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Neville Hobson on corporate blogging

Following Elizabeth Albrycht 's keynote on Day 1 of the New Communications Forum, the participants split into three groups -- convened by Elizabeth, Neville Hobson, and Matthew Podboy -- to discuss a common set of slides comprising an "Introduction to Corporate Blogging."

I chose Neville's session, thrilled at the prospect of communicating f2f with a blogger with whom I'd had a close encounter in cyberspace. Neville's presentation was stimulating and the discussion he led was lively, but I do wish that my tri-location server hadn't been down, preventing me from attending all three sessions simultaneously.

The session slides will be available online and I'll point you to them when they are. For now, here are some comments, notes, and reactions to Neville's session.

Was it primarily the flurry in the blogosphere around the US elections that caused blogs to take off in a big way last year? Neville thinks so, and I agree in part. But I think another factor, little discussed at the conference, played a large role.

By the end of 2004, mainstream media (MSM) outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the BBC, and Reuters had begun syndicating RSS feeds of their content. The five percent of US internet users who use feed readers can now subscribe to continuously updated news feeds from the world's major news outlets, along with those syndicated by lesser media luminaries, rock stars of the blogosphere, and garden-variety bloggers.

The combination of news feeds and blog feeds is very powerful. It promises to become more so as feed readers are increasingly integrated with other indispensable applications, such as the rudimentary feed reader within the Firefox browser and the robust feed readers in collect/organize/share (COS) applications like Pluck and Onfolio 2.0.

Once business and professional people experience the convenience and efficiency of news feeds, it's easy for them to recognize how MSM news is enhanced by the unfiltered (or, at least, less filtered) information and conversations available in blogs. By now, people have had a number of highly-publicized opportunities to see the impact of blogs on traditional journalism and on real-world business and politics. As they continue to understand the connection between the blogosphere and the misfortunes of Trent Lott, Armstrong Williams, and the Kryptonite bike lock, it's only a matter of time before they recognize blogs' potential, for good and for ill, in their own business and professional arenas. 

In the blogosphere, is content king? Neville thinks not. He gives content second place, after linking: Who is reading and linking to the content? Who is talking about what, and to whom?

I beg to differ, though perhaps not as vehemently as Queen Bee Elisa Camahort. Giving links pride of place is, I suppose, another way of reaffirming that the medium is the message. But without compelling content, why read, and what is there to link to? This may be another story about the power of integration -- in this case, the integration of infrastructure, ideas, and insider gossip.

The blog of the bespoke tailor. It was worth the price of admission just to be able to blog that delightful phrase. Neville cited it as " a good example of someone just writing about what his customers are interested in," not about blogging as such. Take a look at English Cut, and The Tinbasher Blog, too, while you're at it.

In the view of one session participant, the key aspects of blogs are immediacy and informality, not linking or even interactivity.  Neville's response: as people become bloggers themselves and become more sophisticated, they come to recognize the importance of links and RSS readers.

What, if anything, does the concept of "bloggers' rights" mean in corporate context? Neville finds this particular "crusade" to be "silly." A discussion of restrictions on employee blogging fails to resolve the question: Have we seen bloggers fired for blogging as such, or for the content of their posts?

Neville suggested a look at internalmemos.com. Having now visited "the Internet's largest collection of corporate memos and internal communication," I second his motion.

How much time does it take to be a blogger? The session handout labels time a "perceived obstacle," suggesting that half-an-hour a day for reading and half-an-hour for writing should be sufficient.

Yes, the blogging conversation with customers and other audiences is a good expenditure of almost any professional's time. And yes, the practice of blogging makes you faster. But an hour a day? Get real! I'm a practiced writer who loves to write and I spend most of every day online. An hour a day is nowhere near enough, and the extra time is still well spent.

Among the most fascinating of the many blogs Neville mentioned is the new effort by Margot Wallstrom, one of Europe's most powerful women. She is Vice President of the European Commission and its Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication. Wallstrom's blog, complete with comments and RSS feed, is "not untypical of most of us: she blogs about things relevant to her job and to her as a person."

“What’s the big deal about blogging?”

Elizabeth Albrycht’s keynote had a more elegant title, but its purpose was to answer that question for the public relations and marketing professionals who made up the majority of attendees at the New Communications Forum. A few of her more provocative points:

Starting with the fact that 8 million American adults had created blogs by the end of 2004, the Pew report on “The State of Blogging” has enough eye-popping stats to convince any communications pro that this is a trend to ignore at one’s peril.

“Blogs offer the single most affordable, efficient, and effective tool to create connections,” a claim Elizabeth backs up by reference to three power laws.

