Social Media: useful links

Posted on April 2nd, 2007 by lymabe

While surfing the digital space I found some useful material which will be useful for assignments due later on down the track. The Workplace Blog is a useful source of information on the use of Web 2.0 technology. In the lasted post (23 Mar) is information about a survey conducted by McKinsey on the use of Web 2.0. The article is free to read as long as you register.

An introduction to social media is given in a free download on Lee Hopkins site. He also has a nice presentation on the importance of employee communication. On the PR 2.0 Universe is a list of resources on a range of social media topics.

And a note on collaboration. The Squidoo site provides a list of the smartest not-for-profit organisations who, in their opinion, collaborate with the community through good storytelling (engagement) and the use of Web 2.0 technology.

If you haven’t already done so – and there’s quite a few of you – you should subscribe to my blog. The easiest way to do this is to go to Google Reader and add the sites you’d like to subscribe to. When you’re ready to read your blog feeds, go to the reader and its all there for you. If you don’t already have any Google related products, you’ll need to get an account first.

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Collaboration

Posted on March 31st, 2007 by lymabe

Our next discussion is on collaboration and decision-making. If you do a Google search on ‘collaboration’, you’ll find a lot of information on collaboration tools and a little bit on collaboration – the discussions between people to get ideas, suggestions, help with decisions etc. We’ll be looking at just how tools will help collaboration.

One of the articles for recommended reading comes from the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. This is what the site is about: ‘NCDD provides resources, programs, and networking opportunities for a rapidly growing community of practice dedicated to solving group and societal problems through honest talk, quality thinking and collaborative action.’ There are lots of great resources – take some time to have a look. BTW the article is An Introduction to Collaborative Technologies.

The other article is Managing the Unexpected by Weick (remember systems theory) and Sutcliffe and, like the other article is very brief. Weick and Sutcliffe discuss decision making in times of crises and identify companies that have good systems primarily due to the nature of the organisation. One of their recommendations is to shift decision making from the leader(s) to the experts.

This reminds me of Bob Suttons discussion about the way NASA (described as a ‘dysfunctional bureacracy’) made decisions – leaders made decisions contrary to recommendations by those with the expertise in the subject area. This occurred, in part, because of the hierarchical nature of the organisation, the requirement to follow procedure and chain of command. He compares NASA to the US Civil Aviation Authority which has an much better safety record due to its system of accident and incident reporting.

More details can be found in the book Sutton co-authored with Jefferey Pfeffer called ‘Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense’. Simon Caulkin quotes a relevant section from the book on systems “bad systems do more damage than bad people, and a bad system can make a genius look like an idiot. Try redesigning systems and jobs before you decide that a person is ‘crappy’”. So, we need good systems/processes that support effective performance. You might hire an expert but if the system does not support them, why bother?

[This paragraph was added after posting] Just in case you think I might be putting a positive spin on using technology to assist collaboration, have a look at this post at Anecdote.

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Attacks in the blogosphere

Posted on March 29th, 2007 by lymabe

One of my favourite bloggers, Kathy Sierra, whose blog called Creating Passionate Users has been receiving death threats some of which have very unpleasant sexual references. She felt so threatened that she cancelled a workshop and has decided not to blog for the moment.

There have been over 1,000 comments left in response to her post on this and, unbelievably, amongst these someone found another threatening message. The response to the threats has been huge. You can read responses from other bloggers at Hugh MacLeod’s blog who is horrified at what’s happened and says that’s why he has no problem deleting anonymous comments, particularly mean-spirited ones.

Robert Scoble comments in his blog that he and other bloggers have also been threatened, and is disgusted at the culture of attacking women. He wants to fix this culture and is looking for ways to do this. In the meantime, and in protest, he is not blogging for a week.

The blogs mentioned here are high profile blogs, and as such, the authors expect that they will receive negative comments on their blog or on other blogs. Some bloggers have a policy of not editing comments, others like Hugh MacLeod and Jeremy Pepper do.

Responses to the issue say that you have to expect you’ll be attacked and you need to be prepared to defend, but most acknowledge that what’s happened to Kathy Sierra has crossed the line.

Perhaps the most comprehensive response, is the one by Lisa Stone at Blogher . Lisa states the Blogher community guidelines leaving you in no doubt what is not acceptable. Comments to the post are also worthwhile reading.

