Friday, March 25, 2005
HC+T Update: March 2005
The March 2005 e-mail newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology
HC+T Update
March 2005
In This Issue:
1) “Writing For The Wired World” Returns
2) Intranet Folksonomies
3) Community Development Of Company Policy
4) Owning The Issue
5) Announcing New Services From HC+T
6) Is Traditional Marketing Dead?
7) Considerations For An Employee Non-Monitoring Program
8) Upcoming Webinars
9) Sites of the Month
10) HC+T Update
11) Boilerplate And Subscription Information
1. “Writing For The Wired World” Returns
You know you’ve been waiting for it, and it’s here at last! This summer, I’ll be back on the road with my acclaimed (really) workshop, “Writing for the Wired World.”
Since I started teaching this workshop in 1997, I’ve revised it just about every year. This time around, for the first time, I’ve completely overhauled the workshop. It covers everything from the basics to the latest (like writing for different types of corporate blogs). So even if you’ve taken the workshop before, this will be much more than a refresher.
Regardless of the type of writing you do for online media, one thing is certain: People don’t read online the say way they do in print. If your job requires you to produce results from online copy, you can’t afford to miss “Writing for the Wired World.”
Here’s the schedule:
- New York, June 13-14
- San Antonio, June 16-17
- Chicago, June 20-21
- Washington DC, July 11-12
- Atlanta, July 21-22
- San Francisco, July 25-26
Get details at http://www.ragan.com/wired2005
And remember, I also bring this workshop in-house if you have enough communicators in your organization who can benefit from it. Details are on my Web site. Book a one-day in-house workshop between now and the end of April and you’ll get $1,000 off the workshop fee.
2. Intranet Folksonomies
I see a lot of intranets. I mean, a =lot= of intranets. And I talk to a lot of intranet managers, review employee surveys about intranets, and conduct intranet focus groups. Were you to ask me, “What’s the biggest intranet problem?” my answer would be instant and unequivocal: “Employee can’t find what they’re looking for.”
Call it usability, call it navigation, it all comes down to a wide gap between how employees think about information and the way the owners of the information classify it. Does a truck driver in Minneapolis know that the retirement plan is managed by the benefits department which is part of human resources? Would his first stab at finding information on the retirement plan lead him directly to the benefits department’s content on the intranet?
The more I read and think about folksonomies, and the more I use del.icio.us, the more I wonder how long it will take before somebody applies the concept to intranets.
Folksonomies let individuals tag content using terms that make sense to them. On del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us), a social bookmarking site, people store links to Web pages they’ve visited based on labels they’ve added. You can search based on the label you’re interested in and find content others have stored using the same tag. Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) takes a similar approach to digital photography: Upload your picture and tag it. Visitors can search for pictures based on their interests, finding photos tagged with that label.
Folksonomies, then, put the power to categorize anything digital into the hands of users. On an intranet, that would mean employees would decide for themselves, once they found a useful bit of content, how it should be categorized.
How might a folksonomy work if our truck driver could save his bookmarks to a del.icio.us-like serve on the intranet? After 10 minutes of frustrated searching, he finally finds the retirement plan information he wanted. Knowing he’ll probably want it again, he adds it to his bookmarks, giving it a tag that is meaningful to him: “retirement.” Now, any employee searching for content on the intranet can enter the word “retirement” into a search engine dedicated to employee-defined content. If enough other employees have labeled the retirement content as “retirement,” the page will be earn a high ranking in the search results; never mind that the benefits folks tagged it “401(k).” Another employee might enter a different term, like “pension.” Some other employees have probably applied that tag when saving the content to their bookmark page, making the page discoverable through that path.
Alternatively, a company could offer multiple types of search results through its search engine—one producing the normal results you’d expect of a search engine, the other identifying the results of a folksonomy seach.
In any case, the end result is easier access to information on the intranet and a solution to the biggest problem plaguing intranet managers.
It can’t be that big a deal to develop an internal version of something like del.icio.us. The bigger challenge will be convincing IT that it makes sense to give employees the ability to label content for themselves. Still, I’m going to start counseling clients to look at this as a means of improving intranet usability.
