Saturday, February 03, 2007
HC+T Update: Jan/Feb 2007
HC+T Update: Jan/Feb 2007
HC+T Update
Jan/Feb 2007
- I Get the Message
- Please Take The Conversation Marketing Survey
- What Is Your Tolerance For Social Networks?
- What Skills Do You Want In A New Hire?
- GoDaddy’s “Any Reason Whatsoever” Policy Creates PR Problems
- Edelman Cited In Top Dumb Business Moves of 2006
- Labels? We Don’t Need No Stinking Labels
- Business, Humanity And Blogs
- Online Spending Increases At Expense Of Traditional Channels
- 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. I Get The Message
Okay, okay; I hear you!
In the December 2006 Update, I asked if I should keep the newsletter going, given that I’m now an employee of crayon (http://www.crayonville.com) and only intermittently taking assignments under the banner of my independent consultancy, Holtz Communication + Technology.
The answer was a resounding “yes.” I had about 30 emails from readers, and only one of them supported the suspension of HC+T Update, and even that reader said the newsletter would be missed.
So I’ll keep it going. I can’t promise it’ll be every month. Working for a startup is very demanding and I’ve been putting in insane hours. But I’ll do it as often as I can.
And to those who wrote in, thanks for all your very kind words!
2. Please Take the Conversation Marketing Survey
I love it when I can play connector and bring together people who have never met to do something meaningful as a team.
Joseph Jaffe is writing a new book, “Join the COnversation.” Joe’s the blogger behind JaffeJuice and the podcaster behind the new marketing podcast, ”Across the Sound. He’s also the president (and “chief interruptor”) at crayon, the new marketing company that now employs me.
For his book, Joe needed a survey to show the status and perceptions of converastional marketing. For the survey, two things were required: an organization to sponsor the survey and somebody with the expertise to draft an effective survey instrument, host it online, and produce a comprehensive report of the results.
For the sponsor, I turned to the Society for New Communications Research; I’m a research fellow and member of the advisory board. Luckily, Executive Director Jen McClure told me the Society, which is pretty new, was looking for a good research project to support. For the survey work, I contacted my old friend Tudor Williams who, along with his son, Ryan, runs TWI Surveys. Tudor told me he has been pondering ways to expand the visibility of his company beyond the employee communications business.
Man, the stars must have been aligned just right for all these elements to come together at the right time.
So Joe and some other crayonistas worked with Jen and the SNCR advisory board and Tudor to draft a survey. It’s online now at the TWI Surveys site. If you work in marketing or organizational communications, I’d be grateful if you’d take 10 minutes to complete it:
http://www.twisurveys.com/SNCR2007/
The results will be presented in Las Vegas March 7-9 at the New Communications Forum, and more comprehensivley in “Join the Conversation” when it’s released later this year.
3. What Is Your Tolerance For Social Networks?
The marketing world seems to be waking up to the idea of defined social networks. As loathe as I am to make predictions, I think we’ll see a surge in the number of such networks in 2007. Toyota, for example, just launched one for hybrid owners. On the site -— which takes a number of cues from MySpace, registered hybrid owners can upload photos and videos, form groups based on characteristics ranging from age to vehicle color, and receive targeted messages from Toyota. More than 10,000 people have signed up since the site launched within the last couple days.
In my experience, hybrid owners probably would want to meet and share experiences with one another. But Toyota isn’t the first company to launch a social network in the MySpace mold; in fact, it isn’t the first company to launch one about cars. (That would be Edmunds.) I know of other companies that are ramping up such efforts for launch in the next few months.
All of which makes me wonder just how many social networks one person can belong to without suffering social network burnout. Any one person can be a hybrid owner, a water skiier, a parent, a chemical engineer, a movie lover, and a pet owner. If that one person joined a social network for each of those characteristics -— along with some generic networks like MySpace and LinkedIn—he’d be spreading himself pretty thin. I suspect the enthusiasm for participating in social networks might grow at first, but then people will scale back their involvement to the two or three networks about which they are most enthusiastic. That means there will be a lot of inactive accounts and hyper-inflated membership numbers in the months ahead.
How many of these networks do you think you could belong to before your participation became an occasional diversion instead of a consuming passion?
4. What Skills Do You Want In A New Hire?
Steve Outing, writing in Editor & Publisher, offers advice to small newspapers in order to “keep up with the times and resist the industrywide trend of flat or declining print readership and loss of advertising dollars to new forms of media.” One of the 10 tips: Don’t hire print-focused journalists.
