Black Belt Dojo

On Podcasting

Here is the tension that gives rise this blog post:
1) I have become pretty good lately at producing interesting corporate podcasts;
2) almost nobody in the firm seems to be listening to them!

I was thinking of subtitling this post "If a podcast is played in the forest and no one tunes in to hear, has the speaker made his point?". (Bet you're glad I didn't.)

I want to believe that the answer to the above riddle is yes. Even though podcasting may not have caught on here at PwC Russia, judging from the lack of response, I think it is a worthwhile exercise and I encourage others to try it.

 Now, I will readily admit to being a podcast junkie. My Sunday is not complete without an evening walk with Bill Moyer's Journal on my iPod.  My week doesn't settle in until after my Monday installment of This American Life. And one of the things keeping me Canadian and sane here in Russia is a steady dosage of CBC podcasts. You might think that I began doing podcasts at work out of a prior love for the medium. In fact, the opposite is true; I started listening to podcasts for pointers and only then became hooked.

When asked to give a short presentation on podcasting for the Social Media module of the Internal Communications Black Belt course this past spring I quickly agreed. I am no expert on podcasting, but was glad for the chance to structure some of what I had learned as I stumbled along in my first year of internal communications. For your reference, here are the PowerPoint slides of that presentation: Download on_podcasting.ppt

The first couple of slides—largely "stolen with pride" from the PwC in-house podcasting manual—cover the very basics. The second half of the presentation is a list of insights that I gained through experience, categorized into before, during and after recording. Now that I look back on them, most of these "insights" are just ways of eliciting from the speakers a confident, honest tone—without which podcasts become unlistenable or unwatchable, in my opinion.

The advice on slide 5 for dealing with pre-recording nerves might need some explaining.

"Perfect-person theory" refers to the tendency to trust someone in a position of authority a bit more after that person has made an innocuous little mistake. (At least, I remember an anecdote to that effect from Psychology 101 and it has not failed me yet.  Want to win over a room? Spill your coffee at the start of your speech.) When coming to someone on staff with fancy recording equipment and a job description that includes the use of it, I find a quick way to build trust and rapport is to make a false start or two. "'Welcome to the Smart Way podcast on office'—cut. Just a sec, sorry, let's start that again. 'Welcome to the Smart Way podcast on audit efficiency.'"

The "slippery sound check" is, as you might expect, a sound check that slips right into becoming the actual recording. I have found that nothing says stress out and clam up like "Ready? Aaaand rolling."

But, anyway. I am sure that many of you know a lot more about podcasting than I do. I would be very interested to read some of your top insights or podcasting tips. And from those of you  who have yet to try podcasting, I would be more than happy to field your questions or concerns.

Let's return to the paradox with which I began this blog post. It seems the better I get at producing podcasts the lower the number of listeners tuning in.

In the short term, I think podcasts are worth the effort anyway because they encourage speakers to reflect on and deliver their message in a new way. They also give listeners the experience of hearing it "straight from the horse's mouth", as the saying goes. When done right, this can foster a deeper and more intimate connection than the written word can, making podcasts great for executive communications. In the long term, of course, podcasting will only be worthwhile if people here at PwC Russia get into the habit of regularly watching and listening to what we produce.

It could be a cultural thing. Perhaps podcasting is as of yet a western phenomenon. PwC Russia is a solid 93% Russian in its staff composition and, let's face it, maybe you can't blame my Russian colleagues for having an instinctive skepticism toward the media—corporate media included. I wonder what the experiences of my colleagues around the world have been. Do podcasts resonate further in some necks of the woods than in others?

Jeffery

Is this what we're afraid of?

For the first time ever, this weekend I reported a blog comment to a moderator. It was one of 805 comments relating to a post on The Guardian's travel site.

I found the original piece by chance on a list of 'most read' articles. Posted on February 14th, it was the start of a new weekly blog by a guy called Max. 19, about to travel around India and Thailand for two months and planning to blog about his experiences.

I read the post and didn't think too much about it .... but then found myself far more interested in the comments.  There were LOADS. 475 in fact - posted between 11am (an hour after the original article was posted) and the end of the day, when the Guardian closed down the thread.

I started off being fascinated by how much more interesting the conversation going off in the comments was than the article itself. (Thinks 'ah - good old social media - this is what it's about - creating dialogue, giving people a voice!').

