Best Practices

Blogging and micro-blogging, joined at digital hip

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I can’t stress enough how easy it is to connect the dots between your communication channels using digital media, if you plan ahead to do so.

Passport To Digital Citizenship
To “Tweet or Not To Tweet?”  |  2nd Webinar in the 6-part series on Social Media

I pointed this out toward the end of the webinar on Monday (it was Sunday night here in Arizona) as Steve England, Gary Campbell and I were presenting at the second webinar on social media.

While Steve was presenting I took this photo of one of our screens (the one bringing in a Skype video feed from the venue in Colombo). Here’s what I did:

Notice the attendees who had logged in –visible on the bottom left of this photo. Also, on the right is Tweetdeck, through which we were monitoring the hash tag #USELK2010 that we were using for the event.

Cross-posting this from the webinar blog.

Live blogging, Wimbledon style

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

A lot has happened since I played a bit of ‘media tennis’ in 2008, watching Wimbledon . IBM had introduced the ‘Slam Tracker’ and I was toggling between the TV coverage on NBC,  watching the scores update online, and listening to ‘Radio Wimbledon’ streamed over the website.

This year, I find the live blog adds a new ‘camera angle’ so to speak. Check this one, covering the women’s game with prose like this about Tsveti Pironkova, who went on to beat Venus Williams:

“Tsveti is tserving up a tstorm. Strong but above all accurate. Bepa’s not getting a look-in at all and is totally on the back foot as Tsveti is following up her services with deep ground strokes.”

Enter the Red Button: The media is also covering Wimbledon in new ways. Take the case of BBC. For those of us in North America who don’t have the interactive TV experience that the Brits have had (I’m talking pre-internet, analog interactivity of Ceefax etc) there’s something called ‘PLASMA teletext content management solution.’

Today there’s the service known as the Red Button from BBC INteractive (BBCi). It is complemented by the functional red button on the new remote. Viewers watching Wimbledon, could select to watch the game from different courts, or engage in a discussion online.

Then there’s the podcasting and ‘radio’ coverage –a.k.a. Radio Wimbledon. Once again a great blend of behind the scenes information, rather than the volley-by-volley coverage we tend to get. This is how the blogosphere can provide a richer experience, whether you are at or following a conference, or an international event. I’ll end with this bit of writing by one Matt Hill, from the Radio Wimbledon blog:

Me? I sit in a small, windowless room at the end of the day and put the highlights together with a popular song. And I love it. This is for two reasons:

1. I suffer from chronic hayfever. I hate the grass, and the grass hates me.

2. It’s my chance to inflict my preferred music on everyone else.

In the end, this year, I settle for the live radio —that you can listen to here. As one listener’s commented (read on air by the broadcaster) “Who needs NBC, when we can have Radio Wimbledon.”

Crowd-sourcing employees in Phoenix

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Incentives and employee motivation go hand in hand, as we have been noting here.

So this story strikes close to our heart, since it is right here in Phoenix. It’s not some hi-tech company doing this. It’s the City of Phoenix!

You may not hear the word ‘insourcing’ often, because its evil nemesis outsourcing gets so much of press. But drawing ideas from the well that’s within the organization is often overlooked. Often there are no mechanisms in place for ideas to bubble up, resulting in apathy or timidness in generating suggestions.

This story by Lynh Bui today (in the Arizona Republic)  talks of 25 out of 175 ideas being implemented in 2009-2010. That’s about a 11 percent success!

Now what if the City of Phoenix was to open up the valves in the employee idea reservoir, and say, aim at generating 720 ideas next year (a measly 60 a month). That same 11 percent rate would then triple the number of implemented ideas.

Incentives are great. But many employees don’t always wait for these to get started. Bui’s observation is spot on: “Employees aren’t necessarily turning in ideas just for the awards.”

Thanks for attending the webinar!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Webinar on social media - US Embassy, Colombo Sri LankaQuick note of thanks to all the attendees at the webinar on blogging, yesterday. (Sunday night here, although it was still the 21st in Sri Lanka.)

Dan Wool Steve England, and I enjoyed being able to share our ideas, and answer your questions.

The application, DimDim, did cause us a hiccup for the audio at the second location, but we know exactly what the problem is and how to fix it in the next sessions.

