Monday, October 24, 2005
HC+T Update: October 2005
The October 2005 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.
HC+T Update
October 2005
- Ten guidelines for B2B podcasting
- Research supports role of leader communication
- Liar, liar
- Unbelievable blogging stats unveiled
- Does Weblogs acquisition herald a reintegration of the web?
- Can blogs turn a film into a blockbuster?
- Video iPod won’t kill podcasting
- Google takes to a blog for issues management
- Site of the Month
- HC+T Update
- 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. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.
1. Ten Guidelines for B2B Podcasting
In my “Writing for the Wired World” workshops, I begin by pointing out a fundamental difference between business websites and everything else on the web. When you build a family site (birthday party pictures and the like) or a fan site (if you love your Mini Cooper, for instance) or a performance art site (fun with Flash, for example), your visitors are happy to click here and there to see what you’re offering. When people come to a business site, however, they know exactly what they want. With laser-like intensity, they will zero in (or, at least, try to) on the answer to their question, the solution to their problem. Visitors to business sites have agendas. They’re not interested in following any links that won’t get them to what brought them.
Similar distinctions apply to business podcasting -– particularly B2B podcasting, where your customer is another business instead of an individual customer or consumer. There’s no point in pretending to be “Dawn and Drew” when your audience has come for useful business content. (Besides, if they want to listen to “Dawn and Drew,” they can. )
That said, it’s also worth noting that your listeners spend most of their time listening to podcasts other than yours. There are podcasting practices you should learn and adhere to that, so far, many business podcasts are ignoring. Most busines podcasts, for example, don’t have associated blogs. More on that later.
Not that there are a lot of B2B podcasts out there yet. I count maybe half a dozen (from Oracle, Jupiter, Eric Schwartzman, and BMC Software, for example). But podcasting is exploding and businesses are going to figure out sooner rather than later that a podcast could be a useful B2B communication channel.
With that in mind, I started jotting down some guidelines for B2B podcasting. As luck would have it, I wound up with 10:
Be relevant
If you’re considering a B2B podcast, you’ve probably already given some consideration to a theme and an audience. One of the no-brainer podcasts no business has A podcast for this audience helps elevate your content above the dozens or even hundreds of other companies sending content through traditional channels. It’s not enough to just focus on this audience; you have to add some value. You don’t need to disclose material information for this podcast to be relevant, but you should offer insights into why your organization is a worthy investment. You might, for instance, pick a focus of your R&D efforts and give it a bit more attention that usual, talk about customer satisfaction metrics, or conduct an interview with one of your thought leaders.
Stick to the point
Under some circumstances, you might be tempted to use your podcast to address issues that have reared their ugly heads. It’s easy to view the podcast as a broad business communication tool. It’s not. Podcasting is all about narrowcasting, particularly when you’re dealing with a business audience. Resist the temptation to digress or risk losing an audience that listens because of the highly focused content you deliver. Consider IBM’s podcast, which delves into the future of some aspect of life (homes, cars, shopping) through the eyes of two company thought leaders on the subject. How many people would unsubscribe if IBM used an episode to explain its labor issues? That’s not why people subscribed.
Avoid fluff
I’ve heard some comments recently suggesting that business podcasts should be more entertaining. One pundit went so far as to suggest that business podcasts should play songs. Don’t you believe it. Someone who listens to the IBM podcast wants to know what the future holds and they want to hear it from experts working on real-world applications. Listeners to my podcast may argue, “You play music.” Yes, Neville and I play a podsafe tune at the end of every show. But we’re not a B2B podcast; there is no business behind our show. (We’re just two guys doing a podcast.) We also save the music for the end of the show, so those who don’t want to hear music can stop listening when the music starts. (Incidentally, we play music to support the independent artists whose efforts are one of the biggest drivers of podcasting and because it’s our show and we want to.)
Be infotaining
While you don’t want to turn your B2B podcast into a top 40 music show, you do want to employ enough entertainment elements to make it interesting to listen to. Solid content is not compelling if it is delivered by a lone monotonous voice. Use musical intros and outros, introduce new features, and generally take advantage of the medium. Adopt a format for your show. “For Immediate Release” is a co-hosted discussion with audio commentary from other sources. You could do an interview show, a panel discussion, or commentary by company thought leaders. Listeners get to like a format. They also like it if you shake it up from time to time.
