Thursday, September 23, 2004
HC+T Update: September 2004
The September 2004 issue of HC+T Update, the monthly newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology
The September 2004 issue of HC+T Update features a rant on a new study that claims employees who spend 10 minutes a day playing fantasy football at work are costing American businesses $36.7 million a day. You’ll also read about corporate blogs—blogs by employees who talk about their companies to the public. And I’ve included some of the replies I received in response to my report on the Accenture study that (to my way of thinking) reveals that employee communications isn’t working. 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:
September 2004
In This Issue:
1) Eyetrack Is Back: Poynter Institute’s Latest Results
2) Bad Communication Is A Crime. Really.
3) Blogs and ‘60 Minutes:’ Credit Where It’s Due (And Isn’t)
4) Pros And Cons Of Wikipedia As A Credible Source
5) Employee Blogs Give Companies A Human Face
6) New Findings On Search Engine Usage
7) What If Newspapers Ran Out Of Paper?
8) Feedback On My Fears About Employee Communications
9) Fantasy Football, The Internet And Workplace Productivity
10) Next Webinar: Intranet Best Practices
11) Internet Use Rising
12) “Bring ‘Em On” Still Available
13) Another Testimonial For Wikis Inside The Firewall
14) Sites of the Month
15) HC+T Update
16) Boilerplate And Subscription Information
1. Eyetrack Is Back: Poynter Institute’s Latest Results
The folks at the Poynter Institute are out with their Eyetrack III study results. For the study, the Institute “observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content.” Some of the key findings:
* People look at the upper left-hand corner of the page first (which contradicts results of a UIE study that showed people first looked at the middle of the screen)
* Smaller type leads to more focused reading (as opposed to scanning)
* The first few words in a headline grab the most attention
* People read summary descriptions (sub-heads leading into articles)
The study is rich in fascinating conclusions for anybody developing Web content. Keep in mind that the study focused exclusively on news sites, but much of what the Institute learned is applicable to any content-heavy site.
The study is available at http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
(Originally reported on my blog)
2. Bad Communication Is A Crime. Really.
Ineffective internal communications in North America can result in a disenfranchised workforce, diminished competitiveness, reduced profits, and a litany of other woes. At least you can’t be fined for it.
Beginning in March, companies operating in the European Union (EU) can be fined up to 75,000 pounds for violating a directive that compels them to communicate effectively with their employees. The directive gives employees the right to know about everything that materially affects their job security, prospects and future, according to Pauline Arnot, director of Beattie Communications, a UK internal communication consultancy.
I’m surprised IABC hasn’t been communicating about this, since the “I” stands for International. According to an article appearing today in Process and Control Today (of all places), more than 70% of the companies in Europe aren’t prepared to comply with the law; most aren’t even aware of it.
“Of course, enlightened businesses have been communicating effectively with their employees for years because they know that a motivated, well-informed workforce is going to be much more productive and profitable,” Arnot says. For everybody else, it’ll be time to communicate with employees about what’s going on inside their business, how their company is performing and how secure their jobs are, along with health and safety information and more.
Could be we’ll see an increase in demand for communication consultants in Europe.
(Originally reported on my blog)
3. Blogs and ‘60 Minutes:’ Credit Where It’s Due (And Isn’t)
A lot of self-congratulatory back-patting is going on in the blogging community. If it weren’t for blogs, they crow, CBS’s use of questionable documents in its “60 Minutes” report of President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service would never have come to light.
There’s no question that the authenticity of the documents was first raised in blogs. These bloggers combined the ability to analyze the documents, the free time to do so within minutes of their release, and a political agenda that delighted in raising the red flag. It’s the nature of the blogosphere that one blogger will link to another, so it wasn’t long before many blogs were filled with accusations and claims about the documents. This linking frenzy boosts the topic in search engines like Google, so it wasn’t long before the controversy reached the ears of mainstream media.
