Sunday, January 31, 2010
HC+T Update: January 2010
The first HC+T Update email newsletter for 2010.
1) Questions Your CEO Should Ask Before Blogging
2) Open Access Is Smart Business, Not An Employee Entitlement
3) Next Webinar: Five New Communication Technologies You Need to Know
4) What Employee Communications Looks Like In The Networked Company
5) The News Industry’s Turmoil Increases The Complexity Of PR
6) Is Your Company Invisible Without An iPhone App?
7) Join Me In Chicago on March 11
8) Site Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information
As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. 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) Questions Your CEO Should Ask Before Blogging
The question of CEO blogging keeps coming up. Opinions mostly fall in two camps:
- All CEOs should blog. As the leaders and chief communicators of their organizations, it is incumbent on CEOs to represent their companies in the social space where so much influence is wielded.
- No CEOs should blog. Because of regulations that govern the kinds of statements CEOs can make, and when, there is just too much risk that an innocent remark could result in a fine.
As with most things, though, the question of CEO blogging is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Clearly CEOs can blog, as evidenced by the number of CEOs who do.
If your CEO is considering blogging, have him or her answer these questions before taking the plunge:
Are you the best person in the company to assume this role?
In the early days of corporate blogging, GM launched one of the earliest blogs penned by a senior executive. It wasn’t then-CEO Rick Wagoner, but rather Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. The decision was based on the fact that the most compelling kinds of conversations GM could have would be about cars, not the automotive business. Since Lutz was the most senior executive with direct responsibility for the vehicles GM produced, he became the executive blogger. Wagoner did post from time to time, when it was important for the CEO’s voice to be associated with the message, using a different company blog.
The focus of the blog is also the key to the next question:
Are you willing to blog about what your stakeholders want to talk about?
Far too many corporate and CEO blogs are filled with material the company wants to push to audiences. While this may make leaders feel good about using a blog, odds are that readers won’t flock to it. These messages are being pushed to them through any number of channels. For a blog to succeed, you need to start conversations about topics your stakeholders want to talk about. Do you know what those topics are? And are you prepared to address them, even if they’re not always what you think is important? If you do focus on topics your readers care about, it becomes easier to digress from time to time with topics you want to share with them. The more the blog becomes a locus of conversation and community, the more interested your readers will be in some of the issues you want to put on the table.
Are you ready to engage your stakeholders in conversation?
The point is debatable, but I don’t believe you have a blog unless you’re publishing reader comments. Without comments enabled, you’re just using blogging software to publish a column. Leaders who blog need to be ready to pay attention to reader feedback and input, and even engage in it. This doesn’t mean a CEO needs to actually read every comment left to his blog, particularly if it becomes popular and attracts hundreds of comments for every post. At some companies, a staff reads the comments, aggregates them based on their topics and sentiment, and delivers a summary report to the executive. Some executives engage directly in the comment while others simply write a follow-up post acknowledging what he heard from readers. But to view an executive blog as just one more one-way, top-down channel is to dramatically reduce the likelihood that stakeholders will pay attention to it. These are people who have come to expect interaction as part of the blogging experience.
Are you willing to commit to posting something regularly—that you’ve written yourself?
You can post as often as you like, but you must post at least weekly (three times a week is better) in order to build momentum, to build the expectation that you’re going to be opening discussions.
This is not a task you can offload to a PR staffer, the way you could when your byline appeared under the ghost-written CEO column that appeared on the inside front cover of the employee magazine. The whole idea underlying a blog is that it’s an authentic, honest message that you wanted to deliver and open for conversation. Nothing is more disingenuous than saying, “This is my blog, I’ve started it so we can have a dialogue about our business, but I’m not really writing it; it’s just not important enough for me to commit that kind of time.”
Your blog doesn’t need to take all that much time. In response to CEOs who have told me they don’t have the time to write a 1,500-word blog post, I respond, “That’s good; your readers don’t have time to read a 1,500-word blog post.” Short, pithy observations, explanations, and reports are ideal. What’s more, you don’t have to actually type anything. Marriott International CEO Bill Marriott dictates his posts into a digital recorder, which is transcribed (word for word) by his staff. At HP, a senior executive calls his posts into a voice-mail box established just for that purpose; his messages are also transcribed by staff for posting.