Power law was a new term for me, but, as it turns out, a familiar concept: “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. . . . The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.”

For example, the familiar 80/20 Rule is a power law. Take a look at the Clay Shirky piece from which I took this quote to see what a power law distribution looks like – a graph with a long tail – as compared to a bell curve or normal distribution.

Elizabeth cites Moore’s law, Metcalfe’s Law, and Reed’s Law.

Moore’s Law predicts that computer processing power will double every eighteen months, quickly increasing the amount of computing power available per dollar cost.

Elizabeth’s translation: The lower the cost of computing power, the better.

Metcalfe’s Law states that “the value of a communication system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.”

For example, a single fax machine has no value: where can it end a fax, and how can it receive one? But as new fax machines come online, the value of every fax machine increases, because the total number of possible communications increases.

Elizabeth’s translation: The more users you add to the network, the better.

Reed’s Law states that “utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.”

Elizabeth’s translation: The more you allow users to form connected groups, the better.

The take-home message: Links equal value, so you want to achieve scale as quickly as possible. The prime example in question: letting employees blog.

The “Marketing Panopticon” derived from philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s 18th^th century concept of a prison, demonstrates that markets are conversations.

Bentham’s Panopticon was designed so that prisoners would be isolated from one another in a circular configuration, but could be viewed at all times by a centrally placed “inspector.” Even though they were not in fact being watched at any given moment, the mere consciousness of “permanent visibility” would change their behavior.

In the Marketing Panopticon, the central “inspector” is replaced by messages and the “prisoners” are replaced by customers, analysts, journalists, partners, competitors, employees, potential employees, and other stakeholders in a company’s business. Once isolated from each other and dependent on messages broadcast by the company, blogs and other new communication media allow the stakeholders to communicate with each other and with the central messenger.

The take-home message: Markets are conversations that cannot be controlled by any one of the participants. What’s more, the quality of the discourse has changed, with statements and declarations replaced more and more by questions, opinions, and values.

Despite the challenges blogs pose for organizations – from how to deal with negative buzz, to how to measure return on investment, to whether blogs demand their own new code of professional ethics – the power of blogs is undeniable, their speed is remarkable, and their impact is growing.

Live, from Napa, it’s the New Communications Forum!

I’m just back from an engaging and challenging couple of days at the New Communications Forum in Napa, CA. Presenters and attendees ranged from rock stars of the blogosphere to blogger newbies to blogger wannabes, most with an interest in blogs as the hottest new medium of corporate communications.

Some bloggers at the event – such as Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, and Anita Campbell – were experienced and confident enough to do live blog posts during the conference sessions. I’m afraid I’m not that brave yet, or perhaps I just can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

But, while trying to emulate my intrepid colleagues, I learned that I could engage in what used to be called taking notes by creating draft posts in my TypePad account and saving them for later use. Some of the drafts will actually be revised and posted, some will serve as reminders for conference follow-up tasks, some will become fodder for other projects in progress, and the rest will end up in the virtual trash. Regardless, flexible, multi-purpose note taking seems to me just one more good reason to consider blogging, if you aren’t yet a blogger.

The drafts that survive my triage-and-revise process are likely to become Advice to the bloglorn posts. For now, though, the next few posts are a potpourri of ideas and questions culled from those two days in beautiful, rainy Napa.

My first junk cell phone call

It was bound to happen, and it finally has: My first junk cell phone call arrived today, just as I was walking in the door from an out-of-town trip, laden with luggage and expecting an important call.

Granted, it was my beloved cell phone provider calling to sell me products and services I don't need. It cost none of my precious minutes to be marketed at -- just my time and attention -- so I suppose some wouldn't count this call as the genuine invasion of the telemarketers.  But it's a harbinger, nonetheless.

In theory, cell phone numbers can be registered with the Federal Trade Commission's National Do Not Call Registry, just as land line numbers can.  Eligible numbers must be removed from the lists of covered telemarketers within 31 days after you enter your number in the registry -- but there are a host of exceptions and caveats.

For example: You can register your personal phone number, but not your business number or your fax number. Your registration expires in five years, and it's up to you to keep track of the date and re-register -- so have your 2010 calendar handy when you visit the Do Not Call Registry site. If you change telephone service providers or calling plans, your registration may disappear in the process, and again, it's up to you to check.

Even with your registration in force, certain telemarketers are still free to invade your telephonic space: political organizations, charities, telephone surveyors, and  -- the biggest hole in the system -- "companies with which you have an existing business relationship, or those to whom you’ve provided express agreement in writing to receive their calls."

