Teblog

Would you spam your followers?

Should I spam my contacts? I don't think so.

Why do I ask? Because, I received an email this morning from someone I once knew slightly asking me to advocate something his brother had done. In essence the email told me exactly how he'd like me to spam my followers. 

Here's his approach:

After an intro he says, "I'm writing to ask you very personally for your help ...".

I like the "very personally" since it's clearly not. It's a mass mailing.

He asked for 'likes' on three social networks, a Tweet, a Facebook mention and a blog post. He also asked for support on a couple of publicity sites and offered an opportunity for a minuscule and fleeting piece of self promotion.

Finally he describes the product in more detail and asks if I can help him find distributors.

Clang!!

That was the bin.

Am I wrong?

 

An evening with PR/Marketing Guru, Larry Weber

Back in May, I trotted off to meet with marketing/PR guru, Larry Weber and a bunch of other interesting people, including Jack Schofield (IT man at the Guardian for donkey's years and erstwhile competitor - we both edited PC magazines in the early eighties) and Bill Nichols an academic and marcomms/reputation consultant who, when Jack and I were competing, was Clive Sinclair's PR man. They were both on the speaker panel with Larry. The other notable people were in the lively audience.

The occasion was the UK launch of Larry's (then) most recent book: Everywhere. It's about social networking being at the heart of the future of business. He calls this 'anytime, anywhere' access the the fourth wave of computing. (I ought to know what the three earlier waves were, but I've forgotten. Maybe it was brains, internal networking and internet, or something.)

No surprises so far then. But I don't think Larry set out to surprise us particularly. More that he wants to share his familiarity with the subject matter in a non-frightening manner. After all, the people who really need his insights are those who are probably the most fearful of openness, transparency and genuine dialogue. You might think of them as the 'command and contol' brigade. While this has its place, it's probably not where the rubber of the corporation hits the road of the marketplace.

Sorry, I should be talking about Larry's evening. (And, if you're wondering why it's taken me so long, it's because I was suddenly pitchforked into a new company and I've been more than a tad busy. My conscience was pricked by a Facebook post about his recent presentation to the Public Relations Student Society of America. The headline of the post was "Social media’s impact bigger than television’s.")

At his book launch, he predicted that, by 2015, "you'll be hard pressed to find any newspapers or nightly news on TV." He says, "TV ads have got to die sometime." He may not always provide answers but he knows how to provoke fresh thinking. Let's hope the revenue replacement doesn't put the TV companies even deeper in hock to corporate sponsors.

With regard to the Fourth Generation thing, he told the story of how he sent off for brochures from all the prospective colleges for his daughter. She didn't look at one  of them. She'd already done her research online. Except she didn't refer to it as online. When Larry once said to her, "I'm going online", she replied "Oh Dad, we don't go online any more. We just are." Online, that is. And a lot of people reading this will know what she means. If you're not one of them, then it's likely that his book will interest you.

Another thing he talked about was Innocentive. Companies give it problems and money and it gets its community of 'solvers' to apply their brains. Larry gave examples of $100,000 here and $25,000 there. It's all online (of course). And the winning contributor exchanges their IP for the cash. That's a great commercial application of crowdsourcing. Related to this were his comments on how social networking allows for the intense, focused, sharing of knowledge. I think his book goes further and talks of micro-segmentation of the internet so that you can find a community and go deep into just about any subject that interests you.

He is very clear that successful companies (especially consumer-facing) will have to become radically transparent, be willing to share and also to stand for something that will resonate with customers and prospects. Core values that permeate the company's business. Larry doesn't claim it will be easy, but he sprinkles his conversation with stories old and new of how companies have turned on the proverbial dime. Dell, of course. BP to a certain extent. And so on.

I was quite taken with the idea that, "big sites will die under their own weight." He said this because he believes that all the power is now in the network. Not sure that a behemoth like IBM would totally agree with this sentiment, despite its strong advocacy of social networking values. With statements like this, the evangelist in Larry seems to pop out of the closet. (My views of evangelists are here.)