Build and engage community
There’s a podcasting myth that suggests one of podcasting’s great limitations is its one-way, top-down nature. Hogwash. Podcasts routinely build communities of listeners the members of which interact with the podcaster. Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code offers a great example. Curry expressed an interest in biodiesel and asked for input. Listeners sent what they knew by email and audio comment. Other listeners commented on what the first round of listeners said. Curry responded and asked more questions. The biodiesel discussion has been going on for weeks on DSC. Neville and I have worked hard to make “For Immediate Release” listener-driven, with as much as half of each show based on themes raised by our listeners.
There are no competitors…okay, there are some competitors
If you spend your time bashing your competitors, your listeners will unsubscribe in droves. They’re coming for insights, not an us-vs.-them commercial. As my mother (and yours, too, probably) used to say, if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say anything. In fact, if a competitor introduces a podcast or says something worthwhile in a blog, point to it. Neville and I don’t see the growing number of PR-focused podcasts as competition. We even link to them in what we call our “podroll,” a list of other communication-themed podcasts on our show blog. Just because your audience is made up of customers doesn’t mean you shouldn’t recognize the interconnectedness of the medium and your listeners’ hunger for useful and interesting content.
Not that I think Boston Consulting Group would ever welcome a new podcast by McKinsey & Company into the podosphere. Short of that, though, it pays dividends to be part of a bigger podcasting community.
Don’t advertise or sell
Nobody wants to subscribe to and download a commercial. You can brand your product, service, or company by being the provider of useful information. You should avoid turning your podcast into an advertisement at all costs, regardless of what your throwback marketing VP wants.
Be authentic
Businesses often are inclined to overproduce their media, striving to be as good as – or better than – mainstream public media. I remember talking to the manager of one company’s video production operation who said his baseline was a local newscast; his work could never, no matter what, be worse than a typical local newscast. While podcast listeners do want to be entertained, their primary interest is in content, not polish. A podcast hosted by voice talent reading a script will be dismissed, while listening to a real engineer or designer or brand manager -– replete with all his “ums” and “uhs” -– will be compelling, as long as he’s talking about something the listener cares about. (Besides, you can edit out the worst mistakes.)
Be mindful of your listeners’ time
Depending on whom you talk to, podcasts shouldn’t exceed 20 or 40 minutes. Neville and I routinely run 70 to 80 minutes. But again, while “The Hobson and Holtz Report” is about business, it’s not from a business. With a business podcast, you’re asking your customer (or prospective customer) to give her attention to your organization’s content. It’s an exchange. Don’t ask for too much of it. Make sure you fill the time you do have with something useful enough to make the exchange worthwhile.
Integrate your podcast into the blogosphere
Outside the pseudo podcasts from the mainstream media (repackaged pre-broadcast radio content), you’ll be hard-pressed to find a podcast that doesn’t have an associated blog. So far, most of the business podcasts haven’t emulated this practice with the exception of GM, where the Fastlane podcast is just part of the Fastlane blog. Your podcast blog page contains show notes, another tactic common among indie podcasters but missing from businesses. Listeners appreciate the hell out of good show notes. Most important, but inviting comments on each show, you more effectively build that community of listeners naysayers insist you can’t build with a podcast.
As I said at the beginning, I’m sure I’ve overlooked some important guidelines. What have I missed?
2. Reserach supports role of leader communication
I must live right.
I was preparing to conduct a post-session interview for a Conference Board podcast when I heard a remark from one of the panelists that made me sit up straight and lean forward. Afterward, I approached the speaker and asked to interview him for the conference podcast series. Of course, the focus of my interview was this one remark.
The speaker was Charles Watts, principal of Towers Perrin and leader of the consulting firm’s Change Implementation practice. Watts notes that the practice focuses on reseach and communication around change management. Watts referred to a study Towers Perrin conducted among 40,000 workers in large companies. The researchers examined nine items that comprise employee engagement and compared the results to the other 100 or so items included in the survey. The result: The item that best explained whether an employee is willing to invest discretionary effort in the company’s success is the one that reads, “To what extent do you believe senior leadership takes an interest in your well being?”
As Watts put it, if employees have a sense that their welfare matters to senior management, they are more willing to invest in the company and do good work.
The channels for this communication do not involve the immediate supervisor. Interestingly, face-to-face engagement with senior leaders is the most popular form of communication, according to another major Towers Perrin study, and technology plays a significant role through video and webcasts. The results did not vary among different employee groups; even the employees on the factory floor indicated that they “want to hear from the source that the right things are being done to build the success of the company,” Watts told me.
