Newest stories at the top, older stories below. Introduction is here.
Tuesday, September 26, 2000
5 points from Pizzo -- manage and monitor issues
I just caught the tail end of Charles Pizzo's presentation on using the internet to manage and monitor issues, but here's the essence of five of the important points he made in the last few minutes.* You'll go back to the web and search for your company's name, with modifiers such as YourCompanySucks, YourCompanyUnfair, and so on, so that you can see where problems are developing, before they make it to the mainstream media.
* Don't let your executives be caught off guard. Doing this research is not only good for your company, it's good for your relationship with senior management. Predicting problems and avoiding executive embarrassment is a good way to get to the management table, along with the lawyers and accountants.
* Review your e-mail policies. Make sure that you actually know what your policies are, and you weight the benefits and negatives of having either an open or closed, restrictive policy. There's something to be said for each. Just make a decision. And recognize that the media will go looking for answers to their questions at lower levels when they are stonewalled by top management.
* Note that "A computer in every worker's home" is becoming a union-driven benefit, as well as a non-union perk. Whether supplied by management or the union, it's an employee/member communications tool, so take advantage of it, and be aware of how "the other side" is using it, too.
Jerry Stevenson was a stand in at Next Wave, with a session called
Building an on-line communityJerry described himself as half technician and half public relations pro, and it's a combination that let him provide useful technical info, and put it into context for the audience of communicators.
Since I'm a regular participant on the Compuserve Public Relations and Marketing Forum, I liked his recommendation of this site as a place to learn more about communications, and pick up hints on how to run discussions. He used as his example a message posted by Libby Howell, an Arizona pr woman in the energy business. Go look yourself, at www.prsig.com.
To see the type of site you don't want talking about your business, he suggested a visit to www.untied.com, a variation in spelling of United, as in the airline, created by an unhappy traveler.
He spent a fair bit of time explaining different software and the differences between chats and discussions and bulletin boards, and I remember thinking that knowing suppliers is the job of IT departments. Knowing what you want to accomplish is our job as communicators. Regardless, there's a list of suppliers (or there soon will be) on his web site, at http://effectiveintranets.com/jerry/ It's the simplest looking site I've ever seen. (Correction, Wednesday afternoon; Jerry web address is now correct. An earlier version started incorrectly with www)
When all was said and done, this was what I marked as most important in my notes.
- Use your knowledge of real-world communities to develop your on-line communities.
- Link your web site to discussion groups.
- Error on the side of caution before you plunge into discussion groups attacking your company.
- When dealing with the anti-groups, stick to facts, not opinions.
- Integrate, integrate .... Make sure all your communications link to each other, including print and broadcast.
- In creating on-line communities, such as discussion groups, encourage friendly competition among members, reward frequent contributors, and put in profiles of your regular participants.
- Watch other forums, and figure out how you should participate.
- Consider alliances. It may be better to join another forum than to start your own.Near the end of his session, the devil got me.
There were about 60 people in the room, and I asked how many were IABC members. Almost all were. Then I asked how many had visited IABC's messaging threads. Fewer than half a dozen said they had. Then I asked how many even knew about IABC's messaging threads (Not "Ask an Expert," but threads where members and non-members alike discussed any kind of communicators question) They didn't even know the threads existed. Seems like a member benefit, just the kind of thing Jerry whole session was talking about, to me. Go see the IABC threads for yourself. Go to www.IABC.com and then go look for "messaging" in the tiny type at the bottom of the page. Clicking her gets you around the password block if you click on Member Center.And Jerry's most important message:
The web lets us move beyond price if we can engage our customers in a discussion.
Reverse engineering an intranet, to
Create a Business-Effective Portal
Joe Katzman -- he's no friend of Razorfish, but he knows what works
Joe Katzman is with the consulting arm of KPMG in Toronto, and he's a pretty good guy to judge intranet effectiveness, because not only does his company consult on web-related matters, he uses a very complicated intranet portal himself.And he's not all that happy with what he sees.
Early on in his talk, he said "It's possible to reach too far," meaning that it's all too easy to get caught up in putting "content in context" and making a very complicated site. Even his own firm's site is being rethought, because it has so many levels and options. Joe's speaking up, in favor of features that may not be obvious to web designers, but are important to actual users. And it's a Razorfish design. If you hire Joe, you won't get him to recommend Razorfish to you.
But right now we can all learn lessons from Joe's analysis of lots of web sites.
Joe started his presentation with First Principles, a concept close to my own heat (See my First Principles here)
Here's what Joe says are the First Principles of the intranet.
- It's all about how your people use information, not how they use machines.
- It's about attention, not information -- and attention is wholly voluntary.
- A public site is designed to be sticky and keep people around -- intranets are designed to be Teflon
- People do more of what they're rewarded for, and less of things they find unpleasant
- Good IT frameworks and classification schemes without front line participation at the planning stage are a sure sign of impending failure.Remember, too, that a bad intranet is like a set of itchy underwear. You can't see it all the time, but you can never forget it's there.
