Tuesday, April 26, 2005
HC+T Update: April 2005
The April 2005 e-mail newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology
HC+T Update
April 2005
In this issue…
1. Is Podcasting For Real?
2. Your Crisis Communication Plan Is Due For Maintenance
3. Dutch Company Gives New Hires Intranet Blogs
4. Boeing Beefs Up Its Blog
5. Next Webinar: Drive Traffic To Your Intranet
6. Will Blogs Replace Press Releases?
7. Don’t Miss “Writing For The Wired World”
8. Site of the Month
9. HC+T Update
10. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com.
1. Is Podcasting For Real?
I couldn’t resist commenting after reading a lengthy post from Darren Barefoot’s blog titled, “Why I’m Not Smoking the Podcasting Dope.”
Barefoot is a “writer, technologist and marketer who lives in Vancouver, Canada,” according to his site. He raises enough issues—compounded by comments to the post—that I wanted to think through my responses. It seemed a good idea to use my own blog for that process. So here goes…
Barefoot begins by leaving no doubt about his skepticism: “I’m skeptical about who’s doing it, who’s going to do it, and who’s going to listen to it. In short, I don’t think podcasting is going to get very far into the mainstream.” He lays out several arguments. Let’s examine them one by one:
Mainstream radio will take over podcasting, offering time-shifted versions of their own content.
The time-shifted nature of podcasting is great, but it’s not the only—or even the main—reason that podcasts appeal to people. Most of the radio we’re subjected to these days is programmed by corporations. My daughter, for instance, has pretty much given up on radio, since she hears the same songs (pushed by the labels) over and over again. What she likes about P2P and, now, podcasting, is the opportunity to hear alternative music. Radio is also sanitized. (Just ask Howard Stern.) Podcasting is about genuine voices. It’s also about narrowcasting. Neville and I will never have hundreds of thousands of people listening to FIR, but if we have the key influencers in the public relations world in our small audience, we’ll be very happy.
I’m sure Emile Bourquin, host of Endurance Radio, feels the same. Endurance Radio targets enthusiasts of endurance sports. That’s not nearly a large enough audience to justify a traditional radio show, but it’s a targeted audience that appeals to advertisers like Fleet Sports and Gatorade. The show has attracted a large and faithful following that never would have had the opportunity to hear this kind of show without podcasting.
Time-shifting will provide some benefits to listeners of traditional radio, to be sure. I’d love to schedule a daily download of Terri Gross (of NPR’s “Fresh Air”). There may be other talk or information-focused radio shows people would like to listen to at some time other than their regularly-scheduled slots. But that won’t preclude others from producing content that also appeals to listeners.
There were similar concerns a decade ago over the World Wide Web. The business world would appropriate the Web and commercialize it, leaving it bereft of the creativity and energy that characterized early sites. Yes, the world of business has established itself on the Web. But that has not restricted the Web’s parallel growth in non-commercial directions. Just look at blogging, for example.
There are only so many hours people can spend listening to podcasts.
And..? There are only so many hours we can spend watching TV, reading books, visiting Web sites, sleeping…
Attention is an issue in general. People will prioritize. Nobody ever suggested podcasting would require people to listen to everything. I don’t have time to read every magazine I want to read, so I make decisions about the ones that are worth my attention and discard those that don’t make the cut. Why is podcasting any different?
“While about 65% of North America has Internet access, only about 40% has broadband access. A fraction of those people have portable digital music players which are the de facto device for listening to podcasts. That really shrinks (and, demographically speaking, narrows) the potential audience.”
Why does everybody insist on judging the potential for a new technology based on the current state and not the future state? Broadband’s momentum is clearly past the tipping point and that number will increase over the next few years. When the Web was introduced, penetration of the Internet into American homes and businesses was nowhere near its current 65%, and there were naysayers then, too, claiming the Web would never be significant because of its limited availbility. iPod sales alone (not to mention other devices) continue to gain speed. (There was a day when very few people owned something like a Sony Walkman, too, remember.) And, of course, you can listen to podcasts at your computer. Podcasting is less than a year old. In three or four years, the technology that enables it will support its inevitable move into the mainstream.
“Personally, I have no commute, and I find that I can’t listen to talking while I’m writing. So, that really limits the available hours for listening to podcasts.”
I have no commute, either, yet I listen to about 15 podcasts. Some are weekly, which makes it easier. But I listen on the treadmill (I used to listen to music), on flights, when I’m walking the dog, and when I’m driving to clients (instead of radio). If the content is compelling, you’ll find time to listen.
“Unlike a blog, anybody can’t do it.”
First of all, I’d argue the notion that anybody can do a blog. My mom couldn’t do one on a bet. She’d be calling every 15 minutes asking how to access it, what a trackback is, why her links aren’t working, and so on.
