Ian@work

RSS Starter Kit

If someone who isn't a techie asks you "What's RSS?" I suggest you send them here.


Technorati Tags: rss, syndication

Follow Up on Getting Blogging

Scoble notes that he didn't do a good job of representing blogging to Amazon employees:

I didn't represent blogging very well and didn't back up the thesis of our book very well (that blogging will improve the way businesses talk with customers).

He follows up with anecdotal evidence of blogging companies' success but admits that he didn't have hard numbers to back his thesis. I'm glad he sees the need to present a stronger argument; a good start would be to stop inferring that blogging equals company success, and not blogging is a sign of falling fortunes. And, saying that you're "pleased" with responses to corporate blogs, as he states Boeing and GM have done, doesn't say anything about blogs' effectiveness.

I'm sincere when I say bloggers need to come up with better arguments - arguments that strike a chord with corporate marketers - in favor of the medium. It's not about denying the power of blogging - it's about demonstrating it to those who are skeptical.

Technorati Tags: scoble, nakedconversations, Amazon

Keynote

I frequently give presentations to different kinds of groups. In the past I've used Powerpoint as a backdrop. I'm a pretty restrained Powerpoint user. Few slides, few words, no animations or other distractions. Those are my rules.

This week I finally got around to trying Keynote. I'm hooked. It's more intuitive than Powerpoint and allows me to quickly create the kind of simple, elegant slides that I like. A presentation that would have taken me a couple of hours to design and tweak in Powerpoint came together in a few minutes. One simple but major difference: Templates look like they were created by a designer. They're simple, plain, elegant. When you build a presentation you don't feel like the content is competing with a graphics-laden background.

Why didn't I try this earlier?


Technorati Tags: keynote, presentation

Is Blogging Just About Getting It ?

If brands won't blog, does that simply mean they don't get it? That seems to be Scoble's and Israel's position. Israel is particularly bothered by a disagreement with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who challenged the Naked Conversations authors to "abandon their fuzzy group hug approach" and offer up a hard argument in favor of institutionalizing blogging at Amazon.

Vogels' point of view is refreshing, and it does the practice of blogging a favor by moving the discussion past the simplistic argument that blogging = "getting it."

Amazon clearly has a well-defined strategy for engaging their customers but it doesn't go far enough to satisfy Scoble, who wants to get into their employees' heads in order to understand what makes them tick:

I guess that's why I'm different than a "consumer." I wanna know what's on the minds of the people creating products and services, and, I'd love to have conversations with them about their products and learn some stories so that I can better evangelize their work.

He wants relationships and he wants to to evangelize. But is that what most customers - even those who like Scoble reject the "consumer" label - want?

• Do customers want relationships with every company that gets their business, or for those companies to give them a great experience?
• Do customers want to evangelize or simply share those great experiences without becoming brand champions? And yes, I'd say there's a distinct difference, particularly after reading one too many examples of the Cingular 2125 meme. Or maybe it's just me.
• When customers have problems do they want dialog or do they want to the problem fixed and their distress acknowledged?

This isn't to say that plenty of companies couldn't stand to take a ride on the cluetrain and couldn't benefit from blogging, but I've talked to enough marketers in companies large and small to understand that they're not buying the "blogging is getting it" argument. Particularly since it doesn't arm them with what they need to sell it to others in their organizations.

The maturation of blogging as a medium doesn't mean diluting it, taming it, or subjugating it in a thousand other ways. It simply means it's time - past time - to stop evangelizing it and start making a solid case that doesn't revolve around nebulous notions of whether or not someone "gets it."

Technorati Tags: cluetrain, scoble, nakedconversations, Amazon

A very bad business idea

Wondering what to do with the information on those business cards you've collected from customers, prospects, friends, family, vendors, and who knows who else? That's right - sell it. Don't think of it as turning cold calling salemen, spammers, and other complete strangers loose on those who have relationships with you. Instead, think of it as helping others while - first and foremost - helping yourself.

On the surface, Jigsaw is bad enough. But look at the privacy policy, which reassures members that their information, unlike that of the poor innocents who are stuck in Jigsaw's business database, is plenty safe. It's almost to the point of self-parody.


Technorati Tags: jigsaw, privacy

Review: "Naked Conversations"

I previously mentioned that I was reading Robert Scoble's and Shel Israel's Naked Conversations: how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers, and would offer a review at some point. Well, "some point" took longer than I expected. Sorry.