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Sun’s response to negative blog

Posted on March 26th, 2007 by lymabe

In the Next section of today’s (Tuesday) Sydney Morning Herald is a report about the reaction of Jonathon Schwartz to a negative blog by Matt Mullenweg. Mullenweg is well known in the open-source developers area. He collaborated with Mike Little to produceWordPress and has worked on numerous other online tools including Akismet which helps stop spam comments.

Schwartz’s reaction was to publicly apologise to Mullenweg and ask if there was a second chance to get things right. Very shortly, they were having breakfast together. Is this what happens to everyone who has something negative to say about Sun? No! This is what happens when an influential blogger, innovative developer, and entreprenuer says it.

Schwartz’s reputation, and Sun’s, would have notched up a few points after this, and deservedly. There was acknowledgement of the issue, an apology and recognition that here was someone whose opinions should be listened to.

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Filed under: Corporate blogs, Uncategorized

Internal Communication articles

Posted on March 25th, 2007 by lymabe

I’ve received an email to say that the articles for the internal communication readings could not be accessed from Blackboard. If you are having these problems, then you can download them from here. Internal Communication (Rodney Gray)   and Finding Right Direction (Gray) .

BTW for some handy links to internal communication have a look at Toby Ward’s blog, David Ferrabee’s blog and the Simply Communicate site.

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Content for Corporate Blogs

Posted on March 25th, 2007 by lymabe

Some good opinions on corporate content were given at a Marketing Workshop (American Marketing Association) as reported by Toby Bloomberg in her blog Diva Marketing, and who conducted a session on social media. See the post titled Corporate Blog Content (Mar19, 2007).

I liked what Toby had to say and delved a little more into her site. She is a consultant for social media marketing strategy believing that to be effective a social media strategy has to be included into a marketing plan. But before this happens you really need to see if the organisation is ready for a more open communication between it and its customers and stakeholders.

As well as whether the culture of the organisation is ready for blogging, consider the fit to the marketing and business goals. If this is looking positive, then start planning for a corporate blog. In this process establish the goals and objectives, the target audience, the type of blog, content, guidelines, amongst other items.

Other major components are the training requirements in writing a blog and in building relationships, planning the launch, and evaluating the results. See Toby’s post on Blog Report Card for some criteria for evaluating blogs.

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Filed under: Corporate blogs

Debbie Weil on Corporate Blogging

Posted on March 24th, 2007 by lymabe

One of the references under the post on books is The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil. Chapter one is freely available at the The Corporate Blogging Book website and you really should read it. This chapter presents information about blogging in a question and answer format.

It looks at the difference between a blog and a website, that its an additional communication channel and not a replacement for press releases, e-newsletters etc. It discusses what makes a good corporate blog, legal issues, employee blogs and resources needed. Weil also provides a list of corporate blogs from large to small organisations. And a list of some good CEO blogs (in her opinion) – Matt Blumberg, Karen Christensen, and Alan Meckler, amongst others.

Weil provides some resources and links to other sites, including Business Blog Consulting which has a number of contributors. The last couple of posts on the site were about responding to negative comments – always handy to know ways to do it well – and what to blog and not to blog from a legal point of view.

About responding to negative comments – I have to say that in the last couple of days I’ve noticed some bloggers responding to what they see as unfair or untrue comments made about them by other bloggers. One blogger even commented that blogging would not survive if people were not being truthful. Given the evolving nature of blogs – we’ll watch this space.

The resources section also has a link to a wiki listing corporate blogs from around the world. There is one listing from Australia which I checked out but wasn’t certain who was blogging, couldn’t help noticing the typos, and thought it would be a good blog to review.

Weil offers consulting in business blogging via BlogWrite for CEOs and podcasts weekly. This supports her views on why you should blog. One of the reasons according to Weil is to contribute to thought leadership. Thought leadership? This means writing on the topic related to your industry in an expert way showing you have something to say and saying it well.

Have fun browsing on the sites discussed!

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Corporate blogging and guidelines

Posted on March 21st, 2007 by lymabe

A corporate blog is an avenue for communication and marketing helping the organisation reach its goals. It helps to raise the profile of the organisation.

