Sunday, July 31, 2005
HC+T Update: July 2005
The July 2005 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology
HC+T Update
July 2005
1. Under The Wire
2. Press Releases For All
3. London PR Agency Launches An Emergency Response Blog
4. It’s Not Just The Unhappy Customers Who Blog
5. Call For A PR Blacklist Should Be A Wake-Up Call
6. Province Of Alberta Bans Keystroke Logging
7. Study Reveals Negative PR Impact Of Google Searches
8. Blog Design An Obstacle To Acceptance
9. Site of the Month
10. HC+T Update
11. 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
It’s almost midnight on the East Coast of the US and I’m sneaking this installment of HC+T Update out just under the wire…again. But it’s still July here in New York, so it’s still the July issue, even though you, no doubt, are reading it in August.
I’ve been busy! I just wrapped up the last three stops on the Ragan Communications “Writing for the Wired World” tour. I’ve had several consulting engagements. And the big news: I’ve been involved in contract negotiations for a new book. Along with my co-author, Ted Demopolous, I’ll be writing “Blogging for Business,” a how-to book that’ll be published by Dearborn Financial Press.
Anyway, I’ve got a lot of good stuff for your reading pleasure, so enough with the self-promotion and on with the content.
2. Press Releases For All
Back in April, I wrote about a discussion that had been taking place online about the idea that blogs could replace press releases. The notion has picked up steam since then, and recently Amy Gahran, who writes about a variety of communication-related issues, challenged PR people to find more creative ways to communicate than the press release. I wrote, in my blog, why some press releases remain valid.
In part of his response to my post, LA-based PR agency president Eric Schartzman wrote, “...it’s tough, in today’s 24/7 news cycle where everyone has access to the newswires online, the segregate a news releases to just the news media.”
Yeah, it’s tough. That doesn’t mean that it’s never desirable.
I encountered two instances of organizations that embraced this notion that press releases are for everybody, although they were oppositve examples. In the first, a high-tech company explained that their primary audience—sophisticated programmers and systems engineers—were far better versed in their field than the average reporter covering the company. Therefore, they wrote their news releases over the heads of the average journalist, unconcerned that they might get less coverage. Since their primary audience found releases on their site as well as other news release venues (Yahoo!, for instance), it was more important that they get news that was meaningful for them.
The other company, a telecommunications outfit, explained that their typical customer could live in a trailer park and have the IQ of a 10-year-old. In order for their news to be comprehensible to the lowest common denominator, they had to dumb down their press releases despite the fact that this rendered them far less useful to the media. (My friend Pete Shinbach wonders if an SEC violation might lurk in this line of reasoning.)
I don’t think either are good solutions. The goal of a press release is to get press. Not coverage in blogs or bars or parks or beauty salons. (If the press release does its job, people will read it in the press and then talk about it in blogs and bars and parks…) You have to love the web because, more than any other channel, it enables the kind of narrowcasting required to craft messages designed to meet the needs of different audiences. Note I didn’t say spin the messages differently. The simple fact is that different audiences have different needs and interests. Employees, for instance, have a different take on news than, say, the investment community because their context is different.
I recall the first time I produced an annual report. Having never done one before, I sat down and listed the various audiences the annual report would reach. The list reached something like 13 or 14, including individual investors, institutional investors (like fund managers), employee-shareholders, prospective employees, key customers, strategic partners, investment analysts…you get the picture. The perspectives of each audience differed, but I could produce only one version. It was a classic case of one-size-fits-all, even if it doesn’t.
So I was intriguted the first time I saw a web-based annual report with two distinct paths: one for individual investors and one for institutional investors. The only difference was jargon. Fund managers got the version laden with financial terms they inherently understood, while individual investors got a version that spelled out the meaning of each term. Brilliant.
So why not produce press releases for the press, written in news style (inverted pyramid) so they can be adapted quickly to trade publications and other vehicles, then produce a consumer version for the company website (or even delivered via a corporate blog)? The press release version would be readily accessible for anyone who wanted to read it on the media site, addressing any concerns about transparency. In fact, it increases transparency, since any discrepancies between the two (or three or four) versions would be instantly visible.
