Tuesday, October 17, 2006
HC+T Update: October 2006
HC+T Update: October 2006
HC+T Update
October 2006
- A Review of Edelman’s Latest Social Media Blunder
- Apple’s Anonymous Employees
- A Blow to “Edge” Content
- Content, Technology, and Podcasts
- Intel Blogs to the IT Community
- Five Stops Left on the “Wired World” Tour
- The Need for Speed in Clearing Blog Comments
- Bars are Dead
- Caribou Coffee Capitalizes on Coupons
- Site of the month
- HC+T update
- Boilerplate and subscription information
Sorry about September! Work was just overwhelming and I simply ran out of time to get an issue of HC+T Update out the door. But I’m back and I’ll do my best not to miss another issue.
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.
1. A Review of Edelman’s Latest Social Media Blunder
The first inkling I had that Edelman PR had stumbled again in its social media efforts on behalf of client WalMart came early when an email containing a copy of the MediaPost story that outlined the situation. In short order, several other colleagues emailed me the story, which I subsequently reported in an installment of my podcast, “For Immediate Release” (http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz) . After that, the blogosphere erputed. A Technorati search on some key words relating to the story reveals about 260 posts on the topic.
The one source we didn’t hear from—at least, not until several days had gone by—was Edelman.
In case you missed the story, a blog ostensibly authored by a couple traveling across America in their RV and spending nights parked in WalMart parking lots turned out to be a fake blog, the brainchild of WalMart’s PR counselors at Edelman. While fake blogs (and other fake social media) are nothing new, it’s dismaying to see it emerge from Edelman, which has some of the smarter new-media people on its staff (Phil Gomes, Michael Wiley, Steve Rubel and more), and which touts itself as the PR firm that truly gets social media. This is the third time (as Todd Defren noted in his post) that Edelman has botched the whole social media thing on WalMart’s behalf.
Those smart PR folks working for Edelman are among the members of the PR community who advocate participation in the conversation. Some of them have been brutal when, to their way of thinking, somebody else fails to understand what it means to be engage in the conversation. So where is Edelman in this particular conversation? Missing in action. As dismaying as this latest misstep is, it’s even more dismaying to see Edelman’s high-powered social media experts failing to walk the talk. Nothing from Richard in his vaunted 6 a.m. blog. Nothing from Steve, who blogs at the pinnacle of PR’s A-list. Nothing from anybody (based on a Technorati search and a survey of the Edelman blogs).
Then, after days of criticism, Richard Edelman posted a very brief item to his blog, as did Steve Rubel. To his great credit, Edelman apologized, acknowledged that the tactic was wrong, and indicated the company is going through an education process. He replied to comments posted to his item, and has even posted a comment among those left to my original post on my blog.
Edelman has also noted that the company refrained from comment until all the facts were in; Steve Rubel made the same point.
Comments posted to both Rubel’s and Edelman’s blogs have run the gamut from praise for admitting the mistake to questions about what took so long to outright dismissal and an assumption that the same behavior is bound to repeat itself. An optimist, I’m willing to give Edelman the benefit of the doubt and assume that, after three conecutive social media blunders on the WalMart account, they’ll undergo some serious introspection and establish some processes and guidelines. I think it takes guts to admit you’ve made a mistake and even more to apologize. A lot of CEOs would never take that step no matter how egregious their acts.
The problem I still have is with how long it took to begin participating in the conversation. I sympathize with Edelman’s desire to get all the facts, but this was a genuine, bona fide, reputation-damaging crisis. As the title of Gerald Baron’s excellent crisis communication book informs us, “Now is Too Late.” Nobody should know this better, as it relates to social media, than a PR agency that promotes and implements social media solutions (not to mention provides crisis communication counsel). It should have taken hours, not days, to ascertain the facts in order to address the crisis quickly. I would hope fast response is another issue Edelman is addressing with his employees. Even “We’re listening and looking into this and will let you know what’s going on once we have the facts” would have been better than the deafening silence.
At the same time, of course, I do understand that the cobbler’s children have no shoes.
