1. AIG’s Executives: A Confederacy Of Dunces
2. Nine Tips For Communicating Layoffs
3. My New Book Is Out; Downloads Are Available
4. How Many Execs Really Leave To Pursue Other Opportunities?
5. Moving The Needle Is The Ultimate Measure Of Online Influence
6. Technology Is A Slave To Me
7. Death Watch
8. Site Of The month
9. HC+T Update
10. Boilerplate and subscription information

Wow—a newsletter one short month after the last one! That shouldn’t be a big deal, since this was originally a monthly newsletter, but given my erratic production for the last year or so, I guess it is worthy of note.

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. and don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. AIG’s Executives: A Confederacy Of Dunces

I have come to the sad conclusion that the people running AIG are idiots. Dolts. Complete and irredeemable morons.

I defended the Southern California retreat for which AIG took so much heat. That event was an incentive for top-performing life insurance salespeople. It was part of the compensation for their contributions and necessary to keep the company’s top performers from defecting to the competition. If anything is going to help AIG get out of its hole and repay the taxpayer bailout it received, it will be top performers selling their asses off. Instead of criticizing the event, I suggested AIG should have foreseen how the retreat would be perceived and been proactive in communicating what the event was, who it was for, and why it was an investment in future sales.

Today, it has been revealed that AIG held another event at a posh Arizona resort. The rationale for the event makes perfect sense. AIG’s CEO Edward Liddy explained the rationale after the event was exposed by local TV news reporter Josh Bernstein. Exposed because AIG made every effort to keep the event a secret.

Brilliant planning there, Fast Eddie. Like nobody’s paying careful attention to every minuscule move your company makes. (News flash, Ed: You’re under the world’s biggest freaking microscope.)

I can just imagine the conversation among the reality-challenged executives who made this monumentally stupid decision:

Executive #1: We need to train the independent, non-employee financial planners who recommend our products to their clients. The more knowledgable these planners are about our products, the more inclined they’ll be to recommend them, and to the right clients. We rely on these guys for sales; the training is a necessary investment in those sales.

Executive #2: Well, yeah, all the companies in our line of business do this as a matter of routine. But we have a problem most of our competitors don’t have. The public couldn’t possibly understand this and, because of that bailout thing, if they see us sponsoring an event like this, they’ll crucify us.

Executive #3: Why don’t we just host the event at some Ramada Inn in East Bumcrap, and instead of sending our top execs for the planners to meet, we’ll send mid-level sales support staff?

Executive #2: Are you nuts? What financial planner would invest his own money and time to come to a meeting in a Ramada Inn in East Bumcrap? We’ll end up with three has-been B-list football players who got mail-order degrees in financial planning. We need to train 150 of the best, most sought-after financial planners in the country if we’re going to produce the kind of sales we need.

Executive #1: He’s right, you know. These guys are high-powered players. They only turn out for top-drawer events. And they expect to hobnob with the top brass.

Executive #3: Hey, I have an idea. We’ll do it in secret. We’ll make sure the hotel staff is in on it, we’ll come up with a fake company name and a fake logo. It’ll be cool, just like an undercover operation. I’ll be Jack Bauer. You can be James Bond.

Executive #1: I love this plan. But I wanna be Jack Bauer.

After his company was caught—hidden camera and all—Liddy went public and made a number of points:

• Most of the tab was picked up by sponsors and participants (the company even released a list of the partners who covered the costs)
• The company has canceled some 160 planned events; the ones kept on the company’s calendars were deemed mission-critical (like training independent planners to sell your products so you can make a ton of money and repay your debt)
• The fancy hotel rooms in which AIG execs stayed were comped by the hotel as part of the total $360,000 package (90% of which, remember, was paid for by partners and participants)

Anybody who has spent time in business recognizes these as legitimate points. But it’s hard to convince anybody you’re telling the truth after you’ve been caught in a cover-up. Footage shown by the Phoenix ABC-TV affiliate included the KNXV reporter confronting a couple AIG execs as they hurried, tight-lipped, onto their flight.

After a performance like that—along with other damning footage on top of the revelation that AIG tried to pull this off covertly—few are inclined to believe a word Liddy says. His quote—“We appreciate what the taxpayer and the federal government has done for us...We intend to pay back every penny we’ve borrowed”—rings especially hollow after being caught in a premeditated, willful effort to deceive. Sure, Liddy did the right thing by appearing on CNN’s Larry King to personally address the charges, and a press release was issued defending the event. But it was way too little, way, way too late.

So now AIG has federal legislators calling for Liddy’s head on a platter and taxpayers itching to form a lynch mob, pitchforks and torches at the ready. All of which could have been avoided if AIG had just been transparent. Rather than assume the public is too stupid to understand its business, AIG should have explained up front the realities of the financial services market, how companies like AIG rely on independent agents to sell their products, how training these agents is what generates sales, and how these sessions need to be upscale or the agents won’t come and your product won’t sell. Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t have liked it, but AIG would be in a lot less trouble than they are now.

If this is the kind of leadership Liddy has to offer, maybe he should resign. But unless AIG’s top PR counselor (I have to assume this is Communications Senior Vice President Nicholas J. Ashooh) advised against this fiasco and was overruled, he definitely needs to go. (Besides, any PR counselor with an ounce of ethics would have resigned before engaging in such an ill-advised cover-up.)

AIG’s predicament should serve as an object lesson for executives at other companies who may still believe that opacity is a viable business strategy in today’s environment.

2. Nine Tips For Communicating Layoffs

All the job cutback news from the last several weeks, culminating in American Express’s announcement that it will cut 10% of its workforce—7,000 jobs—has me thinking about communicating layoffs. Sadly, it’s a chore I’ve had to perform several times in my career.

My worst experience—which was also my first—goes back a long time ago in a Fortune 500 company far, far away. (Well...Los Angeles.) As the internal communications manager, I learned of a 10% reduction in headquarters staff about 48 hours before the ax would fall. I lobbied for some kind of communication to employees, which wasn’t part of the plan because the president unrealistically hoped to keep news of the layoff out of the media. The best we were able to do was desk-to-desk distribution of a letter under the president’s signature; the letter would be waiting for employees as they arrived on the day of the layoff. (Email wouldn’t be an alternative for another five or six years.)