Ultimately, though, your view should be that you don’t have time not to blog. You should recognize what other CEOs—like Thomas Nelson Publishers CEO Michael Hyatt—have realized: that blogging ultimately saves time by reducing the more time-consuming communications that eat into your day. If you blog well, you’ll find that you’ve reallocated much of the time you spent less efficiently with other channels to your blog.
Are you well-schooled in what you can’t say?
Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott International, writes about topics that will never cause regulatory problems. His posts talk about his staff, Marriott’s corporate social responsibility efforts, and other topics that would never raise an eyebrow at the SEC. Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, on the other hand, does blog about the business side of Sun, but is savvy enough about the regulations that govern his words that he is able to avoid writing anything that would cause him trouble. Do you know enough about the regulations, what kinds of off-the-cuff remarks might be viewed as a material forward-looking statement or a revelation about earnings? If not, don’t blog.
Of course, if you’re with a privately held company not subject to SEC rules, this isn’t as important a consideration, although you should keep in mind that there are agencies regulating your business besides the SEC.
Are you prepared to talk about bad news and unpleasant topics?
Your blog cannot be all happy talk, even when your company is hit with bad news. Candor and credibility are contingent upon your being willing to address the issues about which your stakeholders want to hear from you. Are you ready to tackle bad news on your blog and to hear what your stakeholders have to say about it?
If you answer “no” to any of these questions, then you’re not a likely candidate for a CEO blog.
There are alternatives, however, if you’re bound and determined to have your CEO voice heard in the socialmedia space:
- Group blogs—Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly posts an occasional item to the Nuts About Southwest blog, but only when the CEO’s voice needs to be heard. The blog is ready and available to him because of the community of Southwest employees who keep it populated with a wide variety of posts.
- Facebook—A fan page on Facebook affords you an opportunity to create content stakeholders might be interested in and then add a CEO commentary only when the occasion calls for it.
- Video—If your concern is that you’re not the world’s greatest writer, you could always opt for a video blog, speaking (not reading) your comments to a camera. There’s actually a tangible benefit to this approach: Your stakeholders can look into your eyes while you’re talking to them. You can upload your videos to a YouTube channel and embed the YouTube videos in your blog, making it easy for others to spread your words across other channels.
What other criteria should a CEO consider before undertaking a blog?
Here are some other CEOs who blog:
- Paul Levy, CEO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
- John Mackey, CEO, Whole Foods Markets
- Mike Critelli, now-retired Executive Chairman, Pitney Bowes
- Richard Edelman, Edelman Public Relations
There are many other CEO bloggers. Whose CEO blog would you point to as an excellent example?
2) Open Access Is Smart Business, Not An Employee Entitlement
At first, I shrugged off the semi-literate comment left to one of my posts over on Stop Blocking, the site I started to advocate for reasonable employee access to the Net, and particularly to social media sites.
The post to which “reason,” as he called himself left a comment reported on a study that showed 54% of companies were blocking access. Here’s his response:
isnt it funny in todays world how everyone thinks they deserve better than what they are getting without haveing to really work for it no job owes you facebook time so feel your rights are being taken for granted grow up you big baby work time is not your fun time so if you block your workers from facebook @ work dont feel that blocking reduces productivity and engagement, limits recruiting capabilities, and denies networking that ultimately benefits the organization. thats a bunch of crap do your job facebook dont pay your bills you lucky to even have a job.
I blew off the comment initially, relegating it to the “just doesn’t get it” dustbin. But I found the comment kept coming back to me, not because reason’s reasoning is right but because he seems to think that I’m advocating for employee rights in my efforts to get companies to stop blocking.
I’m not an employee rights advocate. If I were, very few of my clients would be interested in my services. My goal is to help organizations succeed. I’ve achieved my goals if companies are more profitable, more competitive, more nimble, more productive. I’m campaigning to get companies to open employee access to social sites because increasingly the networked connectivity of workers is driving competitiveness, productivity and other indicators of improved performance.
