As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Six Questions To Ask Before Launching A Facebook Fan Page

In one of my blog postst, I took issue with critics of a marketing campaign that directed those who saw the ads to the company’s Facebook page. If the company knew what they were doing—that is, they were being strategic—and the campaign achieved its goals, then it was a smart move.

One of the comments to the post, from Ed Lee, pointed to the Nestle dustup of the last several days (which Neville Hobson and I addressed in some detail on yesterday’s FIR. Between the two situations, I’ve been musing over the questions companies should ask themselves before launching a Facebook fan page.

These questions are doubly important in the wake of the Nestle debacle, in which Facebook members—many of whom had just learned about Nestle’s use of unsustainable palm oil sourced from rain forests at the expense of organgutan habitat—deluged the already-established Facebook page with vitriolic messages condemnation. Nestle did itself no favors when the individual tasked with responding to messages on the wall behaved rather rudely (for which he or she later apologized).

But even if your company isn’t a likely target of a coordinated activist campaign, you still may be thinking of slapping up a fan page, adding a logo and a few other items, then waiting for the fans to come streaming in—an approach sure to make you look lame and clueless to all but the least sophisticated Facebook users.

So before you start, ask yourself…

1. Who do you want to become a fan of your page?

With 400 million-plus people on Facebook, it’s easy to fall into the trap of responding, “Well, all of them.” Based on what your marketing goals are, you should be able to determine to whom you’re trying to appeal. In yesterday’s post, I suggested Uniball may have been seeking people who weren’t currently buying their pens but who fit the profile of “joiners” as defined by Forrester’s Technographics profiles.

Based on the goals you’re trying to achieve—more sales to a particular group, a home for raving fans of your product, a place for customers to stay in touch with the company and learn about training opportunities and other events or a place to address corporate social responsibility issues (for example)—you’ll craft the kind of content the audience will want crossing their news feeds.

2. What are these audiences likely to want from your fan page?

If your company produces or sells consumer products, Facebook members want to be kept updated about promotions and offers. It’s not likely that they want a personal relationship with someone in an organization that makes pens, for instance, or facial tissue. If you represent a local community hospital, on the other hand, it’s likely that people do want to establish a direct connection.

Be sure you’re targeting the content of your page to the people you want to reach and who are likely to spend time on Facebook.

One of the comments to yesterday’s post makes this concept explicitly clear: A fan of the product promoted with a giveaway exclusively on Facebook, wrote, “I wouldn’t go to the Uniball site unless I had a very specific need, e.g., refill info. But I see (their updates) in my (Facebook) feeds all the time. So, whether you’re a long-time fan, someone who likes to write (me), or a social media maven, you found their promotion, which you might not have done any other way.”

3. Who else might your fan page attract?

Nestle undoubtedly launched a fan page for people who bake Tollhouse cookies, love Nestle crunch bars or sip Nestle hot chocolate. As a longtime target of activists for a variety of reasons, it was just plain irresponsible to ignore the likelihood that activists would campaign the page.

What organizations or individuals might find your fan page an appealing place to take issue with your organization?

If your organization isn’t prepared for the glare of transparency, opening a public forum to comment from any of 400 million people probably isn’t a good move. If you’re ready to open up and have a dialogue with your critics, on the other hand, Facebook could be a very desirable venue where your authenticity and candor will be plainly visible.

Even after deciding to engage critics, you need to be ready for the behavior your critics are likely to exhibit. Will they see your fan page as an opportunity to express their more hostile feelings, are they organized and likely to undertake a campaign on your page, are they interested in a genuine dialogue, or is it a random group of unhappy customers looking for a place to vent?

4. Who will be tasked with the care and feeding of the page?

Too many fan pages are created, then abandoned, perhaps with the expectation that fans will feed the content while marketers and communicators occupy themselves with loftier activities. The fact is, people ally with a fan page because they want to be notified, in their news feeds, when the company has something to say or offer. You need to keep the page updated with the kind of content that led people to sign on in the first place.

5. Who will monitor the page?

Companies look particularly clueless when fans post questions or comments and nobody from the company responds. Have you appointed a community manager to oversee the page and to scan comments left to the wall and discussion groups? Is the community manager empowered to bring appropriate representatives into the conversation based on the topic and their areas of responsibility and subject matter expertise? Are employees empowered to participate?

6. Do you have contingency plans for unanticipated activity?

When something like the firestorm that engulfed Nestle occurs, you should already have a plan of action. Nestle might have been well-served by having its top environmental officer begin engaging, either on the Facebook page itself or somewhere else, with Facebook fans notified of the venue for the discussion.

You could do worse than to study General Motors social media director Christopher Barger’s actions when GM Next—a completely social website—was campaigned by an environmental activist group. When it became clear the organization was simply reposting the same messages in order to shout down alternative views, Barger shut down the one uploaded photo that was attracting the comments and moved the discussion to a series of chats featuring GM’s environmental chief and several others. The activist group was invited to participate and Barger was prepared to include their tough questions in the mix, but the chat forum allowed for a balanced discussion that welcomed all points of view.

This is by no means an exhaustive list—just six items that I’ve been thinking about in light of the recent Facebook fan page episodes. What other questions would you ask?

2. Chaos Is Not A Strategy

Two seemingly evergreen threads have converged in my mind: First, is social media measurable? And second, the notion that soon, there will be no use for social media directors (or managers or coordinators) in organizations.

I have written several posts on what it means to be strategic in your approach to any communication effort, whether it’s social or traditional, internal or external. Others have taken up the cause, most recently Shannon Paul who elegantly reinforced my insistence that being strategic means you align your efforts with your organization’s (or client’s) business goals.

To be strategic ultimately means that you know what keeps your CEO and the members of her team awake at night so you can tailor communications that will help them all sleep better. That is, you know the business goals the company’s leaders are expected to achieve and you’re able to implement communications that move the needle in the right direction.

While some purists believe in their hearts that all such communication is trending toward nothing but social, a fragmented media ecosystem is evolving in which the efficacy of each kind of medium relies on the continued health of all the others. Smart companies now use traditional advertising and marketing to guide consumers to social channels where companies and customers can meet and engage.

The idea that social media directors are a species on the verge of extinction is based on the enthusiastic but misguided belief that every employee, top to bottom, will engage in social activities as naturally as they scratch their asses. No coordination will be required. This belief recognizes only one dimension of social media in business, one among three: organic, programmatic, and campaign-based.

Organic social media is the natural, ongoing, day-to-day engagement of individuals in the company with other stakeholder audiences. Lionel Menchaca, Richard Binhammer and the rest of the Dell communicators who engage routinely via Twitter are an example of organic social media, as are the kinds of employee blogs aggregated by companies like Microsoft, Thomas Nelson Publishers and IBM. When engaged employees enthuse about the company and its products on Facebook or other networks, that’s organic too.

Which is all great and undeniably important. But t doesn’t do much good—as US Airways learned when Flight 1549 ditched in the Hudson River or Dominos after the YouTube video surfaced showing employees doing disgusting things with food—to launch a Twitter account in order to communicate with people after news about you breaks.

Organic social media is just that: organic. The two other levels of social media—programmatic and campaign-based—are where strategy is applied. Programmatic social media are the ongoing efforts designed to achieve measurable objectives. Those objectives are the foundation of strategies that, in turn, are the broad approaches taken to achieve business goals. If you don’t know what the business goals are, you’ll have one helluva hard time determining if your social media efforts are helping the company achieve them.

Dell’s IdeaStorm crowdsourcing tool and Direct2Dell blog are examples of programmatic social media. They’re focused on specific objectives. The Mayo Clinic’s Sharing Mayo Clinic is another example, as is the Nuts About Southwest blog.

CEO blogs like those from Michael Hyatt and Paul Levy are also programmatic. The posts company leaders make to such blogs are carefully considered, as are those to group blogs like Southwest Airlines’ which usually spotlights the company’s unique culture but can also be used to address issues and crises..

Then there are the campaign-based efforts—like Dewmocracy, Pepsi’s crowdsourcing effort for Mountain Dew—that have limited, defined lifespans and very specific measurable objectives.

Both programmatic and campaign-based social media efforts can (and often should) be supported by employees engaged organically.

In order for program and campaign efforts to succeed, somebody needs to know what business goals they are designed to achieve and coordinate with everyone involved in producing social content in order to ensure the efforts are crafted in order to meet those goals. I’m not talking about being a gatekeeper (although sometimes that’s not necessarily a bad idea). While freedom to experiment and take risks is paramount in social media execution, some consistency is necessary to avoid embarrassing message conflicts. Besides, if everyone’s left to their own devices, you’ll wind up with six departments each paying separate fees for the same type of services. Imagine paying for two cision accounts, three from Radian6 and four from CustomScoop when if the effort were coordinated, the everyone could share data from a single account.

There’s another problem with relying solely on organic social media. I’ve seen too many instances in which an enthusiastic employee launches an effort, but nobody picks up the ball when that employee leaves the company. I’m not talking about the Scoble Syndrome, in which a celebrity blogger leaves and takes his audience with him. I’m talking about a company- or product-branded effort for which nobody else wants to assume responsibility when the originator departs. It happens because it was not part of a strategy; it was not any department’s or business unit’s responsibility. It was just something somebody decided (and got permission—or not) to do.

In the end, social media can easily be measured by determining the degree to which they achieved the business objectives that were set for them. And they’ll succeed a lot better if there’s a resource in the organization who can guide any employee to the right tools, set objectives others can work to achieve, introduce the best new channels, make sure appropriate training is available and aggregate the results so management knows the time and money invested really is contributing to the execution of the company’s business plan.

Social media is social and conversational and businesses need to learn that. But purists need to understand that business is still business.

3) Next Webinar: Strategic Social Media

A five-week Webinar with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, May 10, 2010
Cost: US $195

Far too many social media efforts are based entirely in tools and tactics. “We have a YouTube strategy” is a common refrain, but only YouTube has a YouTube strategy. For the rest of us—those uploading videos—YouTube is a tactic that helps achieve a strategy. And “We gotta have a Facebook fan page” is no strategy at all.

In this provocative five-week Webinar, online communication authority Shel Holtz will guide you through the means by which you can establish a social media strategy for your organization, one that is based on goals that will actually move the needle in your organization rather than just generate hits and visits. You’ll learn…

• The three critical levels of social media and where each fits in your plans
• How to develop a strategy management will buy into
• How to assess the performance of your social media effort
• How engagement with customers and other audiences can help achieve your goals
• The role social media plays in building your company’s brand
• Why employees at the front line should play a part in your strategy

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

To get an overview of how these Webinars work, view the demo video.

Webinar cost: US $195

Register here.

4)An Open Letter To Leaders Of Companies That Block Access To Social Media

Dear Sir or Madam:

I understand your fears and worries. I really do. It’s risky out there where employees may say something they shouldn’t that brings the wrath of a regulatory agency upon your head, where links from Facebook pages lead to sites that exist solely to infect your network, where employees seem to be doing anything but the work you’re paying them to do.

And it’s tempting to deal with it by simply throwing up obstacles to prevent employees from accessing these sites at all, or at least employing tools that let you observe their every online move.

When you hear that these efforts are mostly like in vain because employees have multiple methods for engaging in social media that bypass your networks, you feel frustrated and helpless.

I get that.

The time has come, however, to think differently about the issue of employees tapping into their social networks while they’re on the job. That time has come because new research now supports what many of us have known for some time now: that your organization makes better decisions that are more likely to grow market share and best your competitors because you have stopped encumbering employee access to social media.

Better decisions through professional networking

Out there, amidst all the banality and risk about which you are so frequently warned, the decision-makers in your organization are participating in Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG), according to “The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks: Social Media’s Impact on Business Decision-Making” (PDF file). According to this study—sponsored by the Society for New Communication Research (SNCR) and written by SAP‘s Don Bulmer and Leader Networks’ Vanessa DiMauro—“the long-promised global virtual and collaborative work enviornment” has arrived.

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense that professionals would seek out one another, form into professional networks using channels to which they already belong, channels that make it easy for people who share interests to find and connect with one another. The vision of a global virtual and collaborative work enviornment once conjured images of proprietary software. The reality is that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are the channels through which these collaborations take place.

It has always been a conceit that the organization houses the best minds that can possibly be brought to bear on a problem or issue. That’s why Procter & Gamble formally solicits product ideas via a site called “Connect + Develop,” in recognition of the fact that some of the best ideas are not going to come from the corps of cloistered researchers P&G employs. More than half of P&G’s product initiatives, according to the site, involve “significant collaboration with outside innovators.”

Mining the Social Media Peer Group

But the social networks to which the decision-makers in your organization already belong are fertile ground for seeking answers to vexing questions, for identifying subject matter experts who can help solve problems, for testing ideas and soliciting feedback, for bring customers, partners, suppliers and other critical stakeholders into discussions.

As the study’s authors put it:

No longer do companies need to guess what the decision-makers want, or engage twice-removed customer research projects to find out what the customer thinks. In trusted online environments where the audience is vetted and the rules of engagement are clear, as is the case with most professional networks and online communities for business, companies have an opportunity to make informed decisions for the future—collaboratively with the constituents that matter the most to them. The implementation of collaborative influence strategies designed to interact with customers and prospects will find better results in using social networks to effectively buyild brand experience, opportunities for innovation, and sales opportunities.

Look at it this way. Since 1977, I have belonged to a professional association, the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). The core value of IABC has always been the networking. I can’t begin to count the number of times a fellow IABC member—or group of members—has helped me make a better decision that I could have made alone.

I took advantage of this network either face-to-face (chapter meetings, annual conferences) or by opening up the member directory and calling people one at a time in the hopes that they could help.

Think about Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other online social networks as a professional association’s global conference that never ends. All members are available all the time. I can send a brief query over Twitter or a longer one via the “Answers” feature of LinkedIn and have ideas, suggestions and advice coming back to me within minutes.

Going where the answers are

That’s what the decision-makers in your organization are doing online, according to the SNCR study. Among the primary reasons decision-makers access social media:

• Access to thought-leadership and information I couldn’t get anywhere else
• Increase the speed of collaboration
• Research business decisions

The study reveals that decision-makers’ reliance on online information is shifting with professional networks rapidly becoming a vital decision-support tool—in fact, these business applications have become primary drivers for professionals’ use of social media. They have come to trust the information they get from these networks. When asked the value they derive from social networks, business decision-makers listed the following:

• I am able to reach and connect with professionals
• Collaborating with others provides me with fresh insights, ideas, and actionable information
• My collaboration with peers is strengthened by online collaboration and made more efficient
• My connections online have shared information with me that inform the work I do in meaningful ways

And yet you remained paralyzed—succumbing to the fearmongers who hope to profit from the worries they have created by selling you systems and services designed to allay your concerns by blocking, filtering or implementing Orwellian monitoring of your employees’ activities.

The SNCR survey results should inspire you to reconsider your position. After all, competitors who embrace these networks rather than block them are producing better, faster decisions than you.

Would it help if I told you that nearly 25% of the participants in the study were CEOs?

The role of a leader

You became a leader because of your ability to lead an organization in the right direction, the profitable direction, not the safe one. The evidence is growing clearer all the time that social networks are where work gets done, work that is better than that which your company produced when the opportunities to interaction with stakeholders was far more limited

Pay close attention to the conclusion of the study’s authors: “Laggards who do not understand the value of social networking and its appeal to the emotional side of customer relationship management will lose competitiveness and, ultimately, market share. Perhaps more importantly, they will lose the ability to connect and learn from their customers.”

Avoiding this unhappy scenario means that you, as a leader, need to drive a behavioral change in your organization, one (according to the report) “dominated by valuable content and genuine contributions, transparent honesty, and a commitment to follow where the decision-maker wants to lead.”

Will you lead your organization? Or simply react to the fear-mongers and inhibit your company’s ability to compete?

A Blinding Flash Of The Obvious: Reporters Rely On PR For News

The folks at Crikey are shocked—shocked—to find that 55% of the articles published in 10 hard-copy newspapers were sourced one way or another by public relations.

The author of the article in Crikey—an Australian digital-only news source—believes this to be a dubious statistic, a view supported by the headline that reads, “Over half your news is spin.” The author (whoever that may be, since there’s no byline on the story) also seems to think that it’s a source of shame to practicing journalists. When called about it, “many journalists and editors were defensive,” he (or she) writes. “Who’d blame them? They’re busier than ever, under resourced, on deadline and under pressure. Most refused to respond, others who initially granted an interview then asked for their comments to be withdrawn out of fear they’d be reprimanded, or worse, fired.”

The study was conducted by 40 studnets from the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at the university of Technology Sydney, and is available at a Crikey site (free registration required) with the provocative title, “Spinning the Media.” There, the ACIJ’s Wendy Bacon and UTS student Sasha Pavey conclude:

Our investigation strongly confirms that journalism in Australia today is heavily influenced by commercial interests selling a product, and constrained and blocked by politicians, police and others who control the media message.

The bar charts show the percentage of content across those 10 publications that was driven by media releases and by “other forms of public relations or promotions” and how many were published with “no significant journalism work.”

What strikes me most about this “Joint Crikey-ACIJ Investigation” is the notion that it’s something new. I attended a conference in the 1980s in which a speaker noted that an equally high percentage of the stories appearing in the mainstream press begin with some kind of PR contact. The same point was made in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series on PR, “Spin Cycles,” produced back in 2007. And the Pew Research Project’s Excellence in Journalism unit found, during a week of reviewing Baltimore media, that more “more commonly than in the past…press releases from politicians, governmente agencies and companies were rewritten quickly by multiple outlets and posted on the Web with no additional reporting.”

Crikey and the ACIJ may have done a deep dive into the 10 newspapers they studied, but evidently they didn’t research much beyond that or they might have determined that the situation hardly warrants the sensationalist treatment it was given.

There are two separate issues here. The first is simple: Journalists get a lot of their news from PR people. Does this mean the news readers get from purportedly objective journalists is tainted by PR spin?

Let’s be realistic. Business and government represent a huge part of what journalists cover. And just how do the folks at Crikey think reporters learn about much of the news coming out of government and business? Are investigative reporters hanging around bars and diners hoping to hear snippets of conversation? Are they on the phones all day calling contacts, asking “Hey, mate, anything going on at Acme I should be reporting?” Does all news come from whistle-blowers and tipsters?

The role of media relations professionals is to inform journalists of their organization’s news. That’s how journalists find out that a new CEO has been hired, that a new product is launching, that a smaller company has been acquired, that quarterly earnings have been released. These are legitimate news stories. It is the newspaper’s responsibility to report them. And journalists rely on PR representatives to let them know when these events occur.

Once a reporter has been informed, he generally asks questions, does research, and produces a story. He does not accept the company’s spin. In fact, as former Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski put it, “In most news stories, the spin or angle, is set by the journalist” (the emphasis is mine).

There is a vast difference between spinning the news and providing relevant information about your company to the media. This is a relationship that most journalists take for granted.

Of course, newspapers don’t report on every press release or phone pitch they receive—just the ones about which theyr readers should know. God knows PR agencies shovel a lot of self-serving garbage to the press in the form of media releases and pitches, but that doesn’t mean those releases ever make it into print.

But what about that nasty second issue, that much of the newspaper content originating with PR was reprinted “with no significant journalism work?” Remember Foremski, who said the journalist, not the PR people, are the ones who spin the story? That happens, he says, in the first few paragraphs.

Much of the rest of the story is factual: what the CEO said, when the company was founded, where it is based, the stock price, the specs of a product, the price, etc, etc, etc. There is no need for journalists to rewrite this stuff…It is wasted effort because it duplicates work already done. The journalists should focus on their spin on the story, then assemble the news story from…the press release package.

So on the one hand, there’s Crikey, sounding the alarm that organizations are infiltrating the press and scamming the public with a flood of fluff and spin. On the other hand, there is reality: PR professionals advising the media of their organizations’ news, followed by informed judgments by journalists about which stories warrant coverage. Sometimes these stories are written afresh, sometimes the reporter rewrites the first few graphs to infuse the article with her own perspective, then reporting the facts from the press release pretty much as-is. (And that doesn’t mean the facts haven’t been verified by the reporter, mind you. The appearance of press releases in those 10 Australian newspapers mostly as they appeared in the release does not mean that nobody checked those facts.)

Ultimately, the Crikey-ACIJ “investigation” is just a lot of hot air that doesn’t reveal a damn thing beyond a pathetic ignorance of the wholly ethical process by which the media-PR relationship works at its best.

Personal Vs. Logo Twitter Accounts: Must They Be Mutually Exclusive?

A debate several years ago, during blogging’s heyday, centered on the wisdom of introducing “character blogs.” These aren’t fake blogs. They’re very transparent in their use of a fictional character as the blogger. Some experts defended the practice while others insisted that it could never be a good idea. I fell somewhere in the middle, advising against them in nearly all instances but acknowledging there might be a time when they could work.

An example would be Dwight Schrute’s blog. Schrute is the character played by Rainn Wilson on “The Office” (a show I don’t watch, by the way). Posts are written in character. None of the readers of the blog actually believe a ficitious character is actually writing it. (At least, that’s my fervent hope.)

The argument against the character blog is simple: Wouldn’t it be better if Rainn Wilson blogged?

The fact is, he does. He has Posterous blog and a Twitter account (with nearly 2 million followers). If it’s authenticity, you’re after, Wilson makes plenty of it available.

Why do these concepts need to be mutually exclusive? People don’t read Schrute’s blog (originally penned by Wilson himself but now in the hands of ghost writers) to interact with the actor. They seek a means of staying connected with a favorite TV show in between episodes. And it works.

I have frequently noted that I’d become a loyal reader of any blog under Eric Cartman’s by-line. I got the same argument in response: Wouldn’t it be better if “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone blogged? It would be good, yes, and I’d probably read it. But I’d still expect to laugh my ass off reading a Cartman blog.

The debate seems to have shifted from blogs to Twitter. A number of experts dismiss what they call “logo accounts,” tweets sent under the brand name and not associated with a specific individual. Twitter, they argue, is best when it’s personal.

My answer shouldn’t surprise you: It depends.

The vast majority of the Twitter accounts I follow are individuals because, it’s true, I’d rather hear from people than brands. But I do follow a handful of logo accounts. With those accounts, I honestly don’t give a damn who’s writing it. My motivation for following in the first place was the timely receipt of information.

CNN is one example. I follow the account because I want to get headlines fast. I’m a news junkie, always have been, and getting a tweet that notifies me of the latest events satisfies my craving. I have no interest in what reporter wrote the story or what he thinks of it. I want the 140-character news hook.

Nearly 1 million people are happy to get the tweets from CNN without that personal touch.

The Dell Outlet is another example, with nearly 1.6 million followers who want only the latest deal they can get. There is a name attached to the account—@StephanieAtDell can be reached with questions or problems. But the account itself serves just one purpose: notification of special offers on “refurbished, scratch-and-dent and previously ordered new Dell product.” Would it be a better account if it were named @StephanieDellOutlet?

I don’t think so. First, who cares? The personality just isn’t an issue if my goal is simple notification. Second, what happens when Stephanie leaves? Yes, I know the account can be renamed while maintaining its followers, but some degree of confusion would surely follow.

At Intel, two employees are identified in the profile as the handlers of the account. If those responsibilities change, the account stays the same while the profile gets updated. Why not just give each Intel tweeter their own account? In fact, several Intel employees do tweet. In fact, both of the employees currently listed on the @Intel account are identified by their Twitter handles, and the company actively encourages employees to connect with each other via their Twitter accounts. But @Intel is the official, authoritative account that serves as the corporation’s statement of record. That’s an important distinction.

And there’s no reason—none at all—that Intel can’t benefit from adopting both approaches.

When discussing Dell, the example of the dozens of employees with NameAtDell accounts is usually presented. I agree that there is huge opportunity in having real people like my friends Lionel Menchaca (@LionelAtDell) and Richard Binhammer (@RichardAtDell) building relationships and personifying the Dell brand.

But there’s no denying the power of 1.6 million people anxiously awaiting the next notice of a special deal compared to the fewer than 2,000 to 10,000 people following the average Dell employee.

One of Twitter’s strengths is its flexibility. It can be used for just about anything you can dream up for it. In mosti instances, I agree that the authentic human touch is important. But to suggest that it’s a requirement, that every branded logo account would be better if it contained a real person’s name and avatar, is a mistake. It locks organizations into an approach that may honestly not be the best way to achieve their particular goal.

And what about all the people following brand accounts? Are we to assume they just don’t get it? That every time someone reads a tweet form @Starbucks they’re thinking, “This would lock me into the brand more if I could see the face and read the name of the person behind it?” Somehow I doubt it.

Besides, a logo account is often the means by which companies take their first tentative steps into Twitter. Nervous, they set up an account to which a number of authorized employees can post. When the sky doesn’t fall on them, they screw up their courage and let a few employees open personal/business accounts.

So don’t be too fast to dismiss logo accounts on Twitter. If they serve the purpose for which they were created, there’s no reason to fall victim to the punditry that suggests they’re some kind of misguided, clueless mistake.

Forrester’s Blogging Policy Misses The IP Point

Warning: Long post follows.

Readers of this blog and listeners to my podcast, “For Immediate Release,” know thast I focus primarily on the impact of online media on organizational communications. As a blogger and a podcaster with an audience, companies routinely reach out to me with their news and information in the hopes that I’ll find their content interesting enough to share. It’s only about 9:30 a.m. here in the Bay Area and I’ve already received about a dozen such pitches today via email.

Forrester Research is one of the organizations that engages in such outreach—and, candidly, it’s one of the few organizations whose content actually is of enough interest for me to share it with my community. When Forrester issues a report that deals with social media and communications, Forrester graciously offers me a copy of the report. These reports sell for hundreds of dollars or more, and as an independent consultant, I couldn’t possibly justify the cost of purchasing one. Because Forrester shares its intellectual property with me at no cost, I’m able to opine on the research and share the findings I believe are most significant.

All of which I do on my own blog and my own podcast. As a result, readers and listeners learn about the research who otherwise may never have known it existed. Some may become Forrester customers. Which is exactly why Forrester engages in such outreach: Its IP is only worth as much as people are willing to spend on it. The more people who pay for it, the more it’s worth.

Which is why I’m so completely dumbfounded at Forrester’s much-discussed analyst blogging policy. The company is confining its analysts to blogs that reside on Forrester’s own platform for posts about research. The reason, according to Forrester and several of its analysts, has everything to do with intellectual property (IP). In a recent post, Forrester VP Josh Bernoff (for whom I have enormous respect and admiration) explained:

What people need to understand is that Forrester is an intellectual property company, and the opinions of our analysts are our product. Blogging is an extension of the other work we do—doing research, writing reports, working with clients, and giving speeches, for example.

...for Forrester, it serves our clients better to be able to get to all our blogs from one place, and to know the opinions of analysts that they see are part of the other opinions they read in our reports, in press quotes, and in everywhere else we talk.

The revelation of the policy has ignited controversy with opponents and proponents lining up with their various arguments. But for me, the underlying IP argument is perplexing. Consider this comment from Dana Baxter, left to the SageCircle blog that first reported on the policy and kicked off the whole debate:

I regularly read Bruce Tempkin’s blog “Customer Experience Matters” and it’s one of the best blogs I’ve run across. He seems to regularly refer back to Forrester. I didn’t even know that Forrester had research in customer experience until I read his blog. I know I’m not a client of Forrester, so they aren’t making money from me, but I’ve been trying to make the case based on his work. But if they’re shutting down his blog, then I don’t really want to read what Forrester has to say.

This is the key issue. When analysts have their own blogs with dedicated followings, their discussion of the research with which they’re involved can reach people the official Forrester blogs won’t reach. (If you think that’s not true, go back and read Dana’s comment again.) And if keeping the IP on the Forrester site is so all-fired important, why share it with the likes of me so I can report the same IP on my blog and podcast?

(Of course, after reading this post, maybe they’ll stop sharing their IP with me.)

I’m not the only one making this observation. Writing on GigaOm, Mathew Ingram says:

In his blog post, Bernoff defended the new policy as a necessary step, saying Forrester is “an intellectual property company, and the opinions of analysts are our product.” But a strong analyst who connects with readers and builds a following, wherever that following might occur, is a benefit to the company they work for, even if he or she eventually leaves to pursue other opportunities. That is the nature of a web-based business—something the research industry is becoming, whether it likes it or not.

Trying to confine analysts and control the access they have to readers through the web is not only wrongheaded (in our view) but ultimately futile. Strong analysts who are treated in this way will leave anyway, thus defeating the purpose. We believe that social media tools can be used both to build personal brands and to benefit the overall corporate brand, and that is what we encourage.

Why not aggregate content?

The IP distinction is one that Forrester’s proponents raise repeatedly in the debate. The notion seems to suggest that analysts who write about their work on their own blogs are somehow sapping Forrester of its IP. Maybe I’m just dense, but I don’t see how, particularly if those blogs link back to Forrester, bringing the company to the attention of new prospects.