Second, it’s not as tough as Barefoot makes it out to be. All you need is a microphone connected to your audio-in. No, it won’t be as professional sounding as one produced via a mixer and other high-end equipment, but again, it’s the content that matters, not the production values.
But even if everybody can’t do it, so what? There are producers and there are consumers. I don’t understand why podcasting needs to be equated with blogs. They’re not the same by any stretch of the imagination.
Where is the audience given the decline in radio listeners?
Radio is in decline because of disappointment with its content. Podcasting is an alternative (along with satellite radio and personal digital devices like the iPod). The audience for podcasts will continue to grow over time. The catalysts for that growth will be…
The increasing ease of subscribing to podcasts as the technology improves
The growth in broadband
The growth in the use of personal digital devices
Improved content choices
Improved means of identifying the podcasts in which you’d be interested (there is already a service , http://www.49media.com, that lets you search for podcast content)
Heightened awareness of podcasting in general
Even today, the numbers are impressive. Forrester Research expects more than 6 million people will listen to podcasts in the next year or two.
There’s your audience, Darren.
There were also some arguments against podcasting posed in the comments added to Barefoot’s post:
“Podcasters are basically laying down a linear stream of words that you cannot skim, you must take it in exactly the linear order that it is presented, or not at all.”
Dare I say it again? So what? When I’m in my car, on the treadmill, or walking my dog, I don’t want non-linear media. Yes, audio is linear. That’s what I expect when I listen to something.
“Podcasting goes against everything the Web stands for. It demands that the user take things exactly as the podcaster presents it, which is often a rambling, unedited stream-of-consciousness rant. There are many talented writers, but there are few people who are capable of putting the care into podcasting that even a good amateur writer will put into their webpage. A good podcaster will have to be a good writer first, even before the technical requirements for a compelling audio presentation.”
So let me get this straight. You’re saying “bad podcasts are bad.” There’s a useful way to deal with this: Don’t listen to bad podcasts. While you’re at it, don’t listen to bad CDs, don’t go to bad movies, don’t read bad books, and don’t visit bad Web sites. Sheesh.
Why did posting a short mp3 file to your website and letting people download suddenly get a new fancy name?
The point has been missed. The idea behind podcasting is to use podcatching software (something that will become easier and easier) to subscribe to a podcast so it just shows up on your media player. A key point the critics of podcasting seem to miss is that podcasting isn’t Internet content. The Internet is merely used as a utility to handle distribution of the content. That represents a new use for the Net, but to classify podcasts as the same kind of content designed for consumption on the Web is a mistake.
I’m usually pretty cautious about predicting the sustainability of a new online medium. I never jumped on the “push” bandwagon, for instance. But podcasting, I believe, is here to stay. It will find its niche, it will find its audience. Those who don’t like it don’t have to listen. But I’ll go out on a limb and predict that some form of podcasting, evolved from its current nascent state, will be an integral part of the media mix in five years’ time.
Neville and I spoke about this on our podcast (http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz). Of course, you’ll have to listen to our podcast to hear what we had to say! I also think it’s worth mentioning that General Motors thinks there’s something to podcasting, since they’ve jumped into it. So do Warner Brothers and Volvo, which have started advertising on podcasts. Big companies like these rarely jump into media they don’t believe has a future.
2. Your Crisis Communication Plan Is Due For Maintenance
Any crisis communication plan that hasn’t been updated in at least the last 18 months if fundamentally useless. If you haven’t dusted off your plan lately, now’s the time.
The rapid evolution of citizen journalism and the collaborative Web has changed the way companies need to watch for looming crises, assess the reaction to crises, and respond. Citizen journalism, of course, is nothing particularly new, but the popularization of blogs and wikis—and the various developmental paths they have taken—have changed the dynamics of how a crisis unfolds. If you don’t think so, just ask the folks at Kryptonite, who experienced it firsthand when word spread through the blogosphere with unprecedented speed that their bicycle locks could be picked with a Bic pen.
Or ask Eason Jordan, who’s out of work at CNN because the cable news outlet didn’t respond fast enough to some questionable statements Jordan made to quell the outrage that surged from blog to blog in a matter of hours. Or ask Dan Rather. Or Jeff Gannon. Or…
There are two factors at play when a story hits the blogosphere. The first is the number of people influenced by what the bloggers are writing. The second is the attention paid to the spreading story by the media, which is often compelled to pick up the story and mainstream it, which makes it visible to all those people who don’t read blogs.
