Saturday, July 26, 2008
HC+T Update: July 2008
HC+T Update: July 2008
1) Next Webinar: Bring Your Intranet Into The 21st Century
2) The Future of Print Journalism
3) Official Blogger vs. Just Plain Folks
4) Non-Threatening Ways To Get Your Company Started With Social Media
5) Social Media and B-to-B: Made For Each Other
6) Weighing Legal Counsel Against Other Issues
7) Yes, Virginia, There Is An Audience
8) Sites Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information
I only missed two months...not bad!
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should
seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader:
http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.
1. Next Webinar: Bring Your Intranet Into The 21st Century
When I first presented “Bring Your Intranet into the 21st Century” in early 2007, it turned out to be the most popular five-week course since we introduced Shel Holtz Webinars back in 2002. Nearly 200 people participated, and the reviews that came back were glowing.
Since then, we’ve heard regularly from people wondering when the session would be repeated. Now, nearly 18 months later, a lot has changed in the world of intranets. Research suggests that more and more companies are seeking to implement Web 2.0 technologies and approaching it from a variety of angles. It’s time to update and repeat this wildly popular Webinar.
During the five-week online session, you’ll learn…
- How your intranet can become a source of improved productivity, commitment, engagement and profitability
- How to open the intranet to employee publishing via new media tools like blogs and wikis
- How to replace your outdated employee directory with a vibrant employee social network
- How finding media on the intranet can be as easy as it is on Websites like Flickr and YouTube
- How to get employees engaged with the intranet so they use it—and read it—several times a day
- Techniques for making the intranet easily accessible to employees who don’t work at computers, including factory workers and field staff
As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a collection of online resources and downloadable handouts. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures include a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video...but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous—that is, they do not take place in real time. You can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you—there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.
To get an overview of how these Webinars work, visit http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and view the demo video.
Want a taste of Shel before deciding? Visit his blog and listen to his podcast.
Webinar cost is U.S. $195.
2. The Future of Print Journalism
I have a bet.
For some time now, at least a year, I’ve been offering this wager: $100 says 10 years from now, I’ll be able to buy a newspaper out of a rack on the street. Jose Leal has taken me up on the bet, and this post will serve as the record. I also have it marked on calendar: July 21, 2018.
This all came about when I left a comment to a post by Mitch Joel. Mitch reported on Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s grave forecast for the newspaper business. It has become a given in some circles that newspapers will soon be a relic of a bygone era. To me, that’s just another variation on the never-ending stream of “(fill in the blank) is dead” pronouncements.
The newspaper business is, to be sure, on the ropes. It has never been a business prone to adaptation under new circumstances: The print media turned its nose up at television, certain that real journalism could not be practiced on TV. It was a decision that resulted in reduced newspapers’ market share as TV news provided an appealing alternative.
Today, news organizations are hamstrung by changing news consumption habits. Among those who get their news online, aggregators like Yahoo and Google News are more likely to serve as your gateway to the news than your local or metropolitan daily newspaper. Classified advertising, once the lifeblood of newspapers’ finances, have moved online to Craig’s List and eBay. Circulation rates are dropping. Papers are taking axes to their editorial staffs, reducing size of the paper, and taking other drastic measures.
All of which makes it pretty tempting to jump on the “newspapers are dead” bandwagon.
Print, however, still has strengths. While many newspapers will perish before the industry figures out how to turn things around by playing to those strengths, print journalism will adapt. Print newspapers in 10 years won’t much resemble a newspaper today. My guess is that their focus will be hyperlocal. How good is the web for finding out about the dry clearners opening up down the street or the outcome of the town hall meeting? It doesn’t pay for Joe’s Tavern to advertise on the web when Joe’s customer base is limited to people who live within a two-mile radius. It does pay to advertise in a newspaper that lands on everybody’s front door, that people pick up before they board the train for the city.
Or newspapers could go in some other direction altogether. We’ll see. In the end, there will be considerably less print journalism (somne newspapers will experience considerable success on the web), but print journalism will survive and possibly even thrive again.
Of course, the industry has to endure until the bureaucracies that control them suck it up and change course. There is plenty of evidence to support print media’s survival:
- Most of the 10 largest newspapers are gaining, not losing, circulation. Nationwide, daily newspaper circulation is 50,827,454, down .1% from a year ago, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Details
- A Readership Institute poll finds that only one-fifth of people who subscribe to newspapers visit the newspaper’s website in a month, and 60% never.
