Teblog

Speaking in tongues

Saturday evening: To me, my son's new mother-in-law said, "Will you give a speech in Norway next week?"

Sunday: Wrote speech and wondered whether to give it in Norwegian language. Threw it into Translation Experts' Intertran language translator via Free Online Translators. Knew the output fell short of fluent.

Monday morning: IMs to anyone in my Skype contact list likely to know a native Norwegian. While doing this, got to the letter S in my contact list and realised that one of my contacts, Sigurd Rinde, is Norwegian. He was offline. I still pinged him. Also left message in a Facebook group for Norwegian language enthusiasts.

Almost immediately, David Terrar - one of my Skype pals - suggested Sig. I told him I was on the case.

Monday afternoon: Sig offered to look at the translation. I sent the English original too.

Seventeen minutes later, I had a Norwegian version in my hands.

Then Anne Christine Parborg from the Facebook group offered to help. I showed her Sig's version. She suggested two changes.

Meanwhile Sig's wife, Tittin, had come home and added a woman's touch, which made it even better.

Then I started trying to figure out how to pronounce it. After an hour of using an online pronunciation guide, I had figured out one and a half sentences. And, I suspect, they wouldn't have sounded anything like proper Norwegian.

So, once more, I threw myself on Sig's mercy and asked him to read it into a sound file. A few minutes later, the file arrived.

From first contact to listening to Sig's pronunciation fewer than four hours had elapsed, of which Sig or his wife must have been actively helping for around eighty minutes, on and off. How fortunate that they were in a position to do this. (On the quiet, I suspect they enjoyed it.)

Imagine how long this would have taken without social computing. Find someone. Hurl documents back and forth. Chat on phone and messaging. Make recording. It would have been days probably.

I must have listened to that recording at least forty times. All the time trying to write what he was saying as if it were English. A kind of bastardised phonetic language. It was imperfect, so I made side notes whenever only mimicking Sig would do.

The evening of the speech arrived and the Norwegians were all presenting theirs in English. Which was a very kind gesture towards my family and the one or two other English people there. When I announced I'd deliver mine in Norwegian, there was much laughter because they thought I was joking.

Thanks to Sig, his wife and Anne Christine, I got away with it.

Thank you so much guys and girls. You know I will repay you in whatever way I can, especially if you find yourselves in England. A lunch at the very least.

The curious thing about all this is that, the very next day, David Terrar was looking for help with a speech. I'd done one that overlapped his theme, and had taken a rather unusual approach to the slides. I was able to send him the original PowerPoint, including my speaker notes.

That took minutes and, hopefully, saved him hours.

So the wheel turns...

That's just one of the nice things about social computing.

Social Media Analysis

Nathan Gilliatt has written a 75-page guide to the companies who  monitor, measure and analyse social media for business worldwide. He claims it's the most complete guide available. If it's any good (and I suspect it is), it could save you a ton of leg-work. The pdf download covers 31 providers in nine countries.

Nathan is a member of the Social Media Today blogging group (I used to be a member until I realised it was defining me too narrowly) which is why I'm prepared to pass this information on.

If you don't like it, you can always ask for a refund on the $500 price.

PowerPointless

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to prepare a PowerPoint presentation on a fearsomely complicated subject. Words and bullet points wouldn't do justice to the topic, so I decided on a sequence of captioned images.

Apart from the presentation, the slides were required for publication. I sent them off and warned the organiser that he might be somewhat shocked by my approach. He decided it would not be appropriate for the proceedings, not least because it would diminish the shock factor, when I delivered the presentation.

This made me wonder whether PowerPoint presentations have two conflicting purposes. One for posterity and the other for the gig itself. These are in conflict. If you try and combine them, you doom your audience to the well-known 'death by PowerPoint'.

Blow me down if a story didn't appear in some of today's newspapers which explains the phenomenon. The Daily Mail and The Telegraph (at least) carry quotes from University of New South Wales' Emeritus Professor John Sweller. This is the man who developed the Cognitive Load Theory in the 1980's. Crudeley stated, he advises us that the brain cannot process textual and verbal inputs concurrently.

