a shel of my former self

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #462: July 2, 2009

2009-07-02T19:16:11+00:00

Content summary: Lee Aase, manager of syndication and social media for The Mayo Clinic, joins Shel as guest co-host. Please vote for FIR on Podcast Alley. Lee and Shel discuss the growth of social media in health care. Media Monitoring Minute. Dan York reports on Facebook privacy changes. News That Fits: Malcolm Gladwell vs. Chris Anderson, A Johns Hopkins executive blogs and tweets her kidney donation, why you should monitor your URLs? on Twitter, the Blog Council becomes the Social Media Business Council and moves to socialmedia.org, half of intranets have adopted Enterprise 2.0, senior journalists are jumping ship for new careers in the PR industry; David Phillips reports on research he’ll present at a conference at Lake Bled, Slovenia; listener comments; music from Chester Bay; and more.

About our guest co-host: Lee Aase is manager of Syndication and Social Media for Mayo Clinic. His team’s focus is developing quality medical news resources for mainstream media, and using social media applications to create more in-depth, extended relationships directly with key stakeholders. Lee lives in Austin, Minnesota and is the chancellor of Social Media University Global (SMUG). Be sure to listen to our interview with Lee from February 2009.

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For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for June 29, 2009: A 71-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California and Rochester, Minnesota, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

FIR #462 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. 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.

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So, until Monday, July 6…

Love social media releases or hate ‘em, they work

2009-06-30T22:27:56+00:00

PR agency Text 100 is out with a global survey of bloggers and damned if the results don’t reveal that social media releases—which inspire passion among those who object to them—work.

The survey first determined that bloggers have grown in importance to corporations, measured by the increased outreach by businesses and their PR people. And the vast majority of these bloggers want companies and their PR people to reach out to them. While awareness of social media releases avaries from market to market, among those who know what they are, they’re perceived favorably.

What’s more, bloggers have noticed an increase in the number of social media releases they’ve received. But the real value derives from the elements of the release actually being used by bloggers. In the past year, 26% of Asia-Pacific bloggers have used the various pieces of a social media release, while 15% of European bloggers have taped into these assets. None in the U.S. had, but Text 100 attributes this to a small survey sample of U.S.-based bloggers. The experience must have been good, though, because more than 60% of bloggers in Asia-Pacific and Europe plan to take greater advantage of social media releases in the upcoming year, along with nearly 45% of US bloggers.

To me, this makes tremendous sense, given the disdain bloggers expressed for traditional press releases and their preference for incorporating images, video and audio into their posts. Social media releases (among many other things) make it easy to cherry-pick and embed multimedia assets into posts which, in turn, makes it easy for a blogger to customize the post to his audience rather than regurgitate the same text-based release that everybody else is copying and pasting.

The survey covers a lot of other information, such as the degree to which bloggers are inclined to abide by embargo requests and the sources they use in order to find content about which to blog. Michael Netzley recorded a brief interview with Jeremy Woolf, Text 100’s global social media practice lead, for Monday’s FIR, and a longer FIR interview with Jeremy should be up in a day or two.

But the growing acceptance of and willingness to use social media releases should be heartening to the members of the social media release working group. Our next tasks include further promotion of the social media release; fleshing out the website that contains social media release news, information and resources; and getting to some kind of agreement among companies that distribute releases (both wire services and do-it-yourself sites) to adopt the tagging standard developed by the technical subcommittee and embraced by the group.

With evidence beginning to emerge that using social media releases pays off, I’m guessing interest in adopting them will also rise.

If you’ve distributed a social media release, I’d love to know what kind of results it produced.

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #461: June 29, 2009

2009-06-29T19:00:40+00:00

Content summary: Steve Crescenzo joins Shel as special guest co-host in Neville’s absence. The Mayo Clinic’s Lee Aase will fill in for Neville on Thursday. FIR Live from June 26 is up featuring a conversation about influencer outreach with special guest Gary Vaynerchuk, along with John Cass, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, and Kaitlyn Wilkins of OgilvyPR. Neville welcomes Steve and explains his absence. Follow-up to a conversation from episode #459 about the value and future of paid conferences, with comments from Robin Brown, Chris Thilk and Tony Molloy. Michael Netzley reports from Singapore. Media Monitoring Minute. Discussion topic: One social media battle won, but now how do we get people to do it right? News That Fits: the cost and payoff of investing in social media; how to get your company to pay you to blog. Lisener comments. Music from Uncle Seth.

About our guest co-host: Through his work as a consultant, writer and seminar leader, Steve Crescenzo has helped thousands of communicators improve both their print and electronic communication efforts. Recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts in employee communications, Crescenzo is the leader of three popular workshops: Strategic Employee Communication Vehicles, Integrating Print and Online Communication Vehicles, and The Master Class of Employee Communication. He has also taught seminars at IABC’s 2001 through 2008 International Conferences as well as at numerous IABC chapter and district events throughout America and Europe. He was the number one rated speaker of IABC’s International Conference in 2002 and 2008, and has been asked to speak in IABC’S “All Star Track” for the past four years. Steve also writes a regular column in IABC’s Communication World.

