Sunday, May 18, 2008
HC+T Update: May 2008
HC+T Update: December 2007
1) I’m On The Road With A Two-Day Social Media Workshop
2) Communicators, Prepare: 3D Communications Is Coming
3) One Message Does Not Fit All
4) Britannica Initiative Gets A Boost From TechCrunch
5) Overcoming Key Resistance To Adopting Social Media
6) Blogging Is So Not Dead
7) Survey Says A-Listers Have No Influence. Doesn’t Reach Count?
8) Sites Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information
Wow...it’s mid-May and I realize I haven’t produced an issue of HC+T Update since December! We’ve got a lot of catching up to do…
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. I’m On The Road With A Two-Day Social Media Workshop
I’m beginning a six-city tour with my two-day workshop, “Integrating Social Media and Corporate Communication.” Sponsored by Ragan Communications, the workshop goes well beyond the typical Social Media 101 sessions currently cluttering the landscape, delving into ways to apply the various tools to communication strategies. Heres’ the rundown, minus the San Francisco workshop that runs tomorrow and Tuesday, May 19 and 20:
- Minneapolis: June 5-6
- New York: June 19-20
- Chicago: Julyu 14-15
- Toronto: July 24-25
- Washington, D.C.: August 4-5
You can read more and register at the Ragan website.
2. Communicators, Prepare: 3D Communications Is Coming
In Chicago a week or so ago I got together with a friend; we both live in the Bay Area, but it’s one of those quirks of travel that we could only get together when we were in another city at the same time). Gabe is working for a company that is developing a new virtual world. The company hasn’t announced the nature of its venture and I’m under what Scott Monty calls a “frieNDA,” so I can’t go into any details. But imagine using Second Life-like technology to build a replica of a city as it existed during, say, colonial American times, the reign of Elizabeth I, or ancient Rome. Some people could open shops in these cities, others could take up residence. Then, teachers could bring classes to the city to help them experience what life was like in pre-eruption Pompeii or imperial China.
It’s certainly a long distance traveled from early 3D experiments like VRML.
The uses to which virtual worlds are being put is impressive. The initial push to market products in Second Life were mostly ill-fated, but forward-thinking organizations have realized that there are other, better ways to tap into virtual worlds for business purposes. Some organizations, like Gabe’s, are thinking about commercial uses while other companies see the value of transfering some real-world activities to virtual worlds.
All this is happening relatively quietly, without the hoopla of those early marketing experiments. They’re based on the notion that virtual worlds are really nothing more than three-dimensional social networks. Think about it: If Facebook were 3D, you wouldn’t form groups on pages, but let everyone know that the group will be meeting at Pavilion B on Island X on Thursday at 2 p.m. And rather than post messages to forums and walls, people would engage in virtual face-to-face conversations.
So it’s no surprise to see Forrester Research proclaiming that virtual worlds will dominate the Web within the next five to seven years. That, at least, is the projection Erica Driver makes in the Forrester white paper, ”Web3D: The Next Major Internet Wave (24 pages, $279):”
Web3D will deliver an interactive, immersive experience much richer than the static, text-oriented or even interactive graphical interfaces of today’s Web. In the new rold of work that Web3d will enable, people will be represented visually by avatars that can move in space, communicate with others, and interact with objects and information—making the digital world seem more like the real world. Yet Web3D won’t leave the old world behind; it will integrate with the Web technologies we use today as well as existing and not yet invented business applications. Workers will use Web3D to teach and learn, innovate collaboratively, communicate and network, interact with and present information, and manage real-world systems.
Driver and her team of co-authors are not alone; several business publications—BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, and others—have also foretold the inevitable integration of virtual worlds into the online experience. The Forrester report, though, offers plenty of evidence to back up the prediction. Driving the march toward the 3D experience, according to the report, are…
- A focus on innovation.
- The trend toward workers employing tools that work, whether they’re offered by the company or not. “A confluence of forces—including ubiquitous broadband, a growing technology-native workforce, wide availability of cheap or even free Social Computing tools, and increased mobility—drives this trend.”
- The evolving nature of the workforce.
- Activity among investors, vendors, and early adopters, with some $1.5 billion invested in virtual world companies between Q3 2006 and Q4 2007. Since then, hundreds of millions have been invested in startups and companies that support virtual worlds.
