Sunday, November 27, 2005
HC+T Update: November 2005
The November 2005 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.
HC+T Update
November 2005
- Companies Blocking Access To Blogs
- More Support For Leader Communication
- Power To The Press Release
- Smart Corporate Blogging
- Ex-Employee Blogging
- A Demo Corporate Blog
- Editorial Pages Attack PR Expenditures
- Who Speaks For The Future Of Print?
- 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. Companies Blocking Access To Blogs
If you’re behind a company firewall, there’s an increasing chance that you’re not able to read this—or any other—blog.
A few months back, while working with a client, I entered the URL of a blog that contained information that would be useful to the task at hand. Instead of getting to the blog, the screen displayed one of those corporate security notices that I was trying to access an unauthorized site. My client rolled his eyes and said, “They must be blocking blogs.” I was able to get to my blog, which is not hosted by any of the blogging services, but Blogger, Typepad, and the other hosted services were inaccessible. I was aghast. “Does your IT department know,” I told him, “how many bloggers are writing about your industry?”
Over at Geek News Central, Todd Cochrane reports that his company’s IT department has blocked any site with the word “blog” in it. Cochrane also points to a Wired article about an increasing number of companies shutting down employee access to blogs. These companies cite security fears:
“...companies worry that employees might leak sensitive material—perhaps inadvertently—while posting comments to blog message boards. In a survey of over 300 large businesses conducted in conjunction with Forrester, Proofpoint found 57.2 percent of respondents were concerned with employees exposing sensitive material in blogs. That’s higher than the portion concerned with the risks of P2P networks.”
Others think the security issue is a smokescreen and that companies are more concerned that employees are wasting work time on blogs; the old productivity issue is raising its ugly head again.
Former Sun Microsystems communications executive Andy Lark reports where some of these fears may be coming from -— another one of those absurd surveys that talley up the number of hours employees spend reading blogs and equating that to lost productivity. This one, from Advertising Age, claims workers will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years in 2005 reading blogs. Blog readers, the research suggests, take daily 40-minute blog breaks.
Rather than ascertain if there really is a problem—if work isn’t getting done on time or the quality of work is suffering—reactionary IT managers simply throw up a roadblock. I keep wondering: With all these online obstacles to productivity, why does the Labor Department continue to report increased US worker productivity? The answer is simple, from where I sit: Workers are making up the time they spend on non-work related activities, on top of which the Net is already making them more productive.
Cochrane sees it this way: “For those of you that are dealing with an IT department that is about control versus productivity, we interrupt this discussion to say some are taking 20 years of innovation and have reduced my computer’s ability to perform down to word processing and e-mail. “What these IT departments fail to understand is that blogs offer a rich source of information that can improve productivity. In the workplace, blogs can serve as a knowledge-sharing resource. With over 20 million blogs tracked by Technorati, there are bound to be some that address a question or problem an employee is working on. (Every one of the blogs I track each morning is related to my work.) But rather than communicate policies to prevent problems, some companies are simply shutting off access.
It’s not just businesses, either. In New Jersey, a private high school principal assembled the school’s 900 students in an assembly and told them they had to take down any blogs they may have created or face suspension. The rationale: Keep the kids safe from online predators. Says Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Kevin Bankston, ““It’s an incredible overreaction based on an unproven problem. If they’re concerned about safety, they could train students in what they should or shouldn’t put online. Kids shouldn’t be robbed of the primary communication tool of their generation.”
Again, training versus censorship is the intelligent solution. Expect to see more institutions implement the draconian solution instead.
2. More Support For Leader Communication
The more I talk about the communication role of senior leaders during times of organizational change, the more supporting evidence I get. Take, for instance, the following excerpt from a book called “Organizational Surveys” (1996, Jossey-Bass). William A. Schiemann penned Chapter 4, “Driving Change Through Surveys: Aligning Employees, Customers, and Other Key Stakeholders.” He wrote,
“From my familiarity with many firms who have conducted linkage studies, i have found that one of the best predictors of financial and operating performance is employee rating of management capability, followed closely by employee perceptions of supervisory support and capability. Over the years, I have come to believe that if I could measure only one dimension, it would be employee ratings of management. Those ratings often account for the most variance in customer and financial performance.”
The italics are Schiemann’s, not mine. The excerpt appeared in my fax machine courtesy of Angela Sinickas, one of the leading thinkers in terms of employee communication measurement. Angela appended the paragraph with this note: “And employees can’t rate leaders highly, or even at all, if there’s no communication between them.”
