Wednesday, August 29, 2007
HC+T Update: August 2007
HC+T Update: August 2007
HC+T Update
August 2007
- Wikipedia Scanner: Open Season On Companies
- Facebook Blocking Doesn’t Add Up
- Two New Webinars Coming Up
- Blog Launches Along With The New Chrysler
- A New ROI Calculator For Social Network Campaigns
- Company Leaders: Lousy Internal Communicators
- Second Life Criticism Based On Faulty Assumptions
- Widgets Go Mainstream
- Sites 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. Wikipedia Scanner: Open Season On Companies
Since Virgil Griffith launched Wikipedia Scanner, it’s been open season on organizations whose IP addresses are linked to changes made to entries on the popular DIY encyclopedia. For example…
- PRWeek’s UK edition notes that “PR agencies are flouting Wikipedia rules demanding they do not edit the site. At least six of the PRWeek top ten UK agencies have edited the site in the past year…FD is the biggest offender filing 25 edits, primarily concerning clients Russ DeLeon and Ruth Parasol—founders of the online gambling company PartyGaming.”
- Wired is taking and publishing submissions in a posting titled “Vote on the Most Shameful wikipedia Spin Jobs.”
- Over 750 blog posts have been contributed on the topic, and a Google search produces 342,000-plus results.
Cumulatively, the number of organizations being outed for making changes is staggering. Rarely does a single tool produce such an overwhelming indictment of institutions’ predlicition for spinning facts and history.
But a little perspective is in order.
I’ve been visiting the Scanner over the last few days, spending time in the “Editor’s Picks.” For example, I spent a fair amount of time clicking through edits made from Exxon Mobil’s IP addresses. As of right now, there is a whopping 1,205 edits made by Exxon Mobil. Outrageous, right? Well, no. In fact, only about 20 of the edits seem to have anything to do with entries related to Exxon Mobil.
What, then, were all these other edits? Here’s a very small sampling:
- Correction of a typo (“choose” instead of “chose”) in an entry about Disneyland’s Autopia ride
- Addition of a paragraph about how refrigeration cycles work in an entry about air conditioners
- Removal of an offensive addition to the biography of country singer/actress Dolly Parton
- Removal of a gratuitous addition (I LOVE YOU JENNY) to a listing on the history of American Football
- A section on “Economy” was added to the listing for the city of Natchitoches, Louisiana, suggesting that the city’s tourism industry needs little promotion.
Are these blatant abuses by Exxon Mobil? Clearly not. These are employees who also happen to be Wikipedia fans; they don’t care whether they’re at home or at work when they make their corrections and additions. But because their entries from work computers get aggregated with all other revisions from the company’s range of IP addresses, they get added to the total. Without these entries, Exxon Mobil probably wouldn’t have attracted the editor’s attention and become an editor’s pick.
A look at Amgen’s results shows a similar pattern. Most changes were made to entires dealing with a band called Caustic, the late Monty Python alum Graham Chapman, the term “mnemonic,” the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the like. Reviews of other companies produced the same kinds of results.
And what about the edits to Exxon Mobil entries, the ones that clearly violate Wikipedia’s policy? While some are egregious (deletion of content about the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for instance), others simply correct facts. For example, the entry about Mobil 1motor oil originally stated that Mobil 1 was introduced two years after Amsoil “marketed the first API certified synthetic engine oil.” The change reflects the fact that Mobil 1 was, in fact, the first API (American Petroleum Institute) certified synthetic motor oil.
At this point, you also have to wonder how many of the edits to company-specific content were business-motivated -— that is, deliberately executed by the PR staff—and how many were individual employees who visited the company’s listing and said, “Hey, that’s not right,” and made the change without understanding the consequences. Companies now need policies that limit employee edits to company listings in Wikipedia.