The fact is, through all my years working in employee communications, I’ve never been concerned with whether employees are happy. It’s not a company’s job to ensure employee happiness. Employee job satisfaction is another story. It’s tangible, it’s measurable and it has a direct bearing on employee engagement, which is a predictor of organizational growth.
But even job satisfaction is just one return a company gets from networked employees. Zappos encourages its employees to network on the job, resulting in a reputation for stellar customer service. Employees engaged in their social networks can also reduce the cost and improve the quality of recruiting. It can surface issues the company needs to address. It can generate ideas for new products and services. It improves employee productivity.
On that last note, productivity, I came across an item today on TMCnet sporting the provocative headline, “Workplace Productivity at an All-Time Low.” The press release touted the products of a company called Pandora—not the music streaming site, blocked by a number of companies—but rather one that “allows managers to analyze activities performed by employees and the time spent on different work items. It also affords the ability to track computer usage at a group and/or an individual level, cross-reference activities reported by an employee, and access an employee’s desktop in real-time.”
The all-time low productivity claim is based on this calculation:
On average, workers with an Internet connection spend 21 hours per week online while in the office, a little more than four hours per day. And on average, 26% of that time is spent on personal-interest websites. That amounts to roughly an hour per day, or 22 hours per month.
Pandora is just one of many companies that profit from the fear they produce with such outlandish claims. As I’ve repeatedly noted, these calculations don’t account for the benefits such networking brings to the organization, the improved productivity highlighted in a University of Melbourne study, or the amount of work these employees perform outside the 9-to-5 office hours because they’re networked. In fact, another story that crossed my desk today points out that companies in the UK were able to maintain productivity even as snowbound workers were unable to get to the office because their ability to connect with each other and the office let them get their work done from home.
And, as I’ve also noted before, these lost-productivity assertions don’t stand up to statistical scrutiny. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased in the third quarter of 2009 by 8.1%. That’s a far more credible number than the back-of-the-envelope calculations Pandora, Websense and other monitoring-and-blocking companies use in their scare campaigns. In fact, it reveals the productivity claims by these companies as an outright lie.
Yet these tactics continue to influence managers, as evidenced by the fact that most companies block access despite the fact that blocking is contrary to their own self interests.
Leaders need to realize that organizations that encourage their employees to network during work—guided by clear policies and improved business literacy—will experience success that eclipses that of organizations that block access.
It’s not a question of employee entitlements. It’s a question of smart business practices.
3) Next Webinar: Five New Communication Technologies You Need to Know
A five-week Webinar with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, March 1, 2010
Cost: US $195
Register here
It seems that each new year brings communicators the challenge of learning the latest technologies that will affect the way they do their jobs. But 2010 heralds the introduction of several new online technologies that will have a more profound impact than usual. In this illuminating Webinar, online communication expert Shel Holtz will guide you through five of the most important technologies you’ll need to understand as you adapt your communication strategies to the tools embraced by your publics.
During each of the Webinar’s five weeks, Shel will bring you up to speed on a different online trend. These will include:
- The real-time web—Since its inception in 1989, the World Wide Web has been a repository of static content. You found updated sites by polling them. The change to a real-time web, with updates pushed to you instantly, heralds a significant change in how the web will impact your organization and how you can use it to your company’s advantage.
- Augmented Reality—If you’ve seen a football game in the last few years, you’ve seen Augmented Reality (AR) in the shape of a digital yellow line indicating the spit to be reached for a first down. Now it’s being used for everything from helping you find the nearest subway entrance via your smart phone to promoting music on the web.
- HTML 5—We were told HTML 4 would be the last update to the web scripting language, but HTML 5 is here and will significantly alter the way your audiences interact with online content. You need to be ready to adopt it.
- The app revolution—When Apple introduced the App Store with the launch of the iPhone, it was empty. Apps were not Apple’s focus, but they have become the driving force behind the iPhone and its competitors. They’ve even extended beyond smart phones to printers and television. Will you know when an app is a requirement to achieve your communication strategy?
- GPS and location services—If you haven’t ‘checked in” at a location with the mobile game FourSquare, you know somebody who has. The localization of online content is being aided by the GPS functionality of smart phones, and the business uses are just now being conceived.
When management asks whether you should be using these technologies, you’ll need the answer. Even better will be proposing their use strategically before management is even aware of them.
