Tuesday, December 28, 2004
HC+T Update: December 2004
The December 2004 e-mail newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology
HC+T Update:
December 2004
In This Issue:
1) Update Your RSS Reader For HC+T Update
2) Neville And I Launch A Podcast
3) The Absence Of RSS On Intranets
4) Listening To The “Social Customer”
5) Study Sets Internal Value Of IM At $37.5 Million
6) A Praiseworthy First Stab At A Blogging Code Of Ethics
7) The Quiet Explosion Of Social Networking
8) Another Step In Social Networking’s Evolution
9) Next Webinar: News On Intranets
10) Citizen Journalists Get Their Own Wiki
11) Readership Stats For Online Employee Newsletters Don’t Exist
12) Move Those Mailing Lists Over To RSS
13) Coming Up: A Special Update On RSS
14) Sites of the Month
15) HC+T Update
16) Boilerplate And Subscription Information
As always, this issue of HC+T Update is made up of relevant posts from my blog along with some other items.
On behalf of all of here at Holtz Communication + Technology (that would be me), I’d like to wish you all a very happy and fruitful new year.
1. Update Your RSS Reader For HC+T Update
I recently switched both my blogs—my regular blog and the one I use for the RSS-enabled version of this newsletter—to new software. I was using pMachine, but changed to Expression Engine, a blogging utility by the same company. I discovered that this new software produced a different URL for the RSS feed.
If you subscribe to the RSS feed for HC+T Update, you’ll need to paste this new URL into your news reader:
http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/rss_2.0/
If your news reader won’t handle RSS 2.0, the 1.0 URL is:
http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/rss_1.0/
And there’s an Atom feed, as well:
http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/rss_atom/
2. Neville And I Launch A Podcast
So I figured, enough talking. I’ve written about podcasts for a few months now. I listen religiously to several of them. They’ve gained momentum with hundreds of new podcasts introduced every month and an increasing flood of media coverage. If I didn’t produce a communications-focused podcast, somebody else would.
I approached Neville Hobson, an outstanding communicator from Europe (he’s a Brit living and working in Amsterdam; his blog is at http://nevon.typepad.com) about co-hosting this effort with me. He agreed, and we’ve already released a five-minute test. The first official 30-minute podcast will be available in early January.
It’s called “For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report.”
We’ll bring a balanced view on what’s going on in the US and Europe in communication, technology and other relevant topics. We’ll have weekly conversations via Skype and post the resulting MP3 recording on a special blog we’ve created just for the podcast at www.ForImmediateRelease.biz. You’ll be able to get the podcasts from our RSS feed or download them directly from there. Either way, it will be simple for you to get them. We’ll also post show notes for the podcast on the site as well as on both our personal blogs. (Mine, as you know, is at blog.holtz.com; Neville’s is at nevon.typepad.com.)
I hope you’ll listen in! If you need more information on podcasting in general (like how to get the podcasts so you can actually hear them), here are a few good resources:
www.podcasters.org
www.ipodder.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
3. The Absence Of RSS On Intranets
It’s been well over 18 months—maybe more—since I first suggested that intranets could take advantage of RSS feeds. It has been a bit confounding that, since then, I have found one (count ‘em: one) company with an intranet that incorporates RSS feeds.
This doesn’t count those intranets that have introduced real, honest-to-God blogs (not blog look-alikes). Whether it’s a standard blog app like Typepad and pMachine or an enterprise-strength blogging utility like Traction, these implementations automatically support RSS. But they don’t add RSS capabilities to non-blog content. It’s in this non-blog content that intranets have such great
potential to exploit.
Intranet editors and managers routinely complain that they can’t drive traffic to their intranets. “We have all this great news and information, but we can’t convince people to go there,” they tell me. In many instances, I can detect the problem at a glance. The intranet is news and information and virtually no work processes. If the intranet isn’t the hub of an employee’s work day, there’s not much that will compel employees to spend time there no matter how important the news may be.
Beyond that, though, is the fact that employees have to make an effort to retrieve the news that, back in the days of print publications, just landed on their desks.
Give every employee a news reader and turn those news items into feeds. Problem solved. Some feeds could be required, built into the reader and not removable by employees. These feeds would contain news deemed important enough that all employees need to see it whether they think it’s important or not.
The rest would be subscription-based. Want to know when there’s a transcript of a new executive speech? Subscribe to the feed. Need updates on a specific project or two? Get their feeds.