3. Community Development Of Company Policy
Michael Hyatt posted his request on his blog on March 18 and within hours generated five comments, most asking specific questions or raising substantive issues. The last time I looked, he was up to 15 comments, not to mention half a dozen trackbacks. It’s not the comments, though, that make this particular blog post stand out. It’s the nature of the post itself and the man who wrote it.
Hyatt is president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, the publicly traded Christian publishing company that ranks as the world’s ninth-largest publisher of any kind. With 600 employees, the company achieved sales of nearly $223 million last year and earned $16.2 million. Companies that size usually develop their internal policies, well, internally. But on his blog, Nelson requested public coment on a proposed policy to govern employee blogging at his company.
It’s getting less and less surprising to see reports of executives blogging. While those executives who do blog still represent a tiny fraction of the total population of company leaders, the growth curve in the numbers of executive bloggers suggests momentum that will only continue to build. It’s getting tiresome already to read, “Oh, look another executive blogger,” although eyebrows will continue to rise when certain names are added to the list. (For instance, when will GE CEO Jeffrey Imhelt start a blog?)
But Hyatt has used his blog to a purpose that is unique among CEO bloggers. Hatt, who has been blogging since June 2004, announced that Thomas Nelson Publishers will establish a “corporate blog aggregator site,” a repsository of links to blogs of employees who write about the company. The company won’t host the blogs; it’s up to employees to find a host for their efforts. This is just a listing of all those blogs employees start on their own. The reasons, Hyatt says, involve raising company visibility, making a contribution to the publishing community, and giving people a look at the inner workings of a publishing company.
Then Hyatt offers up a draft of the company’s “Blogging Terms and Conditions,” which he created with some colleagues and input from legal counsel.
“I am posting this draft publicly so that you can comment on it. If we have missed anything, I would like to know. Also, I am hoping that this might be helpful to other companies who are struggling with this same issue. I know that it would have been much easier for us if we could have started with someone else’s work first.”
Sharing a policy is cool. Seeking outside advice is outright daring, particularly in an industry as tradition-bound as publishing. The fact that it’s a blogging policy is no reason to minimize the move. Hyatt has opened the door to a new use of collaborative tools such as blogs. Why shouldn’t companies get help from one another—and from their audiences—on any number of internal policies? To be sure, not all policies lend themselves to such openness. A company’s benefits policies, for example, are a recruiting tool; most organizations wouldn’t want to give the competition a heads-up on the benefits they’re using to attract the best and brightest employees.
But what about ethics guidelienes? Codes of professional conduct? Conflict resolution? Dress codes? How about use of the Internet for non-work-related purposes? The list of policies developed by companies that pose no risk if made public is a long one.
Based on the quality of the responses to Hyatt’s post, the collaborative approach to policy development appears to be paying off. I hope we see more of this.
Hyatt’s post is at:
http://michaelhyatt.blogs.com/workingsmart/2005/03/corporate_blogg.html
4. Owning The Issue
I really don’t want this item to be about IABC, but it’s an online discussion about IABC that motivates me to write it. Allan Jenkins, a friend, colleague, and former IABC board member, posted an item to his blog (http://allanjenkins.typepad.com) that raised some critical issues about IABC. Some 40 comments ensued in a meandering conversation about what IABC needs to do in order to become more relevant and successful. No IABC leader, from staff or the volunteer board, ever participated, even just to say “I’m listening.” The conversation led to an additional dialogue on IABC’s private MemberSpeak message board, where vice-chairman Warren Bickford started participating.
But IABC had an opportunity to engage in this kind of discussion on its own terms long ago, via the Chair’s Blog (http://blogs.iabc.com/chair). By using its own blog to the same effect for which Allan’s was appropriated, IABC could have owned the issue.
hile conversations can and will take place wherever they erupt, it’s hard to argue with the advantages to those conversations happening on your own turf. I first saw this principle in action at Monsanto, back when Jay Byrne (president of the PR agency v-Fluence) worked there.
Monsanto is an activist target based on the genetically-modified products it makes and sells. Byrne convinced management to establish Web forums for discussion of the issues. A message board was at the heart of the effort, attracting opponents and advocates alike. Why would management allow negative comments about its products on one of its own sites? Because, as Byrne explained to me at the time, at least the conversation was happening on Monsanto turf. “We can’t control the message,” Byrne said, “but we can own the issue.”