As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.
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.
Webinar cost: US $195
4. What Employee Communications Looks Like In The Networked Company
Awareness is rising of the impact on business of networked employees—those workers who are continuously connected to their social circles and can tap into them at will. The discussion seems to be shifting, ever so slowly, to the characteristics of companies that, rather than inhibiting these traits, want to reap the benefits of a networked workforce. Recent posts by Olivier Blanchard and Valeria Maltoni have speculated on the nature of these companies. Olivier calls them P2P companies; Valeria refers to them as connected companies.
They both see the recruiting process changing, for example, to one of inviting people already connected to the company through online and offline social networks to come work for them. The IT department becomes the ET department—Technology Enablement. P2P companies don’t outsource customer service. Collaboration is supported by the use of the best tools available. And, according to Maltoni, “Facilitating conversations inside and outside the connected company means designing business through interactions.”
You’ll recognize more and more of these traits as existing companies evolve into networked companies and startups embrace the P2P model. But succeeding under the P2P model won’t happen just because it seems right. It’ll take work. Companies have to implement systems to support the model.
Employee Communications is a critical function that must adapt in order to accommodate its role in a networked company. Inspired by Valeria and Olivier, I’d like to offer a list of characteristics of the employee communications function in the networked/P2P company.
Ease employee access to social networks. Both Olivier and Valeria have noted that connected companies won’t block access to social networks. Leaving access unfettered is, indeed, a requirement, but companies will need to go a few steps beyond unshackling employees from the restrictions that keep them from connecting. It will be incumbent on the internal communications function to identify communities within social networks where the company’s products, services, operations, and other dimensions are discussed and even summarize the nature of the conversation taking place in this communities. Helping employees identify where the conversation is can help them begin participating in a more meaningful way. After all, it is within some of these communities where employees will establish and build relationships with people who are likely to become candidates for employment. These networks are also where employees will glean insights from customers that could lead to product or service innovation.
Show employees who’s saying what, right now. Employees already participate in the networks and communities aligned with their interests. Some may be interested in engaging elsewhere, such as communities they’ve never heard of where the company or its brands are being discussed. At the least, companies should provide a directory of these communities. Ideally, however, companies will let employees see, in as close to real time as possible, what the members of those communities are saying about the company. You might consider this a curator role for Employee Communications, one that demonstrates the sentiment of real people with real influence who are having real conversations about your organization. I can easily see a dashboard on the intranet portal with the very latest customer sentiments along with a link to more detailed content from these communities.
Communicate research results. Organizations of all stripes spend a ton of money on consumer research. Few share the results of the research with employees company-wide; it’s data that, for one reason or another, is usually made available only to brand team members. With all employees networking with customers, knowledge of the study results can inform the conversation. Internal communications needs to become a channel for sharing the results of market research throughout the organization.
Increase business literacy. Employees need to know the business. It’s a sad fact that most frontline employees couldn’t answer basic questions about the business beyond the work of their own department. It’s equally sad that this is most often true because nobody bothers to teach them about the business and the resources for them to teach themselves aren’t readily available. Employee Communications needs to focus considerable effort on ensuring employees are savvy about the company for which they work.
Build awareness of business initiatives. In addition to general business literacy, employees need to know about specific initiatives. Employees in a hospital that has started marketing its quality ratings should know about the effort. Employees in a manufacturing organization that has taken steps to be more sustainable should be able to talk intelligently about what that means.
Make sure everyone knows the rules of the road. Too often, organizations assume that because a policy has been published, everyone knows what it is. Employee Communications needs to communicate the policies and guidelines that govern employee activity in online communities on an ongoing basis through multiple channels. No employee should ever be surprised to learn they have violated a policy.
Champion and support internal training. Some of the companies that have the most positive employee engagement are ones in which employees can attend classes to learn about how to engage. At Zappos, employees can take classes on Twitter. The Mayo Clinic offers tweetcamps, where doctors and other staff can learn about social media. Ideally, the Internal Communications team will partner with the Training department to develop learning opportunities—face-to-face and online—that will help employees get business-literate and learn about social networking and how their engagement can produce meaningful results for the company.
