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Courtesy of a tip-off from my favourite tech blogger, Amit Agarwal, GoDaddy is now selling .me domain names.

Get in while your name is still available; you’ll only regret it later if you don’t.

Filed under: customer service, housekeeping, tools
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The rather clever Jasmin Tragas reminded me yesterday that even though it’s a new communication landscape, we bring to it our old, ingrained habits.

To wit: I often add pictures to my blog posts; usually these pictures are mashups of retro images and text, but every now and then I use pictures of attractive young women. Not without reason and to support a point I am making in that post, but they are young, attractive and female.

Jasmin pointed out that she very occasionally (i.e. hardly ever but at least once in a blue moon) forwards my emails on to higher/other management. Some of those images might not be wholly suitable for such distribution.

Because Jasmin works at IBM in a senior role that means other key people in the tech-comms world.

But I confess right here, right now, that the thought that someone would forward a post of mine to others simply never occurred to me. Honestly. Not even on my radar.

By letting me know that she occasionally does forward a post, Jasmin reminded me that even though this is a new communication landscape we still behave in ways that we are comfortable with.

So posts will still get forwarded, just like emails have been forwarded around the world since emails began.

And just as forwarded emails have the potential to attract all sorts of unwanted consequences, so too with forwarded posts.

Notes to self:

1. treat my readers with more respect

2. treat myself with more gravitas — sometimes being a ‘work from home office’ (step-)parent of teenagers, without the daily conversations with peers that an office-based role brings, means that your own self-esteem takes a hammering and you forget that other people might actually be interested in what you have to say

3. thank Jasmin publicly for taking the time and risk to contact me privately about it via Twitter

4. wish Jasmin a very happy 1st birthday for her WonderWebby blog

5. work harder at deserving to be on to her ‘wonderpeeps’ blogroll

Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, ethics, marketing, nonverbal communication
3 Comments

Gavin Heaton raises an important point over on his blog: that ‘expert’ is a very meaning-ridden word.

We are living in a time where the acquisition of knowledge is occurring at ever increasing speed. Thanks to search engines like Google and to personal knowledge networks like Twitter, we can all find, relatively quickly a preliminary answer to the trickiest of problems. For example, if I want to know how to write a social media release, I will find good quality links to Todd Defren, Lee Hopkins, a case study by Geoff Livingston and even a webinar by Des Walsh. I could also comb back through my own del.icio.us bookmarks (or those of others), or I could reach out to my personal knowledge network (aka Twitter) — or just enlist the charming Connie Reece.

None of this makes me an expert.

Gavin goes on to say,

How then can I, in all honesty, advise clients/companies/ anyone about "social media"?

What I do have is experience, access to people who are way smarter than me, an openness to learning new things and an ability to bear a certain amount of risk. I try before I buy. Oh, and I have failed, and even embarrassed myself.

I claim no expertise in social media … I am continually learning too much (and working on shifting ground) to consider myself anything other than a charlatan. And I have taken the words of Connie Reece to heart — "If someone tells you they are a social media expert, run".

Now, I personally don’t agree with Connie on this point (and as Connie is a very skilfull communicator herself and one who I would call an ‘expert’ she knows that we agree to disagree on this, but still adore each other’s minds and wisdom).

I think being an ‘expert’ is no great ‘con’, as Gavin and Connie would say.

But I agree that the word ‘expert’ can be bandied about with complete abandon and recklessness of ethic.

If someone comes to you proclaiming ‘expertise’ in anything, please please please do your homework.

Read their blog (assuming they have one), listen to their podcasts, google them, find out who links to them and who they link to (who you keep company with says much about you).

And as for Gavin, I respect him immensely for both his writing skills and his honesty. He’s one of those rare folks with whom I’d enjoy sharing some of Sydney’s finest coffee.

Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, ethics, podcasting, videoblog
6 Comments

The NAB PR fiasco that I blogged about earlier in the week has still got ‘legs’, as they say in the football world (allegedly).

