizations have activated personalization functionality. Portal initiatives have languished for two or three years. Meanwhile, employees who spend a lot of time on the World Wide Web have have come to expect more from their intranets.
The lack of portal progress isn’t the only issue, according to Michael. Companies created intranets as a channel for communicating with employees but don’t have the resources to populate the intranet with the kind of content they envisioned. In fact, well short of implementing sophisticated portals, companies are still dealing with providing self-service applications and managing information overload. Despite the evolution of several best-practice intranets, it sounds like most organizations haven’t made much progress over the last several years.
My own consulting experience supports this perception, by the way.
Read the article at http://www.portalsmag.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=5669
4. You Got This Newsletter on the internet, with a lower-case i
In the morning hours of August 16, Tony Long, copy chief at Wired News, issued the following statement:
“Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the “I” in internet. At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.”
Wired News isn’t the first organization to lower-case Internet, Web or Net. But it’s the first of which I’m aware that has a specific style guide and a rationale for making the change: “There is no eartly reason to capitalize any of these words,” Long wrote. “Actually, there never was.”
I’m not 100% sure I agree. There is only one Internet, and it’s called the Internet. Doesn’t that make it a proper noun as opposed to a common noun? Long’s rationale is that sufting the net is like watching television, and we never see television capitalized. Still, Long notes that the “w” in Web will continue to be capitalized when Wired News uses the full, formal name of the official entity, the World Wide Web. But isn’t that like referring to the International Monetary Fund as, simply, the Fund? You wouldn’t lower case the “f” in Fund in that case.
Long wraps up, “By lowercasing internet, web and net, Wired News is simply giving the medium its proper due.” Um, okay. I’ll keep upper-casing them until someone convinces me they’re not proper nouns.
5. Read My Blog—Really
Some of you may remember my ill-fated attempt to start a blog. I called it “Shel on Communication” and managed it through Blogger. I wrote three or four posts, then let it slide.
Well, I’m trying again. But I waited to make sure I’d be serious about it before announcing it. I’ve posted at least daily, sometimes more than that (except while I was on vacation). This blog, “a shel of my former self,” resides on my own server. I’m reading about 50 blogs regularly now, so I can draw from a wealth of coverage for my reports.
So I’m re-extending my invitation: Please drop by and read my blog. Especially if you like HC+T Update—my blog is just more of the same on a daily basis.
You’ll find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. You’ll also find that it’s easy to subscribe to the RSS feed directly from the blog.
Most important, please comment on what you read. The real advantage of a blog is its participatory nature. Rather than me sitting here, typing my newsletter and sending it to you, my blog posts can serve as the springboard for some conversation.
6. TheNewPR/Wiki Part I: Can An Open Source PR Project Work?
Elizabeth Albrycht—author of the CorporatePR blog has sparked some interesting discussion around a proposal she’s posted to TheNewPR/Wiki, a public relations-oriented site that allows anybody to publish or edit site content. The proposal: “The first-ever Open Source PR project, where we invite a willing organization to conduct a totally open PR/marketing campaign with the help of the PR community at large.”
If the term “open source” is alien to you, it refers to the collaborative community-based effort to build something out of passion instead of a profit motive. Linux is the epitome of open source projects. The source code was available to anybody who wanted to add to it or improve, resulting in the operating system that runs (among other things) my server.
Albrycht wonders if the same collaborative approach could result in a top-flight PR effort.
The project page on TheNewPR/Wiki explains that the project would involve a privately-held company launching a new product or service within three to six months. The company would have to accept complete transparency. “No private emails, no secrets,” she says. The community of practitioners that inhabits TheNewPR would contribute—strictly through the wiki—with no expectation of compensation (other than expenses). “We chronicle our experience on our own blogs,” Albrycht says. “We encourage the company executive(s) to do the same on his or her own blog.”
Upon completion, Albrycht proposes producing a case study for a leading communication magazine, written (of course) on the wiki.
What do you think? Visit the project page to review the idea and weigh in. The URL: http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/OpenSourcePR/IntroPage
7. TheNewPR/Wiki Part II: CEOs with Blogs
On August 14, Neville Hobson, a public relations pro based in Amsterdam, suggested in his blog that it would be nice if somebody created a list of blogs maintained by high-level business executives. That same day, Constantin Basturea—one of the driving forces behind the Global PR Blog Week—obliged by starting the list on TheNewPR/Wiki. He listed three executives on the page: Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz, Groove Networks’ Ray Ozzie, and ActiveWords’ Buzz Bruggeman.