Another curiosity arises from Edelman’s admission —- he calls the blog “the cross-country tour that Edelman designed for Working Families for WalMart.” This seems to contradict assertions made in the final post that appears on the blog itself, which insists that the tour was the blogger’s idea: “I called my brother, who works at Edelman and whose clients include Working Families for Wal-Mart, in order to find out if we’d be allowed to talk to people and take pictures in Wal-Mart parking lots. As a freelance writer, I’ve learned over the years that it’s always better to ask about stuff like that in advance. They didn’t just give us permission. They said they would even sponsor the trip!”
Go read the post for yourself to see how it squares with the admission that the tour was designed by Edelman. From what we’ve learned based on Edelman’s and Rubel’s posts, this could be true, semi-true, or completely untrue. We just don’t know.
So props to Richard Edelman for the admisison and the mea culpa. Best of luck to his company in making sure they get it right in the future. And sincere hopes that more answers to the many lingering questions get answered now that the company and its representatives have started engaging in the conversation.
2. Apple’s Anonymous Employees
An employee of Apple Computers has taken “Naked Conversations” author Shel Israel up on his offer to join a conversation about Apple’s customer service. The employee, however, has opted to do so anonymously.
The conversation began after Shel (my friend and namesake) posted an item to the Naked Conversations blog about the diminishing likelihood that he’ll buy a Mac. His decision was prompted partly by Lenovo’s response to a customer service issue. Shel wrote:
“I want to do business with companies who will be there for me when their products let me down. I just got a case of someone I trust getting helped by Lenovo and screwed by Apple. That’s all I need to know to decide. BTW, anyone from Apple Computer wishing to join this conversation is free to do so.”
The response was an engaging and smart one:
“I think the broader issue is how we evolve large company support organisations where typically the relationship is managed by a junior member of staff and arbitrated by fixed processes? How do we build two-way conversations and trusted relationships? The organisation that cracks this first will have innovation far more valuable than any product based innovation!”
The author, though, called himself “masked,” which is also his blogging moniker —- he authors ”The Masked Blogger“ (which is also where he responded in more detail to Shel’s post). Shel replied by asking why he should trust a company whose employees have to mask their identities, to which masked said he, too, was uncomfortable with anonmity:
“Here’s the dilemma: don’t participate in the conversation, participate transparently with a fear that the income to support my family could be at risk, orparticipate with anonymity.
“Is the bigger question, as you point out, why don’t some employers trust their staff to join and add value to the conversation?
“My thoughts have been to ‘extend the membrane’ from the inside with the hope of demonstrating value and effecting a change in approach.
“Am I misguided on this ... is transparency and authenticity a prerequisite?
“I sense I’m not alone with this dilemma. I will post further on this issue as I think it is important to many of us. What is do you think? I’d be very interested if this issue resonates with any of your constituency.”
Credit to mask for his (or her) willingness to participate. And I certainly understand and support the rationale for remaining anonymous. However, you have to wonder how much influence mask can take back to the organization based on the conversation if Apple doesn’t support employees engaging with customers. Microsoft, Sun, and other companies do, and their images are being rehabilitated, wile Apple’s is sinking.
And mask is also right in his assumption that employees at many other companies that have not figured out (or don’t care) that business has evolved into partnerships with customers and that the marketplace is, as the Cluetrain Manifesto authors observed, a conversation.
3. A Blow to “Edge” Content
Long before there was Edgio, del.icio.us, or Technorati Kitchen, Google recognized the notion of content on the edge and the power of a website to aggregate content that already exists in other places.
Edgeio clarified the concept with its use of blog tags for classified ads. Rather than a seller listing an ad on a site like Craig’s List or eBay, he would simply run the item on his own blog and tag it in such a way that Edgeio could find it. Edgeio would list all the classifieds it had found, sucking those items in from the sites where they resided.
Google News has been doing roughly the same thing for years. The principle is the same: If news content resides on news sites, it should be a simple matter to aggregate that content and make it available in aggregate based on the interests of the reader.
On September 18, a Belgian court dealt a blow to Google News and perhaps to anybody thinking of aggregating content without explicit permission. The court was responding to a complaing filed by Copiepresse, which handles copyright issues for the German and Belgian-French press. The court ordered Google to stop reproducing articles from those publications in its Belgian sites.
Failure to coply will cost Google US $1.3 million per day.
News.com quoted Copiepresse General Secretary Margaret Boribon: “We are asking for Google to pay and seek our authorization to use our content…Google sells advertising and makes money on our content.”