Much has to happen between now and the Web3D world Forrester and others envision. The standards need to evolve that will let you move your avatar from one 3D world to another—from Second Life, for example, to a private, secure company environment and then from there to a historical city before winding up in a shopping mall. The ability to create objects and other content must be easier than it is today. But these are initiatives that are underway. The only question really is which developer will create the standards that gain widespread adoption.
Ultimately, though, the engagement that a 3D web will produce is the next logical step beyond the social networks that are set to become an integral part of the web thanks to initiatives like data portability and Google’s recently announced Friend Connect. Rather than simply interact with someone’s profile on a site, you’ll be able to interact with that individual directly; you’ll see other people visiting the site the same time you’re there, and interaction will be more natural and intuitive.
The Forrester report outlines the business potential for a 3D web:
- Training and education will be more effective.
- Business process rehearsal will be cheaper and more realistic. The report points to BP, which is already experimenting with virtual worlds and sees the value of “practicing the management of events that can’t easily be practiced in real life...from practicing hands-on personal skills in standalone learning environments to group interactive teaming skills in unstructured scenarios.”
- Meetings in virtual workspaces.
- Virtual conferences and trade shows.
- Face-to-face customer service and support.
- The use of digital 3D models, not unlike Boeing’s use of a 3D virtual environment in the design and manufacturing of its new 787 Dreamliner.
- A replacement for PowerPoint, as 3D tours do a better job of grabbing attention.
Driver’s report isn’t all optimistic. She and her team present a detailed timeline, identifying the “gating factors,” the issues that must be overcome in order to arrive at a fully integrated 3D environment. They identify the technology advances that are required (such as a next-generation browser, which Forrester has dubbed an “engager” because it’s not passive like a web browser). They even explore alternative scenarios should certain milestones not be met.
Under any scenario, though, the 3D online experience is coming. Its inevitability is the reason I encourage people to try out Second Life now: Learn the ins and outs of 3D social networks while most people aren’t watching. It’s far better to have developed your 3D chops now than to wait until it has become the de facto nature of the Web and everybody can see you make your organization make its newbie mistakes.
Communicators shouldn’t sit on the sidelines and wait for the fulfillment of the prediction, either. As Driver notes in the report, Web3D will lead to new ways to representat and communicate of information. “In Web3D, people will create avatars and build objects and worlds that inform, persuade, explain, and represent important concepts in highly visual and interactive ways.” You can chuckle and chortle all you like at the idea that the company’s media center might someday exist in a highly stylized 3D room in a virtual environment. But trust me: If you’re not ready to create that virtual media center when the time comes, your company will find someone who can.
3. One Message Does Not Fit All
On episode 335 of The Hobson and Holtz Report, Eric Schwartzman shared bits of an interview he conducted with Maureen Kasper, senior director of communication at Cisco Systems. In the interview, Maureen addressed an issue that I’ll be talking about during my session tomorrow at the New Communications Forum: the blurring of the line between internal and external communications.
We did create content that was different—here’s the external face to something and here’s the internal face to something. I don’t think you can do that any more. It’s the same. It’s better communication. You’re not worrying about, “Am I thinking externally or am I thinking internally?” What you’re thinking about is, “What’s our message?”
Maureen noted that Cisco employees once criticized the company when they perceived they were getting the same spin on messages as external audiences. Now, she says, it’s a strength. “It goes back to transparency. What you say externally has to be the same as what you say internally, and vice-versa. If not, you’ll get found out very quickly.”
I agree—and I disagree. The core message absolutely must be consistent. The days are long gone (not that this was prudent or ethical behavior when those days still existed) when you could deliver one message to employees and another to, say, investment analysts:
Employees: We’re merging with Acme in order to absorb a major competitor and bolster our earnings.
Analysts: We’re merging with Acme because of the natural synergies between the two organizations and because we’ll be able to better serve the marketplace working together.
However, I don’t agree with the notion that you can craft a single communication for each audience. Whether or not you share your external communications with employees, they’ll see it—or, at least, have access to it. The message to analysts ends in analyst reports which find their way into investment blogs, the media message is published on news sites and from there into the blogosphere.
But employees still need the internal spin, and I’m using that word in the constructive sense. In a merger, analysts care about the impact on value and share price. Employees may also care about that—particularly if they own stock—but they have more immediate concerns that aren’t on the minds of other publics (including local communities, NGOs, activist groups, the government, and so on). They want to know about the security of their jobs, the status of existing projects, where they’ll wind up in the revamped structure of the new company and whether their benefits will change.
