Monday, May 12, 2008

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #344: May 12, 2008

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Content summary: UserVoice listener feedback put into action; FIR Live on BlogTalk Radio May 24; FIR Interview with Craig Silverman May 16; upcoming FIR Speakers & Speeches podcast of Neville’s PRII Dublin presentation; OTRO interview with Josh Bernoff available; Shel’s being interviewed on Podcast Junction; discussion: PR spam victims bite back; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; the evolution of the press release according to Brian Solis; ‘Nuts About SouthWest’ relaunches; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on the Java Jive Challenge taking place in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand; listeners’ comments discussion; music by David Steele; and more.

Listen to FIR now:

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• Download the MP3 file (28.4Mb, 62:02)
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• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for May 12, 2008: A 62-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, 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 #344 show notes at The New PR Wiki

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, 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; or 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.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

So, until Thursday May 15…

Thursday, May 08, 2008

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #343: May 8, 2008

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Content summary: Dan York reports; One-Minute News: social networking studies, Encyclopaedia Britannica Webshare, Twitterfone, reading on the Web, banks on Twitter; David Phillips reports; listener comments; music from No-Fi Soul Rebellion; and more..

[Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.]

Show notes for May 8, 2008

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 59-minute podcast recorded live from Chicago, Illinois, USA, and almost live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England..

Download the file here (MP3, 23.7.2MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod, subscribe with iTunes; good podcatchers include Juice and DopplerRadio, and RSS aggregators that support podcasts such as FeedDemon.)

Listen to this podcast now:

In This Edition:

• #343 show notes at The New PR Wiki

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 home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, 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; or 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.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

So, until Monday, May 12…

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Ragan spotlights Britannica WebShare

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Ragan Communications—one of my clients—has produced a video of an interview with Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, another one of my clients. I love it when synergies like this happen. How often can you hype two clients in one post?

Ragan also has a write-up on WebShare, Britannica’s initiative to provide bloggers with access to Britannica content. Staff writer Melissa Underwood wonders about the ethics of offering free accounts to bloggers, an issue I haven’t seen surfaced anywhere else. No comments so far, but it’ll be interesting to see what people have to say.

Hospital attacts teens with MySpace page

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When reading the Wall Street Journal article about Ernst & Young’s Facebook-centric recruiting effort, I was struck by the reference to reaching your audience in “their lair.” It’s an important point. People are reallocating the time they spend online to venues where they can interact with other people, whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, whatever. The time they spend in these places is time they won’t spend on your corporate website.

It also points to the importance of identifying the right lair when trying to engage in conversation with members of the public you’re trying to reach. That’s the approach Parkland Health & Hospital System, a Dallas-based healthcare organization, took in reaching out to local teens. Teens, the communicators at Parkland reasoned, are mostly on MySpace, so that’s where a profile was created.

Charise Thomason, who works in Parkland’s Corporate Communications department, sent me an email outlining the effort after reading some of my stuff on Ragan Communications’ website. She pointed out that social media is new to Parkland, but that the MySpace page has worked out well as a means of addressing sex, reproduction, and general health topics.

On the page, there is a question and answer blog where doctors at Parkland answer any and all questions visitors have. This interactive tool has already helped several teens find their way to Parkland’s family planning clinics. Several people have also inquired about working at Parkland.

Social media may be new to Parkland, but they clearly understand the need to use it for conversation instead of broadcast. While public education is one of the hospital’s goals, the family planning department is tapping into the conversation ethos as a means of providing that education. The fact that doctors are taking the time to respond to queries can only lead to word-of-mouth among teens who spread the word that doctors are answering sensitive questions with candid answers.

So far, the page has 227 friends. Other than the doctors’ time to field questions, it’s a low-cost initiative that targets the right people in their lair.