You establish a business relationship when you buy something from a company, and you're stuck with their calls for 18 months thereafter unless you specifically instruct them not to call you again. As for "express agreement in writing" to receive a company's calls, I'd be surprised if that isn't part of most website registrations, shopper discount cards, and similar programs.

More technicalities are spelled out in reasonably plain English on the FTC site for your edification and amusement. The bottom line is that telemarketers aren't going away any time soon. In the wireless world, they're just getting started.

"This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes"

Last week, the New York Times ran an article on the changing economics and culture of call monitoring, "Your Call (and Rants on Hold) Will Be Monitored."  Customer service monitors, often third-party contractors located throughout the world, rate service reps on qualities ranging from how friendly they sound to how accurately they provide information.

It's nice to know that companies have progressed beyond rating the reps solely on how quickly they manage to get the customer off the phone. But it was distressing to learn that the call continues to be taped even during those lengthy periods when the rep places a customer on hold. According to the Times, the only way to avoid being recorded while on hold is to hang up.

As a result, call monitors hear customers cursing at the length of the wait, yelling at their children, or disciplining their pets. Customers, meanwhile, labor under the delusion that we are enjoying what used to be known as the privacy of our own homes.

Sometimes the monitors hear even worse things, such as the sounds of domestic abuse. Because they are listening to recordings after the fact, they couldn't request police intervention even if they were so inclined.

I actually missed this article the first time around, but yesterday, a letter to the editor from Jon D. Morrow caught my attention, not incidentally because I've spent a good deal of time in call center hell recently. In his letter, captioned "I Monitor Calls, Too," Morrow reveals his way of coping with "quality assurance" monitoring.

To ward against "wrong information coming from hurried customer service representatives, " Morrow begins many calls by asking permission to record the call on his end, as well. Almost always, he reports, the customer service rep says no and hangs up.

That raises a number of questions: What kind of rating does this behavior garner for the hanger-upper? Is the rep perceived as protecting the company's interest or being rude to a customer? What would happen if Morrow just recorded the call without permission, on the theory that "this call may be recorded and monitored" works both ways?

And the biggest question of all: If the rep hangs up, however does Morrow transact business with the cell phone companies, banks, airlines, and retail emporia of the world? Jon Morrow, if you are reading this post, please let the rest of us in on your secret.

New Metaforix blog: Advice to the bloglorn

Our new blog, Advice to the bloglorn, is live as of today. It's a spinoff of our well-received column by the same name, originally published in WordBiz Report and later expanded for publication on LLRX.com.

If you are a new reader or writer of blogs, or if you're just plain curious about what blogs are and how they can make you and your business more productive, Infomaven welcomes you and your questions. Visit Advice to the bloglorn at www.advicetothebloglorn.com.

Lois Ambash's dream for the internet

The final question asked of respondents to the Future of the Internet survey was this:

What are you anxious to see happen? What is your dream application, or where would you hope to see the most path-breaking developments in the next decade?

Here was my response, as quoted on pages 45-46 of the report:

My dream application is a fail-safe, user-controlled, user-friendly privacy screen that would allow people to reap all the benefits of cyberspace with none of the personal risks.

What I am most anxious to see is genuine conversation between geeks and newbies. Many people who could reap great benefits from the internet are hampered by the jargon barrier (and other language barriers, such as reading level and lack of facility in English) . . . .

My dream situation – as opposed to application – will occur when beta testing routinely requires that any intelligent adult be able to use the product or application competently without a geek in the family or a lengthy interaction with tech support.

Not a bad dream, if I do say so myself.

Experts (predominantly male?) predict the future of the internet

The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University have released the results of a survey of  "technology leaders, scholars, industry officials, and analysts" asked to predict how the internet will evolve over the next ten years. A non-random sample of almost 1,300 experts predicted the internet's impact on myriad aspects of American society, ranging from electronic surveillance to family life -- and those I've had time to review so far are fascinating.

I heard about the study's release this morning on Marketplace, where lead author Susannah Fox was briefly interviewed. I've worked with Susannah in the past, so I e-mailed her to say it was nice to hear her on NPR. She wrote back to thank me for participating in the survey last fall -- I had completely forgotten -- and to say I'm actually quoted in the report. (See the following post.) What a nice way to start the morning! 

The prediction getting the most play is that "at least one devastating attack will occur in the next 10 years on the networked information infrastructure or the country’s power grid" -- and I won't add my two cents to that frightening scenario. You can sample the other predicitions here, in the full Pew report, or here, in Elon's predictions database (where you can even add your own comments to the mix.)