I’ve been on the record opposing the Wikipedia rule that bars companies and their agents from editing company content. Honest efforts to correct mistatements of fact are prohibited by the rule (such as changing the number of employees from 500,000 to 50,000 because the original author added an extra zero) while unethical companies will simply make their inappropriate changes from non-work computers or use proxy services that mask their identities. Meanwhile, thousands of people who don’t work for the company but do have a biased point of view merrily post entries that obviously were never crafted with objectivity in mind.
But my objection doesn’t matter. The rule is the rule and if companies can’t play by it, they deserve whatever heat they take as a result of being outed courtesy of the Wikipedia Scanner. And, to be fair, most of the companies that have been the subject of news reports since the Scanner opened for business have been caught trying to rewrite history.
Still, it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff, and not much of an effort has been made so far to draw the distinction between truly unethical manipulation of content, minor factual revisions, changes made unwittingly by front-line employees and changes to non-company content by employees accessing Wikipedia from work computers.
2. Facebook Blocking Doesn’t Add Up
Tony Molloy, from the Bolton Citizens Advice Bureau in the UK, forwarded the latest issue of ILM Newsroom, the online publication from the UK’s Institute of Leadership & Management. The juxtaposition of three articles grabbed my attention.
The first one -— the article that prompted Tony to send the site my way —- reports that “More than two thirds of employers have banned or restricted the use of Facebook and other social networking sites amid fears that staff are wasting time at work.”
More Londoners (826,000) are registered as Facebook members than any other city, and one study found that British users spend 191 minutes per month on the site. That averages out to less than 6.5 minutes per day. Still, Transport for London, British Gas, the Metropolitan Police, Lloyds TSB and Scotland Yard are among the organizations that have put filters in place to keep employees from visiting the site. A Scotland Yard representative said, “Access to some of these sites is blocked as there is no business need for employees to visit them.”
Well, except for the ability to network with other employees, potential customers, strategic partners, and people whose knowledge can prove an advantage in your work. Other than that, there’s no business need for employees to visit them.
Which leads to the second article, which reports on a survey that found nearly half of UK employees believe their managers make poor decisions. They blame incompetence and lack of confidence for the bad decisions.
Bad decisions like, maybe, blocking Facebook and other social networks?
The survey respondents thought their own bosses were fine; it’s the higher-ups that earned their derision. One particularly interesting finding revealed that 51% of senior managers believe they solicit employee input before making a decision, only 22% of employees agreed.
Perhaps soliciting employee decisions about blocking social networks would have uncovered business reasons to leave the sites unblocked. Alas, it’s easier to jerk one’s knee.
Neville reported today on a study suggesting that Facebook is costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year in lost productivity. Of course, these numbers are calculated using the same absurd approach that companies like Websense use to heighten paranoia in support of the purchase of their site-blocking software. Here’s the formula:
Hours spent on Facebook x average hourly per-employee pay x working Facebook population
So let’s say the average worker is earning $25 per hour (for a salary of about $50,000 per year—I’m not going to mess with conversion to British pounds for this speculative argument). Multiply that by the number of Londoners with Facebook accounts (which is ridiculous, since not all of them are employees, but this is just for the sake of argument), and you come up with $20,650,000 in “lost productivity” for businesses in the city of London for every hour employees spend on Facebook. Multiply that by the total number of hours they spend on Facebook (assuming all those hours are spent at work), and you wind up with “lost productivity” approaching half a billion dollars a year.
One of my big questions in these decisions to block social networks, blogs, and other sites is whether time is, in fact, being wasted. The measure of productivity, particularly in knowledge jobs, is whether work is getting done, whether it’s getting done on time, and whether the quality of the work meets or exceeds the employer’s expectations. If I spend 20 minutes on Facebook at work, then spend an hour doing work in my living room in the evening or stay an hour late at work, the net result is still the same. (We won’t get into the effect of lack of management trust in employees on levels of employee engagement.)
All of which may be supported by yet another survey: Brits evidently believe time at work should be used primarily for work purposes. The third article from the ILM Newsroom looks at a study that determined “almost one in five employees think lunch breaks are for wimps with some not even taking any time out during their working day.”
