Thursday, January 29, 2009
HC+T Update: January 2009
HC+T Update: January 2009
HC+T Update
January 2009
1) The Time Has Come: Blogging Is A Business Requirement
2) The Relevance Of Relevance
3) Next Webinar: Crisis Communication And Social Media
4) Is There A Market For Your Message?
5) Communication Students Need Mentors. You Can Be One!
6) The Future Of The Media Embargo
7) Use Ning For Project Management
8) Sites Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). 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. The Time Has Come: Blogging Is A Business Requirement
About 18 or 19 years ago, scorn was heaped upon me when I insisted that pretty much every company would need to adopt email and provide employees with email addresses. I got the same reaction 12 or 13 years ago when I proclaimed all companies would require a presence on the World Wide Web. Today, email and a website are a de facto requirement for most businesses, large or small.
Today, I’m taking the same stand on corporate blogs (a reversal of my earlier position, which suggested that a corporate blog was a strategic decision):
Every business should have an authoritative, official corporate blog.
By “authoritative and official,” I mean that content posted to the blog can be construed as statements of record.
I know that corporate blogs generally aren’t trusted. Some believe blogs have peaked and are being replaced by services like Twitter. (ometimes, you need more than 140 characters to say what you need to say. No more than about 7 million people are on Twitter, which means much of your corporate audience isn’t. Those who are may well miss your tweet if they’re not watching every second and don’t check the history of their friends stream. However, you can certainly take advantage of the service Twitterfeed to automatically alert those who are on Twitter that you have posted an item to your blog.) Others believe corporate blogs are legally risky and of questionable value. But the world of business communication has changed and the blog is the best tool available (when done right) to address the challenges of life in the 140-character news cycle.
Speed of response
While I don’t for a moment believe press releases no longer have value, they are no longer adequate in a crisis situation. Consider the September 2008 incident in which Bloomberg inadvertently issued a six-year-old news item announcing that United Airlines had filed for bankruptcy. If United had a blog (which its competitors Delta and Southwest do), the company could have corrected the misinformation in a matter of minutes instead of the hours it takes to distribute a press release.
MacNeil Laboratories, makers of Motrin, is another company that could have quieted a fast-growing controversy by opening a dialogue with customers on a blog.
This is not an indictment of press release distribution companies, but rather the internal process through which releases typically are subjected before they are ever forwarded to the PR Newswires and Business Wires of the world.
Bypass the press
The press gets something about your company wrong. One of your options is writing a letter to the editor, an exercise that can prove futile, as General Motors learned when responding to an assertion by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. Alternatively, you can demand a retraction or correction, which will occupy four lines adjacent to a furniture ad on the bottom of page 37.
In the first instance, General Motors gave up trying to get the New York Times to run its letter and ran it—and more—on its FYI blog, prompting Friedman himself to acknowledge that organizations no longer need to rely on the press to tell their stories for them. As for seeking retractions and corrections, Thomas Nelson Publishers President and CEO Michael Hyatt simply uses his blog. As he noted in an interview for “Tactical Transparency,” the readership of his blog rivals that of the publication in question (Editor’s Weekly), and those who read his blog represent the audience he needed to reach with information correcting the publication’s mistake.
While there are still some troglodyte critics who believe the role of public relations is limited to answering press questions, the truth is that PR’s role is (in part) to get the company’s story out to its publics. You don’t need the press any longer to accomplish this goal. You do, however, need a blog. As Sun Microsystems President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz put it in an interview for the book, “Tactical Transparency,” “Part of the job of a CEO is to explain your mission and actions to the public. Why wouldn’t you use one of the greatest communication tools that exists (a blog) to do that?”
Reach the press
Readership of blogs is high among journalists, according to any number of studies. One 2008 study, from Brodeur & Partners (a PR agency) and Marketwire (a press release distribution firm), revealed that…
- Over 75% of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.
- 70% of reporters check a blog list on a regular basis.
- 21% of reporters spend over an hour per day reading blogs.
- 57% of reporters read blogs at least two to three times a week.
Seventy percent of journalists responding to a SNCR study from Don Middleberg use blogs to assist in reporting.