So there’s no denying the credit due bloggers for identifying the issue. Kudos also for being there first. But it’s the height of hubris to claim that mainstream media would not have uncovered the story without the help of vigilant bloggers. Even Dan Gillmor, technology advocate, San Jose Mercury News columnist and blogger himself, writes, “Certainly by now, big newspapers and broadcasters would have been asking deservedly tough questions of a dismayingly recalcitrant CBS.”
Some bloggers—and dewy-eyed fans of blogs—have created an us-them relationship with the media. Several have proclaimed traditional media dead now that blogging has arrived. I’m guessing the two will wind up co-existing rather nicely. In his “Internet Daily” column, Frank Barnako quotes NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen: “Citizens’ media
complements Big Media with fact-checking and challenges, and with new sources of news, information and diverse viewpoints. Together, they will improve news.”
Evolution, folks. Not revolution.
4. Pros And Cons Of Wikipedia As A Credible Source
In case you missed the news, Wikipedia logged its one-millionth entry the other day. Every article is contributed by somebody who writes and posts it out of sheer good will, a desire to contribute knowledge. That’s the heart of a wiki—a community of people collaborating to create a document for the greater good. Wikipedia—an online encyclopedia—generates about 2,500 such articles every day and about 25,000 revisions to existing articles. Over 100 languages are represented in these contributions.
I’ve found Wikipedia to be an invaluable source of information. I’ve also found it to be highly accurate whenever I’ve reviewed a subject where I happen to have some knowledge. One of the benefits of community editing is peer review of a magnitude the likes of which we’ve never seen before. As for those who would, as a practical joke or with more nefarious motives, enter information they know is wring, well, the editors at Wikipedia are quick (most of the time) to find these problems and revert back to the article’s last saved version.
That’s not enough for Hiawatha Bray, a staff writer at the Boston Globe. According to Bray, Wikipedia “lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability. Old-school reference books hire expert scholars to write their articles, and employ skilled editors to check and double-check their work. Wikipedia’s articles are written by anyone who fancies himself an expert.”
At the Syracure Post-Standard, staff writer Al Fasoldt wrote, a news piece quoting a librarian who was distressed about Wikipedia’s growing popularity. In an interview with Online Journalism Review’s Mark Glaser, Fasoldt said, ““I don’t think wikis can be used for any kind of source. If a source is not accountable, it must not be used. The responsibility of a journalist is to be accountable, and that means his or her sources must be reliable.”
Fasoldt’s comments launched a torrent of comments in the blogosphere, most in defense of Wikipedia. Several contacted Fasoldt with challenges. Enter bad information on an article and see how long it takes to get corrected, one blogger suggested. Fasoldt ignored him.
Several issues are at play in this debate. One is a definition of accountability. Individuals posting may not be accountable, but what about the community at large? Does accountability have to mean you’re paid to make sure material is accurate? Fact-checking is another issue. As a former journalist, I wouldn’t trust what I read in Encyclopedia Brittanica without checking it with a second source. That’s what they taught me in Journalism 101. So why not use Wikipedia if you’re going to validate the information you found there anyway?
At the end of the day, though, the issue comes down to time. Not much has passed since wikis were first introduced and even less since the doors opened at Wikipedia. How credible a medium this is, what models of accountability will emerge and how useful a source it will be is not something that can be decided yet. All you have to do is read newspapers from the late 1700s to realize that there was no guarantee of accuracy or credibility in their pages. Yet it would have been absurd to declare that newspapers as a medium simply can never be viewed as a credible source. Only time will tell.
Glaser’s Online Journalism Review piece on the debate is at:
http://www.syracuse.com/news/poststandard/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1093338972139211.xml
5. Employee Blogs Give Companies A Human Face
Among those blogging are employees who discuss, among other things, their jobs. The leaders of most organizations would immediately create a policy forbidding such inappropriate, out-of-school discussion of the company, noting that “comments about the company must come from Corporate Communications.” Groove Networks has a policy, too. In it, employees who blog are warned not to disclose confidential company information, they are asked to be respectful when talking about their fellow employees, and they are advised to use a disclaimer.