Of course, one of the affected employees sent the letter to the local daily; it was the lead headline in the business section the next morning. Infuriated, the president stormed into my office and slammed the newspaper on my desk. “I told you this would get into the press,” he fumed.

True, I said, but because they reported on the layoff based on our perspective as outlined in the letter, our message infused the story. Had there been no letter, the employee would have called and the story would have been presented from the distressed employee’s point of view. He accepted that and went sulking back to the C-suite. But the worst fallout came months later at am IABC chapter meeting when I was sitting next to the guest speaker, the regional bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. He saw my name and company on my name tag, and told me, “The next time you want something from the Journal, you can go f**k yourself.” Stunned, I asked what had brought this on. “The Wall Street Journal,” he said, “does not appreciate being scooped by a small local daily.”

Today, given the glass houses in which businesses exist, it’s even dicier than it was back in those pre-Internet days. I recall the story earlier this year of a laid-off Yahoo employee who Twittered his termination. Emerging from a layoff as a healthy organization with a focused workforce is more challenging than ever.

Having been through at least half a dozen layoffs since then, I’ve learned a lot about layoff communications. Here’s a rundown of some of the most important considerations:

Involve company communicators in layoff planning. Too many companies view communicators as the hired guns brought in to clean up the town after the mess has been made. Communications counsel at the earliest stages of planning can be invaluable. I worked at one company where performance was not a factor in determining which employees would be cut. Instead, the decision was based on the amount of time spent on defined tasks and the value attributed to each task. The survivors, then, were left with the knowledge that strong performance wouldn’t count the next time cuts were needed. Productivity plummeted and paralysis set in. Sound communications counsel would have identified how employees would react to the message, leading to an alternate approach.

Communicate clearly to all interested stakeholders. Distinct audiences exist within the employee population: Those affected, those remaining (addressed in more detail below), and supervisors. Communicate through your usual media channels. Get in touch with the analysts covering the company. And if you’re really smart, you’ll reach out to activists targeting your company to give them a candid explanation, blunting the criticism they’re inclined to levy against you.

Be human. The most beloved and effective generals in the military felt the loss of each casualty suffered under their command. Leaders acknowledge the human toll, whether that’s counted in lives lost on a battlefield or jobs lost in a tough economy. The rise of social media has magnified the importance of authenticity, so be authentic. Explain how employees’ welfare was a factor in the decision-making process and outline what’s being done for those who are leaving.

Don’t make promises you may not be able to keep. Don’t tell employees this round of cuts will be all that’s needed if there’s the remotest possibility of doing it again one or two quarters down the road. Also, don’t be specific if you can’t be. If you promise that the layoffs will be over on November 15 but pinks slips are handed out for three days after that, employees will never believe you again.

Focus on the survivors. It’s easy to gloss over the employees left behind while lamenting the loss of those who have gone. After all, they still have jobs. But the victims are gone; it’s the remaining employees you’re counting on to drive the business forward. If they’re paralyzed in the aftermath of the layoff, everything from productivity and innovation to engagement will take a hit. One concern all layoff survivors share is the expectation that they’ll shoulder the work that had been done by those have have left in addition to their existing responsibilities. Explain honestly how the slack will be taken up and what kind of sacrifices will be expected.

Articulate the end state of the process. The fastest way to move beyond a layoff is to treat it as a change process—which is exactly what it is. Employees need to know what the payoff will be for suffering through all this misery. What will the company look like if it’s successful? This vision needs to be expressed at the highest levels of the organization for the big picture, right down to the team level for the impact on individual employees.

Pay special attention to top performers. Your top performers, the indispensable assets to the organization, are also the ones who have the least trouble securing other employment, no matter how bad the economy may be. Odds are they were getting calls from headhunters before the job cuts. If things get too grim, they’ll bolt.

Don’t spin it. Layoffs are ugly, unpleasant, and emotional. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous. The best you can do is minimize the pain. Call it what it is—it’s a layoff, not a RIF or an exercise in “rightsizing.” (I hate “rightsizing.” If you didn’t need all those extra people, why’d you hire them in the first place?)

Be transparent. If you know the conditions that could derail your recovery plans, share them with employees so there are no surprises. Share the process that led to the layoff decision, the alternatives that were explored, and why those alternatives were dismissed.

What lessons have you learned from your experiences commicating layoffs?

3. My New Book Is Out; Downloads Are Available

My new book, co-authored with John C. Havens, is now available. The title: “Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media To Maximize Value and Build Their Brand.” (Don’t you love these business titles?)

For the next month or so, you can visit a special site—http://www.ttoffer.com—and enter your online order receipt number and get access to a variety of downloads as well as a free subscription to Fast Company magazine (the subscription offer is available in the U.S. only; sorry about that). Among the downloads available are sample chapters from new books by Roger D’Aprix and Mike Robbins, an e-book by Chris Brogan on personal branding, Jason Van Orden’s e-magnet series, a Forrester report on staffing for social computing by Jeremiah Owyang, and more.

4. How Many Execs Really Leave To Pursue Other Opportunities?

At one of the Fortune 500 companies where I directed corporate communications, many years ago, a reorganization consolidated some of the company’s business units. In a game of executive musical chairs, one high-ranking exec was left without a job.

The press release the company issued used the typical jargon claiming that the poor fellow was leaving the company “to pursue other opportunities.” I suppose that was true. The interesting he was leaving to pursue was finding a job after being dumped from the organization.

Journalists are wise to this kind of euphemism. A night copy editor at one of the dailies covering the company ran the story under the headline, “So long, pal.” The clueless leaders of this company—my bosses—reacted to the headline by insisting that I call the lead business reporter who covered the company and inform him that we weren’t going to deal with him any longer.

The headline may have been snarky, but the “pursuing other opportunities” phrase, along with the lack of any substantive information at all, invited that snarkiness. Of course, the reason companies resort to such vague, non-communicative lingo is that the separation agreement reached with the departing executive insists on it, presumably because they don’t want anybody to learn the truth of the matter. I’ve often wondered how people can rise to such lofty positions in big companies with such thin skins.