It’s a no-brainer these days that a reporter who covers your company will read your corporate blog (even though they may not participate on Twitter or Facebook).
Search engine optimization
Done well, your corporate blog will generate tremendous results on Google and other search engines, driving more traffic to your site.
Corporate blogs done right
As I mentioned at the outset, most corporate blogs are bland and untrusted. This is not a reason to dismiss corporate blogs, but rather a clarion call to do them well.
There is no one way to do a corporate blog right. Among the good ones, some are penned by the CEO (examples: Marriott International, Sun Microsystems), some by a group of employee bloggers that sometimes includes the CEO (examples: Southwest Airlines, Rubbermaid), some by a group of employee bloggers without CEO involvement (example: Transportation Security Administration). You’re not limited to these models; in fact, you can employ any approach that meets your needs as long as you adhere to some basic guidelines:
- Be strategic. Don’t blog because you need a blog. The blog should be aligned with your core business objectives. Consider creating a mission statement for your blog, even if you’re the only one who ever sees it.
- Post regularly. Infrequent posts don’t create community or attract new readers.
- Address controversy and bad news head on.
- Don’t pitch products or engage in happy talk; it’s not why anyone would read your blog.
- Don’t use your blog as another channel for news release distribution. If you have news, the blog is a great venue to offer perspective to your audience not available in the press release.
- Know your audience. If the blog is focused on customers, address customer issues or problems. If your company or its product(s) has fans, skew your blog to those fans.
- Accept comments (based on a comment policy). Address comments that need addressing, either within the comments section or with follow-up blog posts.
- Use a genuine voice. Avoid corporatese.
You can keep track of the Fortune 500 companies with blogs here. The latest to join the list (maintained by John Cass) are FedEx, Ingram Micro, and Safeway.
2. The Relevance Of Relevance
The vast majority of the complaints about PR, marketing, and advertising boil down to a single communication failure: The message is not relevant to the recipient.
The late Ed Robertson, who ran employee communications at FedEx (reporting directly to CEO Fred Smith), developed a model for communication based on Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs. According to Maslow’s model, primitive requirements must be met before people are able to pursue more sophisticated needs. The more abstract the need, the higher up the pyramid the need is situated, with self-actualization at the top. Physiological needs represent the first hurdle to overcome. You gotta eat, after all. If you’re starving, you’re not too worried about group acceptance.
Ed’s model takes the same approach to communication, which ultimately is designed to exert influence. (If you’re not trying to reinforce or change opinions, attitudes, or behaviors, why are you communicating?) In business, too many leaders believe you can influence people simply by telling them what you want from them.
Ed believed people applied the same kind of hierarchy to messages, starting with logistics. If the message was in the wrong language or was illegible, logistics failed and people would go no further. If you ever received employee benefits information after the deadline for benefits enrollment, you’ve experienced a logistics failure.
Next, you had to grab attention. Attention is nearly as big a challenge as relevance, since what will grab the attention of a CEO may hold no interest to a front-line employee who spends his days on an assembly line. As slaves to mass communication techniques, we ignore the fact that different people pay attention to different things and crank out one-size-fits-all communications.
But even if you’re able to capture the attention of your target audience, you won’t keep it long if your message is not relevant. There are two distinct dimensions to relevance:
- What does this have to do with me?
- How will paying attention to what you have to say make my life better?
Consider the howls of protest from scores of bloggers sick of the horrible pitches they receive from clueless PR people. The most vitriolic of these bloggers would still be inclined to write a post about information sent by a PR practitioner if (a) the information was consistent with what he wrote about and (b) the information would reduce hassles or improve opportunities for the blogger and/or his readers.
Madison Avenue used to be adept at relevance. In the 1950s and 1960s, a typical TV commercial would begin with a housewife on her hands and knees in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor with a brush and a bucket of soapy water. As she wipes the sweat from her brow, Mr. Clean magically appears and asks, “Are you sick of that waxy yellow buildup?” The housewife replies, “I sure am.” Suddenly, a push-mop appears and the housewife simply and easily glides the push-mop across the floor, revealing the floor’s beautiful, long-hidden surface beneath the layers of muck that hours of scrubbing couldn’t get to.