Spinning stories (in the good way) to accommodate the unique interests of each constituency is at the heart of effective communication. It’s why we research the audiences before we craft the communications.
By the way, I’m absolutely certain they do this at Cisco Systems and that Maureen didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Her remarks just led me to want to articulate this point of view, which also argues for the continued need for some traditional communication. A single blog post from the CEO about the merger just won’t get the right information into the right hands. Targeted communication can start targeted conversations among publics with different interests.
4. Britannica Initiative Gets A Boost From TechCrunch
What a weekend I had in late April.
It started quietly enough. I’ve been working with my client, Encyclopaedia Britannica, to prepare for the hard launch of its WebShare program, set for next Monday with the distribution of the official press release (to be accompanied, of course, by a social media version).
Tom Panelas, the director of Corporate Communications at Britannica, brought me in to help promote WebShare, which has two distinct purposes:
- Give free Britannica accounts to bloggers and other web publishers so they can use the site in their research, cite Britannica articles and provide selective access to Britannica through links in their posts to Britannica articles and widgets.
- Provide readers of these articles with access to Britannica articles without needing an account at all.
The program includes a variety of elements that strengthen the venerable encyclopedia’s first significant foray into the social media space. In addition to the linking program, there’s a blog, a Twitter account (to include a link of the day), widgets and “topic clusters,” collections of links to Britannica articles that relate to a current news story. For example, we put together a list of links that would be useful to anybody covering the Delta-Northwest airline merger the day that story broke.
Leading up to the launch, we’ve been quietly alerting people to the availability of the WebShare website and giving out some free accounts. Anybody visiting the site could register for a free account, as well. The primary targets of our outreach effort (Neville Hobson is helping me out with this) have been (and will continue to be) education-focused bloggers, library bloggers, and journalists. Many who live and work in these disciplines are restricted, right or wrong, from citing Wikipedia articles in their work, which led us to believe they would constitute a very interested group.
Some popular bloggers were also on my list, and on Friday evening, I went ahead and sent off a note to the first of these to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch. Mike reported on WebShare almost immediately, including some criticisms, and attracting over 100 comments (as of this writing). But positive or negative, Mike’s post opened the floodgates. Stories suddenly appeared in Mashable, C|Net, and some other top-flight blogs, as well as blogs written by librarians we had not yet contacted and scads of others. So far, 156 posts have been written about WebShare that link to the site; Technorati has assigned the site an authority of 80 and a rank of 110,846. Not bad for a site that had no links to it at all on Friday afternoon.
I’ve been archiving significant articles addressing the program on del.icio.us.
Tom and the folks at Britannica were prepared. They have received well over 1,000 registrations so far, and have been handling them all quickly. It’s a manual process, since each registration needs to be approved. We also put in work upfront to identify the inevitable criticisms Britannica would face:
- Britannica, with its 56,000 articles, can’t compete with Wikipedia, with over 100 million.
- Britannica’s business model is obsolete. The company must ultimately move to a wiki-based, open-source model.
- Despite the entry into social media, Britannica is still a one-way resource, not engaged in the conversation.
- WebShare is really just about getting lots of link love to boost Britannica’s visibility on Google.
The folks at Britannica are ready for these, and will be using the blog on the WebShare site to address these issues. The company’s president, Jorge Cauz, will be doing interviews with some bloggers, as well. It’s also nice that some comments—and some posts—take issue with these arguments and applaud Britannica’s efforts. (I was delighted to see my friend Brian Solis lauding the program, even though he had no idea I was working on it). And Tom has been jumping in as well, participating in some of the comment threads. (Tom, I’m sure, is exercising some restraint to avoid correcting people who are just wrong, like the one blogger who said that the company uses the old spelling of encyclopaedia in order to “sound more authoritative.” In fact, that’s been the spelling of the company’s name since it was founded in 1768.)
Meanwhile, I’ve spent much of my weekend identifying new posts and making recommendations about which ones should be addressed by a comment and which by a follow-up post on the Britannica site. A few follow-up posts will appear over the next few days.
A couple of key observations come out of the weekend experience:
- The A-listers count. Regardless of how much people say they trust friends, family members, and participants in their networks, people like Mike Arrington can still create a huge amount of awareness and generate a lot of buzz.
- It makes sense for companies to start small with initiatives in mind, but it pays to get the first bits right before moving on to others.
