Saturday, April 08, 2006
HC+T Update: April 2006
The April 2006 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.
HC+T Update
April 2006
- Yep. You’re Out There
- The Blurring Line Between Internal And External Communications
- Why Are Intranets Stagnant?
- Podcasting: What’s In A Name
- New Webinar on CEO Communication—And New Site!
- Who’s Number One?
- More Evidence Supports CEO Communication
- Old Tools Still Matter
- 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. Yep. You’re Out There
Last month, I wondered if anyone was reading “HC+T Update,” since I hadn’t heard from a single reader when the February issue didn’t appear. Turns out, yeah, you’re out there! About 100 of you responded with pleas to continue producing the newsletter. Most of the responses noted that you read it when it arrives, but don’t notice when it doesn’t.
Some of you also indicated you don’t read blogs so reading mine (from which all of this content is derived) isn’t an option.
So I’ll definitely continue with “HC+T Update.” But I do want to stress my firm belief that email newsletters will be dead in 2-3 years. I know for a fact that several hundred subscribers to “HC+T Update” don’t get it because spam filters catch it. All communicators would be far better off getting an RSS news reader and subscribing to the RSS feed for this newsletter. It’s an opportunity to learn how to use a reader (which will be built into Internet Explorer 7 when it’s released and is already a part of Firefox and Safari). Since you’ll need to use RSS to communicate in the next few years—really, you’ll NEED to know how to use RSS—it’ll be an opportunity to get up to speed.
I’m happy to help anybody who needs some assistance getting up and running with a news reader. Just drop me a line to mailto:shel.holtz@gmail.com. Again, I’m suggesting you subscribe to the feed for this newsletter, not every item in my blog!
Thanks to everyone who answered my query, and thanks so much for being a reader!
2. Why Are Intranets Stagnant?
The evolution of the World Wide Web over the last five years has been nothing short of astounding. Intranets, on the other hand, haven’t progressed an inch since, oh, say 2001. While the web has witnessed the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true web-based applications (like Writely and AjaxWrite), the intranet of 2006 looks pretty much the same as it did five years ago.
I know because intranet audits are a staple of my consultancy. I see a lot of intranets, and have since…well, since before the word “intranet” was adopted. I’m working on three of these audits at this moment. And although there are plenty of fine features and functionality, there is little to suggest intranet teams are adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” web.
Sure, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us (although I have heard of two companies taking initial steps in this direction), audience ranking (along the lines of Digg and Memeorandum, social networks ( like LinkedIn, file sharing services like Flickr and YouTube or AJAXish tools like PageFlakes (which has become my default home page).
All of these utilities make perfect sense forintranets, and most of them would be simple to implement. Simple, in any case, compared to, say, getting an SAP portal up and running. Social tagging would let employees find intranet content based on bookmarks their colleagues have asigned. One cmpany, for instance, calls its mailroom “Document Delivery Services;” there is no reference to “mailroom” anywhere on the intranet. If one employee found the DDS site and tagged it “mailroom,” other employees would be able to find it by searching the bookmark site for the word that makes the most sense to them.
Digg-like ranking would let employees prioritize company news and information based on what is most important to them. (The company could continue to push news it believes is so important that every employee should see it.) Social networks that emulate the likes of LinkedIn would let employees in large organizations make contact with others who can help with a project or assignment through trusted intermediaries. And personzlied web start pages like PageFlakes and ProtoPage do exactly what web portals do (at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time it takes companies to implement portals like the ones sold by Plumtree and Oracle.
Any of these kinds of services would make intranets infinitely more valuable, compelling, and usable for employees. So why aren’t intranet teams making the slightest move to keep up with developments on the web? There are several factors at play:
- IT departments have invested too much time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and are in no hurry to move in a different direction.
- Corporate IT staffs—some of them, anyway—are utterly clueless about what’s happening on the web. They don’t know online AJAX from the kitchen cleanser.