This commercial—shown during soap operas in the middle of the day in order to reach the target audience—answered both questions:
- What does it have to do with me? You spend too much time on your hands and knees in puddles of soapy water.
- What’s in it for me to pay attention to you? I’ll get you off your hands and knees and get you through this chore in a fraction of the time you’re spending now and a fraction of the effort.
Madison Avenue has strayed far from this concept, sadly, as have far too many communicators.
When an executive ignores a direct question and instead blurts out the rehearsed sound bite that reinforces a key message, the problem isn’t that messaging doesn’t work. It’s that irrelevant messaging doesn’t work. If what you have to say—in an elevator, a newsletter, an email, a press release, a speech, over Twitter or on the phone—has something to do with my circumstances and paying attention will make my life better, I’m all ears. If it’s relevant enough, I might even start a conversation with my peers about your one-way, top-down message.
There will always be a market for relevant messages.
3. Next Webinar: Crisis Communication And Social Media
A new Webinar featuring Shel Holtz, ABC
Beginning Monday, February 16, 2009
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Register here: http://bit.ly/2PmlQn
One month after it launched a new ad campaign, the makers of Motrin found themselves under assault from mommy bloggers who galvanized their effort in mere hours, attracting the attention of mainstream media. The water ditching of a US Airways flight in the Hudson River was covered by citizen journalists before mainstream media, with images shot on mobile phones and posted to sites like Flickr and circulated on Twitter. One CEO learned from Twitter that his company’s website had been hacked; he dealt with the issue initially by posting a video comment to the report.
The simple fact is that today’s socially-networked world gives you NO TIME for the deliberate, process-oriented steps organizations used to take when faced with a crisis. Your organization or client needs to respond quickly, effectively, and accurately, using the same tools and resources your constituent publics are using. In other words, much of what you knew about crisis communication is wrong because the rules of the game have changed.
This webinar will take a deep dive into strategies and tactics for employing social media in order to ensure the best possible outcome from a crisis. You’ll learn…
- How to monitor social media channels to identify issues that are building into crises and to identify fast-breaking crises
- The tools you should have ready to deploy in a crisis
- The relationships you should already have in place when a crisis strikes
- How your employees can play a key role in getting through the crisis through their participation in online social channels
- Key learnings from case studies
In addition, you’ll hear and see interviews with experts, along with other multimedia presentations integrated into the sessions providing valuable insights and tips you can put into practice right away.
During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants. All this costs only $195 —- a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room -— and you’ll never have to leave your desk.
Shel Holtz Webinars are asynchronous —- you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new lecture featuring a combination of text, graphics, audio and video is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time.
Be sure to watch the video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for your professional development needs.
Shel Holtz, the instructor for this session, is one of the world’s recognized leading online communication authorities. He has led internal communications at two Fortune 500 companies and counseled scores of others, including Intel, Sears, Symantec, Aetna, The World Bank, The American Red Cross, The Walt Disney Company, General Mills and PepsiCo. He is a leading advocate for the value and power of communication from your organization’s leaders.
Don’t miss the opportunity to prepare yourself, your communications team, and your organization to face a crisis in 2009 and beyond.
Register: http://bit.ly/2PmlQn
4. Is There A Market For Your Message?
A few years back, James Carville told a group of communicators during a conference keynote that Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential campaign rested largely on staying on message. The Democratic party strategist noted that candidate Clinton always returned the focus of conversations to the fact that “it’s the economy, stupid.”
In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore had no such focus, and few voters could tell you what the Gore campaign was all about. In 2008, on the other hand, Barack Obama embraced Carville’s approach; if you lived in the U.S. during the campaign, you had to be working hard at ignoring politics to not know that Obama promoted “Change you can believe in.”
Clearly, Obama had a message. Equally clearly, there was a market for that message. And the Obama team employed messaging techniques to make sure that message got across and resonated.
