Sunday, December 23, 2007
HC+T Update: December 2007
HC+T Update: December 2007
HC+T Update
December 2007
- First 2008 Webinar: Social Networks Inside and Out
- It’s Time to Break the Broadcast Habit
- Three Year-End Signs of Change
- PR is Prominent in Money’s List of Dumbest Moments
- The Great Communications Disconnect
- Chrysler Devalues Communications; a Journalists Admires It
- The Growing Social Media Contradiction
- Sites Of The month
- HC+T Update
- Boilerplate and subscription information
Happy holidays and a prosperous New Year to you all!
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue. 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. First 2008 Webinar: Social Networks Inside and Out
We are pleased to announce the first Shel Holtz Webinar of 2008!
Social Networks, Inside and Out
with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, January 7
TO REGISTER, VISIT WWW.SHELHOLTZWEBINARS.COM
NOTE: Shel Holtz Webinars are five-week-long online seminars that take place 100% asynchronously and 100% on the Web. They are NOT short phone-based sessions.
While “social networking” has been around as an academic concept since the 1970s, today it is almost always equated with online resources through which people can connect with other people. Since MySpace exploded on the scene, social networking has expanded at an unprecedented pace. Today there are pure social networks like MySpace and Facebook, presence-based networks like Twitter and Jaiku, build-it-yourself networks, intranet network suites, wikis-as-networks, networks integrated into other resources and more. Everyone, it seems, is launching one. There’s even new jargon associated the connections within these networks: The Social Graph.
Your customers, employees, and other audiences are participating in these networks at an alarming rate. Communication and influence are happening within the networks. Some companies are using external networks for internal communication; others find them to be ideal recruiting tools.
One this is for sure: You can’t afford to be left behind. During this five-week online webinar, you’ll learn…
* The differences between the various types of social networks
* How social networks can serve as an effective communication channel
* How to set up your own social network
* Using internal social networks as an employee communication channel
* How to monitor social networks for communication issues
* ...and a lot more
As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a collection of online resources and downloadable handouts. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures include a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous—that is, they do not take place in real time. You can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you—there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.
Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.
To get an overview of how these Webinars work, visit http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and view the demo video.
Want a taste of Shel before deciding? Visit his blog at http://blog.holtz.com and listen to his podcast at http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz.
Webinar cost is U.S. $195.
TO REGISTER, VISIT WWW.SHELHOLTZWEBINARS.COM
2. It’s Time to Break the Broadcast Habit
The habit of communicating via broadcast is hard to break. Even as some companies embrace the ethos of social media, they employ broadcast models in their efforts to participate in it. Facebook apps, for example, are a means of injecting a message into a medium used primarily for conversation. There’s nothing wrong with that; in fact, a study from the American Marketing Association suggests a lot of people like ads and apps in social networks: 47% of social network users would use their network to download coupons and 45% would be happy to get information about store promotions.
But getting a message in front of people in a manner that appeals to them isn’t the same as participating in the conversation. And even when companies do participate, a lot of that participation is forced even if it is sincere. Blogger outreach campaigns, for example, broadcast invitations to carefully selected bloggers in the hopes that they’ll help create buzz, get people talking. Again, that’s fine, and there are plenty of case studies that show blogger outreach can be done right.
Jonathan Crow’s experiment in driving messages through social media got me thinking about these things. Crow joined one social network after another, rapidly populating them with contacts, then tried to push out three messages through those networks. First, he wanted to identify a case study to include in a magazine interview. Second, he wanted to distribute a press release along with some blog posts. Finally, he wanted to establish some connections in Latin America in hopes of driving some business.
The results, Crow reports, were not encouraging. The first two, he says, “were unqualified failures.” He did make some Latin American contacts, thanks to the more influential members of the circles he had joined.
Crow has assembled a panel of communicators to evaluate five aspects of his experiment. Their commentary makes for good reading.
I’m not surprised that Crow’s experiment mostly failed. The whole basis of the experiment was broadcasting to an audience of contacts through the networks to which they belonged. Meanwhile, the members of those various networks aren’t engaged in a lot of individual broadcasting. They’re engaged with one another in an ongoing relationship. How much better would Crow’s results have been had he been a long-standing member of the community sharing things that interested him rather than an online Johnny Appleseed, dropping by every network he could find to try planting seeds?
While organizations do need to convey messages, broadcast is becoming a less and less effective way to get them across. Influence happens in conversations these days. Organizations’ best chance to ensure messages are consistent and understandable is through engagement. Albert Schweitzer wrote, “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” A more organic business approach to participating with customers and others online affords companies the opportunity to influence through example.