So now you know.

(By the way, you might be interested to know that this story started its journey to the mainstream media on 23rd March, but I bet you the mainstream media picked it up secondhand from blogs or from Guy Kewney's piece in The Register.)

Was Wired WaggEd?

Once upon a time a PR firm accidentally sent a British journalist the profile it held on him. It started "This guy's a lush." Oh dear.

Well it's happened again, more or less. This time it's Wired contributing editor Fred Vogelstein who has been accidentally (or maybe not!) sent briefing notes from Waggener Edstrom prior to interviews with Microsoft executives.

Although it contains a short briefing on the journalist, it is mostly a backgrounder and 'game plan' for the Microsoft executives for a feature on its "video blogging initiative, Channel 9, and its overall campaign to embrace corporate transparency". From this perspective, it's an excellent insight to how thoroughly Microsoft is briefed for interviews with influential publications.

If you've ever wondered about how to brief and steer your executives, it's worth a read. Scale your approach to the importance of the publication otherwise you'll end up paying PRs a fortune in bloated briefings.

I can't help wondering whether Waggener Edstrom deliberately copied the information to the journalist. He and the PR know the game. Both know that preparation on both sides is key. So why not be transparent and pretend to reveal all? Then, with the journalist suitably off guard, send a second, confidential briefing to the executives that takes them deeper into the journalist's psyche and the interview strategy.

The journalist would have a great resource to get him up to speed in the areas that Microsoft wants to talk about. Result: a fast start and an implied boundary to the conversation.

But, regardless of whether the leak was deliberate or accidental, any self-respecting journalist would still find ways to throws interviewees on the back foot and not let it change their approach in the slightest.

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A PDF of the memo

Waggener Edstrom president Frank Shaw comments on the fuss.

Fred Vogelstein blogs his perspective.

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How long should a blog post be?

Not a new subject in the blogosphere, but it was triggered by two posts today: one was almost 3,000 words and the other 4,000. Each ended with 'to be continued' or similar. Did I read every word? No. After the first few hundred words, my interest in the topic turned into curiosity about why the posts were that long.

Neither was broken up with alleviating cross-heads, bullets, quotes or illustrations. Solid slabs of text - one paragraph alone was three hundred words - are very hard on the reader. This is even more true when being read in an aggregator where other items are clamouring for attention.

I wondered if anyone had produced any statistics which revealed a relationship between blog length and attention span. Clearly, one's interest in a topic would play a part, but there ought to be some general relationship. So off I went in search of some answers. Apart from the odd mention of average attention spans (meaningless really), all I could find was stuff on blog lengths. This is what I learned:

Problogger suggests 250 to 1000 words

Big Blue Wave sugggests 10 to 250, but not more than 500 words

BLOGGING::BUSINESS suggests 300-400 words usually, with the odd short or long one thrown in

ChristianBlog.com insists on a 150-word minimum and 20,000 characters maximum (that's nearly 4,000 words)

A number of bloggers say they "write until it's finished", which suggests a stream of consciousness approach. This also suggests a lack of respect for the reader's time.

Some say either post long and infrequently or short and frequently. (Maybe break long ones into short ones, thus increasing both frequency and readability?)

Others say, "you can always stop reading a long post" which is a bit sad for the author - being uplifted by the hits but not realising that no-one gets to the punchline.

May I be so bold as to suggest to those who insist on long posts that they review the structure and stick in some bold cross-heads which would act as sign-posting, break the monotony and give people encouragement to keep reading?

Antony Brewerton: On branding the library

Found myself speaking at Re-imagining the Library the other day, sponsored by CILIP and Talis. The audience was a mix of public, corporate and academic librarians and the speakers were charged with sparking off some fresh thinking. None did this better than Antony Brewerton, head of academic support at the University of Warwick. Previously, he was at Oxford Brookes University and before that at the University of Reading.