Other companies with bloggers don’t compare because, Bernoff argues, their products aren’t about IP. I would argue that Microsoft and IBM are entirely about IP. Both companies encourage their employees to blog wherever they like. The companies link to those blogs on a page that links to all of the company’s bloggers. (Here are links to Microsoft’s and IBM’s employee blog directories.)

Thomas Nelson Publishers goes one better, pulling the content from each of its employee bloggers into a chronological display of the most recent posts from company bloggers. Admittedly, these posts don’t deal with IP at anywhere near Forrester’s level, but it seems a logical solution, one Tac Anderson suggested in a comment to a post about the policy by Cliff Condon, Forrester’s VP in charge of the company’s social media efforts. Condon replied that too few Forrester analysts are blogging to justify such an effort. ” I feel it’s up to Forrester to help more analysts start blogging by providing them a platform for doing it (rather than creating it on their own).”

In fact, Condon never even mentions IP in his post, asserting instead that the policy is designed to give Forrester analysts a tool designed to get them more involved in social media, to provide each analyst with a personal blog and to make it easier for Forrester clients.

I have no argument with these goals. After all, Hill & Knowlton provides a platform for its counselors to use for blogging. The difference, though, is that Hill & Knowlton doesn’t require its staff to use the platform. Many of the PR agency’s staff maintain their own blogs; their posts are aggregated on the same platform along with original posts.

Is it about control?

Forrester’s representatives argue that the policy isn’t about wielding control over what analyst bloggers write. In fact, they argue, analysts are being encouraged to stretch with their blogs.

Still, one defender of Forrester’s policy—Edison Research Strategy and Marketing VP Tom Webster—thinks control may well have something to do with it, pointing to a post former Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote on his Web Strategy blog that required a follow-up apology. Writes Webster:

This could have (and maybe did) hurt Forrester right in the wallet. It’s not my intent to rehash that particular incident, but let’s all agree it was a significant black eye for the company and indeed the analyst industry as a whole. Forrester can afford to lose an analyst here and there -– but they can’t afford incidents like this.

(Webster, by the way, is a terrific dinner companion.)

I’m inclined to take Forrester’s word for it that the policy isn’t designed to keep a tight rein on its bloggers. After all, a well-communicated policy—like the one Hill & Knowlton implemented—would prevent virtually all such mistakes.

A policy would also preclude analysts from giving away more of Forrester’s IP than they should. But on this point, it’s worth looking at an article appearing in the March 2010 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead, and a quote from lyricist John Perry Barlow:

What people today are beginning to realize is what became obvious to us back then—the important correlation is the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity and value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make something, the more valuable it becomes. In the physical world, that works beautifully. But we couldn’t regulate (taping at) our shows, and you can’t online. The Internet doesn’t behave that way. But here’s the thing: if I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced. That was the value proposition with the Dead.

Yep, that’s intellectual property Barlow’s talking about.

So I’m still befuddled about this notion of lost IP. I still don’t grasp how an analyst blogging about the research he’s engaged in on his own blog, informed by Forrester’s blogging guidelines, represents a tangible loss to Forrester. Do they not grasp what Barlow does? Are they less savvy about social media than they’ve been claiming they are?

The Altimeter equation

Most of the speculation by those aghast at the policy suggest its origins rest with The Altimeter Group, founded by former Forrester vice president Charlene Li; Owyang and Ray Wang are both partners who joined Li and Altimeter after leaving Forrester. In his SageCircle post, strategist Carter Lusher writes:

Forrester CEO George Colony is well aware of that savvy analysts can build their personal brands via their positions as Forrester analysts amplified by social media (see the post on “Altimeter Envy”). As a consequence, a Forrester policy that tries to restrict analysts’ personally-branded research blogs works to reduce the possibility that the analysts will build a valuable personal brand leading to their departure.

I’d be more inclined to call this “The Scoble Effect.” Uberblogger Robert Scoble built his audience and his personal brand while blogging about Microsoft on his personal blog. He became Microsoft’s de facto spokesperson, its voice in the social media space. When he left Microsoft, he took that brand with him to each of his subsequent ventures. No single Microsoft blogger has been able to capture the share of attention that Scoble enjoyed, while Scoble ceretainly benefitted from the personal brand he had built based on Microsoft’s IP.

(Side question: If Scoble had been forced to blog on a dedicated Microsoft platform, would the company have deleted that blog upon his departure? One high-tech company—I can’t recall which—was called out in the blogosphere for doing just that and had to reinstate the posts in the face of accusations of altering history.)

I’m not inside the heads of Forrester’s leaders, so I can’t say how much of a factor the fear of losing analysts who build strong personal brands played in the decision. I’d be disappointed if it was a major consideration, since it seems petty and mean-spirited. In his post on the kerfuffle, C. Edward Brice cited David Armano’s brandividuals, “people who represent your brand and their own, balancing the two may be something we see more of, not less as companies and brands try to figure out how to engage on a web that’s become increasingly social and personal.” Brice, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Lumension Security, writes, “Basically today when you hire someone you bring their on-line social network into your company, and when they leave they take it with them.”

And if you already had a blog?

One of those defending the policy is new Forrester analyst Augie Ray, who will abandon his “Experience: The Blog” in order to comply with the Forrester policy. Ray isn’t thrilled with dropping the blog that has accounted for so much time and energy.

But I also understand Forrester’s reasons for the changes.  There are obvious benefits to the company of aggregating intellectual property on Forrester.com, including Search Engine relevance and creating a marketing platform that demonstrates the breadth and depth of analysts’ brainpower and coverage.

I appreciate Ray’s measured response, but I think it misses the point. He has developed a following on his blog and not all of them will necessarily follow him to the Forrester platform. That represents a considerable number of people Forrester won’t reach with its message, limiting the exposure to prospective new paying customers.

Consider Scott Monty, who brought his considerable following with him to his job managing Ford Motor Company’s social media efforts. He has used the blog effectively as a means of telling Ford’s story to a large audience than he could reach if he had been forced to scuttle his blog and start anew on a dedicated Ford platform.

The value of Scott’s Ford-focused posts still accrues to Ford (even as he continues to build his personal brand), just as the value of a Forrester analyst’s post on her own blog would still accrue to Forrester. Sure, it can also serve to build the blogger’s own brand, but even Forrester’s Bernoff admits that his brand has been built just fine without his own blog. So what’s the difference?

From a personal perspective, had Joe Jaffe told me that I’d have to give up my blog and podcast before joining crayon, I would have declined the offer. While a lot of prospective Forrester analysts may agree to drop their blogs in order to work there, it’s impossible to know how many may never apply in the first place knowing what the policy is. Some have argued that nobody would pass on the job to salvage their blog, but if I would, I’m probably not alone.

Did Forrester conduct a cost-benefit analysis?

I wonder if the powers that be at Forrester engaged in a cost-benefit analysis. What is it truly costing in terms of lost IP? (To reiterate, I can’t figure out where they’d lose a single nickel.) What is the cost if an analyst builds a personal brand and then leaves, taking her blog with her? (You’d also have to factor in how many of those analysts would have left anyway.) And what is the benefit of the expanded reach of Forrester’s messages and stories, the same reach that leads marketers to offer the IP free of charge to people like me?

I may have just answered my own question. If a cost-benefit analysis had been done, I can’t believe it would have led Forrester to adopt this policy.

So why, then? It’s either a provincial and wrong-minded understanding of IP or a knee-jerk reaction to the Altimeter Group situation.

Either way, it’s a mistake.

It’s also Forrester’s call, not mine. The company produces terrific research and I hope this all works out for them and their analysts in the long run.

Site Of The month

Policy Tool for Social Media

I can’t quite say I’m a fan of this site, created by David R. Canton, one of Canada’s leading

authorities in Internet and technology-related legal issues. It’s definitely worth a look,

though, if your organization is one of the majority that still has no social media policy for

employees.

The site is a wizard—that is, it walks you through steps asking for your input. When you

finish, it creates a social media policy for you.

Keep in mind that this is based on Canadian law. More to the point, you should never adopt a

policy based on a cookie-cutter approach. However, this could present you with a decent first

draft upon which to build a unique policy that addresses your organization’s unique

circumstances.

http://socialmedia.policytool.net

HC+T Update

• I’m delivering a keynote address on April 16 in Atlanta at the Customer Based Marketing Strategies conference, part of the Forum for Healthcare Strategists
• I’m presenting a session at the Social Media Plus conference in Philadelphia on May 25
• I’m speaking at the NewComm Forum in San Mateo, California. Join me there! I have a discount code to share that will get you $500 off! Register now with the code NCF500. This is the BEST advanced social media conference, bar none. Details are at http://www.newcommforum.com.

Boilerplate and Subscription Information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology. You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and
selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2010, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1) Questions Your CEO Should Ask Before Blogging

The question of CEO blogging keeps coming up. Opinions mostly fall in two camps:

• All CEOs should blog. As the leaders and chief communicators of their organizations, it is incumbent on CEOs to represent their companies in the social space where so much influence is wielded.
• No CEOs should blog. Because of regulations that govern the kinds of statements CEOs can make, and when, there is just too much risk that an innocent remark could result in a fine.

As with most things, though, the question of CEO blogging is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Clearly CEOs can blog, as evidenced by the number of CEOs who do.

If your CEO is considering blogging, have him or her answer these questions before taking the plunge:

Are you the best person in the company to assume this role?

In the early days of corporate blogging, GM launched one of the earliest blogs penned by a senior executive. It wasn’t then-CEO Rick Wagoner, but rather Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. The decision was based on the fact that the most compelling kinds of conversations GM could have would be about cars, not the automotive business. Since Lutz was the most senior executive with direct responsibility for the vehicles GM produced, he became the executive blogger. Wagoner did post from time to time, when it was important for the CEO’s voice to be associated with the message, using a different company blog.

The focus of the blog is also the key to the next question:

Are you willing to blog about what your stakeholders want to talk about?

Far too many corporate and CEO blogs are filled with material the company wants to push to audiences. While this may make leaders feel good about using a blog, odds are that readers won’t flock to it. These messages are being pushed to them through any number of channels. For a blog to succeed, you need to start conversations about topics your stakeholders want to talk about. Do you know what those topics are? And are you prepared to address them, even if they’re not always what you think is important? If you do focus on topics your readers care about, it becomes easier to digress from time to time with topics you want to share with them. The more the blog becomes a locus of conversation and community, the more interested your readers will be in some of the issues you want to put on the table.

Are you ready to engage your stakeholders in conversation?

The point is debatable, but I don’t believe you have a blog unless you’re publishing reader comments. Without comments enabled, you’re just using blogging software to publish a column. Leaders who blog need to be ready to pay attention to reader feedback and input, and even engage in it. This doesn’t mean a CEO needs to actually read every comment left to his blog, particularly if it becomes popular and attracts hundreds of comments for every post. At some companies, a staff reads the comments, aggregates them based on their topics and sentiment, and delivers a summary report to the executive. Some executives engage directly in the comment while others simply write a follow-up post acknowledging what he heard from readers. But to view an executive blog as just one more one-way, top-down channel is to dramatically reduce the likelihood that stakeholders will pay attention to it. These are people who have come to expect interaction as part of the blogging experience.

Are you willing to commit to posting something regularly—that you’ve written yourself?

You can post as often as you like, but you must post at least weekly (three times a week is better) in order to build momentum, to build the expectation that you’re going to be opening discussions.

This is not a task you can offload to a PR staffer, the way you could when your byline appeared under the ghost-written CEO column that appeared on the inside front cover of the employee magazine. The whole idea underlying a blog is that it’s an authentic, honest message that you wanted to deliver and open for conversation. Nothing is more disingenuous than saying, “This is my blog, I’ve started it so we can have a dialogue about our business, but I’m not really writing it; it’s just not important enough for me to commit that kind of time.”

Your blog doesn’t need to take all that much time. In response to CEOs who have told me they don’t have the time to write a 1,500-word blog post, I respond, “That’s good; your readers don’t have time to read a 1,500-word blog post.” Short, pithy observations, explanations, and reports are ideal. What’s more, you don’t have to actually type anything. Marriott International CEO Bill Marriott dictates his posts into a digital recorder, which is transcribed (word for word) by his staff. At HP, a senior executive calls his posts into a voice-mail box established just for that purpose; his messages are also transcribed by staff for posting.

Ultimately, though, your view should be that you don’t have time not to blog. You should recognize what other CEOs—like Thomas Nelson Publishers CEO Michael Hyatt—have realized: that blogging ultimately saves time by reducing the more time-consuming communications that eat into your day. If you blog well, you’ll find that you’ve reallocated much of the time you spent less efficiently with other channels to your blog.

Are you well-schooled in what you can’t say?

Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott International, writes about topics that will never cause regulatory problems. His posts talk about his staff, Marriott’s corporate social responsibility efforts, and other topics that would never raise an eyebrow at the SEC. Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, on the other hand, does blog about the business side of Sun, but is savvy enough about the regulations that govern his words that he is able to avoid writing anything that would cause him trouble. Do you know enough about the regulations, what kinds of off-the-cuff remarks might be viewed as a material forward-looking statement or a revelation about earnings? If not, don’t blog.

Of course, if you’re with a privately held company not subject to SEC rules, this isn’t as important a consideration, although you should keep in mind that there are agencies regulating your business besides the SEC.

Are you prepared to talk about bad news and unpleasant topics?

Your blog cannot be all happy talk, even when your company is hit with bad news. Candor and credibility are contingent upon your being willing to address the issues about which your stakeholders want to hear from you. Are you ready to tackle bad news on your blog and to hear what your stakeholders have to say about it?

If you answer “no” to any of these questions, then you’re not a likely candidate for a CEO blog.

There are alternatives, however, if you’re bound and determined to have your CEO voice heard in the socialmedia space:

• Group blogs—Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly posts an occasional item to the Nuts About Southwest blog, but only when the CEO’s voice needs to be heard. The blog is ready and available to him because of the community of Southwest employees who keep it populated with a wide variety of posts.
• Facebook—A fan page on Facebook affords you an opportunity to create content stakeholders might be interested in and then add a CEO commentary only when the occasion calls for it.
• Video—If your concern is that you’re not the world’s greatest writer, you could always opt for a video blog, speaking (not reading) your comments to a camera. There’s actually a tangible benefit to this approach: Your stakeholders can look into your eyes while you’re talking to them. You can upload your videos to a YouTube channel and embed the YouTube videos in your blog, making it easy for others to spread your words across other channels.

What other criteria should a CEO consider before undertaking a blog?

Here are some other CEOs who blog:

• Paul Levy, CEO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
• John Mackey, CEO, Whole Foods Markets
• Mike Critelli, now-retired Executive Chairman, Pitney Bowes
• Richard Edelman, Edelman Public Relations

There are many other CEO bloggers. Whose CEO blog would you point to as an excellent example?

2) Open Access Is Smart Business, Not An Employee Entitlement

At first, I shrugged off the semi-literate comment left to one of my posts over on Stop Blocking, the site I started to advocate for reasonable employee access to the Net, and particularly to social media sites.

The post to which “reason,” as he called himself left a comment reported on a study that showed 54% of companies were blocking access. Here’s his response:

isnt it funny in todays world how everyone thinks they deserve better than what they are getting without haveing to really work for it no job owes you facebook time so feel your rights are being taken for granted grow up you big baby work time is not your fun time so if you block your workers from facebook @ work dont feel that blocking reduces productivity and engagement, limits recruiting capabilities, and denies networking that ultimately benefits the organization. thats a bunch of crap do your job facebook dont pay your bills you lucky to even have a job.

I blew off the comment initially, relegating it to the “just doesn’t get it” dustbin. But I found the comment kept coming back to me, not because reason’s reasoning is right but because he seems to think that I’m advocating for employee rights in my efforts to get companies to stop blocking.

I’m not an employee rights advocate. If I were, very few of my clients would be interested in my services. My goal is to help organizations succeed. I’ve achieved my goals if companies are more profitable, more competitive, more nimble, more productive. I’m campaigning to get companies to open employee access to social sites because increasingly the networked connectivity of workers is driving competitiveness, productivity and other indicators of improved performance.

The fact is, through all my years working in employee communications, I’ve never been concerned with whether employees are happy. It’s not a company’s job to ensure employee happiness. Employee job satisfaction is another story. It’s tangible, it’s measurable and it has a direct bearing on employee engagement, which is a predictor of organizational growth.

But even job satisfaction is just one return a company gets from networked employees. Zappos encourages its employees to network on the job, resulting in a reputation for stellar customer service. Employees engaged in their social networks can also reduce the cost and improve the quality of recruiting. It can surface issues the company needs to address. It can generate ideas for new products and services. It improves employee productivity.

On that last note, productivity, I came across an item today on TMCnet sporting the provocative headline, “Workplace Productivity at an All-Time Low.” The press release touted the products of a company called Pandora—not the music streaming site, blocked by a number of companies—but rather one that “allows managers to analyze activities performed by employees and the time spent on different work items. It also affords the ability to track computer usage at a group and/or an individual level, cross-reference activities reported by an employee, and access an employee’s desktop in real-time.”

The all-time low productivity claim is based on this calculation:

On average, workers with an Internet connection spend 21 hours per week online while in the office, a little more than four hours per day. And on average, 26% of that time is spent on personal-interest websites. That amounts to roughly an hour per day, or 22 hours per month.

Pandora is just one of many companies that profit from the fear they produce with such outlandish claims. As I’ve repeatedly noted, these calculations don’t account for the benefits such networking brings to the organization, the improved productivity highlighted in a University of Melbourne study, or the amount of work these employees perform outside the 9-to-5 office hours because they’re networked. In fact, another story that crossed my desk today points out that companies in the UK were able to maintain productivity even as snowbound workers were unable to get to the office because their ability to connect with each other and the office let them get their work done from home.

And, as I’ve also noted before, these lost-productivity assertions don’t stand up to statistical scrutiny. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased in the third quarter of 2009 by 8.1%. That’s a far more credible number than the back-of-the-envelope calculations Pandora, Websense and other monitoring-and-blocking companies use in their scare campaigns. In fact, it reveals the productivity claims by these companies as an outright lie.

Yet these tactics continue to influence managers, as evidenced by the fact that most companies block access despite the fact that blocking is contrary to their own self interests.

Leaders need to realize that organizations that encourage their employees to network during work—guided by clear policies and improved business literacy—will experience success that eclipses that of organizations that block access.

It’s not a question of employee entitlements. It’s a question of smart business practices.

3) Next Webinar: Five New Communication Technologies You Need to Know

A five-week Webinar with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, March 1, 2010
Cost: US $195
Register here

It seems that each new year brings communicators the challenge of learning the latest technologies that will affect the way they do their jobs. But 2010 heralds the introduction of several new online technologies that will have a more profound impact than usual. In this illuminating Webinar, online communication expert Shel Holtz will guide you through five of the most important technologies you’ll need to understand as you adapt your communication strategies to the tools embraced by your publics.

During each of the Webinar’s five weeks, Shel will bring you up to speed on a different online trend. These will include:

• The real-time web—Since its inception in 1989, the World Wide Web has been a repository of static content. You found updated sites by polling them. The change to a real-time web, with updates pushed to you instantly, heralds a significant change in how the web will impact your organization and how you can use it to your company’s advantage.
  
  
• Augmented Reality—If you’ve seen a football game in the last few years, you’ve seen Augmented Reality (AR) in the shape of a digital yellow line indicating the spit to be reached for a first down. Now it’s being used for everything from helping you find the nearest subway entrance via your smart phone to promoting music on the web.
  
  
• HTML 5—We were told HTML 4 would be the last update to the web scripting language, but HTML 5 is here and will significantly alter the way your audiences interact with online content. You need to be ready to adopt it.
  
  
• The app revolution—When Apple introduced the App Store with the launch of the iPhone, it was empty. Apps were not Apple’s focus, but they have become the driving force behind the iPhone and its competitors. They’ve even extended beyond smart phones to printers and television. Will you know when an app is a requirement to achieve your communication strategy?
  
  
• GPS and location services—If you haven’t ‘checked in” at a location with the mobile game FourSquare, you know somebody who has. The localization of online content is being aided by the GPS functionality of smart phones, and the business uses are just now being conceived.

When management asks whether you should be using these technologies, you’ll need the answer. Even better will be proposing their use strategically before management is even aware of them.

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

To get an overview of how these Webinars work, visit http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and view the demo video.

Webinar cost: US $195

Register here

4. What Employee Communications Looks Like In The Networked Company

Awareness is rising of the impact on business of networked employees—those workers who are continuously connected to their social circles and can tap into them at will. The discussion seems to be shifting, ever so slowly, to the characteristics of companies that, rather than inhibiting these traits, want to reap the benefits of a networked workforce. Recent posts by Olivier Blanchard and Valeria Maltoni have speculated on the nature of these companies. Olivier calls them P2P companies; Valeria refers to them as connected companies.

They both see the recruiting process changing, for example, to one of inviting people already connected to the company through online and offline social networks to come work for them. The IT department becomes the ET department—Technology Enablement. P2P companies don’t outsource customer service. Collaboration is supported by the use of the best tools available. And, according to Maltoni, “Facilitating conversations inside and outside the connected company means designing business through interactions.”

You’ll recognize more and more of these traits as existing companies evolve into networked companies and startups embrace the P2P model. But succeeding under the P2P model won’t happen just because it seems right. It’ll take work. Companies have to implement systems to support the model.

Employee Communications is a critical function that must adapt in order to accommodate its role in a networked company. Inspired by Valeria and Olivier,  I’d like to offer a list of characteristics of the employee communications function in the networked/P2P company.

Ease employee access to social networks. Both Olivier and Valeria have noted that connected companies won’t block access to social networks. Leaving access unfettered is, indeed, a requirement, but companies will need to go a few steps beyond unshackling employees from the restrictions that keep them from connecting. It will be incumbent on the internal communications function to identify communities within social networks where the company’s products, services, operations, and other dimensions are discussed and even summarize the nature of the conversation taking place in this communities. Helping employees identify where the conversation is can help them begin participating in a more meaningful way. After all, it is within some of these communities where employees will establish and build relationships with people who are likely to become candidates for employment. These networks are also where employees will glean insights from customers that could lead to product or service innovation.

Show employees who’s saying what, right now. Employees already participate in the networks and communities aligned with their interests. Some may be interested in engaging elsewhere, such as communities they’ve never heard of where the company or its brands are being discussed. At the least, companies should provide a directory of these communities. Ideally, however, companies will let employees see, in as close to real time as possible, what the members of those communities are saying about the company. You might consider this a curator role for Employee Communications, one that demonstrates the sentiment of real people with real influence who are having real conversations about your organization. I can easily see a dashboard on the intranet portal with the very latest customer sentiments along with a link to more detailed content from these communities.

Communicate research results. Organizations of all stripes spend a ton of money on consumer research. Few share the results of the research with employees company-wide; it’s data that, for one reason or another, is usually made available only to brand team members. With all employees networking with customers, knowledge of the study results can inform the conversation. Internal communications needs to become a channel for sharing the results of market research throughout the organization.

Increase business literacy. Employees need to know the business. It’s a sad fact that most frontline employees couldn’t answer basic questions about the business beyond the work of their own department. It’s equally sad that this is most often true because nobody bothers to teach them about the business and the resources for them to teach themselves aren’t readily available. Employee Communications needs to focus considerable effort on ensuring employees are savvy about the company for which they work.

Build awareness of business initiatives. In addition to general business literacy, employees need to know about specific initiatives. Employees in a hospital that has started marketing its quality ratings should know about the effort. Employees in a manufacturing organization that has taken steps to be more sustainable should be able to talk intelligently about what that means.

Make sure everyone knows the rules of the road. Too often, organizations assume that because a policy has been published, everyone knows what it is. Employee Communications needs to communicate the policies and guidelines that govern employee activity in online communities on an ongoing basis through multiple channels. No employee should ever be surprised to learn they have violated a policy.

Champion and support internal training. Some of the companies that have the most positive employee engagement are ones in which employees can attend classes to learn about how to engage. At Zappos, employees can take classes on Twitter. The Mayo Clinic offers tweetcamps, where doctors and other staff can learn about social media. Ideally, the Internal Communications team will partner with the Training department to develop learning opportunities—face-to-face and online—that will help employees get business-literate and learn about social networking and how their engagement can produce meaningful results for the company.

Enlist company advocates. Best Buy’s Twelpforce is one of the more forward-thinking initiatives for engaging front-line employees with customers. Blueshirts—the employees who work in the retail stores—volunteered to respond to queries sent via Twitter to the Twelpforce account. Companies can take this concept beyond the initiative level, finding those engaged employees—that is, the employees who want to make discretionary efforts on behalf of the company, train them, and get them into vital communities. (This kind of engagement must be disclosed and transparent, of course. I’m not suggesting anything deceptive, just a means of identifying and activating those employees who want to be part of the organization’s organic networking efforts.)

Work with ET to ensure systems support networking. If IT has transformed into Technology Enablement, they are the ideal partner for Employee Communications to identify and launch the tools employees can best use to network with one another. The technology department can also ensure the intranet supports the modules referenced earlier, such as business literacy training, communication of research results, and real-time updates of who’s saying what about the company in key online communities.

All of this has to happen along with much of the traditional work Employee Communications performs, such as letting employees know that benefits enrollment is coming, supporting an internal change process, and informing employees about decisions that will affect them. In a networked company, there’s no question in my mind that the role of Employee Communications becomes bigger and more important.

What other traits should characterize the Employee Communications function in the networked organization?

5. The News Industry’s Turmoil Increases The Complexity Of PR

There has been a lot of news about news lately and on the surface, none of it bodes well for the traditional newspaper business, regardless of whether you’re talking about paper newspapers or their online cousins. It does, however, reveal opportunities for people working in PR.

It should come as no surprise that readership of newspapers—both print and online—continues to decline. A Harris poll released just yesterday finds that only two out of five Americans read a newspaper every day, while 72% read a newspaper at least weekly. Ten percent never read a newspaper.

I’m not convinced that last number is all that different than it was, say, 30 years ago. I remember the number of people I encountered when I was in journalism school who didn’t read newspapers—and this was back in the days of the manual typewriter. But the size of the traditional news audience is shrinking. In a presentation delivered at Yale, Pew Internet and American Life Project Director Lee Rainie pointed out that 19% of Americans get no daily news at all, up from about 14% a decade ago. What’s more, Rainie pointed out, the people who do consume news daily spend eight fewer minutes with the news than they used to.

If this isn’t dire enough, the population of newspaper reader is aging; the younger you are, the less likely you are to read a newspaper every day. Nearly two-thirds of those 55 and over make daily newspaper reading a habit. (That might explain my own morning routine.)

All of this—and a host of other statistics that seem to predict the ultimate demise of the traditional news business—leads a lot of communicators to wonder if there’s any value in maintaining a traditional media relations function.

But shrinkage isn’t the same as death. There’s no indication that the trend will continue until there are no newspaper readers.

Remaining newspaper readers still matter

Consider this: While less than a quarter of people 18 to 34 read a daily newspaper, that’s not a number to be trifled with. The 18-24-year-old demographic accounts for about 25% of the U.S. population, or about 77 million people. When you have 19 million young people reading newspapers every day, you’d be foolish to ignore the channel when trying to reach that market, especially when you consider that many of them are likely influencers.

Remember, most of the content reported via social media is not original reporting. Bloggers, Twitterers and others are repurposing content that comes primarily from newspapers. The news that so many people get through these other channels originates in newspapers and is reported through social media by people who read newspapers. Having your story told in a newspaper increases the likelihood that it will be seen by people who rely on alternative sources for their news. Just today, PostRank reported that 80% of all audience engagement is offsite. That means even bloggers’ content is being read on Facebook, Digg, and other venues other than the blog where it was originally produced. It isn’t just newspapers that are in this boat.

In a study that focused on the news delivered over a weeklong period in one major city—Baltimore—the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that, far and away, newspapers were responsible for reporting new information. Examining six key story lines, Pew determined that 95% of new information came from a combination of traditional media (newspapers, television and niche media, with newspapers leading the pack) while “new media”—including social media—reported the least new information.

The Pew study also found that the press was responsible for triggering only 15% of the news they covered. The rest came from other sources. If you’ve been thinking the downturn in the news business has signaled the end of any need for traditional media relations, think again. Yes, 10% of people who have social networking profiles get news through those sites. But those sites didn’t originate the news. By and large newspapers did.

This means the the role of the newspaper is shifting. They remain the primary source of first reporting, but now serve as the inadvertent distributor of news to secondary channels through which an increasing number of people get their news.

A study I’d like to see would determine if social media content creators are among the remaining newspaper readers. I’d be willing to bet real money that they are.