Here’s what I mean: About a year ago I posted an item to my travel blog about Park ‘N Fly, the off-airport parking service I patronize. I was not a happy guy, left standing at the curb after midnight waiting nearly an hour for a shuttle that was supposed to pick me up within five minutes of calling. The first comment to the post was from Caryn Healy, who works in sales and marketing at Park ‘N Fly. She apologized, insisted that the company was working hard to get its customer service act together, offered some free parking coupons and asked for a second chance. The comment was sincere; it was a real person talking with me. When I talk about Park ‘N Fly these days, I talk about Caryn, not my hour in the cold. And if Caryn happened to reach out to me now with information about new customer service initiatives, I’d be very receptive to them—far more so than if she cold-friended me on Facebook, the hit me with a press release.
Another example: Years ago, Adobe employed a group of tech support specialists whose job was to troll forums and message boards looking for people having problems with their Adobe products, then jump in with the solution. (I don’t know if the group still exists, but I can hope.)
Still, even among most of the companies involved in social media through blogs and other networks, broadcast prevails. At Southwest Airlines, for example—a company with a very good blog, an apparent solid understanding of social media, and employees who are passionate about their employer—employee access to YouTube is blocked. That prevents employees from (among other things) commenting on videos about air travel. (A search of “Southwest Airlines” turns up 728 videos.) That’s a wasted opportunity.
This doesn’t mean companies should just turn employees loose. In fact, it means there is a critical new role for employee communications professionals to play. Internal communicators need to…
- Help employees understand the scope and nature of the social media space and the kind of impact their participation can have
- Ensure employees have access to information and resources that help them share accurate information in their posts and comments
- Clarify the organization’s positions and priorities
- Keep employees up to speed on news and issues people outside the company may be interested in or talk about
While it’s impossible to control conversations employees are engaged in, their authentic participation is what customers and others are looking for and ultimately will have a greater impact than the broadcast approach at the heart of Crow’s experiment. Organizations are made up of people and it is people who are exchanging information and ideas online. The organizations that succeed in social networks will be those that view themselves as participants, not interlopers. It’s a significant mindshift for organizations, requiring them to trust their employees and encourage access to social networks rather than block it. Even those companies not ready for that leap need to encourage those who do represent the company online to do less distribution of information in favor of dialogue. Those organizations that make the shift while still applying traditional communication models that still work, however, will be poised to win.
3. Three Year-End Signs of Change
The end of the year brings three profound examples of the mainstreaming of social media.
First, there’s the Frozen Pea Fund and all related conversation around Susan Reynolds’ battle with breast cancer. Thousands of dollars have been raised through ad hoc campaign that cost essentially nothing, based on a connection made with people who had never met Susan personally. The grass roots campaign involved blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Seesmic and heaven knows how many other social media channels. All but absent so far: mainstream media (There was a report on BBC Online). (Chris Brogan has written great summary of the whole effort, which Neville and I will cover on Monday’s FIR.
Next, Buckhgham Palace announced the launch of a Royal Channel on YouTube. Queen Elizabeth will use the channel to distribute her annual Christmas message. It’s worth noting that Dwight Eisenhouser was president of the United States when the Queen issued her first Christmas message. At that time, the usefulness of television was still an open discussion topic. Now, Elizabeth has moved beyond TV, reaching directly to the people using a medium that may well get more attention than a traditional TV message might. (The BBC has this story. Neville will add his thoughts on Monday’s FIR.)
And speaking of YouTube, it has also become a preferred channel for everything from mea culpas to public responses. All-Star pitcher Roger Clemens has taken to YouTube to issue a denial that he used steroids (he was listed in the Mitchell Report). As recently as a year or two ago, Clemens would have made his statement on TV, probably in an interview (he’s still planning an interview with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes”).
That’s the thread the connects each of these stories. Clemens, in order to reach his fans, would have had to seek out an interview or issue a formal statement to the press; Queen Elizabeth would have had to go on TV and hope people would watch the live address; and the backers of the Frozen Pea effort would have had to spend a fortune on promotional materials to get the word out. Today, they can reach their audiences directly and effectively. In 2008, expect more mainstream figures and organizations to communicate directly through these channels as a supplement to or instead of traditional media.