Anyway, his presentation was excellent. The others I saw (I had to nip out, unexpectedly, for a couple of hours to take a briefing for some urgent writing work) were very good but if there was a prize for best presentation he'd have won it. He was intelligent, articulate and amusing on the tough subject, for librarians, of branding.

To give a flavour of the man, he decided to take the theme of 'inspiration'. He looked at pennies dropping, Rodin's Thinker, a light bulb (incandescent, naughty boy), but while good, he felt there was something better. Then he thought of Newton and the famous apple.

Well, and this shows the calibre of the man, Antony couldn't have any old apple, it had to be special.

He spent hours in greengrocery shops studying the goods. Eventually, he found the perfect apple. Then he needed the right light for the photography. He found it outside on a bright day. But then the pesky apple, while it had all the right colours, didn't reflect the light properly. So he took it indoors and gave it the Johnson's Wax treatment. Back outside, he placed it on a large sheet of white card and finally got his shot.

Sadly, I can only find a monochrome picture but, as soon as I find a colour one, I'll put it here.

You can already see what a fine apple it is and how magnificently it's been polished.

And the caption was:

Brilliant. So simple. Addresses the undergraduates' second most important issue (after beer). Or do I mean third?

He cited Theodore Levitt who said, "Purchasing agents don't buy 1/4 inch drills; they buy 1/4 inch holes."

So true. And so easy to forget.

Thanks Antony.

Don't be shy, promote yourself

I have a friend who is darned smart and darned modest. He wonders why people don't realise how good he is and rush to engage him. After all, he writes the odd blog and fires off the odd email to people who he finds interesting and who, therefore, should be interested in his work.

And they are. They see him as bright, and are happy to take his feedback, probably thinking they're dealing with an enthusiastic amateur. Or, God forbid, a tech groupie. The result is that his goodwill is frequently abused. People take a lot from him but give little in return. Yet he has valuable skills to offer and certainly plenty of enthusiasm.

I tell him he should push himself a bit more. When people ask him about himself, forget the self-effacing modesty and articulate clearly and simply what parts of his world are likely to be of interest to the listener.

He finds this incredibly difficult. It's probably a culture thing as much as anything. Over this side of the pond, we're not taught to be assertive, even in a pleasant way. We get hot under the collar and tongue-tied and, in the case of many techies, embarrassingly modest. "I do a bit of blogging and software testing" might mean, "I'm an A-list blogger and I am a freelance software evaluator for major research organisations." You'd never know it.

We give no glimpse of why someone should be interested.

After my friend told me of another lost opportunity, I suggested he sit down quietly and work out what value he can offer other people, then try and articulate that into a workable sentence. It doesn't need to be a life story, just enough to catch the interest of the other person.

Then, when he meets people in future, he can ask them about themselves. (This is always a good conversation starter, even if they kick off by asking about you. I've found you can ignore that, and they go spouting off about themselves. Eventually they remember their manners and say, "but you didn't answer my question.") By then he has gained the knowledge he needs to adjust his own opener to suit the listener.

He's not comfortable with any of the above. Ideally, he wants to be retained for his skills but doesn't want to take this next step. In frustration, I cobbled together a picture and said, "if you were at a party, which person would you prefer to speak to? You're like the one on the left."

Here's an adaptation of the picture but, as you will realise, I've changed the sex to protect the innocent:

At a party, say, which one would you prefer to talk to?

It seemed to ram home the point. My friend is going to take stock. Hooray.

2006 and how to pitch to venture capitalists

Phew! What a year 2006 was. Lots of new opportunities and a summer spent sorting the wheat from the chaff. The chaff turned out to be people asking me to help them set up social computing stuff inside or at the edge of their organisations. With so many experts around, just understanding and using this stuff isn't good enough. Apart from facilitating the odd round table and presenting at conferences, I reverted to type and concentrated on writing and running communication skills workshops.