Google does, indeed, make money with advertising on Google News, but seeing a full story requires readers to click through to the newspaper’s site. As you can see from the image below—of a Google News search on Copiepresse—only the first few words of the story appear, followed by the link to the media outlet’s site.
So Google is driving traffic to these newspapers, traffic from readers who would likely never find those newspapers to begin with. As my mother would put it, Copiepresse is cutting off its nose to spite its face.
But worse, many organizations thinking about how to offer services that leverage edge content may now think twice. That’s a shame.
4. Content, Technology, and Podcasts
I have been hearing and reading a lot of communicators lately proclaiming that, in podcasting, content is king. While I agree wholeheartedly, I’d like to respectfully disagree.
If that sounds like an incongruous statement, indeed, it is. So let me explain the incongruity.
Content is king. Nobody is going to listen to a podcast with content that sucks. To put a finer point on it, nobody will listen to a podcast with content that doesn’t appeal to them. So solid content rocks.
The problem is that lousy implementation of the technologies that underlie podcasting will keep many listeners from ever even getting to the content. A couple examples:
I subscribe to several podcasts I never hear. That’s because they do not include an album title in the ID3 tags, which means these podcasts do not get classified into a playlist. I access my podcasts via the iPod playlist feature. If a playlist for that podcast doesn’t exist, I don’t know it’s there. Hence, great content gathers dust in the deep recesses of the iPod’s and iTunes’ file structure.
Then there are those podcasts where audio levels are not adjusted. A simple normalization action before exporting to MP3 would solve this problem, but instead, I’m forced to crank the volume to max in order to hear an audio comment, then when the host comes back, my eardrums are shattered as the volume returns to its previous higher level. I simply give up on many of these shows as being unlistenable, even though the content is terrific.
So in our haste to proclaim content the be-all and end-all of podcasting, let’s not understate the importance of using the technology correctly.
5. Intel Blogs to the IT Community
I got weary a long time ago of posts announcing companies that have started blogging, but Robert Scoble’s post alerting me that Intel is blogging was intriguing enough to point to. The blog, IT@Intel, “features several of Intel’s top IT leaders, who share their perspectives and invite discussion on the issues they and other IT managers are facing today.” according to the blog’s “About” page; “The blog offers an “inside look” at Intel’s IT operations and provides opportunities for you to exchange ideas directly with the IT experts who keep Intel’s business running and growing.”
The blog will be governed by a set of principles, including these about comments:
- We will post comments, except for spam and remarks that are off-topic, denigrating or offensive
- We will reply to comments promptly, when appropriate
- The initial posts are brief introductions from the bloggers who will contribute to IT@Intel, and commenting is light, but the blog is, after all, brand-spanking new. It’s intriguing that the blog launches
- during the company’s painful and sizable layoffs, but on the other hand, more direct engagement with constituents may reflect the company’s leaner, smarter attitude. I’m sure there will be those
- who will tell Intel everything that’s wrong with the blog, but credit to Intel diving in, especially during a time when it must seem easier to just stay below the radar.
Disclosure: Intel has been one of my clients off and on over the last couple years.
6. Five Stops Left On The Wired World Tour
The first session of “Connecting with the Wired World,” held last week in San Francisco, went great! There are five stops left, so there’s plenty of time to register. In this workshop, I’ll cover how to…
- Reach your many and varied audiences through better and smarter online writing techniques
- Develop audio, video and animated content that will engage your audiences as never beforeóand reach new ones
- Monitor what customers, competitors, employees, activists and others are saying about you online and in the blogosphereóand be ready to influence the discussion
- Sell the concepts of blogs, podcasting and other social media tools to a management skeptical of new tools and technologies
- Engage your audiences in an online conversationóand mitigate the risks inherent in participatory communications
I’ll relate this to intranets, blogs, wikis, social media sites, social bookmarking and tagging, citizen and open-source media, and RSS.
Here’s the remaining lineup:
10/23-24: New York
10/26-27: Washington, DC
10/30-31: Chicago
11/02-03: Atlanta
11/13-14: Toronto, ONT, Canada
Get the details and register online at http://snipurl.com/ragan_connect.
