Archive for the ‘Particpatory Comms’ Category

In the "stupid is as stupid does" category, Wired reports that companies are blocking access to blogs as part of their standard security policies:

…companies worry that employees might leak sensitive material — perhaps inadvertently — while posting comments to blog message boards. In a survey of over 300 large businesses conducted in conjunction with Forrester, Proofpoint found 57.2 percent of respondents were concerned with employees exposing sensitive material in blogs. That’s higher than the portion concerned with the risks of P2P networks.

Communicators need to get engaged in setting clear policies and communicating them. What is even more ludicrous is the suggestion that blogs be blocked for reasons of "productivity over security". Technology companies, like Proofpoint, that suggest this should spend more time on the productivity benefits and articulating a value proposition around that.

Spent Thursday and Friday of last week at the Ragan Communications Summit in Chicago. A great event focused on communicators. If you attended and are looking for a copy of my Keynote, you’ll find them all here

The master presentation is a big download so you might prefer it in bite sized chunks – Part One and Part Two. I strongly recommend that you take time to watch the brilliant E.P.I.C animation.

Dvorak attacks the media for their lame and Apple-friendly reporting. He says: "As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today’s newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. It’s a fact."

You can read the rest… He really lays into the media and exposes the nonsense that has been going on for years now.

Every time Steve Jobs sneezes there is a collective chorus of "Gesundheit" from tech writers pounding away on their Macs.

This reality is not going to change. In fact it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer. With no Microsoft-centric frame of reference, Microsoft cannot look good. The company essentially brought this on itself with various PR and marketing policies that discouraged knowledgeable coverage…

I know plenty of journalists that don’t use Macs. The ones that don’t wish they do. So I’m not entirely with him (although a good ways there) on the assertion that using Macs makes the media clueless to reporting on MSFT. It does seem to make them very Apple friendly and tolerant. Ah, to have a product that inspires such favoritism – and the moxy to use such aggressive, litigious and anti-free speech PR practices… A quick aside – upgrading your Powerbook, as I have done, does not make one particularly Apple friendly. The bad news is it runs slower, does weird things and sucks the life out of a battery in just over an hour. The good news is you can fry an egg on the base with the heat generated during this process.

What is really intriguing in his commentary is the remark on "frame of reference". Four years ago, MSFT framed the entire industry. Apple is the frame now. Arguably it is a frame for broader trends in design and the like. As much as we might like to blame the media – and they deserve plenty of whacks on this one – we shouldn’t take anything from Apple which through stunning execution and design has redefined what we expect – and will tolerate – in computing, music and now entertainment as a whole.

I’ve been up to my neck in it at LogLogic as we get a new website, blog and version 3 launched. Sorry for the lack of posts. It’s been a major undertaking and we’re thrilled with the results. The team at RD2 did a terrific job – a tireless and extremely talented bunch.

We’ve done some interesting things with the site and blog. First, we housed the blog as an element of the overall loglogic.com architecture. This enables blog content to be searched and presented alongside the broader site content. Second, we’re using MoveableType to power large elements of the site. This will make the site a lot more self serve. Third, we automated much of the functionality – integrating the blog feeds and site. So, you post the blog and it automatically appears on the loglogic.com home page. Finally, we’ve added RSS for everything from news releases through job opportunities.

We’ve got much more to do and it has been a really interesting project so far. The bottom-line is that building a web site with participatory functionality makes for a much more powerful experience. Let me know what you think.

Yahoo! News is now delivering blogs as a component of a news search result. This has major implications for PR practitioners. Suddenly those searching for news on your product get a feel for what users, the community, and the pundits are saying – unfiltered. It has equally major implications for blogging. It enables anyone with the energy and enthusiasm for a particular topic to potentially sit on the front page right alongside traditional news sources. If PR people hadn’t woken up to the voice of bloggers, they now need to wake up to their reach as well.

Here is an example. Yesterday I blogged on NetNewsWire’s acquisition by NewsGator. I searched for NetNewsWire using Yahoo! News. To the left you can see traditional news media covering the story. To the right you can see my post from yesterday.

The other question this poses is that is this the beginning of the end for blog search engines? While I’m still keen on many of the blog search engines, most remain incredibly frustrating for users. While some are giving up on them due to search quality, most of the calls I get are related to usability and sheer frustration.

I wonder why Google can’t provide a version of Google News that incorporates blog content. Or, a version that triangulates the major blog content from across the web. Google Blog for instance. Yahoo might beat them to the punch.