- While readership is declining among 18-24-year-olds, it is declining slowly. The age group may place less value overall in print newspapers, but some will continue to read them. (There are even young people who prefer listening to vinyl instead of CDs.)
- Readers of print engage more with the printed newspaper than with the Web site. “Ratings for four experiences – ‘gives me something to talk about,’ ‘looks out for my interests,’ ‘ad usefulness’ and ‘touches and inspires me’ were significantly higher for the newspaper than for the site,” according to the Readership Institute study.
- While readership of local newspapers has declined, local newspapers remain the second most consumed medium in the U.S. after major network TV news, according to Ketchum’s ”Media: Myths and Realities” survey.
- Local and national newspapers are also trusted more than web resources, the Ketchum study reveals.
- Personal observation counts for a lot, too. Riding on BART, I find far more people of all ages reading newspapers than their iPhones or laptops. The same is true on the subways and trains of New York. (And when I pick up the newspaper somebody has left behind, odds are they’ve done the crossword or the Soduko puzzle.)
The readership decline is gradual and there are plenty of people who will continue reading newspapers, at least long enough for newspapers to make the adjustments necessary to find their new niche in the mostly-digital media landscape.
So I’m happy to take Jose up on the bet.
In his note to me, he added a couple other reasons he thinks newspapers will be fully extinct in a decade. First he sees print as a leading factor in “the rape of our forests.” Most paper companies these days are replanting, though; trees are a renewable resource and paper companies know how to renew it. Second, he points to the energy required to produce newspapers. Fewer newspapers, though, will mean less of an environmental footprint, and we’re likely to see advances in ecological-friendly printing. (Soy-based inks are already popular, for instance.)
But Jose mostly believes that the role of journalism is archaic in a world in which anybody can publish, taking “control away from the media organizations and puts it squarely in the hands of the people.” Professional journalism is not about control, however. It’s about the skill and the resources required to track down a story and convey it in a compelling and understandable way. Journalist-reported news is the catalyst for an awful lot of blogging, and the U.S. Army isn’t going to embed somebody with a cool MySpace profile into the 1st Mountain Division on its next mission. Professional journalism will most certainly co-exist with citizen-reported news. Most of it will move online; I heard a Houston Chronicle editor say that the website comes first.
Jose has further articulated his position in a post to his blog. Others, like Jay Moonah, have a more balanced view (as evidenced by a post from Jay’s blog back in March). In his comment on Mitch’s post, Jay wrote:
As I often do I’ll lean on McLuhan who said “people don’t read newspapers, they get into them like a warm bath.” The impact of media forms like paper cannot be displaced simply by displaying the same information in another form because it’s about more than the information. Much, MUCH more. That’s not going to change in 10 years, hell that’s not going to change in a few generations. My 9 month old daughter _might_ not be able to get a newspaper off the stand by the time she’s a grandmother… maybe. But I wouldn’t bet a $100 on that, either.
Jay’s right. I expect I’ll still get USA Today delivered to my hotel rooms and have access to plenty of other forms of print journalism, including reporting included in reinvigorated daily newspapers, free giveaway newspapers that are getting more and more popular, and community weekly newspapers.
So, Jose, I fully expect to take $100 from you a decade from now. Of course, given the way other things are going, that’ll probably be worth about a Euro-and-a-half...or $3.50 Canadian.
3. Official Blogger vs. Just Plain Folks
A lot of choices have to be made when a company decides to launch an official blog. Among these choices: Who will represent the company on the blog?
If you opt for a single blogger, you need to decide whether to tap someone already working for the company or hire a blogger. eBay opted for the latter, Real Networks for the former. Either way, that individual can potentially become a significant voice for the organization.
Some have argued the danger in this approach: If the blogger leaves the company to join, say, a competitor, the audience goes, too. While this may happen from time to time, I don’t buy it as an argument against an individual blogger. After all, key spokespeople have been changing jobs since long before the birth of the blogosphere. And if readers are as interested in the company as its blogger, they may just find themselves reading two blogs—the original blogger now talking about another company and the new blogger at the original company.
