Blogs allow CEOs permission to stop being ‘corporate’

May 10, 2010September 12, 2013 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

There aren’t a lot of CEO’s who blog. Still. No one expects that of them. But there are many who -blog-like– speak their mind. So when people ask me for some examples, there are a few I usually refer to.

Kevin Roberts’ blog – KR Connect, the blog of the the Australian CEO of Saatchi Worldwide.

Steve Jobs’ blog –actually this is not Steve. It’s the celebrated, outed ‘Fake Steve’ blog, but it’s worth reading…

Mark Cuban’s blog. Calling himself BlogMaverick, Mark has been setting the tone for CEO-speak for a long tome.

Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. I hold Jonathan’s Blog responsible for infecting CEO’s with the idea that it was time to bring social media in from the fringes into the mainstream communication

Schwartz, the former CEO of Sun Microsystems, was frequently called things like ‘blogger in chief‘ for good reason. His blog at Sun set the tone for everyone else blogging at Sun. He was not the kind of person who had one set of communication rules for the corporate office, and another set of rules for the rest.

I’ve interviewed many CEO’s and VPs for articles and podcasts, so know when someone is not comfortable presenting his/her human side just because there’s a microphone or camera in the room. Others don’t even have to switch into homo sapiens mode –they are exactly the same when facing external audiences as they are when communicating to internal groups.

How does your CEO, or client communicate? Are they instant ‘blog material?’ Do you sometimes wish you could capture the big guy’s thoughts in a podcast or blog, knowing that if you ask him to write it down or send it through his PR/legal funnel it would come out as something nonsensical?

I don’t recommend a blog for everyone, but I do know that its discipline and format has a way of giving a senior manager the permission to stop being all stuffed up and corporate, and to be more authentic.

How to fly (through social media turbulence)

May 5, 2010May 8, 2010 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Airlines frequently fly into turbulence –not always the kind they are used to. Just ask United. Better still, just ask Southwest Airlines. Over the years since they began embracing a slew of social media tools, Southwest has done a grand job of listening and responding. Sure, they’ve made their mistakes, fixed them fast, and moved on.

There may be a huge difference between an airline and an airplane, but I thought of juxtaposing them because of some common lessons they have for all of us –not just people who communicate about objects with wings.

If you missed this case involving Boeing, it’s worth a second look. The setup:

Child draws lots of pictures of airplanes.
Child sends one drawing to Boeing.
Corporate office sends him a standard letter saying it does not accept unsolicited designs, and has destroyed the letter.

Sad? Legal? Damaging to brand? All of the above?

The boys father was crushed/confused. He writes a blog so he asked his readers what to do. Word got out. People came up with creative answers (including one that suggested writing the letter Boeing should have sent his son!) Boeing was forced to join the conversation at the late stage, and respond.

There are many lessons here. The first is about a canned response and a genuine response. So easy to do the former. But it’s out-of-place in a world where we make a huge din about being better at communications, great at listening yada yada.

To cut to the chase, Boeing Corporate (which uses this Twitter account that’s different from the one that talks of its engineering stuff) responded with aplomb, and thanked everyone for ‘supporting’ Harry Windsor, the child artist/airplane designer. “Supporting Harry,” as you might suspect is code for Punishing Boeing. Loosening them up. Humanizing them…

But we all live and learn. Boeing is a great company. They may have never in their wildest dreams of crisis planning imagined an eight year old would teach them a rapid lesson in communications. Neither do many organizations. So here are my takeaways from these two examples:

Plan for the unplanned: Social media adds a lot more turbulence, often the kind that cannot be anticipated by the most sophisticated ‘tracking’ tools on board.
Know your audience’s audience: No matter who your end-users or customers are, your audience –and your ‘followers’ are always larger than you thought.
Put humans in charge. A professional response is not as good as a human response. Many of us/you are trained in the former. Don’t check your humanity at the door when you walk into your office.