I first read this tip on Jim Horton’s blog; Jim noted that the same advice could apply to companies and agencies hiring PR practitioners. Here’s what Outing says:
My advice is to ONLY hire people whose skills cross media platforms. Look for people who not only understand and are enthusiastic about online media, but who also can serve the print edition well. If a job candidate says she has always aspired to be a newspaper reporter, and doesn’t come in the door with some multimedia skills and experience such as video and audio production, frankly I’d keep looking. You might even go so far as to look skeptically at candidates who look great when it comes to new-media skills but lack the experience or motivation to work on the print side, if you simply can’t afford that much specialization.
Add online channels to the audio and video dimensions of Outing’s statement, and you have the makings of a significant change to a PR practitioner’s job description. Interestingly, Gary Goldhammer reports that California’s Riverside Press-Enterprise is requiring entry-level reporters to shoot video of the stories they cover in addition to hammering out the traditional text articles. “The directive is optional for older or more established reporters, but the message is clear,” Gary writes. “Get with the future or get out.”
Gary makes it clear that the technical skills involved in video or audio production, in and of themselves, don’t mean much:
But rather than shoot video for video’s sake, tomorrow’s journalists need to learn how to be visual and audio storytellers. Just using the technology doesn’t make you relevant or hip –- you can shoot all the video you want, but if it doesn’t tell a story, then you are wasting the audience’s time.
The point, though, is that the future of communication -— whether it’s PR or journalism -— is multi-channel and multimedia. Practitioners will need the skills as well as the knowledge to apply them well, but as Outing notes, specialization in a single medium won’t cut it.
5. GoDaddy’s “Any Reason Whatsoever” Policy Creates PR Problems
For a variety of reasons, I’ve been registering all my domain names at GoDaddy. The domains are dirt cheap and even cheaper if you use a promo code from the hundreds of podcasts the domain registration service sponsors. They have great technical support. They offer a range of related services and are pretty good at them.
But that may not be enough to keep me loyal to GoDaddy in the wake of the news that the company suspended a domain name based on the content of the site. According to a story on Domain Name Wire, the suspension resulted from the discover that SecLists.org was publishing MySpace user names and passwords on its site. SecList’s MySpace profile was also suspended.
SecLists, a security-oriented site and newsletter, archives security-oriented mailing lists. The service apparently archived the MySpace list as part of another newsletter it archives; the list of user names and passwords had already been published in a variety of places and “The bad guys already have the file, and anyone else who wants it need only Google for ‘myspace1.txt.bz2’ or ‘duckqueen1’. Is MySpace going to try and shut down Google next?” asks Fyodor, who owns the list:
“...everyone has this latest password list now, and it was even posted (several times) to the thousands of members of the fulldisclosure mailing list more than a week ago. So it was archived by all the sites which archive full-disclosure, including SecLists.Org. Instead of simply writing me (or abuse_at_seclists.org) asking to have the password list removed, MySpace decided to contact (only) GoDaddy and try to have the whole site of 250,000 pages removed because they don’t like one of them. And GoDaddy cowardly and lazily decided to simply shut down the site rather than actually investigating or giving me a chance to contest or comply with the complaint.”
In response to the suspension, GoDaddy General Counsel Christine Jones offered these comforting and reassuring words: “(GoDaddy) reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever.”
Is anybody counseling this organization on the PR ramifications of this position? “Register your domain with GoDaddy. You’ll never know why or when we might shut it down.” There is already some hubub over the situation in the blogosphere, not to mention some mainstream media coverage. I doubt they’d shut one of my domains down for no reason, but I’m not certain of that in light of this ill-advised statement.
I don’t think my blogs or sites will ever deliberately violate any rules, but who knows what comment might be offensive enough to qualify under the “any reason whatsoever” rule? I plan to take my registration business elsewhere. I’m also pretty sure I’ll also turn down GoDaddy offers to sponsor my content.
6. Edelman Cited in Top Dumb Business Moves of 2006
I like Edelman. I really do. I like Richard and think he’s a smart guy who understands the social media landscape. I like the people I know who work there. I like some of them a lot. But it seems that the hits just keep on coming for the world’s largest independent PR agency. Business 2.0 has just unveiled its 101 Dumbest Moments in Business for 2006, and topping the chart is the Wal-Mart campaign that turned the smiley-faced icon into a political candidate. Edelman’s involvement is noted in the very first sentence:
In an attempt to put a smiley face on its tarnished image, Wal-Mart hires heavy-hitting public relations firm Edelman, which sets about using tactics derived from political races to reverse public perceptions of the giant retailer.
