Flack's Revenge

Enterprise 2.0 and ROI

The Presto Vivace blog called out the 7/27 Information Week article Business Value Of Web 2.0 Tools Hard To Measure yesterday.   The post and article cited a Forrester Group survey of enterprise IT managers that showed lack of hard ROI for Web 2.0 technologies.

I expand a bit here on my comment on the Presto Vivace blog.

I am not surprised by the study. First off, Web 2.0 itself is an amorphous concept - many could and do debate what it is and which technologies it encompasses. Second, it is just technology while it is the application of technology that is important and can lead to quantifiable benefits. I bet if they were to look into specific areas where Web 2.o technologies are well-integrated into applications that support lines of business, they would see a return. Finally, it is true that many of the benefits that Web 2.0 delivers - improved collaboration, organization and discoverability of info - are soft and hard to measure.

This reminded me of my days selling Lotus Notes groupware solutions in the 90's, and sales force automation systems before that.  Although most of the benefits were considered to be soft, many studies documented improvements and ROI over the long term for organizations that did better jobs of implementing these systems, and managing knowledge and info.

When it comes to blogging, it would seem on the face that it is a big time sink and thus a productivity drain, at least for the short term.  Looking outside the sphere of IT and technology projects, there are some hard returns that come with communicating more effectively and openly as some forward looking executives and organizations are starting to do using blogging and related technologies.  See my post From Madmen to PR's Holy Grail, and of course Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's popular book Naked Conversations.

(I am of course not saying that blogging in and of itself is a panacea or recipe for effective PR, just that it is increasingly a tool that can be part of the communications mix).

Also, I touched upon some related areas in my January post Google and Web 2.0 Productivity Dividends.

PR, Politics of RSS, Unintended Consequences

Continuing on yesterday's topic of RSS, I am now starting to understand the importance of RSS standards and appreciating the related politics.  There appears to be lots of teeth gnashing and back and forth about these topics.

Here is where it gets interesting from a PR standpoint.  It shows why us PR folk should stay attuned to some of these issues which at first might appear to be just tech talk and religion.

Scripting News blogged today about Sun's move to release financial results first via RSS:

Mike Dillion is Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for Sun Microsystems. On his blog he says "We're trying something different..."

He says: "On Monday, we will release our financial information first to the public via our website, RSS feeds and 8-K filing. Then, about 10 minutes later, we will release the information to the traditional private agencies and their paid subscribers.

This alone was not that surprising - I had blogged about Sun's intention to do this after the NY Times reported this back in November 2006 (What Next, a MySpace Profile?).  Here's an excerpt from the NY Times What's Online column:

Jonathan Schwartz, the chief executive of  Sun Microsystems, has called for the S.E.C. to accept the use of the Web to disclose significant financial information to shareholders under Regulation FD (for “fair disclosure”). Complaining that his lawyers kept warning him off discussing various company-related issues on his blog, he decried Regulation FD’s insistence that companies use “anachronistic” methods like conference calls and news releases to disclose financial information (blogs.sun.com/jonathan).

Then, I caught Sam Ruby's post from yesterday, First Impressions, on the Intertwingly blog (this goes to the "unintended consequences" part of my post title).  Here's an excerpt:

"Jonathan Schwartz: to get the latest updates directly from Sun, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feeds.

You know, people use the term RSS like Kleenex.  As long as Sun isn’t using RSS 2.0 to disclose financial results, it will probably be OK.  Let’s take a look at the first feed.

Oops.

Oh, well, it probably is still OK.  If RSS 2.0 is used correctly, and Sun is a technology company after all, it will probably be OK.  Probably.  Let’s take a closer look at that first feed.

This feed does not validate.  Eek!

... OK, so in English, what’s the problem here?  Well items are intended to be identified by globally unique identifiers...  It is not good if you are trying to convince the SEC that syndication is a reliable mechanism for distributing financial results."

Oh well, as they say, "no good deed goes unpunished."  Releasing financial information via blogs and RSS might seem like another chink in the armor of the venerable and dated press release and associated news release wire services.  Yet standards and details are important and there's still lots of work to do to perfect PR 3.0.

RSS Blues

My News Radar is picking up lots of chatter about RSS over the past few days.  Lots of this relates to RSS standards, the politics of RSS and the recent acquisition of FeedBurner by Google.

(It figures, just as I get off the dime and decide to do a better job of monitoring my blog's metrics, including tracking feed stats via FeedBurner, Google goes ahead and acquires the company.)

Oh well, we'll see how that goes.  I am not sure if the pessimism exhibited in many of the posts in my freshly updated news radar (see left column) is warranted.

On the other hand, is there another game in town besides FeedBurner?  It seems like a shrewd acquisition on Google's part.  Hope they don't tinker with it too much (read: muck it up).