Social media is nothing special. It has no secret ingredient. It is nothing more than humanized communications, for a world that has done an awful job at it.

The power of the Ampersand

April 23, 2010April 24, 2010 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Amazing things happen when we mix two concepts in a beaker, shake it up & let the molecules of one mix with the other.

Now replace ‘concepts’ with ‘passion’, ‘motivation,’ ‘academic discipline’ or ‘technique’ and you see how attractive this becomes. Trouble is, old-style education tends to push people into specialization (for good reason) and jobs used to demand that employees get hired to do one thing and one thing alone (the factory job). Adding the ampersand to your studies or your career got you into trouble.

Today that mentality is shifting, and I really like how this challenge reflects that. It’s called The Power of AND. It’s promoted by a group holding the Sustainable Brands Conference. Topics at the conference include Design & behavior Change, Corporate Responsibility & Profits etc.

The conference is in June. From the best ideas submitted, one will be picked each week, and given a free virtual conference pass. If you have an idea that’s a combination of two radical concepts –um, techniques, disciplines, passions — go for it!

Need inspiration? Consider how these evolved:

Garbage & Rewards – RecycleBank
Car Rental & Time Share – ZipCar

Blocking and tackling social media distractions

April 19, 2010 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I speak to plenty of young people to whom Facebook is like email –something they leave on and check every few minutes. But they are chatting on other channels as well. If you look carefully some folks even check their phones for incoming mail at …church.

So the question I get asked is, whether TMS (too much socialnetworking) is killing our attention. How do you read a 300-page book, how do you watch a 2-hour movie, or listen to a keynote speaker without instinctively reaching out to your laptop or phone to comment/share/snipe?

We adults have a similar problem –TMI (too much incoming). nearly every Blackberry user I speak to complains of being a few hundreds of emails behind. I knew someone who two years ago, would tune out a speaker at a small-group discussion(for 10 – 15 minutes) just to respond to his incoming mail. It was embarrassing to watch!

I’ve been running into many people calling time out, addressing TMS and TMI. Two names you may recognize.

Joel Spolsky, writer for Inc. Magazine. In his last column, he analyzes why Too Much Communication is killing us.

Now, we all know that communication is very important, and that many organizational problems are caused by a failure to communicate. Most people try to solve this problem by increasing the amount of communication: cc’ing everybody on an e-mail, having long meetings and inviting the whole staff, and asking for everyone’s two cents before implementing a decision.

And Seth Godin, railing against Incoming.

That email, Facebook and message queue is a lot longer than it used to be. For some people, it’s now a hundred or even a thousand distinct social electronic interactions a day. It’s as if a genie is whispering in your ear, “I have an envelope, and it might contain really good or really bad news. Want to open it?”

It’s time to stop letting the genie take over our lives. It’s time to put the brakes ion email; to stop taking notes, to pay attention to the speaker. It’s time to join the conversation happening in front of you first.

The other conversations (online) could wait a few minutes couldn’t it?

Crowd-sourcing as internal communication tool

March 22, 2010March 22, 2010 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Smart mobs, crowd-sourcing, citizen journalism –have you noticed how these waves of outside influence keep crashing on our shores?

Howard Rheingold, in Smart Mobs, uses a powerful analogy of human intelligence and computers. If you consider thousands of computers in a building as heaters running at full capacity, he says, only a small part of the heat generated is being used to warm the building. The rest of the energy leaks outside. It could easily be distriuted to other parts of the enterprise.

Now consider the ‘leakage’ of intellectual capital in your office every day. Employees arrive at the workplace, power-up, and are left to run, but vast amounts of knowledge and ideas are untapped. The occasional survey, the large meetings where no one wants to raise their hand only scratch the surface.

Crowd-sourcing (despite books like this on the future of business) as a driver of big ideas, or as an internal communications / HR function has not taken off. When it has been attempted –in a controlled environment such as focus groups — the costs and time involved make it a very expensive nice-to-have.