4. PR is Prominent in Money’s List of Dumbest Moments
Money magazine is out with its annual ”101 Dumbest Moments in Business,” and PR/marketing gaffes get their fair share of representation in the list. (I’m not including advertising in this review, since I generally don’t cover advertising on this blog.) The vast majority of the lapses in judgment covered in the list created PR issues for the organizations involved, but the following were created by bad communications or had unusually horrific PR consequences:
#8—A YouTube video of rats frolicking in a New York Taco Bell gets millions of views.
#16—Microsoft PR agency Waggener Edstrom sends a 12-page dossier on a Wired contributing editor to the Wired contributing editor. The less-than-flattering dossier, calling the editor “tricky” and “sensational,” was meant to go to Microsoft executives.
#17—Redux is warned by the FDA to rename its energy drink, which was called Cocaine. It was renamed to Censored, then NoName.
#21—The Cartoon Network hires a marketing agency to place electronic lightboards promoting its characters. In Boston, they’re mistaken for bombs, creating a crisis.
#36—Best Buy is sued by the Connecticut attorney general over its in-store, kiosk-baed intranet, which employees reportedly used to display prices higher than those advertised on the external website.
#46—Johnson & Johnson sues the American Red Cross over the use of its Red Cross logo.
#51—Nine-year-old Shea O’Gorman writes a letter to Apple making suggestions about how to improve his iPod Nano. In response, the legal department sends him a letter telling him outside recommendations are not accepted and telling him not to write any more letters. (I guess Apple won’t be launching its own version of Dell’s IdeaStorm any time soon.)
#65—Verizon refuses to distribute text messages for the abortion rights organizaton NARAL to people who opt in to receive the messages. They had to reverse themselves later, claiming they had “great respect for the free flow of ideas.”
#67—McDonald’s launches a campaign to get the Oxford English Dictionary to change its less-than-flattering definition of “McJob.”
#81—Internet hosting company 365 Main issues a press release touting its 24/7 reliability. The same day, a power failure takes out three of its generators, knocking out Red Envelope, Technorati, and CraigsList.
#84—Southwest makes passenger Kyla Ebbert cover her legs after initially throwing her off the plane over her short skirt. She winds up promoting new airline Virgin America.
#89—British Airways edits out Virgin’s logo on airplane tails and also edits out Richard Branson’s cameo when showing “Casino Royale” in flight.
#90—Southwest Airlines, fresh from trying to recover from the Kyla Ebbert debacle, makes a fellow wearing a t-shirt that reads “Master Baiter” change his shirt before allowing him to board. This leads to another apology.
#96—Reports emerge everywhere of illicit changes to Wikipeda when Wikiscanner launches. Wikiscanner connects changes to the people making them.
5. The Great Communications Disconnect
On my walk home from elementary school back in the early 1960s, I frequently stopped at the corner liquor store and bought a one-cent Bazooka bubble gum. The gum was usually great (unless it had gone all hard), but what I really wanted was the Bazooka Joe comic that came with it. One of those comics has stuck with me all these years later. I can’t say why, but it has. In that strip, Joe is walking down the street at night when he encounters a fellow on his hands and knees under a street lamp.
“What are you looking for?” Joe asks.
“A quarter,” the character says.
“Where’d you lose it?” Joe queries.
“Across the street,” comes the reply.
“Why are you looking here?” Joe wonders.
The fellow answers, “The light’s better.”
The insistence that organizations cannot embrace social media for one reason or another is the equivalent of looking for the quarter where the light’s better: Companies prefer the comfort of message control over the messiness of conversation. We hear Dave Taylor, for example, insist that “modern American corporations, publicly traded companies, cannot change their internal DNA and ‘let go’ of the message to the point where their online ‘word of mouth’ efforts will have any traction or be at all interesting.” And another prominent PR-focused blogger argues that “contracts are the language of corporations,” making it insanity to try to communicate in an authentic human voice.
(The latter is a theory, not a fact, first presented in 1937—Coase, R. 1937, “The nature of the firm”, Economica, Vol. 4. There are alternate theories. Thanks to David Phillips for that clarification.)
The simple fact is, however, that businesses that adhere to the principles of these naysayers are more than likely doomed to extinction as their customer base evaporates because they’re not conveniently under the street lamp. They’re across the street.
This point has been driven home by the results of ”Media, Myths and Realities,” the second annual study from Ketchum Communication and the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center. The study found that friends and family are the top source of advice for people making decisions ranging from vacation planning to electronics purchases. Advice from an expert ranks highest for decisions around healthcare and the environment.
In other words, word of mouth is the dominant source of impact. Yet most organizations adhere to old models, evidenced by the fact that only 24% of communicators reported having a word-of-mouth program operating in their organizations.