- Communicators figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken?
- Corporate communicators—many of them—are utterly cluelessa bout what’s happening on the web. They wouldn’t know what Digg was even if they’d been dug.
- Too much of an investment has been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for
- The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest time and effort in it now?
- Most companies are struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are antithetical to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content.
There are, I’m sure, other obstacles standing in the way of intranet evolution. There are also, I’m sure, some intranets somewhere that have undertaken efforts to adopt some of these tools. I haven’t seen them; have you? Intranet teams should start taking a hard look at their stagnant intranets and how they can be improved—to the benefit of the organization through enhanced productivity —- using the many elements that make up the read-write web.
3. The Blurring Line Between Internal And External Communications
Regardless of the other communication disciplines I have practiced—media relations, financial communications, corporate PR, the list goes on—I have always maintained employee communications as part of my portfolio. I believe deeply in the power of effective internal communications. The Globe and Mail made a point yesterday of reporting a Watson Wyatt Worldwide study that linked employee communications to bottom-line performance:
“Shareholder returns for organizations with the most effective communications were 57 per cent higher than returns for firms with less effective communications over the past five years. The survey…also found that the best communicators had a 19.4-per-cent higher market premium—the extent to which the market value of a company exceeds the cost of its assets—than the less effective communicators.”
There’s more support for a strong internal communications effort in the study and the Globe and Mail report.
However, a couple of items in the blogosphere recently have had me pondering the positioning of employee communications within the organization.
My friend Ron Shewchuk wrote a post for the IABC Employee Communications Common that asked just that question:
“I’m particularly interested in whether internal communicators should report directly to Human Resources, or if it’s better to have a “dotted line” and report through to, say, public affairs.”
The post drew 13 comments—not bad for a relatively new blog. Some took this position: “Since employee communications addresses the needs of all the employees in a company, it should report to the sole department responsible for all these people — HR.” Others vote for Corporate Communications. (Read the thread for details.)
I’ve had both experiences. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t report to either. I’d report directly to the CEO. There’s plenty of support for this relationship. In the real world, however, there are few CEOs who would happily add another direct reporting relationship to their plates.
I don’t buy the argument that HR deals with employees exclusively and therefore employee communications belongs in HR. In my experience, far too often HR sees employee communications as an HR communications function, focused on compensation, benefits, policies, and other HR-centric issues. Once you try to communicate anything outside the scope of HR’s jurisdiction, they get very nervous. In today’s world, that can be exceedingly dangerous. (That’s why, in many large organizations, HR maintains its own communicators, distinct from the general employee communications teams.)
Which brings us to the second bit of blogospheric buzz to capture my attention. In the wake of Microsoft’s announcement that Windows Vista would be delayed until January 2007, there has been quite a bit of discussion about the role of employee bloggers. I loved Robert Scoble’s characterization of employee bloggers as being “at the edge of a company.”) Robert insisted he was an official Microsoft spokesperson through his blog; so was any other Microsoft employee blogger, because the blogs are public and his remarks can be quoted by the media.
In comments to Neville Hobson’s blog, I suggested that the issue isn’t one of a blogger’s credibility, but rather of his authority. If 10 or 20 employee bloggers voice their diverse and varied opinions about a company issue—and in the course of their discussions articulate subtly (or not-so-subtly) different information, which one reflects the authoritative statement of record for the organization?
The question of where authority resides is an intriguing one. Inhis post, Robert suggested that he can be the authoritative source…sometimes. Which, exactly, are those times? It depends, Robert says, on whether he’s remarking on his own projects or team efforts, or if he’s simply opining about other company issues. Of course, Robert doesn’t tag his posts as “authoritative” and “non-authoritative;” nor does anyone else. It’s up to the reader to deduce that.
