Monday, February 28, 2005
HC+T Update: February 2005
The February 2005 e-mail newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology
HC+T Update
February 2005
In This Issue:
1) Organized Religion Blogging
2) Intranet Podcasting: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
3) Can PR Handle Transparency?
4) Licensing or Certifying PR Professionals
5) Download or Stream? Everything Old is New Again
6) Timing Was Everything
7) FastCompany Launches an Ethics Monitor
8) Does the Public Need to be Guarded Against Us?
9) Sites of the Month
10) HC+T Update
11) Boilerplate And Subscription Information
Wow, talk about getting in under the wire. In a few hours, it won’t be February any more! So…here’s the February issue. Thanks for reading!
1. Organized Religion Blogging
Last year, one of my speaking gigs took me to Phoenix where I did a couple sessions at a convening of communicators from several segments of the US Lutheran church. (It always tickles me when I get such invitations, being the nice Jewish boy that I am!) Among my topics (no surprise here) was blogs.
Most of those in attendance hadn’t yet heard of blogs. Among those who did, few had thought about the application of blogs to an organization such as theirs. They were receptive to my talk, though, and I was delighted when I heard yesterday from Sallie Draper, one of my contacts, who invited me to take a look at the new leadership blog from the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS). “I’m back,” she wrote, “with the official announcement that our church leadership blog—Imprint —is open for business.”
And Imprint is most impressive. I haven’t looked to see how many other organized religions are blogging. Certainly there are individual churches and synagogues that have started blogs, but I haven’t noted any from the organizations that represent them. Thus, WELS may have a first on its hands.
The blog starts with a mission statement:
“Imprint authors share their thoughts, struggles and blessings. As each of us struggle during these tough times, communication efforts are a priority. Pray, praise, encourage, and comment on topics discussed by all who serve Christ at WELS.”
The authors’ bios—more than 20 of them, including the president—are prominent. Authors’ names also appear on individual posts, like one from Youth Disclipleship Administrator Joel Nelson who writes about youth leaving the church. The blog includes comments…Nelson got three, all from kids expressing their thoughts about the subject (and one that praised the blog, noting that her school uses the same blogging utility).
Imprint also features RSS and, of particularly interest, a page articulating the blogging ethics to which the blog adheres. These are categorized:
- Be honest and fair
- Minimize harm
- Be accountable
- Follow the Most Excellent Way (e.g., ” Remember to exhibit Christian love”)
Other organized religions can learn a lesson from WELS which, in a time of growing detachment from traditional faits, has opened a dialogue with its flock.
2. Intranet Podcasting: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
I’m working with a company to develop a strategic internal communication plan. Part of the research phase includes a communication-focused survey of employees. One section of the survey asks employees to rate their interest in potential new channels. Podcating is one of the choices.
I’m anxious to see podcasting introduced to the employee communications mix. I’d love to help a company figure out how to do it well.
As with most new technologies, podcasting is earning sneers and eye-rolls from most executives. Even as General Motors launches podcasts, the notion of intranet-based podcasts just isn’t resonating with communication executives. Yet. But benefits of pre-intranet communication coupled with the reality of today’s workplace make podcasting compelling, at least to contemplate if not to rush into production.
Think back to the employee newsletter or magazine you received before company computer networks came along. For every employee who stopped what he was doing to devour every word of the publication, there were a dozen who slipped it into a briefcase and took it home to read at their leisure. The only way to do that with an intranet is to print out every article of interest. Nobody does that. Nobody has the time.
That’s the reality of the workplace today. Focus groups at the company where I’m consulting revealed a situation that I’ve heard at every other company where I’ve consulted over the last decade. The company went through a period of downsizing some years ago. In order to avoid ever having to go through that trauma again, management has settled on a lean staff that can handle the work when times are good but is already cut to the bone and ready to operate when times are bad. The downside of this approach is that most employees who are still with the company have absorbed the work of those who left, in addition to continuing to do the work they did before the layoffs. When business improves, these same employees will get even more work to fulfill customer demands.
So who has time to sit at the computer and read company news? The ability to take that newsletter home improved the odds that employees would read it. Restricting access to the desktop when employees are struggling to finish all their work in days that already well exceed eight hours is guaranteeing that many employees just won’t bother. The consequences of an uninformed employee population can have a significant impact on the company’s bottom line.
Do we go back to print? While I’m an advocate of print for a variety of reasons, its effectiveness is realized only when balanced with other media, including the online media, the channel of choice for current content that is best communicated immediately. (“Weekly newsletter” is an oxymoron.)
Thinking about all this, I’m reminded of a channel many companies used 15 or 20 years ago aimed particularly at the sales force. They produced audio cassettes so employees could catch up on news and information in their cars as they drove from customer to customer. The cassettes weren’t exactly timely. They took time to write, produce, duplicate and distribute. But employees could listen when they had the time and in the location of their choice.