Joe was quick with the quips, anticipated the audience's reaction, and owned the room. As a presenter, he was the smoothest, the funniest, and the most in control of all the ones I saw. If you think about his first principles, and learn to live the statement below, you'll be able to benefit from his presentation, without even being there. (I left early to catch Charles Pizzo.)
When does an error become a mistake? When you don't acknowledge it.
Monday, September 25, 2000
Charles asked for 18 point type:
Here's my reporting note I showed Charles Pizzo, Chair, and Elizabeth Allan, President and CEO, of IABC about 10:10 this morningIf you paid attention, fee payoff by 9:20
Watts Wacker
I was showing them my notes about the Keynote Address by Watts Wacker, a futurist and author, who was part way through his presentation at Next Wave. My point was simple. IF you paid attention to him, and acted on his ides, you'd more than justify the conference fee of about $1800 in Canadian dollars. I'm going to track him down and find out where else he's making a similar presentation, because there are some PR people I think should hear him. Apparently getting him to talk requires a three-star fee. That's $10,000 - $15,000 in United States of America dollars.To get the most out of Wacker, you need to be able to catch on, be intuitive, "get" what he's getting at. In that spirit, here are some observations.
Speaking of Ford's computer deal with employees (he didn't mention it's being rolled out very slowly) he explained how Ford will recover costs when Ford employee's click on banners, ads and links in the Ford employees' portal.
At his company, they'll collect about $10,000 this year in revenue from ad referrals, mostly, I gather, to Amazon. He's pledged the money for the company's party fund. There are seven party-goers, plus guests.
He's got a reading list on his web site. Go to http://www.firstmatter.com
Anecdote: The other day he met a soccer mom and IBMer spouse, back from Sydney where she reports six billion hits on the IBM - Olympics web site on opening day, equaling about one billion people.
"My job is to provoke you the think. To think a little bit differently."
Speaking about the pace of change, he said we're the first generation where "possessions become artifacts while we're still alive."
"My ten year old daughter will live to be 200."
"More people speak English in China than speak English in North America."
"Newspapers now write what is going to happen," he noted, while showing a selection of headlines about future events.
Observing the attitudes of younger people, he noted they think "College isn't about getting an education. It's about getting your ticket stamped."
He urged the audience to "give up on logic, and become reasonable'." Elaborating, he pointed out how so much of what happens today does not follow logic, but instead is driven by instinct and emotion.
By now it was 9:20 and I wrote the words in this story's headline. There were heads nodding in the audience, and afterwards David Raymont, with the Ontario Ministry of Education and a head nodder, mentioned some of Wacker's insights about using the web to find out more about an idea as being a concept he's taking back to his office.
By now, I'd vowed to stop taking notes and to just listen, but I had my pen in hand within a minute, catching phrases that I think my interest you.
"As face-to-face communications becomes rarer, it becomes more valuable."
He told about the yellow Volkswagen syndrome; until you buy one, you never notice how many there are, and linked this to the idea that communicators may think something is much more important (their project, their problem) than do other people without the same project or problem, but that there are also lots of other people with similar problems or projects.
BEST HINTS:
- Cover only one topic in each e-mail.
- Cover only one topic in each voice-mail.There was lots more that could get a thinker thinking, but the two most valuable ideas near the end concerned tribes and cowboys. People want to belong to tribes, whether they are riders of Harley-Davidson motorcycles or wearers of Tommy Hilfigger clothes. Wacker's point was that employees want leadership, want to belong to a tribe and want a chief. And tribes love opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies, and reinforcement ceremonies in between. (As I write, there's a great radio commercial about how uniforms shape the performance of companies who dress their employees as, in effect, valued members of a "tribe," although the commercial did not use the exact words.)
And he talked observational research, based, he said, "on my cowboy life." Wacker frequently gets out of the office and actually performs various real-world employee tasks in his clients companies. He's a short order cook, a baggage handler, and so on.
And, not for a client, from time to time, he's a cowboy, where, he notes, two words can often suffice as a complete vocabulary. "Yup" and "No" are all you need.
Wacker has a new book, called The Visionary's Handbook, co-written with Jim Taylor, his partner on The500 year Delta.
Some useful pointers from Luciana, MR and Sylvia
Luciana Duarte and Michele Renee Charbonneau are with Sapient, and Sylvia Kowal is with Nortel Networks
USING THE INTERNET TO GAIN
EMPLOYEE SUPPORT FOR CHANGE
They were talking about intranets -- the internal version of the web -- as a way of communicating with employees around the world.From Luciana and MR of Sapient:
- be aware of, and cope with, the tensions between local issues and national (and international) issues
- consider institutional memories; some employees are new, some have longer service, so the question becomes how much context to put into articles to keep both sides happy.