The ILM Newsroom reports “that while this might appear to be a bonus for Britain’s bosses, working without any breaks can prove detrimental to employees’ health and wellbeing.”
God forbid that break should take place on Facebook or another social network where employees might actually bring the benefits of networking back to the workplace. And God further forbid that supervisors should deal with employees wasting time; it’s so much easier to simply not trust everybody, isn’t it?
So let’s review:
Companies are blocking employee access to social networks without doing the homework required to determine whether their fears of wasted time are justified
Most employees think it’s important to work hard to the point that they skip lunch in order to get more work done and not be viewed as a wimp
Most employees think their leaders make stupid decisions
Yep, that about covers it.
3. Two New Webinars Coming Up
Two Webinars are starting up in the next couple of months.
First up, I’m VERY excited to have Bryan Person (http://www.bryper.com and http://www.newcommroad.com) presenting a Webinar on hot to monitor and engage in the the collaborative, consumer-generated media space. This Webinar will take a very close look at how to interact with bloggers and engage in blogger outreach (also known as blogger relations). This Webinar begins Sept. 10. Register at http://tinyurl.com/2n39rm.
Next, I’m repeating my Human Resources Communications Webinar, which attracted well over 100 participants the first time around. This one starts October 1. Register at http://tinyurl.com/2pdfup.
As always more information is available at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com.
4. Press Releases vs. News Releases
My post on August 2 about a news release (sorry, you’ll just have to go read the blog post) issued by the Adfero Group has prompted some discussion about some of the fundamentals of the social media release. Adfero’s “interactive” news release embraces some of the elements of the social media release, but retains the narrative style of traditional releases.
Adfero representatives offered well-thought-out arguments for rejecting the bullet-listed “Core News Facts” section of the social media release. In a comment to my post, Adfero’s Jeff Mascott wrote, “The best approach for a news release is still the narrative format –- it the easiest to read by reporters, bloggers and interested citizens alike.”
The rationale for the bullet approach comes directly from the Tom Foremski post that launched the social media release effort to begin with. Foremski wanted companies to “deconstruct the press release into special sections and tag the information so that as a publisher, I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.”
The social media releases I have crafted have, in every instance, been paired with a traditional release (as in this example, but Adfero doesn’t like that approach, according to a comment from Chris Battle: “While I respect your idea of sending two news releases -– one with the narrative and one without -– our goal was to create a release that accomplishes our goals in one document.” Others have rejected the dual release concept simply because it takes too much time.
I respect the positions Adfero and others have taken on these issues. But I don’t buy ‘em. Communications shouldn’t be about consolidation. We should target the message to the audience (a term I use advisedly). I see three distinct audiences, each with unique needs:
- Traditional media
- Online media (including bloggers)
- The general public
Let’s tackle the public/press issue first. Battle writes:
“we are not writing solely for journalists. One of the things that makes the new media environment so much more productive is that organizations can issue their news releases directly to the public. The goal is go convince the mainstream media and the blogosphere to pick up the release and run a story about it, but it is not the only goal. Equally important is to deliver that information directly into the hands of target audiences in the public.”
The first time I heard the idea that press releases need to accommodate both the media and the general public, it came up twice in one day. The first was a high-tech company that asserted the need to write releases that might be too technical for the average journalist because the release would be read by sophisticated IT types. The second was a telecommunications company that insisted it needed to dumb down its releases because Joe Beercan might wind up reading it on the web.
We need to make a distinction between press releases and news releases. A press release is targeted at the press and should be crafted to meet the needs of a reporter or editor. A news release is for general distribution to the public. While this is not the approach taken by many PR practitioners, it’s one that makes more and more sense.
As for the traditional vs. social media release, it’s important to remember that some publications don’t have the resources to turn a release into a story. Early in my career, I worked for both trade and public publications where I was one of two writers/editors. Much of the editorial was made up of press releases, run just as we got them. There are still a lot of outlets in that position. For them, a traditional release is the answer.