Sun Microsystems’ bloggers will have to start adhering to a blogging policy soon, and many other companies are exploring policies to ensure the “corporate blogs” don’t cause any problems.
Why not just forbid blogging altogether? According to a Business Week Online article, “Increasingly, execs see employee blogs as a way to transform a transaction with a faceless behemoth into a personal relationship with an employee.” According to one of the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” David Weinberger, blogs encourage a conversation with audiences rather than the one-way, top-down, controlled messaging corporations have traditionally delivered. Blogs create “a connection through real human beings speaking like real human beings, which is something companies have forgotten how to do.”
At Microsoft, over 800 employees produce blogs. (Unspoken policy: “Don’t be stupid.”) The most popular, Scobleizer by Robert Scoble, “technical evangelist.” Other companies encouraging employee blogs including Dell and Macromedia. If you note the high-tech bent, it only makes sense. But for those non-tech companies that don’t recognize the benefits, many will eventually have to give in to the new expectations of the marketplace which—as companies become more human through this exposure of individual employees through their blogs—will will not tolerate traditional controlled messaging.
Not every high-tech company is on board. There was quite a brouhaha over Friendster’s firing of Joyce Park for commenting on the company in three posts on her blog, even though the information she shared was public and not unflattering. Park, whose blog Troutgirl was already fairly well-known, has become a celebrity of sorts, interviewed in Red Herring magazine and offered dozens of great jobs in the wake of the firing. Friendster, meanwhile, has remained mum.
Rather than fire employees who blog and get yourself a bad reputation, it’s time to consider policies that allow employee blogging and protect and enhance the company’s reputation.
6. New Findings On Search Engine Usage
A few years back, I reported that search engines were no longer very important. According to research, most people stopped using them except as a last resort. Search engine usage was down in general because most people had found the sites they needed and therefore no longer required a search engine’s help.
Things change. Right now, the use of search engines is exceeded only by the use of e-mail (except when there’s breaking news, when getting news online becomes the second most popular online activity). This according to a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In June, in the US alone some 4 billion searches were conducted, with the average person conducting 33 searches during the month. Each visit to a search engine produces 4.4 searches. And only about 16% of the online American population has never used a search engine. On any given day, half of those who go online conduct a search.
One reason for the boost in search engine usage is the quality of the results. Close to 90% of search engine users say they find what they’re looking for most of the time, and about 20% say they’re always successful. That’s probably the result of better search engines and smarter searching techniques, an observation validated to some degree by the finding that 92% of seraches believe they’re good at it.
No surprise here: Google is the top choice for most people.
Once again, then, it’s important that you find ways for your material to rank high among search engine results.
7. What If Newspapers Ran Out Of Paper?
Imagine this scenario: A major newspaper finds its subscriptions growing, but doesn’t move to acquire more paper to staisfy the demand for the publication. As a result, the newspaper decides to shorten its articles to just the lead. How satisfied would readers be with such a move?
That’s kind of/sort of what Microsoft did when it sopped delivering feeds from its employees who write blogs (see article #5 above). The blogs gained popularity so more people subscribed to the feeds. The feeds go out as often as once a minute, depending on the feed reader’s settings, which creates a major bandwidth drain.
Rather than spend the money to boost the bandwidth, Microsoft decided to stop delivering the full text of the feeds.
The backlash was fast and furious, to the point that MIcrosoft backed off its decision, opting instead to limit message size. “Bandwidth is not free,” noted one analyst in coverage of the story.
Indeed not. Neither is paper, which is why I think the newspaper analogy holds some water. Microsoft encourages its employees to blog, believing the practice benefits the company by making it more human. If there’s value in blogging and the company wants its employees to engage in the practice, it needs to make the associated investment in bandwidth to support it. After all, if the company thinks employee blogging is good for its reputation, it has to believe that more readers is also good.