An opt-in e-mail newsletter was another case in point. The newsletter covered any news about the genetically-modified organism debate, whether it supported or undermined Monsanto’s point of view. Again, management wondered why they should distribute news that contradicted its business goals. Byrne replied that a newsletter that contained only news supporting the company’s position would attract only readers who were already on Monsanto’s side. By becoming the clearinghouse for all such news, anybody interested in the topic would subscribe and opponents would be exposed to information that supports the company’s position. It was a brilliant strategy.
The zealots on the extreme side of the opposition would never be swayed. Everybody else, though, was willing to engage in a discussion and hear alternative viewpoints. Even those who decided to continue their opposition had improved perceptions of Monsanto, which by hosting the competition was sending the message that it was clearly willing to listen.
While Monsanto dumped the message board after Byrne left (symbolizing the need for a champion for any initiatives that run counterintuitive to traditional management thinking), General Motors has picked up the ball and run with it on its Fastlane blog, where Vice Chairman Bob Lutz is perfectly content to let readers vent negatively in response to his posts. GM has gained nothing but praise and improved reputational points in return. (Remnants of Byrne’s work at Monsanto are still online at the now half-assed Biotech Knowledge Centre.)
Microsoft is another company that employed this strategy. Back when the company was spending most of its time in court fighting federal and state charges, the company established a clearinghouse on the court cases. There was no bias in this site, just an accurate and comprehensive archive of every document that had been filed by any party to the actions. It became the media go-to spot for research. The fact that Microsoft hosted it (instead of, say, the US Justice Department) must have played well in the eyes of the reporters who took advantage of it.
Which brings us back to IABC, the organization of which I’ve been a member since 1977 and to which I am thorougly committed. It is not up to members to find and use an inadequate forum like MemberSpeak to start a spontaneous discussion of the association’s form and function. It is up to IABC to spark the conversation in a forum that lends itself to the conversation. Hosting the discussion on its own turf in the appropriate place will not only benefit IABC through improved member perceptions, but also by setting a communication example for its members to follow.
Until the Chair’s blog is reshaped into such a channel, though, IABC won’t own the issue. Allan will, along with anyone else with the right audience and the willingness to start a conversation. (Yes, the MemberSpeak conversation is fine, except that it’s limited to members. People like Jeremy Pepper and Brian Kilgore who are interested but waiting for IABC to become the organization they want to join have no input. And aren’t they part of the market IABC is after?)
Like it or not —- whether you’re IABC or any other organization—the conversation is going to happen. Part of your communication strategy should be to bring the conversation home so you can own the issue.
5. Announcing New Services From HC+T
I’ve been watching as various shops spring up offering help getting companies started with blogging, RSS, and podcasting. The problem is, most of these shops are run by people with great technical expertise and zero understanding of organizational communications.
I bring both sets of skills to the table.
So I’m introducing new services to the Holtz Communication + Technology menu. If your organization is considering blogs, RSS feeds, and/or podcasts, for internal or external purposes, I can help you strategize the use of the new tools, integrating them into the communications mix and ensuring they achieve measurable results. Give me a call. We’ll talk.
6. Is Traditional Marketing Dead?
Not too long ago, I finished switching my Web site over to a new content management system. I had been using Mamboserver, but wasn’t as thrilled with it as I thought I’d be, so I switched to phpWebSite, which is a vast improvement. Interestingly, on the heels of the switchover came some input that suggested, perhaps, that static Web pages are a thing of the past in light of the conversational nature of blogs. Are static Web sites (and, for that matter, magazine ads) dinosaurs that should be consigned to the dustbin of communication history?
I’ve given this extensive consideration, weighed the implications, and reached a conclusion:
What a crock.
If we’ve learned anything over the last several years, it’s that all new media and communication channels are additive. I would defy you to name one—one—new medium that has outright replaced an older one. These predictions have always accompanied the introduction of a new channel. Radio was supposed to replace print. Television was supposed to replace radio. Now blogs are supposed to replace Web sites.
