Books

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Let’s whine like it’s 1999

There has been a flurry of activity in the PR corners of a variety of social channels today. These messages have been filled with angst and vile and anger. There has been finger-pointing, name-calling and threats.

What could motivate such an outpouring of emotion? A particularly egregious case of astroturfing? The revelation that a PR agency is behind a front organization for an unethical organization seeking to do evil? An outrageous use of a social channel by a particularly arrogant PR practitioner?

It was none of these things. It was—and I can’t believe I’m writing these words—a reply-all fiasco on an email listserv.

The original email that kicked the whole thing off was no different than the couple dozen pitches I get every day. I was on a list—evidently, a good-sized one—of people with some connection to social media to which a solicitation was blasted. As soon as I saw it, I deleted it. Normally, I wouldn’t name the individual who made the initial mistake, but her name is all over the Internet right now, as evidenced by this very small fragment of tweets on the topic:

The pitch was to review an ebook. The event that led to the downward spiral in this instance was one recipient—an innocent soul named Donna—who responded positively. Incidentally, Donna was smacked down for being too ignorant to know not to respond to a pitch. That, in itself, was way out of line. I don’t like mass pitches any more than anyone else, but if a pitch happens to look like something I, my readers or my clients would be interested in, I reply. There’s nothing wrong with responding to something that genuinely interests you.

So Donna replied. Unfortunately, she appears to have replied to all. There were only two addresses to whom she could have replied. First, there was the PR agent who sent the original mail. Second, there was a single email address that, as it turns out, was a list address. By including the list address, she unwittingly sent her request to everybody who received the first pitch. But without careful examination of that address, Donna could not have known that.

Among those receiving Donna’s request for a copy of the ebook was an anxious author whose new book, “Twitterville,” is due out September 3. (In fact, I’m attending a launch party for the book this weekend.) So, when my friend Shel Israel saw an email in his inbox that said, “Can you send a review copy?” Shel enthusiastically responded and copied the reply to the publicity people promoting his book.

And he evidently also used the “reply all.” There was still was no reason for anybody to suspect these messages were going to a large list of people. Those individual names weren’t showing up in the CC line; it was still just the email address of the list, the original sender (Beth) and the person to whom shel was replying (Donna).

Shortly after that, the torrent began. As soon as I saw what was happening, I took 20 seconds (and not a second more) to create a filter in my email client that redirected all messages containing the same subject line to the trash. If I hadn’t started to see blog posts and tweets on the subject, I never would have noticed another single one of these messages.

Evidently, there are a lot of otherwise smart people in the PR world who don’t know how to deal with a problem that that has cropped up every few months for the last quarter of a century.

But now the fun was beginning. People began invoking “reply all” in order to—you can feel it coming, can’t you?—demand that people stop replying “all.” Each one of these added the individual email address of the message being responded to. And so on. And so on. Each response led to a CC: line crammed with more and more individual email addresses. Each response reflected increasingly hot tempers.

We had unfounded accusations, such as the individual who blamed the whole thing on Shel Israel’s publicist, wrongly believing that it was a promotion for “Twitterville” and not a completely unrelated ebook. Someone from AdAge threatened to name everyone who sent a “reply all” demanding that people stop using “reply all.” (He later reconsidered.) There were those who let everyone else know just how unable they were to control their emotions, like the individual whose message (to “all”) read, “Take me off this fucking list which I never asked to be on and can’t unsubscribe from.”

(To be fair, many of the requests were quite civil—but they still found their way to everyone on the list because they were sent using “reply all.”)

Actually, you could unsubscribe from the list. There was a link at the bottom of the original email, and each subsequent message, that connected to a page where you could unsubscribe. But this led to the next round of emails, as each unsbuscribe notification wound up getting circulated to everyone on the list.