For online journalists and bloggers, however, a social media release—one that makes it easy to grab elements and insert them, whether they’re text or multimedia—is in order. The idea is to make the information easy to adapt to social media tools, like blogs and websites. And here, I have to return to Foremski’s original rant:
Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on…
Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists.
This madness has to end. It is wasted time and effort by hundreds of thousands of professionals.
Formeski’s solution to the narrative approach (what Tom calls “topspin”)—the solution embraced by the social media release working group: “Provide a brief description of what the announcement is, but leave the spin to the journalists. The journalists are going to go with their own spin on the story anyway, so why bother? Keep it straightforward rather than spintastic.”
And what of the time it takes to produce two or even three versions of a release, each targeted to the appropriate audience? I don’t buy that, either. Start with the traditional, narrative release, then use it as the basis for the others. It has never taken me more than an hour to create a social media release from a traditional release.
Finally, there’s the worry that the wrong audience will see the wrong release, given that any release will wind up in places like Yahoo’s finance site. But it’s easy to begin any release with a line like this:
This is a press release intended for use by the news media. A general news release can be found here and a social media release is available here.
As communicators working in an increasingly fragmented world, we should not strive to make one size fit all. We should target our messages for maximum effectiveness. If that means an extra hour or two to produce niche-focused versions of releases, then that’s what we should do.
5. Blog Launches Along With The “New” Chrysler
The “new” Chrysler officially launched yesterday as most of the transition of ownership from Daimler to the private Cerberus has been wrapped up. A day earlier, though, the company unveiled a blog prominently accessible from the company’s business home page.
Called “Voices of Chrysler,” the blog has featured several senior-level posts, including a welcome from Vice Chairman and President Tom Lasorda who wrote:
“We will continue our strong tradition of communicating with our stakeholders, employees, dealers, suppliers, community leaders, and most importantly, our customers. That’s one of the reasons for this blog…We also want to start a conversation with you and keep it going, so please feel free to add your two cents in the comment section.”
The invitation was greeted by 22 comments to date, including a few wishes for success along with some concerns. One noted that the new CEO, Bob Nartelli, was removed from his position at Home Depot where his leadership had led to demoralization of the workforce and customer base. “Please tell me that things will be different at Chrysler LLC. I am a lifetime Mopar fan and do not want to see a hacksaw job done on my favorite car company. Just worried, that’s all.” Another complained about the lack of lifetime warranties in Canada.
(The new CEO’s name is spelled Nardelli, but I left the spelling as it was in the comment.)
Other posts have addressed innovation and a look back at the design of the Chrysler logo (by its original creator). There’s also an introductory note from Jackie Headapohl, the editor of the blog. Headapohl spoke to Toby Bloomberg and told her the blog’s goal is to “share the many voices associated with Chrysler that give it its unique “mojo” and provide customers a behind-the-scenes look at our company.” Toby promises a full-blown interview with Headapohl soon.
So far, comments have appeared with each post and it doesn’t appear that there’s any effort by the company to filter out the negative. I may have missed it, but I haven’t seen any of the blog authors participating in the comments section. So far, the writing is a bit stilted and the topics are fairly broad -— not unexpected for a brand new corporate blog launched to coincide with the launch of a new company. The blog should find its footing right alongside the organization.
Overall, though, launching a blog along with the company is a smart move, providing that window inside and the opportunity for the authentic voices of company leaders to be heard and for them to engage with customers (and other constituents).
One interesting note: Accompanying the RSS feed for the blog is a link that reads, “Podcast feed.” This leads to a 404/page-not-found, but suggests that a podcast is in the works.