I’ve made this suggestion to several intranet managers, including one recently at a meeting in Toronto. “It’s a good idea,” the intranet editor told me. “We just have some technical hurdles to deal with.” I can’t imagine what these would be, other than bandwidth (and he wasn’t talking about bandwidth).
Feed creation has become easy with tools like FeedForAll (no product endorsement intended). It’s no big deal to create a feed link on pages that offer them. And news readers are mostly free and many are open-source; IT could easily adapt one for internal use.
So why the snail’s pace in the adoption of RSS in the enterprise? Its place on intranets is inevitable; sooner, rather than later, every intranet will offer feeds. But I thought we’d be farther along by now than we are. If you run an intranet, let me know what’s holding you back.
4. Listening To The Social Customer
According to many of the bloggers I read every day, blogs are the future of public relations.
Christopher Calfi, chairman and CEO of Cerdado, Inc., thinks they’re just the first salvo in a new era of the “social customer.” Writing in CRMGuru, Calfi says wikis and social networks provide even greater opportunities for companies to “break down the walls between companies and their customers, enabling the creation of communities and resulting in significant benefits to all involved. By listening to the social customer, companies have the opportunity to create the tightest relationships between vendor and customer we have seen since the days of the corner store.”
Calfi offers an example of a wiki from Microsoft as a forum for the social customers:
“If you’ve ever wanted to tell Bill Gates, his minions and the rest of the world what you really think of Microsoft, your chance is on the Channel9 developer site, set up by five Microsoft employees ‘who want a new level of communication between Microsoft and developers.’ According to the site, the five employees created it because ‘we believe that we will all benefit from a little dialog these days.’ They said that they wanted to “move beyond the newsgroup, the blog and the press release to talk with each other, human to human.’”
Moving beyond the blog, eh? Now there’s a concept to which we might want to pay attention!
5. Study Sets Internal Value Of IM At $35 Million
Companies promoting their IM-blocking software have produced plenty of studies meant to chill the hearts of bottom line-focused executives by calculating lost productivity resulting from non-work-related use of instant messaging. In an effort to balance the scales, The Radicati Group has produced a study that claims to identify the ROI produced when employees use IM for work-related purposes.
According to the study (reported by InstantMessagingPlanet.com), a 5,000-employee company can reap productivity gains of $37.5 million per year assuming each employee uses IM and earns average hourly pay of $41.67. The numbers are as questionable as those produced by the alarmists over at WebSense, but at least it’s nice to see somebody making an effort to prove quantitatively that IM has value.
Radicati set up two scenarios for its research (which costs US $1,000 if you want the entire report). In the first, an employee is trying to discuss something with a co-worker. In the second, co-workers communicate with one another during a conference call. In each scenario, Radicati calculates the amount of time it takes with and without IM. “By looking at time taken by employees to undertake two typical daily scenarios both with and without IM, we find that using IM can save companies an average of 40 minutes per user per day,” the report states.
IM’s advantage, the study concludes, comes from the real-time responses it enables.
Also among the “soft benefits” noted by Radicati analysts are improved employee satisfaction, better working relationships, and a more open and fun form of communication. Dr. Radicati however does not believe that the “negative” uses of IM (personal conversations and non-business communication) pose a greater threat than those posed by communication via phone or Internet in general.
6. A Praiseworthy First Stab At A Blogging Code Of Ethics
Last month I wondered about the need for a blogging code of ethics. Allan Jenkins has done a noteworthy job of crafting one for his own efforts at “Desirable Roasted Coffee.” Allan tells me anybody is welcome to adapt his code for their own purposes, but he’s not wild about the idea of a central code that people voluntarily agree to adopt.
I’m not sure I agree.
Ideally, something like this would be available for adoption along the lines of a Creative Commons license; anybody who agrees could just add the logo to their blog linking to the Code of Ethics. The only problem is enforcement. As Allan notes in his draft, as an IABC member, he also remains vigilant in his adherence to the IABC Code of Ethics. Should Allan ever violate that code (which I can’t imagine; I’ve known Allan a long time and he’s a fine communicator -— I’m just being hypothetical), IABC could take action up to and including revocation of his membership. What would happen to a blogger who violated a voluntary blogging code? Absolutely nothing.
Don’t get me wrong; I think the personal statement of values is terrific, and knowing Allan, I know he means it. I’m just trying to figure out how something like this could be taken to the next level.