All of which flies in the face of conventional wisdom that asserts “there is no market for your message,” that messages and messaging are dead. In fact, if your message is irrelevant, self-serving, disingenuous or insulting, then there was never a market for your message. On the other hand, if your message is relevant, meaningful, helpful, accurate and/or interesting, then the market for that message is as vibrant today as it ever was. Getting that message into the heads of the people who make up that market requires messaging strategies.
I’ve long been troubled by the enthusiastic agreement to the notion that “there is no market for your message.” But the always-interesting Phil Gomes returned the issue to top of mind with a blog post titled, “Having a ‘message’ is fine, it’s the ‘messaging’ that sucks.” In his post, Phil draws a distinction between messages (it’s important to have them) and messaging, which Phil defines thusly:
“The development and cloying repetition of corporatespeak statements devoid of meaning, rendered in a language that no one uses, delivered without the benefit of listening first, and presented in venues and contexts where they are clearly inappropriate.”
Phil’s absolutely right if, indeed, that were the definition of messaging. It’s not, though. It’s the definition of bad messaging. It logically follows, then, the only bad messaging is bad. Good messaging is simply the strategic use of appropriate channels to make sure the right people—the market for your message—is able to find it and hear it.
“Messaging,” by the way, is a word. A recent podcast discussion suggested it was the inappropriate verbing of a noun, but the word appears in the Random House dictionary, among others, defined as “a system or process of transmitting messages, especially electronically.” There is nothing in this definition that requires corporatespeak, lack of listening, or inappropriate venues and contexts.
Executives and politicians who dodge media or customer questions, opting instead to parrot carefully rehearsed statements, engage in bad messaging. Good messaging is based primarily on an alignment between what you have to offer and the interests and concerns of the market. That is, good messaging begins with listening. You then develop the fundamental concepts you want your market to know.
A good current example of effective messaging is Microsoft’s pitch on Windows 7. At every opportunity, through every appropriate channel (that is, the channels that reach the influencers in the technology marketplace), Microsoft execs tout the fact that Windows 7 is easier to use, less intrusive, runs on older hardware and is compatible with just about everything. In fact, by offering an early beta of the OS to millions of people for free download, Microsoft has effectively boiled the message down to this: “It’s everything Vista should have been; try it yourself and you’ll see.”
So far, it has been an effective message, and one for which there is a well-defined market, evident in the volumes of content that has been created by bloggers, journalists, and others. The channels through which these messages were delivered include live conferences, interviews, briefings, and outreach to influencers. The result has been near-unanimous praise for Windows 7.
So don’t succumb to the popular notion that messaging is dead or that there is no market for your message. There’s no market for your bad message and bad messaging is dead. Good messages are based on…
- Knowing how your message will attract the attention of each appropriate market
- Ensuring the message is relevant to that market (that is, it has something to do with the lives and interests of the marketplace and it offers a way to make life better or easier)
- Clarifying your call to action (what do you want those who have heard your message to do?)
Getting that message into the heads of the intended recipients (i.e., “messaging”) requires the organization to consider all of its various communication opportunities and identify where the message fits—and ensuring anyone who speaks on behalf of the organization knows what the message is so they can adapt it for all appropriate conversations and communications.
It’s amusing when the same people who declare messages and messaging dead ask to hear your elevator pitch. If an elevator pitch isn’t a perfect example of messaging, what is?
5. Communication Students Need Mentors. You Can Be One!
I was a lucky guy when I took my first corporate communications job.
I’d been a newspaper reporter for a couple years when I made the switch. In 1977, few universities offered degrees in communications. At my college, the journalism department offered a single class in PR. So when I made the jump from journalism to communications, I didn’t know much about it. Since I was going to be assistant editor of a weekly employee newspaper, I figured it was just journalism for a different audience.
Fortunately, two of the people to whom I reported became my mentors. The late Ken Estes, editor of the ArcoSpark, and Dave Orman, ARCO’s manager of employee communications, spent the time with me to help me grasp the world of organizational communications. In fact, I recall viewing them as mentors and not as bosses.
Today, universities do offer degrees in communication. Professional associations provide student memberships in student chapters. But there’s nothing like regular contact with an experienced professional who has taken an interest in you and your career. Unfortunately, there are far more students aproaching graduation than there are mentors to help guide them.
