Tuesday, May 31, 2005
HC+T Update: May 2005
The May 2005 e-mail newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology
HC+T Update
May 2005
1. Under The Wire
2. Spam, Blacklists, And The Social Web
3. RSS: The Full-Feed Versus Excerpt Debate
4. PR And Trademarks: Balancing Business Interests
5. Campaign To Promote Print Focuses On Print
6. Posts Count, Not The Number Of Blogs
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. Under The Wire
Whew! Talk about getting in under the wire! It’s about 11 p.m. on May 31. I’m sitting in a hotel in Washington, D.C., getting my May issue out with just about an hour left in May. At least I’m getting it out in May, even if you do get it in June!
To say it has been a busy month is the height of understatement…and June is going to be worse! I’ll actually be home for only seven days during June.
But it’s a monthly newsletter and I’ll get it out monthly, even if it IS at the very last possible moment. I hope you enjoy it. As usual, much of the content is repurposed from my blog. Be sure to read the very next item. With luck, it’ll inspire you to subscribe to my RSS feed and scrap email delivery.
2. Spam, Blacklists, And The Social Web
Spam and spammers suck. I want to make it abundantly clear that I despise spam and the cretinous subhuman vermin-like criminals who send it. Was that strong enough? I just want to leave doubt where I stand before I get to the point. Spam is killing email. People who used to trust their email now fear that their email won’t get through, getting caught instead in a spam filter. They wonder if they’re getting all the email they should; some email destined for them may have been caught in spam filters. And a visit to the email inbox has become an experience to dread as you have to cull through message after message, determining which is spam and which is legitimate, then acting on the spam. Some of us even spend time going through the spam that our filters have caught in order to identify any false positives.
That said, there are some issues with the services that identify domains sending spam you should know about if your company hosts a web site and, notably, if you or your organization has a blog or a podcast.
Neville Hobson, my podcasting co-host, got an email from Steve O’Keefe over at the International Association of Online Communicators. Steve was trying to send his member email newsletter, but the mail server was rejecting it. As he dug into the problem, he found that the server wouldn’t send the email because it contained the domain: http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz. That’s the domain for our podcast. It turns out the server was using a database of domains suspected of sending spam and rejecting any email that contained any of those domains anywhere in the text of their messages.
I sent an email to Jeff Chan who runs the SURBL service—one of many—that maintains such a database. This is not a company, an agency, or a spinoff of any formal entity (such as the World Wide Web Consortium or ICANN). It’s some people who are (justifiably) fed up with spam who have decided to do something about it. It turns out there are a lot of these RBLs around (an acronym for Real-Time Blackhole List). Internet Service Providers use these databases however they want to in order to try to keep these domains from being spread around the Net.
A few email exchanges with Jeff got our podcast blog removed from his blacklist and added to a whitelist. Then Neville found his personal domain, nevon.net, was also blacklisted; he had to go through the same rigamarole.
The process of getting un-blacklisted (de-blacklisted?) was relatively easy. Even over the Memorial Day weekend, Jeff Chan was responsive and understanding. One thing that concerns me, though, is that he noted other blacklist maintainers wouldn’t bother to respond at all. There is no set of guidelines among these RBLs that governs their behavior.
Another concern came from a comment in one of Jeff’s emails. He said, “I’d feel better if you had an email policy on your site.”
I’m no newcomer to the Net and its issues. An email policy is certainly necessary for any commercial web site. But a blog? We have never, not once, sent an email from the forimmediaterelease.biz domain. We never will. We accept email at the domain so our listeners can send us comments, but if we reply, we use our personal email accounts. Now, Technorati is tracking more than 10 million blogs. For any of those that set their own domain names (rather than using the typepad.com or blogspot.com domain), even though they don’t use email—in fact, they are all RSS adherents—their domain is at risk for blacklisting. And if somebody (like Steve O’Keefe in our case) doesn’t tell you that your domain has been blacklisted, you may never know.
I posted an item about this experience to my blog and was immediately attacked as a clueless dweeb who clearly didn’t understand the depth of the spam problem. The comments fell into a few broad categories:
- Spam is bad. We’re doing good. If a few innocent domains get caught up in the process, that’s just the price of vigilance.
- You should have directed your anger at the spammers who created the necessity for this process, not the people who are trying to do something about it. (I didn’t think I was angry, but you can read my post and tell me if I’m wrong.)