But as I read further, I started getting quite sickened by the comments being posted. Someone had googled the guy's name and found a Guardian article from some years ago written by someone with the same surname. So then everyone assumed person has only been given his blog because his dad works at the Guardian. Series of comments folllowed about nepotism, terrible writing, awful concept in the first place, 'posh people' foisting their views on us, The Guardian losing touch with its readership ... Some really acidic, personal comments directed at Max, a fair few removed or edited by moderators.

The next day, the Guardian's travel editor wrote a post in response.  (It turns out Max's dad wasn't a Guardian employee at all - just a freelancer who writes the odd article for them) 330 comments later, the debate was stopped. That was after several people had called for the editor's resignation, lambasted Max's dad -who dropped into comment - for his terrible error of judgment in allowing his son to write the blog and had a go at the moderator who broke the news that comments were being closed at 7pm because they didn't have enough moderators to cope on the evening shift.

It was like watching a fire spreading out of control. Maybe the blog wasn't a great idea and mistakes were made, but I coudn't believe the vitrolic, personal comments it provoked, the harshness of the response (fire the travel editor? Really? Because of one blog entry?) and the way rumours turned into 'facts' and were then very hard to undo. Somebody started a Facebook group. Someone else set up a spoof blog. It was picked up on various message boards and forums. It seems word spread virally as people started sending the link to the article around. Apparently someone even listed it on wikipedia as an example of nepotism at one point - although I've had a look and I can't see it now.

Two of the biggest concerns I hear in our Black Belt social media debates are around a) the loss of control and b) what happens if people say things we'd rather they didn't?  So, some questions:

1. Is this an example of the nightmare scenario we're afraid of?
2. Is there something about an on line environment that allows fires to be stoked very quickly and lead comments to get harsh/personal?
3. What was it about this that lit the blue touch paper and started the fire spreading, and could/should the Guardian have done anything differently?

Sue

Does his tum look big in this?

Very excited (as am now social media expert extraordinnaire) to get an email yesterday from Robin Crumby inviting Liam and I to be the first external beta testers on Melcrum's new social networking site, The Communicators Network. It's been in development for months, and is set for launch next week, so we're getting on there early to have a look around and set up a Black Belt group.

So I'm having a look around the menus and checking it out until I'm interrupted by an email from Liam:

'Which photo should I use???

• recent one of me looking magnificent at X client (although tummy looks a bit big)
• On bicycle
• Old one from BB brochures

??'

Think "what's he talking about?" and ignore it, until am swiftly interrupted by another headed 'quick question'. Two photos attached (exhibits A top left and B below right) and just one line: 'which one of these should I use on the Melcrum site?'

Light dawns that whilst I'm checking out the site and trying to work out how to set up our group, Mr Fitz is focused on that all important question of his profile picture!

Which is, admittedly, an interesting question. It's social networking but it's kind of a business site. Do you go for corporate pic? Or My Space style out of focus pose in shades with half your head chopped off? Something in between - kind of an equivalent of smart casual? Or even a cartoon? Do these things have a dress code??

As for Liam's pic, what do you reckon? Looking dashing in the snow? Or all masterful and authoritative in the classroom? (Don't even suggest the cycling shorts ...)

Sue

Networking know-how

Here are two helpful posts about using business networks.

One from Kay Luo on Linked-In's blog. I like this post in particular, but if you use Linked-In, the blog looks good overall for giving you hints and tips on how to make the most of it.

And one (courtesy of Kay!) from Jory Des Jardins on blogher

Sue

Networked out?

Regular readers will know I'm having my first taste of social networking.  Fiona recently invited me to join Facebook. That made me think I should do something with my Linked In profile. Then I started contemplating getting my mates from Friends Reunited to join Facebook so I don't have to keep hopping across.  Then someone said 'I'm on MySpace. You need to join that next.'

Now, both Ragan and Melcrum are launching networking sites for internal communicators. Which I think is a fantastic idea. I'm a confirmed Melcrum fan, so I'll be joining theirs as soon as it's launched, but in the meantime I've joined Ragan's to have a look.

What do I think of it all so far? Facebook unnerved me. I'm quite a private person and I'm wary of how much people really know about me. I'm also wary that other people might not want me to know what they're doing. And it's not how most of my friends communicate, so it's an uphill job to get them to join. So all in all, I haven't sent that many invitations.

Linked In is nice and easy and very good for pure business contact-making, although I'm not sure what I'd do with it beyond that. It looks as though Melcrum and Ragan might be going a step further and adding resources and content. I'll wait and see.

Overall, I'm feeling a bit networked out. As with any channel, the key question is 'what's the purpose?' It's tempting to sign up to everything just because everyone else is and make as many contacts as you can, and suddenly you've got 6 networking sites to look after ... and what are you going to use them for? I can understand why some people's profiles are way out of date.