This experience leapt to mind as I read a post by PR luminary Jim Horton about a similar announcement from iRobot announcing that its co-founder, Helen Greiner, had resigned as the company’s chairman to be replaced by her fellow co-founder Colin Aigle, who was serving as CEO.

The most Greiner or iRobot have had to say about the reason for the former chairman’s departure is that it was a mutual decision. This, according to the C|Net report, has fueled speculation about what really happened, suggesting that Greiner’s departure was not entirely voluntary. This will come as no surprise to people working in corporate communications who know that, in the absence of authoritative information, second-tier sources and gossip-mongers will rush in to fill the void. Information abhors a vacuum.

As Horton notes, it is the lack of transparency that sparked the rumor. “Wouldn’t it be better just to say that X left because she had a disagreement with the board, or she is tired and wants to move on, or she has another opportunity she wishes to pursue? That, at least, provides a context for stakeholders,” he says, adding, “Silence speaks louder than words.”

The next time an executive leaves your company’s ranks, consider the novel approach of just truthfully telling what happened. It may cause some discomfort, but that’s better than inaccurate speculation affecting perceptions of the organization.

5. Moving The Needle Is The Ultimate Measure Of Online Influence

What is influence?

I’ve been mulling over this question since reading Steve Rubel’s post asserting the Google Page Rank is the ultimate measure of online influence. I drr Steve’s point, particularly when comparing Google Page Rank to other metrics that draw on server-based data.

Like Technorati’s authority rankings, your Google Page Rank improves the more people link to you. There’s a nuts-and-bolts problem with this as a measure of influence: You don’t know why people are linking to you. Sure, you hope they’re directing their own readers to what they consider to be high-quality content. In any given case, though, it’s also possible that they’re linking to you while telling their readers, “You won’t believe what this idiot has written now.” I frequently follow links deliberately directing me to examples of bad content.

Another problem with page rank is the ease with which the unscrupulous can game the system. Not too long ago, I started moderating comments to this blog so I could reject Akismet-proof comment spam that includes a link designed to boost a site’s Google Page Rank.

But these technical issues aren’t at the core of my discomfort with Page Rank as a measure of influence. It’s the definition of influence, which has nothing to do with your popularity. Influence happens when you cause something to happen. Page Rank is an outcome of your efforts, the social media equivalent of counting the number of newspapers that pick up your press release. Influence occurs when you produce outcomes, not outputs.

Katie Paine, in her excellent book, ”Measuring Public Relationships,” defines outcomes as “quantifiable changes in attitudes, behaviors, or opinions that occur as end results of a PR program.” It’s a definition I agree with. The highest possible Google Page Rank cannot determine whether your site has produced such a quantifiable change. That’s what influence is—the ability to alter someone’s attitudes, behaviors, or opinions.

Measuring your ouputs—along with outtakes (the perceptions or understanding created by your work)—is important, but it’s a communication goal, not a business goal; you measure it to determine how effective your tactics have been at meeting the business goal. Ultimately, companies have business goals in mind when they employ PR.

Unfortunately, the ultimate measure of online influence isn’t accessible from any of the online metrics or analytics available. You can’t plug a URL into a search field and produce the answer. There are three basic ways to assess your influence online:

• Read and analyze what people are saying about you to determine whether attitudes or opinions have changed as a result of your online efforts
• Apply some kind of survey mechanism to ask people whether your content drove some kind of change in the people who consumed it
• If a direct link can be made, measure the impact of your content on the business goal; for example, where the goal is to get people to sign up for an online service, you could show that a blogger outreach effort produced a measurable increase in signups

The difference between Page Rank and these three approaches should be pretty clear when you look at what you report to your client. Which would you rather say?

Option #1: Sixty-seven percent of the people who read your blog were more likely to do business with than they were before they started reading it, and 28% said they’ve already done business with you because of the thought leadership you’ve established on the blog. That’s significant, given that our online efforts have generated a Google Page Rank of 7, which means a lot of people are linking to the blog, dramatically boosting the number of customers and prospective customers.

Option #2: We’ve generated a Google Page Rank of 7. That means a lot of people are linking to the site. Isn’t that awesome?

If we’re not working to achieve our clients’ or employers’ business objectives, there’s no reason for our clients or employers to pay us. If that’s not what we’re measuring, we’re not demonstrating the value of our work. Yes, assess your Page Rank. But for goodness’ sake, don’t stop there.

6. Technology Is A Slave To Me

I’ve been thinking about three deals I’ve closed over the last week or so. I arranged a media interview for a client. I arranged a speaking gig. And I got a consulting assignment.

All three deals were done entirely by email, with no phone calls.

The fact that email served as the communication channel for these deals normally wouldn’t have entered my mind, but I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to a recent post by Jeremy Pepper titled “Slave to Technology” in which he exhorted PR professionals to put down their email, IM, and other technology-based communication tools and return to the phone.

There’s no question that some people become overly-dependent on technology, a phenomenon that’s not limited to PR practitioners. I hear way too many stories about people who have been laid off by email, which provides those uncomfortable in confrontational situations with a means of doing what’s required of them without looking into the eyes of the target of their actions. People need to know when to use each tool based on what it’s good at, and the importance of face-to-face should never been underestimated.

But I just can’t agree with Jeremy when he suggests that deals get done on the phone and not by email. It’s just not true. Nor can I agree with Jeremy when he suggests that we should simply force ourselves to stop using technology altogether for some period of time (like one day a week). Sorry, but if a reporter calls to let me know he’s tied up in traffic and will be 10 minutes late to lunch, I’m not going to resist checking email just because I’ve bought into some insipid “no email day” concept.

Besides, we easily forget that the phone is technology, too.

Several years ago, a colleague who worked for Exxon (now retired) sent me a PDF of a page from a 1930s edition of Humble Oil’s salesforce publication, “The Lubricator.” (No jokes, please, this is serious.) The article addressed the introduction of telephones to Humble’s workplace. It offered tips on how far from the mouth to hold the mouthpiece and what to say when answering the phone. It explained why the company was placing only one phone in each department rather than providing one to every employee (people will talk on the phone instead of getting their work done). But the bit that jumped out at me instructed employees that the telephone was not a replacement for the accepted tool for communication: the letter.