While we wrestle with these issues as we journey farther into the era of social computing, there is one thing companies can do to ensure accurate information is presented to various external publics: They can communicate more effectively internally, providing accurate information and access to details that will help those employees who blog (or otherwise engage in the great conversation) avoid making any mistakes. In other words, internal communcations is having a greater and greater effect on external communications.
Given that, how much additional emphasis do companies need to place on employee communications, and where should it reside? Too often, the answer comes down to politics. Wherever your internal communications department sits in the org chart, though, you’d better make sure there’s a strong tie to the external team and that messages are clear, consistent, accurate, thorough and candid. If not, this new era of social computing could reach up and bite your company in the ass.
4. Podcasting: What’s In A Name?
A mini brouhaha has erupted over a report from Bridge Data that “reveals” most people who retrieve podcasts don’t transfer them to their portable digital media devices. According to the study, more than 80% of podcasts are played directly from the PC. Blogging about this, Colin Dixon and Michael Greeson of TDG Research suggest:
“We find ourselves in a bit of pickle: either (a) our definition of podcasting is insufficient or inaccurate, or (b) 80% of those who we call “podcasters” are nothing of the sort.”
Steve Rubel also weighed in, saying, “It seems like some people are calling programs podcasts that really aren’t.”
I think I need to start a new category on this blog called “Take a deep breath.” It would certainly apply to this post. Why is a deep breath needed? Two points. First, I believe the 80% number is being misinterpreted. Second, who gives a damn?
The first point: It’s not that 80% of podcasts aren’t available for subscription. It’s that 80% of the downloads of podcasts aren’t available for transfer to an iPod. It’s that 80% of the people who download any given podcast, for whatever reason, aren’t opting to transfer it to a portable device. (Podcasters are the people producing the podcast, not the people listening.)
But it’s not even the portability of the audio file that makes it a podcast. After all, you could do that with an audio file well before podcasting was introduced. it’s the ability to subscribe via RSS that makes it a podcast. While the TDG post refers to the Oxford dictionary’s definition, I prefer Wikipedia’s: “Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the Internet using either RSS or Atom syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers.” Note that the RSS distribution is referenced before the portability.
Even with that, many people opt to download podcast files directly from a site rather than subscribing. Looking at the LibSyn stats for my own podcast, I can see that just under half of the retrievals of the files come from direct downloads instead of subscriptions. I have no idea how many are listening to the stream we make available. But even if more than half don’t subscribe, and most of them listen at their computer, does that mean it’s not a podcast?
Of course not. And that’s the second point. The fact that the podcast can be retrieved via RSS subscription and can be transferred to an MP3 player makes it a podcast. How people choose to get and listen to one is entirely up to them. I’m working on a podcasting project with a client. One of the requirements I set for the effort is to ensure the podcast can be subscribed to, downloaded directly, and streamed, giving the control to the listener so they can exercise their personal preferences.
And let’s not forget that podcasting isn’t even two years old. Any number of reasons could account for the slow uptake of the RSS and portability characteristics of podcasts: Confusion about subscribing, failure to understand the portability issue, the convenience of listening at the computer immediately after downloading, already-formed PC-listening habits, the list goes on.
So rather than get hung up on semantics, let’s stay focused on the potential for the medium. Okay? Now, everybody, exhale…
5. New Webinar on CEO Communication—And New Site!
My Webinar business (web-based workshops) has been quiet for a few months as it undergoes some significant change. I’ve extended my partnership with Lawrence Ragan Communications, resulting in the relocation of Webinars from my own server to Ragan’s, using a content management system, a simpler registration process, and more integrated Webinar elements (the message board is more tightly integrated with the lectures, for instance).
I’m the lecturer for the first Webinar using this new system. The topic: CEO communications. The Webinar will cover how CEOs should communicate with employees, in general, during times of change, and in support of organizational initiatives. The role of the communication department will be examined, including recommendations on how to get the CEO to listen to your advice and what to do if the CEO just isn’t a great communicator.