Wal-Mart is cited a total of six whopping times on the list, and the fourth (ranked #54) relates to the “Wal-Marting Across America” debacle; again, Edelman is cited.
Will these guys never catch a break? There’s a point at which you wonder whether having the billables from the client are worth the reputational hits it’s causing the agency; all the bad publicity Edelman has experienced has been generated by mistakes made on that one account.
Northwest Airlines’ suggestion in official collateral given to laid-off employees that they turn to dumpster diving came in at second place, and McDonalds came in third for distributing MP3 players in Japan, some of which included a Trojan horse that distributed sensitive computer information to hackers.
7. Labels? We Don’t Need No Stinking Labels
British rock band Koopa entered this week’s UK top 40 at number 37 with their single, “Blag, Steal & Borrow.” It’s a groundbreaking debut on the charts because Koopa has no CD and is not signed by a label. New rules allow a song to make the charts based on the number sold through approved download services even if there is no CD or other physical format, which necessarily requires a record deal with a label. The downloads are the result of seven years of hard work at live performances, notably on the club circuit.
The attention could lead a label to approach the Colchester-based band about a deal, but the prospect doesn’t excite singer/bass player Joe Murphy as much as it might have in earlier days. Quoted by the BBC, Murphy said…
“If someone comes along and gives us an offer, we’ll talk to them. But it depends whether we need it. If we can get enough exposure and get in the top 40 by the end of the week, do we necessarily need a large label? Probably nowadays, no you don’t. We’ll get the exposure ourselves just from being in the charts. “
If the record labels aren’t quaking in their boots, they’re in a state of complete denial. Other media channels also should take note. “Embrace and integrate” should be the mantra, just as the American television networks CBS and NBC are doing. Perhaps they’ve learned from the disaster the music industry has brought upon itself. CBS -— which has the rights to Star Trek‘s television presence -— is building the Starship Enterprise in Second Life with the intention of allowing residents to create their own fan-based episodes using avatars. CBS President/CEO Les Moonves told a Consumer Electronics Show audience:
“It’s a great way to give back to the fans who make the show as successful as it is. Who knows, maybe some day we can even broadcast one of their virtual works on one of our television networks.”
You can hear Second Life honcho Philip Rosedale and Moonves talk about the initiative —- and see some clips -— in this YouTube offering. Meanwhile, NBC is using Second Life to promote an upcoming film, “Smokin’ Aces,” with an in-world game. Beginning Wednesday, you can visit the Nomad Hotel in SL to get instructions, then try to kill Buddy “Aces” Israel (and wipe out your competition). If it sounds violent, you haven’t seen the promos for the movie about the attempts by multiple hitmen to take out one target.
In both instances, marketing is driven by experience using alternative channels that are attracting increasingly large audiences. Concurrently, some record label that could have made a bundle on Koopa—had they adjusted their model to account for the new realities—won’t make a dime while Koopa gets rich without them.
8. Business, Humanity, And Blogs
Several years ago, I read an article (I can’t remember if it was in Forbes or Fortune) that featured Jacques Nasser. Nasser is best known for his controversial tenure as CEO of Ford Motor Company, but this article was written before he ascended to that spot, when he was still enjoying phenomenal success as the head of Ford’s North American business.
The author of the article spent a fair amount of ink on a weekly email Nasser sent to every employee under his leadership, including the union workers who built the cars on the factory floor. The message covered off whatever was on Nasser’s mind that he wanted employees to know about. He didn’t let the legal team or the communications staff see it; he didn’t want it altered to the point that it no longer sounded like him. He didn’t mind that the email frequently contained typos, questionable grammar, and spelling errors. It was raw, honest, and candid.
Every now and then, Nasser would write about something that had nothing to do with work. I recall that one such missive expressed a father’s pride at his daughter’s graduation. That email motivated replies from all levels of the organization offering heartfelt congratulations. The message resonated because it made Nasser into a flesh-and-blood human being who had a daughter graduating from school, just as the lowest workers on the organization chart had children in school. Nasser was no longer just “management.” He was, ultimately, just a regular guy. Thus did Nasser build tremendous support among his team for his initiatives.