- If you’re going to do social media, do it. Rather than simply roll out the linking program, Britannica was very agreeable to adding dimensions of participation to the mix, including the blog and the Twitter account. This provides a platform for listening to feedback and participating in a conversation about the initiative, and maybe even tweaking it where it makes sense.
5. Overcoming Key Resistance To Adopting Social Media
I’ve talked before about the reasons companies resist social media. The Arthur W. Page Society and the Corporate Executive Board are out with a study that puts some numbers behind the top reasons for organizational resistance. The study, which targeted more than 30 chief communications officers who are corporate members of the Page Society, revealed nothing surprising, but still, it’s easier to offer counter-arguments when you know what’s holding companies back.
Resistance from the legal department
Lawyers take too much heat for opposing social media. Their job is to be cautious, to advise their employers/clients against things that pose legal risks. The fault rests with leaders who blindly follow legal advice rather than balancing it against other factors. When faced with lawyers who want to put the brakes on new media, offer the following points:
- Lawyers have okayed blogs of all stripes at 58 of the Fortune 500.
- Sun Microsystems’ general counsel is blogging.
- Few of the legal concerns have materialized among companies with blogs.
- The value of engagement in social media, applied intelligently, will easily outweigh the risks (see next item).
Lack of ROI
There have been a lot of developments in the ability to assess the return on investment for engagement with social media. See Kami Huyse’s example of ROI from a social media effort on behalf of her client, Sea World. PR measurement guru Katie Delahaye Paine also addresses measurement of social media quite nicely in her new book, “Measuring Public Relationships.”
In any case, the days of shrugging off social media because there’s no ROI are over. We need to educate the decision-makers about the kinds of ROI being attained by others and how it can be measured for our organizations.
Too labor-intensive
I remember speaking to the CEO of a Dutch company who said his board was concerned about the amount of time spent blogging. He answered that he wasn’t spending any more time communicating than he was before. However, some of the total time allocated to communicating had shifted to his blog because the blog was a more effective tool, in many circumstances, than phone calls, speeches at industry association meetings, and newspaper interviews. He hadn’t given up on those (and other) older forms of communication, but adding blogs to the mix allowed him to use the most appropriate tool for the job.
On the other hand, some social media will require additional labor. Southwest Airlines had to hire additional staff to monitor and approve comments left to its blog. It wasn’t something Southwest hesitated to do, though, given that they had already concluded that the ROI from the blog would far outweigh the cost of managing it (see previous item). If the company takes a strategic approach to its social media activities, the ROI will already be understood (a far better approach than saying, “Hey, we gotta have a blog!").
It’s also easy to start small in order to get comfortable with social media before diving in. I advised one colleague that his company could start with a blog focused on recruiting (a key issue for his company) rather than a Southwest-like blog or a CEO blog. The audience is more limited and the discussion more focused. When the value of that blog proves itself, additional online social activities simply become the next step.
Lack of expertise
This is actually a valid concern, but shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. The solution is to get some expertise.
There are several ways to do this: Hire someone, start small (see previous item) in order to develop the expertise, find someone in your organization who is already engaged and take advantage of their experience or contract with any of the agencies or individuals out there who can help provide you with the expertise you need.
Challenges, not obstacles
I always rolled my eyes at the corporate-speak that positioned problems as “opportunities.” But we who advocate our companies’ involvement in social media should see the resistance as challenges to overcome rather than roadblocks that send us packing. That’s what Northwest Mutual Life Insurance did, according to the Forrester case study. The conservative, 150-year-old financial services company identified the areas of resistence, then found the means to overcome them, ultimately launching an internal blogging initiative. Applying the principles of sound business management to a company’s entry into the social media space doesn’t have to be an oxymoronic concept.
6. Blogging Is So Not Dead
I can’t open my feed reader these days without at least one article proclaiming the long, slow death of blogging. Bloggers, we are told, are switching to other channels, notably the more conversational microblogging characterized by Twitter. Bloggers are getting burned out trying to keep up with regular posts, no less an authority than The New York Times tells us. Some point to the numbers: The adoption rate has been plateauing, statistical evidence that the end is near.
It’s time for a reality check.
New blogs continue to appear
A few posts ago, I referenced Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption curve, which applies to blogs as much as anything else. When blogs first hit the scene—particularly the free, hosted ones, like Blogger.com and WordPress.com—the innovators couldn’t wait to get their hands one one...or more than one. I happily count myself in this group. Many of us didn’t know what we wanted to do with a blog. We just had to have one. We’d figure out the content bit later. In fact, my first blog died a quick and fairly painless death because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.