Once again, 20 seconds to create an email filter and I didn’t see any more of these, either. For some people, though, it was easier (and evidently more gratifying) to write, “wtf is going on here? why am I now receiving email support tickets!? unsubscribe me from anything and everything you people are involved with and leave me alone!”

There’s personal branding for you.

The only reason I know how people have been responding is that I have visited my email trash and retrieved all these messages in the wake of the kerfuffle they have produced.

Ten years ago, such a vitriolic response was to be expected. But today? Among a group of people who were on a list in the first place because of their supposed online savvy? And they’re still replying “all” when demanding to be removed from a list??

I sincerely hope these aren’t the same people lamenting how slowly others are embracing social media. If we don’t have the basics down yet, what hope is there for real progress?

Monday, August 17, 2009

“Trust Agents” and the complexities of trust

The ability of organizations to develop relationships of “spontaneous sociability,” the ability to form trusting relationships with diverse strangers, predicts when an organization will compete effectively.

If you think the quote above is a conclusion of the Edelman Trust Barometer or a quote from any of the flood of recent social media-focused books, guess again. It was a key finding of a study concluded in 2000 by the IABC Research Foundation titled “Measuring Organizational Trust” (link opens a PDF).

You would think, reading all the conversation about trust in the social space, that bloggers and others active in social media discovered trust. The researchers behind “Measuring Organizational Trust,” however, identified “spontaneous sociability” as an issue before anybody had ever uttered the term “social media.”

In fact, if most of today’s discussions of trust have a fatal flaw, it’s that they focus strictly on the social media dimensions of trust without contextualizing trust around broader relationships and issues. Social media is critical to business today, but trust does not exist in a vacuum. The very definition of organizational trust, according to the study, makes it clear that there’s more in play than blogs and social networks:

The organization’s willingness, based on its culture and communication behaviors in relationships and transactions, to be appropriately vunlerable if it believes that another individual, group or organization is competent, open and honest, concerned, reliable, and identified with common goals, norms and values.

In fact, according to the Foundation study, organizational trust is not a one-dimensional concept. Instead, it is…

• Multi-leveled—Trust results from interactions that span co-workers, teams, organizational and inter-organizational alliances
• Culturally-rooted—Trust is closely tied to the norms, values and beliefs of an organization’s culture
• Communication-based—Trust is the outcome of communication behaviors, including transparency, accuracy and responsiveness.
• Dynamic—Trust is constantly chaging as it cycles through phases of building, stabilizing and dissolving
• Multi-dimensional—Trust consists of multiple factors at the cognitive, emotional and behavioral levels, all of which affect a person’s perception of trust

The role of social media and online conversations should be clear in this characteristics, but so should other relationships and criteria. Clearly there is more to influence the degree to which you trust an organization than what a credible peer has to say. When you consider the five distinct dimensions of trust that emerged from the study, it becomes even more obvious that, while ignoring online interactions can be disastrous, relying solely on them can be equally damaging:

• Competence—Are the organization and its leaders and employees seen as effective? How strongly do we believe the organization will compete and survive?
• Transparency—How much information is shared, how accurate is it, and how sincerely and appropriately is it communicated?
• Concern for employees—When the organization is volunerable, does it abandon its feelings of caring, empathy, tolerance and safety toward employees? Did it ever have those feelings to begin with?
• Reliability—Does the organization and its employees do what they say they’ll do?
• Identification—How connected do we feel to the organization and its people?

A company’s overarching behavior will do more to inform online discussion and the perspectives of peer opinion leaders than any coordinated online communication effort.

These elements of trust were rattling around in my brain this morning as I flipped through my just-arrived copy of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith‘s “Trust Agents,” the new book from Wiley that went on sale today. Thanks to the popularity of the authors and an aggressive marketing effort, the book’s debut is getting a lot of attention; it’s currently ranked 43 among all books at Amazon.com. The 10 reviews on Amazon so far all award “Trust Agents” five stars, including what has to be a highly influential review from Seth Godin.