Since this was a session on blogging 101, I created a basic blog for the attendees, on the fly. I will be using it to update content for the next few sessions on the other key elements on social media.

Here is a link to it.

Does your company have an idea funnel?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Everyone has ideas, right? You hear them in the most unexpected places. In the gym, waiting in line for check-in at the gate, and at places like …Quirky.

Quirky?

It’s one of the latest in the batch of idea generating sites, where the wisdom of the crowds reigns. Runs riot, really. A wide open pasture, with the two ingredients ideas thrive on –rewards and recognition.  OK, make that three things. Add ‘Community’ too.

Quirky.com is a fast-paced idea hub, where people come up with sensible, practical solutions that may not be as quirky. It urges the community with this:

The horses are at the gate, the gun’s about to fire… ladies and gents, step right up and place your bets. We have a bunch of new product ideas for your perusing pleasure.

The “Foolproof Patio Composting Bin” had this detailed sketch. (Enlarge it by clicking on image.) Another stylish spatula set was on sale, because it went from idea to market because enough people voted on it!

How it works is Quirky’s product development team takes an idea and lets the community vote on it. They ‘pre-sell’ the product and then manufacture it. Revenues are shared with the inventor/idea generator.

So what if companies could take this process and let it loose among employees? What would it take to create an idea funnel that taps the passions and ideas that arrive with us at work?

Managers who are receptive to feedback and product development suggestions tend to open the funnel at formal brainstorming sessions. These are not exactly the  moments when the most crazy (or should I say ‘quirky’) ideas hit us. Quirky.com is just one of the ways to get your employees’ creative juices flowing. A few others are beginning to try their hand at funneling.

And you thought that My Starbucks Idea was just a bunch of over-caffeinated people with light bulbs going off in their heads…

Should BP spin its wheels on its pesky little PR problem?

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

I bet this will be question that many presenters on crisis communications and PR turn to –at the IABC World Conference in Toronto this week, and many other events.

Variations of this question could come range from “can social media rescue a company’s reputation,” to “Is this a warning shot for corporations dabbling in social media?”

You could say BP which has the  nation’s largest environmental crisis on its hands should ignore the PR disaster they have inherited (as Len Gutman at ValleyPRBlog noted, “There are some things PR can’t fix”) and stick to fixing what it has wrought. It’s near impossible for them to address the ‘wisdom’ of the passionate crowd leveraging new media.

Take these responses to the oil spill:

BP Logo

  • The BP Logo Redesign Contest. I’ll don’t need to tell you what this means in a Web 2.0 world where images are shared, commented on and archived forever.
  • Wikipedia edits. Lots of activity on the discussion pages of BP’s Wikipedia page, where editors this week seem to be dredging up –still unpublished– unsavory details of cancer etc.

In the face of all this, what in the name of crisis communications is the value of the full page ad in the New York Times, and some of those TV spots? Is there any value in using old media Tylenol-type tactics to fix the situation BP is in? I recall BP used to run a great series of ads, when it was re-branding, that said things like “It’s time to go on a low carbon diet.”

I think its time for BP to go on a low PR diet!

Not all PR agencies get it wrong

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I received one of those dreaded pitches this week from a PR firm in London.

It had the trademarks of having being picked from a list of bloggers and freelance writers: It started Press Release….

But this one was different. It didn’t have “no-reply’ or some garbled name as its sender. It also had a headline that made me want to open it and read. It was about the PR firm’s client, BBC World News.

You might wonder how relevant is that? I could have signed up for all manner of things on the World Service. But the topic was a series of shows Hard Talk On The Road –on Sri Lanka. It may sound dead simple, making sure the subject was in line with the reader. But let me frame it this way. I get so many of these PR pitches that it sometimes makes me wonder where we have taken this form of communication.

This is an industry (PR and Marcom) where everyone is screaming Web 2.0, every consultant, conference presenter and digital marketing agency is throwing out terms such as ‘Social Media Release” and RSS in every slide deck, and every book that has been published on the subject since Cluetrain Manifesto advises that ‘markets are conversations.’  In other words, stop spamming and start talking.

But all my colleagues at ValleyPRBlog, for instance, say the same thing. We are getting drowned in ridiculous PR Spam. We only complain off and on, and that, too when someone really ticks us off, or someone like Chris Anderson issues a fatwa, and everyone nods their heads and says ‘serves them right.’