So how do you connect the internal circuits of your human resource that occupy the building? I’ve come across voting tools, idea-generation apps and feedback systems. Here are a three:

IdeaScale – for community-level conversation tracking
ConceptShare – for teams of designers and Creatives to collaborate and generate ideas
GetSatisfaction -a tool for customers and employees to gather ‘social knowledge’

Feedback widgets are here –and coming soon to a mobile device near you. Many of them only go so far. Some experts even warn of getting entangled in intellectual property problems. But the big hurdle to consider is motivation. Engagement goes hand in hand with incentives -the old WIFM concept.

My client, Arizona-based GreenNurture has takes the concept of feedback and employee engagement further. Deeper!

Here’s how it works: In a company that wants to deploy a sustainability program, employees login to a social media-like app, come up with ideas, start comment or conversation threads, make pledges and vote on each others ideas. When hundreds of them start talking to each other, some idea gets refined, tossed out or voted up. The cream rises to the top, so to speak. There’s more granular information, including an assessment tool, deep reports etc –making sure no ‘heat’ is lost.

If you are interested, check the demo here!

Look for ‘Curators Needed’ signs –clues to your next job?

March 4, 2010March 4, 2010 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“The web needs editors,” someone remarked quite aptly when TMI (the acronym for that modern syndrome, Too Much Information) was beginning to drive people nuts.

Today the web needs curators more than editors. Lots of them. Corporate feedback sites are sprouting all over the place, so,

Who’s gonna sift through the comment streams for good ideas?
Who will prioritize which complaints need to be responded to before it flames out in other places?
Who might be the next breed of Principal Investigators –sleuths, rather than project managers– who turn this data into reports? And I mean well-written, business-case reports?

You will! (Or someone in India, if you’re slow to find these opportunities.)

As I continue to write about and support crowd-sourcing and citizen journalism, I come across many hidden ‘help wanted’ signs for curators. Not in Craigslist, but buried deep in the comments of YouTube, Facebook, the 98 heated exchanges at the bottom of the New York Times article etc. The 200-plus tweets and re-tweets with a hash tag (especially the tag #FAIL).

Yeah, I know who has time to read through these? CEO’s do, that’s who. And they are wondering why their marketing and PR teams are not telling them about it, despite all the analytics money being spent. The trouble with analytics and algorithm-generated charts is that they don’t translate into action items. A Curator with the attitude of an analyst) who can also come up with ideas will be hugely valuable in my reading of this trend.

I just recorded a podcast for GreenNurture on what crowd sourcing as an internal communications app might look like, and serendipitously ran into this story by Marc Gunther. Truly timely piece on curated crowd-sourcing by by Genius Rocket. (Wonderful headline, too: “Why 13,956 heads are better than one.”)

Why do I think this is timely and huge? I’ll give you three clues:

1. Feedback sites are big: And there are attempts to tap customer sentiments: http://uservoice.com

2. Customers are talking back. take a look at Mills Advisory Panel –soliciting feedback for General Mills customers. My Starbucks Idea – a great site for tapping into marketing and product ideas. But who’s gonna take all those ideas if it is another company? Take this comment:

“I am a Canadian partner and I have experienced a lot of frustration, confusion and grief since the new teas have been unveiled. The biggest concern is the lack of consistent pricing for tea lattes….”

It goes on with too much detail, possibly revealing too much inside info that would make some VPs cringe.

3. Wikipedia is a back-channel: Lots of ‘Curators’ Needed’ signs hanging out here. Noisy debates go on in the Talk Pages, and looking at these in your vertical will tip you off to other things.

You get the point. Everyone wants to listen to the customer but there are not enough people who can translate the conversations into actionable knowledge.

Sidebar: If you are interested,in why social media is so ready to gather front-line intelligence within a company, check this podcast I recorded with Derrick Mains recently.

My client, an awesome citizen journalist

February 28, 2010February 28, 2010 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I’ve always been a big promoter of citizen journalism. I’ve trained many people on the fringes of media, and followed all the developments in digital, community-based media. But I never imagined I’d have an opportunity like this –to work with someone at the 2010 Olympics.