Which leaves only the issue of all those venues where the press release will appear over which the company has no control (Yahoo! jumps to mind yet again). That, ultimately, is no big deal. Press releases come with a nifty little feature called a “boilerplate,” the last paragraph that lists company particulars. How hard would it be to insert the following into the boilerplate: “This release was prepared for media use. To read a consumer version of this news, please visit our website at…”
Thus we can narrowcast, satisfying the differing needs of our diverse audiences, while increasing transparency and embracing all appropriate channels. Kinda like having one’s cake and eating it, too.
3. London PR Agency Launches An Emergency Response Blog
If you haven’t read Niall Cook’s description of the blog Hill & Knowlton’s London office created to address the terrorist situation, it’s worth your time. After determining that email was insufficient, the H&K team began using SMS (cell phone text messaging) and a blog to keep employees updated on “the situation in the city, office, and on public transport, as well as any contingency plans we need to put in place.”
“Accessible outside the firewall, but securely, it allows staff to check in whenever there is a security alert to see what the current state of play is. Because it’s a blog, it also has an RSS feed that staff can subscribe to (assuming their reader supports authentication). Finally, it’s incredibly easy for our emergency response team (including members of our excellent crisis communications group) to post updates to it.”
The blog took minutes to create, since it was just a new blog added to H&K’s existing suite of blogs. Niall’s post includes a screen shot. This is an excellent example of a PR agency practicing what it preaches.
4. It’s Not Just The Unhappy Customers Who Blog
Rob Safuto, creator of the terrific Podcast NYC, is out with a new blog. The Red Room Chronicles is dedicated to Marriott Hotels. In his initial posts, Safuto wrote,
I’ve been a Marriott Rewards member for years as I’ve been a traveling consultant for the IT and now Energy Industry since 1998. After staying in so many Marriott’s I’ve come to value inside information on the company for both business and leisure purposes. My hope is that this blog will become a fine resource for travelers everywhere who prefer Marriott Hotels.
This product-focused blog is the polar opposite of “Discover the Truth about the Land Rover Discovery 3” blog, inaugurated by a vey unhappy customer. The blog chronicles the customer’s experience and Land Rover’s response (or lack thereof) and represents a public relations nightmare for the organization. (They could certain turn the situation to their advantage by taking certain steps, but as it stands, the blog is a very public expose of the company’s lack of customer focus.)
Safuto, on the other hand, is a happy customer who prefers not to stay anywhere but Marriott. His blog represents a pure opportunity for Marriott. Whether they capitalize on that opportunity (by taking Safuto into their confidence and feeding him advance information, as they would a reporter covering the brand), “Red Room Chronicles” could become—as Safuto hopes it will—a source of information for people with an interest in Marriott.
It’s not the first blog of its kind by any stretch of the imagination. All those Macintosh-focused blogs (including the ones Apple sued) embrace exactly the same concept. But the introduction of a blog on something as non-tech as a hotel chain indicates that we’ll see more and more of this approach. It could affect everything from company PR to the role of an investment analyst.
Does it mean there’s no role for PR? As Todd Cochrane suggested on Geek News Central, does’t this just mean companies should can their PR staffs and encourage—or even pay—more Rob Safutos to blog about the company? Not on your life. In addition to the things the PR professionals do that are behind the scenes, communicators can provide support to these bloggers and use the blogs’ contents to reinforce other communication efforts.
5. Call For A PR Blacklist Should Be A Wake-Up Call
On his blog, Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo asks for an email blacklist of tech-oriented PR agencies. “I get so damned much spam (I mean “pitches”) that I’m starting to think that life would be better if I just blocked email from all the big names in Tech PR,” Zawodny complains. He doesn’t even want to omit the domains of PR agencies Yahoo works with, like Voce. Most of the comments offer advice on how to set up such a list. One journalist commented that he wouldn’t mind taking advantage of it and offers a short list as a starter.
It may seem, at first blush, that Zawodny is joining the anti-PR meme spreading through the blogosphere (e.g., Russell Beattie’s idiotic rant titled “PR People Are Morons”). Some of these assaults, though, are justified. I don’t personally know anybody who sends massive numbers of press releases and pitches via email to everybody on a generic distribution list, but I know the practice exists and is widely used. Zawodny isn’t alone in dreading the amount of email spewing forth from PR agencies. Before he left the San Jose Mercury News, Dan Gillmor let it be known that he was giving up on email altogether because of the deluge of pitches and releases swamping his in-box. If you wanted to pitch him, he said, let him subscribe to your RSS feed.
