General

A catch-all category for stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Think tankers

I had completely forgotten that I’d taken my little Casio digital camera with me to the IABC Research Foundation Think Tank a few weeks back. I was browsing images from the camera when I stumbled on this, which someone from the Think Tank graciously shot of me with Neville Hobson (left), Adrian Chan, Chris Heuer, and J.D. Lasica.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

A four-step strategic communication planning process

During yesterday’s Twitter-based PR20chat on the seven deadly sins of PR 2.0, it seemed clear to me that a lot of the issues introduced would never occur if communicators employed a strategic planning process rather than just dive into Twitter, Facebook, blogs or whatever.

Even organic social networking can benefit from planning. Sure, you’re going to become a trusted member of communities and engage on an ongoing basis. Which communities you choose, though, can be more easily identified if you know what it is you want to accomplish on behalf of your company.

During my three-decades-plus in the communications business, I’ve seen a lot of strategic planning models. Some list seven steps, some as many as 10. They’re all valid and include activities like measuring the results of your efforts and making adjustments based on research results.

Still, I like the basic four-step model introduced by Wilma Mathews, former head of PR at Arizona State University and co-author of “On Deadline,” one of the best texts on media relations ever written.

The idea of a strategic plan is simple enough: It’s a plan designed to achieve a specific goal as opposed to communication for its own sake. The four-step plan includes strategies and objectives, words that seem to be interchangeable. During yesterday’s PR20chat discussion, I talked about strategies and was challenged: How could I have strategies if I didn’t first have objectives? As you’ll see, in this approach, strategies are broad approaches and objectives are the smaller, measurable activities undertaken to suport the strategies.

The plan works like this:

Goal—You have to start with a business goal. After all, if your communications don’t support a business goal, why are they paying you to communicate? My biggest problem with the Groundswell POST model is that it starts with people, the P in POST. You first have to know which people, and you can’t know that until you know what business goal you’re trying to achieve. Otherwise, you could invest a lot of time and effort in targeting an audience that won’t really help the organization accomplish what it needs to.

Strategies—Once you know what your communication effort is designed to achieve, you’ll develop broad strategies. Princeton’s Wordnet defines a strategy as “an elaborate and systematic plan of action,” as good a definition as any in this context. Any goal can be supported by multiple strategies, including non-communication strategies. As communicators, our job is to develop plans of action that leverage communication in support of the goal. Audience and community identification and research are part of the strategy phase.

Objectives—Each strategy will have one or more measurable objectives that must be accomplished for the strategy to succeed. The key here is “measurable.” Strategies are sweeping; objectives are specific.

Tactics—These are the specific tools and actions you’ll take in order to achieve the objectives. These include the channels you’ll use, like Twitter or Facebook, and the specific activities you’ll engage in.

An analogy and an example

I saw Wilma present the four-step plan at a conference, where she used World War II as an analogy. The goal of the Allied forces during the war was simple: win. In order to achieve that goal, broad strategies were developed in each major theater (Pacific, Europe, etc.). In Europe, one strategy—the elaborate and systematic plan of action—was to surround Germany with Allied troops. With Nazi forces occupying France, a significant arc of that circle remained unclosed, leading to the measurable objective of invading France. With that objective in mind, Allied leaders could deal with tactics: Invade where? How many troops? How many planes? How many ships? On what day?

This process is easily applied to any communication effort. Here’s one I was managed back around 1988 while I was a consultant at William M. Mercer’s Los Angeles office.

The client was an auto company that maintained its design arm as a separate entity. Car designers had their own benefits plans, but the business decision had been made to merge the design employees into the larger company’s benefits plan. Some designers could perceive this as a takeaway, since they had been told for years that their separate plan was better.

Goal—Our client wanted us to implement a communication effort that would result in few or no designers leaving the company. These were highly valued, talented people and the client didn’t want them defecting to the competition where they would believe they would get better benefits.

Strategy—One strategy we developed was to demonstrate that benefits under the larger company plan would be as good, if not better, than the design subsidiary’s plan.