Most crisis communication plans these days don’t include setting up keyword searches on services like PubSub. They don’t address how to build goodwill with influential bloggers who could make or break your efforts. They don’t talk about setting up your own blog in order to have an existing relationship with your audience, much as Bigha did in advance of the story breaking about their laser points being used to aim at aircraft.
Worse, I suspect most of the crisis experts employed by the big PR agencies aren’t up to speed on the impact of citizen journalism. Some probably haven’t heard of blogs. Among these, several probably don’t take them seriously, dismissing them as “personal journals” that don’t wield influence and aren’t worth attention.
Many of the fundamentals of crisis communication remain in tact, such as the prioritization of audiences, honesty, concern for victims, avoidance of speculation and selection of appropriate spokespersons. But the new dimension is significant enough that it will inform many key aspects of the plan. If “Now is Too Late” is the mantra of crisis communication in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, “Yesterday is Too Late” can replace it in the era of citizen journalism.
Don’t wait. Get at that crisis plan before a crisis finds you.
3. Dutch Company Gives New Hires Intranet Blogs
Macaw is a Dutch company in which every one of its 110 employees has an internal blog. It’s not a company of blog-crazy workers. It’s just part of the new-hire package. The blog comes along with intranet access and a company e-mail account.
Still, 90 of Macaw’s employees use their blogs. Writes blogger Frerick Wacka, from whom I learned about Macaw, “The blogs are mainly used to share knowledge about technical issues or solutions. But also fun stuff, politics, current events or pictures appear as blog entries. The internal blog system started because of one employee who believed in the idea and wanted to give it a try.”
Wacka’s post includes a screen shot of one of the company’s intranet blogs, which clearly shows an employee sharing code. (Macaw’s an Internet solutions company.)
I like to think that Macaw’s just the first company to recognize the knowledge-sharing value of intranet blogs, and that the day will come when it’s the odd company that doesn’t provide a blog as part of the new-hire package.
4. Boeing Beefs Up Its Blog
A lot of criticism has been aimed at Randy’s Journal, the pseudo-blog from Boeing Vice President Randy Beseler. The only thing this site had in common with blogs was the blog-like entries. No comments, no trackbacks, no permalinks, no RSS feeds. You can debate the need to allow comments; I’ve noted here before that Dave Winer, the guy who (for all practical purposes) invented blogging, doesn’t think comments are a requirement, since you can use your own blog to comment on what you’ve read and use a trackback to link to the original post. But a blog that misses all these characteristics? That’s what I call a fake blog.
Now, Lee LeFever over at CommonCraft notes that Beseler’s blog has added two of these elements: permalinks and RSS feeds. LeFever points to an April 5 post on the Boeing blog that announces the addition of RSS feeds, but makes it pretty clear that the company just isn’t interested in comments. While you’re free to leave general comments (not associated with any particular post), Boeing is incredibly selective about which ones they’re willing to share publicly. Despite criticism that a blog isn’t a blog without feedback, Beseler replies,
“I didn’t realize that the blogosphere had such a rule. Sorry, that’s just not what we’re about. Sure, we’re going to post some of your comments. Even critical ones. But it’s not a free-for-all.”
GM takes a different approach, publishing all comments except the very few that violate standards of decency. GM is interested in building a dialogue with its customers. I suspect Boeing doesn’t need a blog to do that, since it has pretty tight relationships with its customers, primarily airlines. Permitting open commenting just wouldn’t provide Boeing with the same benefit it produces for GM.
One thing I like in the post is a clear definition of the blog’s purpose. Just as the GM Fastlane blog is dedicated to a discussion of cars—no matter how much others want leadership to talk about business decisions—Beseler’s blog also has an explicit focus:
“Here, we’re going to talk about the future of flight. The exciting things on the horizon for air travelers. The new trends and technologies that are shaping this exciting industry. Quite a few people have emailed to say that they’ve very much enjoyed reading about just those things in this blog.”
(Interesting, though, that the very next post had nothing to do with the future of flight, but was rather at get-well card to ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings, who announced he is battling lung cancer.)
More frequent posts wouldn’t hurt; The most recent post is dated last Friday. But all in all, I agree with LeFever: The addition of RSS and permalinks go a long way toward improving Boeing’s sole blogging effort.
5. Next Webinar: Drive Traffic To Your Intranet
Shel Holtz Webinars presents a repeat of one of our most popular sessions, “How to Drive Traffic to Your Intranet.” The session runs five consecutive weeks beginning Monday, May 5.
It doesn’t matter how good your intranet is. It can be well-written, beautifully designed, and have stellar navigation. It can contain everything an employee needs and still be a dismal failure if you can’t get employees to use it.
Put it another way: If you build it, they still won’t come!
In fact, virtually every communicator with intranet responsibility has the same complaint: We can’t get employees to use it.