A couple of the reviews are particularly encouraging. According to Steven Waterhouse, for example, “Trust Agents” demonstrates “how trust is the foundation of any relationship, why trust is difficult to achieve via online interactions, and what to do to overcome these obstacles.” And Amber Naslund wrote that the book strips away the fog “from complex and intricate concepts like trust, reliability, and the importance of human behavior in a digitized world where attention is at a premium.”

The flyleaf of the book, though, asserts that a trust agent’s words “carry more weight than any PR firm or big corporate marketing department.” There’s truth in this statement, but as the Foundation study makes clear, trust is a multi-layered and complex beast. The sources of trust doesn’t simply shift from one medium to another. How much, for example, do the efforts of a corporate communications department to accurately tell the company’s story influence what trust agents believe and pass along?

I’m anxious to dive into “Trust Agents,” which I’ll do as soon as I finish Emanuel Rosen’s “The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited.” I admire the heck out of Chris (and if I knew Julien, I’m sure I’d admire the heck out of him, too; my only exposure to Julien so far is through the podcast, Media Hacks); Chris is a smart guy (and a nice guy) with a firm grasp on the impacts social media is having on business. I’d bet real money his book is worth the cover price, and then some. (It’s available from more places than just Amazon, by the way.)

I plan to review the book soon on “For Immediate Release.”

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Kindles, paperbacks, and beaches

A few shows back, the Twit crew—Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, and some other guests—praised the Amazon Kindle ebook while simultaneously predicting ebooks would never take off. The gist of their thinking: We never see any Kindles anywhere.

On the other side of the equation is Steve Rubel, who believes we are but six short years away from seeing the death of most tangible media and the serious decline of any that haven’t perished. This would, of course, include books.

The reality is somewhere in between.

It’s absurd to believe that Borders and Barnes & Noble stores will all be shuttered by 2014 and that Amazon’s book business will have gone 95-100% digital. On the other hand, I was surprised at the number of Kindles I spied while vacationing in Honolulu last week. At the Hilton Hawaiian Village pools and the beaches at Waikiki I counted at least a dozen Kindles (not counting my own) in the hands of sunbathers and vacationers.

Of course, that’s twelve Kindles compared to probably a couple thousand paperbacks and print magazines (along with the occasional hardcover) people were reading on their towels and beach chairs .

I admit to a love-hate relationship with my Kindle. It’s a wonderful device, as was the Sony Reader that I’m embarrassed to admit I left on a plane a few months back. But that’s part of the problem. It’s no big deal if I leave a paperback on the plane; I just plunk down another $6 or $7 and replace it. Replacing the Kindle or Sony is a $350 investment.

Then there’s the moment of hesitation in taking the Kindle to the beach. What if I doze off and drop it in the sand? With a paperback, again, no worries, but it could be spell disaster for the Kindle.

My paperback never runs out of power. I can make a note in the margin of a page of a paperback. Then there was the section of a book I’d finished on my Kindle that I wanted to reference in a talk. With a paperback, I could flip to the part of the book where it appeared and flip through pages until I find it. There’s no search function on ebooks and turning pages is a slower, more laborious process. Finally, as an author, I wonder how I’ll autograph a digital book.

On the love side, digital books are cheaper, I get instant gratification (read about the book, buy it, and be reading it all within about 60 seconds), it’s greener and it takes up far less room in my briefcase (a vital consideration for us road warriors).

It’s this balance of issues that convinces me that the digital-versus-paper argument is specious. Well beyond 2012, book shops in airports and beach resort hotels will continue to stock James Patterson and John Kellerman and Patricia Cornwall for travelers who need to something to read while the uptake of the Kindle will continue to climb (there is, after all, a 4-6-week backorder for the device at Amazon). It’s all about coexistence, not replacement. Each format will find its place.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Resources and thanks for my new book, “Tactical Transparency”

A week or so ago, I received my author’s copies of “Tactical Transparency,” the new book I’ve co-written with John C. Havens, and even though it’s my sixth book, I felt that same old thrill the day it went on sale. I’m also very hopeful about the book’s prospects. I must have heard President-Elect Barack Obama utter the word “transparency” about 10 times during his “60 Minutes” interview this past Sunday, and a Google search shows the word has appeared about 567,000 times in the last month alone.