Enlist company advocates. Best Buy’s Twelpforce is one of the more forward-thinking initiatives for engaging front-line employees with customers. Blueshirts—the employees who work in the retail stores—volunteered to respond to queries sent via Twitter to the Twelpforce account. Companies can take this concept beyond the initiative level, finding those engaged employees—that is, the employees who want to make discretionary efforts on behalf of the company, train them, and get them into vital communities. (This kind of engagement must be disclosed and transparent, of course. I’m not suggesting anything deceptive, just a means of identifying and activating those employees who want to be part of the organization’s organic networking efforts.)
Work with ET to ensure systems support networking. If IT has transformed into Technology Enablement, they are the ideal partner for Employee Communications to identify and launch the tools employees can best use to network with one another. The technology department can also ensure the intranet supports the modules referenced earlier, such as business literacy training, communication of research results, and real-time updates of who’s saying what about the company in key online communities.
All of this has to happen along with much of the traditional work Employee Communications performs, such as letting employees know that benefits enrollment is coming, supporting an internal change process, and informing employees about decisions that will affect them. In a networked company, there’s no question in my mind that the role of Employee Communications becomes bigger and more important.
What other traits should characterize the Employee Communications function in the networked organization?
5. The News Industry’s Turmoil Increases The Complexity Of PR
There has been a lot of news about news lately and on the surface, none of it bodes well for the traditional newspaper business, regardless of whether you’re talking about paper newspapers or their online cousins. It does, however, reveal opportunities for people working in PR.
It should come as no surprise that readership of newspapers—both print and online—continues to decline. A Harris poll released just yesterday finds that only two out of five Americans read a newspaper every day, while 72% read a newspaper at least weekly. Ten percent never read a newspaper.
I’m not convinced that last number is all that different than it was, say, 30 years ago. I remember the number of people I encountered when I was in journalism school who didn’t read newspapers—and this was back in the days of the manual typewriter. But the size of the traditional news audience is shrinking. In a presentation delivered at Yale, Pew Internet and American Life Project Director Lee Rainie pointed out that 19% of Americans get no daily news at all, up from about 14% a decade ago. What’s more, Rainie pointed out, the people who do consume news daily spend eight fewer minutes with the news than they used to.
If this isn’t dire enough, the population of newspaper reader is aging; the younger you are, the less likely you are to read a newspaper every day. Nearly two-thirds of those 55 and over make daily newspaper reading a habit. (That might explain my own morning routine.)
All of this—and a host of other statistics that seem to predict the ultimate demise of the traditional news business—leads a lot of communicators to wonder if there’s any value in maintaining a traditional media relations function.
But shrinkage isn’t the same as death. There’s no indication that the trend will continue until there are no newspaper readers.
Remaining newspaper readers still matter
Consider this: While less than a quarter of people 18 to 34 read a daily newspaper, that’s not a number to be trifled with. The 18-24-year-old demographic accounts for about 25% of the U.S. population, or about 77 million people. When you have 19 million young people reading newspapers every day, you’d be foolish to ignore the channel when trying to reach that market, especially when you consider that many of them are likely influencers.
Remember, most of the content reported via social media is not original reporting. Bloggers, Twitterers and others are repurposing content that comes primarily from newspapers. The news that so many people get through these other channels originates in newspapers and is reported through social media by people who read newspapers. Having your story told in a newspaper increases the likelihood that it will be seen by people who rely on alternative sources for their news. Just today, PostRank reported that 80% of all audience engagement is offsite. That means even bloggers’ content is being read on Facebook, Digg, and other venues other than the blog where it was originally produced. It isn’t just newspapers that are in this boat.
In a study that focused on the news delivered over a weeklong period in one major city—Baltimore—the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that, far and away, newspapers were responsible for reporting new information. Examining six key story lines, Pew determined that 95% of new information came from a combination of traditional media (newspapers, television and niche media, with newspapers leading the pack) while “new media”—including social media—reported the least new information.
The Pew study also found that the press was responsible for triggering only 15% of the news they covered. The rest came from other sources. If you’ve been thinking the downturn in the news business has signaled the end of any need for traditional media relations, think again. Yes, 10% of people who have social networking profiles get news through those sites. But those sites didn’t originate the news. By and large newspapers did.