But in the past 10 days I got two pitches that were spot on! Two! As such, rather than outing the bad ones, I like to hold up the good agencies and the great PR folk who do one simple task -take time to understand their audience.

  • The first was so good, from Gutenberg Communications, I have agreed to interview the CEO of the company –on Monday. If you’re interested, stay tuned!
  • And there was this from Parys Communications whose pitch was so simple, I could have hit the delete button.

As a writer I give every pitch a chance. If you take the time to filter, we will take time to read!

Weary of PowerPoint? Fire your imagination with Prezi

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Sure, there are great templates for PowerPoint. But quite frankly I do better when explaining myself on the back of a napkin –with a little help from the book by the same name.

But this week I’ve started teaching myself a great new application for presentations, called Prezi.

Naturally my first one is for Public Radius. Take a first look

Here’s why I love Prezi:

  1. It lets you control the focal points and flow of the presentation -by tilting words, zooming in on words and images etc.
  2. Once you figure out how the striped control icon (the ‘transformation zebra’) works, you could add elements and move them around as you would when brainstorming on a scratch pad
  3. Because you can move laterally or diagonally, you could adjust your story line on the fly as new ideas emerge.
  4. It’s easy to embed other digital content –video, audio etc –something I will get to in the next phase
  5. The best part is your presentation on this platform is designed to be connected to other social media venues. Which is exactly what Public Radius is all about–connecting the dots!

Three things to do before you ‘sell’ social media to anyone

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

I hate using the word sell in a way that really means ‘influence’ or inform. But there are some times when you as a communicator need to sell the idea upstream because, frankly, no one seems to have the courage to broach the subject.

I was talking to someone in an association the other day and he sort of shielded his mouth and lowered his voice to tell me “our website sucks.” I’m sure you have had that kind of experience. Then he went on to say that most people agreed that the content was so badly laid out, and the delivery was soooo not in keeping with new media, that the higher-ups had decided to revamp the site. But still, no one wants to be the first, or loudest, to say that ‘we need to plug into some social media strategies – fast.”

How do we tell them and prove to them these are the things we need to do, he asked? I was tempted tp say make a list, but I held back.

I came across a “Five things to do” article (on executive buy-in) at Ragan Communications that was one of those. It is a great list and I happen to agree with the steps. But I worry about numbering these, and even putting a finite number to it.

I know, I know! I titled this post “Three things” but you will discover why in a bit.

The writer, Frank Strong, asks you who dare to sell the idea to the big guys to take these steps:

  1. Get the facts
  2. Identify customers and prospects
  3. Review the competition
  4. Know your ‘Use Cases’ –a  buzz phrase that means what-if scenarios. Among  many other things!
  5. Manage expectations

To which I would add:

Identify related topics and conversations that the company ought to be addressing. He covers part of this in#3. But apart from responding to queries, senior management might like to know the blind spots and what might not seem obvious, and why this ‘chatter’ could be responded to.

Provide a plan of action. Sounds simple. But most people tend to want to wait for the green light to provide the steps that might be taken. By outlining, however basic, the road map you will might take, makes the executive more confident that this is not just another “let’s throw something and see if it sticks” idea.

Work the back-channel. Execs often have their ear to the ground and randomly check the pulse of people who have opinion credibility. Get to these first if you can. See if you can have their buy-in even at a basic level, so that they may not be the ones who make of break the deal.

So here’s my list of things to do.

  1. Seek out the blind spots
  2. Sketch your road map.
  3. Get lower heads to nod
  4. Ask permission later

On that last point, sometimes you need to get things moving before you can bring the heavy lifters in. Social media always lets you try-before-you-buy. (Can’t see that happening with say, a  TV campaign or magazine inserts!) Start a Twitter account even if no one has approved of one. The worst they could do is shut it down. This gives you the up-seller a way to reach deep and wide and check the pulse, so that you can then say you have dabbled in this thing and have acquired … (provide numbers and details here.) Same with other channels whether it is starting a LinkedIn group, a Flicker account, or guest blogging for a friendly vendor or alliance.

So yes, there are four suggestions in my “Three Things.” The point is, there could be four or fourteen; they can (and should) vary for every situation.

Make your own list! Don’t follow mine, for goodness sakes!