Let's turn to one of the other speakers, Bill Nichols. He scored a hole in one for me with his observation that "People respond to emotion and fairness."

I have the sense that the former has been faked and the latter missing for a long time.

If Larry and Bill are right, we would seem to be heading towards a better and much more harmonious world.

Let's hope so.

Eggs and baskets

Being away from here has given me a chance to focus intensely on launching a new magazine without too many distractions. We now have five issues under our belt and I have reaquainted myself with the rhythms of conventional publishing. I know where the peaks and troughs of effort lie and I can get back to a more normal and less distorted life in the troughs.

Creating, editing and writing for Blue & Green Tomorrow has been a lot of fun and a lot of hard work. And it couldn't have happened without Simon, Lori and Dominic (publisher, sub-editor and designer respectively) and, of course, our marvellous contributors. Other people take care of 'webifying' the magazine at blueandgreentomorrow.com. You can register (free) which gives you an account tab and access to digital copies of the magazine. Otherwise much of the content is publicly available under the various themed tabs.

Even through the mayhem of the launch, I've continued to do the occasional course on how to handle the media, often with my long-time partner in crime, Martin Banks. We used to call ourselves 'Press Here' but, when we both deviated out into analysis work, we sold the domain and renamed ourselves greybeards. One look at our photos will tell you why. I also run the odd writing skills workshop for business people.

And, now, here I am blogging again. Given the nature of the magazine, I suspect that I'll be blogging more about sustainability (could a word possibly sound more boring?) than about IT. But it's hard to keep me away from software. Talking of which, I now have an HTC Desire smartphone running Android, and jolly pleased I am too. That could be another running theme.

We'll see. But, as you can see from the title, I think that a deliberate spread of activities, providing I can do all of them well, will makes for a more balanced and fulfilling life than having all my eggs in one basket.

So, the last post turned out not to be The Last Post after all, just a pause while I gathered my wits.

See you again soon.

David

 

Managing Brand and Reputation in a Social Media World

Last week I co-presented a BrightTALK webinar on the impact of social media on branding and reputation for an audience of media and marketing professionals.

The lead presenter was Cathy Pittham, MD of the European arm of global PR company, the Racepoint Group. (Its chairman, Larry Weber, is something of a new media marketing guru and has been writing books on the subject since before most of us knew it was a subject.)

I went to Cathy because I felt she'd have far more practical advice to offer than I possibly could. After all, I was a bit of an outsider to marketing and PR - mainly an observer or a victim, depending on your point of view. So it ended up becoming 'her show' with me asking questions on behalf of the audience.

As we went through the preparation, it became clear to me that operating effectively in the social media world requires many of the hard-won skills from the traditional media world. It also needs a cultural shift by all participants towards openness, giving genuine value and two-way engagement.

Nothing new there, I hear you say. Which is true. Which is why the presentation focuses primarily on what good stuff and processes can be nicked or adapted from tradtional PR and Marketing activities.

As we discussed the powerful combination of traditional and social media techniques, I desperately wracked my brain for a suitable parallel. All I could think of was a nuclear chain reaction, which is triggered by combining two volumes of fissile material to make a single 'critical mass'.

Which is what led to me slipping this final image into the slide deck.

The webinar (BrightTALK calls it a webcast)  lasts a tad under 45 minutes, unless you skip from slide to slide to make it quicker (and jerkier).

The social media world changes all the time but we hope that this presentation will offer you a durable 'framework' for your own planning.

Interactive Infographic: How To Handle The Media

Since 1988, Martin Banks and I have been running media skills training courses. Early on, we introduced an 'architecture' for the process. We drew it on flipcharts for a few years then, in 2004, we formalised it and started giving it out as part of our wallet-sized plastic business card. The model acts as an 'aide memoire' for all who've attended our training.

A few weeks ago, I was rummaging (as you do) some infographics - pictures that speak well over a thousand words - and took a shine to the interactive variety, where the graphic responds to the user's actions.