My good friend Gerry McCusker was finally granted an interview with the PR agency responsible (Cox Inall, who “coxed it up good an’ proper-like”).

As I have been banging on for a good few years now:

The communication landscape has changed!

As Hewlett Packard have just found out (tip of the battered Akubra to Gerry), ’social media’ means that your ‘little old audience’ is potentially no longer little. Nor silent. Nor acquiescent.

For goodness sake, put your egos aside and think about what is best in the long term for your business or your client’s business. If you or your agency doesn’t have the expertise involved do not be afraid to call in an expert. That’s what Clarity Communications in Perth has done with me, and I applaud their foresightedness and ethical responsibility to their clients.

As Gerry points out, it is now YOUR responsibility to check if we are recording our interviews with you, and in what form we may or may not publish them.

I strongly recommend you read Text100’s excellent survey on the blogosphere and how blogger relations should now be a definitive part of your strategy, be you client or agency.

Take note:

• The Social Media News Release [video introduction to SMNR] is key to gaining our respect. Use it, or lose it
• We want to be treated professionally, not just as an electronic deposit box for your endless releases
• We want to build up a long-term relationship with you, Mr/Ms Agency, therefore please start a conversation with us before you hammer our inboxes
• Be a part of the blogging community that you wish to engage with. If you don’t know who and what the key players and key issues are, we won’t take you seriously. And that goes for Twitter, too, as Nic Hac quite rightly points out

Several years ago Seth Godin wrote Permission Marketing. It was a book that I devoured and tried to encourage clients of mine to read — none of them could be bothered.

Please don’t make that mistake yourself. Nip down to Dymocks, or order it at Amazon. Read. Inhale. Or hire me, or Trevor Cook, or Laurel Papworth, or Stephen Collins or Gerry McCusker.

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers: Seth Godin

Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, ethics, marketing, micro-blogging, tools
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As my final paragraph says: you only have yourself to blame.

Shel Holtz recently reported on a presentation he sat through.

Well, perhaps ‘sat through’ is the wrong term; ‘sat riveted and spell-bound’ might be closer to the truth.

I have seen the future. Advertisers and marketers should be afraid. Very afraid.

I spent today with a client. It was an interactive session with members of the company’s communications team, but during the last couple hours, the group watched a presentation by students from Emerson College, finalists in this year’s National Student Advertising Competition, sponsored by the American Advertising Federation.

The presentation I saw—one of several trial runs before the students head to the finals in Atlanta on June 8 and 9—was one of the best I’ve seen in years. These kids—who have already made it through several rounds of competition—put on a 20-minute pitch that rivals the best I’ve seen from polished professionals with years of experience. From their personal delivery to their presentation support materials, to the written plan, their work could compete—and win—against any agency out there.

All of which is beside the point. The point is their organic understanding of the way social media and traditional communication have integrated. They’re not gushing enthusiasts proclaiming social media this and social media that. Social media is just part of their lives and they understand the way they—and the target demographic established for them by the competition rules—use these tools as day-to-day vehicles for communication.

And these kids nailed it. Sure, there were some quibbles and ideas for improvement here and there, but they nailed it. If I could package these students up and bring them with me, I’d put them in front of every communication leadership team I meet and say, “See? This is what I’m talking about.”

Some agencies will be very lucky to hire these kids. A smart one would hire them as a team, but I doubt there are any quite that smart.

There are two possible outcomes of the competition next week. The Emerson team could win, and I suspect they have an excellent chance. Or, they could lose, which has even more significant implications. If they lose, it means the Emerson team isn’t a fluke, a rare combination of raw talent guided by a savvy professor. It means there are a lot of advertising and marketing students poised to assume positions in agencies and companies where they can bring their organic understanding of the new media world to bear. They can work on campaigns based on their innate understanding of new communication models.

