11/14

 Omit Needless Words.  Anyone who has read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style knows the injunction to "omit needless words" from writing.  Well, touring through blogs yesterday, I found a reference to an expert on Web site design who wrote the following last August.

Excessive word count and worthless details are making it harder for people to extract useful information. The more you say, the more people tune out your message.

The fellow who typed that was Jakob Nielsen, a consultant who finds ways to make Web sites easy to understand and use.  You can read everything he had to say about information pollution here:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030811.html

I'm not surprised by Nielsen's view.  I had to learn that lesson years ago, and like a religious convert, I am passionate about teaching anyone who will listen.  My editing is a process of deleting adjectives, adverbs and constructions to let nouns, verbs and objects shine.  This has taught me much about meaning and clarity.  One learns to value words.  As Nielsen wrote:

Saying less often communicates more. Our lives are littered with extraneous details that smother salient information...

His point is important when writing for Web sites.  People forget that a Web site is closer to TV than to a book.   Web sites are -- or should be -- brief with pointers to information at deeper levels for those who want to know more.  Put another way, Web sites are headlines and short paragraphs arranged in natural order to facilitate reading and understanding.

Look at your Web site and ask:  How many needless words are on each page? The next task you should undertake is to get rid of them and let meaning emerge.

11/13

 Humility?  We write a lot  today about the need for leaders to show some humility, to listen, to speak the truth and to understand they cannot do it all themselves.  It seems to be part of the public relations and leadership studies mantra.

Of course, what we write isn't true, not strictly, and in some cases, not at all.  I was reminded of this while reading about one of the greatest presidents of the 20th Century -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Roosevelt's biographers have long noted that he had a problem with truth, especially when it dealt with himself.  Roosevelt, like Lyndon Baines Johnson after him, seemed compelled to make his world grander than it was and his actions more important.  This was true from the time Roosevelt was a young man casually lying to his parents about his athletic endeavors, and it continued throughout his life. 

Yet, he was a great leader.  No one argues about what he did -- helping the US ride through the Depression, readying the country for war, prosecuting the war successfully, dealing with leaders who decided the fate of the world far into the future.  All the while, he was a boss who was "hell" to work for.  He would tell one person one thing and another something else.  He would swear everyone to secrecy so no one knew what was going on except him.

But it worked for FDR. He got a lot done against overwhelming opposition using a dysfunctional management style.  It does no good to ask what he might have done if his management style were better.  It wasn't and it would never be any different.

Other great leaders in our nation's history have had notable management faults and yet, have kept a course and brought the country through perilous  times.  Teddy Roosevelt was a peacock pushing for a medal of Honor because of his charge up San Juan Hill.  (He didn't get it.)  Lincoln suspended basic human rights during the Civil War in order to beat the South.  Washington tolerated enormous dissension during his presidency that would soon resolve into open political warfare.

Leaders are who they are with all of their faults.  We cannot change them to someone they are not.  PR supports and/or covers up their foibles as best as one can, as long as the leader is doing the right thing and accomplishing goals.  This is not always easy -- and sometimes, it  seems nearly impossible.   But would you have been the one to tell FDR to stop exaggerating and to tell the truth for once in his life?
 

11/12

 The Unseen Threat.  We have been writing a number of contingency papers lately at work.  One of my colleagues recently completed a detailed discussion of a series of possible events for a client.

That got me to thinking.  There are contingencies that can be foreseen reasonably and events that are hard to fathom.  The 9/11 tragedy was a world-shaking instance of the latter.  However, for most companies, unexpected threats simply change the landscape and throw them off-balance.

One such instance happened Monday to local US phone companies (also called Local Exchange Carriers or LECs).  The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that consumers can switch their home phone numbers to their cell phones later this month in major metropolitan areas and by May 24, over the entire US.  Millions are ready to switch.  This is a disaster for LECs, which still depend on copper wire into the home for much of their revenue.  They have had a natural  monopoly on phone service for more than 100 years and in one month for major metropolitan areas, they will lose it. 

The carriers have threatened to sue, but the FCC was right.   An estimated 7 million Americans use cell phones exclusively. and they have just been granted the right to switch cell phone carriers and keep their telephone numbers.  One consulting firm estimates as many as 19 million Americans will drop land lines now and go to cell phones.  That will hammer the bottom line of the local carriers.

Could LECs have seen this coming?  Yes, but I'm guessing they thought they had a year or two more.  Suddenly, it's upon them.  Their first message was that it is unfair, but that message is not going to fly with consumers. 

Their best bet is to communicate that they welcome the opportunity to serve customers, and they are willing to help consumers find service that is most compatible with their needs.  This is, in fact, the message that Verizon, one of the largest US LECs,  sent about a month ago to the consternation of other US local carriers.  But Verizon was right -- and smart.  It is seeking the favor of customers whether they are Verizon cell phone users, landline holders or broadband customers. 

What is curious is why Verizon saw and met this threat while other carriers looked away.
 
11/11 On Second Thought, cont.  This continues Peter Shinbach's critique of the marketing and blog paper, which you can access here. 

Peter makes a good point about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) that I covered quickly in the paper. 