6. A New ROI Calculator For Social Network Campaigns
Measurement of social media’s value continues to be a hot issue, and now another group has taken a stab at developing a calculation to make that assessment. In this case, it’s “a tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like FAcebook and Myspace.” The calculator comes from Care2, which describes itself (in its press release boilerplate) as “the largest online progressive network, bringing together socially and environmentally responsible nonprofits, businesses and its 7 million members.”
The calculator is posted to Care2’s Frogloop blog and is focused on not-for-profit campaigns, but a lot of thought went into the calculator that communicators in the for-profit world can easily adapt.
The first step asks you to determine the metrics by entering goals or results, such as…
- Staff/volunteer hours per week
- Cost per hour of staff and volunteer time
- Social network “friends” recruited per week
- Average direct donation per friend from the social network site
- Net churn rate per year for your email list
A total of 15 metrics are listed. Step 2 involves calculating the resulting revenue and costs for each of the metrics; step 3 involves projecting the response rates for email advocacy and outreach to social network recruits over a four-year period by entering data such as the total number of emails opened per mailing. Step 4 projects the results of the effort. It’s a detailed calculator with some serious math involved. Author Justin Perkins also suggests that, if your results are based strictly on advocacy or branding, you could limit your use of the calculator to “cost per friend” or “cost per email name” to get a comparison of the cost of recruiting people elsewhere.
Take a look; how might it apply to any organization’s efforts to quantify the impact of a social media outreach effort?
7. Company Leaders: Lousy Internal Communicators
It will come as no surprise to anybody who has ever held a job that managers are often lousy communicators. Even if you have leaders who communicated well, you undoubtedly had co-workers who weren’t so lucky.
Employees are not promoted into jobs with supervisory responsibility based on their communication skills. Rather, the promotion track eventually leads to a job with managerial responsibilities, after which few companies require managers to complete any kind of communication skills training.
A human resources consulting firm called Novations has surveyed 2,046 senior HR and training and development executives to assess the degree of the problem. “HR people have a unique vantage on employee opinions and attitudes, and are ideally placed to evaluate the communications effectiveness of top management,” according to Rebecca Hefter, Novations’ Senior VP for Training.
On the one hand, I laughed out loud when I read that quote. I’ve known plenty of HR people who were among the worst communicators I’ve ever experienced. I’ve also worked with companies where HR was an obstacle to effective communication. On the other hand, HR is one of the few departments in any company that touches every other department; it’s also the place employees go to complain.
Hefter continued: “The survey results aren’t just disturbing, they’re also startling, given the time and money devoted to internal communication.”
Again, I had to chortle a bit, given the scant resources most internal communicators have to work with. Most communication resources are shoveled at marketing and external PR. Employee communicators are often left with the droppings.
The survey results are startling, though. Asked to grade the effectiveness of senior management’s communications with employees, HR and T&D executives broke it out this way:
A: 14%
B: 39%
C: 32%
D: 13%
F: 02%
That’s nearly half of senior executives earning a grade of C or less. Even more interesting are the reasons given for such lousy performance:
35%—Senior management relies too much on email (and not enough on face-to-face communication)
30%—Senior management assumes a single message is adequate
28%—Senior management has no feedback loop in place
24%—Senior management’s messages often lack clarity
03%—Senior management communicates too much, too often
The last one is odd, since the benefits of over-communication dramatically outweight the risks of under-communication. The rest, though, resonate. Hefter’s most salient comment:
What stands out is the inherent weakness of email for employee communications. The Internet is used more and more, but there seems to be a point of diminishing returns when email is relied upon so much. Employees like to see and hear their management and may feel depersonalized by too much email messaging, instead of direct contact.”
I suspect email is also being used ineffectively in a lot of cases, but Hefter’s right: We have come to rely far too heavily on email as a means of reaching employees (who, incidentally, are already buried in email).
Part of the problem is that many employee communication departments have little influence over what senior leaders do (hence the quest for that elusive seat at the management table). And, of course, there are those who would argue that senior leader communication is irrelevant anyway.