The article conveyed management’s fear that the phone would encourage employees to procrastinate until the last minute, not write the business letter, then just pick up the phone instead, a practice the company found unacceptable. Writing the letter was the way things got done and the phone was, well, technology.

So, Jeremy. If you’d been blogging in 1932, would you have told people to put down the phone and pointed them to that typewriter thingy on their desks?

The letter has gone the way of the dinosaur; the U.S. mail is now made up almost entirely of bills, packages, and direct mail marketing pieces. Letter-writing—once the primary means of conducting business—has given way to the email. Not the phone, mind you—plenty of letters were being delivered by mail over the decades during which the phone has been a standard tool. But the phone is a real-time tool (annoying political recordings left as voice mail notwithstanding). Email is asynchronous, one of its greatest strengths.

Is it, then, a stretch to suggest that newer technologies have superceded the use of an older technology, that phone thingy on your desk (as Jeremy put it)?

(Note: This isn’t an attack on Jeremy, whom I like, respect, and admire and almost always agree with. If you’re not reading his blog, you should. I was motivated to write this counterpoint only because so many people commented, “Right on, Jeremy” that I wanted to offer the flip side of the argument.)

To be sure, there is value in a phone call. Your voice conveys sincerity and warmth that is far more difficult to communicate with text. (How many times has an innocent joke in an email been misinterpreted, causing grief for both sender and recipient?) It’s easy to digress into off-topic conversation that can build closer bonds.

But if each tool is used based on its strengths, then it becomes a matter of thoughtful integration of all the tools, not an artificial abandonment of a tool that has become a vital part of a PR practitioner’s communication mix.

I also wondered if, as Jeremy also asserts, PR people have, in fact, abandoned the phone. Jeremy wrote in response to my query that a stroll into just about any agency is greeted by silence instead of the chatter of practitioners on the phone with journalists. That’s not my experience in several agencies I visit when I visit agencies, and I get calls from agency reps almost daily, pitching me on one story or another. But I decided to ask PR people, via Twitter, how much they rely on the phone. It’s certainly not scientific, but out of 23 replies I received, only a few dismissed the phone as a critical tool:

• the phone is my worst enemy...I <3 email and texts...fast and I can respond when I have the time; phone is too intrusive
• I rarely use others in favor of in-person mtgs, IM. IM’s the channel of choice - we’re always connected. e-Mail is a relic.
• mostly EM, IM, Twitter, FB—even email is dying off; phone calls are mostly sales calls
• Absolutely. Hate phone calls. Love e-mail/IM. It’s quick, easy, and people actually stop to think before communicating. Win, win, win. 
• I don’t use my phone that much. Seems I can get lots done and get to the point in email conversations best.

I see two results from this quick-and-dirty poll. Most PR people are using the phone and those who aren’t seem to be achieving results anyway (that is, closing deals). You have to wonder how long they’d keep their jobs if they weren’t. Instead, I have no doubt that they are closing deals and achieving other vital goals. They’ve just found that the phone maybe isn’t always the best tool for closing those deals and achieving their goals.

One thing connected each of the three deals I closed by email: I knew the people I was dealing with. I had relationships with them. We could communicate by email easily based on that relationship, rather than play the voice-mail-phone-tag game.

It’s also important to consider how the people you’re contacting (reporters, bloggers, whatever) want to be contacted. Contrary to Jeremy’s assertion that you need to use the phone, there are a lot of reporters out there who’d rather you didn’t. Consider the following passage from ”Care and Feeding of the Press,” an online document from the Internet Press Guild:

Don’t call. Really.

You should not call us to find out if we received your press release. We realize that follow-ups are part of many PR organizations’ normal operating procedure, but in many cases it’s more likely to create resentment. It is appropriate to follow up on requested information, such as a sent press kit or product, but not on a blind mailing.

If we’re interested, you’ll hear from us. If we’ve already established an ongoing relationship because I’ve covered your products earlier, it’s okay to send a follow-up e-mail a few days later to ask if I have any questions; but that’s it.

Now, I know this next point goes against a lot of your training; but take our word for it: Nothing sets a writer or editor’s teeth on edge more than an eager young voice saying, “I’m calling to see if you got the press release we sent.” (It is, alas, common practice to have follow-up calls made by the most junior [read: clueless] members of an agency.) When we’re in the middle of a tight deadline, the last thing we want is a phone call that contains no new or useful information whatsoever. Thus, by making such calls, you’re harming both clients’ and your own reputations. If you actually have something substantive to add, such as pointing out an error in a press release, that’s another story; but you’re still better off sending us an e-mail about it than calling us.

What? How can it be that a reporter tells us, “You’re...better off sending us an email...than calling us?” if the only way to achieve results is on the phone?

Simple. The phone is not necessarily the best way to achieve results, meet a reporter’s needs, or close a deal. The best tool is, well, the best tool at the time and under the circumstances. Ultimately, most of us aren’t slaves to technology. Technology is a slave to our needs.

7. Death Watch

Last Thursday, blogging’s father Dave Winer suggested that online advertising is dead. “Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it’s in now,” Dave writes, “when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.”

That’s a scary thought for all those online properties whose business models revolve around online advertising. Think Facebook, MySpace, blog networks like Gawker, and a little company you may have heard of called Google.

I’ve caught no wind of Google scrambling to identify a new business model. That is, no doubt, because online advertising isn’t dead. It is, however, just one of the many targets of such proclamations, many of which crop up every so often when somebody revisits the meme. According to the oh-so-prescient pundits among us…

• PR is dead (killed by social media)
• Blogs are dead (replaced by Twitter and other channels)
• Press releases are dead (replaced by blogs—but wait, aren’t blogs dead?)
• Journalism is dead (replaced by user-generated content)
• Encyclopedias are dead (replaced by Wikipedia)
• Newspapers are dead (replaced by citizen journalism and, um, online newspapers)
• Print is dead (people will page through the paintings of Michelangelo on their laptops instead of high-quality coffee table books)
• Terrestrial radio is dead (whew! I won’t have to listen to any more Raiders debacles in my car)
• Anything not digital is dead (replaced by, well, everything digital)
• Microsoft Office is dead (everyone’s switching to SaaS and OpenOffice)

I’m sure I’ve missed a few predictions of the demise of anything that isn’t digital/social/populist. (Send them along; I’ll add them to the list.)