- This wasn’t the RBL’s fault, but the fault of the ISP that misused the database.
- We’d love to notify people whose domains we’ve blacklisted, but hey, we’re just volunteers and we don’t have time and the technology doesn’t make it easy.
- The Net shouldn’t evolve to accommodate ev eryone. Everyone who uses the Net should learn the technology as well as the rest of us have.
All of which misses the point. I have no problem with these folks—as disorganized and vigilante-like as they are—doing their best to protect the rest of us from spam. But the web is opening up to more and more people who are not steeped in technology. Starting a blog requires nothing more than a visit to a blog-hosting web site and the completion of a form. Maintaining the blog itself is just as easy. So now we have millions of ordinary people using the web in its most utilitarian form who may be blacklisted and never know it, know how to find out whether they are or not, or determine how to deal with it.
My post was meant to point out that the RBLs haven’t yet caught up to the world of blogging in terms of their expectations and policies (e.g., an email policy on the site), and to point out to those who maintain sites that they need to be aware that they could wind up on a blacklist, and that some of the blacklisters don’t care if you’re innocent. Be warned.
If you want to read the entire comment thread—and it is fascinating—it’s here:
http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/comments/blacklisting_blogs/
And if you want to find out if your domain is blacklisted by any of these services, use the form on this page:
http://www.rulesemporium.com/cgi-bin/uribl.cgi
3. RSS: The Full-Feed Versus Excerpt Debate
The alternative to email mailing lists, as you know if you’ve read this newsletter for any length of time, is RSS. Really Simple Syndication lets visitors to your site subscribe to your “feed” and receive updates on their news readers. The updates arrive when your feed—just a text file—is updated, not when you get around to sending the email. Best known for blogs and podcasts, RSS works perfectly well for ordinary web site content. I offer a feed from my business web site home page, for example. If you subscribe to my feed, you’ll find out whenever I change something on my home page.
As RSS gains momentum, more and more people are reading web pages in their news readers without ever visiting the originating site. This disturbs some people, but it’s a reality we need to deal with: News readers could well disintermediate much of the World Wide Web.
In a recent Communication World article, internal communications thought leader Roger D’Aprix complained that the world of online communication has created a flood of information, but that nobody has helped people sift through all that new data. I suspect Roger isn’t aware of RSS news readers, since that’s exactly what they do. I’m able to read 500 blogs and sites each morning in about 45 minutes because I do it all within my news reader. I could never visit all those sites and pages individually. As I find feeds are less worthwhile to me than I had originally thought, it’s easy to remove the feed. It’s equally easy to add new feeds as I find them.
There are two ways to handle RSS feeds. One is to include the entire article or post in the feed. The other is to offer only an excerpt. The idea behind the excerpt is to tease you with the information so that you’ll want to visit the actual site in order to read the entire piece. Visiting the site is important to those who have advertising on their pages, who monitor visits to the site, and who rely on their sites to drive commerce or convey branding.
The reality, though, is that I find myself removing feeds with partial items. For me—and for many others, based on what I’ve been reading—the benefit of the reader is the fact that it keeps you from having to visit the site. I don’t have the time to visit each page. And, as readers become more common, larger segments of the audience will resent being dragged to a site because the author didn’t include the entire item in the feed.
That’s the idea behind disintermediation. You used to have to visit a web page in order to take advantage of the content, but now a new technology makes it easier to keep up with all those pages without having to visit each one. Web sites become unnecessary. Content producers need to figure out how to get their messages across without the benefit of slick web design.
Of course, web pages aren’t going anywhere. You still need to visit sites to conduct research, buy stuff, find answers. RSS feeds are just for the delivery of content, not unlike an email newsletter. But if you offer feeds, take my advice. If you want readers who deliberately subscribed to your feed to read it and keep subscribing, deliver full text.
4. PR And Trademarks: Balancing Business Interests
I used to work for Mattel. From 1984 to 1988 I was a communicator at the company’s headquarters, then located in Hawthorne, California. I started out managing employee communications and was director of corporate communications by the time Mattel and I parted ways. During my time at Mattel, I came to understand that the company’s defense of its trademarks had assumed kneejerk proportions. Any perceived violation of the trademark prompted swift legal action with no consideration for the consequences. Nobody at Mattel ever dreamed that the fallout from such action might actually be worse than the damage caused by the violation. “If we let this violation go unchallenged, it’ll be harder to challenge the next one,” was the thinking.