The practitioners who apply this shotgun approach to getting ink are damaging the profession. There are thousands of clued-in PR professionals who would target a journalist (or an influential blogger like Zawodny) only after doing his homework and determining that the reporter and the story are a good match. A blacklist would catch all those legitimate queries in the same filter as the “pitch spam.” Not only would the pitch never reach the target, but the journalist could miss a story in which he’s actually interested.
It’s not just Zawodny. Steve Lubetkin points to a post from Boston Heard reporter Brett Arends attacking US PR shops, and notes that PR people are circling the wagons when they should be paying close attention to Arends’ complaint:
“Nearly ever day I find myself staring at the telephone handset in disbelief after dealing with yet another example of ‘Podunk PR’
“Press offices that don’t return calls - from a daily newspaper - for four days. And are then surprised to find that the story has come and gone. Media teams that can’t confirm basic facts about their company. Media offices where everyone has left by 4:51 pm on a big news day. This sort of stuff would be a disciplinary offense in any decent public relations office in the U.K.
“But it’s amazingly common over here. And it isn’t just Boston. It’s true in New York and elsewhere.”
The response from the PR community to Arends’ complaint is to point the finger at the media, recalling all those reporters who never returned calls. But the problem is real. Arends notes, “There are many good public relations people around, people who are professional, hard-working, competent, helpful and friendly.” But these are not enough to prevent him from forming a generally negative perception of PR.
If we, as a profession, wish these online attacks would stop, then we have to do something about cleaning our own house. We have tolerated the worst practices of public relations long enough. Enough bad PR from the highly visible minority of practitioners who engage in it will result in more blacklists, more reporters who dismiss agencies and turn to alternate sources. Without any influence, why would clients hire agencies?
In the book Enterprise One-to-One, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers suggest that complaints are a company’s best feedback. By listening to complaints, companies can focus on fixing problems that make a genuine difference to customers. It’s time for the PR profession to listen to these online complaints so we can fix what is hurting our image. We can dismiss those that are just plain stupid, of course (such as the assertion that no PR is really necessary when blogs alone will do the trick). But torrents of unwanted press releases and PR offices that don’t return calls? These are things we should do something about.
While the profession cannot force individual practitioners or companies to improve their behaviors, we can take some steps:
Our professional associations, notably IABC and PRSA, can undertake awareness and education campaigns to create highlight the practices that are besmirching the profession. Both associations can try to put some teeth in their ethics policies so that they are more than documents trotted out at conferences.
PR bloggers can advocate more strongly for the best practices clients and journalists deserve. (Has anybody thought of a PR bloggers association to advocate for best practices?)
There’s more we can do, no doubt. But if PR is to survive and thrive in this transparent world in which we exist, we need to get the low-rent practitioners to clean up their act.
6. Province Of Alberta Bans Keystroke Logging
The director of the Parkland Regional Library in Lacombe, Alberta, had some doubts about the productivity of one particular employee. Being the progressive manager that she is, she decided to assess the worker’s productivity by installing keystroke logging software. This application does just what its name suggests: It records an employee’s every keystroke so it can be reviewed later by Big Br…er…the employee’s manager.
The employee found out and filed a complaint with the province’s information and privacy commissioner, who ruled that the action violated the Freedom of Information and Protection Privacy Act. The Globe and Mail has the story.
The library director is miffed by the ruling. She claims that it’s hard to measure the productivity for the kind of job this employee performed, and “We thought that using an objective check through the computer would be the most fair and objective way to do that.” Now she fears the ruling has removed an objective means of measuring performance from employers’ arsenal. If this blog were focused on Human Resources, I would rail at length about the ineptness of a manager unable to establish performance measures upfront and then assess the worker’s productivity based on an assessment of performance against those measures. But this is a communications blog, so I’ll stick to my knitting and just note that keystroke logging is another in a long list of engagement killers.
Regular readers can stop here. You’ve heard this rant before.
Engagement is a goal most executives want their employee populations to achieve. Highly engaged workforces, research shows, produce double-digit growth for their employers. Engaged employees are passionate about their work. They want to go the extra mile to meet goals. They want to pull other employees along. A variety of factors play into commitment. Trust is one of the most important. So what does it say to employees who know the company has no problem with secretly recording every key they tap on their computer keyboards? “I’ve done nothing wrong, I work hard, I produce results, but they don’t trust me.” That will build a passionate, committed, engaged workforce. Even considering only one employee who was suspected of slacking (it was never proved), other employees know it could happen to them. In fact, they have no way of knowing their keystrokes aren’t being logged right now.