 

From Madmen to PR's Holy Grail

All the hoopla about Madmen, AMC's new show that covers the men of advertising circa the late 50's, reminded me that there is no recognized culture of PR akin to the culture of advertising.

Dating back to the days of the Mary Tyler Moore show - her husband on show, Rob Petrie, was an ad man - the public has held a fascination with the people who create advertising, despite the ambivalent feelings people generally have about ads.

Ad men were romanticized back then.  Although the image has been updated, and is certainly less male dominated, it is still seen to be a glamorous field.

And the image people have of the PR field is.... ???

Then, I reminded myself that PR as a profession is on the upswing (please see my March post on the Fusion Forum: PR Props).

I was also pleased to see good PR for PR in the Business Week article: The Corporate Image: What Price Reputation?.  It posited the startling thesis that a company's reputation can affect its stock price.  Not a revelation in and of itself, but upon reading further it really did get interesting.  It reported on the growing trend of turning reputation management into a science, and cited research isolating and identifying the specific premium (or drag) that a company's reputation can add to (or subtract from) its stock price.

The article cited work that research firms like Delahaye (you will recall I interviewed author and Delahaye - now Cision - Sr. VP Mark Weiner on Fusion Forum) are doing to research image and steer clients to the most effective messages.

Here's an interesting quote from the article:

"There are plenty of data measuring the visibility and credibility of a company," says Low. "But there have been no data showing how communications adds value to a company." Says corporate communications professor Paul A. Argenti of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, also a CCW partner: "If we can get this right, we have found the holy grail of communications."

The reporter concludes:

While these experiments are intriguing, the real test of faith in the new science of spin will come when somebody risks serious money on it. Suppose a hedge fund really does unravel the secret that can boost a company's value simply by turning around its reputation—and uses that information to buy and reshape that company's image?

Heady stuff indeed!  OK, so there' not cult of PR.  But I am resting easier knowing there may be a hedge fund pot at the end of the rainbow.

 

Avoiding Tech PR Writing Pitfalls

I just thought I would call attention to my post on the Fusion Forum blog today which asks and answers the question: Does tech jargon have its place in PR writing?

It cites a study referenced on Cincom Expert Access about the frequency of tired tech terms that add no meaning to press releases.   Some of the winners, or rather losers, were:

"next generation," with 9,895 uses. There were over 5,000 uses of  "flexible," "robust,” "world class," "scalable," and "easy to use." Other notably overused phrases with between 2,000 and 5,000 uses included "cutting edge," "mission critical," "market leading," "industry standard," "turnkey," and "groundbreaking." Oh and don't forget "interoperable," "best of breed," and "user friendly," each with over 1,000 uses in news releases.

I expand on his analysis and offer tips on how to write about technology, and the proper use and place for jargon.  You can read more about this here.

Memes Gone Wild: What's YOUR Media Appetite?

From a PR person’s standpoint, it just doesn’t get any better.

I have long held a fascination with memetics, the science that purports to study how ideas and culture propagate.  According to the Wikipedia definition: "In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the ethologist Richard Dawkins coined the ... term "meme" to describe a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture." 

After all, if one can truly understand how memes work, isn’t that one step closer to understanding how buzz happens, and to making buzz happen? 

Since digging into this and reading books by Seth Godin (Unleashing the Ideavirus), Richard Brodie (Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme) and Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine), all great reads, I have since come to believe that memetics is more of a pseudoscience than a real science.  There's lots of reasons for this, some of which were explained in my post: Welcome to the New, User Generated Non stop Media Whipsaw.

At any rate, while perusing my daily does of RSS feeds I happened on this “meme” that was started by Jeremiah Owyang, in his post My Media consumption Diet:  "I’m hoping to start this meme, that others will join in and share their media consumption diet, in hopes, that we’ll start to learn how they get information or be entertained. I’ve sort of mixed up mediums, and media types, but after some thought, that’s the best way to organize it."

He goes on to list his media preferences in the following categories: Web, Music, TV, Communication, Movies, Magazines, Books, Newspapers and tagged others to do the same. 

From a myopic PR perspective it does not get any better – to start a trend that might wind up with everyone wearing their media consumption habits on their blog sleeves. 

It is Pay it Forward meets chain letters meets self absorbed blogging culture.  From another perspective, it shows some of the benefits and implications of user generated content. 

I checked on Technorati and over 1000 people have responded. You can sort by authority to see what the high authority influentials are reading, and how they like to get information.

 

 

 

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Read My Blog or I'll Shoot This Dog

I just recently passed the six month mark of Flack's Revenge, and thought I'd take a little time to reflect on the experiences.  It made me think of this famous National Lampoon magazine cover, back from when I was just a kid.  Being a naive kid, I half wondered "geez, will they really shoot the poor dog?"  I bought the issue (actually, I was hooked  and bought most of their issues).