The other approach is a group blog. Some of the best corporate blogs are group blogs, including Direct2Dell, Southwest Airlines’ blog, GM’s Fastlane blog and TSA’s Evolution of Security. FastLane’s key blogger is GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, but other key car executives—mostly people reporting to LUtz—also weigh in. At Southwest Airlines, a number of employees representing the spectrum of jobs at the company were vetted and trained to blog.
Some observers dislike group blogs because they dilute the single voice that can be so compelling on a one-person blog. However, a range of voices from throughout the organization can be equally appealing. There are other benefits to a group blog:
- Nobody is required to spend too much time blogging. A post every couple weeks from each blogger assures a steady stream of fresh content.
- When an issue arises, there is somebody already blogging who is likely to be able to address it based on his or her area of expertise.
- If the blog is determined to be the best channel for a message from the president or CEO, the channel already exists even if the senior executive hasn’t made much use of it. GM’s Rick Wagoner has blogged on GM’s group blog; Gary Kelly at Southwest has done the same.
The most important advantage of a group blog, though, is that it reveals some of the real people in the organization to the public. The blogs listed above have demonstrated the good that comes from letting customer interact directly with employees. There’s also a financial advantage: Define an organization as you will, but without people, it’s nothing. The quality of an organization’s employees will have much to do with the company’s success or failure. Smart people communicating intelligently, candidly, and publicly about their jobs, the company, and the industry can only serve to inspire confidence in investors.
There’s no single right answer, of course; the choice between an individual and a group blog depends on what your company is trying to achieve with an official corporate blog. Weigh your options and choose what’s best for your company, but don’t automatically assume one approach is intrinsically better than the other.
4. Non-Threatening Ways To Get Your Company Started With Social Media
As organizations seek to expand their communication efforts to include social media, they often find themselves facing the same hurdles that were faced and ultimately overcome by earlier adopters. Efforts to introduce social media have been hamstrung by questions of time commitment, IT issues, and legal concerns.
Usually, blogs are the tactic that face these obstacles (although I have also heard of other challenges, such as a legal objection to the construction of a special-purpose Facebook page). The assumption that blogs must be the company’s point of entry into social media is most likely based on the fact that blogs were the first social media tool. By the time other tools, like Twitter, came along, tens of millions of blogs already populated the Web and companies from Sun Microsystems to McDonald’s were already showing results from their blogging efforts.
While there are plenty of good reasons for a company to blog, there’s no rule that says blogs must kick off a company’s foray into social media. In fact, if you start with something that isn’t threatening to the lawyers or likely to raise much concern among IT staff, the successful implementation of smaller, less flashy tools can pave the way for more involved engagement.
If your company hasn’t touched social media yet, consider starting with these approaches:
- For your external communications, add a “share this” link to every article or page
- For internal communication, add a rating-and-comment feature to every page
Share this
People increasingly use aggregation tools to find interestithe websites of media outlets like The New York Times or CNN. (Max Kalehoff says he visits the Times site only to read particular blogs.) Democratized content sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and NewsVine -- where the users determine what’s important rather than a gatekeeper—are also growing in popularity. Even in the world of search, it’s not unusual to hear someone suggest that they get more targeted results by searching Delicious or Furl than Google.
It’s altogether possible that a reader will submit a news item or press release from your website to one of these services. It’s far more likely, though, if you make it easy by giving them the utility to submit with just two clicks (one to open the “share this” box, the other to submit). Consider the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A search of Digg produces several pages of results, most of which are less than flattering with headlines like “FDA’s handling of proposed cancer drug defies compassion” and “Shame on the FDA.” There is, however, a link to an FDA press release about the formation of a nanotechnology task force. The press release itself features no links at all. A “share this” link would certainly lead far more people to do so—people to whom it might never occur to share at all without the nudge.
In fact, if all of the FDA’s press releases contained “Share This” links, it’s likely that more positive material would find its way to Digg, Delicious, and other sites where they would be visible to people who would otherwise never see it, providing some balance to content submitted by the agency’s critics.
It’s important for organizations to get their messages out to where people are spending their time and consuming their information (which is not your dot-com website).
Rate-and-comment
Most intranets are hard to navigate and contain content of questionable value. The simple act of letting employees comment on and rate a page can make good content easier to find and increase the usefulness of a lot of that material.
A simple YouTube-like five-star rating system serves a number of purposes. It gets employees accustomed to interacting. It provides an at-a-glance indication of how valuable other employees have found a page (assuming it has amassed enough votes). And a “highest-rated pages” listing can help direct employees to useful content (as opposed to most-viewed).