Which brings us back to podcasting. Some critics of podcasting have charged that it’s nothing new, that organizations have been producing audio files for years that can be streamed or downloaded. What makes podcasting different, though, is the delivery method. A podcast shows up without the user taking any action beyond the initial subscription. And it can be transferred with ease to a digital audio device so the user can listen when it’s convenient. Most podcasts are heard in cars, but there’s also the treadmill, walking the dog, sitting on long, tedious flights, and waiting in airport terminals. (I’ve listened to podcasts in all these venues.)
So why not produce a podcast for employees? Companies like Cypress Semiconductor have been making MP3 audio files available for employees for several years now; they even bought inexpensive, low-capacity MP3 players for their employees. Now employees catch up on speeches and meetings and other audio content while jogging at lunch or riding the bus to work. Employees who missed a lot of messages before are now hearing them. The next logical step is to give every employee a podcatcher -— the software that facilitates the podcast subscription process—and distribute the files as feeds.
What kind of content could a company offer in a podcast? Off the top of my head, I’ve come up with…
- A rundown of the day’s news
- Executive speeches
- Meetings
- Investor road shows (give employees some insight into what outside audiences are hearing)
- Customer trade shows (ditto above)
- Business updates
I can even see different business units offering their own podcasts, allowing employees to subscribe to those that would be useful and ignore those that aren’t. IT can hard-code those podcasts deemed important to everyone into the podcatcher, just as they can make the intranet home page the browser’s default home page. Access to external podcasts could easily be restricted, protecting the company’s precious internal bandwidth.
Considering the low-to-no-cost entry into podcasting, its acceptance into the internal communication mix should happen sooner rather than later.
3. Can PR Handle Transparency?
I used the couple hours I had available during a long drive a few weeks ago to catch up on some backlogged podcasts, including a January 31 edition of Corante Event Lab. The show involved podcasting challenges. David Berlind, executive editor of ZDNet’s Tech Update, was one of the guests. Most of the show dealt with equipment and such, but toward the end of the show, Berlind talked about an experiment he has undertaken. He called it a “podcasting for transparency channel.”
Here’s the idea: In an effort to address the mistrust with which so many people approach the work of journalists, articles and broadcasts that feature “polished edited content” can be linked to “a parallel channel that’s full of the raw materials.” Specifically, a journalist could link a quote or sound bite in the finished product to a recording of the entire interview. Berlind came up with the idea while pondering how to “unobscure that which is obscure from public view.”
So he gave it a try. The experiment included listing the time codes where readers/listeners can find any given quote in the unedited interview.
Journalists and bloggers responded positively, so he took it to another level. In addition to posting the raw interview, why not also post the e-mails that were exchanged in the story preparation? So he did…including story pitches from PR practitioners.
“The PR community didn’t respond favorably,” Berlind said. “The whole PR community went berserk…They didn’t expect it.”
Berlind has since adjusted his approach to this kind of transparency. “What this means is, if you want to keep your job as a journalists, you can’t go and piss off everybody. You have to figure out how to offer the maximum degree of transparency without compromising or marginalizing what it is you do every day. Now that I’ve learned how sensitive the PR community is to that, now what I’ll do is publish a policy that says, ‘Here’s what I’ll do with what you send me. When you first send me a pitch, I won’t publish that, but I will ask you if I can publish everything that’s subsequent to that.’”
While that’s certainly accommodating of Berlind, I have to wonder why the PR community reacted the way it did. After all, we preach transparency to our clients, citing the risks to reputation of anything less. “If you don’t want to see it on the front page of the New York Times, don’t do it,” is pretty common advice these days. Are we unable or unwilling to eat our own dog food? As a profession, our inability to live the values we preach to our clients, our unwillingness to walk the talk, is one more reason for those outside the profession to hold us in such low regard.
There should be nothing in any of our communications with the media that we should mind having exposed to the scrutiny of the public, particularly if journalists are enthusiastic about having their own source material put under the same microscope.
4. Licensing or Certifying PR Professionals
Steve Phenix, author of the Phenix Rising blog, has trotted out the notion of licensing PR practitioners. Distressed by the low regard in which PR is held, Phenix is exploring a number of ways to rehabilitate the profession’s image.
In my nearly 30 years in the business, I’ve seen the licensing idea brought back to life (not unlike a Phoenix) again and again. The outcome of licensing would certainly be beneficial, since the license would be required for PR professionals to be able to ply their trade and all PR professionals would be held to the same standard. Anyone violating the standard could lose his license. Phenix suggests (for the US, anyway) a state-by-state PR version of the bar associations that test, license and censure lawyers.