That imbalance led Allie Osmar to set up a site designed to match students and professionals. Of course, far more students have applied than pros.
I offered myself as a mentor through Allie’s initiative today. It’s a way to give something back to a profession that has been very good to me, as well as to honor the effort that Ken and Dave made on my behalf more than 30 years ago. I would urge my colleagues in the communication business to do the same.
Sign up here: http://thecreativecareer.com/mentors
6. The Future Of The Media Embargo
Now that the dust has settled over Michael Arrington’s announcement that TechCrunch would agree to honor and then break embargoes from PR contacts, it’s worth taking another look at the issue from a more objective angle.
Like so many other tactics and concepts that have been perverted and abused, the embargo is rooted in a reasonable and useful practice. Jargon such as “paradigm shift,” “world-class” and “best practices”—now the fodder of bullshit bingo games—started out as perfectly legitimate ideas. As they became memes, however, they were mangled and misused with increasing regularity until they evolved into the lingo we roll our eyes over today.
What happened to the embargo is simple enough to explain, with equal blame on both sides of the equation:
- Bloggers have become a news source, but few of them are schooled in the tools of journalism. Reporters know and care that they’ll be blacklisted if they violate an embargo; they know because editors and more senior reporters explain it to them. A lot of bloggers, on the other hand, have no journalism background and are independent, without a senior staff to show them the ropes. They don’t know how embargoes work and don’t care about the consequences for blowing them off.
- In their zeal to reach out to all those bloggers, lazy PR people have ignored the rules and diluted the embargo’s efficacy.
I can’t recall ever being asked to honor an embargo during my brief career as a newspaper reporter. Nor can I recall ever requesting one while I was managing corporate communications for the two Fortune 500 companies where I worked. But I’ve been aware of them my entire career and always viewed them as a practical solution to a genuine need. With that in mind, I searched the various public relations textbooks and references I keep on my shelf. “Embargo” was not to be found in the index of a single one of them. I found that surprising; public relations schools, it seems, no longer teach the concept of the embargo. People joining the ranks of PR practitioners, then, don’t bring an academic concept with them to the job. Instead, they learn by watching what others are doing.
What others are doing, by and large, sucks.
The original notion of the embargo was based on a few basics that have fallen by the wayside:
Genuine news
Most of the unsolicited press releases I get by email that come with an embargo (more on this in a minute) don’t represent real news (that is, it’s not timely or doesn’t have a real impact on the people to whom it is being reported).
A good reason
There needs to be a sound reason for an embargo. Most professionals recognize the primary use of an embargo is to give a reporter a head-start on his reporting, particularly when the announcement is complex and both parties—the organization making the announcement and those reporting on it—will benefit from time to absorb the material, conduct interviews, do research, and produce an accurate story.
Today’s practice is for companies to seek embargoes to a bunch of press will accompany an announcement. That may be great for the company, but there’s nothing in it for the reporter.
Offered to trusted contacts
I have received at least 50 unsolicited press releases by email, sent by people and agencies with whom I have no relationship, each of which included notice of an embargo. I would ignore these without feeling like I had violated any ethical standards. If I have no relationship with these people and have not agreed to an embargo, I am not obliged to honor it.
A true embargo is requested by a PR counselor of media contacts with whom they have established strong, trusted relationships. When that happens, the journalist knows he’s going to get good information on which he’ll want to report, while the PR counselor can count on the reporter honoring the agreement. (Note that I said “contacts,” plural. An embargo never applies to a single reporter. That would be an exclusive, which is different, even though it often requires the reporter to agree to hold the story until a specified date.)
Some examples
Here are a couple examples of embargoes that work, contributed by people I trust:
Sharon Bond—I use an embargo very effectively every year for Giving USA Foundation. I have a core group of philanthropy reporters who depend on getting the information on “who gives what to whom” in America every year in advance of our publication date so that they can prepare their stories. Only once in the known history of the publication of Giving USA (it comes out every June), has the embargo been broken, and that was an honest mistake by the reporter. We’ve been putting out this publication for 50+ years.