I was more comfortable as an early adopter. For years, I had been writing a monthly email newsletter. During the course of the month, I would write articles. At the end of the month, I would collect them, format them, and send them to my distribution list (entirely opt-in, of course). After noodling around with my first blog for a while, it struck me: I can publish my articles as soon as they’re done. “a shel of my former self” was born. I was part of the group of early adopters who simply figured out what to do with blogs early on.
Once the innovators and early adopters had started their blogs, the growth curve began to flatten. Today, people who start blogs, for the most part, aren’t doing so just to have one. They have something specific in mind for which a blog is an appropriate vehicle. These are the early majority, and their more practical approach to blogging is the reason the blogosphere doubles in size about once a year instead of every 55 days or so, as it did during the innovator/early adopter phase. That kind of growth will continue as the late adopters and maybe even some laggards start blogging.
Business is just catching on
We tend to talk a lot about businesses that have blogs, mostly because they are exceptions, not the rule. Those of us in the consulting world hear “my leadership is afraid of it” far more often than “my management can’t wait to start one.” But as companies learn that blogs are effective tools for engaging customers and other publics, and for addressing issues, they will continue to adopt them. Only 57 of the Fortune 500 have blogs today, according to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, but I have no doubt that number will grow over the next months and even years.
Twitter won’t replace blogs
While some of the content that populates blogs can naturally be moved to Twitter (and Jaiku and Pownce and Seesmic and Utterz), some content cries out for more than 140 characters. This post, for instance, would make a terrible tweet. Note, however, how many Twitters direct their followers to blog their posts by sending tweets containing links. Twitter is the best thing that ever happened to TinyURL.
Twitter is also more conducive to dynamic conversation. Blogs are not; the nexus of control in blogging rests with the blogger. I post; you comment on what I posted.
Who notices you on Twitter is limited to those who choose to follow you and those who find you because you’re the second half of a conversation taking place with someone they already follow. When was the last time you saw somebody point to a tweet and say, “I read this great tweet today?”
And the kinds of issues that drive businesses to embrace blogging cannot be addressed with Twitter. Explaining policies, addressing crises, exploring issues—these are not natural themes for tweets. Has anybody heard of Twitter outreach (or, more crudely, pitching Twitterers)? Didn’t think so.
Let’s face it: Jonathan Schwartz, Bob Lutz, and the TSA could not accomplish with a Seesmic account what they do with their blogs.
People still read blogs
A study by PR agency Brodeur & Partners reveals that mainstream journalists are heavily influenced by blogs. How crazy would it be for companies to abandon blogs when not only can they build communities of customers but shape the kind of coverage they get in the still-important press?
The action is everywhere
A bazillion years ago—2003 or so—social media meant blogging. Since then, there has been an explosion of social media, from Digg and YouTube to Facebook and Second Life. You can slide them and dice them, label them and categorize these many tools however you want, but like anything else, people will use them mostly because they satisfy a particular need. Twitter doesn’t satisfy the desire to create videos any more than YouTube satisfies the desire to have burst-like conversations with lots of people. We use tools based on their strengths, and each of the entries in the social media space offers its own strengths and weaknesses, possibilities and limitations.
While we are seeing a reduction in short, pithy blog posts because Twitter makes it easier and provides more immediate gratification, blogs will continue to be an important tool, used based on their strengths. Understanding the strengths, weaknesses, potential and limitations of each tool is what it means to be strategic in our approach to communication. And while I’m a happy Twitterer and a proud early adopter, I’ll continue to counsel my clients to use the right tool to achieve their objectives. That includes blogs, which aren’t going anywhere.
7. Survey Says A-Listers Have No Influence. Doesn’t Reach Count?
There’s a fair amount of buzz over a study issued recently from the Canadian research firm Pollara that supports the notion that influential bloggers aren’t really so influential. Eighty percent of the 1,100 adults polled in December reported that they would be more inclined to make a purchase recommended by friends and family compared to only 23% who would consider recommendations from “well-known bloggers.”
Why this comes as a surprise to anybody escapes me. I would have bet real money on this. After all, would you buy a particular new car based on what a well-known auto critic wrote in a daily newspaper or what Uncle Marvin told you after he’d been driving one for six months?
The study reinforces Duncan Watts’ assertions in a recent FastCompany article. Steve Rubel points out that it also supports the findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer, in which most people put their trust in “a person like me” while only 14% trust boggers. Edelman’s results also mirror those from Ketchum’s Media, Myths & Realities study.