I’ve just read about a suit Mattel has filed against against a Canadian restaurant called Barbie’s. The restaurant name has nothing to do with the plastic icon. Rather it’s a reference to the Australian slang for barbecue (as in, “Throw another shrimp on the barbie”). Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English includes only one definition for the word “barbie,” and it’s the reference to the Australian slang. Regardless of the fact that the Webster’s listing legitimizes the use of the word, Mattel believes the name could cause confusion in the marketplace (Mattel: “Our customers are idiots”), so the company is taking the Quebec restaruanteur to the Canadian Supreme Court, which agreed yesterday to hear the case.
When I worked at Mattel, I was also heavily involved with the Los Angeles chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). Another IABC member, who worked walking distance from Mattel’s offices at TRW Space and Electronics, was a dynamo communicator named (can you feel it coming) Barbie Falconer. She eventually left communications and opening a clothing boutique. I’m not sure what it was called, but I suspect Mattel would have taken her to court if she had called it Barbie’s Boutique, even though it’s her name. Mattel owns the trademark, but it’s worth remembering that the Barbie doll was named after the daughter of Mattel co-founder Ruth and Elliott Handler. They also own the trademark for the Ken doll, named after the Handler’s son. Are they suing every non-Mattel use of the name Ken? Ken’s Auto Body? Ken’s All-Nite Diner? Ken’s Bail Bonds?
Nah, just Barbie, because Ken’s not the icon Barbie is. But I wonder if Mattel has ever measured the fallout of such legal action. There was the Aqua song lyric, “I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world,” which led Mattel to sue. I thought that was a bad idea, as were several other suits Mattel filed, including one against a photographer who used the doll for some, um, impressionistic photos posted to the web. And I think the suit against the Quebec restaurant is a bad idea.
The obvious backlash is over the perceived company with deep pockets going after the small business without the resources to defend itself. But I think there are worse ramifications than being seen as a bully. When I worked at Mattel—admittedly, a long time ago—the company employed different public relations agencies for different product lines. The agency that handled the Hot Wheels account, for example, specialized in events. At the time, the company was conducting Hot Wheels races at shopping malls. Barbie was represented by Rogers and Cowans. This is noteworthy because Rogers and Cowans’ specialty is personalities. That’s right; Barbie was not a toy, but a personality. And if she is being deliberately promoted as a personality, then she’s fair game for such references as those that appeared in the Aqua song lyrics. It shouldn’t take a smart attorney long to figure out that this revelation could be part of a legal defense.
The worst possible case, though, would be for a court to determine that “barbie” does have meaning outside the trademark and, in fact, has become so commonly applied that it has transcended the trademark and has entered the realm of common usage (like band-aid, kleenex, and xerox). This would be like a death sentence for a brand already under pressure from the success of the competing Bratz doll line. And Mattel could avoid it if it would just stop jerking its knee and be more discretionary when picking its trademark fights.
Tonight, in sympathy for the poor beseiged restuarnteur in Quebec, I think I’ll barbecue dinner. No shrimp, I’ll probably throw some steaks on the barbie. Got that, Mattel? I’m going to throw some steaks on the barbie. Sue me.
5. Campaign To Promote Print Focuses On Print
The Print Council is going on the offensive. With the assistance of a coalition of eight public relations agencies that have banded together to produce pro bono work, The Print Council is undertaking a campaign to remind content producers of print’s virtues. According to a Pressbox article, the work these eight agencies will perform includes writing press releases and backgrounders. One will also provide advertising services.
It’s amusing to think of a campaign to support print resulting in a bunch of articles appearing in newspapers. It could be that one or more of the agencies involved plans to go beyond press releases and backgrounders and tap into the Net, but the brief item makes no suggestion that the agencies plan to pitch bloggers or other online channels.
I’m delighted to see The Print Council make this move. Print continues to be an important tool with a number of attributes not available online. It’s portable, for example. You don’t see people taking their laptops to the beach, to bed, or into the bathroom. (Cell phones have found their way into the bathroom, but not computers.) You can make notes in the margin of a printed document. You can put it into a file folder and retrieve in a decade or two. You can push print at an audience; they must pull Web content. People are inclined to actually read rather than scan long tracts of text in print. Most people finding a lengthy article online that they want to read are inclined to print it out, which is why office consumption of paper is up. I don’t think anybody has tried to calculate the number of email messages and web pages that have been printed, but the it must be staggering. So much for the paperless office. Even my 16-year-old daughter, a digital native, scoffs at the idea of reading a novel on a monitor.