Scott Monty—The way I’ve seen embargoes handled around various auto shows that we participate in at Ford is a little different than the “send & ask” technique I’ve seen at large. We have lots of information about new products—including specs, videos and photos—and our journalists want to have time to write about them and post a comprehensive review as soon as they possibly can. I know they appreciate having a head start and I’m not aware of any egregious breach of the embargoes. We create an embargo web site and grant access to it (via passwords) to those who would like to have it. While we have a regular group of writers we automatically include, we also accept requests from those interested in getting access. This way, it’s an opt-in system, rather than the email blast and request to hold the information until the appropriate time.
Paula Symons—An example would be a leading employer in a community closing its doors, resulting in hundreds or thousands of people losing their jobs. An embargo on this announcement would allow reporters to gather background information and interview management to prepare their stories in advance so the news could break shortly after the embargo lifts.
Wendie Owen—I’ve used embargoes many times when reporters needed an embargoed advance copy of product information (when I was in the private sector), or the embargoed advance copy of the text of a speech (when I was serving in the Carter Administration as Advisor on Communications Policy to the Secretary of Energy).
TechCrunch’s response
I feel Michael Arrington’s pain. Honoring embargoes has enabled competitors to ignore the embargo and break news first. But Arrington’s response reflects a disturbing trend: People who don’t like the behavior of PR people and respond by deliberately doing something worse. Chris Anderson did it when he published the email addresses of PR people who had spammed him. Now Arrington has done it by asserting that he will promise to honor an embargo when he has no intention of keeping the promise. In other words, he has publicly stated that you cannot trust his word.
As Wendie Owen put it, “No reputable reporter would break an embargo. That kind of behavior would get him or her kicked off the distribution list the next time. Not honoring embargoes is unethical, unprofessional and unwise, and I’m sure that practice will not spread beyond TechCrunch.” (I wonder about Arrington’s claim at the very beginning of his post that “PR firms are out of control” when it’s bloggers and journalists who are violating the agreements.)
No PR person in his right mind would offer a story to TechCrunch with an embargo attached. Real news with a legitimate reason for an embargo will now go to competitors.
It could be that the TechCrunch staff believes they have become so dominant in their market that they don’t need PR people to provide them with news. Anything’s possible, but I just laugh when I hear assertions that social media have destroyed mainstream media. (There’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that there’s still a huge demand for mainstream media.) But if I were a working journalist or a blogger working in the news arena, I sure wouldn’t want to be scratched off the distribution lists of multiple news sources.
Ultimately it’s just sad all the way around—sad that the PR profession has allowed the embargo to become what it has and sad that some bloggers and journalists have chosen to prove their word worthless. I suspect, however, that journalists/bloggers and PR counselors with trusted relationships will continue to use genuine embargoes to achieve what they were designed for. With luck, they’ll start teaching embargoes again as part of an academic PR curriculum and the guardians of the profession will begin
Note: In the absence of literature on media embargoes, I queried my community on LinkedIn and got some great answers, which have been incorporated into this post. Hat tip to Sharon Bond, Leo Bottary, Gerard Braud, Michael Driehorst, Lloyd Grosse, Doug Haslam, Sebastien Keil, Michael Miller, Scott Monty, Mike Nicholson, Wendie Owen, David Parmet, Peggy Schoen, Angela Sinickas, and Paula Smith Symons.
7. Use Ning For Project Management
Krishna De gives a nice overview of SaaS project management services in the latest episode of “The Podcast Sisters.” In her quest for the perfect service, Krishna queried her Twitter community and looked at the various suggestions they sent her against her well-thought-out list of criteria. She settled on Basecamp.
I’ve used Basecamp and have tried a couple other options, but have gone a completely different direction for project management. I’m using Ning.
Ning was not designed to be a project management tool. It is a DIY social network, giving anybody the ability to build a Facebook-like site dedicated to a specific topic. (For an example of a well-executed and populated Ning network, take a look at PR Open Mic, set up by Auburn PR professor Robert French to support dialogue between PR professors, students, and practitioners. Another is the Pickens Plan, with nearly 200,000 members.)