I am wondering if I'll need to issue a similar threat to get some real traffic going.  On the one hand, blogging (in general) seems like  a desperate bid for attention and self promotion.  On the other, it has been fun, I have  learned by delving into some interesting topics, and have truly appreciated the links, interaction and comments.

I still think it is imperative if you are in marketing, PR or really and type of business communications to blog.  I have a new respect for those who crank out great posts frequently and consistently, and for those who have been able to break through and build significant audiences.

I have been told that I am a good writer, clearly it takes more than just writing skills to build blogging momentum.  Mostly, it has been admittedly difficult to come up with a healthy pipeline of topics and find the time to develop and blog about these.

I guess it depends on the type of blog, but for those who are trying to build audience, interaction and a vibrant community, I have been thinking recently that the skills needed are more akin to those of a radio talk show DJ show. 

The good ones can fill up hours of air time, be provocative with their own thoughts and ideas yet also riff off of hot topics and caller interaction - in short they are interesting, topical, information-driven and consistently keep audiences entertained and engaged.  They keep the conversations and pace of info interesting and moving along.

Looking ahead, I am resolving to post more frequently and be more attuned to (and comment on) others' blogs.

Thanks for reading, I hope to continue to make it worth your time, and without threatening to shoot any dogs.

Social Networking and PR

I thought I would follow-up Monday's post by tuning my news radar (courtesy MySyndicaat) to the search term  "PR and social networking," to explore and share what others have been writing on the topic (in for a dime, in for a dollar I guess).

I found some very helpful posts.  I list a few of them below, please see the links in the news radar section to the left for more info:

Brian Solis of the PR 2.0 blog links to and answers Scoble's question: "Is Facebook the new press release?" ("no").  The post offers a pretty good Facebook primer, and discusses implications for marketing and PR (example: "I wholeheartedly believe that leaving a traditional pitch on the wall of Facebook for all too see is fundamentally a bad idea.")

Blonde 2.0 offers some good advice about building brands with social tools.

The MSNBC "Public Relations 2.0" story (when will the "pet term+2.0" trend just die already?) defines  social media (I learned that social networking is a category under the more general "social media" umbrella) and describes PR applications, although it did not have much to say under "Social Networking Sites."

The PodTech site has a great podcast titled: How Social Media is Transforming PR,  featuring an interview with Brian Solis on the topic (Brian seems to be all over this subject and has some great things to say).  The accompanying blog post links to a manifesto on Brian's PR 2.0 blog ("manifesto" is actually in the title, it is great when rhetoric comes with such user friendly labels, lest we confuse the info with something less weighty): The Future of Communications – A Manifesto for Integrating Social Media into Marketing.

Seriously, it is a great read and I found it to be very informative.  He advocates that marketers must "engage or die" (this sounds like what my wife said to me before we got married).

He further says "What we’re talking about here is how companies will best manage an integrated communications strategy in the not too distant future. It is about putting the “public” back in Public Relations and realizing that focusing on important markets and influencers will have a far greater impact than trying to reach the masses with any one message or tool."

It is a pretty wide ranging post covering everything from Twitter, to blogs, to Facebook and more.

Between the podcast and his post, Brian comes at the topic both from a high level, and for those like myself who have had their fill of philosophy, also offers some very specific and actionable advice.

 

Antisocial networking revisited

Won't you please join my (insert social networking site) network?

I am convinced that, before long we will all be one big writhing mass of social networkers, spending countless hours doing whatever people do on these sites.

The allure is jut too great, the peer pressure too strong.  Come join my network.  Together we can find better jobs, make business connections or get sales leads.  We can figure out how to leverage each other without the awkwardness of making small talk with strangers at in-person networking events, or figuring out what to do with the toothpick when you're done with the hors d'oeuvre .

I started with casual IM and text messaging, progressed to heavy RSS usage and then blogging, the gateway drug to social networking.  Peer pressure is pushing me over the edge, offering the lure that is simply too tough to resist, and proving to me the power of these sites.

Well, I know I haven't suddenly gotten more popular, so perhaps it's the phase of the moon but I have gotten a ton of these invitations recently and I reckon it is time to reconsider my decidedly anti-social networking stance. 

Stay tuned, I'll share my experiences, especially as they relate to Web 2.0 and PR tech, perhaps causing you to reconsider your invitation!

Improving the Online Signal to Noise Ratio: Rumors of the Internet-driven Death of Culture are Highly Exaggerated

I first learned about signal to noise ratio when I was back in engineering school.  I decided to pursue an electrical engineering education through my love of music, which manifest itself in years of piano lessons and a fascination with top-of-the-line audio gear.

