Gosh, things have been busy around BetterComms Towers recently.

There have been a million and one projects to work on, quotes to submit, clients to liaise with and family matters to keep on top of. And that’s just this afternoon!

All of which has made me reflect on how I spend what little time I choose to make available for social media.

I am by far not the first person to have considered the following, but having reached a point in my business activities where I have to make choices, here’s what I’m thinking. This is not the first time I’ve thought this, either.

There are two types of blogger — those who predominantly create links to other conversations and points of view of interest, and those who express opinions.

Depending on the time I have available, I may or may not be disposed to pay attention to the opinion bloggers. But I am more inclined to give my attention to them and increasingly less inclined to pay attention to a linkage blogger. With linkage bloggers, I find myself relying on a stand-out, knock-me-dead headline to induce me to follow any of the links I find on their posts.

For a long time one of my favourite bloggers has been Trevor Cook. I have read Trevor long enough now (for over a year) that I can tell when he has a full plate and when he has a bit of space. When his plate is full his posts are linkage posts; when he has a bit more time up his sleeve he gives insightful commentary. I love it when he gives insightful commentary. When he does he reminds me of Shel Holtz, who is and probably will always be one of the first two feeds I check. The man doesn’t just link, he’s confident enough about himself to give me a glimpse into his soul.

One of the reasons I spend so much time on my ‘Clippings‘ postings is that even though they are only linkage posts they also have enough commentary around them that someone who scan reads (and isn’t that all of us?) can get the gist of what I am linking to and why in order that they may make an informed decision as to whether to follow the link or not. Along with the commentary they will hopefully also ingest some inkling of my own soul and mind.

So, in light of that, I am reducing my ‘cappuccino’ reads even further. Seth Godin once stated that he only reads about six blogs; Allan Jenkins and I recently agreed that there are about 40 blogs which seem to cover the gamut of our industry — reading those on a semi regular basis brings us rapidly up to speed on what is of importance to our daily bread.

‘Attention’ is a commodity that has both finite properties and massive value to me at the moment. If you want my attention, give me something my brain can chew on, preferably with all the old DM verities of compelling headline, compelling sub-heads, great copy, powerful visuals that directly tie in with the copy, a caption to the image to explain its relationship so that I am in absolutely no doubt what the image is trying to tell me, and so on.

Not sure what I’m on about? Not sure you can deliver? Study Ted Nicholas. He is all you need to read. Trust me, I’m a psychologist…

Technorati : Allan Jenkins, Seth Godin, Shel Holtz, Ted Nicholas, Trevor Cook

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Melcrum has just released a new report: ‘Driving a high-performance culture: communication tools, techniques and best practice from leading global organisations’.

At US$775 it’s not normally something I’d pay for, but the very generous folks at Melcrum have, as usual, offered a free executive summary for download.

Excitingly, they are reportedly also offering a free audio file of the key findings for download, too. But I couldn’t find the link, which is slightly annoying, and they also fail to understand the difference between a ‘podcast’ and ‘downloadable audio’.

‘Downloadable audio’ is something I have to go and manually get; a ‘podcast’ is something that comes to me. A small detail but an annoying one, especially as there is no link to the downloadable audio file that I can find.

Perhaps by the time you read this someone at Melcrum will have figured out that the link is missing and have corrected it. Let me know if they have.

Update: Try this link to get to the report:

http://www.leehopkins.net/melcrum-redirect01.html

Technorati : Melcrum, corporate culture

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• Kami Huyse sent a number of us an email the other week, asking for our insights and opinions on a range of questions. The response to Kami’s questions has been outstanding (I hang my head in shame that I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to contribute myself) and I encourage you to check it out.
• Courtesy of the wise, erudite and all-round good egg Trevor Cook (if you don’t subscribe to his blog, you should — it’s a fantastic read every day), I have been asked to appear on a panel of social media experts for the Walkley Foundation for Journalism, who are running a series of morning seminars around the country on ‘hot’ PR issues. My appearance, at the Adelaide seminar, is on August 15th at the Holiday Inn in Hindley Street. As good fortune would have it, Ross Monaghan from Deakin University is also on the panel — I will be recording my first in a long series of podcasts for Ross’s social media project tomorrow, interviewing Stuart Symons, the Senior Communications Officer at Santos, on internal communication.
• I’ve just released yet another social media site unto the world — I’ve updated the Stirling Family Church website to be a blog. I’m still in the process of putting all of the old content back online via the Wordpress CMS (’content management system), but normal service should be resumed very shortly, including podcasting the Sunday services again. In the interim, if you want to ensure you capture the podcasts when they reappear, sign up at the blog as the Feedburner feed will include the mp3 file. There’s a stack of articles and links to other Christian sites to go up, too.
• Garr Reynolds takes a wonderful look at logography, and in particular the World Cup logo (which I personally find revolting and am heartened to see that others do too). As Garr concludes, “Good presentation visuals support your message, they are functional and emotional…and they are a reflection of you - and on you - and your organization.” ‘Yay!’ to that.
• Shel Holtz has created a video tutorial on how to set up your hardware to record a skype conversation. Nice one, Shel. Of course, if you have the wonderful Skylook, it will just about do it all for you anyway…