Of course, none of these things are dead, or even dying. Some are scaling back as alternatives enter the marketplace. Some are struggling to identify a new business model. But none of these will have completely vanished by 2012, or even by 2018. Or 2100.

I plan to cover each of these as time allows in a series on why the death of (fill in the blank) has been, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated. Stand by.

8. Site of the Month

Society for New Communication Research

Okay, I’m a founding fellow of this group, but there are a couple pages on the nascent society’s site you can use without ponying up a nickel in membership fees or any other costs.

The first is the research page, where you’ll find some material you can actually use in making a social media case to your company. One of the most useful looks at the uptake of social media among the Inc. 500, a dramatically different group from the Fortune 500. There’s also a fantastic study, “The Tribalization of Business,” that explore the value of company-sponsored online customer communities.

Then there are the tip sheets. These PDF documents cover best practices for a variety of activities, from developing social media politics to blogging and blogger relations.

Research publications:
http://sncr.org/2008/08/06/research-publications/

Tip sheets:
http://sncr.org/bestpractices/

9. HC+T Update

• I’m helping a state hospital association employ social media as a means of mobilizing its supporters to advocate for increasing funding for emergency rooms.
• I’m conducting an online workshop tomorrow on how to profit from social network marketing. Details are at http://www.whatsworkingnow.net/
• I’m working on an internal communication audit for a major Canadian retailer

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

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1. Next Webinar: Intranet Communication Strategies
2. Marriott Blogs Pakistan Devastation
3. Don’t Give Apple A Pass
4. A Misdirected Email Leads To A Company Crisis
5. Lessons For Non-Profits From The Grass Roots
6. Flash Quiz For PR People: What Is A News Release?
7. No Time For Blogging
8. Sites Of The month
9. HC+T Update
10. Boilerplate and subscription information

The last update went out in late July. As much as it may seem that this bulletin has become a quarterly, I’ll continue to crank it out as I find time.

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Next Webinar: Intranet Communication Strategies

A new Webinar featuring Shel Holtz, ABC
Beginning Monday, October 27, 2008
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar
Register at http://tinyurl.com/3ugp4n

Solid internal communications achieve business goals, but most communication on most intranets is just the publication of news and features, harkening back to the old days of company publications. Some are even starting to question the link between a company’s commitment to effective employee communications and their intranets.

In this five-week online workshop, we’ll explore five distinct classes of internal communication that can be supported on an intranet that go far beyond the simple publication of articles. The approaches examined will include those you can adopt right now, without the introduction of new software or technology, as well as some that require the use of new communication channels. Included in this webinar will be…

* Corporate initiatives—From organizational change to quality improvement, we’ll look at how the intranet can support a company’s efforts to introduce a new approach to employees.

* Business literacy—Intranets can serve as a dynamic tool for bringing employees up to speed about customers, competitors, the marketplace and a company’s own products and services.

* Line of sight—Research makes it clear that companies perform better when employees can connect the dots between top-level decisions and their own day-to-day work. Learn how intranets can strengthen that connection.

* Bad news—Companies are being snatched up and melded together at an increasing pace. Employees are receiving layoff notices at an alarming rate. Rumors swirl about the future of businesses. We’ll look at approaches to helping employees get through periods when the news is bad enough to distract people from their work.

* Benefits and open enrollment—It may be the dullest part of an internal communicator’s job, but benefits are a vital part of what attracts people to work at a company. While open enrollment takes place on intranets, these networks are woefully underused when it comes to benefits.

During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants.

If you haven’t participated in one of these webinars—which take place entirely online over a five-week period (they are NOT 90-minute teleseminars with PowerPoint pushed over the Web), watch the brief video introduction at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com/index.php/site/info/C11#video

2. Marriott Blogs Pakistan Devastation

The power of a corporate blog is nowhere more evident than on “Marriott on the Move,” the blog from the hotel chain’s CEO, Bill Marriott.

Responding to the horrific terrorist act that levelled the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, the company posted a statement on Saturday, the day of the attack, followed in less than five hours by Bill Marriott’s personal post titled, ”This Senseless Tragedy...”

In the post, Marriott notes that most of the bombing victims were hotel employees. He gives special attention to security staff who died while examining the suicide bomber’s truck. “These guys were defending the lives of hotel guests and their fellow co-workers,” he writes. “They were killed in the line of their duty.”

The post does not include the usual audio file. Marriott records his posts into a digital recorder, which his communication staff transcribes for the blog. Visitors can choose to read or listen. The absence of the audio file for this particular post is curious. If ever people—especially employees—would want to hear the voice of their CEO, this is the time. I have no doubt, however, that the words are Marriott’s -— communicators preparing a statement would never use informal language like “these guys.”

Without a blog, the organization would have been restricted to traditional channels for expressing itself. These channels don’t come close to providing a leader with the ability to convey his own reaction, or to providing stakeholders a channel through which to react. Nearly 170 comments append the post as of right now, most offering condolences and expressing outrage and shock. There are comments from people who have been injured in other attacks on hotels, from former employees, and from loyal customers. Some address Marriott’s business specifically, such as these:

-- “I am confident that you will make the right decisions to take care of the Marriott associates’ families in the tragedy and to keep the trust of your loyal customers to continue to want to stay at Marriotts.”

-- “Mr. Marriott: As a Silver level member and a regular traveling business customer, I will now change my stays from Hilton to Marriott for the rest of this year. I can’t help but see that the militant Islamic forces target your establishment due to its Christian heritage. I appreciate your candor and certainly, your hotel staff’s service.”

-- “When I saw this horrid news, I went straight to the Marriott website to see how the company would be handling it. I appreciate your directness, and extend my deepest condolences to the families of those who lost their lives. I for one would feel perfectly safe at one of your hotels, despite this tragedy.”

