July 13, 2007
BCR #33 - the vlog: 12th July 2007
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can even subscribe by email! Thanks for visiting!
And in today’s energy-packed episode I rant about Adobe not selling VlogIt! in Australia; Nel and Sheville’s new book ‘How To Do Everything With Podcasting’ and the major cause of concern that I have with it; answer Sallie Goetsch’s question about “why vlog?” (Happy Birthday, Sallie!); and ask why Debbie Weil seems to have made such a very large faux pax.
Debbie’s actions have become a temporary discussion point in the blogosphere, particularly around the notion of ethics. Tris Hussey has weighed in in defence of Debbie (albeit with a few caveats), and so has Steven Lewis (and the conversation there includes input from Debbie herself). The conversation is also very lively over at Allan Jenkins’ post and at Dave Murray’s. Even Neville over at FIR has vocally weighed into it in the latest edition (#257).
As I commented on Steven’s blog, the reason for my surprise at Debbie’s actions are thus, and I accept that perhaps this is a reflection of our different nationalities:
Despite the fact that I have created blogs for some of my clients, I would never solicit ‘comments’ for them. At most I have let the world know, via my own blog, that the new blog exists and link across to it. It’s up to the reader of my blog if they want to click and go. If I feel that a particular post has ‘legs’ that aren’t been seen by folks, I might blog about it on my blog and again include a link across to the post. But that is as far as I would go.
I agree with Tris Hussey and others that the reason people have not left many comments may well be because the blog is boring (and yes, I accept the legislative constraints Debbie’s client is under. But why brand the blog as she/they did? Why not brand it as something non-product associated and leave a very clear disclaimer that the blog is sponsored by the client?).
I agree with Tris — I think the “don’t tell them you know me” was a key element to the uproar. Tris kindly ascribes this to humour on Debbie’s part. I’d therefore love to believe this is true and look forward to Debbie confirming it.
And I understand why she left off the names of the other email addressees (for privacy reasons); but I think she could have, in the body of the infamous email, listed the names of those she was contacting (because it was a very obvious ‘blanket’ email sent out to a whole load of folks, not an individually crafted one-to-one email).
All in all Debbie has been a fabulous advocate for social media within organisations; I am thus surprised by how she has gone about this particular project. Again, it may be to do with nationality differences and the nature of promotion within a tough town like Washington compared with the very ‘British’ approach we in Australia/Adelaide have.
The video
Here’s the video — if you subscribe via email you may not see it, but you can always catch it over at YouTube, where you can also subscribe to receive word of every new edition of my vlog as soon as it gets published.
Technorati tracking other blogposts about this issue: 
Debbie Weil
Stumble it!
Filed under: Uncategorized
6 Responses to “BCR #33 - the vlog: 12th July 2007”
Leave a Reply
Please note:
1. If this is your first time commenting using the email address you have given, your comment will be held in 'moderation' and won't appear until one of us here at BetterComms Towers approves it. This stops spammers from flooding our posts with garbage. It may take up to 48 hours for your comment to appear -- sorry!
2. This blog runs the WP-Cache plugin, which reduces the amount of processing our host's server has to perform on this blog. The result for you is that our site crashes less. The downside is that sometimes it might take a minute or two for your comment to appear. Please don't resubmit your comment if it doesn't appear straight away. Please be patient and try refreshing your browser after a minute or two... Thanks, Lee
July 13th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Hey Lee, Good summary of what I said. It’s unfortunate how this happened. And I certainly feel for the folks at GSK blogging away and not getting traffic or comments–I think we can all relate to writing a great post and then not getting any comments or links–I still haven’t left a comment and probably won’t. Why? Eh, not really interested in the topic. What can I say about the product and since I was an industry insider for a long time (seven years), I’m not unbiased.
I think asking friends to visit a client’s or a friend’s blog to encourage them is fine. I think it’s just how you do the asking.
July 13th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
G’day Tris, thanks for your comments. I’ve added some extra links to this post (second para) which updates the conversation. Thanks again for your views… now, if we could only solve my LiveWriter problem as painlessly [smile]
July 14th, 2007 at 7:50 am
What I asked wasn’t why you vlogged rather than writing, but why you were using video instead of audio.
July 17th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Lee
That’s it. Blame 300,000,000 Americans. For one email. It’s our country’s fault.
We American constantly send underhanded emails to our friends asking them to do unethical things. That’ us.
But does that ever happen down under. Nooooooooo.
July 20th, 2007 at 1:01 am
This has been so blown out of proportion as to be comical, if it weren’t so painful for me. Two things: Tris got it right. The comment in my email “no need to say you know me” was a throwaway remark and a bit of a joke. It works fine in an email, but not when posted publicly on a blog. Second, traffic to GSK’s alli blog is growing. Nowhere did I say there wasn’t enough traffic. Third, let’s move on…
July 20th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Totally agree, Debbie — I’ve moved on (this was posted before our emails).