As we head into the last day of a social media enriched, much tweeted Olympics (1.1 million Facebook fans) I like to share what I’ve learned from working with what I call an ad-hoc embedded, citizen journalist.

Some background: A few months ago I was been privileged to be asked to put together and work with a social media team at Promontory Club, in Park City, Utah. These amazing communicators –venue and event managers turned content creators/content curators –have begun supporting their PR and marketing efforts via social media.

One team member, the manager of the Outfitter’s Cabin, Sean Smith was invited to be in Vancouver. He happened to be a former member of the US Olympic ski team, but that didn’t automatically make him a social-media reporter. In a short time, however, he learned how vlogs, micro-blogging, photo-sharing sites and blogs work. We prepped him on how to file stories, knit together these daily reports and create a connection between this global event and Promontory members. No laptop involved!

When I briefed Sean I realized he had three things that would work:

Access — he would be in and out of the Olympic village, the venues, and has great rapport with the athletes.
Credibility – he had previously worked for a TV station
Passion – never to be under-rated, this is what makes social media communication so different

Using a Verizon Droid, Sean has been filing photos, tweeting and sending in content for the blog. Better still, he’s doing interviews with members of the US team, before and sometime immediately after an event.

Such as this report:

So what did I learn from this experience? Here are 6 lessons that would help anyone planning to do something like this with a citizen journalist.

1. Plan your angles and visual shots ahead –when it’s possible. Not all events let you anticipate the terrain. An event such as the Olympics is predictable –and not. You don’t know when and at what time you’ll get one-on-ones with the athletes –and medalists! But you do know where you might base your videos. (Check this sneak preview!) Low angle and long shots of steep inclines, close up of emotions etc. Look out for details that would intrigue.

2. Practice with different lighting conditions. Many events were held at night –not the best for video on a 5 mega pixel camera.

3. Have a backup plan for content uploads. We initially chose Flickr for the photo uploads, but when things didn’t work initially, we had Sean to switch to Twitpic.com, from where we grabbed the photos and moved to Flickr.

4. Keep videos short. I originally wanted to have Sean file 2-minute videos. But we quickly learned that it would require jumping through lots of hoops to get them to YouTube or the blog. Phones do have limitations. So instead of fighting the bandwidth problem, especially when it involves an international mobile roaming, a steady stream of short videos worked well.

5. Cover what the mainstream media isn’t. Having access to the athletes –and not just US athletes– was great. This included the fun side of things —downtown Vancouver, night life, former Olympic stars, even the Queen Latifas of this world. Or this image (right) of that snow needing to be airlifted into a venue!

6. Let new media shake hands with mainstream media. It doesn’t hurt to distribute your story -or the story about your story– through traditional media. Since my client is based in Park City Utah, we localized the international story through several call-ins to an independent TV station, PCTV in Utah. After all Utah has instant Olympic appeal having played host to the Winter Olympics in 2002.

Here are where to find our citizen journalist.

Video of one of the call-in segments: Video via Park City TV (and Facebook)

Posts and photos on the blog —with feeds from YouTube, Flickr and Twitpic

Photos uploaded to Flickr —during and after major events

Hoipolloireport

Angelo Fernando's blog since 2004

Best Practices

The power of the Ampersand

AdAge on the New York Times Reporter, writing fro DealBook, who resigned for ‘accidental plagiarism’

Lachlan Markay, of Dialog New Media, on the Tea Party infiltrators.

Josh Bernoff, on Twitter’s business model that might involve advertising

Michael Kelley, in Advertising Age, on Kitty Kelly’s latest unauthorized biography on Oprah

Slate’s Heidi Moore, on the news that Twitter content from as far back as 2006 is being archived in the Library of Congress

Susan Young, at Ragan.com on the ‘Seven Habits of Highly Successful Social Media Communicators’