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For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for June 29, 2009: A 67-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California and Chicago, Illinois, USA.

FIR #461 show notes at The New PR Wiki

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So, until Thursday, July 2…

Cescenzo, Aase guest co-hosts on FIR this week

2009-06-28T14:01:42+00:00

With Neville unavailable for episodes 461 and 462 of The Hobson and Holtz Report (June 29 and July 2) we’re pleased to announce special guest co-hosts who will fill in for those shows.

Joining Shel on June 29 will be Steve Crescenzo, a well-known consultant, writer and speaker who specializes in employee communications. Steve’s blog, Corporate Hallucinations, is a great read with more than a few laugh-out-loud moments. He also writes a regular column for IABC’s Communication World magazine and contributes to the CW blog.

On July 2, Lee Aase sits in the co-host chair. Lee is director of syndication and social media for the legendary Mayo Clinic, one of the first hospitals to embrace social media. Lee is now a regular speaker and frequent interview subject as the media reports and others report on hospital adoption of social media. Lee is also the force behind the Social Media University Global (SMUG), a blog that offers courses on business use of social media.

Neville plans to have audio contributions for both shows, as well.

One role for print: making dull messages stand out

2009-06-27T20:11:33+00:00

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.

FIR Live #15: with Gary Vaynerchuk: June 26, 2009

2009-06-26T19:41:02+00:00

Content Summary: CIn today’s FIR Live, a panel discusses effective influencer outreach. The topic was kicked off by John Cass’s commentary on an email pitch sent out on behalf of online entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and the ensuing discussion that included considerable engagement from Gary. (The post attracted a separate set of comments from its cross-post on Social Media Today.)

Discussion participants were FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz. In addition, we were joined by the following guests:

Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur and host of Wine Library TV
John Cass, longtime blogger and current director of Marketing for ideaLaunch
Kaitlyn Wilkins, Vice President of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy PR, principal author of the agency’s blogger outreach code of ethics
Connie Bensen, whose employment with Techrigy, Inc allows herto help people focus on social media monitoring.
Connie Reece, Chief Community Officer for New Media Lab, a startup that offers curriculum-based learning experiences designed for business professionals new to social media

Callers to the show included Krishna De and Paull Young.

The transcript from the BlogTalk Radio chat room is available here.

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This FIR Live Call-In episode is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

How the approval process needs to change

2009-06-26T19:23:53+00:00

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.

Think tankers

2009-06-25T20:31:21+00:00

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.

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #460: June 25, 2009

2009-06-25T19:24:04+00:00

Content summary: Join us for FIR Live on Blogtalk Radio on June 26; sign up to the FIR mailing list; follow-up on Habitat UK and Twitter: blame the intern!; Dan York reports from Enterprise 2.0 in Boston with Eric Schwartzman and Christopher Penn; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits - Apple plus Steve Jobs’ health and a cult of secrecy, FTC becomes blogging’s Big Brother, research suggests email patterns provide early warning of organization crisis point, Washington Metro train crash exposes the sad state of emergency communications, King of Shaves asks customers for cash to bump up its marketing spend, how are Fortune 100 CEOs using social media?; news about next week’s shows; music from Sarah Fimm; and more.

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For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for June 22, 2009: A 66-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

FIR #460 show notes at The New PR Wiki

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To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday June 29…

TSA wastes no time responding on its blog to critical news story

2009-06-22T23:49:14+00:00

As a matter of habit, I check the websites and/or blogs of organizations who make the news to see how quickly, and how well, they respond. I’ve been doing this since at least 1996. I remember sitting in a hotel room in New York and checking the TWA website as soon as I heard that Flight 800 had gone down. (The site had been updated to provide information on the crash by the time I visited it.)

So when I saw a story on CNN in which a passenger accuses the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) of improper treatment—leading the American Civil Liberties Union to accuse the agency harrassing interrogation and unlawful detention—I hopped over to the TSA Blog (recently renamed “TSA Blog” from the former “Evolution of Security”). I saw the story on CNN’s website yesterday. The response was up today.

This is an agency that understands the importance of using its blog well. The response, written by Blogger Bob, explains where the TSA beleives it acted within its authority and where its agents went wrong. Bob also notes that the officers involved have already been disciplined for the inappropriate language they used when questioning to the passenger.

Agree or disagree with the TSA’s actions (the rules under which they operate seem pretty clear to me), from a communication standpoint, you just can’t argue with the agency’s understanding of social media as a channel for updating the public as well as engaging in conversation with travelers. I’m meeting Wednesday with another U.S. government agency that is reluctant to employ social media. This is an example I plan to show them.

I’ll be watching for comments to the post (there were none yet when I saw it), but I expect the conversation between the TSA’s bloggers and the public to be as open and candid as everything else they do on the blog.