The truth is, new media channels assume the roles for which they are better suited than the older channels. And the older channels adapt to do what they’re best at. Consider television. Before TV, radio consisted of programming that included dramas and comedies, soap operas, game shows and variety shows (from “The Green Hornet,” “Inner Sanctum,” and “The Shadow” to “Texaco Star Theater,” “Beat the Band,” and “Quiz Kids”). When TV came along, these kinds of shows quickly became TV staples because they were better as visual presentations. Did radio die just because “Days of Our Lives” was no longer part of the programming mix? Nope. Radio adapted into a channel for programming that was better as audio.
Today, newspapers are struggling in the face of challenges from blogs, online classifieds (e.g., Craig’s List and eBay), and online news channels, but I don’t for a minute believe newspapers as a medium will vanish. There’s too much evidence suggesting that people scan Web content but read paper. Some newspapers that don’t adapt will certainly perish. But smart publishers will figure out how to evolve their publications into something that is just better on paper than it could be online. New newspapers with fresh approaches that leverage print’s inherent strengths will appear. These will thrive, along with those that integrate new media (newspaper newsrooms, for example, are starting to emloy “citizen media editors”).
E-mail is another example. Think back to when e-mail was first introduced at your workplace. Did IT simultaneously remove your fax machines? E-mail became a new alternative, not a required replacement.
So what’s the benefit of a static Web site or a magazine ad?
Let’s start with the Web, and let’s look at the Microsoft Office campaign that Steve Rubel, author of the MicroPersuasion blog, wrote about. I agree completely with Steve’s assertion that Microsoft has wasted an “opportunity to use what I call ‘conversational marketing’—e.g. blogs, podcsating and RSS.” But that doesn’t mean there should’t be an associated Web site. Once somebody has engaged in a conversation, there should be a place to go where they can quickly navigate to information they need. Remember, good Web sites are built on principles of information architecture, easy retrieval of information. Further, information found on the static site may well be what leads someone to want to engage in a conversation.
Another example: government sites. With the ocean of information available, do I want to engage in a conversation just to find, for example, how to get a camping permit in Yosemite? Well-constructed Web pages are far more useful: Click, click, there’s my answer. I don’t have to wait for somebody to respond to my post. And let’s not forget commerce sites from Amazon.com to the online stores at places like Circuit City or Home Depot. Adding customer service blogs to these is a great idea. Replacing them with blogs is, well, dumb.
And what about magazine ads? People still read magazines; print still rocks. And if you can create the awareness that drives readers to an online conversation, increased share of market follows.
Finally, it’s still worth noting that, according to the oft-cited Pew report on blogging, only 27% of the online adult population in the US reads blogs at all. That’s an impressive number, but it’s still a fraction of a company’s total potential audience.
You’ll find no bigger advocate for the social customer, the business/audience conversation, and the value of new communication channels than me. To achieve genuine and meaningful business results, however, it’s important to temper enthusiasm with practicality. Blogs, RSS, podcasts, and wikis are exciting and important and transformational, but they are a part of a larger communication landscape. Communications that integrate them will be far more successful than those that rely solely on them.
To bring this full circle, that’s why I have a Web site, a blog, a wiki, and a monthly e-mail newsletter. I can engage people in my blog. But someone who wants to know what my intranet audit service entails can find that in two clicks on my Web site. (I still get a lot of business that way.) People who don’t read blogs remain aware of me through this newsletter, which is also posted to a separate blog so I can distribute it as an RSS feed. (This newsletter, by the way, has become a collection of some of the more analystical posts I contribute to my blog.) I have an RSS feed of the news items on my Web site’s home page. I have no plans to give up my site and go blog-only any time soon. Each serves its purpose. And all is right with the world.
7. Considerations For An Employee Non-Monitoring Program
“Tech Republic” offers up an article on issues to consider when launching an employee monitoring program. The article starts out with a list of reasons to monitor, including ensuring employees aren’t abusing communication systems, limiting employer liability for employee misconduct, and assessing productivity. Most of the article is a guide to sidestepping issues that might arise in the development of such a program.
Wouldn’t it be nice, if one of these articles—and there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them —- also included reasons for not implementing employee monitoring programs in the first place?
According to several studies, employee engagement is one of the big issues on executives’ minds. Companies with a large percentage of highly engaged employees tend to have double-digit growth. Those with large populations of disengaged employees plod along with single-digit or negative growth. It’s not hard to make the cause-and-effect connection.