So maybe the Parkland Regional Library director has lost the only tool she’s clever enough to use to assess her staff’s productivity. On the other hand, there’s now a glimmer of hope that her staff can begin to build a sense of trust. While it’s too bad that it took government action to open that possibility, I’m still applauding Alberta for its decision.
7. Study Reveals Negative PR Impact Of Google Searches
As if we need further proof that organizations no longer control their messages, Market Sentinel has released the results of a study that spotlight the negative PR implications of Google searches. The study involved Google search results for the 50 top grocery brands in the UK. Of those searches, two out of five included negative messages in the top 10 search results. The negative messages might be insults, misinformation, or organized campaigns.
According to Robin Langford, writing in NetImperative:
“Mark Rogers, CEO at Market Sentinel said that brand-owners need to pay more attention to online detractors. ‘Corporate PRs and brand owners don’t have to give this crucial ground to their critics. Online detractors can be out-thought, out-argued and out-marketed,’ Rogers said.
The white paper (PDF file) detailing the study results -— “Search is Brand” —- is available from Market Sentinel (link below). Don’t dismiss them if you don’t work in the grocery world. The results translate into just about any industry or market sector.
http://www.marketsentinel.com/files/Searchisbrand280605.pdf
8. Blog Design An Obstacle To Acceptance
One reason all the gushing about how blogs will replace press releases and even PR in general is so silly is that most people still don’t pay any attention to them. A study released Monday by New York-based Catalyst Group Design suggests the design of blogs is a major obstacle to blogs entering the mainstream. The company selected one blog—BusinessWeek’s personal finance blog “Well Spent”—because it typifies the elements and look of most blogs. Study participants—selected because they weren’t blog readers but were otherwise web-savvy—were taken to the blog and asked to react.
Most didn’t know they were looking at a blog at all and were surprised and confused when told they were. Many said they would expect a blog to indicate clearly that it’s a blog. (As I look around the PR blogs I read, few use the word “blog” prominently in their titles, subheads, or other identifiers.) The elements that help most of us identify blogs—an author’s photo, categories, archives, blogrolls, etc.—didn’t register with the test subjects. Some other findings:
Most participants couldn’t figure out how to navigate around the blog and were confused by the different sections (categories, trackbacks, etc.).
There was no clear understanding about how commenting worked. Would they appear immediately? Require approval? Result in an answer?
Every single participant agreed that RSS was confusing, and that blogs don’t help aid in the understanding of what RSS is, how it works, or why they should use it.
When starting on a lower-level page, participants were unclear about the purpose of a home page might be or what they would find there.
At the end of the session, participants said they liked the blog and would be inclined to read more, but complained that blogs don’t offer enough assistance to newcomers to help them figure out the various elements and how to use them. (Trackbacks were particularly confounding.)
The downloadable PDF version of the 19-page report includes a useful summary of findings that could serve as a roadmap for improving blog interfaces. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt for existing blogs to incorporate some basic how-to’s or FAQs for people visiting the blog. I’m already making some notes about some simple additions and enhancements to this blog to simplify the experience for visitors who have not knowingly seen a blog before.
If the report mirrors general perceptions of blogs, though, it’ll be a while—at least through the next phase of blog design’s evolution—before they are mainstream enough to fulfill the expectations so many starry-eyed bloggers believe they are ready to fulfill right now.
9. Site of the Month
Intelliseek has been in the search game for some time, before Google was a gleam in its founders’ eyes. The venerable search organization has just released Blogpulse, a blog search engine with several twists. More than just a way to find blogs, Blogpulse has several features that rank and compare blogs. It’s Profile is particularly compelling, showing just how connected any given blogger is. Be sure to try out all the features on Blogpulse; they’re free.
Blogpulse: http://www.blogpulse.com
10. HC+T Update
- In August, I’ll present two full-day workshops at Intel’s headquarters, one on writing for the web and the other on engagement
- Melcrum Communications is about to issue a white paper I wrote on new communication technologies, running the gamut from blogs and wikis to Skype
- I’ve agreed to speak at Podcast Hotel, a podcasting conference from Corante that’ll be held in Portland, Oregon in September
11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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