The testing that results in the license is the biggest problem with the licensing idea. Lawyers are tested on their knowledge of the law. The law is complex, but it’s also well defined in books that record the laws enacted by federal and state legislatures. Accountants also undergo testing to ensure they understand the principles of accounting. There’s just one way to keep books. (Legally, anyway.) Doctors are tested to ensure they know what they need to know to properly diagnose and treat illness. These professions are all very black and white in knowledge and practice. Sure, there’s room for creativity and flexibility, but within some very sharply drawn lines.
Not so in the PR profession. Any communication challenge can be appropached a thousand different ways, and it takes just one creative thinker to come up with a thousand-and-first. What will work with an target audience in Los Angeles may not succeed with one in Mississippi. Should you apply some humor or be deadly serious? Use the media or go directly to your public? Culture plays a part. The nature of audiences plays a part.
You just can’t test PR the way you can test accounting.
Yes, there are accreditation programs in PRSA and IABC (among other organizations), but these are accreditations instead of certifications for a reason. They tend to be subjective in their approach. While it’s possible to determine someone came up with the wrong approach to a PR assignment, there is simply no one right approach.
Of course, there have always been people on both sides of the issue. Given the news reports of PR malfeasance that just don’t seem to stop, perhaps it’s time to drag out the licensing debate and hash through it one more time. Perhaps something good will come out of the discussion.
5. Download or Stream? Everything Old is New Again
I’ve been chewing on something Steve Gillmor said.
Speaking at a meeting I attended last month of the RSS/Blog SIG of the East Bay IT Group (ebig), Gillmor tossed off this observation during a converation after the meeting broke up:
“Streaming is dead.”
Gillmor was at the meeting to speak on attention.xml (which I’m still chewing), but I was struck by the “streaming is dead” observation. After all, I still hear from most communicators who work on intranets that they continue to struggle to get buy-in from management (or IT) to let them stream video or audio.
Gillmor’s observation is based on the greater usefulness of a multimedia file that resides on your hard drive versus one that is streamed to you. It’s far easier to jump around to the part you want to see or hear. There are even ways to bookmark those spots. You can transfer the file to other devices; more and more portable media players are sporting video capabilities.
Streaming became popular as an alternative to downloading back in the dial-up days when downloading a video file could take a full day and hard disk space was at a premium.
Today, with broadband connections, such downloads are much faster, and disk space is cheap. More important, though, is the idea that you can subscribe to audio or video files and have them download without your intervention so they’re waiting for you when you need them. That’s the idea behind podcasting, which lets you set up a subscription to a podcast so your podcatcher software can grab the new file as soon as it’s available. And if you haven’t seen ESPN’s “Motion to Go,” you need to go see it. Once you sign up for the free service (which requires broadband), the latest sports news is downloaded during times your PC is idle, so the video clips are waiting for you when you visit the site. These aren’t the choppy, grainy streams to which we’ve become so accustomed. These are high-quality videos with CD-quality sound.
Typical of business, most organizations are still at the stage of adopting streaming media—or they’re not even that far along yet. Streams will still have some value. There is still a large segment of the population without broadband, and streams would still be my choice for vlogs (video blogs); if I subscribed to a bunch of those, my computer would be working overtime grabbing all the various video files. But by and large, after considerable chewing, I’ve come to the conclusion that Gillmor is right. Streaming is so, like, 15 minutes ago. Downloading is in again. How retro.
6. Timing Was Everything
Remember the days when a company could craft a press release and time its distribution for just the right moment to achieve maximum value? The carefully-honed statement could go out just as the markets close, just before they open, on a quiet weekend when it’ll get more play, or during a news-heavy period when nobody will notice. Timing was everything. It’s nostalgic to look back on those bygone days of, oh, last year.
The folks over at AskJeeves probably had timing in mind when they set tomorrow for the announcement of its purchase of Bloglines. But Mary Hodder caught wind of the deal and ran it in her Napsterization blog, and the rest of the blogosphere went wild.
The acquisition was still only a rumor, since neither company had confirmed or denied it. One could assume it was true, if the evidence meant anything. If you conducted a search of blogs from the AskJeeves blog, the results came up in Bloglines. That was a pretty cozy relationship.
Still, when the word gets out ahead of your well-thought-out statement, unpleasant things happen. People react differently than they might if they had read your statement which, if produced with the help of good counsel, proactively address such concerns. For example, CBS Marketwatch’s Frank Barnako reported that A-list blogger Russell Beattie produced a vulgar four-word warning to AskJeeves not to make any changes to the service. “I use it constantly and incessantly and if it went away or was changed drastically, I would be very unhappy,” he wrote. When that carefully crafted press release finally came out, it was clear that no changes were planned.