Today, the list is organized by country and includes links to nearly 65 blogs. Because the list is maintained on a wiki, anybody familiar with an executive blog is free to add it.
The list is titled CEO Blogs List, but it’s a misnomer; not everyone listed is a CEO. Mark Cuban, for example, is the “owner” of the Dallas Mavericks. But they’re all very senior people, and they’re all blogging.
Executive blogs make a lot of sense according to the likes of Business Week, which noted: “Blogs…give execs a chance to tell their side of the story without interference from the media or analysts. That has been particularly important for (Jonathan) Schwartz as Sun has been ailing for some time. ‘There’s a free market of ideas out there,’ says Schwartz. ‘And I’d rather be driving the dialogue than be run over by it.’
“Another plus: writing a blog often is less time-consuming than trying to get a message across via interviews. ‘I can spend three hours talking about a topic, and the media will edit it to fit the three-minute segment or 500-word column. That’s far from the most efficient way to communicate,’ Dallas Mavericks owner and soon-to-be reality TV personality Mark Cuban wrote to BusinessWeek Online in an e-mail. ‘The blog changes all that.’”
You can find the list at http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Resources/CEOBlogsList. Let me know if you convince your CEO to start a blog of his own.
8. The Net as Utility
A year or so ago, a New York Times columnist proclaimed the Internet was over. Her rationale: the number of references to the Net in articles in the media and press releases had declined precipitously. At the time, I insisted that the drop in stories and press releases about Web sites was the consequence of a transition of the way people use the Web from novelty to utility.
Now, those hard-working folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project have done the research that proves the point. “The Internet and Daily Life” reports that Net users go online “to conduct some of their ordinary day-to-day activities, from mundane tasks to social arrangements to personal recreation.”
A significant percentage of online Americans—88%—say the Net plays a role in their daily routines, and a third of those say that role is major. Nearly 65% say their routines and activities would be affected if the Net were taken away from them, and more than half say they participate in certain everyday activities because they’re able to use the Net to do them.
The categories of activities include accessing information (news, weather, maps and directions, sports scores, phone numbers, zip codes, etc.), conducting transactions (buying tickets to events, banking, shopping, scheduling appointments) and communicating (communicating with friends and family, sending greeting cards and invitations, planning gatherings and meetings, meeting people).
People also use the Net for entertainment, playing games, pursuing hobbies, listening to music and radio, and even reading and watching videos.
I feel vindicated. The Net’s not dead, it’s just been integrated into our lives. Nobody rushes home from work to spend hours “surfing” the Web, but they use it when they need it. Still, the Net hasn’t replaced the offline world…yet. People who do things online do many of those things offline, too, including getting news, buying tickets and doing their banking and bill-paying.
Read the study at [url=http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/131/report_display.asp]http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/131/report_display.asp[/a]
9. America Is Increasingly Wireless-Ready
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has also released a study indicating that more than a quarter of American adults are equipped with wireless Internet capabilities through either a laptop or a cell phone. That’s right—a 28% of adults (and 41% of all Internet users) can check e-mail and call information up via the Web.
Need a number instead of a percentage? Here you go: 56 million Americans are wireless ready. Of these, 10% say they go online from someplace other than home or work every day, 23% do it once or twice a week, and 44% say they have logged on via a wireless device at some point. As the report notes, “on a typical day, approximately 5 million Americans with wireless ready devices go online from some place other than home or work.”
It’s this kind of growth in the wireless population that made it possible for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to set up free WiFi hotspots at every rest stop on the Texas highways. The program is designed to encourage more drivers to stop and rest, ultimately reducing accidents. To be sure, the goal preceded the tactic, but the tactic was feasible only through the recognition that enough drivers had WiFi devices to make the hotspots an attraction.
10. Change Communication is the Focus of our Next Webinar
The next session at Shel Holtz Webinars is “Planning Communication for Organizational Change.” The five-week session—hosted by myself and my colleague Tudor Williams, ABC, begins this coming Monday.
Mergers, acquisitions, restructuring, new management initiatives and styles, new business tools and technologies, new corporate strategies and directions � these are just a few of the changes organizations today are dealing with and at the heart of the change is communication.
Understanding the principles of change management and the ability to apply the concepts of organizational communication in the development of strategies to support change are core competencies of professional communicators need today.