7. The Need for Speed in Clearing Blog Comments
There is an expectation in the blogosphere -— and not an unreasonable one -— that bloggers will check their blogs frequently and clear out their comment moderation queues quickly in order to keep the dialogue fresh and current. As businesses expand their presence in the blogosphere, they appear to be doing so at corporate speeds, not blog speeds. That’s a mistake. The blogosphere will not adapt to the pace of business.
Two recent incidents show the hazards associated with the usual business response times. First, Direct2Dell, the Dell Computers blog, has been criticized for withholding negative posts and getting some information up to the blog—such as the battery recall—concurrent with the announcement through normal channels. More recently, McDonald’s has taken heat for not clearing negative comments to its Open for Discussion blog that focuses on corporate social responsibility. A post on the blog responded to crticism aimed at the company for including a HumVee toy as a Happy Meal item, part of a promotion with Hummer maker GM. Comments appeared a day later.
In both cases, the desired items and comments eventually appeared. But did they appear in response to blogger outrage decrying apparent corporate censorship?
I don’t know the answer for certain, but having spent 15 years working for Fortune 500 companies, I suspect not. My guess is that nobody is dedicated 100% full-time to these blogs, and clearing moderation queues is something that is gotten around to when time permits and higher priority tasks have been completed. That’s just the way businesses try to handle these kinds of activities: “I know you’re already working full-time, but now we’d like you to manage our highly visible corporate blog, too. But don’t let your other responsibilities slide.”
It’s easy to see why corporations wouldn’t want to dedicate a full salary, benefits, and other associated costs to an employee who will do nothing but blog. (Although it’s not unheard of, either, as in the case of Stonyfield Farms.) But when a business is unable to respond quickly enough to meet the minimum requirements that have emerged as a standard for responding in the blogosphere, the company’s blog could wind up doing more harm than good.
Of course, even among us individual bloggers, it’s not always possible to respond as quickly as we’d like. However, companies are not individuals. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect a company that has started a blog to commit the resources to maintain it, which includes reviewing comments in the moderation queue in a timely manner.
For those who are counseling their companies and clients to blog, it’s important to explain the commitment as well as the rationale. If the organization isn’t willing to make that commitment, an alternative means of ensuring comments are addressed effectively are not available, it’s probably better to hold off on blogging until the organization grasps the benefits in terms of the expense of time and resources. It’s just not worth it having high-profile bloggers lambaste you for censorship when you really just haven’t had the time to get to it.
8. Bars are Dead
Why drag yourself out to a bar when you can sit all by yourself at your desk blogging with a Scotch in hand?
Robert Scoble has predicted the death of big conferences. Now, I like Robert and agree with most of what he says, but I have to take issue with this one. In his post, he points out that he told 15 people at a small blogger conference about his departure from Microsoft. Some of those folks blogged the news, leading to somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million impressions. Says Robert:
“So, why does anyone need to go to a big conference to hear the news again? Simple: you don’t. It’s not worth doing. Not when a CEO can write a blog, get more people to visit it in 36 hours than would probably visit his booth at the Detroit Auto Show. How do you get news out? Invite a blogger over for lunch. It doesn’t matter who the blogger is. If the news is interesting it’ll spread and spread fast.”
I have no issue with Robert’s argument; it’s absolutely true. The problem is that conferences are about a whole lot more than disseminating news. I wouldn’t go to the Detroit Auto Show to hear a CEO make an announcement. I’d go to see and sit in the cars. Not a picture. Not a virtual car in Second Life. I want to see 3,000 pounds of metal, plastic, chrome and rubber. I want to sit in the front seat and wrap my hands around the steering wheel and inhale that new car smell.
I go to the IABC conference to interact with other people, both in sessions and in bars and restaurants. I know I can do that online, but there’s something a whole lot more satisfying about a face-to-face experience. That’s why so many of us (including Robert) host geek dinners when we’re traveling. There’ll be a big such dinner at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo where I’m looking forward to finally meeting people like Heidi Miller, John Wall, Terry Fallis, and a host of others (not to mention renewing friendships with people I’ve met before like C.C. Chapman and Rob Safuto).