Here’s more:
- Communicators rate their companies’ own Web sites as the most effective way to share news or respond to a crisis, while their audiences score company Web sites sixth among sources for corporate news and seventh for crisis information.
- In the U.S. consumers increasingly dismiss all mainstream media. Even though local TV news continues to rank highest for credibility (consistent with many other surveys), its credibility has dropped from 7.4 (on a 0-to-10 scale) last year to 6.9 in the current study.
- As trust in traditional media wanes, use of social media continues to skyrocket. In the U.S., there has been a 6-point increase in the use of social networking sites over the course of a year, from 17% to 22%. Blog use has also risen 6 points, from 13% to 19%. The use of social media more than doubled among people over 55, suggesting it’s time to stop dismissing social media because “my audience is made up of older people.”
Ketchum and the Annenberg Center offer takeaways from the study, including…
- Treat audiences as groupings of individuals rather than faceless masses
- Put word-of-mouth and search-engine-optimization strategies in place or miss out on tremendous potential for audience reach and sales
- Be wary of the communication flavor of the month
- A company’s own Web site should not be the primary choice when communicating to stakeholders
I’d sum it up this way: Communicate to people where they are, not where the light’s better.
6. Chrysler Devalues Communications; a Journalist Admires It
There were positive signs out of the reborn automaker Chrysler, which was acquired by a private company from Daimler. A blog was one of the first visible signs of change at the company.
But news this week from Chrysler casts a different light on the degree to which it values communications. The company’s communications VP, Jason Vines, resigned and the entire communications function was shifted to report to—are you sitting down?—Human Resources.
An article in the Detroit Free Press quotes Chairman and CEO Bob Nardelli suggesting that the realignment is all about being more “holistic” in order to “more effectively drive company strategy.”
I might chortle over Nardelli dropping the word “holistic” to explain a reorganization, but the demotion of an entire communications function—internal and external—to a unit of HR is disturbing. At its core, HR has defined goals and objectives that are likely to taint external communication efforts. Further, HR executives have little, if any, understanding of media relations, either tactically or strategically. Personally, I even oppose internal communications reporting to HR, which prefers to address benefits and wellness issues over corporate strategy and other subjects that are likely to create higher levels of employee commitment and engagement. And most HR leaders are loathe to address bad news.
But there’s a bigger issue at play here. Nardelli clearly hasn’t seen enough value in communications to be bothered with it as a direct report; he has opted to sweep it under the rug and left his personnel manager to deal with it.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen communications relegated to a trivial stature. I seem to recall that GM once had communications reporting to (urgh) Legal.
Chrysler’s action certainly doesn’t speak well of Nardelli’s view of communications’ importance as a management function. I can only hope it isn’t the start of a trend.
Reporting in Sunday’s Detroit Free Press, columnist Mark Phelan slammed the move. Excerpts:
“Communications must have a seat at the grownups’ table, with direct access to Chrysler’s bosses as the company develops and executes its turnaround strategy. Somebody in communications must be able to walk into the CEO’s office and say “There’s a crisis. Here’s what we have to do,” and the boss must trust that person enough to listen.
“Done right, communications shapes corporate strategy, influences whether a company has a good or bad reputation and serves as a reality-check for managers who can easily lose touch with how the outside world perceives them.
“A really good communications executive is less a spokesperson than a consigliere, the trusted counselor the boss listens to in a crisis.”
While expressing dismay over Chrysler’s move, he applauded GM for its “masterful handling of the Chevrolet Volt concept car,” among other things, then told this story:
“John Mueller, a retired GM communications executive, worked closely with chairman Rick Wagoner when Wagoner ran GM’s North American operations. One day, he suggested Wagoner do an interview with a journalist from a leading newspaper. Wagoner said that his schedule was full.
“Mueller picked up the phone and called Wagoner’s assistant. “Tell him I’ll be right up,” he said. As Mueller stepped into Wagoner’s office, the future leader of the world’s largest automaker smiled.
“‘If you think it’s important, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever quit challenging me when you believe you’re right.’”
That, Phelan wrote, is the approach Chrysler should take, rather than relegating communications to a corner of Human Resources.
As my friend Pete Shinbach noted in the email that alerted me to the Free Press story, “How many times have you read a journalist writing about the value of PR other than as a purely media relations function?” Too true: It’s refreshing, amidst all the bickering between PR and journalists, to see a reporter who appreciates the value of effective communications.