Next, I think it would be useful to further explore the importance of RSS as an underlying technology for marketing or organizational communications blogs. Without RSS, syndication is cumbersome at best and impossible in general. Without RSS, a PR firm could not provide the type of service Dan Gillmor's been writing about recently.

I should have covered RSS in greater depth.  My excuse, feeble as it is, comes from that fact that I have not had enough experience with syndication to know just how it would work, Dan Gillmor notwithstanding.  The suggestion from Gillmor and at least one other reporter is that syndication of content would make news gathering easier for reporters who could sign up just for news they are looking for.   Gillmor cited one high-tech PR firm last week for adapting RSS.  Syndication depends on XML, the next generation of language formatting, which brings amazing capabilities to the Web from free-text databases to the automatic distribution of copy.  My problem is that I am not sure RSS will help reporters avoid useless data in the end.

Lastly, Peter does not like the way I suggested that one determine if a company should use a blog or not:

Finally, your "A decision process" section smacks of old-style organizational communication command & control. You're trying to jam a round block (blog) into a square hole (hierarchical communications management). Again, look at Microsoft's employee blogs. There's absolutely nothing in them that has anything to do with reporting structures, where people work or how the blogs are marketed. Then take a look at Groove which has a blog policy for its employee & partner blogs. I'm sure Microsoft has one too, but Groove posts their's on their public site and Microsoft doesn't (at least I can't find it). My point is that a blog is usually a personal, not organizational, thing. The role of the organization's communications management should not, I believe, be one to control, edit, vet or otherwise manage the employee blogs' content. Rather, it should be to establish guidelines and to monitor the blogs as a way of further determining what people (i.e., "target audiences") are writing and reacting to.

Peter and I part company here.  What he is describing is that way that blogs are working today, but not that many are being used explicitly for marketing purposes, which was what the paper is about.  Secondly, as I commented yesterday, employees don't have the freedom to comment that they think they do.  And, if they are allowed to veer off-target, one enters the situation cited in the paper where blogging teenagers failed to mention a product.  Blogs to be useful as marketing tools need to be matched closely to a blogger who is already writing about the topic or developed as an in-house medium focused on the topic, if they are to be useful marketing tools.

But then again, I may be wrong and Peter may be right. That's what a good argument is for.  Time will tell how marketers actually use blogging.
 

11/10

 On Second Thought.  I asked my colleague and friend, Peter Shinbach, to critique my marketing and blogs paper mounted late last week.  You can read the paper here.  

I'll excerpt Peter's comments: They are long and detailed.  Peter has given me a "Gentleman's Grade"  because there was so much I didn't write about in detail, but the paper was long and I didn't want it any longer.  So here are some of the things he noted:

You could have, in fact should have, brought in the importance of hyperlinking and the resulting communities of interest among blog writers and their readers. This is, I think, an extraordinarily powerful element of the blogging culture. This is something that's missing from your paper and something that really has to be included so people will understand how blogging differs from other online fora (e.g., Web-based discussion groups, mailing lists, etc.).

I should have spent more time on hyperlinking, but marketing blogs may or may not use hyperlinking as much as the rest of blog culture.   It has been my observation that they don't, but I don't have enough evidence to prove that.   In fact, in blogs I read (I track several dozen.), use of hyperlinking varies.  Some are hyperlinks with a minimum of commentary.  Others are commentary with a minimum of hyperlinks.  It is up to the blogger.  Secondly, a blogger who is marketing may not wish to join a specific "blog" culture.  Rather, the marketer might focus on a specific topic, such as software service questions, that might not lend to hyperlinking.  It is an open question, in my opinion.

What is missing is the fact that blogs can be broadly targeted (e.g., MediaMap) or tightly focused (all those Macromedia blogs). Those that are tightly focused can enable the communications management people to get a very, very good view of precisely what's on the minds of the people they are seeking to influence through their broader mass communications tactics (e.g., media relations, advertising, etc.).

Peter is right.  But, the Internet is peculiar in audience targeting.   It is so large and groups so self-selected that even a broad, general group might not be broad or general.  We monitor worldwide bulletin board comments for a major client, and we've noticed that those who go to a bulletin board are a subset of product owners who choose to write in bulletin boards.  They are not, as far as we can tell, representative of the universe of product owners.  So, it is possible that blogs targeted to broad, general audiences still go to a subset comprised of those who read blogs and do not reflect broad, general opinion.  I have no answer for this one.

Also missing are examples of corporate blogs that seem to give insight into the thinking of the corporation's managers and executives, thereby effecting the reputation of the corporation. Microsoft is the best example, with hundreds of publicly-accessible employee blogs.

Peter and I disagree here, especially since Microsoft just fired a blogger who published an unauthorized picture on his blog.  There is less room for employees to speak than one would think.  Sure, they might comment on the industry environment, views about trends, etc., but they had better not stray into company politics, proprietary data or critiques of company policies.  Or, if they do, they had better be prepared for fallout.  Secondly, most company executives have little or no time to blog.  Blogging is a discipline.  One has to make time for it and do it  regularly.   How many executives are prepared for that?  I will cheerfully bow to Peter's greater wisdom if his view prevails, but it is much too early.  And, corporations must and will impose control on blogging that affects their reputations.