For all those communicators putting off learning about social media, hesitating, resisting, this is very bad news. You could quickly become expendable as agencies populate their ranks with those who (and I really do hate using this phrase) “get it.” [emphasis is mine - Lee]

That last paragraph sums it up for me. I’ve been saying this for a long time, but perhaps you will listen if someone else says it: if YOU don’t get up to speed with these new technologies and this new communication landscape, then those coming in underneath you will. They will take your job from under you.

If, as a business communicator, you are irrelevant to your company then why should you continue to receive your salary? Say goodbye to your nice house, your nice car, your kids’ private educations, your wine cellar, your holidays on Hamilton Island.

You only have yourself to blame.

Filed under: PR, Second Life, Second Life & 3D virtual worlds, blogging, customer service, ethics, internal communications, marketing, micro-blogging, podcasting, public speaking, tools, videoblog
2 Comments

Further to my rant the other day about the cluelessness of PR agencies in Australia, a fevered series of emails has crashed into your humble correspondent’s inbox.

Most of them are from agency seniors who took umbrage at my labelling of them. However, as they are all very experienced practitioners, they framed their comments in positive, non-combative language, which is fabulous and shows why they are at the top of the tree.

In distilling the wisdom from their communications I came to the following conclusions:

• PR and communication agencies ARE discussing Web2.0 with their clients, and these clients ARE interested.
• Of the many tactical solutions to communication challenges both within and outside an organisation, social media initiatives are not the quickest, simplest or cheapest. So, as Anthony Hasluck from Clarity says, "other things are being done first."
• Social media initiatives are resource intensive (no news there) and not everyone wants to contribute. This is something I have always said — only about ten percent of any population group will be content creators (‘prosumers’ in the new lexicon), the others will be the consumers and only a small percentage of these folks will actually ‘spread the news’.
• We are all time-poor — consultant, employer and employee alike. This creates two challenges: 1) no one has time to create and add additional material to their intranet/extranet/ internet/web2.0 offering without some other task having to be sacrificed; and 2) few people have the luxury of time to read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch vidcasts, contribute to wikis, etc.
   
  Yet I argue that spending 15 minutes a day skim-reading through the headlines in your rss feed reader (FeedDemon, say, or Google Reader) can give you a personal edge over your competitors (even if they are in the same office as you), as well as enhance your life. You may be Joanne Juniper, the Accounts Junior, and think that blogs and stuff are irrelevant to you in your current role, but what about a future role? Wouldn’t it be handy to have knowledge about industry trends, about possible future employers, about what the industry pundits think will be the implications of a piece of legislature the Government is considering introducing?
   
  You may have the luxury of driving yourself to work each day, but as fuel prices increase that luxury may not last; car pooling, public transport (woeful as it usually is) and even home-working will become larger features in your life. So while you are sitting in the passenger seat in the pool car, or sitting on the bus, train or tram, or saving yourself that hour-long commute by wandering over to your laptop in your pyjamas, you have the opportunity to update yourself on the incredible world you live in.
   
  I also appreciate the resistance from employees who feel imposed upon if they are ‘encouraged’ to contribute. They probably won’t get paid for it, nor rewarded in any way. This is an issue we touched on in a recent edition of Mark Jones’ superb podcast ‘The Scoop’ (the most subscribed-to and downloaded business podcast in Australia, according to iTunes). There is no doubt this is a management headache.
   
  But if it were such a headache how have companies like British Telecom, American Electric Power, ING, National Research Council of Canada, IBM, Microsoft, Nortel, Altana and many more solved it, because those companies have high participation rates in their internal web2.0 initiatives? 
   
  [More details about these initiatives in the Melcrum report ‘How to use social media to engage employees’, to which I contributed some material.]
• PR and communication agencies are atrocious at self-promotion. This is probably more of a general cultural problem than one particular to our industry; we have that ‘British’ reluctance to ‘blow our own trumpet’ lest we be seen as egomaniacal. But if the industry reached out to the pundits, such as your humble scribe, to let them know what work IS being done, then we ALL (agency and general industry reader alike) would be able to puff out our collective chests in pride, certainly more so than the industry does at the moment, what with one ethical and reputational scandal after another.
   