I know that when whole networks of people are signed up (university years, sports clubs) Facebook and MySpace get used to organise events, parties etc. which makes sense. And if I can drag old friends from all over the place onto Facebook so we can all talk to each other, I probably will. Otherwise, I'm going to wait and see what the two comms network sites are like, and then a few weeks down the track I'm going to do some pruning. I'll come off one or two of them and be clear with myself about how I'm going to use the rest.

And then, hopefully, once it's not new to me anymore and the initial excitement and 'what the heck do I do with  it?' has worn off, I can stop spending far too long staring at my computer screen.

Sue

PS Calling the latest black belt lot. Oi! Didn't you have a task to comment on this blog? I don't remember seeing you lost for words at Cranfield!

Social media again

It's funny how the same conversations happen every time we talk about social media on Black Belt. Some people not familiar with terminology, some using social media inside/outside work, questions about 'are these now core skills for internal communicators and will we fall behind if we don't have them?'

Part of me agrees with David Ferrebee when he questions whether social media is all a bit over-hyped. Give me a couple of sessions at a conference and I find it quite interesting. By the time I get to the fourth, I'm thinking 'give it a rest'.  If I see blogs getting dominated by non-stop social media debates, I stop visiting for a while. Do I think it's worth thinking about? Absolutely. But there are plenty of other things that tax my brain on a daily basis.

Having said that, I don't think I've made the effort to find out enough about it myself. Being the 'ooh look! Someone I like has sent me an email and asked me to join something!' type, I instantly signed up to Fiona's invitation yesterday to join Facebook. When I actually went onto Facebook. (for the first time ever) it reminded me how bad I am with networking sites. My Linked-in profile is only there because someone asked me to join ... and the only people on there are the ones that look me up and send invitations - I've never done anything with it myself. So a) I could probably be using it for things and i'm not and b) I just end up looking like Billy no mates!

I've just challenged the Black Belt gang to take a couple of actions to start them playing around in the social media sphere. First off is to post a comment on this blog. Second is to add themselves to my new facebook profile (or whatever it's called. Which means I'd better get somebody to show me later how the heck to set up my OWN profile and how I invite them to join it! I felt at least slightly better when I referred to Facebook and everyone in the room said "what???"!)

I also promise to start adding Technorati tags to my posts. I reckon that's enough of a social media education for me for one day. But if anyone wants to set me a not TOO complicated techie task to try, I promise to try them out and report back on progress. If a techno-phobe like me can do it, anyone can...

Sue

Dilbert on blogs

Have a look at the Daily Dilbert for 27th April for the wise one's advice on writing blogs. (you might have to go to 'read past strips'). Thanks to Graham Keen for sending this to me. Excellent!

Sue

PS Serious advice on ghost-writing blogs for other people: don't! 

Open to scrutiny

I've just seen that Lee Smith is reviewing a blog of the month on his Talking IC blog.

My immediate thought was 'oh heck, I wonder what he'd say about this one?' 

It's a real sign of the times that anyone can say anything about anyone, quickly, easily and to potentially millions of people. Liam's party trick is typing a company's name into a search engine to see just how many nasty things people have been writing about them. Try it. You might get a shock.

I think it's actually quite a good thing. Apart from giving everyone the power of the pen, being open to this level of public scrutiny and comment must surely make you think about what fodder you're giving people to write about?  I saw from  Chapple's latest update that they've signed up with a new website called Hire Scores, that gets candidate to score recruitment consultants so we can get a view of what they're really like to work with.  It looks like the headhunters' version of Trip Advisor or Top Table, or all those other sites listing reviews from 'normal people' about anything from books to holidays to the best chocolate biscuits.

I thought it was quite a brave thing for Chapple to do. It's one thing knowing there's a reviewers' website around and they're going to write about you whether you like it or not. It's another saying "here we are - tell us what you think! In fact, hey, tell the whole world - why not!"  I used to work with a senior leader who hated doing regular employee surveys, and when I challenged him on the grounds that we did equally regular customer surveys, he said "Yes, but I don't have to write out to our customers each time and tell them very publicly what we're doing badly."

So anyway, back to this blog, and I AM asking. What do you like about it? What don't you like? What could we be doing better?  How would you rate it if you were reviewing it? What would make you want to sign up to the daily e-mail updates?  Views and ideas please - good or bad!

Sue

Control freaks?

Stand up and take a bow - Time Magazine has just named YOU its Person of the Year.