Even Robert Scoble, who writes “Scobleizer,” the most popular of the Microsoft employee blogs, is attuned to the situation. “I know of a major broadcaster that refuses to turn on RSS feeds because of this issue too. We need smarter aggregators and better defaults. I only pull down RSS feeds once per day—right before I start reading my feeds. But, clearly, RSS is losing some of its advantages. More and more sites are not providing full-text feeds. I can’t fight this one alone.”
8. Feedback On My Fears About Employee Communications
I received several responses to my screed on the failure of employee communications. Jitka Holt wrote, “Where you see the responsibility for the outcome with employee communicators or HR departments, I see the accountability for effective communication with managers, C-executives included. I see communicators as facilitators enabling the management to communicate as effectively as possible.” Jitka posted her entire response on my blog, which you can read at http://blog.holtz.com/comments.php?id=31_0_1_0_C1
(I agree entirely, but don’t believe that communicators are fulfilling that role. In a lot of organizations, they’re not even trying.)
Another response came from Hilary Marsh, who wrote (as part of a much longer message): “Executives should speak honestly to employees. There should be an employee council made up of rotating representatives from each area of the business; this council’s job is to help understand the implications of information to their various constituencies. This does not eliminate the need for the communications department, but it drastically changes the department’s role to that of editor: for example, prioritizing information for publication in various channels, guiding and overseeing the multitude of people in the organization who willl be communicating, setting and monitoring guidelines and standards, identifying additional areas of communication that exist or need to be monitored.”
(Again, I agree entirely. In fact, this is already what communicators are supposed to be doing, but many are not.)
And I got an e-mail from Ontario-based communications consultant Jana Schilder, who listed her own five reasons why employee communcations is ineffective on her own site.
9. Fantasy Football, The Internet And Workplace Productivity
No business leader wants to hear that it’s losing money because worker productivity is dropping. When they read a statement from a respected organization that suggests one specific Internet activity could be costing US businesses $36.7 million a day, they tend to sit up and take notice.
That’s the figure released by executive recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The culprit: fantasy football.
Yup, you heard right. The amount of time employees spend playing fantasy football is costing business nearly $40 million a day in productivity. And some think Challenger’s estimate of 14 million people spending 10 minutes of work time a day is low. The calculation: Mutiply 14 million by $2.62 (the average amount a US workers is paid for 10 minutes of work).
If you’re talking about people in the factory who are expected to crank out x number of widgets in y hours, this could be a problem. These workers, however, rarely have access to the Internet on the job. The use of the Net occurs in the office. And that’s where the problem with these mindless multiplication estimates begins. It assumes first that every worker puts in eight hours, no more and no less. Ten minutes spent on fantasy football (or online shopping or random surfing) is 10 minutes lost. Second, it presumes that those 10 minutes mean a worker won’t produce quality work on time.
Neither assumption is necessarily true. I recall seeing one study a year or so ago that revealed most employees spend more time doing work online at home than they spend doing non-work-related surfing online at work. Access to the Net has generally improved productivity through faster access to information that lets workers cut the amount of time it takes to do their jobs. And how many knowledge workers do you know who show up precisely at 8 a.m. and leave at 5 p.m. on the dot and never take work home?
These multiplication estimates keep coming out—usually from the company Websense that sells blocking and monitoring software—claiming productivity losses in the millions and billions. Yet I don’t see any studies confirming the lost productivity based on measures that matter—like reduced quality of work, late work and increased product development cycles.
Even CEO John Challenger himself concedes that “For some companies, that amount of lost productivity is a good expenditure of the company’s money, because it makes for better morale and more productive workers.” A San Francisco Chronicle article examining the issue quotes a product manager for a manufacturing company who says he spends a half hour each day playing fantasy football at work, but he also stays long after closing time. The article also quotes an HR consultant who notes that employees “Often come in late, work late, work from home. There’s a very high tolerance for that kind of stuff. No one cares as long as the programming gets done.”