I learned that in recorded music, "signal" is the part you want to hear, and noise is all the other unintended stuff.  In the days of vinyl records and magnetic audio tape this generally meant background hiss, and the snap crackle and pop sounds caused by record scratches.   In audio technology, the goal was always to boost signal and reduce noise, or improve S / N, ratio hence the introduction of Dolby and DBX noise reduction systems.

I thought of this while reading an ironic post on the AlwaysOn blog. It is ironic because the author contributes to the very issue he rants about - excessive online noise and shrill opinion.  Moreover he voices his opinions through the very medium that he complains about.

In an AlwaysOn blog post titled: "Mindles Crap: Blogs, Vlogs, etc." David Scott Lewis writes about a NY Times article that references a book in which the author deplores the user generated content and blogging crazes and blames these trends on nothing less than "killing our culture."

I tend not to be a flamer but this was too good to resist, and were the information from less reputable sources I would probably let it go.

Scott Lewis writes:

It's a great article and guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of many Web 2.0 / Second Life / Digg /YouTube /Twitter /MySpace / Facebook / StumbleUpon Jihadists -- the fanatics and extremists and self-anointed elitists of everything Web 2.0.  "Fools" would be an appropriate synonym.

The article in the Times is titled, "The Cult of the Amateur" and is based upon the  book by Andrew Keen with the same name and with the sub-title, "How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture."

I don't consider myself a "Web 2.0 Jihadist," although as a communications professional I am intrigued by the implications and effects (both positive and negative) of Web 2.0 on public discourse and information.

Scott Lewis continues:

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.”  This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

For one thing, Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears.” The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created the disastrous Tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th century.

Uh, OK - so we sometimes get it wrong.  The folly of crowds is the flip side of the wisdom of crowds. However tulip mania was hundreds of years ago and the dot bomb preceded Web 2.0. I am really not sure what he is trying to say here. Why not argue against democracy itself?  Scott Lewis derides "self appointed elitists" but this passage smacks of elitism. It seems obviously slanted to favor the heretofore information gatekeepers, e.g. research organizations, historians and MSM.

Although crowds are not always necessarily wiser, Web 2.0 gives us more dots to connect, by empowering almost anyone to contribute to a topic, and more people to participate in connecting the dots. In this way it can perhaps even mitigate mob mentality and bubbles.

Because Web 2.0 celebrates the “noble amateur” over the expert, and because many search engines and Web sites tout popularity rather than reliability, Mr. Keen notes, it’s easy for misinformation and rumors to proliferate in cyberspace.

Disinformation is the flip side of freeing up information flow. Would Scott Lewis and Keen prefer to put the lid on free and easy exchange of info? All but the densest of us – e.g. the ones who actually respond to email Spam – know that you must consider the source, not just on the Web but especially there.

People turn to those whose opinions and information they have learned to trust and respect, even if not among the traditional information gatekeepers. And the better search engines, certainly Google included, factor credibility in their rankings. Other sites, like TechMeme do a good job of filtering out the noise.

For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.

This is an absolute hoot and I am not sure if Scott Lewis / Keen are being serious here.  It seems like the point is that history and journalism were the bastions of pristine and unbiased information before the blogosphere came along.

True, the new world of unmediated media sometimes throws off more heat than light, and ill- informed opinions can see the light of day and occasionally dominate debate.

At the same time, let’s not forget the potential of these new tools to "out" misinformed posers and enable debate, collaboration, and the furtherance of discussion and evolution of ideas.

The rest is a bit rambling as Lewis expands on his analysis of the Keen and NY Times piece with some additional  own ideas. And here we actually find some common ground.

I started this post with a discussion of S / N ratios and an interesting area that is ripe for further development is how to boost the S / N ratio on the Web.  How do we filter out the noise, evaluate information, and a source’s reputation and credibility?

Scott discusses some of the techniques used by scholarly research databases, for example ISI's Web of Science makes it possible to consider the influence and credibility of a source by allowing users to track and analyze author citation histories (I mentioned this in my post Power Searching for PR Professionals). There are some other ideas worth consideration presented as well.

And then there are times when, absolutely, you just need to put that mouse down and go and get a professional opinion. David Carr relates in a June NY Times piece (Call the Doctor) in a much less bombastic way his own experiences with illness, and how in trying to do some research about a controversial drug online, threw in the towel and went back to his doctors, because he found "everything, except insight" online.  He closes: "This Wednesday, I will see my endocrinologist. We will chat for a few minutes... and no doubt he'll smile when I entertain him with all that I have learned on the Web. Then after he tells me what he thinks, I will follow my doctor's order."