Not all of the survey respondents chose to identify themselves, and, as Susannah and colleagues point out, "some of the best comments came from those who declined to dazzle us with anything besides their ideas." Neverthless, as I scanned the report this morning, I could not help noticing that the authors of the signed comments quoted in the report were preponderantly male. This impression was strengthened by the graphic adorning Elon's main "Imagining the Internet" page: eight male internet luminaries and a and lone female, Esther Dyson.

Granted, most internet pioneers and tech experts are male. But roughly half of online Americans are women. And women are key stakeholders and decision makers in many of the arenas covered by the report: healthcare, education, family, work-life balance, civic engagement -- even if we ignore the fact that the strictly technical predicitions will affect women's lives just as much as men's.

Early in the report, in a section entitled "Why Predicitions Matter," is an excerpt from co-author Janna Quitney Anderson's forthcoming book, Imagining the Internet. Drawing on the work of futurist Ithiel De Sola Pool, Anderson writes,

The prophets who seek to foresee the consequences of a new technology often do so in the hope of making a profit. Many others are motivated by the idea that better social choices can be made if the coming impact of a new tool can be accurately pre-assessed. An observance of what stakeholders and skeptics are saying at the dawn of a new communications age is vital in the formation of policy and thoughtful planning.

With such high social and economic stakes, women's voices must be clearly heard. I e-mailed Susannah Fox again, expressing my surprise that the questionnaire hadn't asked about gender (or age, for that matter), and indicating  my concern that a lack of women's input into predictions might actually distort the evolution of our common technology agenda.

Here's what Susannah had to say:

Since we conducted a snowball sample, we knew it would not be projectable onto any population other than the one surveyed. We also knew that the people taking the survey would be both busy and wary of sharing more information than absolutely necessary.  So we did not include the usual survey questions about demography (gender, age, income, etc.)

Many, many respondents told us only their work affiliation, not their name, so we have no idea how many are men, women, etc.  Many respondents DID identify themselves at the start of the survey but did not sign their names to any of their written responses. And of course I could only include a fraction of comments in the actual report (imagine: about 1200 people’s written answers to 24 questions; hundreds of spreadsheet pages read over 4 months; just a 60-page report).

There are definitely women’s voices included in the mix – some are named (you [p. 45], Moira Gunn [p. 29], Tiffany Shlain [p.29], Pam Whitten [p.35], Tobey Dichter [p. 21 and p. 38], etc.) but many are anonymous, by their own choice.

So more women's views may be reflected in this study than initially meet the eye. That's reassuring. It also highlights, again, the value of broad access to electronic technologies by people of all genders, ages, races, and backgrounds. "Ordinary" users, as well as innovators and early adopters, have important ideas to contribute about how electronic technologies will and should affect our lives.

Words have power to depict the present and define the future -- one reason why the state of blogging is of such interest to the media and why the current survey suggests that of all American institutions, news and publishing organizations will be most profoundly changed by the internet over the next ten years. I encourage you to take a look at the press release, if not the full Future of the Internet report, and add your voice to the conversation.

E-Waste and data security

The computer industry has embarked on a major effort to educate consumers about e-waste -- discarded consumer and business electronics -- and how to recycle it. The Rethink Initiative, a coalition of industry, government, and environmental groups led and hosted by eBay, aims to promote environmentally and socially wise choices about what to do with unwanted cell phones, computers, and similar equipment.

I have often found myself at a loss about what to do with such equipment, for fear of failing to wipe the device completely clear of my business and personal data. Given the choice of compromising my privacy and security or shoving that old computer to the back of the closet, the closet wins every time. If I do give equipment away, it's always to someone I know and trust -- and even then, I worry about who may own it after that.

The first thing I looked for on the Rethink homepage was a Privacy or Security link -- but no such luck. Nothing on the What Is E-Waste? page or the What Can I Do? page, either. So I jumped down to the FAQ link, which has 35 unindexed questions.

I had to scan and scroll through 27 questions before I reached what I was looking for --  "What if I have confidential/personal data/information on the computer, phone, or PDA that I'm hoping to resell/recycle?" -- and was directed to a page inviting me to achieve peace of mind by using the free Blancco Data Cleaner software. Only after I register and sign in, of course. I haven't registered or signed in, so I still don't know whether this tool cleans cell phones beyond regognition or just computer hard drives.

It's clear I don't think like an eBay user. I would have arrived at the Blancco link much sooner had I clicked on Sell instead of FAQ. But I venture to say that many people who discard computers, and especially cell phones, don't think like eBAy users.

Please, Rethink, rethink the text on your homepage. And rethink the need to collect data from would-be Blancco users. Willing recyclers shouldn't have to choose between data security, privacy, and responsible care for the environment. And good corporate citizens shouldn't insist that we do so.