To underscore the point, Angela also sent along the results of some research she conducted for a client. In the study, Angela reported, “The greatest predictor of (the client’s) employees’ overall satisfaction with communication is how they feel about senior leaders’ communication behaviors, accounting for over one-third of the satisfaction.” Supervisors’ communication behavior and employees’ level of information each accounted for just over 20% of the variations in overall satisfaction.
In this study, Angela recommended that senior leaders focus on the communication behaviors with the highest interpretational weights that were rated low by employees responding to the survey. These included…
- Senior leaders explain the reasons behind decisions
- Senior leaders clearly explain the direction the company is heading
- Senior leaders keep employees informed about things we need to know
One other question was included in the study—“Senior leaders provide information that is believable.” In this case, employees were reasonably positive. The point, though, is that these behaviors are important to employees, despite assertions that senior executive communication is irrelevant, boring, and a waste of time as far as most front-line employees are concerned. Clearly, from the Towers Perrin research to Schiemann’s body of research to individual in-house studies, that’s simply not the case. When communicating to employees during change, supervisors are important but nothing is more important than the communication behaviors of senior leadership.
But wait. There’s more. This time it comes in the form of a study conducted by the Hay Group, which surveyed 1.2 million employees at 400 companies (not a bad sample) and determined that leader communication is “a leading factor in employee motivation, morale and even loyalty,” according to CIO magazine’s report on the study. Hay’s research also indicates that “keeping workers informed is not something executives do well.”
Any number of reasons account for poor executive communication. It is the job of the internal communication department to help improve—not ignore—the leader’s communication role. Otherwise, their organizations risk high turnover from employees who don’t understand where their organization is headed. Not their own department’s role in achieving company goals, a critical role for immediate supervisors and managers. It is the executive’s job to communicate the big picture to the entire workforce. When that doesn’t happen, employees who don’t understand the big picture feel more inclined to provide their services elsewhere. “One of the most important predictors of employee commitment, and ultimately loyalty, is the connection between the individual and the big picture,” according to study author Mark Royal, senior consultant at Hay.
Among study findings:
- Just 49% of employees are satisfied with the openness and honesty of communications in their companies
- 42% were not satisfied with the company’s ability to keep them informed about how the business is doing
- Among those employees who indicated they were inclined to stay with their employer, 57% were confident in the direction senior leaders communicated
- Among those employees inclined to leave the company within two years, only 27 percent said they understood where their companies were headed
There’s plenty of evidence to support the importance of communication between workers and immediate supervisors. But every study I see indicates that executive communication is the dominant factor. You’re wise to employ both.
3. Power To The Press Release
SearchEngineWatch has an intriguing article about search engine optimization (SEO) for PR purposes. The article, by Catherine Seda (author of “Search Engine Advertising”) covers a variety of ways to enhance public relations efforts by making content easier to find. Wal*Mart, for example, created a landing page dealing its anti-unionization efforts and enhanced it so a Google search on the topic ranked it as the number two page dealing with the company’s anti-union stance.
What attracted my attention, though, was the reference to press releases, those venerable PR tools so often misused and so frequently maligned. When they actually contain news and are thought through, though, press releases remain a powerful tool, even in the era of blogs that so many people think can serve as a total press release replacement. SEO-PR President Greg Jarboe, interviewed in the article, pointed to two instances when press releases generated jaw-dropping results. In one case, Southwest Airlines introduced new low fares in a press release that produced $1 million in ticket sales. In another, Verizon saw a 438% increase in the number of searches for “florists” on its website after the company issued a press release about a Valentine’s Day offer.
“Why are press releases so powerful? According to Jarboe’s presentation, Yahoo! News has a unique audience of 24.9 million people and Google News has a unique audience of 7.2 million. Journalists and consumers are turning to the search news channels for information. Plus, optimized press releases appear in the general search results as well. (Beyond Ink managing partner Anne) Kennedy also pointed out, ‘When your press release ranks well in a search engine, you control more real estate on the search results page. That’s one more spot your competition won’t get.’”
The article does reference blogs. Thirty-nine percent of the top 20 search listings for brands appearing in the BusinessWeek 100 brands listing in July 2005 “were derived from consumer-generated media such as blogs.” Thirty-nine percent is impressive, but in no way suggests blogs can replace press releases and the other channels that represent 69% of search engine results.
4. Smart Corporate Blogging
I’ve seen two examples lately of companies with blogs that used them well in response to, and as part of, blogosphere conversations. These are case studies other companies could apply to their own thinking about how to communicate in a networked world.