The awards are all about pinpointing who's most affecting the news. Time magazine's verdict this year is that we all are, thanks to the growing influence of user-generated content on the internet.

They talk about how the balance of power is shifting, from news being under the control of the few and disseminated to the many, to giving everyone the tools to create content. "It's (the internet) a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter," says journalist Lev Grossman.

This is one subject that always gets me on my soapbox, I'm afraid.  As IC practitioners, we've long talked about two-way communication and berated the organisations we work with for being too top down in their approach.  But while the outside world is celebrating because the lines of communication are well and truly being opened up, what are we doing?

Are we honestly, hand on heart, managing to create that dialogue we talk so much about? Or are we still putting most of our effort into our well-controlled, top-down channels, where at least on the face of it, we get to control the message?  Where's the REAL conversation happening? And is this state of affairs really down to those big bad senior managers that don't want to change, or might we have something to do with it?

I've referred before to the presentations I saw from Yahoo's Head of IC and Steve King from the Futures Institute, at Melcrum's US Summit earlier this year.  For both of them, the important question was not 'has your organisation got a blog?' but 'how far have you opened up control of the conversation?'  Whether you've done it through using new media tools or any other way.

Opening up that converstaion is not an easy option. When I had an open user forum in an organisation before blogs came along, I spent a lot of my time fending off very unhappy senior managers, who weren't happy about the subjects people were raising or the things they were saying about them.  But people were talking about these things anyway. The only difference was that now they had a way to talk to thousands of other people about them rather than 2 or 3 people around the coffee machine. 

We know that the Generation Y lot coming to a workplace near you have a healthy mistrust of official channels, corporates and spinspeople like us (sorry, but I hear that awful term more and more). I'm convinced - and maybe I'll be proved wrong - that the influence of 'official' channels will become less and less as the years go by.  The real conversations will go on somewhere else. Will we choose to help them happen and get in there and become part of them? Or will we keep writing the e-mails?

How long will it be before we can genuinely give employees the equivalent of Time Magazine's award for shaping the conversations in our organisations?  Or maybe your organisation could already? Examples and views - for or against - welcome!

Sue

blogging past its peak?

Analysts Gartner are predicting that 'the blogging phenomenon' is set to peak in 2007.  They say 200 million people have already STOPPED writing their blogs, and anyone who was likely to start a blog has already done so.  I'm not sure whether I agree with that last part.  I think in the internal comms world we haven't yet got anywhere near deciding what our verdict is on blogs and how we should use them or how we shouldn't.

In case you're one of the people still thinking about it, I came across this post on Debbie Weil's blog - blogwrite for CEOs. It links to a really comprehensive and practical guide by Steven Streight called 'effective blogging for high ranking executives.'

Back to Gartner, and they also say people who love blogging will keep blogging, and those who don't will get bored and stop. No kidding? That's why I hate the term 'consultant' and can't stand being called one myself.  I don't especially want to be known as one of those people that gets paid loads of money for stating the blinking obvious.

I never thought I'd say it, but I've got quite addicted to the whole blog thing. You can't tell, can you?! My old team would never believe this is the same person who was always asked to test out ntl's IT-related communications on the grounds that 'if Sue can understand it, anybody can.' 

Still, I'm off on a mind-numbingly long journey up to Sunderland now, ready to run a workshop tomorrow, so no more blogging for me this week. Given a choice between a 4.5 hour train journey with three changes (gah!) and a one hour flight in the tiniest plane I've ever seen, the train won. 

Sue

Techno frolics

Well, we're back at Henley for module two, and Amy and I have just returned from a furtive but successful mission to nick all the chocolate eclairs from the Henley sweetie store. 

We're all getting quite excited about technology today. After Liam enthralled the room at the end of module 1 with exciting demonstrations of his new blog about his home town of Rickmansworth (Sal Pigot - in puzzled tone - "but who's the audience for this blog?" me - " he hasn't got one!"), we invited Melcrum's Alex Manchester in to talk to us about all things new media.

Learnt that the internet was 16 years old yesterday.  And all marvelled at Second Life. How can people pay for land and property that's not real??  How much will that site get sold for one day? And why didn't one of us think of it first??!

Alex recommended three more good reads for our bookshelves:

• The Corporate Blogging Book, by Debbie Weil (She's also got a good blog about corporate blogging)
• Naked Conversations, by Robert Scobie and Shel Israel
• The Cluetrain Manifesto by Doc Searles & David Weinberger

So enthusiastic did everyone get about technology that I now get to put my feet up for the rest of the afternoon while Tony from IBM gives everyone a demo of how to set up a blog.