The Webinar begins Monday, May 1. You can get details and register here:
http://www.raganwebinars.com/ME2/Sites/Default.asp
Remember, these are NOT telephone-based sessions! All Webinar activity takes place on the Web; they are primarily text-based. If you’re expecting a teleseminar with web-based PowerPoint slides (what some people CALL webinars), this isn’t that.
The next Webinar will feature a primer on podcasting!
6. Who’s Number One?
In the March/April issue of Journal of Employee Communication Management (a print publication; subscribers have access to online articles), my good friend Steve Crescenzo questions the notion of companies prioritizing audiences.
Steve often ponders things that never occur to anyone else. This tendency comes from a combination of creativity, stress, and alcohol. As for his musing about ranking audiences, Steve wrote:
“I just think it’s dangerous to start ranking and prioritizing your different audiences or stakeholders. It’s sort of like a parent favoring one child over another. If customers are always first, who’s second? Do employees come before shareholders? Where do your distributors fit in? Outside contractors? Wha about the board of directors, or your lobbyists and legislators? If you’re putting one group first, that must mean you’re putting another group last.
“And there’s another reason the whole ‘customers first’ philosophy irks me. As an employee communications guy, I tend to think that if you are going to start ranking your audiences (and I’m not saying you should), then the employees should come first.”
Steve cites Southwest Airlines, which has always held that employees come first. I remember hearing a tale about retired Southwest CEO Herb Kelleher reacting to a company vision pitch from a PR agency by insisting the agency just didn’t get the essence of Southwest’s vision. In a nutshell, he said, the vision is: “Smiles on faces, butts in seats, money in the bank.” In other words, customers will want to fly Southwest if the company is populated by happy employees. Thus, you start with your employees. I don’t know if the story is true, but it makes me happy to think that it is.
But I don’t think Steve is looking at the prioritization from the right perspective. It is important to rank audiences, and it is important to put customers first. And I say this as a guy who spends a lot of time on employee communications myself. But employee communications isn’t the point. The point is about dealing with crises.
In a crisis, senior management is inclined to panic. Panic begets knee-jerking. Knee-jerk reactions in a crisis can be deadly to a business: “Oh, crap, this is serious! We gotta protect our shareholders or our share price will tank. What do we do?” The answer, most often, is to make a decision with investors in mind that ultimately sinks the company.
That’s precisely what Johnson & Johnson didn’t do when faced with the Tylenol tampering incident back in 1982. For those who are unaware (I figure that’s about six people in the US), someone had laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules with cyanide and then returned the bottles to store shelves. Seven people died as a result of ingesting the capsules. To this day, Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the crisis is a textbook study of effective crisis management. That success was the direct result of the prioritization of audiences.
Johnson & Johnson earned its reputation by pulling all Tylenol from store shelves. The cost to the company was enormous. The recall of 31 million bottles of Tylenol cost the company $100 million. The company also stopped manufacturing Tylenol until they could come up with a method for protecting the contents of the bottles, another huge hit to the company’s bottom line. The company was under no obligation to yank the product—after all, only a few bottles in one region were affected and odds were 99.999% of the people who bought Tylenol wouldn’t die of cyanide poisoning. A kneejerk reaction would have been to keep product on store shelves, protecting sales and profits, while making statements about working with law enforcement to find the culprit. But the company had a printed priority list of stakeholders with customers firmly at the top and investors equally firmly at the bottom. The philosophy was simple: Do the right thing by customers and profits and share value will take care of themselves. During crisis exercises, management put the list into practice. Thus, when the Tylenol scare erupted, management didn’t hesitate to put customers first and pull the product and suspend production until the company could innovate its tamper-resistant bottle.
Following its decision to put customers first, rather than let circumstances and panic dictate the decision, the company’s share price fell seven points. Before the action, Johnson & Johnson owned 35% of the non-prescription pain reliever market. Without the product on store shelves, that percentage dropped to 8%. Investors could not have been happy. But because the company’s decision bolstered its reputation among consumers, it didn’t take long to regain its market share after the tamper-proof bottles were introduced. It exceeded its previous market share shortly after that.