First came Barbara Krause, principal of Krause Taylor Associates, whose firm came under attack by Yahoo! blogger Jeremy Zawodny. Zawodny accused Krause Taylor of spamming bloggers when he received what appeared to be a clearly off-target email pitch. The original title of the post named Krause Taylor as a PR spammer. Among the many comments the post inspired (most of which took issue with Zawodny’s complaint) were two from Krause Taylor’s client, Six Apart, defending the company. But the best was from Barbara Krause herself:
“We goofed when we sent you the email yesterday about our client’s news and we’re sorry. Here’s what happened. We were sending information about our client’s news to journalists and bloggers who have previously covered related topics, in this case video on demand, portals, AOL. The Yahoo Search Blog’s email address came up and was erroneously included. We try very hard NOT to spam anyone, and we simply made a mistake this time. Our sincere apologies – and you can bet it won’t happen again!”
A simple acknowledgment of a mistake and an apology is a rare approach for a company to take—especially companies with lawyers. But Krause’s response is professional, dignified, and honest. It didn’t satisfy Zawodny, though, who responded that the explanation was “a bit fishy,” so Krause elaborated:
“Here’s the blow by blow description of what happened: We did a search on MediaMap using key words which pertained to the news we were announcing. Those words were video on demand, portals and AOL. The Yahoo Search Blog record came up, presumably because the record contains the word “portal.” That entry was then placed on the list of thirty or so people to whom we were going to send the information. It obviously shouldn’t have been!
“Since then, I did another search on MediaMap specifically on you—and your personal blog and personal email address is also in the database. I am happy to contact MediaMap and try (as others have already apparently tried to do) to get you and the Yahoo Search Blog removed. In fairness to MediaMap, though, they are quite explicit in telling PR professionals that we should not be sending press releases to Yahoo Search Blog, and on your personal entry, it says ‘BEWARE! Proceed with caution when contacting this blogger.’ Good advice!”
That did the trick for Zawodny, who thanked Krause for the details. Krause Taylor winds up looking pretty damn sophisticated and smart—and human. I wonder how many people reading the exchange considered that the agency would be a good one to work with.
Then, more recently, Dan Gillmor points to Pajamas Media, which I reported on here on November 16. The company had launched a journalist blog network and titled it Open Source Media. The announcement brought swift condemnation from the open source community, not to mention a soft-spoken notice that the name was already taken. Rather than resort to lawyers or fight to keep the name, the folks behind the network simply apologized for the oversight and announced they were changing the name back to Pajamas Media. They’ve even updated the post with a friendly response from the owner of the OSM moniker. Here’s a taste of Pajama’s notice:
“We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity.”
(The argument could be made that the Pajamas item isn’t really a blog since there’s no feed for the content and no commenting. But it’s a dated post published in reverse chronological order using what appears to be a blogging utility as part of a blog network.)
Two companies that made mistakes that could have cost them reputation instead managed to turn the tables and make themselves look pretty smart and savvy by fessing up to their errors and apologizing to the online community. There’s a lesson here. The only question is whether more entrenched organizations can learn it.
5. Ex-Employee Blogging
Doug Edwards, who was Google’s director of consumer marketing and brand management from 1999 until recently, has been blogging about his former employer for what appears to be the last week or so. The blog, Xooglers (get it? ex-Googlers?), invites other former Google employees to “reminisce and comment on the latest developments in search.” Most of his initial posts recount interviewing for, getting, and starting the job, including this notable excerpt:
“So, now I was Google’s online brand manager. What exactly did that mean? I didn’t have a clue, and evidently no one else did either. It was as if some corporate biological alarm clock had gone off: ‘You know, we’re at that point where we need to have somebody to do all that stuff that’s not engineering. Let’s get us some of them marketing folks. And since the world is divided between online and offline, we’ll get one of each.’
So far, I haven’t found any comments that come from other former Google employees, but the blog’s only been around about a week and may not yet be on xoogler radar screens. Nevertheless, the number of comments is growing and the blog seems to be gaining popularity quickly. Edwards’ candor and writing style don’t hurt.
Ex-employee websites are nothing new, of course. Employees of Enron who had lost their jobs started several sites that served as resources, gathering places, and support. But this is the first time I’ve seen a blog dedicated to discussion of a former employer. While Google hasn’t done anything comparable to Enron’s abuses—and thus would not be likely to inspire the kind of vitriol the ex-Enron sites did—it is a venue where dirty laundry can be aired and a company embarrassed. As the audio clip Adam Curry often plays warns, “There are no secrets, only information you don’t yet have.”