There’s nothing quite like good timing.

Now that the book is available, I want to let you know about a special offer that makes the purchase price worth a a bit more, point you to some resources, and extend my deepest gratitude to everybody who had a hand in getting the book from concept to publication.

The offer

First off, if you buy the book online you can go to a special site that will be available temporarily where you can enter your online order receipt number. That’ll get you an email with a link to a page where you’ll be able to download a variety of resources, including an e-book by Chris Brogan; a lengthy excerpt from Roger D’Aprix’s new book, The Credible Company (which is must-reading for anybody working in employee communications); sample chapters from Mike Robbin’s book, Focus on the Good Stuff; Jeremiah’s Owyang‘s Forrester report on corporate staffing for social computing; Jason van Orden’s Community Magnet series, a PDF covering the seven deadly sins of social media from Room 214, and (for U.S. residents) a free one-year subscription to FastCompany magazine (which I still read religiously).

Resources

The primary resource associated with the book is a blog titled (aptly), Tactical Transparency. I have to confess that John has been shouldering most of the burden of contributing to this blog, but I’ll start getting some material up there now that the book is out and the blog will (I hope) attract some more attention.

There are also some videos from a presentation John and I gave at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas this past August. Here’s the video of John and me:

You’ll find other versions of the video—including the full discussion John and I had before the presentation—at my Viddler account.

Thanks

I couldn’t possibly be too effusive in my expression of thanks to everyone who had a role in getting the book done.

First, I have to tip my hat to John C. Havens. We met when John called to ask me to co-present at a meeting—he’d be live, I’d be Skype’d in. Unfortunately, I had technical problems and couldn’t get through, leaving John hanging. In our conversation after that, though, the talk turned to the many dimensions of transparency that we hadn’t planned on talking about at the meeting, and the book concept took off from there.

I still hadn’t met John face-to-face when a publisher came on board, but we’ve seen each other several times since then. We’ve also had countless phone calls, exchanged hundreds of emails, and gotten to know each other pretty well. At this point, I’m proud to count John among my friends.

Next on the thank-you list are those who worked directly on the book’s development. First, I’d like to heap praise on Yvonne DiVita and Tom Collins ofWindsor Media Enterprises, our agents, who go well above and beyond the role an agent usually assumes. (I’ve had three agents before this; I know whereof I speak.)

On the publishing side, the International Association of Business Communicators—of which I’ve been a member for more than 30 years—played a pivotal part. IABC has a publishing partnership with Jossey-Bass, and my very good friend Natasha Nicholson, IABC’s vice president of publishing, brought the idea to the publisher. Natasha and I met for lunch with Kathe Sweeney, senior editor in the business/management group at Jossey-Bass, who also became a champion for the book. Since then, we’ve worked with many great people at Jossey-Bass (a Wiley imprint), but a special nod goes to Erin Moy, who’s handling the marketing. John, Kathe, Erin, Natasha and I had a great lunch to talk about the book at this year’s international IABC conference in New York.

Finally, there are all those who provided the substance for the book, the many who agreed to be interviewed. (All those interviews, in their entirety, are available on BlogTalk Radio, where John works as VP of business development. (The continued availability of these interviews is an example of transparency: If you read a quote in the book and wonder about its context, you can just listen to the entire interview and hear exactly how that quote was presented.)

Not everybody interviewed made it into the book, but their contributions were no less important than those who did—their observations, insights, and wisdom are unquestionably apparent in the finished product, even if specific quotes aren’t.