I'd just been doing some training work with the Racepoint Group and, coincidentally, one of its US staff Kyle Austin wrote a blog post: Are Infographics the New Slide Shows?  Good point, I thought, having just taken someone through our 'architecture'.

So I set to work to convert our flat image into something a little more lively. It's aim is to refresh the memories of those who've attended our training and to give others an appreciation of how they might set about handling the media.

The first attempt was an animated .gif file with text boxes to expand on each element of the image. Horrible. Boring. Sequential. No user interaction. Didn't lend itself to the web. Etc.

I wanted an interactive infographic that would work in more or less any browser and not depend on the presence of JavaScript, Flash or any other kind of plug-in. Just HTML and CSS. (I'd done some simple stuff before, here and here, so I was optimistic that it could be done.)

The second attempt was a graphic that the user could mouse over, highlighting image elements and showing the relevant text in a nearby box. The size was determined by my computer screen, which was a bit stupid because many of the people I'd like to share it with might have a smaller screen - an iPad for example.

So I reworked it with the iPad in mind. The hover can be achieved with a finger, even on the smallest graphical element. And while I was resizing everything, I added drop shadows and rounded corners to the text boxes.

If you're interested, the end result is at How To Handle The Media

I hope you enjoy it.

PS If anyone wants the gory technical details of how to do this sort of thing, I'll pen another post. Just ask.

Media Skills 101 (reprise)

First of all, apologies for radio silence. I've been on holiday. Very nice it was too. We hired a motorhome and stayed at four sites in Dorset. We hired the highly specced and almost new vehicle from Ferndown-based Abacus which turned out to be a very professional company. Highly recommended if you fancy that sort of holiday.

Before I get stuck in to blogging again, I thought you might be interested in some posts I wrote over five years ago about handling the press. While a lot of the press appears somewhat emasculated these days and the new media folk are largely more kindly, the suggestions I made then are no less valid for shaping your outlook and approach to the media of any kind.

Why IT companies top Newsweek's green 500

Hats off to Newsweek for its green rankings of the 500 largest US corporations. And congratulations to Hewlett Packard for coming first.

Hang on... Hewlett Packard came out top? Surely a software company or some other organisation that is inherently more environmentally friendly should have topped the list? Yet four of the top five are computer companies. (The other was Johnson & Johnson.) Making computer equipment is known to be environmentally damaging. In fact, when Newsweek considered the environmental impact of the supply chain up to the point of delivery, it ranked these same four computer companies at 115th (IBM), 160th (Dell), 175th (HP) and 268th (Intel). Discrepancy or what?

The environmental assessments were done by a company called Trucost. Its methodology is widely regarded and is a heck of a lot cheaper than a company having to embark on a full lifecycle analysis (LCA) of its activities. Trucost maintains a research database of over 4500 companies which takes into account over 700 environmental impact measures. 

The results are not good showings at all for the IT companies but they are in line with what you might expect. However, their ratings rocketed because the Newsweek team decided to give 'green policies' equal weighting with 'environmental impact'. And it chucked in 'reputation' as well, for a further ten percent of the overall assessment.

The main elements of the green policies score were, 'climate change policies and performance, pollution policies and performance, product impacts, environmental stewardship and environmental management.' The reputation scores were derived from, 'an opinion survey of corporate social responsibility (CSR) professionals, academics and other environmental experts who subscribe to CorporateRegister.com and CEOs or high-ranking officials in all companies on the Newsweek 500 list.' Weightings were applied: 3x for CEOs, 2x for professionals and 1x for others.

You can see that the elements of the survey make sense individually and the outcomes can, no doubt, be argued mathematically. But the weighting of the scores, especially the importance given to the three major elements, has to be questioned.

Also, was it wise for the research to try and assess vastly different sectors against each other and come up with a common measure? If a company knows it is not damaging the environment too much, then why should it spend fortunes on PR and CSR to influence external perceptions and, hopefully, internal realities? At this point, one can almost feel sorry for Newsweek for having taken on such a challenge.