  Perhaps the agencies could make more of a ‘blogger outreach’ effort to keep folks like me informed.

I thank all of the folks who emailed me to join in this discussion, and who contributed to the comments in my previous post about this. I particularly thank Anthony Hasluck from Clarity Communications and Antonia Christie from Text100 for their insights, views and hopes about this issue.

I close with Anthony’s closing comments in one of his many erudite emails to me (from sunny downtown Seattle, no less!):

I understand your frustration but a lot of people do actually "get it" with blogs. They are just not going to "do it" right now.

The solution, find some way of turning off all the other electronic crap everyone gets hit with in their daily lives and then blogs may come into their own.

A lovely idea, but it will probably never happen, so we’d just better get used to finding ways of filtering the information and receiving it in ways that work for us (and acknowledging that what works for me may not work for you, and what works for me one day may not work for me the next).

—————

Related posts: The state of comms in corporate Australia and Why don’t Aussie PR companies get it?

Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, internal communications, podcasting
6 Comments

My good mate Gerry, of PR Disasters fame, recently presented at the FroComm PR Summit in Sydney, as also reported by Paul McKeon.

His finding? As he lamented over the phone at the end of the event:

possibly only 6 out of the 120 or so event attendees are active in the blogosphere.

That’s a scant five percent. Five percent!

Gerry went on to explain why the figure was so low:

I teased out the reasons why in the breakout workshops, but mostly it’s:

• lack of knowledge about where to start [Lee - in a nation recognised worldwide as comprising individual early adopters of technology? Why the fear?]
• concerns over legitimising ‘rogue’ comments
• fear of being engulfed by the new workload and,
• not really relevant for our kind of company [Lee - Gerry said that it was this finding that blew him away].

Sorry? Not Really Relevant?

NOT REALLY RELEVANT??????

What in twelve shades of buggery are they thinking? How can online reputation management not be relevant?!?!?!?!

Don’t the PR agencies have a responsibility to their clients (let alone their own staff, who need jobs to pay mortgages) to stay on top of these developments?

However, unlike some when presented with this information, I reckon this is a fabulous opportunity!

The utterly clueless PR agencies around Australia will eventually have to secede their clients over to those consultancies who do get this stuff, like maybe Text100* or Hill & Knowlton, or to individual reputation management and relationship management consultants like Trevor, Gerry and yours truly, inter alia.

I am prepared to help them; I know Trevor is and I know that Gerry is. I have no idea what either of them will and do charge, but I can assure you that I don’t come cheap. You get what you pay for. Noblesse oblige

——————-

* although even Text100 don’t have any real credibility in Australia yet. I see no member of the AsiaPac team blogging on the Text100 corporate blog or their .com.au domain being anything other than a redirect to their main and very old website. I hope you’re paying attention, Antonia! Isn’t it about time you unwrapped the Text100 AsiaPac site and let the public marvel at its beauty, rather than resting on the laurels of the Text100 Second Life team in the US?

And lest you think that I ‘have it in’ for Text100, wither any of the other big agencies in Oz: Edelman? Fleishman-Hillard? Burson-Marsteller? Weber Shandwick? Ogilvy? Porter Novelli?

——————

Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, ethics, marketing
8 Comments

A great video popped up on my radar yesterday and I’ve been wondering how to share it with you.

What pithy comment would I make? What clever bon-mot or witticism would I use to intro/outro it?

Couldn’t think of one, so here’s the best video I’ve seen on why video can be such a powerful communication tool.

[I was once in business with someone who thought YouTube was only for kids and funny, wacky, zany, mad-cap stunts. No amount of facts to the contrary, no list of companies and corporations who used YouTube would convince him otherwise. It was one of the reasons I dissolved our business partnership -- I no longer have the patience to work with the terminally stupid. See here and here for two recent examples of great YouTube usage]

Filed under: customer service, marketing, tools, videoblog
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