Objective—One objective for achieving this strategy was to show each employee his projected benefits over short- and long-term periods under the next plan compared to the old one.

Tactics—We designed a personalized document for each employee that showed benefits values in two columns—the old plan and the new plan—in one year, five years, 10 years and 20 years, accounting for standard merit increases. These sheets were inserted into die-cut slits in a four-page brochure explaining the rationale for the change.

Goals, strategy, objectives, tactics. Use this approach and you’ll minimize the risk of your communications going awry.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Team building by terror

During my Tenure at Allergan, the leadership of the Human Resources department spent a long weekend at a Ropes course. At this outdoorsy facility, the vice president of Benefits and Compensation and I sat on the ground back-to-back, locked elbows, and figured out how to stand up without separating and without falling over. Teams negotiated the crossing of a river without falling in. We each stood on a platform and toppled backwards, confident in the knowledge that the rest of the staff would catch us before we hit the ground.

All of this was designed to help us learn to work together as a team. There was lots of cheering and high-fiving. We discussed the learnings in an emotional wrap-up session. Then we went back to the office where we were just as dysfunctional as we ever were.

The reason Ropes courses don’t work is simple: If you ever find yourself and your team trapped in the wilderness, you’ll probably figure out how to cross a river. But the dynamics of office activities are completely different. What you learn in the outdoors in a small group with no extraneous factors in play simply doesn’t translate to the business world.

That isn’t stopping British Airways from taking the Ropes concept to the next level of absurdity and charging 130 pounds per employee for it (that’s about $260 in US dollars) to work together in a different kind of challenge. Rather than a team coming together to solve an immediate problem (e.g., crossing a river), the team must come together to survive (wait for it…) a plane crash.

That’s right. Members of the corporate team board a Boeing 737 mounted on a motion platform. Takeoff is simulated, after which the plane simulates a 3,000-foot plunge as smoke fills the cabin. Once the plane “hits” the ground, the employees have to…well… get off. That is, they must escape as quickly as possible through front and back exits.

These half-day “crash courses” (not my pun) are booked for more than 350 faux flights. The passengers come from oil companies, financial services, civil servants, and even staff at a UK national sports league.

(You’d have to wonder about a Wall Street company spending $260 per person for this. You would think, as one comment left to the London Times story suggested, that they would have had enough experience with crashes.)

The idea, according to one report, is that your survival instinct leads you think of yourself first. In a team-building exercise, you’re supposed to consider the needs of others. According to BA’s Andy Clubb, who manages the program, “The adrenaline kicks in and they all bond together because they go through a stressful environment.”

Yep, that’ll make it so much easier to go through the budget process back at the office.

As ludicrous as this is, you have to give props to British Airways for coming up with a way to make some money during an economic downturn that has produced a decline in air travel. But if you’re genuinely interested in team building, here are two more reality-grounded exercises:

• After every difficult or lengthy project or assignment, pull the team together to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and how different members of the team reacted to the process. Decide what to do differently next time.
• Go offsite for major planning processes. Use the living room of a team member’s house or a park (if the weather allows).
• Get together as a team outside of work from time to time. Dinner, a barbecue, anyplace you can be more relaxed and informal without artificial crises that distract rather than reinforce the kind of team you are.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Offline social networking

My online activities—from blogging to Twitter—have been very light for the last week. The image above should speak for itself. At left are Cindy and Steve Crescenzo, who are spending more than a week with Michele (at right) and me in Waikiki. At right is the sunset view from the patio lanai of our room. I get back Monday night and expect to return to a normal schedule. Until then, social networking is more about mai tais at the bar with our friends and other vacationers than digital messaging. It works great. Aloha!

Thursday, November 13, 2008

I’ll be on radio today: Listen in

I’m being interviewed on WCRN-AM, a Worcester, Massachusetts terrestrial radio station, by on-air personality Hank Stolz. That’s right, it’ll be the Stolz and Holtz Show. It’s set for 2:30 p.m. EST. You can listen on the station’s website at http://www.wcrnradio.com.