6. A Demo Corporate Blog
There are good corporate blogs and bad ones. Niall Kennedy has seen enough of both to cobble together a demo blog to display the way a business can launch an effective blog dedicated to a product. He selected a real company and product—iRobot’s Scooba—and has developed an impressive blog to show what the company could do and to serve as a model for others considering a blog as part of a marketing effort. (Interestingly, this concept integrates quite well into a larger marketing strategy, contrary to Shel Israel’s contention that blogs don’t fit into an integrated marketing strategy.) Says Kennedy,
“Corporate marketing teams are often a bit afraid to enter the world of corporate blogging. They read reports of mobs of bloggers attacking CBS or Kryptonite and fear for the lives of their brands in the wild frontier that is the blogosphere. Companies are also afraid of creating a huge mistake such as the Juicyfruit blog. I wanted to create a good example for corporate marketers to show how a company can try to connect consumers with information about the products they care about.”
Kennedy’s the community manager at Technorati, so he certainly has the creds to build this site that includes a variety of categories (e.g., announcements, interviews, press coverage) and enough varied types of posts to open a few eyes and minds to the medium’s potential.
You can find the demo blog at http://www.scoobaclean.com.
7. Editorial Pages Attack PR Expenditures
There seems to be a trend emerging in the press: Attack governments that spend money on public relations.
The first example I saw of this comes from California’s Contra Costa County (where I live). The county is facing a budget dilemma and has eliminated several positions and initiated a hiring freeze on several open jobs. Under these circumstances, the supervisors have come under intense fire for the decision to hire a public information officer. The county Fire Department followed suit and is also suffering slings and arrows for its desire to have PR support.
The unions are upset. Even an editorial in the Contra Costa Times (free registration required) urged the board to reconsider:
“It is not just the timing that is bad, the whole concept of a special PR person for the supervisors is bad public policy. County supervisors and other officials can and should speak directly with the press, as they have done in the past. There is no public purpose in hiring someone to filter information and serve as a barrier between county supervisors and the people…We hope the board will come to its senses and shelve the idea of hiring yet another public information officer and that the fire district will come to the same conclusion.”
Next up, a Florida newspaper got into the act. The editorial writers at The Stewart News, a Scripps paper, say, “Martin County needed to get out a lot of information during Hurricane Wilma, but did it have to spend $17,900 with a local PR firm to get it?”
The brief editorial explains the situation, then expresses the editors’ woeful lack of understanding of what is required in a crisis and what professional PR counselors do: “Even if the firm spent seven days on the job, how many people are paid $17,900 for that length of time? The county has people who know how to answer questions, and who would not be at their regular posts during a storm, so why didn’t it use them?”
Fortunately, one of the two comments posted to the online version of the editorial asks the same questions I’m inclined to ask:
“Does anybody in Martin County actually know what a Public Relations spokesman does? Do you know what the bill for a PR person would charge in Ft. Lauderdale? A hell of a lot more than 17K. Complain all you want but remember that this is a service that counties throughout the nation pay to represent them on TV. What if CNN happened to show up in Martin County for a report? Send in some amatuer to open his mouth an say the wrong thing and embarrass the County? THIS is why you hire a professional. Martin County did the right thing by hiring a professional PR person.”
Allen Myers deserves credit for taking the editors to task for their uninformed opinion, but the mere publication of the editorial so soon on the heels of the California example suggests a disturbing trend, all the more confounding considering how much newspapers depend on PR professionals for a majority of the content they publish in their own papers. (I’ve referred here before to a study suggesting that 80% or more of a newspaper’s content originates with a statement, press release, or contact from a spokesperson of some kind.)
8. Who Speaks For The Future Of Print?
Steve Crescenzo and Allan Jenkins are both my friends. Not online friends, but real-world, in-the-flesh friends. I’ve spent time with Allan in Copenhagen. I went to Steve’s wedding. I probably shouldn’t get in the middle of a dust-up between them. My life is filled with things I shouldn’t have done.
Steve takes Allan to task for his contention that print is pretty much useless. In his post, Allan comes down pretty hard on IABC’s “Communication World” magazine, nothing that “Any day of the week, any IABC member can go into the blogosphere and find 50 better articles than CW publishes in a quarter.” Crescenzo counters, “I use the Internet, and I like getting my print copy of Communication World. I think it’s a great benefit. So don’t try to speak for me on this issue, okay?”