So is the report of any value to you? Well, yes. It does allow you to look at rankings by sector and this has the potential to be helpful, but only if you consider each contributing factor separately. You might be wondering (if you've read this far) how your potential suppliers stack up in environmental performance or in green policies. Whether you care about reputation as seen through the eyes of C-level executives of the target organisations and several thousand CSR professionals is another matter.

What you clearly don't want to do is take the overall results too seriously. Treat them as a guide. Perhaps think of them as a cake that contains all the right ingredients but which didn't quite make the grade because inappropriate measures were used.

And this doesn't just apply to the Newsweek story. If you are being told something which jars with your reality, see if you can dig around a bit for the underlying assumptions.

Don't put lipstick on the pig

Today's issue of PR influences covers 'greenwashing' - "the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service."

It's good to see professional PR folk in action. Part of their job is to make sure that companies don't get carried away with their rhetoric and make fools of themselves. Of course, there will always be poor PR folk who see their job as "putting lipstick on the pig". We have to take a certain amount of personal responsibility for filtering good PR from bad.

Once upon a time, it was easy to pull the wool over most people's eyes, by writing good press releases, advertisements and brochures. The public didn't have much of a voice - the letters page of the newspapers, the complaints desk of a company or the local advertising standards authority. In other words, except in newsworthy cases, not a lot would happen.

Now, with bloggers galore, some will always be expert enough to see through the greenwash and blow the whistle. And we all know how fast bad news travels through the blogosphere. And how mainstream media organisations quickly pick up juicy stories.

We hear about companies that claim to be carbon neutral which is wonderful, if true. But, if close examination were to reveal that one of the directors drives a gas guzzler or that the heat from the data centre is being vented to the atmosphere, then the carbon neutral claim falls apart and the company risks ridicule.

The best option is transparency. To show what steps are being taken to run a sustainable (financially and socially, as well as environmentally) business and not make any pretence that things are better than they are. Some IT companies - IBM, Sun, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Fujitsu Siemens spring to mind immediately - seem to be very forthright in their claims and their explanations.

They still fly people around when necessary, but they'll talk about how much travel has been cut. They still have to run high-powered data centres - even more so for those who offer hosted software services, but they'll talk about how much they've slashed their energy bills through consolidation, virtualisation and other measures.

Of course, they would all like to sell more equipment, software and services and they will dangle the cost and environmental savings that are possible. But they are also well aware that new equipment brings its own environmental costs, including the disposal of old equipment. Honest discussion around these issues will win vendors more customer loyalty than misleading claims based on dodgy premises.

Indeed, they may well find that their revenues rise for hosted services, consulting and software, even if an increasing awareness of sustainability among customers were to lead to a slowdown in hardware sales.

End of an era. Albeit a short one.

On March 27 last year, I welcomed Strumpette with the words "My God, if PR professional Strumpette's blog posts are as good as her 'About me', she's a must-read from now on."

Well, she blew hot and cold, like most of us. When she was 'outed' as Amanda Chapel, most of us thought that this was a made up persona, despite immediately receiving personal emails to try and convince us otherwise. I received twenty, which I will treasure.

Anyway, (s)he's had enough. Hanging up the stilettos and moving on. We'll miss you, whoever you are.

Tom Foremski over at Silicon Valley Watcher used her departure as an opportunity to explain what is wrong with PR. He sees it as Wily E Coyote hanging in thin air - an industry going nowhere. The comments are as interesting as the post itself.

Who writes Skype's Heartbeat blog

After a couple of days of mayhem at Skype, its 'Heartbeat' blog had this to say:

The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software.

Am I the only person who finds the second sentence to be utter tripe?

And, as for the third, isn't this a glorious way of saying 'it was a bug'?

UPDATE: Ah, I see the the Heartbeat author has now posted that it was, indeed, a bug. Hooray for plain speaking.

UPDATE: And I've just read this self-description of the blog author: "Yes, I’m a PR flack." It all makes sense now.