In the face of such horrible devastation and loss of life, the Marriott blog—which already had an established voice a leadership—gave the company…

The means to reach out to customers and employees with an authentic expression of grief
• The ability to react almost instantly
• An opportunity for stakeholders to offer their own thoughts, serving as a form of catharsis
• The ability for Bill Marriott to assume leadership during the crisis

There are plenty of reasons for organizations to maintain a corporate blog, from search engine optimization to addressing business issues head-on. But if Marriott’s experience isn’t enough to make other organizations consider adopting a corporate blog, nothing is. 

3. Don’t Give Apple A Pass

I was embarrassed back in August during my presentation at New Media Expo in Las Vegas. John C. Havens, the co-author of my new book , and I were delivering a talk on the the theme of the book, “Tactical Transparency.” When discussing the notion of being transparent about business processes and problems, I used Apple’s Mobile Me as an example, showing a screen shot of the MobileMe Status page on the Apple website.

As soon as I started talking about it, a hand shot up. Allison Sheridan said the MobileMe status page was a terrible example.

I was confounded. After all, the inaugural post to the MobileMe status page made my point precisely:

“Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date.”

But Allison explained that updates to the site had stopped. David G., the site’s author, did not make good on his promise. Her husband, she said lost weeks worth of email and looked to the status page for information that was never posted. I had added the screenshot shortly after the third update was posted because John and I were required to meet a deadline for delivering a copy of the presentation. I hadn’t checked the site since then. Big mistake.

When I got back to my room, I visited the site. There are still only three posts there, the most recent from July 29. That final post concludes with these words:

“Next post later this week.”

Is David willing to blow off Jobs’ instructions to “write a posting every other day or so?” (That would take some chutzpah.) Has Jobs decided to return to Apple’s traditional opacity when it comes to communicating with customers? I can think of a dozen or so other reasons the updates may have been suspended, none of which excuse the shrugging off of a commitment made to customers to keep them informed. To make matters, worse, there have been continued problems with the service. Still, no updates.

But, hey, that’s just Apple. We’ll let it go because they make such cool products, right?

In fact, Apple frequently gets a pass for atrocious communication practices (among other things) because the manufacturer of such cool products can do no wrong. The Apple faithful turn a blind eye to any flaws, excusing the company because, well, we all just love our Macs and iPods.

Personally, I prefer Windows to the Mac. I had a Mac for 15 months and wound up giving it to my daughter and returning happily to the Windows world. But I have several other Apple products that I do love. And I still don’t think that makes the Mobile Me situation acceptable. Any organization that makes a public commitment to communicate and then clams up is, more than likely, hiding something. Even if they’re not, that’s the perception that will be created by their sudden silence.

MobileMe was (and continues to be) an unmitigated disaster (particularly compared to the relative trouble-free launch of Microsoft’s Live Mesh). The company launched a status page and promised updates “every day or so.” The company provided three updates, then went silent. And there has been barely a whisper of protest. (I say “barely” because there have been some reports of the sudden halt to updates, but not many...certainly not nearly as many as there would have been had it been Microsoft in the hot seat.)

Yeah, Apple’s products are cool. But it’s time to stop giving them a pass.

4. A Misdirected Email Leads To A Company Crisis

In the days before email, someone at a company where I worked inadvertently pushed the wrong speed-dial number on a fax machine. Instead of faxing a draft press release to outside counsel, he sent the release to a newspaper reporter who covered the company as part of his beat.

It was fear of this kind of all-too-human mistake that led attorneys in organizations everywhere to resist the introduction of fax machines to the workplace. The same paranoia accompanied earlier communication technologies, including photocopiers and telephones.

More recently, lawyers lobbied against email, worried about the ease with which company-confidential information could escape the ever more porous walls of the organization. There is good reason for lawyers to worry. More than one email has been sent mistakenly to external addresses from within IBM, one about a switch to Linux for employee desktops, another from an executive telling employees about the company’s woes. There are hundreds of such stories from companies, but few as chilling as the tale plaguing Carat, a media agency owned by Aegis Group, as reported yesterday in AdvertisingAge.

Faced with an impending round of layoffs, Carat’s HR staff prepared an email for those tasked with notifying affecting employees. The email was accompanied by PowerPoint and Word attachments that covered key talking points for those to be laid off, those remaining, clients and vendors. The email also telegraphs the extent of the layoffs by talking about consolidation of business units, although actual numbers aren’t included.

Rather than send the email to the intended audience of senior managers, though, the company’s top HR executive inadvertently sent it to all employees.

The AdAge piece will give you all the details about the layoff itself, along with a quote from John Hollon, editor of Workforce Management (an AdAge sister publication), who said:

“It seems to me the issue here is one of a dumb, stupid error that just about everyone who uses e-mail does from time to time. You would think that the chief people officer would be more careful given their position in the company—a reasonable assumption to make—but that’s not always the case. Owning up to the problem, apologizing and emphasizing it was a terrible mistake won’t solve this or make it better but can go a long way toward getting beyond it quickly.

“Still, if I were the CEO, I might want to start looking for a new chief people officer. You pay those people to step up in these situations, not make it worse.”

Over on David Murray’s blog, comments revolve around whether it makes sense for Carat to can Rose Zory, the chief people officer. On the one hand, it seems like a PR move designed to pacify without really addressing the issue. On the other hand, as one commenter put it, “I still really question how effective that HR person will/can be moving forward after a fiasco like this.”

(I learned about the story from a reader who read about it on David’s blog.)

A series of questions beyond that of Rose’s fate arise from Carat’s unfortunate experience, key among them…

• How do you deal with layoffs now that employees have had sneak peeks at all the layoff materials?
• How do you handle the reputational damage outside the organization?
• What steps do you take to minimize the risk of this happening again?

The first decision the company should make is to take the hits. Being defensive won’t help. Admit this was a horrible mistake and just deal with—even agree with—the criticism.

Next, acknowledge that nothing is going to fix the situation. It will take time—and positive action—to rebuild the company’s damaged reputation.

Be utterly transparent about all this. No equivocation, no hunkering down. Admit and elaborate on plans that were exposed in the email, even if your original intent was to keep them quiet.