Allan took exception to Steve’s characterization of his comments, and the debate has continued. Underlying the dispute, though, is whether print really does have a future. About 12 or 13 years ago, one of the leading business publications (I think it was BusinessWeek, but I wouldn’t swear to it) predicted we were only 10 years away from the paperless office. Three years ago—the point at which offices should have been purely digital—a paper products association reported that the average office consumed 30% more paper than it did a decade ago. If you work online, you know why: You’re constantly printing emails and web pages because holding that piece of paper in your hand makes the content more readable than it is on the screen.
Of course, there are some who prefer reading on the screen. Allan is one; my podcasting co-host Neville Hobson is another. Neville has cancelled all his print magazine subscriptions, opting to read everything online. And, of course, there are those who argue that the generation of digital natives ultimately will sound the death knell for print, since they’ve grown up reading computer screens unlike us digital immigrants, who had to get accustomed to it. (And there’s a lot to get accustomed to: glowing light, reading across instead of down, reading a document the dimensions of which are wider than they are tall…the list goes on.) I don’t buy it for a minute. There are few digital natives more in tune with the online world than my 16-year-old daughter, Rachel, who manages a dozen or more instant messages while listening to online music, engaging in a three-way phone call, watching TV, and doing her homework. Several years ago, when “The Wizard of Oz” was re-released in a digitally remastered print, I took her to see the classic at a gorgeous, refurbished one-screen movie theater in San Francisco’s Castro district. She was knocked out and wanted to read one of the books. Being the dedicated nerd that I am, I refused to buy a copy of a public-domain book, so I visited the Gutenberg Archive (a volunteer effort that long preceded Google Print in its effort to make books and other literature available online) and downloaded one of L. Frank Baum’s novels. I loaded it onto Rachel’s computer. The next day, I came home to find her reading the book in hard copy; she had printed out all 500 or so pages.
“Why in the world did you do that?” I asked.
She looked at me as though I was a clueless moron (the older she gets, the more I get that look): “You didn’t expect me to read a novel on the screen, did you?” she said.
Exactly. The problems with extended reading on the screen have nothing to do with generational differences. It’s physiological. Besides, there are plenty of characteristics unique to print you just don’t get online:
- Portability -— I still don’t see people taking their laptops to the beach or the bathroom. Cell phones, yes, but not laptops. Nor have I had any luck reading my laptop in bed. I heard one speaker complain that whenever he tried to lay back in bed and read his laptop, the lid would close on his nose. I still see more people reading newspapers on BART than laptops.
- Permanence -— I can delete this post tomorrow and it’ll be gone. If you print it and file it in a manila file folder, you’ll be able to retrieve it in 50 years and read it.
- You can write on it. The only way you can make notes in the margin of an online document is to print it out.
- Substance -— There’s something nice about the tactile feel of something solid in your hands.
- Quality -— The best designed online annual report still looks like other online annual reports. In print, you can use high-end paper stock and class-A printing with foil stamps and blind embossing and other design elements to reflect the organization’s substance.
- It works when the power’s out.
Think about it; you’ll probably come up with other characteristics of print that appeal to you. There’s a reason so many websites offer a printable version of the material they offer.
So no, I don’t think print’s going anywhere anytime soon. The plummeting subscription rates newspapers are experiencing have nothing to do with the fact that they’re produced in print; it’s a consequence of content that hasn’t transitioned to take advantage of print’s strengths. Most newspapers will make that adjustment; some won’t. But in the end, remember that new media never kill old media. Old media adapt and, in some cases, shrink. But they continue to offer value as long as they play to their strengths.
9. Sites of the Month
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Play MP3s Directly From Your Site
A bit of Javascript from del.icio.us will let visitors to your website or blog play any MP3 file just by clicking the link. Visitors to the For Immediate Release podcast blog are able to listen to a stream of the show thanks to a Java applet called Wimpy, but this is far simpler, free, and seems to work great. The code even lets visitors to your site tag and post the MP3 to del.icio.us. I feel a test of the Playtagger coming on…
Note: The instructions on the del.icio.us page have you pasting the Javascript code between the
and tags, but the page’s own source code has the Javascript between the andtags. Adding the Javascript code will add the link to every MP3 on your page.
http://del.icio.us/help/playtagger
Add Your Voice To Your E-mail
Waxmail makes it dead easy to record an audio email from directly within Microsoft Outlook. The free edition includes an ad in the email, but the ad is for Waxmail itself. Give it a try; it’s great.
10. HC+T Update
- Shel will work with the National Geographic Society’s external communication staff on an approach to blogging for the Society.
- Shel presents material on intranet best practices and the application of new social media internally at The Walt Disney Company.
- Shel presents his “Writing for the Wired World” workshop for a division of Johnson & Johnson.
11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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