Enabling comments on pages lets employees enhance the content with their own experiences and observations. Consider the page containing the travel policy. An employee might add a comment noting that his expense report was kicked back multiple times because currency conversions were wrong, then directing employees to the right resource for calcuating conversions.
In both the external and internal cases, the value of social media should become evident in relatively short order and serve as a basis for introducing those blogs, Facebook pages, and other tools that help organizations engage in dialogues with their publics.
5. Social Media and B-to-B: Made For Each Other
Of all the questions I’m asked about social media, its applicability in business-to-business companies is probably the most common. Come to think of it, it’s not always posed in the form of a question. Just as often, it’s a statement: “There’s no role for social media in B-to-B.”
Social media actually makes more sense in B-to-B companies than business-to-consumer firms.
A lot of B-to-B companies evidently agree. In a 2007 report by Forrester, researcher Laura Ramos found that, as of the end of 2006, nearly 40% of B2B marketers surveyed used blogs, social networks, or user-generated content in their efforts.
The benefits of social media to B-to-B companies is simple: It’s all about relationships. B-to-C companies nearly always need to get their messages to large, amorphous groups of people; the companies have no relationship with the vast majority of those people. In most B-to-B environments, companies know exactly who their customers and prospective customers are. Social media provides B-to-B companies with a channel to have conversations that you’d like to have one-on-one with every customer and prospect, but just can’t.
Sun Microsystems, a social media poster child, gets this. (Most people don’t think about it, but Sun is primarily a B-to-B company; you’re not likely to find a rackmount server at Best Buy and the average customer isn’t likely to download and install Solaris.) Commenting about the value of having his employees blogging about their work, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said…
I don’t have the advertising budget to get our message to, for instance, Java developers working on handset applications for the medical industry. But one of our developers, just be taking time to write a blog, can do a great job getting our message out to a fanatic readership.
Hat tip to Phil Gomes for that quote, by the way.
During an interview for my upcoming book (Tactical Transparency, co-authored by John C. Havens), Schwartz offered additional insight into the value of engaging B-to-B customers through social media:
I don’t just sell to my customers, I love my customers. I embrace my customers and ask them to embrace me, . I ask them for their insights and input. As a result, the products we build become assets of those communities. Somebody who feels part of a community is going to be a much more aggressive evangelist for our products than someone who just paid $29.95 for it at a big-box retailer.
Those customers become “aggressive evangelists” because Sun—using social media as a channel for transparency—shares with customers “what’s next for a product, how we are going to manage our relationship with them, how we are going to treat them.”
That’s exactly the kind of insight that can be shared on a B-to-B blog, along with other carefully-chosen social media tools.
Is there really a reason to worry about the competition?
Some worry that such open, transparent communication can give too much away to the competition. I view this worry from two angles. First, if it really is something the competition shouldn’t see, don’t communicate it—not on a blog, not in a press release, not in any venue that can result in unintended disclosure. But I do have to wonder how much of this concern targets information from which competitors couldn’t really benefit. After all, if you’re already talking about it, how quickly could a competitor catch up with you? (I once read a quote about excessive focus on the competition that stuck with me: “Nobody ever won a tennis match by keeping their eye on the scoreboard.")
Again, Sun’s Schwartz makes it clear that there is a difference between open discussion with customers and the need to keep secret things secret:
We also have a responsibility to our customers not to leak what they’ve shared with us. We have legal obligations because we’re subject to Reg FD, which says we have to share with everybody at the same time information that might be deemed material to our performance. For folks to violate those principles because it’s convenient or expeditious isn’t a good thing. Everybody can talk to everybody, I don’t have any problem with that, but everybody should remember that we have signed confidentiality agreements with folks and we have to honor them. There are a lot of people who do business with us because they know we can keep a secret.
In other words, open conversation via social media and confidentiality are not mutually exclusive.
B-to-B and blogs
There are more practical uses of B-to-B blogging than discussing company plans. At EDS, for example, the Next Big Thing blog, authored by EDS’s fellows, explores the future of technology from the perspective of the company’s brightest minds. The topics addressed by EDS’a bloggers are higher-level discussion topics that affect companies and the world strategically; there is no focus by the fellows on day-to-day operational issues.