This does not mean there is no role for the immediate supervisor; it’s just a different role, Watts said. “Am I getting the rewards I deserve, am I developing my career, am I getting the learning and development opportunities I should. These kinds of basics” are what employees seek from their immediate supervisors, the “bread and butter” issues, according to Watts.
In his reply to my critique of his belief that the immediate supervisor should be the sole source of communication during change, Dr. T.J. Larkin suggested that I believe that “communicators should do a little bit of everything.” I believe no such thing. Rather, I believe communicators should use the channels that will, in combination, produce the desired results. In communicating change, it is clear that employees want and need to hear from senior executives for some messages and immediate supervisors for others. It’s not a matter of picking one over the other, but instead a matter of ensuring the complete message is delivered through each channel.
Incidentally, you can hear this and otherinterviews from The Conference Board at:
http://www.conference-board.org/rss/cct_conference/rss.xml
3. Liar, Liar
The next time Apple CEO Steve Jobs says, “No, we’re not working on anything like that,” expect to hear laughter. Nothing Jobs says about product development will ever have any credibility since Jobs proudly unveiled the video iPod.
For months, Jobs has been more than dismissive of the idea of a video iPod; he has been contemptuously dismissive. On Business 2.0’s B2Day blog, you can read many of his comments indicating Apple would not release such a product. For example: “We don’t think people have a burning desire to watch video on tiny little screens.” Maybe he had his fingers crossed behind his back.
According to Stephen Baker at Blogspotting, Jobs has also rankled a lot of Apple fans by holding back on the video iPod in order to boost sales of the Nano. Now a bunch of consumers are stuck with tiny music players when they’d rather have the video version. Nanos are cropping up all over eBay, many presumably offered by those who would like to recoup their investment so they can afford the more desirable video player. Leading the charge is A-list blogger Jeff Jarvis, who suggests that Apple “screwed” its community.
Apple innovates some fine products, but it’s also a case study in throwback communications. Consider its approach to employees who leaked product information: Sue the bloggers who published the information to reveal the employees’ names. Now compare that to Sun’s approach: Get your highest ranking executive blogger, President Jonathan Schwartz, to publish a public appeal to employees to stop leaking information and explain the reason why. Sun is progressive and transparent and treats employees like adults. Apple gets mad and sues.
Even Todd Cochrane at Geek News Central has taken Apple to task for its practices, dubbing it a “communications black hole:”
“Apple does not communicate, Apple does not have a person that publishes their cell phone number on their blog that I can call and get clarifications on or bitch about something that has made me mad. Guess what Microsoft does!...Black Hole communicating is what I am going to start referring to Apple’s development and support teams. Comments and e-mails go in nothing comes out.”
Does financial success mean a company has no need to communicate effectively? Does being the darling of the technology sector excuse arrogance and a one-way, top-down, secretive communication philosophy in an era of transparency and conversation? Or is the day coming when Apple will reap what it has sown?
4. Unbelievable Blogging Stats Unveiled
According to the results of a study released at the BlogOn conference in New York, 55% of corporations are blogging internally, externally, or both. Guidewire Group’s BlogOn 2005 Social Media Adoption Survey suggests 91.4% of these corporations are using blogs internally and 96.6% externally.
If you believe these results, I have the deed to a nice bridge we should talk about.
I’m not the only one who bashed the results; they were roundly dismissed throughout the blogosphere. Constantin Basturea posted four specific questions about the survey on his blog, “PR Meets WWW,” and Mike Sigal, co-founder and CEO of Guidewire, replied. He said the survey’s goal was to explore why and how corporations were adopting blogs. “That’s why we promoted the survey via press release and to the blogosphere…because we wanted folks who were blogging to answer it.” That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? If the response base is skewed to those with blogs, you’ll wind up with an absurd number like 55% saying their companies have blogs. And then the company positioned it as 55% of corporations having blogs, not 55% of respondents working for corporations with blogs.
Constantin also asked about the guarantee that those who took the survey were in the position of knowing the information they provided. Sigal’s reply? “No guarantee. That’s why we were explicit about the sample and methodology.”