But as I began working on a communications audit managed by my friend Tudor Williams, it occurred to me that Ning’s features fit our project management needs quite well. First of all, I could opt to invite members of the project team and the client to the private network. In this case, the client was not included because audio and text transcripts of focus groups are included for team members’ review; focus group participants were promised their comments would be confidential. (More on audio in a bit.)
One of Krishna’s criteria for a project management tool was the ability to create multiple projects. Since Ning is free, this isn’t important; you just set up a new network for each project.
One of the best features of Ning (and Facebook and other social networks) that I haven’t seen implemented nearly as well (if at all) on other project tools is a “latest activity” block on the home page as well as your own personal page. Just as Facebook will let you know that Tom has added a photo and Mary has posted something to Bill’s wall, the “latest activity” listing on our Ning network provides a chronological listing of the latest project activities (e.g., “Joe replied to the discussion, “Lastest Version of Managers Survey.”
Team notifications are handled through broadcast messages. One-to-one communication is easy—just leave a note on the wall of the appropriate team member. Not only is that note waiting for him when he returns to the site, he’ll be notified of the message by email. Every member gets an inbox to retain project-specific messaging.
While there is no calendaring per se in Ning, there is an event function that works just as well. We’re using events to list meetings, deadlines, conference calls, and anything else with a time-or-date component to it.
Ning supports the creation of groups, which makes it easy to break out the work of sub-teams and to house content in easy-to-find places. On our project site, we have a group for executive interviews, another for focus groups, and one for weekly team meetings.
There’s one more group I set up to contain links to all audio files. We’ve been using digital recorders to capture the audio from executive interviews and focus groups, and my first thought was simply to upload them to a LibSyn account I set up for project audio. Shortly afterwards, though, I found that you can add an audio module to a Ning network, so each audio file now simply gets added to an audio player that occupies a spot on the home page.
Forums allow for discussions on specific topics, such as each focus group, interviews, and the like. And, to seal the deal, you can attach documents to your forum contributions. So one of our project team members conducted a focus group, set up a forum for the that particular group, and attached her Word notes to the post. (Next time, we’ll probably use one forum for all focus groups, which each separate focus group listed as a topic within the forum.)
We’re using the photos module for official artwork (like the company’s logo, which we’re using on presentations and documents). There’s even a “notes” page.
There are more features we’re not using but that could prove valuable, such as live chat among project team members who are live on the site at the same time, blogs for recording observations maintaining status reports (far better than sending Word documents around), and an RSS feed of site activity (both of which, I suspect, would be more useful for larger teams (there are only six of us on this particular project).
I mentioned that setting up networks is free. If you invite clients to the site and they’re sensitive to such things, you might want to consider spending $19.95 per month to get rid of the ads that provide Ning with its revenue. It’s also $4.95 per month to map the network to a unique URL and $9.95 per month for each 10 GB of storage and 100 GB of bandwidth (that’s how much comes with your free account).
After my experience with Ning as a project management tool for this project, I plan to use it for all upcoming projects with multiple participants. Its familiar interface (to anyone who has ever used Facebook, MySpace, or any other social network), its full suite of features, its flexibility and its price make it my top choice over any software designed for project purposes.
8. Sites of the Month
Microsoft Tag
This could be a game-changer, and it’s free while it’s in beta. On his ZDNet blog, Zack Whittaker calls Tags Microsoft’s most crucial technology to date. It is poised to make propel mobile computing to the next level.
And it’s pretty simple. You create a tag using a (free) account which produces a small, colorful square graphic you download and then publish—on a magazine ad, a movie poster, a bus advertisement, a business card, you name it. Somebody sees the ad and uses his or her cell phone camera to “snap” it. This opens content on the smartphone, anything from a video movie trailer to driving directions to more information on a company, product, or service. The app for your smartphone is free (and always will be).
9. HC+T update
>>Lots of speaking engagements coming up, starting with a talk next week at PRSA Las Vegas.
>>I’m keynoting Blog Potomac in Washington, D.C. in June.
>>I’m helping a major packaged goods company with its intranet.
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