Agency folks and corporate marketers who haven't spent much time in the blogosphere will help themselves by reading this book. It's a well-researched primer on why to blog (or not), how to blog (and not), and who's blogging (or isn't, shouldn't, or won't). There are minor inconsistencies - Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who counter to Scoble/Israel's advice doesn't encourage anyone below him in his organization to blog, gets a pass because he's "consistently interesting." And there is flawed reasoning, like the authors' tendency to align corporate fortunes with those corporations' stances on blogging. Their sense that the "fortunes of [Apple and Google] are slipping a bit" comes off as wishful thinking; there's nothing to substantiate that the lack of blogging cultures at those companies is responsible.

Naked Conversations ultimately falls flat by not addressing some bigger issues that come with corporate blogging. And you can see those failings in the fallout from Scoble's bad week that followed announcements and subsequent news stories that Microsoft is going to be late shipping their new operating system, Vista. Suffice to say, he took plenty of heat, let loose with some intemperate posts that called for the firing/shunning of a writer and editor, and then followed up with something of a mea culpa. Some bloggers applauded him, some accused him of being a corporate shill.

There's a strain of technoutopianism in Naked Conversations that implies that if you do the right things - get off the sidelines and into the conversation - you always have a competitive advantage over those who aren't blogging. This could be so, in the most general sense, but the reality is a whole lot more nuanced and the book does little to demonstrate what to do when the conversation isn't going the way you want. There's no scorecard for the Vista conversation debacle, but I'd be hard pressed to put this whole episode in the win column for Scoble and Microsoft. It's by no means a disaster - the conversation, that is - but you'll have to make up your own mind on the Vista delays.

Beneath all this is the question of staking your personal equity on the company you represent. Scoble and Israel address it from the corporate angle: Should companies trust employees to blog? But they have less to say on the issue of how a staffer comingles her identity with that of her employer. Face it, when you blog for a company you become identified with that company, for better or worse. You ride their highs and you can try to mitigate their lows, but make no mistake, those lows reflect on you, too. We're in a transitional period where companies are testing notions of transparency, but when business and blogger are out of sync it's the blogger whose reputation takes a direct hit. That's not to say that Scoble doesn't see more reward than risk, but he and Israel could have written a far more interesting book if they had addressed the implications (beyond simply being fired) of blogging for companies that are out of step with their customers, staff, and stakeholders. So if you're a communications manager considering blogging, you're left to sort out whether you're comfortable fronting a global forum for discussion of your company.


Technorati Tags: blog, transparency, nakedconversations, scoble

Email Problems

My apologies to those who are trying to send email to either the ianjoyce.com or augustcommunication.com domains. I'm having some problems which I hope to sort out shortly.

In the meantime you can reach me at ian_writes@yahoo.com.

[Update: I suspect that my email provider was blocking messages from specific domains. A switch to a new provider should take care of the problem, although you may experience isolated issues with sending email to ianjoyce.com or augustcommunication.com addresses over the next day or so. Sorry for the inconvenience.]

New Business Journal Op-Ed: "Biz Lit"

My latest op-ed is now online. In it, I discuss where my relationship with business writing went wrong. An excerpt:

The [Jack: Straight from the Gut] era became the time of hype and mysticism -- when I could learn how to supercharge my business or energize my enterprise. A time when I could become a purple cow or take advantage of the big moo. An age of learning from the ape in the corner office and keeping track of who was moving my cheese. When any skill could be mastered in 10 days or 10 steps, or came in a box. Not to mention a time to revel in the sanitized, ghost-writer channeled heroics of retired superstar CEOs.

Read it (please).


Technorati Tags: writing, bizlit, opinion

Gauging the American Zeitgeist

Want a clear snapshot of the collective American mind?

Go to Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, or Borders. Grab a cup of coffee. Look at the magazine covers. Note: B&N and BAM generally have the best magazine selections. If you're lucky enough to have a local bookstore with an extensive selection, all the better.

Another magazine cover gazer, John Hendricks of the Discovery Channel, notes (sub. req.):

"Every time I walk into a Borders bookstore, I spend a lot of time looking at the magazine rack — because staring at you are all the passions of America. The bride who is about to get married, there is a magazine for her. And for the person who is a little older, there are wonderful travel and leisure magazines."

Try it sometime.

Technorati Tags: zeitgeist, magazine, consumers

Spout

Bill Holsinger-Robinson, an old friend of mine from my Michigan days, is COO for online movie community Spout. They just launched at SXSW (where else would you launch a business like this, right?). Take a look.


Technorati Tags: movies, sxsw, community, social