7. The Growing Social Media Contradiction
Rob Cottingham pointed me to a Canadian study that suggests business and marketing leaders believe the importance of social media is eclipsing that of traditional media. The study determined that 46% of respondents say that social media is more important than TV, radio, newspapers and magazines; 85% believe social media have become vital elements of the communication mix.
At the same time, though, 66% don’t think employees should be using it at work.
The study of 444 business and marketing leaders was conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights for Veritas Communications’ new com.motion unit.
Consider that, according to the study, 43% of business and marketing leaders have profiles on MySpace or Facebook. That would include a significant number who believe their own employees shouldn’t be able to access that profile or interact with the business leader—or other employees, customers, or others in their business network—during company time.
If social media are critical elements of the communication mix, shouldn’t employees be exposed to it? Participate in it? Shouldn’t the organization help employees figure out how to represent the organization in their online dealings, the way some companies are?
Rob also wondered (in his note to me), “So… Which group of employers is going to be more attractive to a young, entrepreneurial workforce in an era of skills shortages? And which group stands the better chance of being alive, vibrant and growing in ten years’ time?”
At least we’re starting to witness some chinks in the armor. A few days back, I heard the usual report from job placement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas warning companies that productivity would suffer on Black MondayWall-Street-Crash Oct-07 , the first Monday after Thanksgiving when online retailers offered deep discounts. Their estimate: $488 million in lost productivity, based on 68.6 million American workers spending an average of 12 minutes on the Net. The company also pointed out that those 12 minutes result in $700 million in online sales, which is positive for the economy. But in the radio interview I heard, John Challenger also said that employees are increasingly expected to work when they’re away from the office, which balances things out.
Challenger also offered this, from a report in the Kansas City Star:
“While employers shouldn’t be surprised to see distracted employees on Monday, Challenger, Gray said it is hard to measure productivity using a traditional “widgets per hour” formula.
“The consulting firm said that while some productivity will be lost, employers should not fret because, realistically, workers are not paid by the minute and are not expected to be productive every minute of their work day.
“Overall, “… unless online shopping causes deadlines to be missed or Internet performance to suffer, companies should not attempt to crack down on the practice. Doing so could negatively affect moral and loyalty, which ultimately will have a greater impact on the bottom line than a few minutes of cyber shopping,” said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray.”
Challenger, Gray & Christmas has been releasing these productivity calculations for some time, around everything from Black Monday to the NCAA Final Four. This is the first time I’ve seen an admission that the numbers don’t mean very much.
8. Sites of the Month
Social Media Training Wiki
Dave Fleet has started a wiki over at WetPaint, the ”Social Media Training Wiki.” The wiki’s contents represent a good start; it has the potential to become a valuable resource, a valuable supplement to the hodgepodge of resources over at Constantin Bastureau’s “The New PR Wiki.” The wiki—appropriatetly headlined “Using Social Media to Create Social Media Training” -— features 10 top-level topics so far:
- Fundamentals (“ethics” is featured as a sub-category)
- Blogs (“blogger relations” is a sub-category)
- Micro-blogs
- Podcasts
- Social bookmarking
- Social browsing
- Social media news release
- Social networks
- wikis
- Useful social media tools
http://socialtraining.wetpaint.com/
Media Bullseye
Chip Griffin of CustomScoop, the media monitoring service, has launched an online magazine called Media Bullseye, designed to “provide media, public relations, and marketing professionals with news and commentary about the modern communications landscape.”
Articles are authored by Chip and members of his staff (notably the clearly prolific Sarah Wurrey) as well as by guest authors like Chris Brogan and Chris Thilk. Features are tagged and categorized under labels like advertising, ethics, mobile media, privacy and public relations. Each article includes commenting functionality. In addition to features, the online magazine features news briefs and CustomScoop’s PR BlogJots and PR PodJots blogs. Most of the content so far is text; however, there’s a video introduction and more video is planned.
9. HC+T update
- I’ll conduct a six-city tour with a two-day Ragan workshop on social media. Included will be a talk by a communicator using social media effectively in each city. Details aren’t available yet, but the workshops begin in May and run through July; cities include San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, Washington D.C. and Toronto.
- Now that a contract is signed, I can make it official: I’m co-authoring a book on communications and business transparency. My co-author, John C. Havens, and I will turn a manuscript in to Jossey-Bass by mid-March. You can follow interviews and get more information at http://www.transparencybook.com.
- I’m presenting a session at the annual conference of the Nuclear Energy Institute in March.
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