The fact is that trust is a critical component of engagement and commitment, and trust evolves from (among other things) clear line of sight between the senior-most levels of the organization and the front line. The folks in the C-suite make decisions that determine whether front-line employees will have a job in the future. Strong leader communication is a vital element of any internal communication effort, and therefore needs to be strategized like any other aspect of employee communications.
With luck, the ability to share this data with senior leaders will produce some results. It would have been nice, though, if the research had been able to to tie bad leader communication to disappointing business results. Change is most easily initiated when the organization can ease some pain.
8. Second Life Criticisms Based On Faulty Assumptions
I’ve just gotten around to reading some of the many blog posts that gleefully point to Frank Rose’s Wired piece about real-world businesses failing in Second Life and proclaiming, “I told you so.”
A lot of what Rose writes is true; companies are, indeed, blowing it in Second Life. I have long maintained that the goal of getting into Second Life is to figure out how a company can engage with avatar communities since it’ll only be a few more years before the World Wide Web is pretty much one big avatar community. Plenty of mainstream business publications and analysts have agreed over the last several months that the Web is destined to go 3D, and it just makes sense for companies to make their mistakes now when the consequences are so much lighter than five or seven years from now when the entire online population will witness your screw-ups.
That means that raking in big bucks shouldn’t be a key objective for any company’s Second Life activities (even if the American Cancer Society can raise real money in a virtual fundraiser).
But there’s another part of the story that bugs me. It’s characterized by statements like this, from a blog called Team Spirit:
“I think spending valuable budget on Second Life is a huge mistake. Finally, here’s the proof: Coca-Cola’s ‘Virtual Thirst’ pavilion receiving just 27 visits on “a random day in June…” Just so you know, there are now over 7 million avatars in Second Life.”
and this, from The Brand Wiki:
“The story goes on to detail how Michael Donnelly, Coke’s head of interactive marketing, went through all the steps to create a Second Life avatar and set up a Virtual Thirst pavillion only to find that ‘you can long linger without encountering another avatar.’”
Don’t you just love it when people reach conclusions based on assumptions that are profoundly incorrect? I was with crayon when we were working on the Virtual Thirst project, so I’m well aware that the Coca Cola Pavilion was not built in hopes that avatars would drop on by for a visit whenever the hell the felt like it. Rather, it was built as a venue for special, scheduled, promoted events. These included the project launch and a series of dance parties, all of which were perfectly well attended, thank you very much.
In fact, the Pavilion was built on crayon’s island in Second Life specifically so Coca Cola would not have to invest in an island, a terrible mistake many companies have made. crayon’s advice (led by the brilliant C.C. Chapman, was for Coca Cola not to construct an edifice to itself, but rather to engage the population as part of an effort to learn how to market in virtual worlds. That’s why the Virtual Thirst effort wound up as a design competition with information in a variety of places, including MySpace and YouTube.
It’s not just the bloggers who have made the mistake of equating low random traffic to the Pavilion with failure. Rose did, too:
On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM’s Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke’s Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27.
Well, um, yeah. There was nothing scheduled and promoted at the Pavilion on that “random day in June.”
Journalists and bloggers alike would be well served to make sure they’re drawing conclusions from facts and not assumptions.
(By way of disclosure, I should note that I’m not a huge Second Life user or booster. I’m just a realist about where things are headed.)
9. Widgets Go Mainstream
There was little agreement when, at the New Communications Forum in February, I declared 2007 “the year of the widget” (although it was covered in a few places, like here and here). Bryan Person figured I might be on to something when he reported on the first conference dedicated to widgets, WidgetCon, held last month in New York.
But surfing through TV channels last night, I saw the definitive proof that widgets have arrived.
Burned out from staring at the computer monitor all day, I took a half hour to kick back on the couch and relax. Nothing I usually like to watch was on, so I settled for Discovery Channel’s recurring event, Shark Week. I sat up when I saw a crawl on the bottom of the screen letting viewers know they could get the Shark Week widget.