This means the the role of the newspaper is shifting. They remain the primary source of first reporting, but now serve as the inadvertent distributor of news to secondary channels through which an increasing number of people get their news.
A study I’d like to see would determine if social media content creators are among the remaining newspaper readers. I’d be willing to bet real money that they are.
Authoritative sources still matter
It’s equally important to have channels that let you get your organization’s news directly to its audiences. While media relations will be important for the foreseeable future, you’re competing for a shrinking amount of news space. The Baltimore Sun, for example, produced 32% fewer news stories in the period of the Pew study than it did 10 years earlier and 73% fewer than it did in 1991.
Some smug new-media pundits may be basking in the warmth of the certain knowledge that blogs and other social channels have taken up the slack. But that’s not so. According to the Pew study—as I suggested above—social media has served mostly to notify readers of the mainstream article’s existence. Social media has a greater impact on the speed with which news breaks than on the overall number of new stories. Citizen journalism has its place to be sure (just look at the iReports CNN is including in its coverage of the Haitian earthquake), it’s not panning out as a replacement for professional journalism. Social media is finding a more comfortable niche in areas such as fundraising (again, look at the Haiti situation, where social media is responsible for raising awareness of the U.S. State Department and Red Cross relief efforts, generating millions of dollars in giving.)
The repetition of news items by social media content producers—from blog posts to tweets—satisfies the growing preference for news grazing, consuming bits of news all the time instead of all at once (whether that’s sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper for half an hour or watching the nightly news). Fewer people get their news at all one regular time than get it from time to time, according to numbers Rainie cited during his Yale talk.
But this repurposing of news creates confusion. As the Project for Excellence in Journalism put it, “As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.”
Blogger Adam Sherk beat me to the punch with the observation that the long-abused press release still has legs: “Companies can increase the likelihood of their press releases being used by bloggers and local news sources by giving them a more news-like tone and dialing down the marketing hype,” he writes. Press releases bearing the company’s official imprint can be authoritative statements of record in the absence of other sources people can trust.
Press releases still matter
That’s a significant change in the press release’s former role as a pitch to mainstream media. That role is dead, but as a channel for getting information directly to people—information they can cite—the press release has new life. (They also do a bang-up job of search engine optimization, when done right.)
You should also read Shannon Cherry’s post extolling the virtues of making your press releases available for subscription via an RSS feed, which contradicts the growing popular belief that RSS has outlived its usefulness. “Many reporters are using RSS feeds to get their releases, because they can customize what they are receiving for their target market,” Cherry writes. “Many of the press release posting sites only have one feed, so journalists avoid them due to all the clutter of releases not pertinent to them. They would certainly rather subscribe to news feeds, like your press release feed, that’s targeted.”
In other words, if you want your company’s or client’s story told, you need to make sure it’s everywhere. To get social media content creators to report it, you need to do your damnedest to get it into the papers. To get it in the papers, you need to maintain a solid media relations effort that accommodates reporters’ preferences (like RSS). You also need to go directly to influencers (through blogger outreach) and directly to the public (through a variety of techniques ranging from a strategic social media presence to tried-and-true SEO practices).
The news space has grown more complex. The sophistication of your efforts to earn coverage need to grow with it.
6. Is Your Company Invisible Without An iPhone App?
Speaking as a CES panelist, NewsGator Media & Consumer Products GM Walker Fenton told the audience, “You’ve got to be on the iPhone; same as you’ve got to be on the Web.” Not having an iPhone app today, he suggested, is like not having a website 10 years ago. Without an iPhone app, you don’t exist.
It’s a sentiment I’m seeing echoed by a lot of observers and analysts. I appreciate the enthusiasm and understand where it’s coming from. And while your organization may well benefit from an iPhone app, it’s not a requirement. What is required is developing a strategy for smart phones.
Marketers and communicators should look at two issues when making plans for their presence in the mobile phone space.
First, is an app the answer at all?
Claiming that apps are a requirement is putting tactics before strategy. Whether to release a smartphone app should be the answer to the question: “What tactics can we employ to achieve the objectives that drive our strategy?” I imagine “We need an iPhone app” is as common an assertion today as “We need a brochure” was 20 years ago. Those who “needed” a brochure had rarely performed the due diligence to determine that a brochure was the most effective means of accomplishing their goals.