Authoritative sources still matter

It’s equally important to have channels that let you get your organization’s news directly to its audiences. While media relations will be important for the foreseeable future, you’re competing for a shrinking amount of news space. The Baltimore Sun, for example, produced 32% fewer news stories in the period of the Pew study than it did 10 years earlier and 73% fewer than it did in 1991.

Some smug new-media pundits may be basking in the warmth of the certain knowledge that blogs and other social channels have taken up the slack. But that’s not so. According to the Pew study—as I suggested above—social media has served mostly to notify readers of the mainstream article’s existence. Social media has a greater impact on the speed with which news breaks than on the overall number of new stories. Citizen journalism has its place to be sure (just look at the iReports CNN is including in its coverage of the Haitian earthquake), it’s not panning out as a replacement for professional journalism. Social media is finding a more comfortable niche in areas such as fundraising (again, look at the Haiti situation, where social media is responsible for raising awareness of the U.S. State Department and Red Cross relief efforts, generating millions of dollars in giving.)

The repetition of news items by social media content producers—from blog posts to tweets—satisfies the growing preference for news grazing, consuming bits of news all the time instead of all at once (whether that’s sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper for half an hour or watching the nightly news). Fewer people get their news at all one regular time than get it from time to time, according to numbers Rainie cited during his Yale talk.

But this repurposing of news creates confusion. As the Project for Excellence in Journalism put it, “As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.”

Blogger Adam Sherk beat me to the punch with the observation that the long-abused press release still has legs: “Companies can increase the likelihood of their press releases being used by bloggers and local news sources by giving them a more news-like tone and dialing down the marketing hype,” he writes. Press releases bearing the company’s official imprint can be authoritative statements of record in the absence of other sources people can trust.

Press releases still matter

That’s a significant change in the press release’s former role as a pitch to mainstream media. That role is dead, but as a channel for getting information directly to people—information they can cite—the press release has new life. (They also do a bang-up job of search engine optimization, when done right.)

You should also read Shannon Cherry’s post extolling the virtues of making your press releases available for subscription via an RSS feed, which contradicts the growing popular belief that RSS has outlived its usefulness. “Many reporters are using RSS feeds to get their releases, because they can customize what they are receiving for their target market,” Cherry writes. “Many of the press release posting sites only have one feed, so journalists avoid them due to all the clutter of releases not pertinent to them. They would certainly rather subscribe to news feeds, like your press release feed, that’s targeted.”

In other words, if you want your company’s or client’s story told, you need to make sure it’s everywhere. To get social media content creators to report it, you need to do your damnedest to get it into the papers. To get it in the papers, you need to maintain a solid media relations effort that accommodates reporters’ preferences (like RSS). You also need to go directly to influencers (through blogger outreach) and directly to the public (through a variety of techniques ranging from a strategic social media presence to tried-and-true SEO practices).

The news space has grown more complex. The sophistication of your efforts to earn coverage need to grow with it.

6. Is Your Company Invisible Without An iPhone App?

Speaking as a CES panelist, NewsGator Media & Consumer Products GM Walker Fenton told the audience, “You’ve got to be on the iPhone; same as you’ve got to be on the Web.” Not having an iPhone app today, he suggested, is like not having a website 10 years ago. Without an iPhone app, you don’t exist.

It’s a sentiment I’m seeing echoed by a lot of observers and analysts. I appreciate the enthusiasm and understand where it’s coming from. And while your organization may well benefit from an iPhone app, it’s not a requirement. What is required is developing a strategy for smart phones.

Marketers and communicators should look at two issues when making plans for their presence in the mobile phone space.

First, is an app the answer at all?

Claiming that apps are a requirement is putting tactics before strategy. Whether to release a smartphone app should be the answer to the question: “What tactics can we employ to achieve the objectives that drive our strategy?” I imagine “We need an iPhone app” is as common an assertion today as “We need a brochure” was 20 years ago. Those who “needed” a brochure had rarely performed the due diligence to determine that a brochure was the most effective means of accomplishing their goals.

As one commenter noted in response to Fenton’s assertion, “If you have a website, you’re already on every smartphone.” If there’s a requirement for every organization regarding smartphones, it’s to bring their websites up to snuff for viewing on phones.

Having the mobile-ready site is a first step; the next is making sure people can find it. “Make sure that the redirects are in place so that most mobile browsers will end up (at your mobile-ready site),” writes Steve Smith at Mobile Insider. While Smith recognizes that 2010 will be the year of mobile-ready content that employs a lot of creativity,

It is going to have to be creativity with a purpose. I did a quick review of brands’ mobile sites the other day and found that there is a substantial difference between merely having a mobile “presence” and having a mobile purpose. 

This is a no-brainer, given the shift of web consumption from the computer to the mobile phone. Morgan Stanley, in "

The Mobile Internet Report” released last month, proclaimed that “More users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.” Yet I’m routinely surprised at the number of companies that haven’t taken even the first tentative steps to address this trend.

Adam Cahill, writing for ClickZ News, suggests a three-phase approach to strategizing your adoption of mobile technology as a marketing/communications channel:

1. Assess the impact of the persistently connected consumer is on your your industry and your business. “How, when, and where do consumers use mobile to make buying decisions about what you sell?”
2. Commit a “predictable and sizable” part of your budget to developing the right channels for bringing your brand to the mobile space.
3. Figure out how you’re going to measure the effectiveness of your mobile efforts.

I have no doubt the m-dot and mobile app space will be littered with a lot of useless crap that satisfies somebody’s insistenhce that “we have a mobile presence.” Those who adopt strategies that satisfy customers’ real needs and desires, solve their problems, simplify their lives or allow them to do something they could never do before (for instance, with location-based phone tools) will actually produce measurable results.

I have to wonder if NewsGator’s Fenton remembers all the terrible, useless websites that sprung up like weeds in response to the mandate, “You’ve got to have a website.”

If an app is an answer, what platforms should you consider?

When the iPhone was released, it was (as Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted) a game-changer. My reaction to the iPhone’s introduction turns out to have been correct: It will force other mobile phone companies to step up their game in order to compete. Initially, in one corner stood the iPhone, simple to use and adaptable to its owners needs. In the other corner were a host of crappy phones everyone hate because they were hard to use and didn’t do what their owners needed them to do.

Today, the marketplace hosts a number of viable competitors to the iPhone, many of which sport features with which the iPhone can’t compete (like multitasking). Even in the rare air of celebrity geek circles, iPhones have been abandoned in favor of the Motorola’s Droid and some other contenders. (Sometimes this is because of the Droid’s features, including a real keyboard; sometimes it’s conceding the iPhone just isn’t worth the problems associated with AT&T’s service.)

In fact, 28% of those who plan to buy a smartphone plan to get Apple’s product, but 21% will buy an Android and 18% a Blackberry. Add the 9% who will opt for a Windows phone or one sporting WebOS (Palm’s platform, currently available on the Pre and the Pixi), nearly half of the smartphones being sold will not be iPhones. It seems to me, then, that if you build only an iPhone app, you’ll be invisible to half your target market.

Gartner expects Android to surpass the iPhone by 2012, while Nokia’s Symbian—currently the market leader—will own 37.4% of the market. The iPhone will be in third place.(As of last August, Symbian commanded about half the market. The BlackBerry had about 20% and the iPhone wasin third place with 13%.)

The analogy of an iPhone app to a website isn’t an apt one because of competing platforms. HTML is an open platform—pages rendered (to varying degrees) on any browser whether it was installed on a Mac, a PC, or a Linux/UNIX box. Smartphone apps, conversely, need to be developed separately for each platform.

If your strategy leads you to conclude that apps are necessary, you’ll need to produce them for each of the key platforms, the cost of which—both time and money—will need to be factored into your planning. That’s part of the serious budgeting Cahill recommends in his three-step planning process.

You’ll also need to figure out how your effort integrates with your communication through all the other channels you’re already using.

The fundamentals apply

Ultimately, communicators should apply the same strategic planning that works for any communication effort:

• Identify the need or opportunity
• Identify the audiences to reach in order to take advantage of the opportunity or satisfy the need
• Articulate the goals and objectives you will have to achieve in order to succeed at the effort
• Determine the tactics you’ll implement in support of the goals and objectives. (These would include smartphone apps.)
• Measure and evaluate the project outcomes.

While it’s easier to jump up and down like a five-year-old in a toy store shouting, “I want an iPhone app! I want an iPhone app!” it’s smarter to strategize your inevitable adoption of the smartphone as a key communication channel.

---

7. Join Me In Chicago March 11

Mark Ragan has asked me to lead a workshop dedicated to Social Media and Strategic Internal Communications.

It’s on March 11 in Chicago at the Aon Building. Here’s a link to the online brochure:

http://bit.ly/9EOWzT

Early sales are so strong that Mark thinks this event could sell out.  I wanted to give you a heads up in case you were thinking about coming.

I hope to see you there

---

Site of the Month

GroundMap

A backlash of sorts has been forming against location-based services, one of the hot new social categories. Despite the popularity of services like Foursquare and competitors like Gowalla, some have argued that these tools won’t scale. After all, the argument goes, just how many people do you really want knowing where you are at any given time?

It’s a short-sighted observation. There’s far more to location-based social media than checking in so the world can know you’re at the grocery store. (Besides, who really wants to be the mayor of Safeway?)

Justin Davey, author of the GPS Obsessed blog, joined the throng of bloggers offering up their predictions for 2010, although Davey’s forecast was focused on geospatial industry trends. He sees an explosion in the use augmented reality and mobile coupons. He envisions search engines dishing up location information with search results and the same time of location-based information appearing with videos shot with GPS-enabled devices that you can now find on photos uploaded to sites like Flickr. And, he writes, every gadget—from digital cameras to netbooks (and, presumably, tablets)—will include a GPS chip.

One of the more interesting location-based sites, though, doesn’t take advantage of a GPS chip. At least, not yet. GroundMap was launched by a pair of 20-somethings from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, with an eye toward becoming the next big social media destination. Whether they’ll reach that goal remains to be seen, but GroundMap does point to the growing importance of location-based content.

“The Internet is located somewhere nobody knows, and we’re essentially making it relevant to where people go,” co-founder Matt Boyd said in a Southeast Missourian interview. “We’re almost making digital media tangible.”

GroundMap lets you associate content—tweets, documents, YouTube videos, Google Maps, you name it—with a place. If the location you’re interested in isn’t listed, you can add it. You can also add your opinion to any content that has been contributed.

Checking Rockville, Maryland—one of the most popular places listed, according to the tag cloud that appears on the home page—I found a couple YouTube videos (including one of an all-GM car show that was held in town), a link to the wikipedia listing for Rockville, a photo of city hall and a few other links and opinions.

The site is brand-spanking new, launched the last week of 2009, so there’s not a lot of content yet. But it’s easy to envision city listings loaded with material. The potential for marketers—particularly for small businesses—is huge. I’ve already read one account of the owner of a resort uploading a PDF of information about the facility to the listing for the city where the resort is located.

It makes perfect sense. Given our increased reliance on peer content, this would make it easy to learn what others think about a city to which you plan to travel. Sure, there’s Yelp, but it’s limited to reviews and you have to know the name of the service you’re researching. There’s CitySearch, but it’s limited to the major metropolitan areas and user-generated content is limited to reviews of services already listed. And while much of the content associated with a city in GroundMap already exists elsewhere (such as YouTube), it would take a lot of work to uncover it with a typical web search.

GroundMap will be a lot more useful with a bookmarklet that lets you add content from anywhere on the web, an iPhone app that adds GPS functionality, and other enhancements. But the obvious benefits of the site underscore the growing importance of location-based services. PR and marketing professionals would do well to begin exploring the opportunities these sites have to offer.

---

9. HC+T Update

• I’ve just wrapped up a project to develop a strategic social media plan for an Alabama hospital.
• I’ve developed and am about to conduct the first session of an “introduction to Twitter and Facebook” for staff at a California hospital.
• I’m presenting a half-day workshop on how to bring social media to the local level for field marketers of a fast-food chain

---

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone you like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2010, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

]]> 2010-01-31T20:17:19+00:00 http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/hct_update_october_2009/ The October 2009 edition of Shel Holtz’s email newsletter HC+T Update
October 2009

1. Companies Invest In Social Media, Block Their Own Workers
2. Who Should Own Social Media? Everybody And Nobody
3. Next Webinar: Cut Through The Clutter With Ann Wylie
4. Death Watch: Static Destination Website
5. Just how social can you be if your online content is exclusionary?
6. Recruiters Shouldn’t Care About Your Racy Facebook Picture
7. I’m Teaching Ragan Webinar On Podcating November 9
8. Site Of The month
9. HC+T Update
10. Boilerplate and subscription information

As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Companies Invest In Social Media, Block Their Own Workers  

At least 10 of my colleagues have alerted me to a study released yesterday by Robert Half Technology, in which 54% of the sample of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 or more employees block employees from accessing any social media at work.

Mashable points out the Robert Half study is consistent with other reports. The trend is gaining momentum.

I even received an email today from a communicator who observed that she received a security notice that access to Stop Blocking (http://www.stopblocking.org) was blocked at her organization. Right. God forbid anybody should be able to explore the arguments against this inane and counterproductive practice.

Given the publicity the Half study is getting, it’s worth reiterating the key arguments against blocking.

Well-communicated and consistently enforced policies will deal with most issues. The number of companies blocking access to social media sites is roughly on par with the number of companies without social media policies. Isn’t it possible that employees who knew what the rules were might actually follow them? Especially if they knew there were real and serious consequences for failing to do so?

Access to social media improves productivity. According to Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, “Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access.” But multiple studies prove exactly the opposite.

Productivity concerns are based on fatally flawed assumptions. First, there is research to suggest that every hour an employee spends at work on non-work-related websites is compensated for by an hour spent away from work on work-related activities. Do you check your work-related email on your mobile phone before you even get out of bed? Most knowledge workers say they do. Second, there are work-related benefits to social media activities, including collaboration, mindsharing and professional social networking amongst employees, affiliates and partners, according to David Lavenda of WorkLight (drawing on results from a Gartner study).

Employees don’t need your network. I can access any social network I like on my iPhone and my Palm Pre. I have a laptop with built-in access to the Sprint network that gets me on any site I want. Employees can (and do) bring these tools to the workplace. Your blocks have no impact. Employees can still get to Facebook all they want.

Who died and put CIOs in charge of worker productivity anyway? I’m not sure when supervisors and HR abdicated this responsibility to IT, but IT is simply not qualified to address employee productivity.

Blocking kills engagement. There are plenty of studies that tie high levels of worker engagement to increased growth and profitability. Trust is a pillar of engagement. So what happens to engagement when all employees get the same message, “We don’t trust any of you, not a single damn one of you, as far as we can throw you, so we’re blocking all of you”? Bye bye, engagement.

Access to social media is not an automatic invitation to viruses and malware. Those companies that do permit employee access have found ways to protect their networks. For many of the companies blocking access based on the fear of infection, it’s just easier to block than to find ways to protect the network while providing access. Laziness is not an excuse for blocking.

Millenials will not work for companies that block. These workers—the ones you need to hire to replace the retiring boomers—are networked 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate them. Many simply won’t work for companies that block access, which means you’re left to hire your second and third choices. Is mediocrity actually a hiring goal in your organization?

Bandwidth is a bogus issue. Bandwidth is the paper of the digital era. Can you imagine a company 25 years ago telling workers, “We’d love to get memos and publications to you, but we don’t have enough paper”? The very notion is absurd. They’d buy more paper. Companies pinching pennies on bandwidth are doing themselves a disservice in many more ways than one.

Please support the Stop Blocking initiative. Contribute research you’re aware of to the wiki. Share how your access to social networks and other web content has benefitted you at work. Share how blocking has restricted your ability to be as effective as possible at work. Link to Stop Blocking; feel fee to use the Stop Blocking badges on your blog or site. We must get the word out that blocking is a counterproductive, knee-jerk practice that must be stopped for the sake of the very companies that are implementing it.

---

2. Who Should Own Social Media? Everybody And Nobody  

I thought I had seen all the arguments about which function, within an organization, should “own” social media. I’ve argued that PR or communications is the logical home, since PR/comms is the only function in the organization accountable for the company’s reputation and the only function practiced in building relationships with stakeholders.

Reading Chris Kieff’s post yesterday, though, had me rethinking my position. Kieff—a freelance marketer who rights the 1 Good Reason blog—argues that social media is most properly housed in the Human Resources department.

My first thought on reading the post (which Scott Monty pointed out to me) was that the “who should own social media” meme has jumped the shark. I mean, HR? Really? Or perhaps Kieff tossed out a wholly nonsensical argument as a means of generating link bait.

Since everyone in an organization needs to abide by policies governing their social media activities, Kieff asserts, and HR is the keeper of policies, HR should be responsible for social media implementation.

I know, I know. My head was throbbing, too. Companies have travel policies, too; does that mean HR should manage the travel function? There are expense reimbursement policies. Should HR manage the expense function? And, incidentally, what in the world does HR know about communication with external audiences?

Incidentally, I’m sympathetic to HR staff everywhere. They get knocked about as the epitome of bureaucracy, but I’ve worked in and with HR in many organizations and find the vast majority of HR people to be smart, hard-working souls who are committed to their mission of recruiting and retaining the best possible workforce for their employers.

But HR should not own social media. In fact, reading Kieff’s post and the dozens of comments it inspired—and recalling all of the many arguments over social media ownership—have led me to revise my earlier thinking. No single department should own social media.

I was on the road earlier this week working with a company on the evolution of their intranet. Ownership of the intranet at this organization—as it is in so many others—is split among many departments. IT is responsible for technical implementation, communications for content, HR for self-service, and so on. This model is a recipe for problems. In most companies, each department makes decisions about the intranet based on departmental goals and objectives. No single department is accountable for the intranet’s overall direction. The funds to manage and evolve the intranet are split into many different pots.

Back in 2001, Melcrum Communications surveyed more than 500 intranet managers from around the world and found that the most successful intranets—the ones that achieve company-wide goals and get the most funding—are governed cross-functionally. That is, a collaborative or steering committee, rather than any one department or collection of departments with divided responsibilities—produce the best results.

Since a cross-functional model produced the best intranets, it should be no surprise to learn that—back in 2001—67.5% of intranets were governed this way. These cross-functional teams had CEO-level sponsorship, official charters, and high-level membership with the authority to get things done. They were empowered to convene subcommittees with expertise in technical, editorial, and design matters. They tended to be fairly high-level in their focus, spending their time on matters including…

* intranet mandate and vision
* business objectives
* policies and standardization
* project prioritization
* trouble-shooting and conflict resolution

Membership in this teams generally consisted of IT, internal communications, external communications, HR, and marketing. When the members of the team got together, they checked their departmental goals at the door and worked together for the common good of the company.

One other benefit of the cross-functional model: When the group made a decision, it was easier to get the organization to fall in line becayse the decision was made based on input from every group with a dog in the hunt, as opposed to an edict from a single department.

Every element of intranet governance applies to social media. The best way to stop arguing about who owns it is to make sure no single department dictates policy to the rest of the company and that all departments with a stake in the game can collaborate to come to the best decisions for the entire organization. Look at the list of issues intranet steering committees address—mandate/vision, business objectives, policies, prioritization, etc.—and you’ll see precisely what needs to be addressed for companies to employ social media intelligently and strategically.

It’s time for the power plays to come to an end and departments to work together for the good of the organization. Do you have a cross-function governance model for social media in your organization? How does it work?

---

3. Next Webinar: Cut Through The Clutter

Make every piece you write easier to read and understand
with Ann Wylie
Beginning Monday, Nov. 9
Webinar Cost: US $195

Register here

Is your copy easy to read? According to communication experts, that’s one of the two key questions people ask to determine whether to read a piece — or toss it.

Fortunately, academics have tested and quantified what makes copy easy to read. Unfortunately, that research virtually never makes it out of the ivory tower and into the hands of writers who could actually apply
it.

But you’ll leave this session with “the numbers” you need to measure and improve your copy’s readability. Specifically, you’ll learn:

* How long is too long: For your paragraphs? Your sentences? Your words?
* Three ways to shorten your copy — and which is the most effective
* How to avoid overwhelming your readers with information — because the more data people get, according to studies, the worse their decisions become
* How to cut your copy before you’ve even written the first word
* How to avoid causing your reader to skip your paragraphs
* How to make your copy look easier to read
* When it makes sense to use jargon — and when to avoid it at all costs
* How to run the “Hey! Did you hear?” test on your copy
* A tool you can use (you probably already have it, but you might not know it) to quantifiably improve your copy’s readability
* About research you can use to sell your approvers on shorter, clearer writing

Once you’ve completed this dynamic, example-packed Webinar, you’ll be prepared to make every piece you write or edit clearer and more concise.

About Ann Wylie

As president of Wylie Communications, Ann Wylie works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. She travels from Hollywood to Helsinki,
presenting writing workshops that help communicators at such organizations as NASA, FedEx and Verizon Wireless polish their skills and find new inspiration for their work.

In addition to writing and editing, Ann helps organizations launch or revitalize their Web sites and publications. She has served as a PR professional in an agency, a corporate communicator at Hallmark Cards,
editor of an executive magazine and consultant in her own firm.

Ann is the author of more than a dozen learning tools, including RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. Her work has earned more than 60 communication awards,
including two IABC Gold Quills.

About Shel Holtz Webinars

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting
in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

If you have not participated in one of Shel’s webinars before, watch the introductory video. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser.

Webinars are asynchronous — that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you — there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

Register: http://bit.ly/4hR0SS

---

4. Death Watch: Static Destination Websites

I understood Jonathan Schwartz’s enthusiasm when he suggested, during a talk a couple years ago, that a Sun Microsystems intranet really wasn’t necessary with so many employees blogging. It still didn’t make any sense to me, though. Would it really be easier to find benefits information on employee blogs than on an intranet benefits page? And how, exactly, would an employee enroll for benefits on a blog?

The same kinds of thoughts cross my mind as I hear all the claims that static web sites are dead. The rise of social media and the real-time web has certainly shifted the focus of the online community. There is no question: The era of the destination website is ending, if it’s not already over.

But we’re talking about the end of an era, not the death of a tool. The era of the destination webiste has been one in which organizations pumped most of their online efforts into their dot-com sites; their strategies were focused on driving traffic to those sites. With the time people spend online shifting to real-time and social content, companies do need to rethink how (as a post on digitalbuzz put it) they deliver digital experiences to their customers and other stakeholders.

This is one of the reasons lifestreaming could become important to business. A company can publish many forms of content to one place, which in turn distributes it to appropriate channels: photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, commentaries to Twitter, and so on. Microsoft is the first business I’ve seen to launch a Posterous lifestream for its new retail stores. The site owners easily send photos from their phones to the site, where they can in turn be added to a Facebook fan page or just about anywhere else.

This doesn’t mean Microsoft has no need for a destination website, however.

The use of a tool is based on the use to which it’s being put. Yes, a lot of content that has been cloistered on company dot-com sites will—and should—shift to distributed venues where people are spending their online time. But there’s still a need for static content that’s housed in one place. I can’t imagine a time when that need will vanish.

When seeking certain types of information, people will continue to go directly to a company website rather than hoping they can find it somewhere in the social web:

* Contact information
* Investor resources
* Product/service listings
* Company history
* Jobs

In fact, the static company website has a new purpose. More and more organizations are using their website as the home for a directory of links to their Facebook pages and groups, Twitter accounts, blogs, Flickr streams, and YouTube channels. Why hope people will stumble on your content when you can direct them to it?

The idea that the social and real-time web will completely kill off static sites is hardly strategic. Far too many organizations are still focused on driving traffic to their dot-com sites, which will become an increasingly frustrating and unrealistic goal. But having those sites available when they prove to the best resource for the kinds of information to which they lend themselves will remain a pillar of a company’s online presence.

---

5. Just how social can you be if your online content is exclusionary? 

I spent some time while at the IABC Heritage Region Conference, with Amy Salmon. Amy is a business consultant based out of Oklahoma City. She’s wife and a mom to two young children.

She’s also blind, the result of macular degeneration that struck her as a young adult. She gets around with the help of friends and family, and her guide dog, Wilbur.

Amy’s consultancy (she’s part of The Rodgers Group, a longtime communications firm run by Amy’s sister, Vicci Rodgers) works to help companies make their online content accessible to the disabled. According to the U.S. Census, more than 54 million people in the U.S. are disabled, representing about 19% of the population. As baby boomers age, the percentage of people with disabilities—and blindness in particular—is poised to rise dramatically.

For a lot of the disabled, getting through a typical website is beyond challenging. It’s impossible. Amy, for example, prefers to shop for her kids online. It’s easier than getting someone to take her to the store and help her identify the products she needs. On the WalMart site, she is able to find products, but she can’t order; that requires a mouse click. A mouse is an essentially useless tool to a blind person, Amy told me.

(Incidentally, Amy won’t shop at Target at all. The only reason the iconic retailer’s site is compliant with the accessibility standards established by the World Wide Web consortium is that they were ordered to by a federal judge following a lawsuit filed by the National Federation of the Blind.)

In the U.K., a study determined that purchases the blind cannot make on inaccessible website account for tens of millions of pounds. I’d love to know the results of such a study in the U.S. with its considerably larger population.

Amy uses a tool called Wave—not the new Google communication tool everyone’s talking about, but a more established site for evaluating a website’s accessibility. I plugged in the URL for WalMart’s home page; Wave returned 10 accessibility errors, including Javascript that can’t be interpreted by a text-to-voice reader, hidden content, problematic link text (text that “does not make sense out of context”), headings that are not appropriately marked, event handlers, and more. And all this was just on the home page.

I was also struck by Amy’s stories about talking to companies about the inaccessability of their sites. She has been told, flat-out, “We don’t care about that part of the market.” A key reason: remediating sites to make them accessible could be costly, particularly for ecommerce-based sites with thousands or pages.

Much of Amy’s consulting business comes her way via legal departments. Businesses are concerned about avoiding lawsuits. Accommodating nearly a fifth of the market? Not so much.

Accessibility is not a new issue. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web back in 1989 and heads up the Worldwide Web Consortium, has said, “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” (Here are more quotes from Berners-Lee about accessibility, an issue he clearly believes in.)

But considering all the proclamations by companies that they want to build relationships through social media, accessibility should be a more prominent goal. When companies establish Twitter and Facebook fan pages in order to be more accessible, isn’t it disingenuous—even hypocritical—to maintain online content that can’t be consumed by those whom life has handed the additional challenge of blindness, deafness, or cognitive or physical limitations?

Just how social can you claim to be if your online content excludes this segment of society, this potentially lucrative slice of your market? It’s hardly sincere to claim to be engaged while simultaneously proclaiming, “Sorry, the blind and deaf are not welcome.”

Part of the problem is that nobody wants to be accountable. Communications professionals tell Amy it’s not their problem; talk to IT, they say. (Wave detected 20 accessibility errors on the PRSA website.) But part of the problem is lack of attention. Tens of thousands of people can protest a Motrin video that offends them, but good luck finding a surge of indignation around a site that denies access to the disabled.

I’ll be talking with Amy for an interview segment on my podcast, “For Immediate Release. In the meantime, I just wanted to make the point: It should give you pause the next time you tout your social efforts if your own online content includes a huge “Go Away” sign for anybody who isn’t fortunate enough to be free of disabilities.

---

6. Recruiters Shouldn’t Care About Your Racy Facebook Picture

It’s becoming a litany.

In a meeting or during a presentation, somebody—usually an HR rep or recruiter—will tell me how many candidates she has rejected based on something she saw on the candidate’s Facebook or MySpace profile. In every case, it has been something along the lines of a photo taken during a party at college. My response: “If your employer knew what you did during college, would you have been hired?”

College is for two things: Getting an education and being stupid. The only difference between college when I went and college today is that there was no Facebook, or anything remotely like it, during my days at university.

Today, we’re living through one of the most remarkable transitions in history. We’re moving from an era during which people were secretive and kept things close to the vest to an era where everyone is networked and everyone shares everything. And those who grew up in the soon-to-be bygone era are making hiring decisions about people who grew up in the era that is hurtling toward us like an out-of-control freight train.

It has become conventional wisdom for people of my generation to wag their fingers at millenials, warning them of the dangers that await if they’re too open with their extracurricular activities. Even Dan Tapscott, whose “Grown Up Digital” does an admirable job of explaining the Net Generation, insists that the one thing they don’t get is that sharing outrageous behavior today will come back to bite them in the ass a few years down the road when they’re trying to get hired.

That’s true today, with people who kept their late-night fraternity-house drinking binges on the QT. It won’t be so long, though, before the hiring managers have shared just as much of their social lives online as the recruits they’re looking to hire. The fact that people got drunk and engagred in questionable behavior in school just won’t matter.