Enough clippings for one day — I must off to bed, for tomorrow is yet another frantically busy day.

Technorati : Deakin University, Garr Reynolds, Kami Huyse, Presentation Zen, Ross Monaghan, Santos, Shel Holtz, Skylook, Skype, Stirling Family Church, Stuart Symons, Trevor Cook

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[Cross posted from The Adelaide Bookshelf]

A true measure of a book’s value to me, I have discovered over the years, is the number of post-it notes it has sticking out of it by the time I’ve finished it.

Some books only have a few stickies, some none at all (and the books’ authors usually never get another chance with me). In the case of Hugh Hewitt’s book ‘Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation that’s changing your world’ I thought it was a case of a book with far too few stickies in it to be of importance. I was wrong.

Although the book started with few stickies, now that I have finished it the book is festooned with little yellow flags.

Let me get what I don’t like about the book out of the way, so that I can concentrate on the many things I do like.

Firstly, Hugh hectors. He is a political commentator and chat show host in North America and he bashes his point home relentlessly. The point? That blogs are here to stay companies, individuals and especially CEOs (the target audience for this book) had better figure out a strategy for dealing with them.

Most assuredly, he does give example after example to support his argument. But the problem with the examples he uses are that they are probably only known about or relevant to North American bloggers. There is a very large world out here that doesn’t have a clue what Rathergate is about. Sure, he explains it, but the emotional punch is missing because we outside of the US don’t have an emotional attachment to Dan Rather.

About half of the book is taken up talking about North American politics and North American bloggers. For instance, I didn’t know that Glenn Reynolds of instapundit.com (the subject of a previous book review) is a highly regarded Law Professor at a major university and the most widely read blogger on the planet (at least as far as Hugh is concerned). Which again smacks of cultural snobbery — like I’d automatically know who Glenn was and so there’s no need to put any background info about him on his book jacket.

But such cultural snobbery (and strong whiff of imperialism) aside, Hugh’s book is absolutely chock-a-block with insight and ‘this is a great point’ moments (hence the plethora of stickies in the second half of the book).

Here’s just a few snippets:

• The blogosphere was directly responsible for the downfall of Senator Trent Lott by highlighting a ‘throw-away’ comment and how it linked into his previous political record. Mainstream media (the ‘MSM’ such as traditional newspapers, radio, tv and other such outlets) couldn’t afford the in-depth background research that the amateur, unpaid blogosphere regularly conducts.
• The newspaper the San Antonio Express discovered and ‘outed’ a serial plagiarist junior at the New York Times, Jayson Blair. But it was happened afterwards that defined the blogosphere as a fact-checking force, because as one pundit said, “who seriously believes that a blogger doing what Blair did could have survived more than a few months without being caught out?” It was the relentless discoveries and attention paid to the Times’ management, and in particular editor Howell Raines, by the ‘pyjamahadeen’ (a brilliant term coined by Jim Geraghy of KerrySpot for the bloggers who created massive and relentless blog storms around issues of truth in reporting) that led to Raines’ resignation and the serious besmirching of the Times’ reputation.
• The blogosphere was directly responsible for the ‘outing’ of Senator John Kerry’s “Christmas in Cambodia” and other fabrications
• The RatherGate Affair: Dan Rather, the host of 60 Minutes 2, ran a story asserting that now-President George ‘Dubya’ Bush had, in 1973, disobeyed direct orders, using as ‘proof’ of these allegations memos allegedly written by his then superior, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. Within hours of the show airing serious concerns about the authenticity of the memos was airing across the blogosphere, including concerns about the font used, font kerning and the ’slip’ that caused a ‘th’ to be superscripted, much as Word automatically does with dates. Word didn’t exist in 1973, nor was the machinery to create such superscripts in use other than with industrial printers and certainly not military Lt. Colonels and their typists. The amount of hard evidence collected in a few scant hours by the pyjamahadeen was beyond staggering.
• Hewitt, himself a Christian, likens the Information Reformation of now with the Reformation brought on, largely, by Gutenberg’s gift of the printing press and the spread of the Bible from the ‘elite’ clergy to the masses. For the first time the masses were able to read God’s Word for themselves and make their own minds up on it, not have a power-broker (clergy) tell them what to make of it. With the spread of ideas that printing made available, the church’s grip on theological absolutes was gone forever. So too with today’s Information Reformation: now that publishing is so easy and free (there are plenty of sites you can create a blog for free), ANYONE can become an information producer and publisher. The power of the lone voice is no longer located only in the lone voice — one voice can influence millions. Witness the aforementioned Glenn Reynolds — his blog attracts over 500,000 visits a day. I doubt Australia sells that many newspapers across the whole continent. And the crucial currency of blogs — trust — is slipping away faster from a constrained mainstream media faster than you can say ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’.
• Even though Technorati finds that, of around 46.2 million blogs, only around 55% are still ‘active’ three months later, that is now 25 million new publishers up against mainstream media — direct competition to MSM but curiously not themselves. Bloggers take great delight in not only telling and pointing out the truth (because they know that a lie is so easily found and publicised) but also in linking to each other, like a kind of virtuous circle. Oh, and according to Technorati, about 50,000 new posts are made each hour, 24 hours a day, around the world.
• Hewitt asks the very relevant question: if the blogosphere were around in 1985 would CocaCola have made such a hash of it? Would they have preferred to pose important questions around New Coke to the relentlessly opinionated world of first-person open journalism?