ThoughtFarmer: A lesson in excellent blogger outreach

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Just today, I’ve received half a dozen pitches by email. Some are nothing more than press releases without even a passing effort at personalizing the pitch. Others make nothing more than a passing effort. So it’s a welcome relief—not to mention an entertaining and engaging experience—to get a pitch that is personal, creative, and attention-grabbing.

The pitch began with a cryptic email from Darren Barefoot, who asked for my mailing address because he had something to send me. (It helps, when making this kind of request, to already know the person to whom you’re reaching out, which speaks to the importance of having relationships vs. blasting out material to bloggers who have never heard of you.)

A week or so later, a package arrived at my house. It contained what you see in the image below:

• A letter welcoming me as a new employee of a ficititous company called Tubetastic Inc. (slogan: “We make tubes. A whole series of them.” This pitch was going to people who would appreciate the dig at U.S. Sen. Ted Stephens and his famous speech supporting an end to net neutrality in which he described the Internet as “a series of tubes.")
• An org chart showing exactly where I’m situated in the new company (I’m the Tubular Comptroller, part of the Operations department, reporting up through ZDNet’s Dan Farber, Tubetastic’s Director of Tube Distribution.) The org chart also shows me who else has received the pitch.
• A name badge complete with my photo, copied off my website.

There’s no hint in the welcome letter of the pitch behind the package. Instead, Darren (who signs the letter as an HR rep) informs me I’ll be featured in an upcoming edition of the company newsletter, then invites me to learn more about the company by logging into the company’s intranet. The letter includes a username and password. Who wouldn’t log on?

What I found was Tubetastic’s intranet fully loaded with Enterprise Web 2.0 features: Twitter feeds, blog posts, a presence status (like Facebook’s), a newsfeed that updates me on what other employees have been doing (also like Facebook’s), and my profile. This is where the draft of my “interview”—set to appear in the company newsletter—is waiting for my comments as well as an answer to an additional question. The profile also includes links to the latest articles from my real blog along with the ability to edit my profile, which already contains all the information a typical employee directory would offer (title, reporting relationship, mailing address, phone number, email address, etc.).

The top of the home page features a link that will explain everything. This is the pitch: The intranet was created using a tool called ThoughtFarmer. I followed a link to a ThoughtFarmer page that includes YouTube videos, screenshots, and other resources that go into more detail on this “ultimate intranet.” The elevator pitch tops the page:

ThoughtFarmer is the ultimate intranet. Forget the impossibly complex, seldom-used corporate intranets of days gone by. ThoughtFarmer is a simple, social way for employees to collaborate, share ideas and find information.

What’s special about ThoughtFarmer? It combines the best of wikis and social networking. It’s an intranet for intranet-haters. Plus, it sits behind the firewall, just where your IT manager wants it.

At this point, I was spending a fair amount of time noodling around both the faux Tubetastic intranet and the ThoughtFarmer site. I must confess, I was pretty impressed with ThoughtFarmer, which includes a slew of features ranging from single-signon and polls to inline tagging and image galleries.

What I didn’t see is any reference to the kinds of resources that reside on the old intranets that are still important: benefits enrollment, work-related online applications, database access, requisition forms, new-hire recruitment tracking, payroll stubs and the like. Most employees use intranets to complete tasks, so these are important. My guess is that you would continue to host these resources right where they are and link to them from tabs you’d create, such as “Human Resources” and “Work Tools.” Maybe someone from ThoughtFarmer will confirm that in a comment here.

But the point is that I spent time with this product site—and wrote about it—because the pitch was compelling. If I had received yet another press release introducing ThoughtFarmer, it would have gone where all the other press releases I receive go—into my email trash. So, what did Darren and the ThoughtFarmer marketing team do to stand out?