Saturday, November 01, 2008

The extent of the spam problem

I read a lot in various newsletters I get about the extent of the spam/virus problem, but nothing drives it home like a snapshot of your own email volume.

My spam provider just launched a new service, a monthly report in PDF format of the actions it has taken over the last 30 days with your email. (SpamSoap isn’t software installed on your own PC to filter out spam. Since I have my own mail server, I route all mail first through SpamSoap, which then forwards on all legit email to my server.)

For the month of October, SpamSoap sent 1% of the email addressed to the holtz.com domain on to me. The rest was either quarantined (13%) or denied altogether (86%). In other words, 99% of the email sent to holtz.com was illegitimate.

If the percentages are eye-opening, consider the numbers. For the month, 832,776 emails were received, but only 10,024 were sent on. The emails broke down like this:

• Spam detected: 361,456
• Virus detected: 1,151
• Attachment violations: 7
• Content violations: 60,033

For the year to date, the numbers are even more staggering: 26,326,829 spam messages and 54,241 viruses. At this pace, SpamSoap will have blocked more than 30 million spam messages destined for holtz.com by the time New Year’s rolls around.

Astounding.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Utterz steps up its instant online communication game

I joined Utterz shortly after it launched. I liked the idea as soon as I heard it: a way to share a thought impulsively by recording it over the phone. The recording is saved to a profile where those who choose to follow you are notified that you have a new Utter. What you Utter can often become a conversation, just as text does on Twitter and video on Seesmic. As with Twitter, you can put a widget on your site that plays your latest Utter. As with YouTube, you can embed an Utter as part of a blog post.

Utterz, Seesmic, and Twitter represent a suite of tools for me. Most often, I’m at my computer and it’s easiest to send a tweet. Sometimes, though, video seems more appropriate to the message. When I’m not at a computer and keying text into my mobile phone just seems like a hassle, I can call it into Utterz.

Twitter is well-established and, if Biz Stone and his crew can overcome persistent reliability issues, it’s not going anywhere. Utterz and Seesmic have less certain futures. Seesmic is still in alpha, so it’s way too soon to make any guesses about its prospects. Utterz, with its cow-based theme, has attracted usership only in the thousands.

Utterz has stepped up its game with announcements made today. I spent some time on the phone last week with the company’s CEO, Michael Bayer, who walked me through some of the changes the company is introducing. (The discussion was arranged by The Conversation Group, which represents Utterz.) While it won’t dethrone Twitter, the upgraded Utterz represents a threat to Seesmic.

Most of the changes are based on user input, Bayer said; that thousands of comments helped prioritize which improvements to introduce now and which to work on for later. The new features reinforce Utterz’ promise to let you produce any kind of content instantly, using any device, and to post that content where you want. Utterz now supports voice, video, images and text from computers and mobile phones and lets users direct where their content winds up: on their blog, their Facebook account, wherever. In our conversation, Bayer stressed Utterz’ platform-agnosticism.

Today’s announcements include the addition of threaded conversations on the Utterz site. In addition, Utterz is going global with local phone numbers for voice contributions in nearly 20 countries including the UK, France, Italy, Australia, Ireland, Sweden, Israel and others.

The multiple-media approach makes this partricularly interesting. The only way to reply to a Seesmic video is with another Seesmic video; Twitter tweets require tweets in return. With Utterz, I can respond to text with a video I record directly from my webcam (just as Seesmic works) while someone can reply to my video with audio called in from a mobile phone.

Utterz is introducing one more change today: an improved interface. The design looks more business-like. The cartoony cow motif was fine, but not exactly the kind of thing that would inspire widespread business adoption. The new interface looks just fine for work:

Audio uploaded to Utterz are added to feeds as RSS 2.0 compliant enclosures, which allows the service to double as a podcast host.

Taken together, these enhancements make Utterz a formidable competitor in the growing world of instant online conversation.

Here’s my Utterz profile, by the way.