Johnson Controls blogs for reputational reasons, a B-to-B company aiming its messages at consumers with its Your Energy Forum blog, which focuses on the smart use of energy at home, at work, and on the road. A blurb on the blog touts it as “a way for those in the energy efficiency movement to discuss how we’re working to reduce energy consumption. Visit to give or share your perspective.”
Architectural firms, general contractors, and (of course) PR agencies—along with a host of other B-to-BN companies—are all blogging.
Social Media Today puts another spin on B-to-B blogging. The company manages sites populated by posts from prominent bloggers in related fields; readers can not only comment on the posts but use a Digg-like function to vote for posts they like. The sites are B-to-B focused and sponsored by companies anxious for the insights not only from the bloggers, but from the comments and votes they inspire. The Customer Collective—focused on B-too-B sales and marketing—is sponsored by Oracle, for example.
(You can hear an interview I recently interviewed Robin Fray Carey for IABC’s conference podcast on BlogTalk Radio; Social Media Today is a conference sponsor.)
B-to-B beyond blogging
But there’s more to social media than just blogs. Many of the channels presumed to cater exclusively to consumers can serve B-to-B communications. A search of YouTube revealed more than 2,000 videos tagged “software as service” many focused on B-to-B companies like Salesforce.com. By putting B-to-B-related videos on YouTube, you make them embedable elsewhere and increase the likelihood that they’ll be discovered and talked about by your target market.
IBM recently re-launched its IBM and the Future Of podcast series. Here, thought leaders within the company, often joined by outside experts, examine how technology will impact a wide variety of activities. Recent topics have included shopping, movies, water management, data security, mobile phones, Africa and medical imaging.
Interviewed for “Tactical Transparency, investor relations expert Domnic Jones explained the value of blogs like EDS’s and podcasts like IBM’s, which offer insight into the depth of the company’s expertise by shining a light on the people who will bring profitable new services to life. ““Past performance is one thing, but investors are placing their bets on the future of the company,” Jones said, and employee talent will drive much of that future.
IBM has found other ways to tap into social media. The company’s developerWorks site allows customers to network with each other. IBM also uses the site to share information and bookmarks of interest with customers. Gartner Group’s Nikos Drakos, commenting on developerWorks, said, “If you create a place where engineers can find peer support, learning, and provide feedback to vendors, you are ultimately providing better customer care.”
More traditional social networks represent another avenue for B-to-B companies. Ernst & Young, for instance, executed a recruiting campaign on Facebook that captured the attention of The Wall Street Journal, among others. Deloitte used YouTube as a channel for recruiting with its Deloitte Film Festival, featuring employee-produced videos.
If this post weren’t already running ridiculously long, I’d talk about the use of widgets by B-to-B companies, LinkedIn networks blog network advertising potential, the list goes on. And what’s the potential for emerging channels like Twitter and FriendFeed?
With so many B-to-B companies engaged in social computing—an so many demonstrating solid business results from lead generation to bolstered reputations to strengthened customer loyalty—why do so many people continue to insist that social media has no place in the B-to-B world?
6. Weighing Legal Counsel Against Other Issues
A significant portion of my family is made up of lawyers. My brother, an uncle, several cousins all practice law of one type or another. I’ve also worked closely with corporate attorneys over the course of my career, and I can’t think of one who wasn’t a good, decent person. So I don’t view lawyers through the stereotypical filter that has produced volumes of lawyer jokes. They’re real people and most of them work hard to do a good job for their clients.
That doesn’t always mean their advice is always best. In the business world, a lawyer’s job is, in large part, the mitigation of risk. That’s why so many communicators seeking to implement social media in their organizations run into legal roadblocks. It’s not that launching a blog or participating in social networks is illegal per se, but rather that the lawyers—who are only doing their jobs—are obliged to report the potentially negative consequences that could result from such activities.
Some would have us believe that companies must—are required to—comply with every recommendation from the legal team. The fact that every corporation came into being as a legally-based form of organization does not mean that its purpose is legal in nature. As Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, a corporation is a “specific legal form of organization of persons and material resources, chartered by the state, for the purpose of conducting business.”
So a corporation is born of legal standing but its reason for existence is the conduct of business.