Consequently, that Animal House behavior really shouldn’t matter to hiring managers today. Like I say, the hiring manager probably engaged in some pretty stupid behavior of his own when he was in college, too. The fact that he did shots off a co-ed’s belly when he was 19 didn’t make him a bad hire when he was 23.

Back in 1987, Judge Douglas Ginsburg didn’t make it onto the U.S. Supreme Court because he’d smoked a little pot when he was in college. Today, denying a job to anybody who ever tried marijuana in college carves a huge slice out of the pool of prospective candidates. A prospect’s social behavior in college is simply not a predictor of their value as an employee.

Recruiters and HR people can even eek out a competitive edge by overlooking a four-year-old picture on a Facebook page and focusing on their qualifications today. After all, that’s what today’s candidates will be doing in five years when they’re the ones making the hiring decisions.

---

7. I’m Teaching Ragan Webinar On Podcasting November 9

Ready to try podcasting? Already podcasting and wondering what’s new?

Then you’ll want to learn from the best. Shel Holtz, a leader in podcasting, will teach you how to create a podcast that will:

* Influence opinions, attitudes and behaviors of your targeted listeners
* Build community within your company AND with customers
* Build affinity with existing customers
* Heighten C-suite credibility
* Encourage dialogue among employees

You will learn how to:

* Strategize a business podcast: Make sure your message is in line with your communications initiatives
* Produce a podcast: The tools and resources you need to get started—no matter what your budget
* Integrate your online content with your podcast: Match up your online text and
* Produce a podcast with no equipment and no cost: Use new services to record a podcast with nothing more than a telephone.
* Incorporate live call-ins with recorded podcasts: Build an audience with a show that involves your listeners in real time, online and off.
* Build a community of listeners: Draw an audience—both externally and internally
* Promote a successful podcast: Create content that builds a better connection between employees and leaders
* Take advantage of tools you may already own: Produce a podcast—including the upload—with an iPhone? Successful podcasters are already doing it.
* Measure the effectiveness of your podcast: If no one is listening, you’re wasting your time and resources

Podcasting is one of the easiest of social media tools to convince management to use—and the success you have could serve as the gateway to more company engagement with social media. What you need to know is how podcasting can be applied strategically in your organization, how it can support communication efforts and promote the bottom line. (Why do anything if it doesn’t support the bottom line?)

The answers are right here. When you complete this webinar, you’ll know how to produce a podcast, engage your listeners, and increase communication both internally and externally.

Fee: $349 ($249 for RaganSelect members)

Register: http://bit.ly/47CUdi

---

8. Site of the Month

I’m frequently trying to schedule multiple people for conference calls, which usually involves a lot of back-and-forth emails: “No, I can’t make that date, can you make this one?” “I can but one of the other participants in the call can’t. How about this date?” “That’s good for me, but not at 2 p.m. How about 8 a.m.?” “Is that East Coast time?” And on it goes. Fortunately, I’ve found a free online tool that makes this process a breeze. It’s called Tungle, and if you ever need to schedule a lot of people for any kind of activity, you’ll immediately add it to your list of really, really useful online tools.

http://www.tungle.com

---

9. HC+T update

• I’m participating in a National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) panel at the organization’s Silicon Valley chapter on November 13.
  
• I’m delivering a keynote at the Greystone.net Healthcare Internet conference in Las Vegas on November 3; I’m also presenting a luncheon talk at a pre-conference session on November 2.
• I’m speaking at Ragan Communications’ 2009 Employee Communications, PR and Social Media Summit at Microsoft headquarters on November 17.

---

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

]]> 2009-10-28T15:40:25+00:00 http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/hct_update_august_2009/ The August 2009 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology HC+T Update
August 2009

1. Ten Ways PR And Marketing Are Every Bit As Powerful As Trusted Peers
2. What Should Journalism Schools Be Teaching Their Students?
3. Next Webinar: Leader Communications
4. Your Home Page Is Your Home Page
5. Sorry, Rupert. Pay Walls Won’t Work. But Thanks For Playing
6. Has Social Media Paid Off With Improved Customer Satisfaction?
7. Site Of The month
8. HC+T Update
9. Boilerplate and subscription information

As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

---

1. Ten Ways PR and Marketing Are Every Bit As Powerful As Trusted Peers

If your reading was restricted to social media purists, you’d think that PR and marketing had no role left to play, that the rise of the trusted peer has so marginalized the communications profession that agencies everywhere should just fold up their tents and encourage their employees to learn a new trade.

The purists are right, but only if marketing and PR counselors ply their trade exactly as their predecessors did 30 years ago. Most don’t. Gone are the days of expecting a press release to generate media coverage; instead, they’re used primarily for SEO, to reach consumers directly and for a few other reasons that have nothing to do with the reason their original mission. More and more, marketing professionals develop two-way efforts and interact with communities. These days, “spin” is more likely to mean ensuring the story is told in a way that’s meaningful to the audience rather than twisting a client’s response to an issue to make them look good.

And, as word of mouth becomes more dominant, communications professionals are adapting to help their clients and employers succeed in this environment, as well.

That’s right. I’m calling bullshit on the notion that trusted peers are more powerful than marketing and PR. It’s not an either/or situation; it’s not a competition. PR and marketing, done well, inform and influence the conversations trusted peers have with their friends, colleagues and families. The marketplace is an ecosystem and communicators — like all the other players — continue to evolve so they can contribute to the delicate balance.

How can communicators be every bit as powerful as trusted peers? Here are 10 ways:

1. Promote a culture of transparency — Transparency is one of the five dimensions of trust as defined by the 2000 study, “Measuring Organizational Trust,” a comprehensive research project funded by the iABC Research Foundation. How much information is shared, how accurate it is, and how sincerely and appropriately it is communicated will determine the degree to which trusted peers believe what the organization says. This is a communications job.

2. Encourage and equip front-line employee participation — Rank-and-file employees represent the front line of public relations. Their discussions of work and work-related issues in their social networks — online and off — can be random and haphazard or they can reflect a comprehensive understanding of the organization, its initiatives and its positions. This isn’t to suggest that employees be given astroturf-style messages to repeat, but rather that they’re well-informed and business-literate. How much they influence the conversation will depend on how well the organization communicates with them, how much the organization trusts them and the clarity of the organization’s social media policies. That’s a communications job.

3. Find unique ways to tell the company’s story — For your organization’s story to rise above the din, its story needs to be compelling. When people are out there talking about your organization, it’s not in a vacuum; it’s based on the fodder that sparks the conversation in the first place. That’s a communications job.

4. Connect company leadership to the new marketplace realities — There’s a reason PR people are called “counselors”: They counsel their clients on the communications implications of their actions and the best means of telling their stories. The communications function in any organization is the only function that is 100% dedicated to protecting and enhancing the company’s reputation. It can be frustrating and time-consuming, but communicators are in the best position to help leaders understand the consequences of ignoring social media or engaging in it badly. This is a communications job.

5. Recommend corrections based on intelligence gleaned from monitoring — Integrating careful monitoring of social media into existing environmental scanning efforts can reveal customer sentiment and even provide an early warning to emerging issues. Most importantly, it can allow the organization to respond to an issue before it reaches crisis proportions. This is a communications job.

6. Earn the media coverage that gets bloggers’ attention — Mainstream media still matters. I have yet to see a study that suggests people have stopped trusting local newspapers and TV. And if you still think newspapers and TV news organizations have no influence, just select a random sample of 100 blog posts and count how many cite, opine on, analyze or pass along reports from mainstream media. Getting a story into the press can easily create fodder for trusted peers. This is a communications job.

7. Create assets that help trusted peers grow their reputations — The idea of the social media news release is to provide digital assets that help citizen reporters (like bloggers) tell their stories. Images, video, audio, widgets — bloggers and others can easily inject these assets into their conversations in order to help them make a point or stand out. This is a communications job.

8. Guide the company’s adoption of social media tools — Anybody can throw social media tools against the wall and see what sticks. Knowing which channels, which communities, and which approaches will produce results that align with business goals requires a different skill set; knowing how to measure the results adds another dimension that is a communications job.

9. Know when the old rules do apply — The fact that there are new rules for communicating within a networked and social environment means the old rules have been augmented, not replaced. Organizations ignore non-social dimensions of PR at their peril. There is far more to PR than media relations. (If 76% of businesses don’t understand what PR is, how can we expect the average blogger to comprehend what we do?) This is clearly a communications job.

10. Become the trusted peer — A number of organizations have shown that communications staff can be trusted voices just as much as anyone else. There’s the crew from Dell, for example, Scott Monty from Ford and Christopher Barger from GM, and a host of other examples. By being human, involved, candid and interesting, PR people can earn the trust of community members and directly influence purchases. Professional communicators, as much as anyone else, need to understand what it takes to become a trust agent; they should read the book that explains it. This is a communicator’s job.

Of course, dozens of books have been written on the role of PR and marketing in the networked world (To name just a few: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Groundswell, Now Is Gone, Word of Mouth Marketing). It’s funny that the purists praise these books for their insights, then turn around and declare PR and marketing dead. Talk about spin…

What PR and marketing activities would you add to this list?

---

2. What Should Journalism Schools Be Teaching Their Students? 

Last week, I delivered a keynote talk to the faculty of a university Journalism department. “Change” was the theme of the retreat. Some of the change had to do with remaining viable in the face of massive budget cuts. As one participant in the retreat said, “Higher education in California will never be the same.” But an equally important dimension of the change discussion centered around changes to journalism.

I’m experienced in a lot of things, but even though my degree is in Journalism (California State University Northridge, 1976) I haven’t worked as a professional journalist since 1977 when I made the move into organizational communications. So I began the process of fleshing out the presentation by putting the question to my Twitter followers: What should I tell this group?

The answers mostly reinforced what I already thought. Most of the presentation addressed the changes to journalism business models and my own prognostications about the future. My last slide summed everything up with a list of skills and philosophies that should be incorporated into journalism classes.

It’s a relevant discussion because, even as the newspaper business continues its downward spiral, the number of students registering for journalism programs continues to be high. I’ve always believed a journalism degree is useful for any number of career paths — after all, the main thing you get out of journalism training is how to learn (as in, how to learn about the story you’re covering even though you have no background in it) and how to articulate what you have learned.

But you also have to suspect most of these students are working toward a journalism degree because they want to be journalists. The question they’ll face upon graduation is what kinds of journalism jobs will exist?

Whatever those jobs are, journalism students will be better equipped to qualify for them if they have learned the following as part of their education:

o SEO — Most of what I remember about writing a basic news article is consistent with the principles of on-page optimization, but the importance of writing so people can find your articles shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s particularly important since students in journalism classes today don’t have a clue whether they’ll be working for a centralized news organization or some kind of distributed network. This synchs nicely with my next point:

o How to think like a freelancer — With nobody certain what economic model or (more likely) combination of models will pan out for professional news, journalism departments need to instill a mindset in students that will allow them to tap into whatever opportunities arise. That’s quite a shift from the view of professors when I was in journalism school: If it’s not a daily newspaper, major newsmagazine or network TV news channel, it’s not journalism.

o Flexibility — Print, broadcast, radio, online…journalists had better be prepared to report anywhere. When I worked in journalism, I was a print reporter with no interest in electronic journalism, which was a whole different ballgame. Those lines are gone and today’s students need to be prepared to do it all.

o A continuum of reporting — When I was a reporter, I filed a single story following on-site reporting of news or research for an investigative piece. Today, a single report is inadequate.

Take a lead from the Spokane Spokesman-Review, whose reporter covering a sensational murder trial tweeted regular updates from the courtroom, wrote longer blog updates during breaks then filed the complete story from a hotel room after court adjourned for the day. I wrote about this on my blog about a year ago, as it was happening.

The very definition of news is changing. With channels like Twitter and Google News email updates, nobody has to wait for the 6 p.m. newscast or be in front of a TV to get the latest, smallest update to a story. The thirst for these updates is insatiable and it is up to journalists to fill the 140-character news cycle. Tweets from the courtroom included information like, “The prosecution has challenged 16 jurors so far” and “Peremptory challenges have ended. The court is on a 10-minute break.” Such updates feed the hunger for the latest information and give people something authoritative, rather than speculative, to talk about.

o How to be a curator of links — If you haven’t seen the clip of NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen talking about the ethic of the link it’s definitely worth your time. The idea that news operations must contain links to their own content is a bankrupt notion in an environment that thrives on diverse linkages. Becoming a trusted filter of valuable content does not mean you don’t generate your own; you simply analyze and distill the best related content, wherever it may reside, to make it easier for your readers to pursue more reading on the topic. No single news organization contains all relevant knowledge and viewpoints within their staffs. The better you are at curating links, the more readers will want to come back to the well.

o How to develop a digital footprint — Given that reporters are not likely to get a job with a single news outlet, they will want to build enough of a reputation (what some might call a “personal brand,” but not me) that she will be followed and read wherever she goes. Journalists who participate in discussions about their articles, who tweet (assuming their employers are smart enough to allow it) and who are accessible will go a long way toward establishing that identity.

o The Web 2.0 dimensions of reporting — The online dimensions of reporting are relevant to every aspect of journalism education. I cannot think of a class for which issues such as sharing tools, RSS feeds, monitoring feedback, participation in resultant conversation and embed codes, to name just a few, should not be taught.

o The role of news crowdsourcing and citizen journalism — Rather than viewing non-professionals who publish news as competition, teach students to understand their role in an ecosystem of news. There are more non-professionals with mobile phone cameras than photographers on your staff, for one thing. There are more individuals who might be interested in doing a bit of research on a topic of personal interest than there are research assistants in your newsroom. Professional journalists will need to know how to crowdsource some of what they need for their stories.

There is also no reason professional journalists can’t come to the aid of citizen journalists who are on to something good but don’t have the chops to bring it home.

o Ethics, accuracy, and balance — As the ranks of trained, professional journalists thin out, those who remain will be under a greater microscope than ever. Adherence to the highest professional standards won’t be just a good idea; it will be a baseline requirement.

o Transparency — One way for journalists to maintain a high credibility standard is to become far more transparent. I can imagine every reporter maintaining a blog where they catalog the sources for every story and, where appropriate, the full text (or audio files) of their notes.

o Multimedia — During one of my newspaper stints, I would often carry a camera with me. We had only three photographers on staff and they couldn’t go out on every story. Today, carrying audio and video recording equipment should be just as commonplace. These needn’t be complex or expensive. A Flip-like camera and an iPhone with an audio recording app work just fine. The more multimedia a reporter can inject into his coverage, the more compelling it will be for online readers to consume it… and the more likely it will be that the story will spread.

What’s missing? Where do I have it wrong?

---

3. Next Webinar: Leader Communications

Creating line of sight within your organization (for fun and profit)
with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, September 21
Webinar Cost: US $195

Ample research exists to support the idea that communications from leaders to employees is among the most powerful available. With change initiatives in particular, employees are more likely to follow leaders who engage with them and display genuine interest and concern for their welfare. Even organizational profitability has been tied to how effectively leaders communicate with employees.

Yet in far too many companies, leader communication is an occasional activity, a once-a-month “Breakfast with the CEO” program or a quarterly town hall. While these are important, they are woefully inadequate in today’s fast-moving environment. Leaders msut be a part of the communication process — and in most cases, they need to rely on their professional communication staffs to guide their efforts.

In this introductory course, you’ll learn the fundamentals of leader communication as well as the in-depth, nuanced approaches the best organizations take to creating line of sight between leaders and the rank-and-file. You’ll learn…

o The various ways to get employees face-to-face with leaders
o How to extend face-to-face communication with online resources
o The role of business unit leaders in the leadership communication process
o The role of transparency in leadership communication
o The importance of two-way communication and how to foster a culture that supports it
o Why much leader communication should be visible from outside the company
o How online video can enhance your leadership communications
o How to measure the effectiveness of your leaders’ communications
o The argument to make to your leaders that will convince them to get more involved

Once you have completed this dynamic, example-laden Webinar, you’ll be prepared to guide the leaders of your organization as they take their efforts to communicate with employees to a new level.

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

If you have not participated in one of Shel’s webinars before, visit the site at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and watch the introductory video. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —-  that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

Register: http://bit.ly/12IPUM

---

4. Your Home Page Is Your Home Page

These things are true:

o If your website domain isn’t instantly intuitive, people will go to a search engine to find you

o If people are looking for companies that do what your company does, they will go to a search engine to find you

o As people conduct searches about your organization, they’ll find what has risen to the top, whether it’s positive or negative

o With increasing regularity, people visit destinations other than standard websites when trying to learn about an organization

I get all that. And yet I am increasingly irritated when I hear someone utter this nonsense:

Google is your new homepage.

This phrase produces more than 8,500 results in a Google search, mostly blog posts exhorting companies to embrace this belief. Yes, search in general and Google in particular are vitally important. But your homepage is your homepage.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, let’s remember that a homepage is defined as the opening page of a web site. Your index file, not Google, is the opening page to your web site. But this is a bigger issue than just a formal definition.

While the era of the destination website may be over, the corporate website is far from dead. The notion suggests that destination website no longer dominate the customer’s attention online. They once did, mainly because there wasn’t much else online to see. Now, with social networking and online video dominating people’s attention, the importance of the destination website has diminished.

That only means traditional websites are now part of a bigger mix of options online, not that their usefulness has vanished.

The 2009 Trust Barometer from Edelman reiterates that a company’s own website is one of the most credible source of information a company can provide about itself, beating business blogs, social networking sites or advertising. Only corporate communications — such as press releases, white papers and emails — ranked higher, and only by a two percentage points. And while searches of Google News and Yahoo News ranked higher, searches of the core Google search engine didn’t even make the list. At the very top of the list you won’t find any new media at all, but rather the staid and traditional industry analyst report, reinforcing the high levels of trust people place in third-party experts.

Certainly, consumers may glean information that doesn’t help your company’s cause when searching Google. In fact, according to one study, search engines are the most common way consumers find opinions about products, brands and services. But if they’re looking for what you have to say, they’ll still click through to your website, and most often the top search result will connect consumers to your homepage.

Your website is also the home of the static content that still serves a purpose. The bio of your CEO, shareholder information, details of your corporate social responsibility efforts, archives of your news releases (your authoritative statements of record), job listings — all these represent details people need.

And search engine optimization, which has become a core corporate activity as the importance fo search continues to grow, is still about enabling discovery of your content on your site. As this Google-as-home-page notion gains currency, I fear people will spend less resources on the maintenance of their websites — an odd dilemma, since one SEO fundamental is to continuously update your website and infuse it with new content.

Still, according to a study just released today, web content managemente has fallen as an intrinsic component of organizations’ communication efforts. While social networking is part of web-based communications for about 72% of organizations, web content management is an activity among only about 53%. That’s particularly odd given that the study found SEO is an activity at nearly 70% of organizations. What’s more, web content management is declining as a skill companies look for when making a PR hire.

That is, more organizations are optimizing their sites for search than are managing those sites in order to ensure that the sites offer value to those who find them, despite the fact that corporate websites are among the most credible communication a company can produce.

That’s a huge disconnect.

SEO, along with social media engagement, are critical, but let’s not lose sight of the basics as we embrace new media. SEO is a critical skill and companies must do it well. But your homepage is still your homepage.

---

5. Sorry, Rupert. Pay Walls Won’t Work. But Thanks For Playing 

Since Rupert Murdoch announced his plans to eventually charge for all of his newspapers’ online content, a number of opinions have surfaced about the feasibility of the pay wall and the reasons it won’t work.

For example, a MediaPost item by Wendy Davis (free subscription required) suggests that enough people who pay for the content will share it in violation of the publisher’s terms that the content will get out anyway. Others note that for every news site with a pay wall there will be plenty of alternatives that remain free.

From my perspective, the issue isn’t about whether the online content offered by news organizations have any value. Clearly it does, despite all the hand-wringing over “content wants to be free.” (Stewart Brand, remember, said in the same breath that “content wants to be expensive.”) It’s more about the discoverability of the content and the value per article.

The primary difference between the content news organizations publish on the web and that which they publish anywhere else — even if it’s just a repurposing of the same content — is the difference between pull and push. And once you understand that, you understand that it’s all about the package.

Non-web content — whether it’s in print, on TV or aggregated in an email — is pushed at you in a package. I subscribe to The Contra Costa Times. It shows up on my driveway every morning, held together by a rubber band. The newspaper has sections — Sports, Business, Time Out, Morning Report — each one with articles and features that I discover as I methodically turn the pages. I’m not paying for one columnist or one type of story or one set of box scores. I’m paying for the package.

Nobody subscribes to The New York Times just to get David Pogue’s column. (Well, maybe his mom.) Pogue’s column is one of the features you look forward to when you consume the Times.

The same is true of news on TV. It starts at 7 p.m. and ends at 7:30 on the major networks, beginning with the top news and moving through features and commentary. On cable, there’s also a collection of stories contained in the package. If the most interesting item on “Countdown” is the story that starts at 5:40, you just have to wait 40 minutes to get through it (which is fine since the stories preceding it are probably of interest to you, too).

With the pull dynamic of the web, things don’t work that way; the package is so much less important that it’s a non-factor. Too many people ignore the front page of the newspaper website, opting instead to make Google News or Digg or their RSS aggregator or Twitter’s trending topics their front page. Or they see a link tweeted by someone notifying their followers of an intriguing news story.

Or, you like just the David Pogue column; it’s the sole reason you visit The New York Times site.

In any case, it’s the individual items that attract attention.

(On a side note, it’s truly a scary thought that the pay wall will block individual news items from being collected in these third-party channels, isn’t it? How counterintuitive would it be for the only way to find that the story exists at all is to pay your admission fee and slog through all the links on a newspaper site’s home page?)

So I find a link to a story through any of the 10 or 15 channels I use, click to it and discover that a subscription is required. Will I pony up $9.95 per month for every one of the 20 to 30 news sites I wind up visiting? Not likely. I’m not interested in accessing the whole site. I just want the one story, the one column, the one feature that brought me there in the first place. And I’ll skip it before I subscribe.

After all, I only get The Contra Costa Times in print. I don’t pay for subscriptions to 15 or 20 other newspapers. It befuddles me that Murdoch and other publishers think we use the web the same way we use print.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t pay for access to news content, but the news business needs to introduce a new model that just doesn’t exist yet. I’d gladly pay $9.95 per month for access to any news content, with some kind of collection agency — a kind of ASCAP for news organizations — divvying up the proceeds and distributing them to publishers using a formula based on the volume of visits to each of their sites.

Given the results of the recent VSS media study, which shows people are spending more time than ever with paid content, I think an approach like this could work.

But as long as each publication plans to assess a discrete subscription fee to gain access to any of their content, this plan will fail. It has nothing to do with whether the publishers deserve compensation, or whether the content has value. It simply has to do with finding a model consistent with the way people use the content. A monthly per-publication subscription fee isn’t it.

---

6. Has Social Media Paid Off With Improved Customer Satisfaction?

All this social media must be having a real impact, wouldn’t you think? I’m not talking about cool case studies, but significant trends showing sustainable results that demonstrate a payoff for all the prosletyzing going on (by me, among others).

Look at the story we tell: Companies can’t get away with bad behavior because social media puts them under too much scrutiny; it only takes one blog post or tweet or YouTube video to kick-start a flood of criticism leading to damaged reputations and lost customers. All those conversations are the motivation companies have needed to start providing excellent service, if for no other reason than to avoid fast-spreading conversations about just how bad they are.

If we’re right — if social media is a catalyst for improved business practices — then there should be some evidence. Where’s the evidence?

It could be here: According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has hit an all-time high.

The Index, the result of a survey conducted by the University of Michigan, is not alone. The WSJ article notes that other customer satisfaction studies are also reporting gains. These improvements in customer satisfaction are confounding a lot of the experts, since satisfaction typically plummets during tough economic times. But the numbers aren’t vague. Customers are increasingly happy with the companies with which they do business.

Nobody is crediting social media with these results. In fact, experts are cautioning that the numbers could be deceptive because earlier customer satisfaction numbers were so perilously low; they had nowhere to go but up. And, while the trend is clear, it’s not a tide that lifts all boats. Some companies have seen their numbers dip.

Spokespersons for each of the companies profiled in the article — Sprint, The Cheesecake Factory, Comcast, US Airways and Southwest Airlines — give good, solid reasons for their focus on customer satisfaction. For example, the desire to maintain customer loyalty prompted The Cheescake Factory to enhance a mystery shopper program, resulting in information about customer dissatisfaction with wait times for tables. The restaurant’s CEO, David Overton, said, ““We are carefully balancing our cost containment efforts so as not to reduce the experience that guests have in our restaurants.”

The article also points to handheld scanners US Airways is using to improve baggage tracking. The airline was the target of 35% fewer complaints in the first quarter, and its ACSI rating improved 9.3%.

It’s easy enough to shrug off these results by arguing that most companies want to be profitable and will take the steps necessary to protect and grow their market share. But as I consider what has changed between now and, say, 10 years ago, social media emerges as a significant factor. Complaints about table wait times used to be delivered to the restaurant host and maybe a few close friends and customers kept showing up. Today, those complaints are available for anybody checking out places to eat on Yelp. The population of people talking over the backyard fence, where consumer complaints are a typical subject of conversation, has exploded ever since the fence went digital.

So, while reporting of the ACSI results haven’t singled out social media, I keep thinking about Sherlock Holmesian logic: “henever all other possibilities have been ruled out, the improbable, however unlikely, must be the truth.”

What has changed is the amplification of customer complaints and the credence customers’ peers put in their opinions. If one couple decides never to return to The Cheesecake Factory or defect from Sprint to Verizon, that’s a shame. If hundreds or thousands make the same decision based on the experience the customer shared on Facebook, that’s an entirely different story.

So even though I’m making a very long leap in logic, I say let’s hear it for social media. The social customer has spoken, companies are listening, and everybody wins as a result.

---

7. Site of the Month

You’ve built a social network. What can you do with it? The idea of a third party providing an interface to your own network so it can be put to use for a specific purpose is an intriguing one. Aardvark.com takes a stab at it but creating a utility that lets you pose a question that goes out to your network. The site owners claim that you’ll get answers in as fast as five minutes. The site, which is free, has earned good reviews from the likes of The New York Times and TechCrunch. If you already have a Facebook account, you register through Facebook Connect.

I tested Aardvark with a question about crisis communications. It was a legit question, one that was posed to me by a Wall Street Journal reporter. The system found five people in my network with crisis communications chops, and in five minutes, I had severak replies. For free, it’s definitely worth a try when you’re in need of answers, fast.

http://www.vark.com

---

8. HC+T update

>>I’m delivering a keynote and a breakout session at WebCom Montreal on October 22.

>>I’m leading an employee communications audit team for an internationally known medical institution.

>>I’m leading a three-consultant team on an assignment to help a global technology company re-envision its intranet.

>>I’m delivering a keynote to IABC’s Heritage Region conference on October 20.

---

9. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

]]> 2009-08-28T16:39:14+00:00 http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/hct_update_june_2009/ HC+T Update: June 2009 HC+T Update
June 2009

1. GM and social media: damned if you do, damned if you don’t
2. How the approval process needs to change
3. Next Webinar: SEO for Communicators
4. One role for print: making dull messages stand out
5. Ending the “Deny-delay-defend” crisis strategy
6. Site Of The month
7. HC+T Update
8. Boilerplate and subscription information

As always, the content of this newsletter comes from my blog. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

---

1. GM and social media: damned if you do, damned if you don’t  

We hear that most companies still haven’t jumped on the social media bandwagon and we roll our eyes in dismay and maybe even a little contempt. But there are reasons companies resist getting engaged with communities. It can be seriously perilous.

Look at General Motors. The magnitude of the company’s problems have inflamed peoples’ passions; our emotional reactions to its situation—and how GM responds—will forge its reputation for years to come.

In the midst of this classic institutional crisis, GM has committed to engage in social media at virtually every level. Say what you will about other dimensions of General Motors, from labor practices to product innovation to financial management. The companies’ communication efforts have been sincere and wide-ranging:

They were pioneers of the corporate blog. Members of the communications team participate in the auto blog communities. Communication staff have reached out to answer questions and participate in conversations wherever they are found. Employees throughout the organization have been encouraged to talk about the company’s future in conversations they encounter during their day-to-day online activities. The public was invited to join GM leaders in open conversations about controversial issues. They have hosted mommy bloggers and podcasters on a retreat. They’re on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Flickr. To record the company’s 100-year history, they created a wiki to which anybody can contribute.

In other words, GM has put into practice the kinds of actions most social media consultants would have advised. Still, even people engaged in the space are oblivious to those efforts, even as they insist upon them. In a comment to Joe Jaffe’s blog (in response to something I wrote), Viveka Weiley wrote, “People are already having these conversations, we don’t need GM to facilitate, centralise and filter them. It’s up to them to join our conversation, not the other way around.”

Exactly what GM has been doing.