Trust is one of the biggest drivers of employee engagement. What kind of message does it send to employees when their companies say, “We need you. We’re counting on you to help this company succeed and grow. You’re important to us. But we don’t trust you as far as we can throw you, so we’re going to monitor every keystroke, every e-mail, every communication you make”?
Monitoring programs are engagement killers.
This doesn’t mean that the small percentage of employees who will abuse priveleges will be able to get away with the most egregious violations. The problem with monitoring is that it starts with the presumption that =no= employee can be trusted. In fact, the vast majority of employees want to do a good job. They crave recognition, advancement, and reward. They take pride in what they do. Starting from a position of distrust with them is the easy way out. It takes more work to train supervisors to identify abuse, but this approach — managing by exception — is the one that will help build trust and boost engagement.
A supervisor who suspects an employee of abusing communication systems can approach IT to review server log files. “Ah, yes,” they can report; “this employee has been going out to triple-X Web sites.” And the appropriate disciplinary action can be taken. Meanwhile, all those employees who would never view porn at work continue to experience the high job satisfaction that goes along with knowing that the organization presumes them innocent and trusts them to behave in a manner consistent with company policies, values, and expectations.
Executives can talk about how much they trust and respect employees. They can spout the “employees-are-our-greatest-asset” line until hell freezes over. Until they walk they talk, the bond of trust won’t grow and employee engagement will stagnate. Isn’t double-digit growth enough of a motivation to dump these draconian programs and find a better way to deal with those few employees the programs are designed to catch?
The “Tech Republic” article is at:
http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-10593_11-5615878.html#
8. Upcoming Webinars
A new series of Webinars is on the horizon! These are asynchronous, online professional development sessions designed to provide you with learning equivalent to what you’d get at a full-day live workshop. Webinars are spread over five weeks, with a new lecture posted every Monday. In addition to reading the lecture, you participate in an ongoing discussion with the lecturer and other participants, download handouts, vote in a poll, and take advantage of links to additional information and resources. You can get details at http://webinar.holtz.com.
Here’s the list of upcoming Webinars:
Using e-mail for employee communications
with Shel Holtz, ABC and Tudor Williams, ABC
Begins April 4, 2005
An introduction to five new communication technologies:
RSS, blogs, wikis, podcasting and social networks
with Shel Holtz, ABC
Begins April 18, 2005
How to drive traffic to your intranet
with Shel Holtz, ABC
Begins May 2, 2005
How to audit your employee communications program
with Tudor Williams, ABC
Begins May 16, 2005
Usability for communicators
with Steve Crescenzo
Begins June 7, 2005
9. Sites of the Month
- This is hot. If you’re not familiar with Creative Commons, this is a site that lets you assign various levels of protection to your online intellectual property. For example, my blog has a Creative Commons license that lets people redistribute and publish my blog posts, but only for non-commercial purposes. Now, Yahoo! has launched a search engine that lets you find intellectual property based on their rights. Need a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge that’s available for free for commercial purposes? Just type “Golden Gate Bridge” into the query field, select “Find content I can use for commercial purposes,” and away you go. This is an excellent extension of an already great service. http://search.yahoo.com/cc
- Jeff De Cagna thinks about non-profit associations. A lot. And what he thinks is, if nothing else, very interesting. De Cagna has a blog called “The Association Innovation Blog” and a podcast called “Associations Unorthodox.” I’ve already become a big fan of the podcast, the most recent installment of which pondered the heretical question, “Do associations need members?” De Cagna suggested that eBay is a lot like an association, and some associations could prosper with such a model. If you work in the non-profit world, your thinking will be stimulated, if nothing else, by De Cagna’s ideas. Blog: http://www.associationinnovation.com/ Podcast: http://www.associationsunorthodox.com
10. HC+T Update
- Shel will address a health care company’s communication conference to talk about intranets
- Shel will speak about blogs, RSS, wikis and other collaborative tools at a conference of communicators from through the government of Canada
- Shel has been asked to write a chapter in the latest revision of IABC’s “Inside Organizational Communication;” the chapter covers communication technology
11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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