What’s more surprising to me is the conclusions people are drawing from the study. Rubel, for instance, suggests that outreach efforts that focus on reach miss the big picture. “Trust is by far a more important metric.”
Really? Whatever happened to the importance of building awareness? While the influential bloggers—the so-called “A-listers”—may not have influence, they do have eyeballs. They are A-listers, after all, because people read them. I may have greater trust in my friend in the next cube, but where did he hear about it? And if he heard about it from a trusted friend or family member, they read about it from a source that gets broad distrtibution. The information has to start somewhere.
My goal in reaching out to widely-read bloggers is not to trick them into using their influence to get other people to buy the product. It is, rather, to create awareness and get people talking. Once it trickles down to Uncle Marvin, that’s when the trust factor kicks in. Or are we supposed to just wait for Uncle Marvin to discover the product while poking around in Best Buy?
Has the application of PR in the social media space led us to forget the objectives we’re trying to achieve in the first place? Is it always influence? Or is is sometimes just getting the message out? If a sympathetic blogger agrees with the message and chooses to help distribute it, that’s great. Should I no longer take that approach because a poll states the obvious, that friends and family have a greater impact on a purchase decision? Nonsense.
Rubel notes that Louis Gray found that top bloggers extend their reach among people who subscribe to their feeds (beyond those who just read their blogs), but he opines, “Who cares?”
I do, Steve, and any good communicator should. Reach increases awareness, driving more people to take a look and, if they like what they see, make the recommendation to friends and family. That’s why so many tech companies try to get their products into the hands of The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and The New York Times’ David Pogue. Same idea: I may not buy a product based on their recommendation, but their reach and influence will lead me to see what my friends and family—and the bloggers I do trust have to say about it.
In her outstanding book, “Measuring Public Relationships,” Katie Paine repeatedly points to awareness as a key measure of the effectiveness of a public relations effort. “If your objective is exposure and communication of key messages, measuring media content is by far the cheapest, easiest, and fastest form of measurement,” Katie notes in one chapter.
Why does outreach have to be either/or? There is a strong case for targeting B-list and C-list bloggers. Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington get hundreds, maybe thousands, of pitches every day, good ones and bad ones. The odds of yours finding its way into their blogs isn’t great. B- and C-list bloggers, on the other hand, are a bit more hungry for good, relevant content in which their audiences will be interested. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, assuming your information is genuinely relevant and would be of real interest to Scoble or Arrington.
There are a number of dimensions to outreach, a lot of nuances, many shades of grey. Does the Pollara study mean there’s no value in reaching out to bloggers with high levels of readership along with smaller groups where there are higher levels of trust? Nope. Those blogs with high levels of readership are one way to kick-start the conversation among the groups of trusted individuals in the first place.
8. Sites of the Month
Tweetscan
Enter a search term and find all the Twitter “tweets” that contain the term. Comcast and Southwest Airlines are among the company using Tweetscan to find references to their organizations, then responding with offers to help resolve problems.
Sentiment Analyzer
Enter the text of an article and watch the Sentiment Analyzer parse the document and then let you know whether it was mostly positive or negative, highlighting the elements that fall into each category. Notes David Phillips, “This kind of development is useful for analysing sentiment of news articles, blogs and other content, which is its primary purpose but it also has applications in evaluating style and and bias all of which are very useful to the PR industry, regulators and watchers of political sentinemt on and off line.”
http://netreputation.co.uk/sentiment/
9. HC+T update
- I’m presenting a session at the IABC International Conference on communication via social networks. It’s part of the All-Star Track on the last day of the conference.
- I have been co-hosting a live Net-based call-in show leading up to the IABC International Conference. John C. Havens (who is also the co-author of my new book) and I are interviewing speakers and others involved with the conference every Wednedsay at noon Eastern. Listeners can call in or listen later on the site or by subscribing to the podcast. The show is on BlogTalk Radio at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/iabc.
- Speaking of my new book, it’s due out in October from Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, as part of the IABC series of books. “Tactical Transparency” is about the use of communication tools and channels to promote a culture of transparency in your organization.
- I was delighted to get coverage on page 2 of the May 12 issue of PRWeek for the work I’ve been doing with Encyclopaedia Britannica.
10. Boilerplate and subscription information
You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.
Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!
HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.
Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.
(C) 2008, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.