J&J’s credo is explicit: “We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.” Next are employees, followed by communities, and finally by stockholders.
That’s right: Employees come second in the company’s ranking. It’s a sound approach —- one that led the company through a crisis that could have doomed any organization with different priorities —- or worse, no priorities at all. It doesn’t mean employees don’t matter. It does guide decision making that can mean life or death for an organization.
7. More Evidence Supports CEO Communication
As noted in item number 5, the next Shel Holtz Webinar focuses on CEO communication. I’m really happy about doing this Webinar, since it’s something I believe in so strongly. I feel it necessary to offset the beliefs of some communication consultants that employing the CEO to communicate with frontline employees during times of change is a waste of time, money, and effort. I’m always delighted to find research to contradict this belief. I’ve found plenty, and use my blog to spotlight it. Like these:
If you reject all the other research and rationale for CEOs to communicate with employees —- especially during times of change and stress -— you should pay attention to the recently released “Return on Reputation” survey. Hill & Knowlton released the study, conducted by MORI, revealing how financial analysts view corporate reputation management. As much as you may dislike the amount of power financial analysts wield over organizations, that power is very real. And analysts expect CEOs to communicate with their employees.
The authors of the study found it “unsurprising” that analysts need to lead organizational change (an opinion held by 76% of the analysts responding to the survey).
“Nonetheless the ability to communicate (66%) and motivate employees (60%) are also important factors which perhaps too many senior executives ignore to their detriment.”
Another strong piece of evidence tipping the scales in support of direct leader communication with employees. I wouldn’t want to be the CEO of a company that got a negative analyst recommendation because I was listening to the voices arguing that leader communication with employees is a waste of time.
But wait. There’s more.
For reasons I cannot imagine, I was been assigned to judge the “Electronic and Digital Communication - Skills” entries at the IABC Gold Quill Blue Ribbon Panel. Among the entries I reviewed was one from a well-known global company with many tens of thousands of employees. The company is going through evolutionary change wrought by global markets, new technologies, and new demands from existing customers. Communicating the change to employees has been high on the list of priorities for the company’s internal communicators, who conducted employee research to help them craft the efforts. A key bit of research that drove a major decision (and led to the Gold Quill entry) as described in the work plan:
“A majority of employees wanted to learn more about (the company’s) goals and direction, and they wanted to hear this information from the CEO.”
It’s important to understand the nature of this company: The vast majority of employees are unionized, blue-collar laborers. Yet they wanted to hear about the company’s goals and direction from the top. Yet more evidence that the CEO plays a pivotal role in communications within an organization.
8. Old Tools Still Matter
To hear some people, you’d think business should abandon traditional communication channels and dive into social computing to deliver its messages and address its issues. The audience, we are told, has no interest in being talked to; we must, at all costs, accommodate a growing desire among the audience to be engaged in conversation.
I do believe in the conversation and the shift to a social computing environment and all the consequences for business and communications. However, nothing changes everything and I’ve maintained for years that the new tools should be added to the old, not replace them.
Validation came while I was reading my hard copy of the March 20 BusinessWeek. (That’s right, I still get a dead-tree copy in the mail every week. It’s easier to read that way, particularly in the bathroom.) The article that struck me: “Why the Web is HItting a Wall” (paid subscription required). The article by Roger Crockett reports on a Parks Associates survey that reveals 39 million American households do not have Internet access —- meaning only 64% of households do. (And only a small percentage of these read blogs or listen to podcasts!)
The study broke down the reasons why so many Americans are avoiding the Net. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to assume they’re all just getting what they need at work. In fact, that rationale accounts for only 31% of nonusers, according to the study. Sixty percent of people over 65 aren’t connected. There are 6 million homes with PCs but no Internet connection, and most of them wouldn’t subscribe to Net access at any price. Another million say they’re not interested in “anything” on the Net.
