Hoi Polloi

IABC Conference report: 'Straight talk' but no blogs for Motorola's Stu Reed.

Stu Reed, a Motorola VP and a passionate proponent of 'straight talk' checked most of the boxes in communication this morning in a very engaging presentation.

Reed, was feted by IABC as this year's Excel (stands for "Excellence in Communication Leadership") award winner, which is to say he's the cherry on top of communication this year at the international conference. The kind of boss everyone would want to have.

In his straight talk about straight talk, he admitted he started off getting a 'C' in communications when Motorola conducted an audit. His lessons learned are well worth recounting:

• The most important communications should address the 'What's in it for me' factor.
• Communication is pretty simple, but binary: Go/No go.
• Communication is a process, not a fad.
• Don't communicate only when it feels good.
• Be proactive, even when you have to do reactive communications.

But there was one thing that stuck out --remember I said he 'checked most of the boxes.' Stu is still not ready  to launch into blogs. He's holding on to the belief that he would rather make sure his team enhances existing communication processes before adding one more thing.

Controversial? Yes. At a later session this topic came up. You know, the 'what to do if your bosses don't get social media' question. To give Reed credit, he 'gets' the transparency, and the part about responding quickly and directly, and has done a terrific job sans social media. He was also largely talking of employee communications.

But as the critics would put it, engaging your different constituents, be they internal or external, is all about conversations not just communications.

Sidebar:
None of this is to imply that Motorola execs do not blog. Padmasree Warrior, Motorola's executive vice president and chief technology officer, has a wonderful blog called Bits At The Edge. She writes in a style that belies her IT side, with the kind of openness that we sometimes long for in corporate communications. In one post earlier this year titled Mea Culpa Warrior refers to a Dilbert strip about embarrassing blogs.:

I know why I feel blue. It is unadulterated guilt! My blog! I have shamelessly neglected it for almost a month.
Now God is messaging me through Dilbert...
Sigh.

Mea Culpa? Seems like they've got straight talk in their DNA, with or without blogs.

No wonder Stu Reed --and Motorola-- got an A today in New Orleans.

Timeshifting and the role of aggregators

An eMarketer report says that podcast listeners think that transferring podcasts to portable players is too complicated and time consuming. In 2006, there were 10 million podcast listeners. That will jump to 25 million next year. The report, based on surveys of people in ten US cities. Weekly listeners' growth is much slower, but steadily increases

This brings me to the point about why technology sometimes cannot keep up with changing lifestyle --in this case a practice we almost take for granted: time-shifting.

Having tried out many software applications, from Juice to iTunes, I know the frustration when downloads move like treacle, or iTunes just won't grab a feed you want. It often reminds me of the time we needed a user manual to operate another time-shifting device -the VCR.

iTunes is dead easy to use, but not every podcast I need is available through the interface. Direct downloads from a podcaster's site involves that extra step, and if they aren't using a good aggregator, the bandwidth may be terrible.

Which is where good aggregators come into play. Services such as LibSyn (stands for Liberated Syndication!) make it very easy, at a nominal fee.

Googled someone lately?

My post ("Googling as due diligence") made me wonder how often we communicators use Search as due diligence. Now you can tell us!

As in previous one-minute surveys, we'll report the results at ValleyPRBlog (Don't worry, you won't be asked for personal information!)

Take the quick survey here.

Marketing or PR: Which wants more control?

Do marketing and PR work in silos? Still? Whatever happened to our love affair with integrated marketing?

Jonah Bloom of Advertising Age has an interesting take on the convergence/divergence thing:

"Ad execs are also becoming more PR-like "listening to influential consumers before crafting messages and are trying to facilitate word-of-mouth programs -- two tactics some PR practitioners see as inherent to their discipline. "

At the same time,

"many companies' PR executives, who once massaged other people's messages and left most content creation to the marketing department, are now building and populating websites, social networks, message boards, blogs, vlogs and podcasts. They're no longer just intermediaries; today they're becoming media and message originators, too."

But --and there a huge but-- both don't share the same view about giving up control, even they have similar communication and marketing goals. Marketers are more likely to give up control than PR folk, he says.

Agree? Or violently disagree?

Googling as ‘due diligence.’ Ever done it?

The folks at Harvard Business Review have a case they want you to crack.

It’s called called "We Googled You" and is right up your street! It involves googling a potential employee as a background check, and coming up with search results that could cost the candidate the job.

I think it’s a good what-if scenario not just from an HR perspective, but about due diligence and reputation systems in the digital age. What we ‘know’ based on search results, may not often be the complete picture. Digital breadcrumbs that people leave behind may be skewed by the algorithm. Would you do business or not with an organization based on its reputation you find online?

We know that the blogosphere sometimes gets it wrong; the posts remain, even after the facts have been disproved.

Back to the case study. A fictitious Mimi Brewster, is googled after the interview, and her dossier turns up with something no candidate would present at an interview. Problem? Or reality in the digital age?

The case study is open to anyone, and closes tomorrow, June 15^th.

John McCain's 'Pacemaker' -- it's not what you think!