As one commenter noted in response to Fenton’s assertion, “If you have a website, you’re already on every smartphone.” If there’s a requirement for every organization regarding smartphones, it’s to bring their websites up to snuff for viewing on phones.
Having the mobile-ready site is a first step; the next is making sure people can find it. “Make sure that the redirects are in place so that most mobile browsers will end up (at your mobile-ready site),” writes Steve Smith at Mobile Insider. While Smith recognizes that 2010 will be the year of mobile-ready content that employs a lot of creativity,
It is going to have to be creativity with a purpose. I did a quick review of brands’ mobile sites the other day and found that there is a substantial difference between merely having a mobile “presence” and having a mobile purpose.
This is a no-brainer, given the shift of web consumption from the computer to the mobile phone. Morgan Stanley, in "
The Mobile Internet Report” released last month, proclaimed that “More users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.” Yet I’m routinely surprised at the number of companies that haven’t taken even the first tentative steps to address this trend.
Adam Cahill, writing for ClickZ News, suggests a three-phase approach to strategizing your adoption of mobile technology as a marketing/communications channel:
- Assess the impact of the persistently connected consumer is on your your industry and your business. “How, when, and where do consumers use mobile to make buying decisions about what you sell?”
- Commit a “predictable and sizable” part of your budget to developing the right channels for bringing your brand to the mobile space.
- Figure out how you’re going to measure the effectiveness of your mobile efforts.
I have no doubt the m-dot and mobile app space will be littered with a lot of useless crap that satisfies somebody’s insistenhce that “we have a mobile presence.” Those who adopt strategies that satisfy customers’ real needs and desires, solve their problems, simplify their lives or allow them to do something they could never do before (for instance, with location-based phone tools) will actually produce measurable results.
I have to wonder if NewsGator’s Fenton remembers all the terrible, useless websites that sprung up like weeds in response to the mandate, “You’ve got to have a website.”
If an app is an answer, what platforms should you consider?
When the iPhone was released, it was (as Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted) a game-changer. My reaction to the iPhone’s introduction turns out to have been correct: It will force other mobile phone companies to step up their game in order to compete. Initially, in one corner stood the iPhone, simple to use and adaptable to its owners needs. In the other corner were a host of crappy phones everyone hate because they were hard to use and didn’t do what their owners needed them to do.
Today, the marketplace hosts a number of viable competitors to the iPhone, many of which sport features with which the iPhone can’t compete (like multitasking). Even in the rare air of celebrity geek circles, iPhones have been abandoned in favor of the Motorola’s Droid and some other contenders. (Sometimes this is because of the Droid’s features, including a real keyboard; sometimes it’s conceding the iPhone just isn’t worth the problems associated with AT&T’s service.)
In fact, 28% of those who plan to buy a smartphone plan to get Apple’s product, but 21% will buy an Android and 18% a Blackberry. Add the 9% who will opt for a Windows phone or one sporting WebOS (Palm’s platform, currently available on the Pre and the Pixi), nearly half of the smartphones being sold will not be iPhones. It seems to me, then, that if you build only an iPhone app, you’ll be invisible to half your target market.
Gartner expects Android to surpass the iPhone by 2012, while Nokia’s Symbian—currently the market leader—will own 37.4% of the market. The iPhone will be in third place.(As of last August, Symbian commanded about half the market. The BlackBerry had about 20% and the iPhone wasin third place with 13%.)
The analogy of an iPhone app to a website isn’t an apt one because of competing platforms. HTML is an open platform—pages rendered (to varying degrees) on any browser whether it was installed on a Mac, a PC, or a Linux/UNIX box. Smartphone apps, conversely, need to be developed separately for each platform.
If your strategy leads you to conclude that apps are necessary, you’ll need to produce them for each of the key platforms, the cost of which—both time and money—will need to be factored into your planning. That’s part of the serious budgeting Cahill recommends in his three-step planning process.
You’ll also need to figure out how your effort integrates with your communication through all the other channels you’re already using.