It would be nice to see a legitimate, scientific study of, say, the Fortune 1000. I remember such studies dealing with intranet adoption about a decade ago. In the meantime, we’re stuck with this nonsense. Nevertheless, there are some interesting numbers deeper in the study. For example, among those companies responding that actually do have intranet blogs, the predominant use is knowledge sharing (63%) and internal communications (44%). About 60% of those with external blogs have more than one and 17% have more than five.
Interestingly, the biggest problem business bloggers face is maintaining enthusiasm.
5. Does Weblogs Acquisition Herald a Reintegration of the Web?
In workshops and talks, I’ve been suggesting that the web has become balkanized. Three separate entities have emerged:
- The “reference web”—The traditional web where people go to extract information. Characterized by the receiver-driven model of communication, it’s all about pulling what you want when you want it.
- The “collaborative web”—Social media, consumer-generated content, conversations. This is made up of wikis, blogs, social networking sites, tag-driven sites, and the like.
- The “broadband web”—Sites enabled entirely by the prevalence of high-speed access, including vlogs, vidcasts, and podcats.
Of course, these are all websites in the end, and all part of the World Wide Web. However, only in rare cases are blogs (for example) just one element of a larger site. In nearly all cases, the blog is the site. The blogosphere is an entity unto itself, separate and distinct from the rest of the web. Compare that to message boards which, in nearly all cases, have been subordinate elements of a larger reference website. Similarly, Wikipedia is its own site as is TheNewPR. Rocketboom is just a vidcast with supporting links. They are distinct from traditional reference web content.
I have also been suggesting that this balkanization is temporary, that these three elements of the web will eventually reintegrate. I’ve been guessing that this would take three to five years, but the news that AOL had acquired Jason Calacanis’ blog network Weblogs may lead me to accelerate my estimate. While AOL insists that Weblogs will continue to operate independently as a wholly owned subsidiary, AOL is planning to integrate the blogs into its web portal by linking to specific entries. For example, according to one report, “Visitors to AOL’s Moviefone, for instance, might see referrals to Weblogs’ Cinematical blog on films.” Hence the blogs become an element of a larger, more traditional website.
Whether this is good, bad, or neutral is something we can debate endlessly. For instance, it’ll be harder to quantify what the buzz within the blogosphere or its influence when blogs are subsumed back into the overall web. Either way, the AOL acquisition may signal the beginning of this inevitable reintegration.
6. Can Blogs Turn a Film into a Blockbuster?
Joss Whedon, whose “Firefly” TV series didn’t last a season, convinced a studio to produce a feature-length motion picture based on the series when DVD sales went through the roof. Still, the band of sci-fi fans who scooped up the DVD represent a fraction of the audience necessary to make the movie profitable. Whedon, who had a long, successful run with his series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (after the original film he scripted fared less well), wasn’t content to hope word-of-mouth and a strong, traditional ad campaign would boost ticket sales. He turned to the blogosphere.
Or, at least, somebody associated with the film—dubbed “Serenity” (the name of the spaceship) turned to the blogosphere, and used an A-list blogger to serve as a kind of online Pied Piper. According to a blog at KnoxNews, the online version of the Knoxville News Sentinel, InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds had 150 tickets to an advance screening of the film available for local bloggers. News Sentinel blogger Michael Silence notes, “it’s a chance to blog a review on the new movie, due out Sept. 30. It’s also sound marketing for movie studios. If you want to go, confirm in my comments.”
There were plenty of enthusiastic confirmations, like this one: “I’m delerious with the possibility of two tickets? Why? ...I’ve got every episode of Buffy on video and DVD, and every episode of ‘Firefly,’ the basis for ‘Serenity.’ See my Camera Obscura post on my blog regarding creator Joss Whedon (Sept. 9th) and the Buffy convention in Knoxville.” Can you imagine the review this guy was going to write? Add another 149 similarly-inclined sci-fi fanatics and Buffy fans, and you have the potential to build some genuine buzz.
A quick search of Technorati turned up one other screening -— already held -— in which Grace Hill Media swapped Serenity tickets in exchange for blogged reviews. (Grace Hill is a media company that helps “Hollywood reach people of faith.”) One suspects there will be a few more such outreach efforts before the film debuts. This notion of turning to the blogosphere to promote books and movies isn’t new, but we can expect to see it become more institutionalized as the payoff becomes more evident. Why give your free screening tickets to anybody passing by when you can focus on bloggers with far greater reach and influence?