Dealing with employees is tougher, but not impossible. An apology from the highest levels of the organization is a good start, followed by a conversation about how the process for managing the layoff unfolded. There’s not much you can do for employees who will lose their jobs, but plenty for those who are staying, including becoming more open in your ongoing communication with them about the state of the business and the forces at work on the organization, as well as the previously-hidden internal workings of HR. Employees are never surprised by a layoff when they work for companies that keep them well informed.

Finally, don’t jerk that knee and restrict the ability to send email. Rose’s mistake was a bad one, but it was a mistake. Organizations are made up of humans; we are all inherently imperfect. I doubt there’s even a need to reinforce the need to be careful when pushing that “send” button—no message could be stronger than the one that has already been sent.

If you were counseling Carat, what advice would you have?

5. Lessons For Non-Profits From The Grass Roots

These are tough times for non-profits, especially those looking for the contributions required to fulfill their missions. It’s hard enough asking for people to part with their money, but high energy costs and an uncertain economic outlook make it even tougher than usual.

Non-profits can learn a lot from some of the organic, grass-roots efforts that have received attention in the social media space over the last several months. In the case of the Frozen Pea Fund, the American Cancer Society did not launch a campaign to raise money. Instead, those who knew Susan Reynolds, who blogged that she was afflicted with breast cancer, undertook to raise money as a means of expressing their support for Susan, with the funds they collected earmarked for the American Cancer Society. The Austin blood drive tweetup produced a record number of first-time blood donors, but not based on any call to action from the blood center. Instead, it was a program launched by the Austin Social Media Club and promoted by interested individuals through tweets and blog posts.

People listen to each other thse days more than organizations. That’s precisely why a bunch of people on Twitter raised money from people who would not have otherwise donated to the American Cancer Society. It’s why people gave blood in response to an appeal from others in their network when they had never responded to a direct appeal from the Red Cross or their local blood center.

The lesson for the non-profits is to turn some of their donation efforts over to their most passionate advocates. Rather than hold out their hands and ask for money, they can make information available about the needs the donations will address. Get this information into the hands of people who will use it, from those you have already identified as your biggest supporters to those whose current social media activities indicate they’d be highly sympathetic to your cause.

Your own employees can even promote the issues, as long as they’re transparent about it and remain focus on the results the donations will produce instead of requesting money.

This notion isn’t dissimilar to something I head of Christopher S. Penn and John Wall’s “Marketing Over Coffee” podcast, the idea that if you ask a venture capitalist for money, you’ll get advice, but if you ask for advice, you’ll get advice and money. Translated to non-profit donation efforts, ask for money and you’ll get an excuse, but if you can make the need resonate with the right people, you’ll get money (or blood, if that’s the goal).

Non-profits can grease the skids by making material available for people to use in their efforts. How much easier would the Frozen Peas donations have been if the American Cancer Society had a place where the grassroots activists could have created a landing page that included a donation button and a place for the effort’s leaders to tell their story?

This is about more than just engaging in conversation. It’s about enabling people who care—people with networks—to have the conversation on your behalf.

6. Flash Quiz For PR People: What Is A News Release? 

Ah ha, caught you, didn’t I? You started to blurt out an answer, then stopped. I know I did, when I read a “Big Idea” post on FastCompany with the provocative title, ”Text messaging has become a likely alternative to traditional media releases.”

Barack Obama will announce his vice-presidential running mate on Twitter. People who follow Obama on Twitter will be the first to learn who will round out the Democratic ticket (including journalists). Who needs a press release?

Obama’s move is great on a number of levels, but I’ve no doubt the Obama campaign will still issue a release articulating all the right talking points. So, I thought to myself, a Twitter-first strategy isn’t really an alternative to a news release, because a news release is…

And I stopped.

To define what a news release is today, it’s useful to revisit what it used to be. There are three important points to keep in mind:

• The publics organizations wanted to reach relied on mainstream media to deliver content. There was no “pull.”
• There were two ways to get a message out through the mainstream media: Buy it (advertising) or earn the coverage (PR).
• Journalists—the gatekeepers—had limited channels through which they could receive organizations’ news: phone, fax, wire services, the postal system and (more recently) email.

News releases worked all the way around. Organizations could distribute them by fax, wire service, the mail and email. Reporters learned about news to cover and got a kick-start on their reporting. Publics had access to this information. (Yes, a lot of what was and is communicated in press releases is crap. But a lot of useful and important news and information has also been conveyed in press releases.)

Fast-forward to today. To begin with, the publics organizations want to reach are made up of individuals who are able to choose one or several channels to receive information. They can choose what to read and they are not forced to rely on any single medium or gatekeeper to get it.

The media are not limited to old channels for story leads or research. A study by Brodeur revealed a growing reliance on blogs by journalists as sources of information.

Finally, organizations are not limited to the media in order to convey information and make announcements.

But—and here’s the kicker—organizations still have to communicate news and information and there are people who still have an interest in knowing what that news and information is.

So, in this environment, what is a news release? It is not any one thing. There is no single bolt-from-the-sky alternative; you can’t “kill traditional releases and just blog it.”

I submit that a news release is the communication of an organization’s news or other announcements through all appropriate channels in a transparent manner using tools that work in harmony and open the door to further conversation on the information released.

Let’s say, for example, you’re announcing a new product line. A news release would include…

• Blog posts from the CEO, the brand manager, and anybody else in the company that has a perspective on the news.
• A tweet of the news through appropriate Twitter accounts, including any “official” company account as well as employees who have established themselves as company representatives (think RichardatDell). The official company tweet can include a link to the authoritative statement of record, while the tweets of the individual employees can link to their own blog posts.
• It most likely happens as a matter of course, but the company’s official RSS feeds should include the announcement. All content—from individual blogs to traditional press releases—should be distributed by RSS.
• Any company podcasts can include interviews or other appropriate content related to the product. The show notes can link to other content, including, for example, the brand manager’s blog posts if the brand manager was the interview guest.
• Company pages on social networks like Facebook can be updated as appropriate.
• A traditional press release crosses the “wires” for inclusion in places like Yahoo! News and Google News. Mainstream journalists—particularly in smaller markets and trade publications—can also make good use of worthwhile, well-crafted releases.
• Appropriate multimedia should be uploaded to company channels on media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr. This could be a general company channel or one dedicated to the brand, if the launch is a big enough deal. You can link to any of these assets in tweets and blog posts.
• Establish a Delicious account or two (or more) to house links to related content and/or coverage of the announcement
• Create a social media release

This is not a comprehensive list, of course; there are other channels I haven’t mentioned that could be entirely appropriate, depending on the news and the audience. New channels are opening up all the time. But the core idea is to release the news through all the channels the public and journalists use to receive and share it. (Note there is no pitching involved in any of this. Whether pitching is done well or badly, or should even be called “pitching,” t’s still a separate activity from the release of news itself.)