Here’s Allan’s Code of Ethics:
To write, publish, and be read is a privilege and responsibility. Being mindful of that privilege and responsibility:
1. I shall not barter my words or my silence.
2. I shall write and advocate openly and honestly.
3. I shall strive for accuracy, avoiding errors and correcting them immediately when discovered.
4. I shall strive for balance; even in advocacy, I shall not distort or suppress obviously relevant facts to bolster my argument.
5. I shall welcome and invite rebuttal, debate and discussion through comments, email, and trackbacks.
6. I shall disclose my sources fully, through credits, links and trackbacks, unless the source, with good grounds, has requested anonymity; moreover, I shall trackback where relevant and possible.
7. I shall respect copyright; my own words will be licensed with a Creative Commons license.
8. I shall let the record stand; I shall not delete posts, or parts of them, unless not doing so would violate one of the foregoing principles, and shall give notice that I have done so. If I modify a post, it shall be by adding to it; and I shall mark these additions clearly.
9. I shall reveal material conflicts-of-interest.
10. I shall, as a member of IABC, a trained reporter, a resident of the European Union, and a citizen of the United States of America, remain mindful of the IABC Code of Ethics, the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the laws of the European Union and the United States.
7. The Quiet Explosion Of Social Networking
While blogs continue to compel the attention of the media, the public and (of course) bloggers, social networking continues to expand into the marketplace with much less fanfare.
Netflix, the DVD rental company that lets you select your movies online and get them in the mail, is building social networking into its offering as part of an effort to fend off competitive threats. Subscribers will invite friends and family to see reviews they’ve written of the movies they’ve watched. If a friend accepts the invitation, the sender gets reciprocal rights to see the friend’s lists and reviews. The San Jose Mercury News has the story.
At UCLA, a social networking site is being added to bruinwalk.com, the university’s campus portal. According to an article in the Daily Bruin, the site is designed to help students connect with their fellow Bruins. “Students create a profile containing a variety of information, including their interests, attitudes towards such topics as politics and religion, and personal attributes such as gender and physical build. They can also include a personal photograph.” The site was created in anticipation of increased demand for on-campus social networking.
In Toronto, the social networking company WowFriends has expanded its service to cell phones. According to a report from the UK, the service “offers access to exciting features of the Web site, such as profile sharing, personal networking, messaging, testimonials, daily horoscopes, people finder, and invitations. More features such as forums, web polls, eCards, interest groups, and ringtone downloading will be available soon.”
Reunion.com has acquired GoodContacts, which crafted a social networking application. Already one of the early social networking companies, Reunion.com intends to use the platform to enhance the ability of its 34 million members to stay in touch with important contacts, according to a press release.
I finally had my own contact from among the nearly half-million people in my LinkedIn network. A friend notified me that he’d been contacted by a colleague through LinkedIn (who also happened to work for the same company). The colleague and I had chatted by e-mail several years back when he worked at a different company, and he was interested in re-establishing contact.
At the risk of being told social networking will evolve at its own pace, I believe the communications community needs greater awareness of the impact it will have on our audiences and our ability to communicate, as well as the potential it holds as a channel for reaching key constituencies. Social networks ultimately will integrate seamlessly with blogs and wikis. If you think the communication landscape is different today, just wait.
8. Another Step In Social Networking’s Evolution
Other than LinkedIn, social networking hasn’t made inroads into the business world yet. The inevitable business adoption of social networking is only awaiting proof of concept, evidence that social networking can produce the kinds of results businesses care about. The launch of a new social networking site, 43 Things, could go a long way towards providing that evidence.
Lee LeFever talks about 43 Things in his CommonCraft blog, explaining that… “At the core it’s about finding and working with people who share your specific goals. Plus, people who have accomplished goals become resources for those who haven’t. I’ve described it previously as a marketplace for accomplishing goals.”
Members of the network list new goals they want to accomplish. Others who visit the site can see the goal and reply that they, too want to accomplish that goal or that they already have. User profiles, then, are a collection of things users have done or want to do, including their progress toward meeting those goals.
LeFever lists some of the technology that could make 43 Things rock. I was immediately struck by the prospects for intranets, particularly in large companies. Any employee with a goal can list it and either find another employee who has already achieved that goal or other employees working toward the same objectives. The potential for productivity improvement is huge.