After having presented us with a full platter of facts and figures on ‘why’ the blogosphere exists, Hewitt then brings the argument closer to home to his target audience: what CEOs can do themselves.

He outlines a three-point strategy:

1. Prepare a chain of command — a blog storm will eventually hit your company; you just need to decide who has the authority to move quickly to address the storm when it hits
2. Prepare a policy on employee blogs — you already have bloggers in your company, whether you are aware of it nor not. Attempts at banning employee blogs is futile; they’ll just do it behind your back. So you need to think through and articulate a clear policy on employee blogging, what is acceptable and what is not, guidelines on the use of company information, best practise examples and what the consequences are for clear breaching of the rules
3. Prepare for transparency — the ‘biggie’ because most CEOs and senor managers are paranoid about telling the truth, and most employees want nothing less than the truth and know they are highly unlikely to ever receive it, even at their Annual Performance Review. The blogosphere thrives on truth and transparency; professional cynics can spot a lie or an obfuscation at a thousand paces. So when the swarm attacks you don’t lie, don’t insult them (because that will infuriate them more and you will deserve all you subsequently receive) and put you and your senior managers on record. Admit errors if errors have been made but if there is no error then repeatedly defend your position with patience, humility and a sense of humour. Respond quickly, clearly and transparently. Nothing stirs up trouble more than rumours borne of darkness.

Finally, Hewitt goes to some length to show the benefits of CEOs writing their own internal blogs — the engagement scores that can go up, the trust in the CEO and the company, the leadership shown by embracing this new and ‘won’t go away’ medium.

For example, how happy do you think employees would be to read the following in the CEOs blog one morning:

Before we get caught up in end-of-year inventory, I’d like to take a moment to thank James Jones, Sarah Smith, and Archie Young. Their manager, Joe Grounds, sent me an email that these three spent their weekend here, churning out the report we needed to provide the compliance manager at CalOSHA. Without that report, we’d have gotten some dings for lateness. Instead we are on time, our report is professional and complete, and we can report that we have had no injuries at the Jackson plant for the fourth year in a row. This stuff counts. You did a great job, James, Sarah, and Archie — and you too, Joe. I checked. I understand you were here with them. Thanks to you all.

What would the effect of that post be on the CEOs four thousand employees? Those mentioned would love the CEO for ever, other employees would notice that effort was noted, and managers would get the idea that their efforts are appreciated as well. Plus, the CEO would get a growing number of emails from managers and staff, allowing them to have a much greater ‘handle’ on their company and what is really happening within the company walls.

Hewitt sums up the blogosphere nicely on page 155:

The key to keep in mind is that trust drives everything. To build and maintain trust is a tremendously difficult thing, requiring patient attention to detail and discipline over long periods of time. Mistakes by bloggers will be forgiven, but not deception and certainly not stubborn attachment to falsehood.

Fantastic book. Amazon sells it (disclosure: I get 2% of the sale price), as does in Australia (who I recommend you purchase from if you are in the Southern Hemisphere; experience shows me he can get it here quicker than even Amazon). and reserve your copy — I can guarantee you won’t regret the AUD$32.95 purchase.