That’s why the general counsel reports to the CEO, not the other way around. It is the job of the CEO to weigh legal counsel against other counsel and make a decision about what is best for the business. Of course, no CEO in his right mind (and there evidently are plenty who are not) would embark on any venture that is illegal. Conversely, a CEO can decide that the benefits of an activity outweigh the risk that a law might, maybe, be violated, particularly if safeguards are put in place to minimize that risk.
Such is the case with organizational engagement in social media. There are some leaders who simply bow to the legal department and reject blogging or other online social engagement. Then there are legal teams—like the one at Dell—that wholeheartedly support company blogging, even by the top investor relations official. In between, there are organizations whose leaders make judgments based on the company’s best interests.
Michael Hyatt, president and CEO of Thomas Nelson (one of the largest trade publishers in the U.S.), is one of these. Interviewed for the new book I have co-written with John C. Havens, “Tactical Transparency.” Hyatt’s outside counsel advised against his plan to encourage employees to blog, citing several risks. Hyatt thanked them for their input and went ahead with his plan which, he says, has produced none of the risks but has returned huge dividends to the company. When asked how he could reject the lawyers’ counsel, Hyatt said:
Leadership, whatever else it takes, it takes courage. You’ve got to be willing, as a leader, to set the pace, to be the example, to model what you’re asking others to do and to be courageous in the face of people who might be fearful or are only looking at the downside. You have to focus also on what’s the upside, and with very, very modest investments, the returns are huge.
(You can listen to the entire interview here.)
History validates Hyatt’s view. The let’s-mitigate-risk approach led legal teams to advise companies against adopting fax machines and email and instant messaging for many of the same reasons they are advising against social media today. Imagine business today if CEOs had listened to their lawyers and rejected email and fax machines! Besides, the lawyers are looking only at what could happen, not necessarily what is inevitable. The development and communication of policies has been incredibly effective at keeping company representatives from stepping on legal landmines. Besides, as Lynn Tyson—Dell’s vice president of investor relations—put it:
The ability for an investor relations department to execute this and do it well quite frankly is predicated on how well they do their jobs every day. And if there’s confidence in their ability to exercise sound situational judgment over the phone or over e-mails or in one-on-one meetings with investors or group meetings with investors or drafting press releases, then there should be that same level of confidence by the company in their ability to have a dialogue over the Internet.
The same goes for an engineer, a human resources manager, or a front-line employee.
As a senior communicator in two Fortune 500 companies, I worked hand-in-hand with the companies’ general counsels. Given their druthers, these top lawyers would have preferred the company didn’t communicate at all. The absence of communication means the absence of legal risk associated with communication. But, of course, these same lawyers recognized that the non-legal risks of not communicating were far greater. That’s why we worked together: to ensure solid communication while also minimizing the potential legal consequences of a misstatement.
I even worked with one associate general counsel who was very clear in a meeting where we were each making our case to management: “My advice is just the legal perspective. There are always other considerations.”
Every now and then, though, a leader had to intervene. In my first job, as an internal communications representative at ARCO in the mid-1970s, I wrote an article based on an interview with the president of the company’s minerals division. At that time, the threat of Congressionally-mandated vertical divestiture was looming, which caused the lawyers to excise a quote in which the president insisted that, should divestiture occur, the minerals division would be able to survive as an independent company.
In a meeting, the president listened respectfully to the lawyers’ arguments. When they were finished, he asked, “But is it true?” The lawyers agreed it was true. The president turned to me and said, “So print it.”
That’s courage. The lawyers did their job and the president made a decision based on all the factors. And wouldn’t you know, none of the lawyers’ concerns ever materialized.
There’s a reason, after all, that lawyers are called “counselors.” I have no issue with lawyers invoking legal risks when advising on social media. I just have problems with leaders who fail to weigh those risks against all other factors to make a decision based on the best interests of the business.
7. Yes, Virginia, There Is An Audience
While working on a proposal for a consulting project, I’ve had an opportunity to give a lot of thought to some of the most dearly held notions of organizational communication in the era of social computing: There are no more audiences and there is no market for your message.
As with any popular belief, there are grains of truth to these, but by and large they don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Audiences have supposedly vanished because everybody now creates content. A lot of people promoting this notion point to Jay Rosen’s phrase, ”The People Formerly Known as the Audience” when making their case. However, on this blog Rosen commented:
Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.
Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business.