Jaffe’s post about which Viveka and I were commenting, by the way, is a savaging of GM over a 60-second spot the company unveiled concurrent with its bankruptcy filing. In the commercial, the company brands the bankruptcy as a turning point and acknowledges that a massive rethinking of the company is required. It ends with the URL for GM Re: Invention, the repository of all things related to GM’s turnaround effort.

The site shows an understanding of the networked world, with…

• Sharing links
• RSS feed
• Links to Twitter accounts of GM designers, engineers, and other front-line employees
• Link to a Facebook fan page where critical comments are a part of the conversation

I saw the video as an invitation to come to the site, one channel for engaging consumers among many. Joe things “Somebody deserves a real hefty bitch-slap” because (among other things) “advertising is not the answer….especially during times where cathartic healing needs to take place via honest…authentic, transparent and open dialogue.”

Which, again, GM has been doing to a degree few other companies—and even fewer outside the technology world—can claim.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Perhaps the best example of this peril comes courtesy of the Huffington Post, months before the bankruptcy filing. Back in February, Huffington blogger Allison Kilkenny tweeted a message to her followers: allisonkilkenny: sees GM is phasing out the small, fuel efficient Saturn. Oil companies: 1, Earth: 0.

Kilkenny was nonplussed when she got a reply: “@allisonkilkenny we don’t have indiv trash cans at ofc cubes at hq, just an ex, not sure total $ saved from small ideas, but likely large”

Kilkenny was bewildered. Why would a company needing to focus on its recovery invest in people who respond to Tweets, especially those that weren’t a specific request for help or information? “No one likes that in your rush to modernize and embrace the technology of the internet (complete with Twitter experts,) you forgot how to compete with foreign car companies,” she wrote.

So Kilkenny’s complaint, on the highly-visible Huffington Post, is that GM is doing exactly what Joe Jaffe and Viveka Weiley (and scores of others) say they must do.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Make no mistake, GM is doing the right thing, even if they’re making mistakes along the way. But knowing the kinds of hits you’ll take from both sides for stepping up as GM has would deter many a CEO from taking the social media plunge.

Measurement is key. If we cannot convince business leaders that the business results of community engagement will outweigh the kinds of risk on display with GM, it’ll be hard to condemn them for their obstinence. I have no doubt that GM’s leaders are getting regular reports on the payoff for their commitment to community engagement. Given the current climate, it’s a good thing they’re in it for the long haul.

---

2. How the approval process needs to change  

Among the tiny early-adopter subset of the total online population, a lot of buzz is dedicated to a perceived shift from blogging to lifestreaming. Edelman Senior VP Steve Rubel, the most widely read of PR’s many participants in social media venues, has shuttered his Micro Persuasion blog in favor of a Posterous lifestream, asserting that “blogging feels old” and “publishing today is all about The Flow.” (More on this in an upcoming post.)

In the real world, though, communicators employed by companies struggle to overcome a phalanx of obstacles to the most basic of online engagement. One such obstacle about which I keep hearing is the institutionalized content approval process. I was with an organization recently in which the simple concept of blogging was confounding in light of the fact that every word that goes public is subject to a daunting round of approvals.

Before most organizations can join Steve and the other innovators and early adopters at the vanguard of social media, they will need to come to terms with era of the 140-character news cycle and establish processes and cultures that allow communicators (and others) to communicate effectively, unhindered by vestiges of outdated and archaic policies.

The approval process that became the standard in most organizations is based on several assumptions:

• Employees who are charged with creating content, such as press releases and authoritative statements of record, don’t know enough to avoid saying things that could cause problems for the company. Therefore, those who are in the know must vet the document in order to minimize the risk.
• The vetting process is designed to scrub the content clean for external consumption.
• Adequate news cycles exist that ensure there is enough time for the document to wend its way through the various layers of approval. A press release updating a crisis, for example, didn’t need to be in the hands of the media until 15 minutes before the 6 p.m. newscast.

Neither of the last two points is valid any longer, which requires organizations to think differently about how they address the first one.

First, the messages delivered internally are subject to external scrutiny, like it or not. While some organizations have awakened to the need for transparency, all organizations are having transparency thrust upon them. The line between internal and external communications is blurring. Communications to any audience need to be considered from this perspective at the time they’re crafted.

Second, there are no more news cycles (or, as I like to say, they’ve been reduced to 140 characters). Given the speed and volume of information filling the conversation space, the time it takes to process content through an approval process is time during which thousands of other messages can define your story and shape the public’s opinion. Especially in a crisis, you need to get your information into the mix now.

Given these realities, how does an organization prevent the communication of a message that contains inaccuracies, regulatory boo-boos and inconsistencies with the official company position? The answer, in most cases, is to alter the thinking about approvals from reactive to proactive. Rather than wait for each bit of content to be created, those tasked with communicating on behalf of the organization need to have a series of sit-downs with Legal, Regulatory Affairs and all the other specialists in order to be trained on the issues that could cause the company grief. Done well, this would leave lawyers and others confident that these communicators will produce problem-free content. They’ll also be confident that communicators will seek out their counsel when they’re not sure whether something they’re planning to say is problematic.

Ultimately, a new view of the role of internal communications can have largely the same result with all employees, not just the communicators.

But make no mistake: Before organizations can catch up to where the Steve Rubels and Stowe Boyds of the world were even two years ago, issues like the approval process will need to be addressed first.

---

3. Next Webinar: SEO for Communicators

The beginners’ crash course in Search Engine Optimization
with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, July 20
Webinar Cost: US $195

Register: http://bit.ly/38aEit

Highly reputable people are asserting that SEO—search engine optimization—could ultimately replace PR agencies. Meanwile, larger PR agencies and media companies are acquiring SEO boutiques.

At the very least, communicators need to have a foundation in SEO today just as much as they needed to understand desktop publishing two decades ago.

In this introductory course, you’ll learn the basics of SEO as it relates to communications; we’ll focus specifically on the dimensions of SEO that communicators need to incorporate into all their online efforts. You’ll learn…

• The importance of keywords and how to choose the right ones
• How metadata can drive better search results
• Critical elements fore any web page
• The ethics of SEO, and how not to violate them
• How to use web analytics to improve your SEO efforts
• SEO for press releases
• SEO behind the firewall, on your intranet

If SEO is brand new territory for you and you want to get up to speed in a hurry, this five-week course is for you! This Webinar will include a variety of multimedia elements including videos, audio, and screencasts, along with text.

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

If you have not participated in one of Shel’s webinars before, visit the site at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and watch the introductory video. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

Register: http://bit.ly/38aEit

---

4. One role for print: making dull messages stand out

Communicating mundane messages to employees is one of the tasks that has been made harder for internal communicators by the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities on internal networks.

Consider, for example, the communication of a benefits enrollment deadline. There’s little that gets communicated inside companies duller than employee benefits information. But employees still paid attention 20 years ago because the reminder was one of a few messages being broadcast to employees. Back then, the role of communications was to produce one-way, top-down messages to ensure employees knew what they needed to know (like, for instance, not missing the benefits enrollment deadline). With communicators acting as gatekeepers, it was easy to maintain a flow of content that the average employee could digest.

Today, communicators produce only a fraction of the messages through which employees must sift. Depending on the dgree to which the company has embraced the Web 2.0 concept internally, employees consume messages from communities of various stripes, employee blogs, internal RSS feeds, updates on enterprise social networks, employee-generated videos, internal presence networks like Yammer, the list goes on.

Not that this is bad; in fact, it’s great. The more employees can network with each other, the more quickly they’ll find the information they need to do their jobs, get answers to question, connect with others with whom a relationship is beneficial and form ad hoc teams to tackle problems and jump on oportunities.

But still, with all this content, how prominent can you make an email or intranet item on those drab-as-dishwater messages that still need to get out?

The solution is to go analog. While this won’t work where employees are scattered and working from wherever, but for those organizations whose employees still gather in office buildings and manufacturing facilities, analog communications can stand out from the sea of digital messages.

Who’s going to miss a brightly colored poster on an easel by the elevators, in the lobby and in other high-traffic areas? How about table-tent cards in break rooms and the cafeteria? When I worked for ARCO back in the early 1980s, Employee Communications Manager Dave Orman drew attention to a 401(k) plan by hanging mobiles all over the ARCO Towers and other facilities; each of the pieces hanging from the mobile reinforced the enrollment message.

Even a print publication can get attention. One communicator I spoke with several years ago had ceased publication of a company magazine, moving all content to the intranet. But when a critical issue arose, she produced a special print issue that was distributed to employees’ desks. The reaction from employees was, “Wow, if they’ve gone to the trouble to print this, it must be important.”

I remember one boring message that was printed on movie theater-style popcorn boxes, then filled with popcorn and distributed on cafeteria tables for employees of one big manufacturing company. That was a message that employees not only remembered, but talked about.

Not only is print not dead, it’s a means of getting mundane messages to stand out.

---

5. Ending the “Deny-delay-defend” crisis strategy

In the countless battles between communicators and corporate attorneys over what to say in response to reputation-threatening situations, the lawyers’ advice to say nothing (or little) usually prevails.

The result is often disastrous for the organization, but CEOs and senior leaders presume that mitigation of legal risk is of paramount concern. Industry pundits often agree, arguing that corporations are legal entities, requiring leaders to sweep legal concerns under the rug.

There is no need to characterize this situation as a battle between PR and Legal, however. The fact is that, viewed strictly through the legal prism, the counsel coming from corporate attorneys is frequently bad legal advice. The reasons bad advice comes from the general counsel’s office:

• In a crisis, lawyers are no less inclined to jerk their knees and make bad decisions than any other unprepared member of senior management
• Law schools do a lousy job of equipping their graduates to address the long-term consequences of short-sighted legal counsel

Still, bad legal advice is followed with barely a thought simply because it’s coming from a lawyer who has a seat at the management table. In far too many organizations, management does not share that same level of built-in trust with its top communicators.

-Bad advice

The typical advice from legal counsel—silence or something close to it—is usually designed to minimize the risk of judgments awarded to plaintiffs in lawsuits filed in the wake of whatever situation prompted the statement in the first place. That same silence, however, is construed as guilt by a risk-averse public, which can have consequences far more dire than a large judgment. Stakeholders are inclined teo assume the worst about companies in a crisis, so they lose confidence when they resort to typical non-responses.

This isn’t opinion. In a study conducted 12 years ago, the year-end closing stock prices of companies that experienced crises were compared. Those that responded well saw their share value 4%, then rebound and remain 7% above their pre-crisis close, while those responded badly (that is, did what their lawyers told them to do) experienced initial declines of 10% with share prices remaining down, closing the year 15% below pre-crisis levels. That’s a 22% difference in year-end share value between companies that responded honestly and candidly versus those lawyered up over the possibility of lawsuits.

(The Oxford Executive Research Briefing that reported these findings is detailed in this Wharton Leadership Digest, a PDF file.)

Another study, this one from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, found that companies taking responsibility in a crisis outperformed those that blamed someone else by 14-19%.

Expressing regret, apologizing, and acknowldging blame (if there’s blame to acknowledge) do more than help a company’s reputation, though. They actually produce better legal results. While this flies in the face of conventional wisdom—that same conventional wisdom that drives CEOs to buy into the say-nothing strategy promoted by their attorneys—just isn’t supported by the facts. Just ask Jim Golden.

Golden served as general counsel for a company in the trucking industry, a litigation-prone business if ever there was one. He practiced what he calls the “deny-delay-defend” approach to crises, but has since concluded tehat the legal results are far better if companies embrace the responses so often advanced by their PR advisers. Golden, now a negotiation counsel for a Tennessee law firm, says that doing the right thing and telling the truth results in fewer cases going to trial and smaller judgments from those cases that do make it to the inside of a courtroom.

In those cases that do go to trial, Golden says, juries believe that justice has already been done and see no bad guys in the case; there’s nothing left to be proven in court. Golden’s clients that have taken this approach have had their insurance premiums reduced by up to 30%.

This isn’t just Golden’s experience. A study of doctors accused of malpractice found that those who apologized for the outcome (without necessary taking blame) experienced fewer trials and lower settlements. That’s counterintuitive to the legal advice most doctors get, to keep their mouths shut so the lawyers can deal with it in court.

Blame law schools

Golden—who recently participated in an FIR Live discussion on lawyers and communicators—blamed law schools for the deny-delay-defend tactic. Corporate counsels, Golden says, “don’t know their options” because law schools aren’t presenting them. Mid-career attorneys, however, are increasingly seeking training on just those options, with bar associations and litigation departments bring the training in-house.

In the meantime, communicators can do a better job of making the case against deny-delay-defend by pointing out that there are more options than saying nothing (what the lawyers prefer) and self-destructive blathering (what the lawyers fear). According to Fred Garcia, founder and president of crisis management firm LOGOS Consulting Group—and another guest on the recent FIR Live—there’s a lot of room to maneuver in between those two extremes.

It would help, though, if the top communicator’s views were held in the same regard as the top legal counsel. A Financial Post article suggests that’s not the case, with communications relegated to middle management where they don’t have leadership’s ear:

“Whether it is due to arrogance, entitlement or a sense of invulnerability among senior executives, as one expert suggests, the reality is that many kings of the corporate world no longer put communications at the top of their agenda. Such isolation has made them more vulnerable to crisis.”

It is this inattention to the reputational issues at the heart of communications’ agenda that has led (at least in part) to “the AIG spa scandal, the car manufacturers’ jet debacle and the bonus blowup,” the Post article concludes.

We in communications have been talking about that seat at the management table for at least as long as I’ve been in the profession—more than 30 years. The obvious approach to securing that seat is to prove the bottom-line value of our counsel. But I’m curious: What’s your approach to being taken as seriously as the lawyers in your organization?

---

6. Site of the Month

Posterous is getting a fair amount of attention ever since PR uberblogger Steve Rubel decided to abandon his longtime blog, Micro Persuasion, in favor of a Posterous blog. With Posterous, you can post anything from the website or via email—even from your phone. It’s being touted for its ability to let you maintain a “flow,” but I’m skeptical…and planning a blog post about it. Still, it’s worth looking at.

Posterous: http://www.posterous.com
Steve Rubel’s Lifestream: http://www.steverubel.com

---

7. HC+T update

• I have posted two of my recent presentations—both audio and PowerPoint deck, so you can follow along. “Social Media and Crisis Communications” from the SNCR NewComm Forum is here: http://bit.ly/10dOo7. “The News Release in the Social Media Era” from IABC’s 2009 World Conference is here: http://bit.ly/lr2EW
  
• I’ll be helping an internally-known healthcare institution strategize their social media activities over a two-day engagement at the end of July
  
• I’m working with a hospital to develop social media policies and guidelines for employees

---

8. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

]]> 2009-06-30T18:05:31+00:00 http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/hct_update_may_2009/ The monthly email email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology HC+T Update
April 2009

1. I Don’t Care If You Were On Twitter Before Oprah
2. Cluetrain Thesis #4: A Decade Later
3. Next Webinar: The New Employee Communications
4. The Serendipity of the Package
5. Rock Tour Leads To Evolution Of Print
6. Site Of The month
7. HC+T Update
8. Boilerplate and subscription information

I haven’t hadmuch time for blogging. I know it’s early in the month and I could wait until later, but I’m leaving town and won’t have much time to produce the issue later in the month, so I decided to put one out that’s a little lighter on content than usual rather than miss it altogether. 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 Don’t Care If You Were On Twitter Before Oprah

If you stick around long enough, you get to see history repeat itself. Since history repeats itself when nobody learned from it the first time around, it’s usually not a pretty sight.

The latest example of this is all the righteous indignation by users of Twitter over the surge of newcomers to the service joining in order to follow celebrities like Shaq, Ashton Kutcher, and Oprah Winfrey. With her media power, Oprah has motivated more than 1.5 million people, by some estimates, to sign onto Twitter just since she mentioned on her TV show that she has started to use the service, all before she sent her first tweet. The day she referenced Twitter on the show, 37% of visits to Twitter.com were from first-time visitors and overall traffic surged 43%, according to a USA Today article.

Buzzfeed actually proclaimed that all dates after April 17 shall forever be known as TAO—Twitter After Oprah. Somehow, I doubt that. But of all the ego-boosting nonsense surrounding the objection to the mainstream public joining Twitter, the “Here Before Oprah” website is the most pathetic. Seriously, just how desperately do you need to stand out? (Besides, why isn’t the same crowd whining about Sony’s use of Twitter as the platform for a game in support of its new “Terminator” movie? Could it be because they’re all playing the game?)

Incidentally, you can also use the “Here Before Oprah” site to see if your Twitter account predates anybody else you know, which might, I suppose, possibly have some minor uses.

I do not care who was here before Oprah. I do not care whom I beat to Twitter, or who beat me. It does not matter. The only thing that matters is whether your tweets are interesting or valuable. If they’re not—at least to me—I will not follow you. If they are, I will. Whether you were here on the day of Twitter’s launch or joined yesterday is irrelevant. Only the quality of your content matters. Period.

(Please don’t be offended if I’m not following you. I’m about 1,500 new followers behind in my should-I-or-shouldn’t-I assessment, and I don’t foresee catching up any time soon.)

I can’t possibly be the only person who remembers the same angst-ridden chest-thumping that took place when AOL users began migrating to the Web. “It’s all over,” the early adopters sobbed. “The unwashed masses will forever ruin our pristine geek clubhouse.”

Of course, what the influx of all those AOL newbies really did was create the critical mass that enabled the growth of ecommerce, online communication, and even (dare I say it?) social media. But even that wasn’t the first time the early adopters resisted opening the doors of their cherished private domain to outsiders. When Canadian online expert Michael Strangelove began publishing his (print) “Internet Business Journal” back around 1990, he actually received death threats. That’s right, people would rather send death threats than acknowledge that the Internet might someday play host to anything so base and undignified as business.

These are history lessons from which today’s generation of early adopters clearly have learned nothing. While nobody will ever commemorate the day the first banner ad appeared, business and the mainstream public both proved to be boons for the Net. Many of the online innovations we take for granted were developed to support business’ efforts to reach consumers, after all.

So here’s my advice to everyone wringing their hands over the intrusion by Joe Beercan into the Twitterspace: If you don’t like it, don’t follow them. Other than that, take a deep breath and crack open a history book. Maybe you’ll learn something.

2. Clutrain Thesis #4: A Decade Later

Ten years ago today, The Cluetrain Manifesto was unveiled. Since then, it has been held up by many as truth writ large. Others dismiss it is impractical, unrealistic, unworkable. In the middle are those who find wisdom in the Manifesto but wonder what all the fuss is about.

Lost in the debate about The Cluetrain Manifesto’s value, though, are the 95 theses that comprise it, beginning with the notion that “markets are conversations.” Certainly, it was a bold concept, given that a market, at its core, is a complex environment in which people and institutions exchange goods and services.

Each of the subsequent 94 theses, though, stands or falls on its own merit. And how they were interpreted a decade ago, while of some historical interest, isn’t very relevant in the vastly changed world in which we live today.

Keith MacArthur, a journalist-turned-communicator (currently senior director of social media and digital communication for Canadian megacompany Rogers Communciations), has undertaken an impressive project to explore each of the theses on their collective 10th birthday. I was particularly pleased when Keith reached out to me to offer my thoughts on thesis number four:

Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

Understanding thesis number four requires, as a prerequisite, an agreement with the preceding thesis, which proposes that “conversations among human beings sound human; they are conducted in a human voice.”

The premise here is simple: Conversation is natural, while the function we have come to know as “communication” grew increasingly wordsmithed. It wouldn’t be pretty if an executive spoke to his wife the same way he talks to shareholders about company strategy:

“Life partner, I’m pleased to report that the meal we just concluded conformed to requirements, and the meat loaf exceeded requirements. Now we should shift our competencies from the dining facility to the recreation venue where we can leverage our discretionary time in order to consume some best-in-class entertainment from a wide range of options.”

Fortunately, even the most formal CEO probably tells his wife, “That was a great meal, honey. Let’s go to the living room and find something to watch on TV, unless you’d rather listen to some music and read.”

The growth of social media in the last decade is largely responsible for more and more organizations talking in a human voice. Or, more accurately, the people in organizations have increasingly been talking for themselves, a departure from the carefully crafted statement of record.

• At Ernst & Young, a Facebook-based recruiting effort invited employees to converse with prospects in discussion groups, a far cry from the display ads and job descriptions that usually kick off a recruitment drive.
  
• Employees from throughout Embarq, a Fortune 500 telco, have conversations with customers over Twitter and other channels, led by @Embarq_Joey who inaugurates conversations with unhappy customers with language like, “Sorry your DSL is messed up. Can I help? Send me a DM with your DSL # and I can check it out for you.” “Messed up” is hardly corporatese, is it? On the same account, he tweets non-work-related messages, like “Home at last!!! Such much to catch up with on the DVR, man!”
  
• Dave Neeleman, former CEO of JetBlue, spoke from the heart when he recorded YouTube video apologizing for the 2007 Valentine’s Day freeze at New York’s Kennedy Airport. Clearly, no lawyers were involved in prepping Neeleman’s statement.
  
• Alan Mullaly, Ford Motor Company’s CEO, sat and chatted with participants in a blogger dinner, with no handlers in sight, allowing the conversation to be videotaped, an informal chat most CEOs 10 years ago would have seen as undignified and unprofessional. Today, it’s viewed as authentic and real.
  
• Marriott International CEO Bill Marriott tells his stories in his own unedited voice on his blog.

These are just a few examples. Others appear in blog posts and comments, podcasts, videos, and other channels that permeate the Web. It’s a good thing, too. People are sick to death of hearing stilted language churned out by communicators and lawyers that sound like anything but the conversations they want to have. And because leaders are recognizing that their markets are conversations, they are increasingly recognizing the need to participate like real people—and for their employees to engage, as well.

Revisiting the thesis affords an opportunity to see how smart companies are showing their humanity in each of the ways described:

Delivering information — PepsiCo podcasts have featured executives delivering performance results as though they were sitting across the cafeteria table from frontline employees.

Delivering opinions—Michael Hyatt, CEO at Thomas Nelson Publishers, blogs routinely about what he thinks, such as this post about why he believes every traditional publisher should be blogging.

Delivering perspectives—Beth Israel Deconness CEO Paul Levy uses his blog to offer perspectives on healthcare in some of the most forthright posts imaginable.

Delivering dissenting arguments—GM’s Bob Lutz spoke candidly on the Fastlane blog about his own views on global warming. Like them or not, it’s hard to deny that his words were genuine.

(We’ll let the humorous asides go. I’ve never heard one in delivered in corporatese.)

What characterizes each of these examples—and the list that preceds them—is the human voice—open, natural, and uncontrived. Of course, there are plenty of organizations still caught up in the inhuman, forced language of business from a bygone era, but the change is upon us and accelerating; there is no turning back.

None of this would matter if business didn’t benefit from the effort. A recent Heyman Associates study, however, indicated that genuine two-way communication is a more credible way to deliver information. Credibility is a pillar of trust, and trust drives business.

To all those who are weary of shifting paradigms and outside-the-box thinking, nothing could be more welcome.

What examples of authentic human voices from organization employees and leaders impressed you?

3. Next Webinar: The New Employee Communications

The New Employee Communications
with Shel Holtz and Steve Crescenzo
Beginning Monday, May 18
Webinar Cost is US $195

This Webinar was so popular when it ran over a year ago that I’ve decided it’s time to offer it again for those who may have missed it. Plus, it’ll be updated to include the latest information.

The employee communications profession is in turmoil. A function that has thrived on the careful crafting of messages in order to build engagement and support business goals, internal communications is now faced with the infiltration of Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise. Is the job now one of cruise director instead of drill sergeant? And what about the eroding line between internal and external communications as employees increasingly are participating in World Wide Web-based social networks like Facebook? Does employee communications have a role to play in addressing customer service issues that arise in blogs? Should communication to new-hires take place in external social networks? What about employees about to join the company?

In this incisive Webinar, online communication authority Shel Holtz and employee communications guru Steve Crescenzo will explore the various dimensions of internal communications in a dramatically changed world. You’ll learn from Steve, Shel, and from each other…

• How to draw the line between formal and informal communication
• Where internal communications should participate in online knowledge sharing activities
• How to integrate social media into an internal communication strategy
• How to prepare employees to serve as brand ambassadors in social networks
• Why most traditional internal communication tools are still valid, and how to use them in this new environment

This Webinar will include a variety of multimedia elements (including conversations between Shel and Steve on the lecture topics, videos, and screencasts), along with text.

As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.

If you have not participated in one of Shel’s webinars before, visit the site at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and watch the introductory video. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.

Webinar cost is U.S. $195.

Register here: http://tinyurl.com/d3nt92

4. The Serendipity of the Package

The “print is dead” meme is based on a couple simple assumptions. First, the digital world can do anything print can do, only better. And second, the economics of print—from turning trees into pulp into paper, then managing the distribution channels—just won’t cut it.

The evidence supporting the meme just keeps pouring in, like word today that The New York Times Company plans to shut down The Boston Globe (only to offer a reprieve shortly after the announcement). Layoffs and spending cuts haven’t produced the savings required to keep the paper afloat, so the Times announced it plans to shutter the paper in 60 days after failing to win concessions from the Newspaper Guild.

A lot of people predict the death of the newspaper industry. Steve Rubel has gone so far as to predict the death in the next decade of all tangible media.

As regular readers know, I have a $100 bet with Jose Leal that, in 2018, I’ll be able to buy a newspaper from a rack on the street.

The terms of the bet include nothing about what newspaper I’ll be able to buy. I never asserted it would be a newspaper publishing today. It could well be that somebody starts a print newspaper that captures the public’s attention and imagination after the one-time juggernauts of journalism have faded from the scene.

Ultimately, though, there’s nothing wrong with print. In fact, the best way to revitalize the print business is to recognize print’s strengths over online delivery and be bold in executing them.
The real power of print is in the package.

For all the astounding content on the Web, a hyperlink-mediated environment can actually discourage the serendipitous discovery of content. Consider a visit to a news aggregation site. Your eyes skim over the hyperlinked headlines, but you click only on the items that interest you. While you may have absorbed some information from the headlines you dismissed, you’ll never see the additional links to content that might have been compelling on the pages you opted not to view.

Print, on the other hand, can be the source of endless serendipity, when done well. Turning a page should be an adventure: You have no idea what you’ll find, such as a design that delights you, a photo that wows you, a story that captivates you—none of which you would have searched for or clicked to. Quality printing also provides benefits you can’t get on-screen.

Sadly, as print media retrenches, publishers have gone exactly the opposite direction, embracing timidity instead of boldness. I can’t remember the last time the design of a newspaper page struck me as enticing and the stories are the same ones I read everywhere else, AP and Reuters filler that’s just as easily found in 10,000 online sites, not to mention other newspapers.

Whether the publishers of any surviving newspapers figure this out remains to be seen, but somebody will embrace the idea of the serendipity of the package. Once readers can’t wait to flip through an issue to see what unexpected delights they’ll discover, advertisers will follow. At that point, the fact that putting ink onto paper is an expensive proposition will be incidental—people will pay for products in which they find value.

I’m not suggesting, by the way, that print can regain its market share over digital content, only that print will find a place. But I recall talking to a communicator whose company had dispensed with print, taking its internal communications online. Only rarely—when she needed to make sure something stood out from the rest of the company’s communications—did she produce a printed publication for distribution to employees. When such a publication landed on employees’ desks, their response was, “Wow, it’s in print. It must be important.”

Like I say, it’s all in how well content producers understand the importance of the package.

5. Rock Tour Leads To Evolution Of Print

Print’s not dead. Regardless of what the digital purists say, there are plenty of uses for print. As I’ve noted before, I don’t foresee the complete migration from print to digital for graphic novels and comic books, baseball cards, direct mail pieces, or the brochures they give you when you walk into Disneyland or that you find in racks in front of tourist attractions. I even think you’ll still find paper newspapers 10 years from now and beyond.

Print is evolving, however, and nothing characterizes that evolution quite like print-on-demand (POD). There is no shortage of dunderheads out there who think POD is a new synonym for vanity press, but the two have little in common. Vanity presses did large press runs for wannabe authors who couldn’t find a publisher, while POD lets anyone produce just the number of copies they want, when they want them, of just about anything. The possibilities are unlimited.

Take, for example, the deal that Blurb just inked with The Dead, the current iteration of the The Grateful Dead, featuring all four surviving members of the iconic Bay Area jam band along with a couple friends to fill in the gaps.

The Dead is touring this spring, and the band will produce a book of photography for each of the tour’s 17 stops. The photography will be provided by longtime Grateful Dead photography Jay Blakesberg. And fans will be able to replace the cover image with their own photo. Each book will be available within 72 hours of the end of the show.

Blurb developed the Personal Cover option just for this offering, although undoubtedly it will be extended to other products down the road.