At the ValleyPRBlog, we've gained some valuable insights about keywords, tags and headlines for tracking, newsreaders, and search.

This story, in Fast Company caught my attention because the headline unwittingly combined two words that always signify one thing: age. But the Fast Talk story on "John McCain's Pacemaker" was actually about advertising --by Russ Scriefer, McCain's media director. He makes an interesting observation about using traditional and new media to tell an unfolding story:

Thirty-second ads are still going to be the way you're going to communicate your message with the most voters, faster and more efficiently. But other methods of communication are beginning to supplement television. Now you need to do television plus the Web, television plus bloggers, television plus social networking, so it all becomes part of a bigger piece.

This guy's deep into social media. He's talking of using unedited bloggers, and an integrated media to 'pace' the campaign. Now it gets me thinking. Did he, in fact, craft that headline?

What could Photosynth do for you?

Don't miss checking out Photosynth, an idea in Microsoft's Live Labs. You need to download a small app first to work with IE or Firefox.

It's hard to describe how the technology works. I enjoyed being able to fly through Trafalgar Square, in way that's actually smoother, and easier than Second Life. 

But it makes me wonder: If you could zoom in to a Coca-Cola logo on a T-shirt, in a vendor's display rack, in the vast pigeon-filled piazza of St. Mark's in Venice (you must sign into Photosynth for this), imagine what this could do elsewhere. Not just for brands (though brand managers would sure like that!) but for organizations trying to create experiences out of the collage of images that could be filed with details.

1. Obvious one: Tourism marketing for travel agents, countries, states and cities. Get people to submit holiday photos, and turn them into citizen photo-journalists.

2. Art galleries: Deploy street teams with digital cameras to cover a topic or art form and mash-up their work into composite experience.

3. Colleges: Stitch together thousands of images out there of campuses, schools, dorms, pubs and places of interest now in the hands of alumni. Create a multi-perspective virtual tour that belongs to them, literally.

4. Mega-events: Political conventions, the Olympics, Street marches and other crowd-magnets. Wouldn't it be a great way preserve a historical record right down to the wording on the buttons, street signs and posters? Boggles the mind to think what Woodstock would have looked like with this kind of coverage.

This is the outer edge of social media.

There's a similar use of 3D modeling and digital images in Google's StreetView, but it doesn't involve citizens' input. We don't know how Microsoft will do with Photosynth. But the concept is definitely exciting.

"Everything is Miscellaneous"

I just picked up "Everything is Miscellaneous" (David Weinberger) and an odd image popped into my mind: Jimmy Wales hanging out at the Library of Congress.

I had mentally dismissed this double spread ad for Conde Nast --or so I thought. Excuse my wanting to deconstruct the ad to make a point. The context and scale of the photograph adds to the incongruity of the founder of Wikipedia perched on a railing in one corner of the Library. Its magnificient cathedral-like arches, and everything else in balance create a great metaphor. You just know that this guy is here to quietly turn things on his head --in a good way, mind you.

I know why that image came to mind. The jacket cover of Miscellaneous has a blurb from Mr. Wales lovingly complaining:

"Just when I thought I understood the world, David Wenberger turns it upside down - and rightside up again."

Sure, it's one of those sweeping 'advance praise for' comments you've seen on many other jacket blurbs heaping praise on a new book about the digital economy.

But it's hard to exaggerate this book's analysis. Weinberger, who co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto, notes that the card catalog system gives us a 'narrow slit' to look through the world of books, but 'imperfect classification' in the digital world, is paradoxically richer. He's referring of course to tags and links that create this thing called 'social knowing' (the term 'social media' isn't in the index) by showing us connections, and putting bits of knowledge into context.

Which is exactly what the book does, drawing on centuries of historical precedents, to make that point of miscellany over and over again.

 

Communicators prefer MySpace over other social networks.

Curious about the results of the survey on Social Networks ?

Of the nine social networks, MySpace has the most users. 32.1% consider themselves 'Active Users.'
An equally high number, 25% are 'Occasional Users.'

MyRagan and FaceBook nearly tie for second place --12% and 12.5%, respectively.

But...

More respondents claim to be 'Occasional Users' of LinkedIn (25%) than any other by a large margin.
In the open ended question, two respondents named Plaxo, and Zaadz as networks they use. (Plaxo, incidentally, is not a social network, per se, but a way to manage an online contact database.)

What does this tell us? My interpretation of these results:

1. For sure, we are experiencing social network overload, and people are trying out many services, but eventually settle for one.
2. People seem comfortable being occasional users.
3. All these networks expecting us to make them our home page, or the first thing we check when we are online, are dreaming!
4. Communicators will abandon you if you don't add value, and offer the same old, same old.

Note: This was a survey posted on the Friday before the Labor Day weekend. Poor timing, I admit. But instead of wrapping it up in one week, as I did in previous surveys, I kept it open for two. We had much more respondents this time. Thanks for participating.

Social Media Survey - takes just a minute!

I've extended the deadline for the Social Media Survey about social media overload!

Being a short week, many people who could have provided valuable feedback just did not get to it, from what i hear.

Got a minute? Here's the link.