- At Sapient, Pulse, (the daily newsletter) comes in two versions. One is HTML-web based for people in Sapient offices, and one is in PDF format for employees not in the office.
- At the end of the month, Pulse Wrap carries all the major stories of the month, for those who missed them earlier.
- Design matters; they've redesigned frequently in response to reader surveys, changing technology, and strategic decisions to change emphasis from time to time."It's not easily left on the subway" -- that security consideration means that Sapient can provide confidential information over the web, with less fear that it will get into the wrong hands.
From Sylvia Kowal of Nortel Networks:
She provided lots of information BAK's Report readers might find useful in developing their own electronic internal communications. She has to reach 80,000 Nortel people and another 20,000 contractors around the world. And the network she uses is the same network Nortel uses to show off its products to the world.First, senior management support is absolutely necessary. She's got executive approval, and it extends far enough that she and her people can edit down long executive messages, or even get the execs to do it themselves, to only one or two paragraphs.
And, she says, e--mail doesn't work for mass internal communications, especially when you get to over 80,000 people. The web-based distribution of information, with its graphics and layouts and illustrations, is much more efficient. Now the internet is the source of daily messages and employees know to go look for them.
She also reported on using games, one in a Jeopardy-style format, to educate employees, and double check that the education had sunk in. About 50,000 employees have played the web-based games, which takes about five minutes and which can result in prizes being awarded. Nortel's thinking of letting customers and shareholders play too, after successfully bringing an earlier internal game to a sales events, and letting customers try their skills.
She discussed how multiple generations look at info differently, with younger employees having a short attention span, so there's a need to engage them quickly.
"Give us ten seconds of your time" is the request from her department.
Geography, information overload, and, as in the Sapient case, lack of institutional memory (50% of Nortel employees have less than five years service, 20% less than a year) are factors to consider in communications.
Most popular item is stock price, updated every twenty minutes
Of particular interest were some thoughts on change she quoted from Mark Prensky, who's with a New York organization called Games2Train.
Conventional speed has changed to twitch speed
Linear processing has changed to parallel processing
Step by step has changed to random access
Text first has changed to graphics first
Stand alone has changed to connected
Work oriented has changed to play oriented
Patience has changed to payoff
Reality has changed to fantasy
Technology as a foe has changed to technology as a friend
Weekend, September 23 - 24, 2000
BAK's Report is covering ...
Next Wave e-Communication
Maximize Technology to Drive Organizational Performance and ResultsThe International Association of Business Communicators and a company called NetGain think they can make a buck or two (and serve the public good, I bet) by educating communicators about how to, as the brochure says, " Maximize Technology to Drive Organizational Performance and Results"
One of the Net Gain founders is Shel Holtz, who I know via the Compuserve PR forum and who has run a writing for the web workshop attended by several people I know. If the whole conference is half as good as Shel's web-writing workshop, it'll be a good way to spend a day and a half. BAK's Report invited itself to the conference, and IABC's picking up a free media registration for me, so I'll be reporting here over the next few days.
Opening Monday is Watts Wacker, a futurist who wrote, along with two other people, The 500 Year Delta, one of the few business books I've read, and a great one at that. I've caused at least half a dozen other people to buy the book.
After Wacker's general address to all the audience (I understand there's about 100 people at about $1,800 in Canadian money each) the group breaks up into four streams, each of which gets five more sessions. You can mix and match streams, but nothing's repeated, so you are guaranteed to miss 15 presentations.
I've semi-picked what I'm going to, (see below, subject to tips from attendees that will make me change plans) and since BAK's Report is just me, we'll miss lots. I'll try to select sessions I think will match our intended reader profile, and catch oone from each of the four streams.
When I review a session, I’ll try to find some things for executives to do in order to manage PR strategy well, and for practitioners to do, to cause stakeholders to take actions. I'll probably walk out of sessions where I can't read the visual support materials.
About a million years ago, I worked on the videophone at Northern Telecom. Now, over lunch Monday, we’ll learn the latest about visual electronic communications from Nick Twyman of Sony and Kevin Thomson of "The Marketing and Communication Agency."
Here's my tentative seminar list
Monday
10:15 – 11:45, Internal communication stream
Using the internet to gain employee support for change
Luciana Duarte, Sapient
Michele-Renee Charbonneau, Sapient
Sylvia Kowal, Nortel12 – 1:30, Lunch, the visual communications talk
2 – 3:30, Knowledge management stream
Adding value to customer and employee satisfaction with knowledge management
Tudor Williams, Craig Jolley - consultants4 – 5:30, Knowledge management stream
The new breed of rising stars: the Techno-Communication literate executive
Jerry Bryan - consultantTuesday
8:30 – 10, Marketing stream
Building an online community
(no-one identified in the IABC brochure)10:30 – 12, Knowledge Management stream
Intranets: creating business-effective portals
Joe Katzman - KPMG