§ Subscribe

Alternatives

Enter your email address to receive blog updates by email:

Delivered by FeedBurner

§ Utterz

§ Podcast

• For Immediate Release
  A weekly podcast for professional communicators from Shel Holtz, ABC and Neville Hobson, ABC.
  Podcast Feed
  Vote for FIR

---

§ PR Search

---

View blog authority

---

§ Places

• Shel's link blog
• Blogs I read
• Holtz Communication + Technology
• IABC
• Ragan Communications
• Society for New Communications Research

---

§ Dead Trees

• How to Do Everything with Podcasting
  
  by Shel Holtz with Neville Hobson
  
  
  
  
• Blogging for Business
  
  by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos
  
  
  
  
• Corporate Conversations
  
  by Shel Holtz
  
  
  
  
• Public Relations on the Net
  
  by Shel Holtz
  
  
  
  

---

§ License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

---

Technorati: Blogs that link here

Brands

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Speakers & Speeches: Employees Are the Brand - April 23, 2008

Share This!

Content summary: Shel Holtz presents a breakout session on the blurring lines between internal and external communications at the Society for New Communications Research New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, California, on April 23, 2008. The session delves into internal communications practices that prepare employees to represent the company in their social media activities.

Download the file here (MP3, 29.2Mb, 1:04). Subscribe to the Speakers & Speeches RSS feed to get these and future podcasts automatically. For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as the free Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon. To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full RSS feed.

Listen to this podcast now

If you have comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future podcasts, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Your Blog: the latest from Dell

Share This!

Dell, the poster child for a big company embracing social media, has launched a new blog. Dell’s chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, announced ”Your Blog” on Direct2Dell, the customer service-focused blog launched during some of the company’s darkest days.

“YourBlog” will focus on the uses to which people put their computers. Lionel thinks of it as “a little bit Community + Lifehacker + ReadWriteWeb + Gamespy.” Dell employees will contribute to the blog, which features an idea submission field: The blog will steer toward topics about which people want to read.

So far, only an inaugural post with two paltry comments appears on the blog. The welcome message comes from John Pope, who writes:

It is our hope that by providing such a venue, the hyper-connected power of social media – primarily its infinite potential for stoking two-way dialogue – will help you get more out of your passions. Things like photography, gaming, music, film, fashion, social media … and all things computer related. For Dell, it’s another opportunity to listen, learn and ultimately act in mutual self-interest.

Support for conversations with customers seems to be unconditional at Dell. Lynn Tyson, the company’s investor relations chief, said (in an FIR interview) that she encountered no resistence to starting DellShares, one of the few IR-focused blogs. Even the lawyers have seen the results. Dell also gets that it’s people, not the corporation, that have conversations.

“Your Blog” could be a potent extension of Dell’s existing efforts. If it becomes a home for people looking to soak up all they can about their passions, as Pope puts it, then those people will have a regular positive brand experience. That will require some hefty blogging to compete draw the attention of people inclined to follow Lifehacker, ReadeWriteWeb, Gamespy and the like. If anybody can pull it off, though, it’s Lionel and his colleagues.

I’ve already subscribed.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Blame the law, not the lawyers

Share This!

Getting a degree in journalism back in the mid-1970s, when I got mine, required a class in journalism law. I suspect this is still true, but I wonder if a parallel class is required for students in PR, marketing, and communications majors. Based on the speed with which people working in these disciplines jump on lawyers, I would guess not.

I was as amazed as everybody else when I read that Hasbro (representing US distribution) and Mattel (which owns international rights) issued a cease-and-desist to the group behind Scrabulous, a Facebook app that emulates the board game, Scrabble. (I’m one of the more than 600,000 people who use the app, by the way.)

Matt Dickman, who writes the Techno//Marketer blog, wrote a terrific post outlining some of the alternative approaches the toymakers could have taken. (Thanks to Chris Brogan for pointing the post out to me; Matt learned about the incident from Shel Israel.) Matt suggests that Hasbro or Mattel could have bought Scrabulous and made it an official Scrabble game or sponsor the app. These are great ideas. But there’s a compelling reason the lawyers (whom Matt suggests should be forced from the room during discussions about situations like the intellectual property issue Scrabulous presented) make the decisions they do.

I learned about this when I worked for Mattel (1984-88; I left as director of corporate communications). From a PR perspective, I opposed legal action against someone who infringed on the Barbie trademark. The infringement didn’t strike me as particularly onerous and I thought the PR fallout would be worst than any losses we might suffer as a direct result of the violation. Our IP lawyer—a very nice guy named Ron, as I recall—set me straight. Here’s the scenario, modernized to address the Scrabble/Scrabulous issue:

Let’s say Hasbro and Mattel opt to do nothing about the Scrabulous infringement, or that they decide to follow Matt’s advice and buy or sponsor the application. Then, next year, a truly egregious violation occurs: Somebody produces a boxed board game called “Scramble” that is, for all practical purposes, a complete knock-off of Scrabble, which is distributed to dealers who sell the game at flea markets and swap meets. Hasbro takes the company behind Scramble to court, where the defense attorney gets up and says, “Your honor, not only did Hasbro not defend its trademark with the Facebook app called Scrabulous, they paid money to sponsor the application! If Hasbro didn’t defend its intellectual property then, what standing do they have to do so now? Why aren’t they paying us to sponsor Scramble?”

This argument is a valid one in court. Companies lose the right to defend a trademark if they don’t take action against any and all violations of which they are aware.

I’m certainly not suggesting this is a good thing. But it’s the law that needs to change, not the lawyers.

As Matt says in a reply to a comment I left on his post, companies now must weigh the risk to the trademark against the risk associated with alienating customers. But from the lawyer’s perspective, there is no choice. We’d all know this if we knew just the basics of the law as it applies to brands and marketing.

Friday, January 04, 2008

Social media as customer service

Share This!

I received an invitation a few weeks back to write a post for Brandweek, and was delighted to take Senior Online Editor Rory Thompson up on the offer. Of course, I don’t work in marketing—never have—so it took some thought to come up with a theme that addressed branding. I settled on the impact bad customer service has on a brand and how social media provide companies with a means of improving customer service that involves the entire employee base. I talk about the notion of customer service reporting to one of the company’s communication functions where it can be treated as the first line of public relations. Taken together, these changes to the customer service model can result in positive, buzzworthy brand experiences. The post is here.