I've been helping senior people in IT and non-IT companies to handle the media, people in IT to make effective contact with the board, and  IT startups to secure the interest of venture capitalists. Which brings me to the main point of this post...

...Guy Kawasaki was the original Mac evangelist who now adds "entrepreneur, investment banker, and venture capitalist" to his credentials. He's just posted something Bill Reichert, the MD of their venture capital fund, wrote about dealing with venture capitalists. It's an interesting read which focuses primarily on getting the elements of the story right. And it does the job in about 3,500 words.

Here's a tiny extract:

...you will be engaging them in your story—instead of letting them play with their Blackberries under the table

Quite. Instead of getting shirty, do something about it.

BlogBridge, Feeds43, CleverClogs and more

The details are fuzzy now, but something I wrote moved Marjolein Hoekstra to contact me. She is based in the Netherlands, speaks perfect English, is very smart - an expert on RSS among other things - and calls her blog CleverClogs. We have exchanged a lot of words on IM and email.

She encouraged me to take a look at BlogBridge. It's good. It's an aggregator where the software sits in your machine (Mac, Windows, Linux). It is still run as a service but you can synchronise and work offline. This means that you can run the program on your desktop and laptop and never miss a beat. After years of using NewsGator, I found myself very quickly turning to BlogBridge as my first port of call.

It has lots of goodies built into it, including the ability to build and share reading lists. I'm still experimenting but I've started sharing. Take a look at the Writing topic in the What I do Grazr sidebar of this blog. You'll find an OPML include there (blue icon). I admit it's messy but I have gathered together all my columns, blogs and more recent features for Information World Review in one place.

And this is despite 33 of them not having their own RSS feed. For that I want to welcome back Feed43. They were off-air when I looked at the weekend and I was worried that they'd died before I'd made proper use of the service. Feed43 will scrape a web page according to your instructions and turn it into a named RSS feed. [I'm going to have to find another scraper. Today I'm not able to see these feeds from  Feed43 [Grovel time: Feed43 was fine, it was my understanding of BlogBridge that wasn't] Then you can graze it, along with all the other things that interest you.

As I say, mine is messy. The blog feeds are fine - they work automatically, courtesy of VNU's use of TypePad. BlogBridge's SmartFeed enabled me to filter out the columns I wrote from the IWR main site's RSS feed. [Darn it: Marjolein has just reminded me that the SmartFeeds are an internal thing only - I'm going to have to find another way to get published columns into the outside world.] The older columns involved a bit more hard work. I pasted them all together into a long web page and gave Feeds43 the rules for isolating each column within the feed.

The point is that, even at this embryonic stage in my learning, I was able to put together a bunch of disparate information sources - explicit feeds, filtered feeds and home-made feeds in a few hours. And, yes, it was egocentric of me, but I thought I'd start with material I could readily lay my hands on and learn with.

The next step is to create a number of feed groups (they're called Guides in BlogBridge) and get subscriptions to key sources of information in subject areas that interest me. I'm sure Marjolein will be following with interest and intervening when she sees me veering off course.

Once I have the groups together, I'll be able to share them with anyone else who's interested. And that's why I mention it here. It's all part of collaboration and cooperation. And this post is about communicating what's involved.

(It's also an excuse for me to wear my propellor hat for a few hours.)

It's also an excuse to say a public "Thank You" to Marjolein. Thank you for your help and support. Hugely appreciated.

Communicating IT to the board with the NCC

I didn't realise that the NCC was promoting some work we (Martin Banks and I) are doing in December. Not online, anyway. We approved the brochure a while back. The NCC logo in the left sidebar of this blog links to Communicating IT to the Board.

For 18 years Martin and I (together and separately) have been helping mainly blue chip IT companies handle the press. Occasionally this work has taken us into other areas and other industries. What we divined a long time ago is that a systematic approach to handling the press actually stands you in good stead with other interested (or disinterested) parties: venture capitalists, the board, analysts and even work colleagues.

It's a way to hook interest, tell your story, engage in meaningful dialogue and all come away better off as a result of the encounter.