You can take the first step to solving this problem by enrolling in the first repeat of this popular professional development session. This Webinar will provide you with a wealth of ideas and tools you can use to bring employees to your intranet in droves. You’ll learn how to…
Mount a campaign to raise awareness of the intranet
Keep the intranet top-of-mind after a campaign ends
Get your organization’s leaders to make the intranet a requirement for employees
Launch new features that renew interest
Pull readers to the intranet by pushing traditional communication at them
...and a lot more.
And the best part is that you won’t have to leave your desk. Webinars are not conducted in real time, so you can go to each lecture (virtually) when you have the time. There are five lectures in all posted on consecutive Mondays—the equivalent of a full-day workshop! Besides the lectures, you’ll get printed handouts, links to invaluable World Wide Web resources, and the opportunity to interact with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants. The cost is US $175. To register, visit http://webinar.holtz.com.
6. Will blogs replace press releases?
Scott Baradell cites an Economist article in which Bruce Lowry of Novell foresees blogs “completely replacing press releases within 10 years.”
The argument goes like this: The Net has promoted transparency. Your press releases don’t just go to a targeted segment of the press; they also get posted to Yahoo! and other sites. Since everybody sees all releases, companies need to be more consistent in their messages. So as long as companies are saying the same thing to everybody, why not just move from press releases to blogs?
Even if the premise were accurate, the idea is still absurd. The primary difference between a blog and a press release is that you can push the release to a list of people who should see it. You certainly can’t count on every editor and reporter in a given market or covering a certain beat to subscribe to your feed or routinely check your blog. Of course, some reporters are insisting that PR people distribute releases and pitches via RSS, and we all learned in PR 101 that you must accommodate the reporter’s contact preferences. Then there’s the use of press releaes to satisfy regulatory requirements such as communating substantive financial information consistently and concurrently to financial audiences.
Ultimately, a press release represents the company’s official on-the-record position. In court, the press release would have primacy over a statement made on a blog.
But the issue goes deeper than that.
I remember a couple years ago having the same discussion twice in a matter of weeks. The first time, I was having dinner with a group of PR agency reps who handled a major high-tech account. Knowing that press releases about this company would be posted to consumer news and business sites, the agency was elevating the language and technical lingo in the releases beyond the level at which the average reporter could understand it. “Our typical reader is an engineer, and our releases have to meet their needs,” I was told.
A couple days later, I was talking with a communicator who worked for a large telecommunications company. He articulated the same issue, except in his case the average reader was Joe or Jill Beercan. “We dumb down our press releases so a customer living in a trailer park can understand them,” he said.
I was appallled at both approaches. After all, there’s a reason they’re called press releases and the fact that they are made available to the general public doesn’t change the release’s main target. Every press release I ever wrote was designed to get a reporter to use it as the basis or inspiration for a story he’d write himself. I always envisioned a lazy editor whenever I saw one of my releases reproduced wholesale in a newspaper.
The idea that an organization shouldn’t target the right message to the right audience is ridiculous, even if any given release will show up online. The financial community looks for a different angle than the trade press.
Over at the Verizon media Web site, journalists can narrow down the releases they want to receive from the company so they see only content that is relevant to their interests. A reporter who writes the “Who’s News” column for the Atlanta Constitution’s business section could specify that she wants only releases dealing with executive staffing in Georgia. Press releases that match those criteria will be the only ones she gets. Currently, she’d get them by e-mail. RSS would be great. But could you target like that with a blog?
What to do, then, about the notion that everybody can read every press release? Should the agency working with the high-tech company produce releases a reporter can’t understand? Should the telecommuncations company write press releases at the third-grade level?
Press releases should be written for the press. The fact that they appear elsehwere is incidental. How much trouble would it be to add something like this to the press release boilerplate: “This release was written for the press. A consumer news release on this topic is available at…”
None of which suggests that company executives shouldn’t blog. Opening a channel of communcation between an organization’s leadership and key external audiences is one of the best business uses of blogs. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for press releases any more than the introduction of e-mail eliminated the need for telephones and faxes.
7. Don’t Miss “Writing For The Wired World”
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.
8. Site of the Month
Searching the Web with Google and other search tools is great, assuming what you need to search is text. What about all that audio out there? Now, along comes PodScope, which actually indexes audio and not only helps you find audio files (like podcasts) that contain your key search word, but will take you right to the part of the file that contains that word. I don’t know how they do this, but it’s incredible.
9. HC+T Update
- In May, I will present a half-day workshop for Adobe Systems, Inc. and do a keynote talk at an internal meeting at Aetna.
- I’ll be doing a couple workshops in June for Intel.
- I will help a New York-based health care company with its intranet
10. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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