From the press release:
“The band wanted to enable the Dead Heads to visually experience the show in a totally new way,” said Jay Blakesberg, photographer for the upcoming DEAD tour. “Extending the concert experience via personalized, professional-quality photography books, available within days following each show, is unlike any band merchandising I’ve ever seen. The speed of Blurb’s publishing platform meant we could create books with unique content for every tour stop. By also allowing fans to add their own magic to the cover, The DEAD are once again breaking the rules with this awesome new technology!”

“Working with The DEAD presents an exciting opportunity for Blurb to help a band create a new, cool type of merchandise item,” said Robin Goldberg, SVP of Marketing and Business Development, Blurb. “This partnership was attractive to The DEAD and to Blurb because we’ve been able to allow Dead Heads to work with licensed content but still add their own personal touch to each book.”

Since I’ll be at the show in Mountain View on May 14, I’ll just have to bring a camera so I can personalize a cover and order my own copy. It’ll most likely sit on my coffee table, where a digital version could never replace the tactile pleasure of flipping through a book of high-end printed images on high-quality paper.

Now, put on your thinking cap. For your company or clients, to what uses could this kind of near-instant printing, with the personalized touch, be put? The company holiday party? Images from trade shows or product launches? What ideas pop into your mind?

6. Site of the Month

Twitterfall
http://www.twitterfall.com

If you need to see how fast a meme is spreading through Twitter, nothing helps you visualize it like Twitterfall. Rather than relying on a refresh of the page, Twitterfall grabs tweets that match keywords and drops them as fast as it can from the top of the page.

I demo’d this using the #swineflu hashtag, and within minutes had over 30,000 tweets in the queue—even dropping at one every half-second couldn’t clear them. It’s an indicator for you—and management—that a topic is building a head of steme and can help determine whether—and how—you’ll address it.

7. HC+T update

• I’m off to Brazil this week to conduct workshops for Petrobras and ABERJE, Brazil’s communications association.
  
• I’m presenting the keynote at Blog Potomac in Washington D.C. next month, right after the IABC conference.
  
• Speaking of IABC, I’ll be presenting in the All-Star track, focused on the Social Media News Release.

8. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

]]> 2009-05-05T20:44:25+00:00 http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/hct_update_april_2009/ 1) Mommy Bloggers Are Media Properties
2) Twitter: Gateway To Substantive Content
3) Next Webinar: Micromessaging for Communicators
4) What Are You Willing To Barter In Exchange For Content? 
5) Online Americans Are Redefining What It Means To Be Entertained
6) Choose: Free Speech Or Medical Care?
7) A CEO Role Model For Transparency, Engagement, Responsibility
8) Site Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information

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. Mommy Bloggers Are Media Properties  

I saw a news item reporting on the five winners of the first-ever Mommy Blogger Awards. This is significant on a number of levels, starting with the sponsor of the awards. This isn’t the Webbys or some awards program from new media publisher. It’s Scholastic. The folks who gave us Clifford the Big Red Dog, Harry Potter (in the U.S.), and Captain Underpants, not to mention school book fairs, is the company behind the Mommy Blogger Awards.

More specifically, it’s Scholastic’s Parent and Child Magazine that sponsored voting that wrapped up last Saturday. When an old-guard publishing business recognizes the importance of the blogosphere, it’s time to admit that social media—at least this part of it—has gone mainstream.

It’s a smart move on Scholastic’s part. Parent and Child Magazine targets exactly the same readers who read mommy blogs. Creating a relationship with both the bloggers and their readers is a good idea. Doing it in a non-competitive way—like, say, through a mommy blogger recognition program—is an even better idea.

The winning blogs also point to the mainstreaming of social media. One of the winners, “Salsa in China,” has a store and about 625,000 visits per week. Another, Momisodes, attracts 350,000 visits a week and takes in advertising dollars.

These don’t yet approach the numbers of Better Homes & Gardens (7.6 million) or Good Housekeeping (4.6 million). On the other hand, Salsa in China’s readership every week is roughly the same as the circulation of Men’s Fitness magazine (the print edition). These mommy blogs are not just blogs. They’re media properties. They attract readers, sell advertising, manage e-commerce sites. Their use of blogging platforms is incidental. Salsa in China and other comparable mommy blogs deserve the same respect and status as Barron’s (300,000 subscribers) and Wine Spectator (345,000 subscribers). It’s not silly or pointless for GM to make nice with mommy bloggers when they command readership numbers that rival the magazines in which companies have traditionally advertised.

Of course, that also means that pitching these media properties is every bit as legitimate an activity as it is pitching to Smart Money (820,000 subscribers) or Conde Nast Traveler (780,000 subscribers).

(This doesn’t excuse off-target, lame, clueless pitching. It does kinda irk me that all those bloggers who complain about being inundated with bad pitches seem to suffer under the belief that they are the exclusive recipients of such garbage. Talk to a reporter. They’ve been getting clueless pitches and lame press releases for decades. Hell, I got too much of it when I was a reporter, and that goes back to 1977; I remember stacks and stacks of mail containing unbelievably bad press releases.)

But once your website becomes a full-blown media property, it’s ridiculous to think you should be exempt from outreach by PR people trying to get their clients’ stories told.

2. Twitter: Gateway To Substantive Content

Twitter is all about brevity. One-hundred forty characters in which to condense your most profound thoughts. It’s perfect for the Attention Deficit Disorder crowd, since they can’t focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds anyway.

Everything you read about Twitter—and it’s a lot these days, between blog posts like this and a sudden infatuation by mainstream media—mentions the brevity thing. And I think it’s a load of crap.

Yes, the messages are short. But many tweets are just part of some greater content. Tweets direct you to blog posts, breaking news, videos, photos, just about anything you can find on the Net. Remarking on the brevity of these tweets is like pointing out the terseness of tables of contents. In a sense, a lot of tweets are like the listings in a table of contents, signposts to more information, more content.

On the most recent Media Hacks podcast, someone (it may have been Julien Smith, but I honestly don’t remember for sure) compared it to seeing a billboard for a McDonald’s hamburger. If it looks good, you don’t drive to the billboard and hope to be served a meal. The sign just makes you want to drive to the restaurant.

Other tweets are notifications of some kind, like Jeremy Pepper spreading word of a tweetup in Venice Beach.

Then there are those that are part of a conversation, which is greater than the sum of its tweets. Verbal conversation is mostly brief give-and-take punctuated by a few speeches and lectures. The fact that tweets are brief in a conversation is no big deal.

There are also queries that generate a flurry of interesting, if not useful, information, such as the one to which I recently responded asking our opinions of the greatest rock album ever recorded (I cast my vote for “Dark Side of the Moon”).

Far from a collection of short, standalone messages for the attention-challenged (as many see it) Twitter is frequently a gateway to more, deeper content; in these cases, its role is that of a portal. A social portal, that is, in which the destinations are offered by whomever you choose to follow.

If only there were a way to isolate the tweets of those who only update us on their activities. Then Twitter would be all about brevity. But I scrolled through over 100 tweets from those I’m following and couldn’t find a single simple status update to use as an example. If I had the time, I’d categorize those tweets. Maybe for another day.

3. Next Webinar: Micromessaging for Communicators

A new Webinar featuring Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, April 20, 2009
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Register: http://tinyurl.com/d2k5ts

You can’t open a newspaper, sit in a restaurant, or attend a conference without being inundated with Twitter. The micromessaging tool inspires discussion ranging from “a waste of time for the attention-challenged” to “a key tool for organizations for everything from branding to crisis communication.

The simple fact is that Twitter is hugely important for communicators and will become even more important in the months ahead—both for external and internal communication. But it’s just as important to know that Twitter isn’t the only micromessaging option out there. And how these micromessaging tools are used can have an impact on your engagement in other dimensions of social media.

While there’s a ton of material on the web offering insights into Twitter and its kin, this Webinar offers the context of the organizational communicator, the issues and challenges of implementing the various uses of micromessaging in a corporate environment, the means of assessing the impact of your efforts, and how to use the tools strategically to support communication efforts and have an impact on the organization’s bottom line. It’s also not the same old gushing enthusiasm but rather a hard look at how Twitter can make your life easier in some respects and complicate it in others.

You’ll learn…

- How some companies have used Twitter as an internal communications channel
- The alternatives to Twitter for employee communications, and how to decide which to use
- The approaches to organizational engagement in the Twittersphere
- How brands should be represented
- Using Twitter to provide audiences with a gateway
- How to get the most out of Twitter search
- Using Twitter as a research tool
- Guidelines and rules for employee involvement

...and a lot more!

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. All this costs only $195-a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room-and you’ll never have to leave your desk.

Webinars are asynchronous-you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new text-based lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time. Be sure to watch the video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for your professional development needs.

Shel Holtz, the instructor for this session, is one of the world’s recognized leading online communication authorities. He has led internal communications at two Fortune 500 companies and counseled scores of others, including Intel, Sears, Symantec, Aetna, The World Bank, The American Red Cross, The Walt Disney Company, General Mills and PepsiCo. He is a leading advocate for the value and power of communication from your organization’s leaders.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn all you need to know to bring micromessaging into your organization’s communications mix with nothing but positive results.

Register: http://tinyurl.com/d2k5ts

4. What Are You Willing To Barter In Exchange For Content?

Back in 1984, Stewart Brand uttered the words that have become the slogan of the free content movement: “Information wants to be free.”

Those who advocate free content, however, are taking Brand’s statement out of context. At the first Hacker’s conference where he made the statement, he was talking about the tension between the value of content and the vanishing cost associated with distributing it. Here’s what he actually said:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

While the free content movement has embraced the latter part of Brand’s quote, paid content advocates haven’t adopted “information wants to be expensive” as a motto. Maybe they should. At the same time, maybe they should argue that compensation for that content doesn’t have to assume a monetary form. In the world of barter, there are things besides money that have value.

KPMG, the professional services firm, has found—in the UK, at least—that Internet users are willing to tolerate a brief delay in getting to otherwise free content to watch an advertisement. In its third annual Consumers and Convergence study—produced by the company’s Communications and Media practice—KMPG found that more than 60% of British consumers said they were willing to receive the Internet ads as long as the reward of free content awaited them at the other end.

If people are willing to pay for “free” content with their attention, you have to wonder what else they might be willing to give up. Contact information? Participation in a brief survey?

Ultimately, it’s a question of convenience. The free content movement has a point when they argue that there’s so much free content available that nobody has to dig into their wallets to get at it. But there’s plenty of free music available, too; yet people seem more than happy to give Apple (or WalMart or Amazon) 99 cents rather than go through the hassle of finding and downloading illegal music via Bitorrent or Limewire. Convenience makes it worth the 99 cents.

The same concept can easily apply to other kinds of content. Sure, if I dig around long enough, I might find an alternative source for the information I need. But if getting to the easy-to-find, original, authoritative document only costs me my name and email address (for addition to a lead list), four answers to questions on a poll, or 20 seconds with an ad, I’ll be happy to enter into that bargain. It’s more convenient than starting a new Google search and assessing the quality of the resulting links.

In the survey, only 16% of respondents said they would rather pay for the content and avoid the ads. This suggests different views of what it means to pay. Money is the issue, not other kinds of exchanges. Of course, this is the UK we’re talking about. Worldwide, more than 40% said they’d rather pay than receive ads. That’s a lot more than 16%, but it’s still a minority.

Tudor Aw, KPMG’s convergence partner, said, “This willingness to view adverts in exchange for free content is good news for advertisers and is perhaps a pointer in the ongoing debate over whether advertising or subscription is the right revenue model.”

Ultimately, this could be one of those rare cases of having your cake and eating it, too. Content can be free and yet you may still be able to extract something of value in exchange for it.

5. Online Americans Are Redefining What It Means To Be Entertained  

f you’re going to capture anybody’s attention, you need to do it where they’re spending their time. Increasingly, that’s social networking sites. According to a study from research company NetPop, time spent social networking has exploded 93% since 2006. That means around a third of the time U.S. Internet users spend online is devoted to communicating, not consuming.

Dig deeper into these social networking activities and you find out that people communicate online each week with, on average, 18 people one-to-one and with 110 people through group interaction. And this isn’t just kids, the usual justification for dismissing the importance of social media. Of active social networkers (those who have estalbished profiles on more than one site) 25.6% are between 18 and 24, 23% are 25 to 35, but nearly half are 35 to 64.

The study, “Online Activities among U.S. Broadband Users, 2006 and 2007 (U.S. $295),” reported that 76% of American broadband users are “joiners,” to use the parlance of Forrester’s technographic ladder. That translates into 105 million people in the U.S. communicating through social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, not to mention niche networks and social networks (like CarSpace and MyRagan) and social networks integrated into broadere sites (like FastCompany).

More time on social networks means less time spent elsewhere, and Netpop’s research suggests that reallocation of time comes at the expense of more traditional online entertainment. Passive consumption of entertainment online droped 29% over the last two years, to just 19% of the time people spend online. Another way to look at this: Peoples’ idea of what constitutes entertainment is shifting from passive consumption of online media to a more active engagement with other people, mostly people they already know. Sharing with others is more fun than kicking back and watching a video.

According to Netpop, the study suggests that companies need to do more to engage consumers and commit more of their online efforts to user-generated content and social media through which people can talk with the company and with each other. If companies don’t provide these opportunities, they will find it harder to track and engage consumers because, Netpop believes, they’ll find other channels through which they can participate in such conversations, even if it means building those communities themselves.

It’s easy to dismiss the notion that cmpanies must build community around their brands, but trying to caputre attention by hitting people with messages in places they’re not spending time is like shoving wads of money into a garbage disposal. I’m currently reading Martin Lindstrom’s excellent book, “Buyology,” in which he provides compelling evidence that people don’t pay attention to brand messages in video games, for example, yet companies are pouring exorbidant sums into in-game marketing. Business needs to understand that consumer habits across a loarge demographic swath are changing, and thus the means by which to reach them have to change as well.

The blog Bohan Style offers a good example with Victoria’s Secret Pink, a Facebook group into which more than 1.1 million people have opted. The post quotes Brad ABettese, executive VP and managing director of a Sanfrancisco marketing agency: “The community is a self-selecting loyalty program. Pink has been careful to provide tools that not only help to manage the brand’s identity, but communicate with loyal ‘friends’ and strengthen the brand’s relevance.”

The decision to deliver value through authentic engagement seems less and less optional in the face of ia growing body of evidence. I’ll be including Netpop’s numbers into my upcoming presentations. 

6. Choose: Free Speech Or Medical Care? 

Consider this scenario:

You’ve been dying to try out a hot restaurant that’s been generating a lot of buzz. So you make a reservation and, at the appointed time, you head to the eatery. You and your dining partner walk into the restaurant and approach the maitre d’. You give him your name, he finds you on the reservation list, and then hands you a document that looks oddly legalistic with a line at the bottom for your signature. Anxious to get to the appetizers and not interested in reading fine print, you inquire about the document. And the maitre d’ replies:

“Before we serve you, we’ll need your signature on this document agreeing that you won’t write any negative reviews of this restaurant for any online review sites.”

The idea is, of course, outrageous. And it’s all the more outrageous that Jeffrey Segal is hawking a template for just such a document to doctors.

Segal, a North Carolina-based neurosurgeon, is behind a concern called Medical Justice which is focused on shielding doctors from the deliterous effects of social media.

The template for the legal agreement is just part of Medical Justice’s offerings. Segal’s company also monitors review sites—including the growing number of sites dedicated to rating doctors—and using other techniques to prevent patients from posting negative comments to those sites. Some 2,000 doctors have become Medical Justice clients. In return for their fees, Segal’s company will find negative comments from any patients who signed the document and use the threat of legal action to force them to remove the comments.

What about patients who decline to sign on the dotted line? Segal advises the doctors decline to treat them.

John Swapceinski, who founded RateMDs.com, sees Medical Justice’s approach as forcing patients to choose between medical treatment and (in the U.S.) their First Amendment rights. He calls it “repulsive.” According to an AP article, Swapcienski was planning to post a “Wall of Shame,” listing the names of doctors who require patients to sign the waivers. (RateMD’s comments are anonymous anyway, rendering the documents impotent.)

Segal argues that doctors’ reputations are threatened by the uncontrollable reviews patients post to the web. Medical Justice’s web site suggests that “Published comments on Web pages, blogs and/or mass correspondence, however well intended, could severely damage physician’s practice.”

Yeah? So it’s okay that bad reviews of restaurants can destroy a restaurant’s reputation, but doctors should not be subjected to the same kind of critiques? The very notion that doctors should somehow be immunized against word of mouth is reprehensible. Doctors, after all, are paid service providers, just like plumbers (who are also subject to posted reviews on sites like Yelp, among others).

Segal practices the worst kind of spin by arguing that Medical Justice is not trying to restrict patients’ freedom of speech. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he huffs on the company website. His argument: Claims of malpractice can be made by bitter ex-employees and ex-spouses pretending to be patients. Of course, these are not the targets of the waivers that restrict negative posts by patients. Further, most negative doctor reviews I’ve seen have to do with bedside manner, attitude, and behavior. Those that address quality of care generally don’t assert malpractice—just that they didn’t like the results they got.

Even if Segal’s argument made sense, the bottom line seems to be, “Because the consequences to doctors are greater, muzzling your free speech rights is fine and dandy.”

Doctors—like restaurants and plumbers—have never been able to stop the word of mouth that occurs over backyard fences, at PTA meetings, family dinners, and church picnics. (In fact, positive word of mouth can drive business their way. Of course, the waivers don’t restrict patients from posting positive reviews.) Nor should they try, unless the word of mouth descends to the level of slander. The medical profession needs to understand that word of mouth has moved online and seeking to censor it is a very bad idea.

I once suggested to a healthcare client that, if they really wanted to embrace social media, they would offer discharged patients the ability to offer an online five-star rating of the doctors who provided their care. You could feel the foundations of the institution tremble at the mere thought. But it did occur to some communicators that, after the medical staff’s initial outrage faded, the doctors would probably wind up competing with one another for the best ratings. Doctors are, after all, a fairly competitive bunch.

Paul Levy, the poster CEO for transparency and author of the “Running a Hospital” blog, posts clinical outcomes to his blog. During an interview for my book, “Tactical Transparency,” Levy said the initial response from the staff was surprise and trepidation, but the staff ultimately saw the public disclosure of their performance as an impetus to continuously improve…which is eactly what they’ve been doing.

I’ve also noticed several negative doctor reviews that were balanced by opinions from others who thought the doctor was great. As most organizations engaged in social media know, unfair criticisms tend to be self-correcting as those with different experiences weigh in.

So what are the 2,000 doctors who have forked money over to Dr. Segal and his company—and the countless others who would do so if they knew about it—afraid of?

The truth, maybe?

As we who work in this space often insist, control of the message has been lost. Influencing what people think now involves honest engagement, not China-like barriers to the ability of your publics to view information you don’t like.

As for me, if any doctor ever waves a Medical Justice waiver in my face, I’ll find myself another doctor who isn’t afraid of honest opinions. I’m sure there are great doctors out there who will be happy to have my business.

7. A CEO Role Model For Transparency, Engagement, Responsibility

CEO reputations are already in the tank. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, used car salesmen have more cred than CEOs and official corporae spokespersons. Those same CEOs should be looking beyond the current economic crisis. A rehabilitated image will be important once the sting of the recession has faded.

Writing on ReputationXchange.com, Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross pointed out that a CEO’s internal communications stand to have a bigger impact on how a CEO is perceived by external audiences than external marketing or PR efforts. Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for Weber Shandwick, said, “as companies continue to announce layoffs, reputations will be built and destroyed on how well job losses are communicated and how fairly the process is handled.”

Gaines-Ross’ perspective is consistent with the findings of a 2006 study conducted by Fleishman Hillard and the National Consumers League. When asked what how they assess a company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR), most people said it hinged on how well the company treated its employees.

From what we’ve been hearing, the future does not bode well for a lot of CEOs who have taken a slash-and-burn approach to reducing the workforce.

Paul Levy, on the other hand, is one CEO who shouldn’t worry.

Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Massachusetts, has been using his Running a Hospital blog to keep internal and external constituents up to date on his efforts to control expenses while a combination of factors conspire against the hospital’s goal of meeting budget.

Paul reported on a series of quickly-assembled town hall meetings convened to explain the financial situation to employees. An even bigger goal of the meetings, though, was to solicit ideas from employees about how to address the budget gap. The meetings were convened following the distribution of a memo to employees. In a demonstration of what it means to be transparent these days, Paul posted the memo to his blog, a much more above-board approach to sharing internal matters with the public than deliberately leaking a supposedly internal-only document, the approach Citigroup took to get the word out that it had performed well during the first two months of 2009.

Overtly disclosing information will build much greater trust than pretending that an internal memo found its way outside of the company.

The memo included these candid and sobering remarks:

“For BIDMC, our hoped-for 2% FY09 operating margin (about $18 million) has disapeared. The state has reduced Medicaid payments by over $7 million, our major insurerer is paying us less than we had hoped, and reseach funding has also fallen short by several million dollars. In addition, patient volumes are substantially lower than budgeted as people in the community defer or forgo medical visits and treatments.

“Right now, at best, we can break even for the year if patient volumes return to budgeted levels. However, if they stay at current levels, we will face an operating loss of up to $20 million.

“Now, sadly, we have to crank up expense reduction…Part of the solution to this problem will be to lay off people. I’m not sure how many yet, and I am hoping you can help me figure out how to minimize the number by using more creative and less disruptive ways to solve the problem.”

Levy encouraged employees to write him with their ideas, use an electronic chat room he was setting up, or talk to him in person at the town hall meetings. He suggested elimination of pay raises, reduction of future earned time accruals, forfeiture of one or two days of past accruals, voluntary pay cuts, and unpaid leaves of absences.

Then he threw in the zinger:

“The senior managers of the hospital have recognized their personal responsibility to help with this problem. The senior vice presidents, vice presidents, and chief operating officer have been asked to take voluntary 5% pay reductions, and I have eliminated all of their bonuses for 2009, a total potential pay reduction of 15% to 25%. I am personally taking a 10% salary reduction and will forgo my bonus opportunity for this year, a total potential pay reduction of 30%.”

If it wasn’t already clear, Paul articulated the rationale for the measures imposed on senior staff and requested of the rank and file while face-to-face with employees at the town hall meetings: “to protect (BIDMC’s) lower wage earners (e.g., transporters, housekeepers, food service people) from measures we take, even if it means that the other people have to give up more of their salary and benefits.” After all, he explained, it would be harder for these people to find new jobs and the impact of being unemployed would be harsher for them. “A lot of these people work really hard, and I don’t want to put an additional burden on them,” Levy told his employees.

Here’s another surprise: Kevin Cullen, a Boston Globe reporter, was in the room. That’s right; rather than try to keep word of the meetings from leaking, Levy invited the press to attend. Here’s what Cullen wrote: “He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when Sherman Auditorium erupted in applause. Thunderous, heartfelt, sustained applause. Paul Levy stood there and felt the sheer power of it all rush over him, like a wave. His eyes welled and his throat tightened so much that he didn’t think he could go on.”

On a follow-up post, Paul shared some of the emails he received from employees after the meetings, like one from a nurse who wrote, “I would be more than happy to forego a pay raise and reduce my earned time if that would mean another person in the hospital could keep their job. I think this is a great idea and I hope my colleagues feel the same.”

Levy plans to keep reporting on his thinking and inform employees of final decisions by April 1. Those decisions will also, no doubt, appear on his blog for the world to see. In fact, just today he provided an update to employees, posted (of course) to his blog. Among his messages:

“Your participation in this process and your advice to me has succeeded in accomplishing two very important things: First, we have reduced the number of necessary layoffs dramatically, from over 600 to about 150. This is a major victory and will mean a lot to more than 450 families who would otherwise lose their income from BIDMC. Second, we will do this at the same time we provide earnings protection to our 900 lowest wage workers. As you will see, this does come at a higher cost to the rest of us, but you have all made clear to me that this is consistent with our community’s values and expectations. Thank you in advance for your generosity of spirit. “

The entire post is well worth reading, especially for the detailed explanation of how those to be laid off will be selected.

My friend Albert Maruggi, who also blogged this story, sums it up well:

“Much of America has a very long way to go to eliminate the culture of ‘gotcha,’ of confrontation, a culture of ‘keep the info, keep the power.’ All these insecurities and tactics of greed will hinder the benefits of what social media can bring to an organization and our society. With each blog post, each honest answer to a criticism, each good idea raised and implemented, the organization becomes stronger.”

Somehow, I don’t see AIG’s CEO Ed Liddy meeting face-to-face with employees to seek their input on how to turn things around. Even if he did, I don’t see him sharing the experience on a blog or inviting the press to attend the meetings. Instead, I hear the protests, “We’re a financial institution, not a hospital.”

More’s the pity. Liddy’s reputation is most likely beyond redemption, but Levy will long be remembered as a beacon of responsibility, transparency, and engagement.

Hat tips to Ron Shewchuk and Albert Maruggi for some source material for this post. 

8. Site of the Month

Real-Time Chatterbox

A lot of marketers probably looked at the Skittles experiment and said, “Damn. Having a link to Twitter chatter about us would be a great idea, but not if it means our brand will be sullied by all that crap.”

What would be great would be the ability to filter out the four-letter words, the sexist and racist comments, even entire tweets by trolls.

Enter Shannon Whitley. It took Shannon—the creator of PRXBuilder (Shannon chairs the technology task force for the Social Media Release Working Group), Chat Catcher, and a bunch of other cool stuff—less than a couple weeks to create Real Time Chatterbox, a utility that lets you apply a variety of filters to a Twitter search so you can include the stream on your website without having to worry about inappropriate content.

The service is free for individuals and non-profits; you can create two Chatterboxes per account. Shannon is working on a subscription pricing model for commercial accounts, but you can try it out now.

http://www.realtimechatterbox.com/chatter.aspx?id=4

9. HC+T update

>>Multiple speaking engagements on the horizon, including the annual conference of the Council for Communication Management and the New Communication Forum.

>>I’m off to Brazil in mid-May to conduct workshops for Petrobras and ABERJE, Brazil’s communications association.

>>I’m presenting the closing keynote at a social media conference Ragan Communications is hosting in June.

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

]]> 2009-04-13T12:42:12+00:00 http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/hct_update_march_2009/ All in one place, my favorite posts from the last five weeks or so. HC+T Update
March 2009

1. Too Crunched for Social Media? Use It To Save Time
2. Ignoring New Media COuld Mean Ignoring New Markets
3. Next Webinar: SharePoint for Communicators
4. Why Bother With An Agency When You Have In-house Staff?
5. IR Blog Makes IR History
6. Licensed or Not, Public Relations is a Profession
7. With Web 2.0 Synonymns, Everything Old Is New Again
8. Sites Of The month
9. HC+T Update
10. Boilerplate and subscription information

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. Too Crunched for Social Media? Use It To Save Time

When companies lay off employees, the work they performed doesn’t magically evaporate. Those left behind are expected to take up the slack. The stomach-turning phrase usually associated with assuming the work of your now-unemployed colleagues is “do more with less.”

Finding yourself in this position was bad enough 10 or 15 years ago. After all, few of us were strolling into the office at 9 a.m., leaving at 5 p.m., and taking no work home with us. The stress and pressure of having to assume even more responsibility when you’re already pedal-to-the-metal, jamming to get everything done in 14 hours a day, can be overwhelming.

But today, when communicators are also trying to figure out social media and integrate it into their work, the challenge seems even more daunting.

That was the message I got recently from several communicators when I gave a presentation on how social media fits into a corporate communications environment. The communications staff at this company had suffered a 25% reduction; those who remain are already stretched as thin as they can get. Where, they wondered, will they find the time to do the additional work associated with a social media effort?

Fortunately, I have good news. Adopting social media can actually make it easier to do more with less. If you take a strategic approach, you can reallocate to social media some of the work you have been doing using less efficient tools and channels.

In this regard, social media is like any other technology. Its adoption is spurred by the fact that it makes it easier to do things you’ve been doing all along with older, less nimble technologies. As Jared Spool put it when I interviewed him more than a decade ago, new technologies will succeed only if they can do one of three things: solve a problem, improve a process, or let you do something you’ve never dreamed possible before the technology was introduced.

If it can’t do one of these three things, why would anyone use it?

The first time I heard the case for reallocating old tasks to social media, it was from the CEO of computer company who had received a letter from his board of directors expressing their concern for the time he was spending on his blog. His reply to them: He was spending no more time communicating than he had before he began blogging. The blog had simply replaced some phone calls, speeches, meetings, letters, and other channels that he had been using before he discovered blogs.