Strategic communicators select their tools based on their strengths, and sometimes print emerges as the best tool for a given communication effort. But strategic communicators also recognize that the best communication efforts integrate more than one channel. Without giving it much thought, I can think of several ways to tap into the blogosphere as part of a campaign to heighten awareness of print’s benefits. Based on the article introducing The Print Council’s efforts, it seems that these eight agencies haven’t considered the online avenue. I hope that’s just an oversight in the article. Print rocks, but I would be sad to see this campaign fail because of an inability to comprehend the importance of the Net and the blogosphere as a channel for getting the message out.
6. Posts Count, Not The Number Of Blogs
Interesting note from the Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik (by way of Frank Barnako’s Internet Daily) about measuring the growth of blogs. The total number of blogs isn’t a relevant measure, Bialik suggests, since there is wide disagreement about the total number blogs (between 10 and 32 million). With new blogs being started and bloggers abandoning existing blogs, it’s a moving target at best.
Easier to track -— and more pertinent -—is the total number of blog posts contributed each day. According to Barnako, “That’s an indication of activity and life. Technorati says it tracks as many as 900,000 postings a day, while Blog Pulse says it sees about 450,000.”
Where Bialik fails to grasp blogs’ significance is in his insistence that low readership signifies low importance. Readership volume isn’t the point in blogs; the initial Kryptonite bike lock posts, for example, appeared on the blogs of bicycle enthusiasts that did not enjoy large audiences. What they did enjoy was a trust network among those who did read the blogs. Even if the audience for one of thee blogs was fewer than 10, it only took one to write about hit on his or her own blog and link or trackback to the original post in order to begin the rapid penetration of the message until it reached Engadget and then The New York Times.
Those 450,000-900,000 postings each day, then, can have a huge impact, even if they’re posted to blogs with limited visibility. It’s not the volume; it’s the network.
7. Internal Uses Of Blogs
Among the letters Business Week received in response to its cover story on blogging came this one: “What you nail is that blogs have become a killer app for public relations and marketing. But it’s less clear that they are effective for internal communications. For that, the blog format is very much overhyped.”
I’ve been engaged in employee communication for 28 years. When I started as an employee communications representative at ARCO in 1977, we used manual typewriters, a Compugraphics typesetting machine, and our primary communication vehicle was the weekly newspaper, the ARCOspark. I’ve watched all the advances in communication and few are as exciting as blogs.
Not that blogs will replace other forms of communication. As is always the case, this new medium will be additive. The best companies will apply them where they improve communication. But the opportunities for blogs internally are huge, mostly (but not exclusively) as an enhancement to knowledge sharing. Contrary to what some marketers of very expensive knowledge databases would have you believe, knowledge sharing is a person-to-person activity, not a machine-to-person activity. Blogs can facilitate that exchange better than most other tools.
Here’s a list of the uses to which blogs can be put internally. I’m sure there are more I haven’t thought of, but at least it’s a place to start:
Executive blogs -— Intel’s Paul Otellini finds a blog a far better vehicle for conveying his thoughts to employees than a traditional CEO’s column. The commenting feature has turned the vehicle into a dialogue, allowing the CEO to learn as much from employees as employees learn from him. Aside from the CEO, blogs provide business unit leaders with a tool for keeping their staffs up to date and up to speed.
Alerts —- If there’s a trend in internal communications that makes me crazy, it’s the use of e-mail to communicate single news items. An e-mail from the CEO announcing a major initiative looks just the same —- carries the same appearance of importance -— as one announcing that the server will be down for maintenance for two hours on Sunday night. I’d much rather see IT set up a blog to post server announcements. Employees who need to know can subscribe to the RSS feed and stay up to speed. Those who don’t care don’t need that notification to clutter their in-boxes. The same idea would work for personnel announcements (“Please welcome Betty Cliff as the new administrative assistant in the Adelaide, Australia sales office”) and extracurricular activities (employee birthdays, service anniversaries, softball league updates, etc.).
Projects —- One of the best uses of blogs internally is to provide daily updates on projects. Not only would any employee be able to see the status of a project, but the organization maintains a record -— institutional memory —- of exactly what it took to get the project done. Project team members can also benefit from a group blog where they can share information and provide updates without having to hold a time-wasting team meeting.