I recall one communication conference at which the speaker urged the audience to not forsake face-to-face as a tool for communication, noting that we’re hardwired from prehistoric times to communicate that way. “Any communication that is not face-to-face,” he said, “is a corruption of face-to-face communication.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I think blogs and other social media rock and Robert is absolutely right about the way news can get out in this era of social computing. But in a blog posting you lose facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and all those other non-verbal cues that drive most of our reaction to a message. That’s what the speaker meant about corruption of face-to-face communication. (Yes, a video can address a lot of that, but let’s face it, only a handful of the people with whom you’d want to interact will produce and post a video, and then it doesn’t allow for real-time engagement.)
Big conferences, then, will continue to thrive—so we can put hands on the products and services being touted there and so we can interact with real people in the physical world. Or, as Robert Bruce put it in a comment to Scoble’s blog, “Having no conferences will prevent me from having realtime conversations with people who I can’t get an email or blog response from because you are all too busy with your A, B or C lister rankings!”
9. Caribou Coffee Capitalizes on Coupons
Talk about a smart move. Caribou Coffee has turned a Starbucks gaffe into an opportunity to promote itself.
In case you missed the story, Starbucks hastily canceled a promotion it had launched to get people to try its iced coffees. A coupon for a free iced coffee was linked to an email Starbucks sent to employees to share with friends and family in the Southeast. How Starbucks didn’t see this email going viral is beyond me, but they didn’t. The coupon spread and counterfeit versions appeared. Starbucks pulled the plug, earning them “loser of the week” designation on Joseph Jaffe’s Across the Sound new marketing podcast.
Most marketers would kill for a promotion to go viral like that. Most marketers would swallow the cost of all those drinks they hadn’t planned to give away in order to get that many people into their stores to try an iced coffee…and maybe get them to come back again and again to buy more.
Among those who see the value of such a giveaway are the folks at Caribou Coffee, who recognized the potential in Starbucks’ mistake to serve its own interest. The company quickly communicated that it would accept those coupons -— but for only this Friday from noon to close of business and only while supplies—for a medium-sized cold-pressed iced coffee, iced Americano, or iced tea. The same offer went out to subscribers to Caribou’s email mailing list.
Caribou’s CEO Michael Coles, quoted in a Denver Post article, said, “We want to introduce gourmet coffee lovers to a great new product, Cold Press iced coffee.”
When CC Chapman passed this story along to me, he noted he’d never heard of Caribou Coffee. (I have—they’re all over Washington, DC. It was a Caribou Coffee barista who told me that light roast has more caffeine than dark roast, leading me to switch. I love caffeine.) I bet CC isn’t the only person who’s heard of Caribou now. Caribou’s quick thinking is Starbucks’ loss.
This isn’t the first time Caribou has trumped Starbucks. The ubiquitous Starbucks offers WiFi, but only to those with a T*Mobile WiFi account. Late last month, Caribou announced free WiFi for its customers (PDF of press release). Smart marketing like that could result in some of Starbucks sales migrating over to Caribou.
10. Sites of the Month
I just got an invitation to participate in the beta for Slideshare, which I can best describe as YouTube for PowerPoint. The idea is to upload a PPT presentation, which is converted into a Flash format and shared on the site. You can tag your presentations to make them discoverable via search. And the code is available to either embed or link to the presentation within your own blog or website.
The site emulates YouTube in other ways. Each presentation you select comes with links to similar presentations. You can comment on presentations (although I don’t see a voting option yet). Google ads run down the right-hand side of the page.
I did a presentation in Riverside, California for the Inland Empire chapter of PRSA and posted the PowerPoint to SlideShare; you can see it on my blog at http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/slideshare_presentation/.
Todd Defren from SHIFT Communications announces on his blog today the availability of PRX Builder, a tool that lets you build a social media news release without having to figure out all that dicey formatting. PRNewswire charges $395 for a web-only release using the tool.
http://www.prxbuilder.com/default.aspx
11. HC+T update
- I’ll present a session with Thornley-Fallis’s Terry Fallis in Toronto next month on podcasting.
- In November, I’ll make two presentations in Atlanta, one to a healthcare conference, the other to a conference on travel. Both sessions look at social media.
- As you may have heard, I’m leaving the adventure of self-employment and returning to the world of the working. I’m joining a startup communications firm along with Joseph Jaffe, Neville Hobson, C.C. Chapman, and a cast of other talented and new media-focused communicators. More to come next month—or just listen to “For Immediate Release,” where the information is being communicated first. Don’t worry, though; this newsletter will continue, and I will remain available for speaking and training engagements.
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