By the way, if you’re listed here and you never got the PDF of the review version of the book, let me know and I’ll get it off to you.

Here’s the rundown of those who took part in the interviews, in decidedly non-alphabetical order:

• Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President, Sun Microsystems
• Robert Duffy, Open Port Group, Intel
• George Faulkner, Corporate Communications at IBM
• Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
• Dominic Jones, Principal of IR Web Report and founder of Clarity! Communications
• Jeff Pulver, founder of Vonage and Pulver.com
• Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor for FastCompany.com
• Michael Hyatt, CEO, Thomas Nelson Publishers
• Alan Levy & Bob Charish, CEO & COO, co-founders of BlogTalkRadio
• Christopher Carfi, co-founder of Cerado
• Bill Sobel, Principal of Sobel Media and founder of the New York Media Information Exchange Group
• Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst with Forrester Research
• Ludovic Fourrage, Group Program Manager for the Academy Mobile Program at Microsoft
• Sean O’Driscoll, General Manager, Customer Service and Support for Microsoft
• Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief, WIRED Magazine
• Todd Defren, partner at SHIFT Communications
• Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing and Founding CEO of WOMMA.org
• Gabe Dalporto, Chief Strategy Office for Zecco.com
• Tom Foremski, author of the Silicon Valley Watcher blog
• Bob Langert, Vice President for Corporate Social Responsibility at McDonald’s
• Mike Prosceno, Head of New Media Relations at SAP
• Mike Wing, vice president of communication strategy for IBM
• Lynn Tyson, director of Investor Relations at Dell
• Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations
• John Czwartacki, Executive Director of External Communications for Verizon
• Chris Heuer, Principal, The Conversation Group
• Chris Brogan, New Media Consultant and co-founder, Podcamp.org
• Brian Solis, principal of Future Works PR
• Andrew Horowitz, President and Founder of Horowitz & Company and author of The Disciplined Investor
• Timothy Sykes, CEO, Bullship Press and author of An American Hedge Fund
• Tia-Carr Williams, CEO at EveryMedia and Chief Network Officer at http://www.NovumInstitute.org
• Michael Port, nationally acclaimed speaker and author of Booked Solid
• Dave Balter, Founder and CEO of BzzAgent
• Joel Smernoff, President and COO of PalTalk
• Josh Levy, CEO, BeenVerified
• Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston
• Jonathan Vanasco, Founder and CEO of FindMeOn
• >Andrew Baron, Founder, Rocketboom
• Gerald Baron, founder of AudienceCentral and author of Now is Too Late
• Anthony Moor, Deputy Managing Editor/Interactive for the Dallas Morning News
• Micah L. Sifry, Senior Editor, Personal Democracy Forum
• JD Lasica, founder of Ourmedia.org
• Stephanie Rogers, Director of Interactive Strategy for PARTNERS + Simons
• Anil Dash, Vice President, Six Apart
• Robert Scoble, Managing Director, FastCompany TV and co-author of Naked Conversations
• Eric Skiff, Community Evangelist at Clipmarks.com
• Paull Young, Senior Account Executive at Converseon
• Scott Ginsberg, The Nametag Guy
• Jason McClain, founder of the Institute for the Development of Evolutionary Awareness
• Andrew Kaplan, CEO at MediaMensch Networks
• Cindi Bigelow, President, Bigelow Tea
• Valorie Luther, Founder and CEO, Creative Concepts
• Sean Bohan, Advertising and Marketing executive
• Lauren Wood, Senior Program Manager, Sun Microsystems
• Matthew Knell, former General Manager, Jet Blue
• Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communications, Jet Blue
• Brian Lusk, Manager of Customer Communication and Corporate Editor, SouthWest Airlines
• Bill Owen, Lead Planner in the Schedule Planning Department, SouthWest Airlines
• Paolo Tosolini, New Media Business Manager, Microsoft

One more thing…

There have been some early write-ups of the book:

A “drive-by” review by Johnathan Fields
A blog post by Connie Crosby
A nice reference by Christie Adams, who attended the Third Tuesday event in Toronto a few weeks ago
My friend C.C. Chapman’s post announcing that he received his review copy
C.C.‘s early thoughts on the book, discussed in his terrific podcast, “Managing the Gray”
IBM’s George Faulkner announces that he’s received his review copy
A great post by Lynne d Johnson, FastCompany’s director of social media, who wrote the foreword
A brief interview that Albert Marruggi of Provident Partners conducted with me at the recent SNCR research symposium
Paull Young of Converseon talks about the book

I think that’s about enough self-promotion, don’t you? Now, back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The first copy of Tactical Transparency

The doorbell rang late yesterday. I was ready to be assailed by yet another advocate for or against one of the ballot propositions, but it turned out to be my regular UPS guy with an envelope containing one copy of the new book I have co-authored with John C. Havens, “Tactical Transparency.” The official release date is November 8, but it’s great to have a copy to show off. It’s only my second hardcover (the first was “Corporate Conversations”), and the production values are great. Most flattering are the testimonials from the likes of Chris Brogan, Andy Sernovitz, Paul Levy, Jonathan Schwartz, David Meerman Scott, Pete Blackshaw, and Jackie Huba.

In the spirit of transparency, all of the 50 or so interviews conducted for the book can be heard in their entirety at the BlogTalk Radio site where they were recorded. We also have a blog dedicated to the book. And we’ll have a special site launching shortly with a short-term promotion for the book’s launch. I’ll let you know when that site is up.

The book was published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, as part of the IABC publishing series. I can’t begin to express how thrilled I am to have been involved with John, the folks at IABC, and the folks at Jossey-Bass, not to mention our agent, Yvonne Divita. And I also can’t begin to express how thrilling it is—no matter how many books you write—to hold the final product in your hands!

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Work on transparency book is underway

I’ve been wanting to make this official for some time, but now that the contracts are signed, I can let the cat out of the bag. I’m excited to be co-authoring a new book on the role of communications in promoting business transparency. I’m even more thrilled to be co-writing the book with John C. Havens, lead organizer for PodCampNYC, VP of Business Development for BlogTalkRadio and a well-known figure in the world of social media.

The book is tentatively titled “Media 2.Open: Tactics for Transparency.” It will be published by Jossey-Bass, a John Wiley & Sons imprint, as part of the series of books Jossey-Bass is publishing with the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). So far, these books have included Mark Weiner’s “Unleashing the Power of PR: A Contrarian’s Guide to Marketing and Communication” and “The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication.”

Our manuscript deadline is March 15. Between now and then, in addition to writing furiously, John and I are conducting a ton of interviews. We’re recording all of them and making them available as a podcast. Some of the interviews are being conducted live via BlogTalk Radio; others are being recorded offline.

We also have a blog where we’ll be publishing chapters in advance for reader feedback.

Finally, we’ll be setting up a wiki shortly where case studies and other content will be available for your input—and even for you to contribute your own. We’ll let you know when it’s available.

The book focuses on how businesses can communicate in a transparent manner, but it also serves as a primer on transparency, establishing some definitions and setting some boundaries. (Transparency does not mean giving away all your secrets, for instance.) We’ll make the case for transparency and balance it with the realities of conducting business in the real world. We think it’ll be a great addition to the library of any communicator or executive, along with a host of other audiences.

We’re excited to be writing this book and to be working together. I hope you’ll join us on the podcast, the live BlogTalk Radio broadcasts, the blog and the wiki as we progress through the journey of crafting what we hope will be an important work.

Our agent, by the way, is the remarkable Yvonne DeVita, who also repped Neville and me for our book, “How to Do Everything with Podcasting.”

Here are the various resources we have available right now:

• Blog
• BlogTalk Radio show/podcast
• Podcast RSS feed