Individual employee blogs -— If I’ve done some work or learned something other employees might find valuable, I can post it to my blog. Those who find the information I share valuable would read my blog or get my feed; those who didn’t wouldn’t. (The use of an RSS news reader addresses the concern that reading intranet blogs will take too much time. A quick scan of the headlines will help an employee identify useful information.) A Dutch software company where every employee has a blog has led employees to share code they have written, for instance, eliminating the need for another employee to duplicate work or spend hours trying to track down whether such code has been developed.
Departmental —- Who reads department update memos? A departmental blog, though, could be a quick and easy tool for departments to provide updates to the rest of the company on what’s going on with its staff and projects.
Business literacy -— I love the idea of a blog that provides brief updates about customers and competitors in as close to real time as internal communication has ever seen.
Intranets are embracing content management systems. What is a blog, after all, other than a cheap, easy-to-use, lightweight content management system? Add the comments (for dialogue) and trackbacks (for flagging important or popular items), and blogs become powerful tools for internal communications. Perhaps that’s why companies like The Walt Disney Company are embracing them and why they’ll eventually become a standard employee communication tool.
8. 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.” (It’s one of the big reasons I’m so busy in June.)
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.
9. Site of the Month
Amidst all the hot air being expended on both sides of the “are-bloggers-journalists” debate, vlogs -— video blogs —- could sneak in under the radar offering a new kind of journalism that manages to elude the controversy.
Rocketboom is my new favorite daily pleasure. A daily three-minute video, Rocketboom includes all the elements of a blog, including comments (which pop up so you can review them while watching the video), archives, and hyperlinks. “Anchor” Amanda Congdon -— a New York-based performer —- handles most of the reporting, although a team of correspondents from across the US pitch in to report on local happenings, such as the Cinco de Mayo celebration in Los Angeles.
Congdon and her team -— along with producer Andrew Baron -— have been at this since October 2004, producing the video Monday through Friday, and they’re obviously having a good time. The videos feature more attitude than you would think could fit in three minutes. Most installments are presented from behind the archetypal anchor desk, some from a location.
Despite the unconventional approach Rocketboom takes to its reporting, it is, nonetheless, reporting. Mainstream TV news reporters most likely would turn their nose up at Rocketboom, but audiences could gravitate toward this kind of offbeat news coverage. In fact, one article about Rocketboom appearing in the Washington Post goes so far as to suggest that Rocketboom could represent the future of TV news.
Web purists decry the notion of vlogs of any kind, arguing that the linear nature of video runs counter to the non-linear character of the Web. The notion is absurd, of course, as broadband adds alternative characteristics to the Web, making it a delivery mechanism for all kinds of media. Non-linear Web pages will continue to thrive, but more and more content that doesn’t fit that mold will be accessible online. We might call this “The Delivery Web,” joining “The Reference Web” (traditional Web pages) and “The Collaborative Web” (blogs, etc.). Podcasting, for example, would fit in the “Delivery Web” category.
Hate linear online content like Rocketboom as they may, these purists will just have to put up with it. Rocketboom boasts about 25,000 daily downloads. (What blogger wouldn’t love to have those kinds of numbers?) Once other vlogger/reporters begin adding their reports to the vlogosphere (I didn’t really just call it that, did I?) you’ll be able to assemble your own daily 30-minute video newscast, leaving The CBS Evening News and its ilk to struggle to find an audience.
Most vlogs (and there aren’t all that many yet) are shot with webcams in home offices and bedrooms, just a talking head speaking what could just as easily have been written in a blog. The production values behind Rocketboom require more effort than most vloggers are likely to want to put into their efforts, but there are probably enough enthusiastic amateur producers out there to create a niche space for Rocketboom-like Web-based programming. If the efforts of Amanda and her crew are any indication of what that will mean, I can’t wait.
Rocketboom: http://www.rocketboom.com
10. HC+T Update
- I’m conducting an audit of a communication process for a major international non-profit organization
- I’m conducting my “Writing for the Wired World” workshop for several organizations in the months ahead, including NRECA and First Data Corporation
- If you’re going to be at the IABC International Conference in Washington DC in June, don’t miss the session Toby Ward and I are conducting on Wednesday morning. I promise, you haven’t seen a conference presentation like it
11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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