• They made the pitch personal. They made it clear they knew who I was and that I wrote about intranets with some regularity.
• They piqued my interest by asking for my mailing address without giving me a hint about what I’d receive. I only accepted this offer because I knew Darren.
• They sent the pitch to me in the regular mail in a package that cried out to be opened.
• They spent time and effort to create something different. While mock intranets have been around for more than a decade, this is the first one I’ve seen that listed me as an employee.
• They made the pitch interactive. I really can modify my profile and get engaged with the intranet at a number of levels.
• They actually had a compelling product to show off.
• The personalized profile, the name badge, and the other personalized elements are cool, but none of it feels even remotely close to a bribe.

Now that’s blogger relations.

FIR Interview: Jon Iwata, IBM - May 5, 2008

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A recent white paper published by the Arthur W Page Society examines the evolving role of the senior communications executive in 21st century business.

The Authentic Enterprise: Relationships, Values and The Evolution of Corporate Communications (PDF) considers the rapidly-changing context for global business and society and the ability of organizations to manage successfully their relationships with customers, investors, partners, employees and other key audiences and stakeholders.

The report also includes the results of a survey the society conducted among the CEOs of 31 U.S. and international companies that have more than $2 billion in revenues, on those CEOs’ perceptions of how their own jobs are being reshaped.

In this FIR Interview, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz joined in conversation with Jon Iwata, Senior Vice President Communications, IBM Corporation, and Chair of the Authentic Enterprise task force for Page, about the key findings in the white paper including the range of strategic business options for CEOs and communicators; the role of Page Turner, the society’s new blog designed to enable ongoing conversation and dialogue relating to the white paper; and changes in IBM Corporation that led to Jon’s new responsibility as head of an integrated global marketing and communications organization, announced to IBM employees on May 5.

About our Conversation Partner

Jon Iwata is responsible for worldwide communications for IBM. In May 2008 IBM announced the integration of its global marketing and communications organizations. Jon will become senior vice president, marketing and communications, effective July 1, 2008.

IBM communications manages the company’s relationships with the media, industry analysts and employees. It is responsible for corporate brand strategy and design, and the company’s global intranet, which serves 380,000 employees. The function coordinates IBM’s corporate affairs initiatives and plays a leading role in instilling IBM Values into the company’s practices and culture.

Jon is a member of the IBM Strategy Team, the IBM Performance Team, and the company’s Intellectual Property Policy and Open Standards Advisory Council. He reports to IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano.

He joined the communications function of IBM in 1984 at the company’s Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley. In 1989, he came to IBM corporate headquarters in Armonk, New York, and held a variety of communications positions, including providing support for the president of the company. He was appointed vice president of corporate communications in 1995 and assumed his current responsibilities as senior vice president, communications, on January 1, 2002. He was named chairman of the IBM Global Marketing Board in April 2008.

Jon is a co-inventor of a U.S. patent for advanced semiconductor lithography technology.

From 2006-2007, he served as chairman of The Seminar, a professional group consisting of chief communications officers of major corporations and institutions. He is a trustee of the Arthur W. Page Society.

Jon holds a B.A. from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, San Jose State University.

Download the 44:16 conversation here (MP3, 17.7MB), or subscribe to the Interviews RSS feed to get it and future interviews automatically. For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as the free Juice, DopplerRadio or 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 interviews, 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; or 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.

This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Monday, May 05, 2008

Cluetrain up for discussion on next live FIR call-in episode, Saturday, May 24

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John Cass started a meme back in February when he asked several bloggers to share their thoughts on five questions related to “The Cluetrain Manifesto.” Bloggers inlcuding Phil Gomes, Richard Binhammer, Jason Falls and Valeria Maltoni, among others, have shared their answers. We’ll run down the questions and some answers, offer our own thoughts, and hear what you think when we discuss John’s meme on our next live call-in episode, set for Saturday, May 24. The show will take place over the course of an hour beginning at 10 a.m. PDT, 1 p.m. EDT, and 6 p.m. BST. You can listen by visiting FIR’s BlogTalk Radio page or by calling 347-324-3723, which is also the number to call if you want to participate. (Incidentally, John wrotea follow-up post that covered some of the responses to his initial post.)