There are two problems with the assumption that audiences have evaporated because everybody is now engaged:
- The presumption that all audiences are passive
- The disconnect between the way communicators use the word and how others define it
The powerful force of passive media has made it easy for audiences to evolve quickly into something else, into groups that share and collaborate. But some people don’t want to make that transition and some audiences never evolve beyond audiences. Like so many things, it’s not an either-or proposition.
The myth of the passive audience
The image that propels the belief that audiences have vanished is one of masses of passive recipients of content. The truth is, there is no such thing. Even as Jay Rosen notes that we won’t storm the theater stage to demand our own production, neither do we sit silently. The enthusiasm of our applause determines the number of curtain calls, for example. Certain types of audiences have even more impact. Try telling a European soccer (er...football) audience that they’re passive. The quality of a Grateful Dead concert was directly proportional to the give-and-take with the audience.
Newspaper and magazines send letters to the editor. People offended or upset by advertising write letters to the offending company. I could go on, but you get the idea. Not everybody in pre-social media audiences engaged in these ways, but neither does everybody today. The percentage of people creating new content is low; the percentage of people either passively consuming content is high, as is the percentage of people who are not consuming social media at all. Look at the technographic statistics compiled by Forrester Research: 48% of the global online population are spectators. Wouldn’t that be synonymous with “people currently known as the audience”?
The communicator’s definition
Whether or not you agree with the idea that audiences still exist is moot, however, when you consider that the argument is a semantic one. “Audience” is just a term to define the target. In the proposal I’m writing, the client’s goal is to get high school and college-aged individuals engaged with its altruistic, non-profit goals. We can talk all we want about the sanctity of the individual, but my proposal still has to reach a target population, a demographic (or technographic) group, a collection of people who share common characteristics. If the proposal is accepted, then I have to show that the new media approaches I have recommended succeeded in producing that heightened level of awareness and engagement. Yes, the effort must engage individuals. But I have to approach those individuals through channels that are most likely to reach them. And let’s face it, even old-style advertising blasted over television ultimately had to translate into one person plunking down cold cash for one bottle of shampoo.
Understanding social media means recognizing the dynamics that can propel willing members of an audience into group mode, where they become more actively engaged and can have far greater impact. But we do still hear radio commercials while driving (nobody has figured out a way to let us fast-forward through those yet), see billboards, view product placements in movies and video games, and view display ads while flipping through paper magazines. If there were no market for messages, 10 million people would not have viewed Dove’s “Evolution” video. Clearly, there was a market for that message.
Look no further than the poster child for business engagement in social media for an example of integration of old and new media. Dell learned the hard way that some members of an audience can become a dynamic group, leading Dell to dive into social media. But they still send me direct mail, advertise in magazines, and produce television commercials. They recognize the rise of the individual while at the same time acknowledging that there are audiences to whom a message can be delivered.
Bottom line: Target audiences continue to be a critical dimension of communication. But we must understand that individual members of those audiences can form into groups in a heartbeat. That’s what social media has changed. But any communicator who starts planning without identifying the audience is headed down a road to failure.
8. Sites Of The Month
Two services that let you paste content into a form and get some interesting feedback:
Press Release Grader
Paste a press release into this form and you’ll get graded on a variety of factors, including the release’s readability (including the grade level a reader must have achieved in order to understand the release), the use of gobbledygook words, the use of hyperlinks for search-engine optimization, contact information, “about” sections, end-of-release markers, and more. The results also produce a word cloud to show you the words used most frequently in the release. I recommend using the free service before issuing a release.
http://www.pressreleasegrader.com
Sentiment Analyser
One of the great challenges of public relations is determining whether the coverage you’re getting—in the mainstream press, the blogosphere, or anywhere else—is positive or negative. The only way to be sure is through content analysis, which requires you to read each item. That hasn’t changed, but there are tools that can give you a head start, like the Sentiment Analyser. Paste the item into the analyzer and find out what’s positive, what’s negative, and whether the document is predominently one or the other.
http://netreputation.co.uk/sentiment/
9. HC+T Update
- I’ve just wrapped up proofreading the galleys for the new book I co-authored with John C. Havens. “Tactical Transparency” will be available from Jossey-Bass (a Wiley imprint) in early November.
- John and I are presenting a session addressing social media and organizational transparency at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas on August 15.
- I’m thrilled to be working with Chris Heuer, founder of The Social Media Club, on a social media plan for Blood Centers of the Pacific to try to encourage young people to make blood donations.
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