Analysts anticipate the total online US population will only reach 67% by 2009. The bottom line is simple: Abandon traditional methods of communication for social media and you also abandon 36% of the total consumer market. Sadly, rather than shift all your efforts to social media, you’ll just have to allocate the resources to do both.
9. Sites of the month
PodBop
Two things will accelerate the uptake of podcasting. One is ease of use. The other is innovative podcasts to which people will want to subscribe. From the second category, I’m anxious to see more services like PodBop.
The idea behind PodBop is simple. Type in the name of your city and you’ll be presented with a list of musicians who are playing live there over the next week or so. You can listen to MP3 files of each band. Better yet, just subscribe to the RSS feed for that city and each week you’ll get a sampling of music from bands playing locally in the days ahead. You can listen at your leisure and decide if you want to take in a show.
According to the site’s information page, PodBop works using the API from Eventful, pulling tagged events into its own database. As for the MP3s, “They are direct links to MP3s hosted on band and record label websites. Much like music blogs do. We can’t imagine why they would have a problem with us using their file sources (they are available for download anyway, plus it’s free promotion).” Well, that could be a problem, I suppose, if the RIAA decided to make an issue out of it. The site does have a link for artists to request links be removed.
But conceptually, PodBop (no pun intended) rocks. The idea of a weekly sampling of music available live in your town fills a need that no technology accommodated before podcasting. I’ve subscribed to the San Francisco feed.
An Elegant Use of Flash
I still maintain the vast majority of Flash implementations on the web are awful. They take too long to load, they inhibit your ability to get to the information that brought you to the website in the first place, and they add nothing to the information the site conveys. But there are exceptions.
I ran across this elegant animation reading my feeds today. Beginning on March 20, 2003, it shows chronologically the casualties incurred on troops fighting in Iraq. As the calendar zips from day to day, month to month, year to year, the dots continue to spread, conveying in heart-aching clarity the real toll the conflict has taken.The animation runs at 10 frames per second, one frame representing a day. A single black dot indicates the location where a military fatality occurred. An accompanying “tick” sound represents a single casualty.
The map is interactive—you can deselect countries and add location names to the map. Credit for the project goes to designer Tim Klimowicz, who has some other impressive efforts under his belt.
I don’t show this example to make any political point whatsoever, but rather as an example of how Flash can be put to good use to convey quantitative information visually using the dimensions of time and space. It shouldn’t be a great stretch to figure out how to use this approach to represent iPod sales over time and by region—or any other dramatic incursion of a thing or meme into geographic regions.
http://www.obleek.com/iraq/index.html
IABC Conference Blog and Podcast
IABC has launched its official conference blog, “In Session,” and an associated podcast, “ConferenceCast.” Several IABC members and staff will author the blog leading up to and continuing through the June 4-7 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The podcast will feature interviews with speakers, staff, conference organizers, and some members planning on attending. The podcast will provide insights, information, and updates on the conference. And guess who’s hosting it? IABC asked Neville Hobson and me to produce and co-host the podcast. The first episode is up. I recorded interviews with Gold Quill Awards Blue Ribbon Panel judges during the annual judging session in March, and I think I did a heck of an editing job. I’d value any feedback you may have.
10. HC+T update
- It must be audit season. I’m conducting four (count ‘em, four) intranet audits for companies large and small.
- Demand for “Writing for the Wired World” continues. I’m conducting the daylong workshop for a company in Minneapolis later this month.
- I’m in the midst of managing a blogger relations program for a high-tech startup. The application is very cool—a way to give users control over online video, to let producers create start points within the video, and for individuals to engage in a conversation about the video. I don’t usually work for very small companies and startups, but I’m sold on this product, called Click.TV. Take a look—http://click.tv.
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