John C. Havens (my co-author on Tactical Transparency) and I heard similar tales from other CEOs we interviewed for the book. Michael Hyatt, for example, the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, explained how he addressed an error about the publisher’s editorial policies that ran in Publisher’s Weekly. It would have taken hours to negotiate a correction, he said, which would have run deep in the paper, a week after the original error appeared, and would occupy about an inch next to some display ad. It took far less time to simply report the error on his blog. The correction reached all the right people and what could have been a reputational crisis evaporated in a matter of hours.

Here are some other ways you can embrace social media and spend less time than it took you to do things in the days before social media:

Monitoring

PR academics call it “environmental scanning,” the process of keeping your finger on the pulse of references to your organization, industry, products, people, and issues. Setting up a listening post using social media tools (with RSS serving as the infrastructure) will require a one-time investment of time, but after that keeping tabs on what they’re saying about you will take a few minutes a day. The scary-smart Marshall Kirkpatrick offers just one approach to achieving this kind of monitoring nirvana in a post on ReadWriteWeb.

Reach the press

Multiple studies support the fact that mainstream media has glommed onto social media. There are lists of journalists who are on Twitter (for example, here’s a list of journalists just from the Vancouver Sun. You can let reporters with whom you routinely work know you’re on Twitter, then link to the online version of any news you release. Since those journalists have opted in to follow you, the attention they’ll pay to your content will be better than normal (assuming you’re producing content that’s truly useful).

But you can still use older social media to reach reporters. At The Mayo Clinic, Syndication and Social Media Manager Lee Aase set up the Mayo Clinic Newsblog using the free WordPress.com hosted service. For a small fee, he’s able to map the site to the Clinic’s domain. Tweaking of the CSS code has let him skin the blog with the Mayo design scheme. He posts news items here, along with video — usually of doctors talking about new research — that he shoots with a Flip video camera and uploads to the Clinic’s channel on YouTube. The stories get picked up, since it’s easy to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, and the videos have been embedded on sites like The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog.

Bypass the press

Michael Hyatt is hardly the only person to reach an audience directly. Organizations are no longer constrained to the press as a channel to reach publics, and any number of companies have figured this out. A New York Times column by Thomas Friedman provoked a response from General Motors, but the company’s communicators were unable to negotiate a letter to the editor with the paper’s op-ed editor. Instead, they published the letter — along with more detailed explanations — to their FYI blog, which received widespread coverage and succeeded in getting GM’s message out—probably more effectively than a traditional letter to the editor would have.

Get your thought leaders quoted

Most PR professionals are expected to get their companies or clients ink (real or virtual). One way to do this when the company or client has no news worth reporting is to ensure its thought leaders are go-to resources for reporters covering other stories.

Social media has made the task a lot easier than it used to be. Several companies have provided a blogging platform to their thought leaders, like EDS’s “Next Big Thing blog, authored by the company’s fellows. As their observations get traction in the industry, the media covering the industry begins to follow the posts and then reach out to those individuals when they need to interview someone or get a good quote.

Even easier is subscribing to Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Reporters, bloggers, and others seeking people to interview submit their queries to Peter, who blasts them out three times a day in a simple email. If your company or client has someone ideally suited to meet a reporter’s needs, just follow the instructions to reach out to that reporter.

Conduct research

Putting together most communications requires some research. Getting answers has gotten far easier thanks to social media. During a phone call with a client, I was asked if I knew internal communicators using Microsoft Sharepoint. I tweeted the question and got a dozen positive answers in less than a minute, which I was able to report back to my client.

It gets even better than that. You can put out questions on LinkedIn, which nearly always produces quality answers. And you can check the profile of those who reply in order to assess their qualifications before using their replies. Mahalo offers a similar feature that enables you to offer a monetary “tip” to the best answers, which could motivate the best resource to provide a detailed answer.

Inserting a poll into blog post can be a quick-and-dirty way to get information, while setting up an RSS-based listening post and conducting tag searches of blog search engines can reveal what others have already written about the subject.

Even the comments you get to in response to your blog posts and tweets can prove invaluable. GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has noted that the comments car enthusiasts leave to his Fastlane blog have proven to be the best intelligence he’s seen in his decades in the auto industry.

Reach key stakeholders

Earlier, I noted that technology succeeds when it lets you improve on what you’re already doing. A recent Forrester report suggests that B2B organizations are poised to embrace social media that closely mirrors the more traditional channels they’re already accustomed to using, like online conferences, exhibitions, and buyer guides. According to the Forrester report, “Social media helps open participation to more people, and many don’t have to be physically present to be involved.”

But social media can help reduce the workload in more ways than those Forrester expects B2B companies to embrace. The Dutch computer executive I mentioned earlier was able to use his blog to reduce the amount of time he spent on individual phone calls, preparing and delivering speeches, attending trade shows, and crafting email. He didn’t completely stop these activities, but was able to reduce them dramatically because the blog served to achieve the goals that previously required the use of these older channels.

Generate leads

If your communication role requires you to produce sales leads, social media can help you, too.

Before it was acquired by Forrester, Jupiter Research produced a podcast associated with each of its reports. The principals involved in the research wold chat about the findings. Listeners subscribed to the podcast series would hear about reports that interested them, leading them to make a purchase decision.

Blogger and podcaster outreach can also grease the lead generation skids. Yesterday, for example, I spent about 10 minutes on “For Immediate Release talking about Forrester’s new study on social media in the business-to-business space. I was able to report on the study because a Forrester rep offered me a copy. While I can’t say how many listeners will order the report, I’ve heard from a few that they plan to.

Find new hires

The recruiting process can be expensive and time-consuming, but social media can reduce some of the pain.

Ernst & Young, for example, turned to Facebook to recruit interns and hew-hires based on the knowledge that 80% of college students in the U.S. have Facebook accounts. They were able to target their advertising to students at the three universities that produce the best accounting graduates. Employees in various types of jobs engaged with prospects in forums to talk about what it was like to be an auditor, for example, or an IT person at Ernst & Young. Students were able to get answers to general questions by interacting with recruiters on the recruiting page’s wall.

Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company’s social media manager, put out the word that he was seeking an employee on Twitter and his own personal blog. Sure beats display ads in newspapers.

Collaborate

Business collaborative efforts can also be improved through social media tools. I was working with one company where a communicator shared that her greatest pain was the review process for the annual report. Twenty executives and others received Word versions of the report text. Each one made revisions using the “track changes” and then sent the document back to her. She then had to reconcile 20 different sets of changes and produce a single document. In a number of instances, multiple reviewers made different changes to the same text, complicating this reconciliation process.

She then sent the revised document out to the same group and repeated the same process — multiple times.

To resolve this problem, she moved the text to a wiki, provided password access to the 20 reviewers, then sent them each an email notifying them of the document’s availability and giving them two weeks to have at it before she sent the finished document to the CEO for final input.

More reallocation

If you’re using social media to ease the burden of work that used to require the use of other, less effective tools, share it here. The more ways to use these tools to relieve work burdens rather than complicate them, the more likely communicators will be to embrace social media even if they face the time crunch so common to those working during this tough recessionary times.

2. Ignoring New Media Could Mean Ignoring New Markets

Social media is often about the niche. For a mainstream media outlet to host content that satisfies the interests of a group, that group needs to be large enough to fit the CPM (cost-per-thousand) model. Social media makes it possible to identify and reach groups that fly under mainstream media’s radar.

That’s exactly what Melanie Notkin has done with her online venture, Savvy Auntie.

Melanie candidly explains in a blog post that she is unmarried and has no children of her own (so far). But she adores her siblings’ children (first becoming an aunt in 2001) and lavishes on them the attention most parents devote to their own kids. Melanie also recognized that she isn’t alone. There are, she explains, “cool aunts, great aunts, godmothers and all women who love kids.”

Through her social interactions — on her own site and on Twitter — Melanie has attracted and nurtured a community of this category she calls aunties (along with some uncles, too, I suspect) who look to her and her community for advice on a variety of aunt-related topics, including what to buy for those precious nieces and nephews. Through relationships with companies that sell these products, Melanie has turned Savvy Auntie into a viable business in a short seven months.

Having built a niche community with dollars to spend, however, doesn’t necessarily mean every marketer will recognize the spending power contained within the community.

Take Mattel, for instance. Mattel (in addition to being my former employer; I was a communicator there from 1984 to 1988) is one of the few iconic toy companies, dating back to the 1950s when its Fanner 50 toy gun was a primary sponsor of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club. Over the years, Mattel has been behind brands like Hot Wheels and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. But nothing is linked in consumers’ minds to Mattel like Barbie.

Recently, Mattel hosted one of its premium events at New York’s Fashion Week to celebrate the Barbie doll’s 50th anniversary. Mattel has always had a knack for special events. I remember attending American International Toy Fair where, to celebrate Barbie’s 35th anniversary, Andy Warhol unveiled his portrait of the doll at a top-flight cocktail reception. Mattel paid Warhol a quarter of a million dollars for the portrait which, for all I know, is gathering dust in a storage facility.

The Fashion Week event was as natural an event to cover for the Savvy Auntie as MacWorld is for Calli Lewis and her video podcast, “GeekBrief TV.” Melanie includes Barbie products on her merchandise page and includes video content on the Savvy Auntie site, so she started seeking an invitation to cover the event.

Mattel should have been all over the opportunity to reach a target market traditional marketing just isn’t configured to reach. And it’s not like Melanie has no credentials. She is, for instance, (as her bio notes) a regular panelist on the Strategy Room on FoxNews.com.

Still, Melanie ran into a brick wall.

TWEET: I am trying to get in touch the Mattel Barbie PR. If you’re on Twitter, please connect? Thanks!

I can’t say I was surprised when I saw Melanie tweet her frustration at Mattel’s rejection. When you manage one of the most successful brands in history, you tend to start believing your own press and think nobody can teach you anything. It isn’t that Mattel isn’t on the lookout for new marketing opportunities. While I worked there, the company was just starting to target divorced parents whose children lived with their ex-spouse and grandparents, who were now living long enough to represent some serious dollars spent on their grandchildren.

Aunties who have formed an online community, though, was evidently just not mainstream enough to warrant Mattel’s attention.

Eventually, though, Melanie reported that she received an email invitation to the event from out of the blue. So she gathered her tools and went, only to be turned away.

TWEET: I am leaving Barbie Show. Full and won’t let me in. What was the point of the ticket? Fail.

She wasn’t alone. It turns out, as she said in a tweet, that hundreds of people got the same invitation. Mothers of young Barbie-loving girls dressed their daughters up and made the trek to the event venue, where they, like Melanie, were told they couldn’t get in. Apparently, more VIPs showed up than expected, leading Mattel to reneg on the invitations.

TWEET: Saddes thing abt the incredibly unorganized Barbie show were the little girls who could not get in. all dressed up. I choked up!

Turning away little girls — the end consumer of your product — who were promised they could attend is bad PR. Failing to see the opportunity to reach a new market is dumb marketing. As Melanie put it in a tweet, “You’d think they’d want me in there as CEO of the site that reaches all the Aunts who buy Barbie for nieces.”

I’m not picking on Mattel (which later apologized to Melanie), but I am holding them up as another example of companies that have taken some preliminary steps into social media but still haven’t grasped it enough to recognize, as David Meerman Scott would put it, that the rules of marketing have changed. The retailer Target was an earlier example when it issued a statement asserting that it did not respond to queries from bloggers, including mommy bloggers, who have become a new source of influence over purchases made by mothers who increasingly turn to them for advice and recommendations.

Has your company identified new niche markets for its products within the social media space? What’s the niche and how are you tapping into its potential value?

3. Next Webinar: Crisis Communication And Social Media

A new Webinar featuring Toby Ward
President of Prescient Digital
Beginning Monday, March 16, 2009
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Register: http://tinyurl.com/dh3ef4

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is becoming the dominant intranet technology platform with nearly 40% of large to medium-size organizations using it (or the previous version) to power some or all of an intranet’s components. Many communications professionals have asked, “Is SharePoint good for my company intranet?” This webinar answers the question with advice on how to proceed.

In this five-week online workshop, we’ll examine MOSS as a technology platform, and as a communications platform for managing content including news and social media. MOSS is not known as a strong solution for a large-size enterprise intranet. But it is good starting platform in a Microsoft environment, and is very good for team and group collaboration. This workshop will consider all of the pros and cons of MOSS, with expert opinion and advice for non-techie business users and communicators. Included in this Webinar will be.

1. Introduction to MOSS — An overview of the technology in non-techie language.
2. Pros and cons of MOSS for communicators — The good, bad and the things Microsoft won’t always tell you.
3. MOSS for content management — The elements and functionality of the content management system and how it compares to other systems.
4. Planning & Governance — MOSS can in fact create more problems without the necessary planning and governance. We’ll tell you what you need to prepare.
5. Plug-ins and alternatives to MOSS — MOSS is a very complex platform, but there are many additional modules and plug-ins that can enhance it greatly… We’ll also compare MOSS to other alternative solutions.

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. All this costs only $195-a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room - and you’ll never have to leave your desk.

Webinars are asynchronous - you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new text-based lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time. Be sure to watch the video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for your professional development needs. (The video is at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com/index.php/site/info/C11#video) If you have questions, contact me at mailto:shel@holtz.com.

Toby Ward, the instructor for this session, is one of the world’s leading authorities on intranets. He has worked for dozens of Fortune 500 companies and big name brands including CBC, HSBC, Intel, Mastercard, Nintendo, PepsiCo and dozens of others. He is a leading advocate for the value and power of communication from your organization’s leaders.

Don’t miss the opportunity to propel your internal communication efforts to new heights.

Register: http://tinyurl.com/dh3ef4

4. Why Bother With An Agency When You Have In-house Staff?

Most organizations — and particularly those funded by taxpayers (whether an essential government agency or a bank that received bailout money) — are under increasing pressure to cut unnecessary expenses. With most people feeling the effects of the recession, ire rises when they see what appears to be profligate spending.

In an increasing number of cases, public relations — notably services provided by outside agencies — is viewed as one of those expenses that ought to be trimmed from the budget.

The latest example comes from Chicago, where the Daley administration earlier this week dropped 11 PR contracts worth $55 million. The contracts were canceled, according to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times, to drive home the point that taxpers can’t afford to supplement the “highly controlled message” coming out of City Hall. Here’s what Mayor Daley’s press secretary, Jacquelyn Heard, said:

“We get it. We absolutely get it. We understand that it would seem absurd at a time like this to be using taxpayer funds for this kind of non-essential service. It’s been made abundantly clear to every department that they are not to use these contracts…The door is locked shut on the use of these kinds of firms at this time.”

The Sun-Times had earlier reported that City Hall signed its 11th contract for $5 million just this week — for translation services designed to get content distributed to neighborhoods into the non-English language spoken in those communities. That contract set off alarm bells, since Heard has promised just last fall to spend nomore money on outside PR until the city dug itself out of its current budget crisis. The attack was led by people like Alderman Scott Waguespack, who called the use of outside PR “wrong-headed.”

None of the 11 agencies involved are big international names. You’ve got Jasculca/Terman Associates, MK Communications, Carolyn Grisko & Associates, Landrum & Brown, Valerie Denney Communications, American Marketing Services, Better World Advertising, Interpro Translation Solutions, Metropolitan Group, Jim Mudd Advertising Agency, and Cultural Communications.

The line in the Sun-Times article that struck me was this one:

Aldermen found the contracts particularly galling because every city department has at least one public information officer. That’s in addition to the mayor’s press office, with a staff of 15 and an annual budget of $1.2 million.

In another Sun-Times article, Waguespack questioned the need for “outside spin doctors,” even during the best of financial times, adding, “I don’t think they provide any more service than the dozens of other PR people we already have in the city.”

My favorite part of Alderman Waguespack’s quote is “I don’t think.” Evidently not. It wouldn’t have taken too much of the alderman’s time to know instead of guess. And I’m certain the people in those 11 firms working hard on the accounts would take exception to the portrayal of their efforts as valueless. In fact, the notion that outside PR isn’t necessary when you have internal staff makes about as much sense as berating an internal legal team for hiring outside counsel. The internal team sets the company’s agenda but is generally not large enough to handle actual litigation duties. This is well understood. Similarly, internal PR staff guides the organization’s communication, but doesn’t have the time to spend days on end on the phone pitching media. That is often what internal PR staffs outsource to external agencies.

Todd Defren wrote a wonderful piece, by the way, extolling the virtues of external agencies. It would make for illuminating reading for Alderman Waguespack.

Be that as it may, the attacks on organizations paying for PR efforts isn’t limited to government. AIG — American International Group, AIG, the company that has taken billions of dollars in federal bailout money — has already been caught engaging in some spendthrift behaviors. But now the company has been caught spending money on PR — what Fortune Magazine has characterized as a “dizzying PR binge.” That’s based on the revelation that AIG has four PR groups on the payroll. And again, the source of angst seems to be the fact that AIG also has an in-house communications team.

In AIG’s case, the outside teams are fairly well-known global brands, including Hill & Knowlton and Burson Marstellar, which are involved in government communication efforts. The Fortune article argues that, despite the money spent on PR, “the company has given little clarity on taxpayer losses to date or indeed much communication directed toward taxpayers at all.”

This could be the fault of the PR staff. It could also be based on counsel from outside PR agencies. Most likely, though, it’s a final decision from company executives who are opting to ignore the advice of its communication advisers to be more transparent and forthcoming. Whoever’s responsible, the situation — like the one in Chicago — is fueling the growing belief that external PR is unnecessary if you have an internal team. And while some external engagements may not be the best use of budget dollars, most inside PR staffs know exactly what they’re doing when they budget for external resources.

It’s worth noting that the recent Annenberg report on the impact of the recession of PR confirms that agencies are being hit much harder than internal staffs.

If the PR profession ever decides to undertake a genuine campaign to address these inaccurate perceptions, the roles of internal and external teams needs to be added to the mix. Otherwise, uninformed pundits like Alderman Waguespack, who have no interest in determining the real value PR agencies provide in exchange for their fees, will be telling our story for us.

And it wouldn’t hurt if agencies as a matter of course produced some kind of ROI metric, even if the client isn’t paying for it, just to have evidence in hand that these pandering attacks just plain have it wrong.

5. IR Blog Makes IR History

It has been a long time — November 1, 2007, to be precise — since I’ve been able to point to an investor relations effort that has embraced social media. That was when I posted an excerpt of an interview Neville Hobson and I conducted with Lynn Tyson, Dell’s VP of investor relations, who had launched the Dell Shares blog. In the interview, Tyson told us there weren’t many blogs to which we could compare Dell Shares; most IR types were too concerned about regulatory issues to even consider blogging about investor issues.

That’s why I was delighted to read a post on Dominic Jones’ IR Web Report that another company — a much smaller one than Dell — has not only launched an investor-focused blog but is using it in a practical manner that promotes transparency.

What’s more, it turns out I had a hand in it.

I referred Tiffany Bradford to Dominic after she contacted me looking for advice on introducing a social media component to her company’s IR efforts. My own IR experience is limited (although I once was a member of the National Investor Relations Institute for a whole year), and I wasn’t comfortable speaking authoritatively with her, so I put her in touch with Dominic, knowing her time would be better spent with him. I’ve never met anybody with as comprehensive an understanding of IR in the current business environment as Dominic has.

Today, Dominic posted the outcome of his conversations with Tiffany. It turns out that, on Dominic’s advice, she she launched a multi-author blog for investor relations and marketing. The blog, Displayground, launched as Microvision‘s official blog at the end of last year.

It’s what Tiffany did with the blog recently, though, that was worthy of Dominic’s praise. “She called for investors to submit questions on the blog so that she could address them on the company’s upcoming earnings conference call,” Dominic wrote. “Even I was surprised by the response from investors. They loved it, and have submitted a total of seventeen comments as I write this, the most comments of any post on the company’s blog to date.” (The emphasis is Dominic’s.) Dominic also points out that investors love being solicited for their input.

During the conference call, which occurred earlier today, various company representatives fielded all the questions that had come in via the blog.

Dominic sums up the history-making event better than I could:

“When I suggested recently that companies open up their earnings calls to bloggers there were grumblings from the old school IR pros about it not being their jobs to talk to “the masses” and that it would lead to a degradation of the discourse on the calls.

“Microvision shows that there are ways to be more open and inclusive in IR and that it doesn’t have to be a free-for-all. Tiffany Bradford isn’t one to seek the limelight, but she deserves a lot of credit for taking the lead in the IR profession to use a blog to open up the lines of communication between management and retail investors.”

Hat tip to Bryan Person, who pointed me to Dominic’s post.

6. Licensed or Not, PR Is A Profession

Every now and then, somebody prominently proclaims that public relations is not a profession. Usually this is based on a single narrow definition of the word that requires practitioners to obtain a license or some other form of legal authorization to engage in the work of a professional.

Even if you acknowledge this as the only definition that matters, PR is a profession in some parts of the world. Licenses are required to practice PR, for example, in Brazil, Panama, and Nigeria.

Even in the US, the idea of licensing public relations gets bandied about every few years. The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, was an advocate of licensing. The movement never goes anywhere, though, because the ability to license is based on a defined set of ways to do things. Passing your dental boards, for example, requires that you know the appropriate treatments for a cavity. To pass the bar and become a lawyer, you need to know the exact precedents to apply in a given situation.

In communications, there are too many variables to produce a set of right-and-wrong approaches. Two well-educated and experienced communicators could take two entirely different approaches to the same challenge and both could be right as long as they both achieved the goals they intended to. The approach taken in a pharmaceutical company may well not work in a snack food company, even if the ultimate goal is to increase market share. An audience of small-town residents in the Bible Belt will drive a different approach than an audience of Manhattanites.

In the world of licensed professions, someone who deviates from the defined right approaches can be censured, even lose their licenses, because the governing body can review standards and declare that injecting a patient with medicine A was not an accepted treatment for condition B. The fact that a governing body could not make the same kind of judgment about whether the use of humor was an appropriate way to communicate with audience A about issue B does not diminish the skills, education, and experience required to practice PR effectively.

This leads to the next argument: Without licensing, any bozo can claim to be a professional; you can be prosecuted for practicing law or medicine without a license. But a license is no guarantee of quality; contractors are licensed but I’d like a dollar for every story I’ve heard of shoddy construction. And there are plenty of people engaged in some tangent of healthcare and law who don’t need licenses but still deceive and mislead — or, in some cases, produce better results than the licensed pros.

All of which assumes that you accept this single definition. If you do, it’s at the expense of several other views of what it means to be part of a profession. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary calls a profession “a paid occupation, especially one involving training and a formal qualification.” That’s especially, but not exclusively. THis is not a distinction the OED would make lightly. Wikideia uses the word “usually” which, again, is decidedly not a black-or-white difference.

Princeton’s definition is even looser, calling a profession an occupation requiring special education. Of Random House Dictionary’s six definitions of “profession,” none make any note of special qualifications or oversight by a regulatory board. One of the key definitions is simply “any vocation or business.”

And of course, there’s the most common definition of a professional: someone who gets paid for what they do. Professional athletes, musicians, and entertainers are those who earn a paycheck. Are bloggers journalists? Sure, a lot of them are, but are they professional journalists? Not unless they’re getting paid for their reporting.

If you look at these definitions, a couple of general requirements emerge. First is the academic angle. There is a huge body of academic research and literature in public relations, a discipline in which you can earn a PhD (just as Dr. James Grunig or read the book that bears his name, “Excellence in Public Relations and Communications Management,” which reviews the literature).

To be sure, there are people working in PR with no formal education. That includes me — my degree is in journalism. In fact, as newspaper reporters find themselves on the street, a lot are looking for work in PR, usually in the media relations corner of the business. I know one outstanding PR practitioner who started out as a chef.

The fact is, though, that you can take the bar without having attended law school. How professional you are depends on how well you understand the business. Balancing the inability to license PR in most countries with the need to assess a practitioner’s professionalism, PR’s professional associations have forged a middle ground: accreditation. Accreditation is the means of ensuring that an individual qualifies under a set of acknowledged standards to perform certain work.

Accreditation, unlike certification, is voluntary, and there are plenty of outstanding, professional PR practitioners who are not accredited. And it’s as likely you’ll find an accredited communicator who behaves badly as you are to find a lawyer who acts less than ethically.

But when faced with two communicators who are unknown to you, but who both seem to be equally capable, you can be more assured that the accredited communicator is going to perform his job based on a thorough understanding of communications’ models and standards because he has gone through a process and judged knowlgeable.

You are, of course, obligated to perform within the ethical codes of the professional body that presented you with your accreditation.

Between accreditation and a body of work that reflects professionalism, it’s not hard to identify communicators who reflect the best of the profession.

The purists can argue all they like, but PR is a profession.

7. With Web 2.0 Synonynms, Everything Old Is New Again

The first time I heard the notion that there’s nothing new under the sun, it was about 30 years ago on my first communications job. Our design goddess was flipping through an issue of Communication Arts magazine looking for layout ideas. Several of us got into some good-natured banter about whether that was copying or adaptation, and that’s when the “under the sun” concept was uttered.

If you spend much time reading social media — blogs, tweets, whatever — you would think the space was loaded with new concepts. I find many of the more popular memes, though, are just old concepts repackaged and relabeled. Three of my favorites: transparency, tribes, and personal branding.

Transparency

As the co-author of a new book on transparency, you’d think I’d be all over this. But it seems most of the time I read someone talking about transparency in business, what they’re really talking about is disclosure.

Take the @thebklounge discussion about the Twitter account used by Burger King’s icon, The King. Because it wasn’t clear who was authoring the tweets — someone from Burger King or someone from the restaurant’s advertising agency. Whether this is actually important (not, in my opinion), making this information available is not a question of transparency. It’s disclosure.

Transparency is access to information publics need to make informed decisions. I’m not sure which public would be unable to make an informed decision because they don’t know who’s tweeting on behalf of a fictional character. If Burger King decided to make that information available, however, it would disclose it.

“Disclosure,” also the name of a Michael Chrichton thriller featuring lawyers, is a legal-sounding term that lacks the hype factor of “transparency,” which cable news commentators are throwing around as an anticipated characteristic of the Obama administration. Hence, “transparency” has become the Web 2.0 synonym for “disclosure.”

Tribes

I like Seth Godin‘s work. I really do. But through my reading of “Tribes” and listening to him speak (thanks to the “Marketing Over Coffee” guys), I had trouble cramming the concepts presented into the definition of a tribe.

Mainly, tribes are generally not groups anybody opts to join because it synchs up with your interests. Tribes are anthropological constructs, usually made up of bands (smaller subgroups), defined by traditions of common descent. They share language, cuilture, and ideology. Someone from the Cheyenne tribe couldn’t decide that those Cherokee do a rockin’ rain dance and join that tribe. I couldn’t turn my back on the Levites and join the Zebuluns.

So when everybody gloms onto the “tribes” notion, what they’re really talking about are “communities.” But community is a concept that has been discussed to death. Call it “tribe” instead and new life is breathed into the notion and we’re off and running with whole new discussions.

Personal brand

I know I’m going to take some heat for this one, but after long consideration, I’ve concluded that “personal brand” is just another synonym for “reputation,” which can be defined simply as what you are known for. As I review the elements of a personal brand, derived from a variety of sources, they all — every single one of them — come down to what you are known for. Whether you’re genuine or artificial, reliable, responsible, innovative, a good listener, a good communicator, funny, a spiffy dresser — that’s all what you’re known for. It’s your reputation.

But, as with “disclosure,” “reputation” has a distinctly corporate smell to it. So Tom Peters introduced the euphemism of “personal brand,” and everybody gets excited.

Understand, this doesn’t mean I have a problem, per se, with the idea of a personal brand. It’s just that your personal brand existed long before the term did.

But I recently heard somebody (I honestly can’t remember who) suggest that Michael Jordan is a personal brand. Well…he has a reputation as a great athlete, a nice guy, a talented individual. He is also, distinctly, a brand — when you see him in an underwear commercial or see his name on a pair of shoes, you react based on your association with the Michael Jordan images and experiences you have collected.

Would Jordan’s “personal brand” lead you to decide to join a pickup game with him? That would be his reputation (he’s going to kick your ass). Would you buy a pair of Nike Air Jordan’s based on his personal brand? Again, it would be the brand (forget personal) that would drive that decision.

Am I picking nits?

Probably. But it gets tiresome hearing some folks talk about these concepts as though they invented them when, in fact, they’re actually age-old concepts that have just been relabeled.

These three aren’t the only ones, of course. What other Web 2.0 concepts are long-standing notions with shiny new names? 

8. Site of the Month

Greasemonkey Plugin for Firefox

If you use Firefox and haven’t installed the Greasemonkey add-on, you’re missing out on the power of Firefox.

There are probably ways you’d like to see web pages displayed that the site designer didn’t bother to implement. For instance, rather than have to click to the next page in long search results, you’d rather just scroll. You’d like to sort the results of a delicious.com search by the number of times the page was tagged. Or you just can’t find the RSS feed on a blog to which you’d like to subscribe. Greasemonkey to the rescue!