The fundamentals apply
Ultimately, communicators should apply the same strategic planning that works for any communication effort:
- Identify the need or opportunity
- Identify the audiences to reach in order to take advantage of the opportunity or satisfy the need
- Articulate the goals and objectives you will have to achieve in order to succeed at the effort
- Determine the tactics you’ll implement in support of the goals and objectives. (These would include smartphone apps.)
- Measure and evaluate the project outcomes.
While it’s easier to jump up and down like a five-year-old in a toy store shouting, “I want an iPhone app! I want an iPhone app!” it’s smarter to strategize your inevitable adoption of the smartphone as a key communication channel.
7. Join Me In Chicago March 11
Mark Ragan has asked me to lead a workshop dedicated to Social Media and Strategic Internal Communications.
It’s on March 11 in Chicago at the Aon Building. Here’s a link to the online brochure:
Early sales are so strong that Mark thinks this event could sell out. I wanted to give you a heads up in case you were thinking about coming.
I hope to see you there
Site of the Month
A backlash of sorts has been forming against location-based services, one of the hot new social categories. Despite the popularity of services like Foursquare and competitors like Gowalla, some have argued that these tools won’t scale. After all, the argument goes, just how many people do you really want knowing where you are at any given time?
It’s a short-sighted observation. There’s far more to location-based social media than checking in so the world can know you’re at the grocery store. (Besides, who really wants to be the mayor of Safeway?)
Justin Davey, author of the GPS Obsessed blog, joined the throng of bloggers offering up their predictions for 2010, although Davey’s forecast was focused on geospatial industry trends. He sees an explosion in the use augmented reality and mobile coupons. He envisions search engines dishing up location information with search results and the same time of location-based information appearing with videos shot with GPS-enabled devices that you can now find on photos uploaded to sites like Flickr. And, he writes, every gadget—from digital cameras to netbooks (and, presumably, tablets)—will include a GPS chip.
One of the more interesting location-based sites, though, doesn’t take advantage of a GPS chip. At least, not yet. GroundMap was launched by a pair of 20-somethings from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, with an eye toward becoming the next big social media destination. Whether they’ll reach that goal remains to be seen, but GroundMap does point to the growing importance of location-based content.
“The Internet is located somewhere nobody knows, and we’re essentially making it relevant to where people go,” co-founder Matt Boyd said in a Southeast Missourian interview. “We’re almost making digital media tangible.”
GroundMap lets you associate content—tweets, documents, YouTube videos, Google Maps, you name it—with a place. If the location you’re interested in isn’t listed, you can add it. You can also add your opinion to any content that has been contributed.
Checking Rockville, Maryland—one of the most popular places listed, according to the tag cloud that appears on the home page—I found a couple YouTube videos (including one of an all-GM car show that was held in town), a link to the wikipedia listing for Rockville, a photo of city hall and a few other links and opinions.
The site is brand-spanking new, launched the last week of 2009, so there’s not a lot of content yet. But it’s easy to envision city listings loaded with material. The potential for marketers—particularly for small businesses—is huge. I’ve already read one account of the owner of a resort uploading a PDF of information about the facility to the listing for the city where the resort is located.
It makes perfect sense. Given our increased reliance on peer content, this would make it easy to learn what others think about a city to which you plan to travel. Sure, there’s Yelp, but it’s limited to reviews and you have to know the name of the service you’re researching. There’s CitySearch, but it’s limited to the major metropolitan areas and user-generated content is limited to reviews of services already listed. And while much of the content associated with a city in GroundMap already exists elsewhere (such as YouTube), it would take a lot of work to uncover it with a typical web search.
GroundMap will be a lot more useful with a bookmarklet that lets you add content from anywhere on the web, an iPhone app that adds GPS functionality, and other enhancements. But the obvious benefits of the site underscore the growing importance of location-based services. PR and marketing professionals would do well to begin exploring the opportunities these sites have to offer.
9. HC+T Update
- I’ve just wrapped up a project to develop a strategic social media plan for an Alabama hospital.
- I’ve developed and am about to conduct the first session of an “introduction to Twitter and Facebook” for staff at a California hospital.
- I’m presenting a half-day workshop on how to bring social media to the local level for field marketers of a fast-food chain
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