Is it fair that companies can no longer plan for the strategic release of information? Is it right that bloggers can run with what they’ve got regardless of the upside or downside for other parties? It’s not about right and fair. It’s just what it is. Companies need to understand the new reality: Release your information as soon as it’s ready or somebody else will release it for you. Waiting five minutes may be too late.
7. FastCompany Launches an Ethics Monitor
With a bit of trepidation, I visited the new “Ethics Monitor” FastCompany magazine has just launched. According to Heath Row, writing in the magazine’s FC Now blog, the monitor is “a series of periodic surveys in which we gauge readers’ positions on a number of topics and everyday scenarios.”
The first questions deal with individual behavior. The questions include…
- Do you instruct your assistant to tell callers that you’re “in a meeting” when you really just don’t want to be bothered?
- Have you given good performance reviews to a worker who maybe didn’t deserve it?
- When discussing job opportunities with potential new employers, have you ever fudged the size of your current or most recent salary?
- Do you sometimes “embellish” your professional experience when circumstances call for it?
- Have you told an employee “no” and blamed company policy or your boss when it really was your own decision?
- Have you ever lied to meet high expectations from your boss?
- Have you ever been caught in a lie? If so, what happened?
What with the Ketchum scandal and a greater public interest in the worst of public relations, I don’t suspect it’ll be long before PR is the focus of an Ethics Monitor query.
8. Does the Public Need to be Guarded Against Us?
Public perception of the public relations profession is so bad that some individuals feel compelled to keep an eye on us and report on what they find. That’s the gist of an article published recently in The Guardian (from the UK), featuring an interview with David Miller, professor of sociology at the University of Strathclyde. Miller got start-up funding for a Web site called SpinWatch, designed to do for UK citizens what PRWatch does for folks in the US: guard them against “the manipulations of the PR industry.”
“Spin techniques are much more extensive than is generally realised, encompassing media management, lobbying, corporate social responsibility, investor relations, dirty tricks and spying. There is precious little critical or timely research available in the UK or EU on the increasing influence of spin in public life.”
In the interview, Miller detailed how The Guardian published an article that fell prey to PR:
“‘You ran a story about a report from the International Policy Network claiming that climate change was nowhere near as bad as had been previously thought,’ he says. ‘What you didn’t say is that the IPN is a small company ... that has received a $50,000 (27,000-pound) donation from Exxon, the US oil giant. If your readers had been made aware of this, they might have read the article somewhat differently.’”
One of the most disturbing aspects of this story is the assumption that a study is tainted merely because it was funded by big oil. Did IPN disclose the funding? Did they explain the safeguards they took to ensure the study results were accurate and unbiased regardless of fthe funding source? If not, what PR firm was providing such dubious counsel?
Such skepticism arises, though, because there are so many instances of public relations designed to deceive the public. As I’ve noted before, nearly every PR professional I’ve ever met is honest, sincere, hard-working, and ethical. They subscribe to the notion of two-way, symmetrical communications. That is, the effort involves a dialogue with the goal of achieving a win-win for the client and the target audience. But these efforts that characterize most of the profession are largely ignored (if they’re noticed at all), while the unethical (or just plain stupid) work is held up as examples of what public relations is designed to do. After all, virtually every job we undertake is designed to be noticed by some public somewhere.
(An interesting aside: Two-way symmetrical communication will always produce the best outcomes, but it also takes the most work. PR aimed to deceive is, among other things, the easy way out.)
I know I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but individual bloggers are not going to turn the tide. The profession as a whole -— as represented by its associations —- need to point out these failings and, where appropriate, take action. (Ethics policies, for example, provide for sanctions against violating members, including expulsion from the association.)
More to the point, the associations should be the ones running sites like PRWatch and SpinWatch. As long as the policing of the profession’s ethical behavior is being done to us and not by us, all of us will continue to be represented by the worst among us.
9. Sites of the Month
- Nooked, the company that produces RSS feeds for corporate communications, has launched a directory of RSS feeds. It’s a valuable service worth a look. http://dir.nooked.com/home.dir
- If you need a good example of an institutional blog, try Catholic Insider. This podcast, from a Netherlands priest, recently included a “soundseeing” tour of the Vatican. I know a non-Catholic who was so taken with the podcast he plans to keep listening. What a great way to reach people who may otherwise never hear your message! http://www.rorate.com/catholicinsider/scripts/index.php
10. HC+T Update
- I’m conducting an intranet audit for an engineering company.
- I’m speaking later this week at the Ragan leadership conference. The topic: communicating to achieve employee engagement.
- I’ll conduct my Writing for the Wired World workshop for an energy company in the midwest in April.
11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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