In this Webinar, you will learn:
* The fundamentals concepts of change and the role communication plays in successfully managing change
* Identify the key communication needs to build awareness and acceptance of change and support and commitment to change
* How to develop long term communication strategies and short term tactics that will enable the organization to successfully navigate through change
* How to exploit Internet technologies to advance the communication of change
* The critical metrics you will need to track and evaluate the effectiveness of change communication.
The last time we presented this Webinar, we got feedback like this: “I found the webinar to be useful and have already referred back to the lectures to gain some insight about how to handle a situation in the best manner.”
Register at [url=http://snurl.com/changecomm]http://snurl.com/changecomm[/a]
11. New Realities: IM in the Workplace, Broadband Everywhere
A couple studies worth reporting:
Opinion Research Corp. says that the use of instant messaging in the workplace has nearly doubled in the last year. Some 27% of IM users now apply the tool at work; 43% of study participants say IM helps them communicate quickly around the office.
Nielsen NetRatings reports that high-speed Internet access has exceeded dial-up connections. Broadband is being used by 63 million Americans, or 51% of the population, up 38% from last year. Only 61.3 million homes still connect over the phone, 13% fewer than a year ago.
12. Author Gives Away New Book about Participatory Journalism
I reported in Update a few months back that Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, was posting chapters of his upcoming book online in order to get feedback. Gillmor told me that he incorporated much of the input he got from his readers into the final draft, but he discarded more than he used.
The book is now available. “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People” is $24.95 in the O’Reilly hardcover edition ($16.97 at Amazon.com). Or, you can download it for free. Chapters PDF format are available from the same O’Reilly Web page from which you can order the hardcover. It’s part of O’Reilly’s Open Book project, a series of books with open copyrights thanks to a decision by the publisher and/or author.
I’d recommend the book even if you had to pay for it. A description: Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media’s monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. Not content to accept the news as reported, these readers-turned-reporters are publishing in real time to a worldwide audience via the Internet. The impact of their work is just beginning to be felt by professional journalists and the newsmakers they cover. In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nationally known business and technology columnist Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon, and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make and consume the news.”
The book’s home page (from which you can access the download) is at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/. And (it should come as no surprise) there’s a blog for the book at http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/
13. ChangeThis: A Site of Business Manifestos
It has only been a few weeks since ChangeThis.com launched, and it has already grabbed a lot of attention. The site—which collects manifestos about how to change business and media for the better—boasts authors like Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, Seth Godin, and Robert Scoble.
The manifestos are mostly in PDF format, but PDF is used to great advantage in this instance. The manifestos are also thought-provoking and forward-looking. That’s consistent with the site’s goal, to provide a new venue for discussion about issues rather than a means of broadcasting one-sided points of view. “We’re betting,” the site owners write in their own manifesto, “that a significant portion of the population wants to hear thoughtful, rational, constructive arguments about important issues. We’re certain that the best of these manifestos will spread, hand to hand, person to person, until these manifestos have reached a critical mass and actually changed the tone and substance of our debate.”
A manifesto, according to the site, is a brief (5-20 pages) PDF file that “makes a case. It outlines in careful, thoughtful language why you want to think about an issue differently.”
Tom Peters’ manifesto talks about women as the future of leadership, the need for diversity in organizations, and why audacity matters. Robert Scoble—the Microsoft employee who blogs about working for the software giant—is about company-focused blogs.
The site is fascinating, the manifestos worth reading, and the concept is intriguing. It’s certainly worth a few minutes of your time. It’s at (of course) http://www.changethis.com.
14. Bring ‘em On Still Available
My report on driving traffic to Web sites and intranets is still available for $64.95. Buy “Bring ‘em On” at my Web site and I’ll send you 75 strategies and tactics as a PDF attachment to an e-mail.
Order the report at http://www.holtz.com/content/view/63/
15. Sites Of The Month
>>> We’re using the Web more and more frequently as a research tool. How do you assess the credibility or authenticity of the material you find? That’s the focus of a thorough and useful document called “Evaluating the Quality of Information on the Internet,” contained on a law firm’s Web site. The URL: http://www.virtualchase.com/quality/
>>> Need a rhyme? Visit the Rhyme Zone, type in the word you want to rhyme and you’ll find words with two, three, four, and five syllables. http://www.rhymezone.com
16. HC+T Update
>>> I’m facilitating a daylong portal planning session for a major utility
>>> I’ll deliver a two-hour session on “Writing and Designing for the Wired World” for a major financial institution
>>> I’m continuing work on intranet redesigns for an industrial company and a well-known Internet brand
17. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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