Some time ago, I found a document on the Net that predicted social networking would infiltrate intranets as one of the big business technology trends of 2004. It didn’t happen, but the prediction may have just been a bit premature. If 43 Things takes off, the light bulb may yet shine over the heads of business managers.
Currently, 43 Things is an invitation-only service, although you can sign up to get an invitation when a spot opens. The site is adding only 43 users per day during its beta period.
9. Next Webinar: News On Intranets
Communicating news on the intranet:
Where it comes from, where it should go, and what you can do with it online you can’t do in print
Begins January 10, 2005
Cost: US $175
Communicators everywhere are using intranets to deliver company news to employees. There’s an expectation that the news will change every day and that there will be plenty of it. But communication staffs are stretched about as tight as they can be stretched, trying to fill that online news hole with the same resources they used to apply to a regular print publication. In the meantime, print used to land on every employee’s desk where the could see it, while in the world of the intranet, employees have to make a deliberate visit to the news page if they’re going to find out what’s going on.
“Communicating news on the intranet” will provide you with solutions to your news delivery dilemma.
In five weeks, some of the topics we’ll cover include:
- Sources of employee news you’ve never considered
- Technologies that can make finding the news easier
- Methods of getting employees to contribute news
- Getting employees to read the news no matter how little time they say they have
- Taking advantage of technology to add compelling features to your news—at no extra cost
Register at: webinar.holtz.com/synopsis/intranews.htm
Learn more about Shel Holtz Webinars at: webinar.holtz.com
10. Citizen Journalists Get Their Own Wiki
The journalists who complain about Wikipedia’s lack of accountability will love the fact that the founders of the collaborative encyclopedia are introducing a wiki to allow anybody to report news.
Currently in beta, Wikinews works just like Wikipedia, except (as co-founder Jimmy Wales notes) authors will need to create original content instead of summarizing existing material. Wikinews was inevitable. Back around 1995, I was on a panel that included the president of Canada Newswire. I spoke for a few minutes about selective news reading, the fact that the Net makes it easy for readers to assemble their own newspaper (what Nicholas Negroponte called The Daily Me), bypassing the judgments of editors who decide for readers what’s important. The newswire president was horrified. “You need trained journalists to identify what’s important based on their experience,” he insisted. “Without that, you could miss something you really should be paying attention to.”
I agreed with him wholeheartedly, but followed up by asking, “So what are you going to do about it?” The plain answer is: nothing. There’s not a damn thing you can do about it. The same is true of Wikinews. In a post to my blog, I reported on an essay by a former editor-in-chief at Encyclopedia Britannica who identified some of the serious problems with amateurs creating and editing encylopedia articles. The same goes for news reporting. Scoff all you like at the failings of professional journalists, but if you think they make mistakes, just wait until Joe Beercan starts reporting the news.
Will the massive peer review that is Wikipedia’s hallmark solve the problem? It doesn’t on Wikipedia, where not only aren’t the standards of encyclopedia entries met—they’re not even known. This doesn’t keep the Wikipedia from serving as a useful tool; I use it all the time. But it’s not 100% authoritative, and I never trust what I read there unless I can verify it somewhere else. How many people will read Wikinews and make it their sole news source? The idea is just a bit alarming.
You may argue that blogs are already doing this, that Wikinews simply uses a different tool to let readers become contributors. True, but you can’t pull every blog reporting the news onto your desktop by clicking one bookmark.
I’m not suggesting there are no benefits possible from the Wikinews experiment. For one thing, we’ll see news reported that the mainstream media ignores. Broader coverage of more news can only be good.
For another, the mainstream media will be forced to address issues they might otherwise choose to ignore once a story breaks on Wikinews. We already have plenty of experience of this phenomenon in the blogosphere.
In any case, it’ll be interesting to watch.
11. Readership Stats For Online Employee Newsletters Don’t Exist
At least once a week, I get e-mail from a communicator under pressure to show that readership of the online newsletter she produces for employees is acceptable. “Do you know where I can find any statistics about readership of online newsletters?” the e-mails usually ask. “I was hoping to get some perspective from other companies.”
I make a dedicated effort to stay on top of communication research, but I’ve never seen a study that assesses readership of online employee newsletters or bulletins across multiple organizations. I suspect the need for an apples-to-apples comparison is behind the lack of statistics. For example, if I work for a company where only half the employee population has access to computers, I could never achieve the levels of readership enjoyed by one in which all employees are networked.