I raise this in response to a blog post by Dave Taylor titled, ”When is a blog too personal?” Dave muses:
“What surprises me, however, are people who have what I call a hybrid blog, where it’s somehow intermingling personal and professional information. One article might be about the relative merits of a particular new coding standard or software product and the very next is about a big fight that the blogger had with their significant other or an encounter with a hostile street person or similar.”
It’s not that these experiences aren’t legitimate blog fodder, the problem is that it’s not focused. Good blogs—at least in my opinion—are those that are focused pretty tightly on a single topic, be it coding standards, real time inventory management, RFID implementation problems, or even international tariff regulations.
I agree with Dave, but only to a point. In his post, Dave suggests that the goal of a business blog is “to convey a certain level of expertise, credibility and, yes, professionalism.” That’s true, but another critical aspect of a business blog is to move beyond corporate-speak and reveal the humanity of the organization and its employees. Just as Jacques Nasser earned the respect of his North American employees by opening himself up and exposing his personal side —- both in his language and in the content of his emails —- a blog can turn a two-dimensional corporate executive (the kind that makes an annual appearance in the CEO’s letter to shareholders) into a flesh-and-blood human being.
Does that mean a corporate executive should write about an argument with a spouse? Of course not—and I haven’t seen such posts in any of the executive blogs I follow. On the other hand, I have seen posts that have nothing directly to do with work. The employee blogs at Thomas Nelson Publishers offer some good examples. CEO Michael Hyatt, in his blog, From Where I Sit, devotes most posts to business (e.g., “Our Top Ten Accomplishments in 2006” and “Toward a Better Bestseller List”), many focus on Hyatt’s observations about life, ranging from his issues with his computer to insights he gained reading an article in “Outside” magazine.
Jim Thomason, Thomas Nelson’s VP of HR, mixes his posts up, as well. His most current offering addresses the company’s implementation of new federal guidelines for digital communication retention, but an earlier post commends some youngsters he helped to push a stalled car out of the street. His point was simply that the stereotype of self-absorbed, thoughtless, uncaring youth is not always supported by reality. It had nothing to do with work, but certainly reinforced the values of one of the world’s largest publishers of Christian books.
I agree with Dave that a blog should stay true to its focus. (The first time I ever engaged in a conversation with Steve Rubel was when he issued an endorsement of a presidential candidate on his blog about PR and social media.) But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be personal, nor that every post needs to be related directly to work. It is the humanity of the inividual author, after all, that distinguishes blogs from other communication channels.
9. Online Spending Increases at Expense of Traditional Channels
An annual survey of projected advertising spending reveals that the online world will attract 20% of the advertising dollars spent in 2007, up from 18% last year. Meanwhile, spending on TV, radio, and movie ads will drop 3.5%. (I’m especially glad to hear this about movie ads. I hate spending $10 to get into a flick only to have to sit through a commercial.) Print advertising, on the other hand, is expected to hold steady with 40% of advertising spending in the U.S.
Not everything is rosy for all online advertising. Pay-per-click is expected to drop 1% over concerns about click fraud. Nearly half the advertisers participating in the survey say they’ll reduce their investment in pay-per-click. Things are brighter for cost-per-action advertising, which should rise 8% while online sponsorships are expected to jump 12%.
The survey, conducted by Outsell, was reported in ClickZ Stats.
More than just signifying advertisers are growing more enamored of the online space, the increase in online ad spending at the expense of traditional channels suggests that TV, radio, and the like simply don’t work as well as they once did, while advertisers are seeing better results from their online efforts. The move away from pay-per-click suggests advertisers are assessing exactly what does work best and making adjustments based on those results.
10. Site of the Month
If you’re producing RSS feeds, then you’ll be fascinated by what Feedshake can do. This free service lets you create a single feed out of multiple feeds. Here’s an example:
I belong to an informal group called CAPOW—communications and Advertising Podcasters of the World. Each of the members of the group has his or her own podcast, but C.C. Chapman used Feedshake to create one feed that would let you subscribe to ALL the shows represented by cAPOW. Pretty cool!
The service also lets you track subscribers to your feed and apply keywords and tags to customize your feed.
11. HC+T update
- Shel will provide the closing keynote at the New Communications Forum at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, March 7-9. In my opinion, this is the premier conference addressing social media for communicators. Please join me. Registration is at http://www.newcommforum.com.
- Shel is addressing the senior leadership team of a large health care organization to explain the role of social media in an organization’s communications mix. The talk is in Indianapolis on February 16.
- Shel is speaking at ABERJE, the Brazilian association of communication professionals, in sao Paolo on March 15.
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