By itself, Greasemonkey doesn’t do a thing. But there are thousands of scripts created by various people designed to give you more control over pages you see. There’s one that adds an MP3 player wherever an MP3 file is linked on a page. Another lets you expand or contract the size of a text entry box.

You’ll find Greasemonkey here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
http://www.greasespot.net/

Scripts are all listed here:

http://www.userscripts.org

And there’s a great 5-minute tutorial on using Greasemonkey here:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_start_using_greasemonkey.php

9. HC+T update

• I will be consulting with two Texas hospital systems on launching a strategic social media effort.
• This doesn’t suck: In May, I’ll be teaching at a communications university created specifically for Petrobras. I teach on Thursday and then again on the following Tuesday. The catch? It’s in Rio de Janiero. I’ll just have to cool my heels somewhere Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
• I’m delivering the keynote address at Blog Potomac in June.

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

]]> 2009-03-06T14:35:06+00:00 http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/hct_update_january_2009/ HC+T Update: January 2009 HC+T Update
January 2009

1) The Time Has Come: Blogging Is A Business Requirement
2) The Relevance Of Relevance
3) Next Webinar: Crisis Communication And Social Media
4) Is There A Market For Your Message?
5) Communication Students Need Mentors. You Can Be One!
6) The Future Of The Media Embargo
7) Use Ning For Project Management
8) Sites Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information

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. The Time Has Come: Blogging Is A Business Requirement

About 18 or 19 years ago, scorn was heaped upon me when I insisted that pretty much every company would need to adopt email and provide employees with email addresses. I got the same reaction 12 or 13 years ago when I proclaimed all companies would require a presence on the World Wide Web. Today, email and a website are a de facto requirement for most businesses, large or small.

Today, I’m taking the same stand on corporate blogs (a reversal of my earlier position, which suggested that a corporate blog was a strategic decision):
Every business should have an authoritative, official corporate blog.

By “authoritative and official,” I mean that content posted to the blog can be construed as statements of record.

I know that corporate blogs generally aren’t trusted. Some believe blogs have peaked and are being replaced by services like Twitter. (ometimes, you need more than 140 characters to say what you need to say. No more than about 7 million people are on Twitter, which means much of your corporate audience isn’t. Those who are may well miss your tweet if they’re not watching every second and don’t check the history of their friends stream. However, you can certainly take advantage of the service Twitterfeed to automatically alert those who are on Twitter that you have posted an item to your blog.) Others believe corporate blogs are legally risky and of questionable value. But the world of business communication has changed and the blog is the best tool available (when done right) to address the challenges of life in the 140-character news cycle.

Speed of response

While I don’t for a moment believe press releases no longer have value, they are no longer adequate in a crisis situation. Consider the September 2008 incident in which Bloomberg inadvertently issued a six-year-old news item announcing that United Airlines had filed for bankruptcy. If United had a blog (which its competitors Delta and Southwest do), the company could have corrected the misinformation in a matter of minutes instead of the hours it takes to distribute a press release.

MacNeil Laboratories, makers of Motrin, is another company that could have quieted a fast-growing controversy by opening a dialogue with customers on a blog.

This is not an indictment of press release distribution companies, but rather the internal process through which releases typically are subjected before they are ever forwarded to the PR Newswires and Business Wires of the world.

Bypass the press

The press gets something about your company wrong. One of your options is writing a letter to the editor, an exercise that can prove futile, as General Motors learned when responding to an assertion by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. Alternatively, you can demand a retraction or correction, which will occupy four lines adjacent to a furniture ad on the bottom of page 37.

In the first instance, General Motors gave up trying to get the New York Times to run its letter and ran it—and more—on its FYI blog, prompting Friedman himself to acknowledge that organizations no longer need to rely on the press to tell their stories for them. As for seeking retractions and corrections, Thomas Nelson Publishers President and CEO Michael Hyatt simply uses his blog. As he noted in an interview for “Tactical Transparency,” the readership of his blog rivals that of the publication in question (Editor’s Weekly), and those who read his blog represent the audience he needed to reach with information correcting the publication’s mistake.

While there are still some troglodyte critics who believe the role of public relations is limited to answering press questions, the truth is that PR’s role is (in part) to get the company’s story out to its publics. You don’t need the press any longer to accomplish this goal. You do, however, need a blog. As Sun Microsystems President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz put it in an interview for the book, “Tactical Transparency,” “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 (a blog) to do that?”

Reach the press

Readership of blogs is high among journalists, according to any number of studies. One 2008 study, from Brodeur & Partners (a PR agency) and Marketwire (a press release distribution firm), revealed that…

- Over 75% of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.
- 70% of reporters check a blog list on a regular basis.
- 21% of reporters spend over an hour per day reading blogs.
- 57% of reporters read blogs at least two to three times a week.

Seventy percent of journalists responding to a SNCR study from Don Middleberg use blogs to assist in reporting.

It’s a no-brainer these days that a reporter who covers your company will read your corporate blog (even though they may not participate on Twitter or Facebook).

Search engine optimization

Done well, your corporate blog will generate tremendous results on Google and other search engines, driving more traffic to your site.

Corporate blogs done right

As I mentioned at the outset, most corporate blogs are bland and untrusted. This is not a reason to dismiss corporate blogs, but rather a clarion call to do them well.

There is no one way to do a corporate blog right. Among the good ones, some are penned by the CEO (examples: Marriott International, Sun Microsystems), some by a group of employee bloggers that sometimes includes the CEO (examples: Southwest Airlines, Rubbermaid), some by a group of employee bloggers without CEO involvement (example: Transportation Security Administration). You’re not limited to these models; in fact, you can employ any approach that meets your needs as long as you adhere to some basic guidelines:

- Be strategic. Don’t blog because you need a blog. The blog should be aligned with your core business objectives. Consider creating a mission statement for your blog, even if you’re the only one who ever sees it.
- Post regularly. Infrequent posts don’t create community or attract new readers.
- Address controversy and bad news head on.
- Don’t pitch products or engage in happy talk; it’s not why anyone would read your blog.
- Don’t use your blog as another channel for news release distribution. If you have news, the blog is a great venue to offer perspective to your audience not available in the press release.
- Know your audience. If the blog is focused on customers, address customer issues or problems. If your company or its product(s) has fans, skew your blog to those fans.
- Accept comments (based on a comment policy). Address comments that need addressing, either within the comments section or with follow-up blog posts.
- Use a genuine voice. Avoid corporatese.

You can keep track of the Fortune 500 companies with blogs here. The latest to join the list (maintained by John Cass) are FedEx, Ingram Micro, and Safeway.

2. The Relevance Of Relevance

The vast majority of the complaints about PR, marketing, and advertising boil down to a single communication failure: The message is not relevant to the recipient.

The late Ed Robertson, who ran employee communications at FedEx (reporting directly to CEO Fred Smith), developed a model for communication based on Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs. According to Maslow’s model, primitive requirements must be met before people are able to pursue more sophisticated needs. The more abstract the need, the higher up the pyramid the need is situated, with self-actualization at the top. Physiological needs represent the first hurdle to overcome. You gotta eat, after all. If you’re starving, you’re not too worried about group acceptance.

Ed’s model takes the same approach to communication, which ultimately is designed to exert influence. (If you’re not trying to reinforce or change opinions, attitudes, or behaviors, why are you communicating?) In business, too many leaders believe you can influence people simply by telling them what you want from them.

Ed believed people applied the same kind of hierarchy to messages, starting with logistics. If the message was in the wrong language or was illegible, logistics failed and people would go no further. If you ever received employee benefits information after the deadline for benefits enrollment, you’ve experienced a logistics failure.

Next, you had to grab attention. Attention is nearly as big a challenge as relevance, since what will grab the attention of a CEO may hold no interest to a front-line employee who spends his days on an assembly line. As slaves to mass communication techniques, we ignore the fact that different people pay attention to different things and crank out one-size-fits-all communications.

But even if you’re able to capture the attention of your target audience, you won’t keep it long if your message is not relevant. There are two distinct dimensions to relevance:

- What does this have to do with me?
- How will paying attention to what you have to say make my life better?

Consider the howls of protest from scores of bloggers sick of the horrible pitches they receive from clueless PR people. The most vitriolic of these bloggers would still be inclined to write a post about information sent by a PR practitioner if (a) the information was consistent with what he wrote about and (b) the information would reduce hassles or improve opportunities for the blogger and/or his readers.

Madison Avenue used to be adept at relevance. In the 1950s and 1960s, a typical TV commercial would begin with a housewife on her hands and knees in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor with a brush and a bucket of soapy water. As she wipes the sweat from her brow, Mr. Clean magically appears and asks, “Are you sick of that waxy yellow buildup?” The housewife replies, “I sure am.” Suddenly, a push-mop appears and the housewife simply and easily glides the push-mop across the floor, revealing the floor’s beautiful, long-hidden surface beneath the layers of muck that hours of scrubbing couldn’t get to.

This commercial—shown during soap operas in the middle of the day in order to reach the target audience—answered both questions:

- What does it have to do with me? You spend too much time on your hands and knees in puddles of soapy water.
- What’s in it for me to pay attention to you? I’ll get you off your hands and knees and get you through this chore in a fraction of the time you’re spending now and a fraction of the effort.

Madison Avenue has strayed far from this concept, sadly, as have far too many communicators.

When an executive ignores a direct question and instead blurts out the rehearsed sound bite that reinforces a key message, the problem isn’t that messaging doesn’t work. It’s that irrelevant messaging doesn’t work. If what you have to say—in an elevator, a newsletter, an email, a press release, a speech, over Twitter or on the phone—has something to do with my circumstances and paying attention will make my life better, I’m all ears. If it’s relevant enough, I might even start a conversation with my peers about your one-way, top-down message.

There will always be a market for relevant messages.

3. Next Webinar: Crisis Communication And Social Media

A new Webinar featuring Shel Holtz, ABC
Beginning Monday, February 16, 2009
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Register here: http://bit.ly/2PmlQn

One month after it launched a new ad campaign, the makers of Motrin found themselves under assault from mommy bloggers who galvanized their effort in mere hours, attracting the attention of mainstream media. The water ditching of a US Airways flight in the Hudson River was covered by citizen journalists before mainstream media, with images shot on mobile phones and posted to sites like Flickr and circulated on Twitter. One CEO learned from Twitter that his company’s website had been hacked; he dealt with the issue initially by posting a video comment to the report.

The simple fact is that today’s socially-networked world gives you NO TIME for the deliberate, process-oriented steps organizations used to take when faced with a crisis. Your organization or client needs to respond quickly, effectively, and accurately, using the same tools and resources your constituent publics are using. In other words, much of what you knew about crisis communication is wrong because the rules of the game have changed.

This webinar will take a deep dive into strategies and tactics for employing social media in order to ensure the best possible outcome from a crisis. You’ll learn…

- How to monitor social media channels to identify issues that are building into crises and to identify fast-breaking crises
- The tools you should have ready to deploy in a crisis
- The relationships you should already have in place when a crisis strikes
- How your employees can play a key role in getting through the crisis through their participation in online social channels
- Key learnings from case studies

In addition, you’ll hear and see interviews with experts, along with other multimedia presentations integrated into the sessions providing valuable insights and tips you can put into practice right away.

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. All this costs only $195 —- a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room -— and you’ll never have to leave your desk.

Shel Holtz Webinars are asynchronous —- you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new lecture featuring a combination of text, graphics, audio and video is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time.

Be sure to watch the video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for your professional development needs.

Shel Holtz, the instructor for this session, is one of the world’s recognized leading online communication authorities. He has led internal communications at two Fortune 500 companies and counseled scores of others, including Intel, Sears, Symantec, Aetna, The World Bank, The American Red Cross, The Walt Disney Company, General Mills and PepsiCo. He is a leading advocate for the value and power of communication from your organization’s leaders.

Don’t miss the opportunity to prepare yourself, your communications team, and your organization to face a crisis in 2009 and beyond.

Register: http://bit.ly/2PmlQn

4. Is There A Market For Your Message?

A few years back, James Carville told a group of communicators during a conference keynote that Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential campaign rested largely on staying on message. The Democratic party strategist noted that candidate Clinton always returned the focus of conversations to the fact that “it’s the economy, stupid.”

In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore had no such focus, and few voters could tell you what the Gore campaign was all about. In 2008, on the other hand, Barack Obama embraced Carville’s approach; if you lived in the U.S. during the campaign, you had to be working hard at ignoring politics to not know that Obama promoted “Change you can believe in.”

Clearly, Obama had a message. Equally clearly, there was a market for that message. And the Obama team employed messaging techniques to make sure that message got across and resonated.

All of which flies in the face of conventional wisdom that asserts “there is no market for your message,” that messages and messaging are dead. In fact, if your message is irrelevant, self-serving, disingenuous or insulting, then there was never a market for your message. On the other hand, if your message is relevant, meaningful, helpful, accurate and/or interesting, then the market for that message is as vibrant today as it ever was. Getting that message into the heads of the people who make up that market requires messaging strategies.

I’ve long been troubled by the enthusiastic agreement to the notion that “there is no market for your message.” But the always-interesting Phil Gomes returned the issue to top of mind with a blog post titled, “Having a ‘message’ is fine, it’s the ‘messaging’ that sucks.” In his post, Phil draws a distinction between messages (it’s important to have them) and messaging, which Phil defines thusly:

“The development and cloying repetition of corporatespeak statements devoid of meaning, rendered in a language that no one uses, delivered without the benefit of listening first, and presented in venues and contexts where they are clearly inappropriate.”

Phil’s absolutely right if, indeed, that were the definition of messaging. It’s not, though. It’s the definition of bad messaging. It logically follows, then, the only bad messaging is bad. Good messaging is simply the strategic use of appropriate channels to make sure the right people—the market for your message—is able to find it and hear it.

“Messaging,” by the way, is a word. A recent podcast discussion suggested it was the inappropriate verbing of a noun, but the word appears in the Random House dictionary, among others, defined as “a system or process of transmitting messages, especially electronically.” There is nothing in this definition that requires corporatespeak, lack of listening, or inappropriate venues and contexts.

Executives and politicians who dodge media or customer questions, opting instead to parrot carefully rehearsed statements, engage in bad messaging. Good messaging is based primarily on an alignment between what you have to offer and the interests and concerns of the market. That is, good messaging begins with listening. You then develop the fundamental concepts you want your market to know.

A good current example of effective messaging is Microsoft’s pitch on Windows 7. At every opportunity, through every appropriate channel (that is, the channels that reach the influencers in the technology marketplace), Microsoft execs tout the fact that Windows 7 is easier to use, less intrusive, runs on older hardware and is compatible with just about everything. In fact, by offering an early beta of the OS to millions of people for free download, Microsoft has effectively boiled the message down to this: “It’s everything Vista should have been; try it yourself and you’ll see.”

So far, it has been an effective message, and one for which there is a well-defined market, evident in the volumes of content that has been created by bloggers, journalists, and others. The channels through which these messages were delivered include live conferences, interviews, briefings, and outreach to influencers. The result has been near-unanimous praise for Windows 7.

So don’t succumb to the popular notion that messaging is dead or that there is no market for your message. There’s no market for your bad message and bad messaging is dead. Good messages are based on…

- Knowing how your message will attract the attention of each appropriate market
- Ensuring the message is relevant to that market (that is, it has something to do with the lives and interests of the marketplace and it offers a way to make life better or easier)
- Clarifying your call to action (what do you want those who have heard your message to do?)

Getting that message into the heads of the intended recipients (i.e., “messaging”) requires the organization to consider all of its various communication opportunities and identify where the message fits—and ensuring anyone who speaks on behalf of the organization knows what the message is so they can adapt it for all appropriate conversations and communications.

It’s amusing when the same people who declare messages and messaging dead ask to hear your elevator pitch. If an elevator pitch isn’t a perfect example of messaging, what is?

5. Communication Students Need Mentors. You Can Be One! 

I was a lucky guy when I took my first corporate communications job.

I’d been a newspaper reporter for a couple years when I made the switch. In 1977, few universities offered degrees in communications. At my college, the journalism department offered a single class in PR. So when I made the jump from journalism to communications, I didn’t know much about it. Since I was going to be assistant editor of a weekly employee newspaper, I figured it was just journalism for a different audience.

Fortunately, two of the people to whom I reported became my mentors. The late Ken Estes, editor of the ArcoSpark, and Dave Orman, ARCO’s manager of employee communications, spent the time with me to help me grasp the world of organizational communications. In fact, I recall viewing them as mentors and not as bosses.

Today, universities do offer degrees in communication. Professional associations provide student memberships in student chapters. But there’s nothing like regular contact with an experienced professional who has taken an interest in you and your career. Unfortunately, there are far more students aproaching graduation than there are mentors to help guide them.

That imbalance led Allie Osmar to set up a site designed to match students and professionals. Of course, far more students have applied than pros.

I offered myself as a mentor through Allie’s initiative today. It’s a way to give something back to a profession that has been very good to me, as well as to honor the effort that Ken and Dave made on my behalf more than 30 years ago. I would urge my colleagues in the communication business to do the same.

Sign up here: http://thecreativecareer.com/mentors

6. The Future Of The Media Embargo

Now that the dust has settled over Michael Arrington’s announcement that TechCrunch would agree to honor and then break embargoes from PR contacts, it’s worth taking another look at the issue from a more objective angle.

Like so many other tactics and concepts that have been perverted and abused, the embargo is rooted in a reasonable and useful practice. Jargon such as “paradigm shift,” “world-class” and “best practices”—now the fodder of bullshit bingo games—started out as perfectly legitimate ideas. As they became memes, however, they were mangled and misused with increasing regularity until they evolved into the lingo we roll our eyes over today.

What happened to the embargo is simple enough to explain, with equal blame on both sides of the equation:

- Bloggers have become a news source, but few of them are schooled in the tools of journalism. Reporters know and care that they’ll be blacklisted if they violate an embargo; they know because editors and more senior reporters explain it to them. A lot of bloggers, on the other hand, have no journalism background and are independent, without a senior staff to show them the ropes. They don’t know how embargoes work and don’t care about the consequences for blowing them off.

- In their zeal to reach out to all those bloggers, lazy PR people have ignored the rules and diluted the embargo’s efficacy.

I can’t recall ever being asked to honor an embargo during my brief career as a newspaper reporter. Nor can I recall ever requesting one while I was managing corporate communications for the two Fortune 500 companies where I worked. But I’ve been aware of them my entire career and always viewed them as a practical solution to a genuine need. With that in mind, I searched the various public relations textbooks and references I keep on my shelf. “Embargo” was not to be found in the index of a single one of them. I found that surprising; public relations schools, it seems, no longer teach the concept of the embargo. People joining the ranks of PR practitioners, then, don’t bring an academic concept with them to the job. Instead, they learn by watching what others are doing.

What others are doing, by and large, sucks.

The original notion of the embargo was based on a few basics that have fallen by the wayside:

Genuine news

Most of the unsolicited press releases I get by email that come with an embargo (more on this in a minute) don’t represent real news (that is, it’s not timely or doesn’t have a real impact on the people to whom it is being reported).

A good reason

There needs to be a sound reason for an embargo. Most professionals recognize the primary use of an embargo is to give a reporter a head-start on his reporting, particularly when the announcement is complex and both parties—the organization making the announcement and those reporting on it—will benefit from time to absorb the material, conduct interviews, do research, and produce an accurate story.

Today’s practice is for companies to seek embargoes to a bunch of press will accompany an announcement. That may be great for the company, but there’s nothing in it for the reporter.

Offered to trusted contacts

I have received at least 50 unsolicited press releases by email, sent by people and agencies with whom I have no relationship, each of which included notice of an embargo. I would ignore these without feeling like I had violated any ethical standards. If I have no relationship with these people and have not agreed to an embargo, I am not obliged to honor it.

A true embargo is requested by a PR counselor of media contacts with whom they have established strong, trusted relationships. When that happens, the journalist knows he’s going to get good information on which he’ll want to report, while the PR counselor can count on the reporter honoring the agreement. (Note that I said “contacts,” plural. An embargo never applies to a single reporter. That would be an exclusive, which is different, even though it often requires the reporter to agree to hold the story until a specified date.)

Some examples

Here are a couple examples of embargoes that work, contributed by people I trust:

Sharon Bond—I use an embargo very effectively every year for Giving USA Foundation. I have a core group of philanthropy reporters who depend on getting the information on “who gives what to whom” in America every year in advance of our publication date so that they can prepare their stories. Only once in the known history of the publication of Giving USA (it comes out every June), has the embargo been broken, and that was an honest mistake by the reporter. We’ve been putting out this publication for 50+ years.

Scott Monty—The way I’ve seen embargoes handled around various auto shows that we participate in at Ford is a little different than the “send & ask” technique I’ve seen at large. We have lots of information about new products—including specs, videos and photos—and our journalists want to have time to write about them and post a comprehensive review as soon as they possibly can. I know they appreciate having a head start and I’m not aware of any egregious breach of the embargoes. We create an embargo web site and grant access to it (via passwords) to those who would like to have it. While we have a regular group of writers we automatically include, we also accept requests from those interested in getting access. This way, it’s an opt-in system, rather than the email blast and request to hold the information until the appropriate time.

Paula Symons—An example would be a leading employer in a community closing its doors, resulting in hundreds or thousands of people losing their jobs. An embargo on this announcement would allow reporters to gather background information and interview management to prepare their stories in advance so the news could break shortly after the embargo lifts.

Wendie Owen—I’ve used embargoes many times when reporters needed an embargoed advance copy of product information (when I was in the private sector), or the embargoed advance copy of the text of a speech (when I was serving in the Carter Administration as Advisor on Communications Policy to the Secretary of Energy).

TechCrunch’s response

I feel Michael Arrington’s pain. Honoring embargoes has enabled competitors to ignore the embargo and break news first. But Arrington’s response reflects a disturbing trend: People who don’t like the behavior of PR people and respond by deliberately doing something worse. Chris Anderson did it when he published the email addresses of PR people who had spammed him. Now Arrington has done it by asserting that he will promise to honor an embargo when he has no intention of keeping the promise. In other words, he has publicly stated that you cannot trust his word.

As Wendie Owen put it, “No reputable reporter would break an embargo. That kind of behavior would get him or her kicked off the distribution list the next time. Not honoring embargoes is unethical, unprofessional and unwise, and I’m sure that practice will not spread beyond TechCrunch.” (I wonder about Arrington’s claim at the very beginning of his post that “PR firms are out of control” when it’s bloggers and journalists who are violating the agreements.)

No PR person in his right mind would offer a story to TechCrunch with an embargo attached. Real news with a legitimate reason for an embargo will now go to competitors.

It could be that the TechCrunch staff believes they have become so dominant in their market that they don’t need PR people to provide them with news. Anything’s possible, but I just laugh when I hear assertions that social media have destroyed mainstream media. (There’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that there’s still a huge demand for mainstream media.) But if I were a working journalist or a blogger working in the news arena, I sure wouldn’t want to be scratched off the distribution lists of multiple news sources.

Ultimately it’s just sad all the way around—sad that the PR profession has allowed the embargo to become what it has and sad that some bloggers and journalists have chosen to prove their word worthless. I suspect, however, that journalists/bloggers and PR counselors with trusted relationships will continue to use genuine embargoes to achieve what they were designed for. With luck, they’ll start teaching embargoes again as part of an academic PR curriculum and the guardians of the profession will begin

Note: In the absence of literature on media embargoes, I queried my community on LinkedIn and got some great answers, which have been incorporated into this post. Hat tip to Sharon Bond, Leo Bottary, Gerard Braud, Michael Driehorst, Lloyd Grosse, Doug Haslam, Sebastien Keil, Michael Miller, Scott Monty, Mike Nicholson, Wendie Owen, David Parmet, Peggy Schoen, Angela Sinickas, and Paula Smith Symons.

7. Use Ning For Project Management

Krishna De gives a nice overview of SaaS project management services in the latest episode of “The Podcast Sisters.” In her quest for the perfect service, Krishna queried her Twitter community and looked at the various suggestions they sent her against her well-thought-out list of criteria. She settled on Basecamp.

I’ve used Basecamp and have tried a couple other options, but have gone a completely different direction for project management. I’m using Ning.

Ning was not designed to be a project management tool. It is a DIY social network, giving anybody the ability to build a Facebook-like site dedicated to a specific topic. (For an example of a well-executed and populated Ning network, take a look at PR Open Mic, set up by Auburn PR professor Robert French to support dialogue between PR professors, students, and practitioners. Another is the Pickens Plan, with nearly 200,000 members.)

But as I began working on a communications audit managed by my friend Tudor Williams, it occurred to me that Ning’s features fit our project management needs quite well. First of all, I could opt to invite members of the project team and the client to the private network. In this case, the client was not included because audio and text transcripts of focus groups are included for team members’ review; focus group participants were promised their comments would be confidential. (More on audio in a bit.)

One of Krishna’s criteria for a project management tool was the ability to create multiple projects. Since Ning is free, this isn’t important; you just set up a new network for each project.

One of the best features of Ning (and Facebook and other social networks) that I haven’t seen implemented nearly as well (if at all) on other project tools is a “latest activity” block on the home page as well as your own personal page. Just as Facebook will let you know that Tom has added a photo and Mary has posted something to Bill’s wall, the “latest activity” listing on our Ning network provides a chronological listing of the latest project activities (e.g., “Joe replied to the discussion, “Lastest Version of Managers Survey.”

Team notifications are handled through broadcast messages. One-to-one communication is easy—just leave a note on the wall of the appropriate team member. Not only is that note waiting for him when he returns to the site, he’ll be notified of the message by email. Every member gets an inbox to retain project-specific messaging.

While there is no calendaring per se in Ning, there is an event function that works just as well. We’re using events to list meetings, deadlines, conference calls, and anything else with a time-or-date component to it.

Ning supports the creation of groups, which makes it easy to break out the work of sub-teams and to house content in easy-to-find places. On our project site, we have a group for executive interviews, another for focus groups, and one for weekly team meetings.

There’s one more group I set up to contain links to all audio files. We’ve been using digital recorders to capture the audio from executive interviews and focus groups, and my first thought was simply to upload them to a LibSyn account I set up for project audio. Shortly afterwards, though, I found that you can add an audio module to a Ning network, so each audio file now simply gets added to an audio player that occupies a spot on the home page.

Forums allow for discussions on specific topics, such as each focus group, interviews, and the like. And, to seal the deal, you can attach documents to your forum contributions. So one of our project team members conducted a focus group, set up a forum for the that particular group, and attached her Word notes to the post. (Next time, we’ll probably use one forum for all focus groups, which each separate focus group listed as a topic within the forum.)

We’re using the photos module for official artwork (like the company’s logo, which we’re using on presentations and documents). There’s even a “notes” page.

There are more features we’re not using but that could prove valuable, such as live chat among project team members who are live on the site at the same time, blogs for recording observations maintaining status reports (far better than sending Word documents around), and an RSS feed of site activity (both of which, I suspect, would be more useful for larger teams (there are only six of us on this particular project).

I mentioned that setting up networks is free. If you invite clients to the site and they’re sensitive to such things, you might want to consider spending $19.95 per month to get rid of the ads that provide Ning with its revenue. It’s also $4.95 per month to map the network to a unique URL and $9.95 per month for each 10 GB of storage and 100 GB of bandwidth (that’s how much comes with your free account).

After my experience with Ning as a project management tool for this project, I plan to use it for all upcoming projects with multiple participants. Its familiar interface (to anyone who has ever used Facebook, MySpace, or any other social network), its full suite of features, its flexibility and its price make it my top choice over any software designed for project purposes. 

8. Sites of the Month

Microsoft Tag

This could be a game-changer, and it’s free while it’s in beta. On his ZDNet blog, Zack Whittaker calls Tags Microsoft’s most crucial technology to date. It is poised to make propel mobile computing to the next level.

And it’s pretty simple. You create a tag using a (free) account which produces a small, colorful square graphic you download and then publish—on a magazine ad, a movie poster, a bus advertisement, a business card, you name it. Somebody sees the ad and uses his or her cell phone camera to “snap” it. This opens content on the smartphone, anything from a video movie trailer to driving directions to more information on a company, product, or service. The app for your smartphone is free (and always will be).

http://www.microsoft.com/tag/

9. HC+T update

>>Lots of speaking engagements coming up, starting with a talk next week at PRSA Las Vegas.

>>I’m keynoting Blog Potomac in Washington, D.C. in June.

>>I’m helping a major packaged goods company with its intranet.

10. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

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

]]> 2009-01-29T20:15:43+00:00 http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/hct_update_november_2008/ HC+T Update: November 2008 HC+T Update
November 2008

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 You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you. Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like! HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology. You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader. Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts. (C) 2008, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved. ]]> 2008-11-18T13:56:54+00:00