And yet executives, facing shareholder pressure to eek out profits in a low-margin world, will undoubtedly look at this study and consider restricting Net access. General Motors has already done it, blocking access to fantasy football sites. We live in a knee-jerk world. That makes these meaningless multiplication numbers dangerous.
(Originally reported on my blog)
10. Next Webinar: Intranet Best Practices
Here’s the Webinar you’ve been waiting for! Rather than zero in on one aspect of intranets, we’re going to spend five weeks reviewing what makes the best intranets best and how you can emulate them.
This won’t be a gee-whiz look at expensive implementations that only IBM or GM can afford to undertake, or programming challenges to rival the development of a new computer operating system. We’re going to look at practices and tactics that are simple and inexpensive yet draw employees to the intranet and make them into intranet converts.
Among the categories we’ll cover will be interactivity, employee involvement, collaboration, navigation, writing styles, governance and ownership, design, and content. There’s no question but that you’ll walk away with at least a dozen ideas you can put into practice that will increase your intranet traffic and help produce the kind of results you know the intranet is capable of delivering.
On top of that, the Webinar message board will surely be more active than ever as participants share their own best practices. And we’ll have links to so many resources that you could spend the rest of the year following and reading them!
11. Internet Use Rising
Internet use continues to rise in the US, according to Harris Interactive. Since the beginning of the year, the percentage of adults using the Net has grown to 4% to 73%. The rate of growth is greater than Harris has tracked in previous periods. The review also shows broadband continuing to gain strength, with 44% of adults using a high-speed Internet connection. The average amount of time spent online, though, has dropped from nine hours a week to eight. That could be because of broadband—an hour less spent waiting for pages to resolve on the screen thanks to a pokey dial-up connection.
All of which points to continued validation of the Internet as a channel for reaching most Americans.
12. “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.
13. Another Testimonial For Wikis Inside The Firewall
With all the debate over the credibility of wikis as an information source for journalists, the software’s potential as an internal communications tool seems to have been lost. Fortunately, the Globe and Mail has run an article touting the benefits of running a wiki behind the firewall.
The article explores the impact of internal wikis on software developer Xten Networks, whose development team is scattered across two continents. The company’s president, Eric Lagerway, says a wiki “was the best way not only to disseminate information but to allow developers to interact and provide input.” Consequently, the company was able to reduce product development time by 20%.
The company also used a wiki on the Web for beta testers to comment on the product.
(Originally reported on my blog)
14. Sites of the Month
>>> At heart, communicators are all writers, no matter what other aspects of the profession wind up occupying our time. Critique magazine has, for the first time, made its special anniversary issue, “On Writing,” available via its Web site. The issue contains interviews with and essays by writers, teachers and translators. Included in the issue: Clive Barker, Andrei Codrescu and David Baldacci. Good reading on good writing.
http://www.critiquemagazine.com/onwriting/
>>> This one has nothing to do with communications. Tivo has changed my life. Well, at least my TV-viewing life. (Any of you who have Tivo are nodding right now; you know exactly what I mean. Those who don’t are shrugging in confusion.) I’ve found a blog dedicated to Tivo and other digital video recorders, offering “how-to articles, news and reviews.” It’s called PVRblog
http://www.pvrblog.com
15. HC+T Update
>>> I’ll be on the road a lot in October, presenting conference sessions at the Federal Reserve Bank, Thrivent Financial, Manulife, and Siemens.
>>> At the end of September, I’m participating in an intranet panel at a Conference Board seminar in New York on technology in corporate communications.
>>> Here’s one off in the future. Toby Ward and I will present a session at IABC’s 2005 conference in Washington, D.C. Our plan is to take a game show approach—fast and furious—to showing off best practices in Web and intranet content.
>>> Newell Rubbermaid asked me to prepare a document outlining best practices in the use of the Web for media relations and financial communications.
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