Technorati : Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation, Glenn Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt, instapundit

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If you haven’t already, drop by the Better Desirable Roasted Communications Café Podcast, the twice-a-week (usually), where Allan Jenkins and I chat about communication and other stuff for about 20 minutes.

Today’s summary:

• Are bloggers “weirdos” on the fringe of society. Well, why not? Lee and Allan ramble at length on self-expression & creativity, inspired by John Wagner and Jeremy Wagstaff.

• Cheryl Johnson asks Lee: “Do you think gender stereotypes of communication styles can be generalized to the entire workforce? and Are these styles influenced by national culture?” Allan and Lee don’t have a clue, but that doesn’t stop them from attempting an answer.

• Robert French leaves us an audio comment, weighing in on the “Is it Web 2.0 or just evolution” question.

Download [8mb] and take an 22 minute coffee break with Lee and Allan. And don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to catch every sparkling discussion as we pass the coffee pot around. And if you are an iTunes user, you can find our podcast on the iTunes Music Store (for free, of course!).

Technorati : allan jenkins, commscafe.com, jeremy wagstaff, john wagner, robert french

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And will they have free wireless broadband? Will this become my new ‘home away from home’?

Technorati : adelaide, starbucks

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… but a Hopkins-Jenkins conversation has never been successfully hijacked.

Matt Simpson, soon-to-be graduate of Auburn University, drops in on Lee and Allan to throw out some questions about advertising and PR. Listen in to living proof that two old fogies can handle tough questioning with a fair amount of aplomb.

Major topic: when celebrity bloggers move to a new place, how much of their brand is the new employer buying?

What do you think? Agree with us? Disagree? Drop your comments on the show post, or send a Waxmail to ‘comments at commscafe dot com’.

Download [8mb] and take a hijacked 18 minute coffee break with Lee, Allan and Matt. And don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to catch every sparkling discussion as we pass the coffee pot around. And if you are an iTunes user, you can find our podcast on the iTunes Music Store (for free, of course!).

We talked about: Matt Simpson, Robert French, the Marcom Blog, Erin Caldwell, the Forward Blog, Robert Scoble, Podtech, Steve Rubel, Cooper-Katz, Edelman.

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A few snippets from this morning’s chauffeur-driven limo trip to town:

• Donna Tocci shows how clueless and insensitive some petrol companies can be (”oh, really?” I hear you exclaim). In her post ‘Mobil on the Run? Not So Much‘ Donna tells of a less-than exemplary customer service attitude displayed not only by an employee, but also the company itself. Surely its communications department could have got this one better?

  As Donna says, “It also made me think that their marketing department doesn’t have a clue that ‘on the run’ doesn’t mean much to those that are expected to implement the slogan.”

• My old colleague-in-arms Trevor Cook takes a clueless journo (the high-profile Kohler) to task for his comments that “Blogging is where armies of unpaid non-journalists publish stuff just because they can, a sort of massive boom in vanity publishing.” Quite rightly Trevor scoffs. I’m just starting reading Hugh Hewitt’s ‘Blog: the Information Reformation’ and in the first couple of chapters he neatly dissects how this army of unpaid non-journalists now act as the guardians of truth for journalists who are either too lazy or too under-resourced to do their fact-checking homework.
• Trevor also points out why companies who fail to pay attention to their website are deserving of all the acrimony from disgruntled customers and social commentators that they will inevitably get. Serves them right, I say; but then again I’m in a bad mood after a night of distracted sleep thanks to Neville Hobson.
• Virginia Postrel (recommended to me by the wise and sagacious Allan Jenkins) points off to a startup that has a new way with bags, blogs and mass customisation. I just wish she’d publish the ‘full’ feed rather than just snippets for everyone’s feed reader.
• The Freakonomics guys provide a snippet of information about a hotel in Chicago (The Sheraton Chicago, in fact) that offers to confiscate one’s crackberry upon arrival and return it upon departure. Seeing as how I have had my nose permanently buried in my noisy notebook for over two months now, Mrs BetterComms has decreed that, with the handing in of this semester’s assignments tomorrow, the weekend will be a ‘computer free weekend’. This is my equivalent of cold turkey and already neighbours have been warned. If you read about random wanton and grizzly murders occurring in the Adelaide Hills over the next four days, please don’t tell the police about your suspicions, okay?

Ahh, the chauffeur has arrived at my destination. Enough blogging for one morning. Have a great day!

Technorati : Allan Jenkins, Donna Tocci, Freakonomics, Hugh Hewitt, Neville Hobson, Trevor Cook, Virginia Postrel

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