There are internal and external corporate blogs. Internal blogs tend to be used to provide information or for project management to improve internal communication. External blogs communicate information about products, services, and events as a way to establish closer contacts with customers and to get feedback from customers.

Given the number of bloggers and the variety of topics blogged about, it is worthwhile looking at whether your company and it’s products and services, or your industry, are the focus of blogs.

You can do this using free blog search engines, such as Technorati, Google Blog Search, and Blogpulse (a service provided by Neilsen BuzzMetrics). You can see what your competitors, customers, employees are saying, helping you stay in touch and respond very quickly and very easily with what’s happening.

Corporate blogs contain a mix of information ranging from opinion, information about products or services, and perhaps commenting and responding on popular or unpopular aspects of the company or its products.

Having a set of blogging guidelines is recommended. Yahoo have posted guidelines as well as BBC staff. In 2005, IBM guidelines about blogging were published. This is the less formal version which had some useful reader comments about providing personal information and letting the world know you’re on holidays.


Dell outlines some ‘rules for engagement’ . I also like what Jeremy Pepper says in his “About Blog” and “Comments Policy” clearly outlining to his readers about his opinions and changes to posts, as well as expectations of reader’s comments.

It is expected that bloggers follow a code of ethics which include telling the truth, being accurate, noting mistakes and showing where changes have been made to posts, and not deleting posts. Comments should be addressed respectively, and any conflicts of interests need to be acknowledged.

Blogging guidelines provide you with information about legal issues, that is, the things you don’t or shouldn’t be saying about financial information, trade secrets. They’ll also talk about avoiding issues with copyright, libel and privacy.

Some authors allow you to post content from their papers or sites as long as you acknowledge the authors under the Creative Commons agreement .

So at least one of your posts for the assignment will be on blogging guidelines – appropriate content, legal issues, ethics.

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Filed under: Corporate blogs

Attend an Online Summit

Posted on March 15th, 2007 by lymabe

One of my favourite blogs is by Guy Kawasaki at  (listed as How to change the World under blogroll). I stopped by there today and found some great information. There is a post about Carol Dweck’s article ‘The Effort Effect’. The article is about what makes some people excel and why others don’t. Kawasaki applies some of Dweck’s theories from her recent book called “Mindset:The New Psychology of Success” to business.

One of the important findings is that it’s better to focus on processes used to complete a task than on talent or intelligence. This means that we need to give some thought to communicating about the task. An example is ‘I can see how much thought you’ve put into that report. I can really understand the issues raised’ which emphases the effort and contrasts with a response, such as ‘Wow that just shows how clever you are’.

For those with an interest in social media and marketing, there’s a post on the Digital Outlook Report 2007.

Another post was for the Microsoft Small Business summit. You’ll be able to attend live via Windows Live. I’ve signed up (a lengthy process but hopefully worth it) for:

  • The Art of Innovation by Guy Kawasaki;
  • Working as a Team – software to enhance collaboration;
  • Avoiding Burn Out – work life balance;
  • Buzz Marketing

The one by Kawasaki is on Monday 19th at 11am which translates into Sydney time as Tuesday 20th 6am – mmm, a nice early start for the day. Apparently the US kicks into daylight savings time on the weekend, so I’m hoping that the online time convertor was right.

I attended a virtual conference put on by Avaya last year. I could head down the virtual conference venue and select a talk – this was a pre-recorded video of the presentation and download the relevant paper. It certainly cuts down on time and costs compared to attending a ‘real’ conference.

Just recently we had an online live presentation via Windows meeting and a conference call. The fellow presenting was in Texas (USA) and was supported by a technical fellow in Hong Kong. Windows meeting was used for the powerpoint presentation. Amazing what you can do!

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Filed under: Online Activities

Wikipedia

Posted on March 13th, 2007 by lymabe

Wikipedia is a great resource for information on blogs and corporate blogs. You’ll find general information about how blogs got started. Under corporate blogs there is a description of internal and external blogs along with references and links. Also listed are number of links to various corporate blogs, including Nokia, IBM and the Marriott. Blog monitoring gets a mention as well – these are organisations that watch or listen to the content of blogs to see who is talking about what or who.

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Filed under: About blogs

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