7. Video iPod Won’t Kill Podcasting
Over at the BusinessWeek Blogspotting blog, Heather Green recounts a conversation with an advertising exec who wondered if BW would reconsider its coverage of podcasting in the wake of Apple’s introduction of a video iPod. This advertising exec fails to understand that new media don’t kill old media. And in this case, the old medium (if you can consider podcasting old at 14 months) doesn’t even need to adapt since the vast majority of content delivered in podcasts wouldn’t lend itself to video.
Look at most people using their iPods. Most of the time, they’re not sitting still. They’re on the move, walking down the street, driving their cars, working out, doing their jobs. Audio’s great virtue is the ability to listen to it while you’re doing something else. This isn’t a concept new to the digital era; Sony didn’t choose to call their groundbreaking portable cassette player the “Sitman,” after all. Video, like text, on the other hand, doesthat you sit and concentrate on the medium to the exclusion of all other input. (At least, I hope to God I don’t see people watching their video iPods while cruising along at 65 miles per hour, even though I do see my fair share of idiots with newspapers draped over their steering wheels.)
While podcasting’s star is still rising, the video iPod does open the door to an explosion of vidcasts. Detaching vidcasts from the computer heightens their desirability: The idea of loading Rocketboom onto an iPod to watch on the plane or the bus is very appealing. I expect to see more and more vidcasts as a complement to—not a replacement of—podcasts.
Heather agrees, by the way:
“...podcasting has energized what we used to think of as radio and helped broaden the appeal of listening. Watching of course will be popular, but it’s different.”
8. Google Takes to a Blog for Issues Management
While most companies struggle to figure out blogs’ role in the communication mix, Google has figured out that blogging is the best way to present its position on policy issues. An article in PRWeek praises Google’s recognition that blogs—while not the channel for reporting earnings—represent a better means of getting information quickly into the hands of analysts, media, and influencers. The article quotes Michael Robinson, vice president with Levick Strategic Communications: “This is where Google lives and breathes. The world is moving so quickly now. The ability to get out there and tell your side of the story before rumors overwhelm the marketplace is critical.”
Leave it to Mike Manuel, though, to point out the shortcomings of Google’s blogs: The blogs don’t allow comments, enabling “Google to talk about sensitive issues and protects it from a controversial conversation, as there’s no way for readers to talk back.” (http://http://mmanuel.typepad.com/media_guerrilla/)
Agreed. On the other hand, any example of blogging as an issues management tool is welcome, if for no other reason than to be able to say, “Yes, you can” when lawyers at other organizations suggest, “You can’t do that.” And if one of those lawyers suggests that Google’s attorneys must not be happy about it, you can always point out that Google’s lawyers are among those posting to the blog.
Google’s blog—http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
9. Sites of the Month
So you like the idea of a wiki, but you don’t want to download and install one and you don’t want to pay to use one of the hosted alternatives. You could try the free Writeboard, a new entry into the world of wikis from 37Signals. Visit the site, complete a brief online form, and you’ll have a wiki up and running that’s pretty darned easy to use.
Setting your RSS newsreader to ping your subscribed feeds every five minutes just isn’t fast enough for you, eh? You might want to try a new free product from a company called KnowNow. eLerts—which is beta (of course; what isn’t?)—installs a button to your Internet Explorer toolbar. Once installed, it synchs up with a background service that that monitors your feeds. As soon as a feed is updated, you get an alert on your toolbar. Adding subscriptions is a matter of dragging one of those ubiquitous orange boxes into the “add channel” field on your toolbar—no need for a newsreader. It’s not an aggregator, though; clicking on an alert takes you to the website that contains the new content. I suspect it’s best for feeds that are critical, not the 1,500 you review every morning; it complements instead of replaces a newsreader. eLerts is only available for the PC, and I’m on the road with my PowerBook, so I’ll install this on my desktop when I get back to the office so I can take it out for a spin. You’re also out of luck if you use only Firefox, although I suspect that a Firefox version is inevitable if the product takes off. As for a business model, KnowNow plans to offer branded versions for companies.
10. HC+T Update
>>>Shel has inked a retainer agreement with a major global software company to provide intranet consulting.
>>>Shel is helping a major product company develop a portal that will unite the company’s various operating units.
>>>Shel has been selected again as a speaker at the IABC International Conference, set for June 2006 in Vancouver. He’ll be on the “All-Stars” track one more time.
11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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