Thanks to Sabrina at beSpacific for alerting us to this initiative.

"Do you speak American cyberspeak?"

Robert MacNeil is the co-creator of PBS's NewsHour and a word-lover to be reckoned with. Nearly twenty years ago, he produced The Story of English, a memorable nine-part documentary and associated book suverying the evolution of the English language and its emergence as the world's lingua franca.

Now McNeil has produced a more personal, less ambitious, but highly engaging three-part follow-up, "Do You Speak American?" My local PBS station aired all three parts last night, so I Tivoed it for later viewing. From the few excerpts I caught, I knew I would be blogging about the program soon.

Before I had a chance to do so, I got an e-mail from a journalist interested in talking with me about "changes to the English language in recent years, especially the infiltration of words and expressions from high-tech and the digital age." (Google had been kind enough to send him repeatedly in my direction.) He wonders, in part, whether the new tech vocabulary is mainly a practical set of new names for new ideas and things, or whether it has metaphorical qualities, as well.

The reporter's query set me thinking about trends I observe in tech-related language, both in the cyberspeak favored by the digerati and in the day-to-day language of ordinary speakers.

Cyberspeak: a powerful form of jargon

Cyberspeak is just another form of jargon, the specialzed language that evolves in professions, businesses, and individual workplaces in reponse to "the need for experts in a field to communicate with precision and brevity." The flip side of precision and brevity is exclusivity -- the creation of a barrier between fluent speakers of the jargon and those who find it unintelligible, between club members and people who don't know the secret handshake, between, in this case, newbies and power users.

When a profession holds a great deal of power over people's daily lives, those who are not fluent in the jargon can find themselves at a severe disadvantage when it comes to making decisions or evaluating quality. Medicine is one such profession and, these days, internet and computer technology is another. Cyberspeakers get to have it both ways: they get to enjoy the status conferred by their exclusive knowledge, while simultaneously complaining about others' ignorance.

Last year, in the wake of a particularly widespread computer virus epidemic, the New York Times  ran a front-page article highlighting the "growing friction between technophiles and what they see as a breed of technophobes who want to enjoy the benefits of digital technology without making the effort to use it responsibly." Geeks and nerds framed the issue as a failure of personal computer users to learn the basics of good computer hygiene. But the problem is really one of language.

Busy people outside the tech world generally have little interest in how computers work, how malware travels the internet, or what to do about it. They just want their computers to perform as expected. How can the average user learn to keep her computer safe from viruses, Trojans, and worms when presented with documentation (once called instructions) composed in what seems not to be English, but gibberish?

The highly successful "Dummies" series originated in 1991 with the computer-related DOS for Dummies. DOS as explained in that book is passé for the average user, and most people still don't recognize the term as an acronym for disc operating system -- if they even know what a disc operating system is. But it's no accident that the first and most popular "Dummies" books are about computers and the internet. What's a mystery to me is that people are willing to pay for the privilege of being insulted by such titles. As I said, it's all about language.

(I'm in good company on this. Wall Street Journal computer guru Walt Mossberg thinks "The real dummies are the people who, though technically expert, couldn't design hardware and software that's usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it." Well, maybe they could design it -- but they can't, don't, or won't clearly explain how to use it.)

Digital influences in everyday language

What about technical influences on our everyday speech and writing? They're certainly unavoidable, even for people who avoid or don't have access to computers and the internet.

To start with the reporter's question, many tech terms are metaphorical. World Wide Web itself is the mother of all tech metaphors. Where did we get the term mouse, do you suppose? What about desktop and inbox? Even Google is a metaphor, derived from googol, a word invented by a nine-year-old to mean a very large number, 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Can you imagine that many search results? Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin evidently could and did.

Word play and puns are rampant in tech-related vocabulary: clicks-and-mortar for businesses with both physical and online sales outlets; dot-bomb for online (dot-com) business failures; eyeballs for website visitors or viewers; dead tree version for a printed, as opposed to online, book or article; wetware for a human being or human brain, as opposed to computer hardware or software.

Compression, abbreviation, and collapsing of words and expresssions all can be attributed to the speed of the Information Age. Depending upon who is writing the style manual, we're losing hypens (email as opposed to e-mail), initial capital letters (internet, not Internet),  spaces between words (website, not Web site), and initial syllables (blog, not Web log). And that's just in standard business usage. We'll leave txt msgs 4 l8r. Similar transformations are affecting non-tech words by imitation, or perhaps infecting them as idea viruses.

Once I've had a chance to watch all of "Do You Speak American?" I'll blog more about these trends in light of Robert McNeil's road trip and the materials on the series website.