UPDATE

Ten past five, and it appears we're quite a cynical bunch about blogs! One of the main questions this afternoon has been 'but does anybody actually blog about anything useful or interesting?'   

Challenged to find something of interest, Tony picked on Kath and asked her to reveal her passion! Turns out it's pop group Take That. So off we went to Technorati did a search, and lo and behold,  we were treated to a rendition of A Million Love Songs.

We were amused, but still not convinced, it seems. Technorati opens with the phrase "55 million blogs - some of them must be good."  "Yes," said one of the group. "But at those odds, you're probably slightly more likely to win the lottery."

There are some we think are worth a read over on the 'recommended blogs' section. Anyone else have any worth a read - business or IC related or otherwise?

Sue

blogs, blogs everywhere

The latest report from blog tracking firm Technorati shows the blogosphere (as we hip people in the know like to call it) is still growing scarily fast.

Apparently every day 100,000 new blogs are created and 1.3 million posts are made. Technorati is now tracking 57 MILLION blogs.

There's an interesting quote from the founder of Technorati saying that some well-organised blogs are now behaving "increasingly like our friends in the mainstream media". In other words, they are becoming a comms channel just like any other.

Strikes me that it's important not to get it into our heads that blogging is just about having another comms channel in our toolkit.  I heard the Head of IC at Yahoo say at a conference that social media is not about channels. It's about the whole idea that now everyone has the opportunity to have a voice and create content, not just those of us with 'communication' in our job title.

Sue

blog writing cats

An apology to anyone who has this blog set up as an RSS feed who might just have received a blank post - I'm afraid my cat managed to send it!  (yes, really)

I left a key with the neighbour to feed him whilst I was away at the summit for a couple of days. I couldn't get him to come back in when I left at 5.30am on Wednesday, and the neighbour didn't pick up my message that he was outside and went out for the day.  Apparently he caused quite a stir in the courtyard where I live by sitting on the doorstep and howling his head off for hours ... until one of the neighbours couldn't stand it any longer and opened a tin of tuna! 

Anyway, the upshot is, he now won't leave me alone and is walking all over me/the desk/the laptop, and managed to publish the entry I was about to write before I managed to write anything! So folks, it really is THAT easy to blog - even my cat can do it! (he just hasn't learned to type in the words yet). 

On that subject, last night at the drinks it emerged that some people were being put off writing replies to blog entries because they're not sure how to do it.  So here you go:

How to comment on a blog entry

1. Click on 'comments' at the bottom of the entry.  You'll then see a 'post a comment' section with various boxes.

2.  If you haven't got a TypePad account (TypePad is the company that makes the blog work, but you don't need an account with them to post a comment), put in your name and e-mail address.

3. Don't worry about the URL box - this is just if you've got your own blog or website and want to paste the address here

4. Type your comment

5. Preview it to make sure it looks pulitzer prize winningly brilliant

6. Hit publish ... and you're done!

Sue

When is a blog not a blog?

Interesting story in the UK news this week about two Labour politicians that posted a spoof video of David Cameron (leader of the opposition party) on YouTube.  Various apologies have been made and the offending item has now been removed.

The video was having a satirical dig at David Cameron's own (video and written) blog.   

I heard an interview with one of the politicians involved in the spoof blog. His argument was that David Cameron's blog was not a 'proper' one - just a managed communication channel cleverly targeted at a particular age group, which went against the whole spirit of blogging.

It's an interesting point, and it raises a dilemma that I've seen posed in various articles of late. The whole point about blogs is that they are written by ordinary people with no ulterior motive, and that's why we trust them. (The spoof blog continually showed the 'spoof' Cameron saying "I'm just like you".)  So if new media - blogs, YouTube and the like - are the type of communication a certain demographic are starting to trust, can we use them as channels without somehow going against the spirit of blogging?   

Is the Chief Exec. really just writing his/her own random thoughts about life in general, or are there discussions going on behind the scenes about objectives, messages and tactics? Have a look on Cameron's blog, in fact, and one of the video diaries has been shot in his kitchen. Cue various postings suggesting this was staged.  No, says Cameron in his commentary, we were just busy, so we shot the video in the kitchen because it was quicker.  Should we believe him or not?

Can we use blogs in our organisations without by implication undermining what they're all about?  Do we end up using tactics to make them look home made and informal, even though they're actually corporately managed? Is that called connecting with your audience, or is it manipulation? Any tips from anyone that's using them successfully/unsuccessfully or seen good or bad examples elesewhere?

Sue