The widget includes three shark-related headlines (updated to stay current), links to a couple Shark Week online features (“Ask a Conservationist” and a feature that lets you assemble your own shark documentary, along the lines of the misguided Chevy Tahoe experiment but without the risk), a link to the Shark Week site, and a link that lets you add the widget to your own blog or website.
The widget is huge, as widgets go, expanding to fill whatever space is available, which may discourage some shark fantatics from adding it to their sites. Still, a Technorati search revealed 423 blogs specifically about sharks. I’d be willing to bet the widget has found its way onto some of those sites, among others. In any case, it’s a sign—to me, at least—that widgets can be a relatively cheap way to get your content out onto the edge where your target audiences will be likely to see it.
You can see the Shark Week widget on my blog post: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/widgets_go_mainstream/
10. Sites of the Month
There is no doubt in my mind that tagging is going to grow in importance. It will become a dominant element of online search; I was not surprised to see the number of people confounded by changes to Techorati‘s interface, which made it more difficult to search by tag. Microformats will become more pervasive. Social bookmarking will grow in popularity. Tagging content, as you can on sites like Flickr and YouTube will become someething we can take for granted on any site that offers uploads.
So it makes perfect sense that we’re seeing the introduction of products that allow you to carry the tagging concept to your desktop. I’ve been playing with two of them, Taglocity and Attensa, both of which have considerable potential.
Both Taglocity and Attensa are Microsoft Outlook add-ins. Taglocity allows you to tag email messages for discovery later. It includes a tag cloud so you can simply click to your most commonly used tags. Your most commonly-used tags are also available in a toolbar. Several techniques are available to allow you to tag your email as well as to find emails you have tagged.
Outlook 2007 has vastly improved keyword search compared to earlier versions of Outlook, yet I still have found myself using Taglocity to find all the emails I have deliberately tagged a certain way. For example, emails from people discussing various aspects of my podcast don’t always include the name of the show, but tagging these emails “FIR” makes it drop-dead easy to retrieve them.
Taglocity offers a personal edition for free and a professional version for US $39 (there’s a 30-day free trial of the professional edition). The free version is for those who don’t use a lot of email (which wouldn’t include any readers of this blog, I suspect). A video demo does a nice job of explaining the features and how they work. I’ve been using the 30-day free trial, but plan to pony up the $39 once it expires.
Attensa is an Outlook-based RSS reader/aggregator. Since Outlook 2007 already supports RSS feeds, you might wonder why anybody would install an alternative. Not surprisingly, Attensa has done a better job with RSS than Microsoft has. Attensa is feature-rich, offering the ability to read feeds in a “river of news” style for either all your feeds or those within a folder. Any item can be tagged, and you can configure Attensa to automatically add tagged items from you feeds to your del.icio.us bookmarks, which I find to be an incredibly cool and useful feature. Attensa also handles downloads and plays videos and audio, so it can serve as a podcatcher. You can designate that audio and video files automatically get added to iTunes or Windows Media Player and put in an appropriate playlist.
I am running into one problem with Attensa: marking folders as read or deleting all items in a folder can take a long, long time, during which Outlook is unavailable. Version 2.5 is the first to support Vista, though, so I suspect this is a problem Attensa will iron out.
There are video demos that show how the various features work.
Attensa for Outlook is free (Attensa also makes fee-based enterprise RSS products); personalized support is $24.95 per year.
Taglocity: http://www.taglocity.com
Attensa: http://www.attensa.com
11. HC+T update
- I’ll be conducting two days of workshops for a pharmaceutical company in Copenhagen; this is coming up in October.
- I’m helping a major global consumer goods company “refresh” its intranet.
- I’m set to speak at the Greystone.net Internet healthcare conference in Vegas in November; it’s my second appearance in two years.
- I’ll be at Social Media and Podcast Expo in Ontario, California for just one of three days; I’m doing a talk for an aerospace company the day before and leave for the U.K. the day after.
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