There are other factors that keep any such analysis from being meaningful. Employees are more likely to read online newsletters they can scan in a minute versus those that require 20 minutes of focused reading. The relevance of the news is also a factor. It would be tough to measure up to statistics of companies that produced effective newsletters while mine was filled with corporate rhetoric and fluff.
In a comment to my blog post on this topic, Brian Kilgore noted, “And, speaking of analysis…I don’t trust the questions the researchers ask. I bet that ‘do you have access to a computer at work’ is a lot more common a question than, ‘do you have time and permission and computer access to allow you to spend 5, 10, or 15 minutes a day reading an internal on-line publication?’ The useful research might be to ask online editors, “Do employees take the actions you want them to after you run stories in your online newsletter?’”
If anybody were to undertake such a study (Melcrum Research, are you listening?), it would need to
incorporate these differences into the research instrument. It would be valuable for communicators to know what works in getting employees to read online newsletters in different work environments; it’s research that’s long overdue. Convincing a research institution to undertake so unsexy a study, though, may be as great an effort as conducting the actual study.
If anybody knows of such a study, please fill me in!
12. Move Those Mailing Lists Over To RSS
E-mail newsletters have become a standard communication tool. There’s hardly a business Web site that doesn’t offer opt-in capabilities for everything from site updates to earnings announcements. Thanks to spammers, though, a hefty portion of your target audience may be turning its back on the opportunity to subscribe.
According to a study from Relemail seven out of eight people believe subscribing to an opt-in e-mail list will result in more spam. And 83% have said they avoid subscribing to a list when they don’t trust the publisher, while 78% said they just don’t always believe a company’s official privacy statement.
While 91% of the study respondents said they are more likely to do business with an organization that adheres to ethical e-mail practices and respects their privacy, it will be increasingly difficult for people to determine which organizations fit that bill. Subscribing to an RSS feed, on the other hand, eliminates the potential for spam and privacy abuse. RSS doesn’t provide communicators with the kinds of metrics you get with e-mail list programs, there are ways to measure its effectiveness. But being able to measure a channel whose star is fading is a waste of time in any case. Move those lists to RSS.
13. Coming Up: A Special Update On RSS
As long as we’re on the subject of RSS feeds…
My friend Bill Boyd suggested in a recent e-mail that I produce an issue of HC+T Update dedicated to RSS. “A special edition would really hammer home the importance of RSS (and a single-topic edition might be easier to assemble over the holidays),” Bill wrote.
Well, yeah, except I was pretty much done with this issue, and I like to keep these newsletters focused on what’s going on in the online communication space. With only 12 issues each year, there’s a lot to jam into each edition!
But I kinda like the idea of a special issue. So in early January, between this issue and the January 2005 issue, I’ll send out a special HC+T Update that focuses on RSS, including the key points Bill thought I should include:
- A list of your top 3-4 news readers and why I like them.
- The software that communicators can use to create RSS feeds
- The RSS sites (including blogs) you find most valuable.
Watch for it.
14. Sites Of The Month
>>>How comfortable are you, really, with that digital camera? And God forbid you need to actually buy one, what with all the choices and options available. Help is available at this site that offers everything you need to know about digital cameras and digital photography. Its contents includes shooting, editing, organizing, sharing, software, tips and tricks, and a bunch more.
www.basic-digital-photography.com
>>>The notion of ProAms is an interesting one. We’re not talking golf here. The term referrs to “professional amateurs,” amateurs who pursue their hobbies to professional standards. I first read about ProAms in a FastCompany article that details their influence in everything from the popularization of rap music to the infiltration of Linux into the Windows world. The article’s author, Charles Leadbeater, along with co-author Paul Miller, has written a book on the subject, “The Pro-Am Revolution,” which costs money if you want the book but not a cent if you want to download a PDF of the text. The topic is relevant to the world of online communication where average citizens (amateurs) are invading the turf of the professionals (journalists and PR practitioners).
www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/proameconomy/
15. HC+T Update
- I will develop a strategic employee communication plan for a major Silicon Valley company.
- I’m one of the keynoters at an annual meeting of senior executives from Nextel (just acquired by Sprint). Should be an interesting talk, dealing with change communications.
- I will provide ongoing consulting services to a large semiconductor manufacturer during 2005.
16. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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