I remain committed to the social media release because of the role it plays in the symbiotic world of the multi-channel news release. It is the one source that contains everything else. The social media release is one-stop shopping, an aggregator of all content related to the news, organized in a digestable, objective, and usable format. If you read the tweet and want more information, where do you go? If you read the CEO’s blog and want more details on the product, where do you go? If you get the news because you’re a friend of the company’s Facebook page and want more information, where do you go? That’s the role the social media release fulfills.

So the news release is no longer a single thing, nor can any single thing ever accomplish what the traditional release used to. The biggest objection most PR practitioners will raise is thats a multi-channel release takes a lot more work. That’s true. But even some old-guard newspapers, like the Spokane Spokesman Review, are figuring out that tweets, blog posts, and traditional reporting are all now part of a news continuum.

So no, a text message is not an alternative to a news release. It’s part of one.

7. No Time For Blogging

I was running a daylong seminar that led one of the participants to fire off a blogging proposal to her CEO via her Blackberry. She shared with me the two-word answer that came back within minutes:

“No time.”

It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard this issue raised; I’m certain it won’t be the last. Whether it’s a CEO or any other employee, if it makes sense for that individual to communicate by blogging, time shouldn’t be a problem. Here are some thoughts on getting around the “no time” argument.

==Reallocating resources==

One executive with whom I spoke recalled receiving a communique from his company’s board of directors. The board took issue with the amount of time this CEO was committing to his blog. His answer was succinct: He wasn’t spending any more time communicating now than he was before he took up blogging.

Blogging is a new communication channel. Before blogs became widely available and accepted, executives made do with the channels available to them: one-on-one phone calls, conference calls, speeches, road shows, letters, email and so on. I have heard from a number of CEOs that blogs are more effective than any of these tools for a variety of communications. Therefore, they have replaced the use of such channels with blogging. In aggregate, though, they’re spending just as much time fulfilling their role as the company’s chief communicator.

As Thomas Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt put it (in an interview for my forthcoming book), ““At least a third of my job needs to be spent on communication. There are a lot of ways to do that, (such as) emails, phone calls, and speaking publicly. A blog is just another tool to do what a good CEO does: communicate.” (Hyatt addressed the time he commits to blogging in this post.)

Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Massachussettes (also interviewed for the book), concurs: “Part of the job of a CEO is to explain your mission and actions to the public. Why wouldn’t you use one of the greatest communication tools that exists to do that?”

==It’s not an essay==

A lot of leaders think anything they write needs to be a 1,500-word masterpiece. They’re accustomed to these missives from their annual shareholder letters and those columns that used to appear on the inside front cover of employee magazines.

Readers of blogs, however, don’t want 1,500-word posts. If every post were that long, people would probably stop reading blogs. Short, pithy observastions, quick questions (such as the time Michael Hyatt asked for feedback on his proposed employee blogging policy), brief activity updates and terse reactions to news and issues are all preferable to essay-length posts. A typical post from Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott International, runs under 500 words.

==Writing (per se) not required==

Speaking of Bill Marriott, he doesn’t write his blog at all. No, it’s not ghost-written. He records his posts into a digital recorder, which is transcribed (word for word) by his communication staff. On the blog, you have the option of reading the post or listening to it. An HP executive calls his posts into a voice mail line set up just for that purpose; the communications staff transcribes it for his intranet-based blog. There’s no need for any executive to sit at a keyboard and pound out a post.

==Group blogs==

Southwest Airlines’ Nuts About Southwest blog is a perfect example of a group blog to which company leaders can contribute when it’s appropriate. Authored by a group of employees, Nuts About Southwest has featured only a few posts by CEO Gary Kelly, who writes on the blog when the voice of the CEO is the appropriate one to address a specific issue. Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, has taken the same approach on GM’s blogs.

==ROI==

Tom Lehrer noted that life is like a sewer. What you get out of it, he said, depends upon what you put into it. Any number of executives who have undertaken blogging have been rewarded with a return on the investment in their time. This ROI can take the shape of improved relationships with key publics, better innovation, heightened employee commitment, conversation that leads to tangible actions and results (such as Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog-based conversation with SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, leading to changes in Reg FD), and even direct sales (Bill Marriott credits a link from his blog to Marriott’s reservations system with producing hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue).

==Should a CEO blog?==

It depends. There are certainly plenty of good reasons CEOs can cite for not blogging. In fact, there are CEOs I wouldn’t let anywhere near a blog. They don’t have the conversational manner required of blogging, they don’t have anything interesting to say, or they’re flashpoints for controversy. Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman, is the company’s principal blogger because the Fastlane blog is about cars, not the vehicle business (including labor, finance, and other non-car topics). CEOs who won’t maintain the commitment to blog regularly should not start one. And, frankly, a CEO is like anyone else: She has to want to blog. If she doesn’t, drop it.

But for CEOs otherwise inclined to blog if not for the time commitment shouldn’t let that stand in their way.

8. Site of the Month

Web 2.0 in the Workplace

This is the first time I’ve used the “Site of the Month” slot to promote something of my own. But what the heck, it’s free and I can’t just put it in a text email. It’s a video I recorded that explains the key benefits of Web 2.0 in the workplace. It runs about 25 minutes. I hope you find it useful.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/shelholtz/videos/1/

9. HC+T update

• I’m off this week to speak several times at the Ragan communications summit at SAS headquarters near Raleigh, North Carolina.
• It’s less than a month before my new book is released. I co-wrote “Tactical Transparency” with John C. Havens. It’s being published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.
• I’m involved in several consulting projects, including working with a blood donation organization to make donating blood more appealing to high school and college students through social media.

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(C) 2008, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

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.

Register here

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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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, ”