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Business Needs Drive the Use of Communication Tools (a Leap of Faith Helps, Too)

I read a lot about the use of technology for corporate purposes, and I have to agree with some of the blogophobes. I'd like to see less blind faith, and more discussion of some of the ways social media can help organizations achieve their goals.

I still think the new media advocates have the right idea. We just need to apply the same rigour to the adoption of new technology tools that we would apply to any other important business function.

I was a strong advocate for an intranet/extranet at the trade association I was with about seven years ago. We made a good case for the benefits, and worked out ways the communications within our association, between us and our members, and among our members could be improved through the use of technology. We even involved Shel Holtz, Craig Jolley, Pete Shinbach and Tudor Williams in an examination of the business needs, a consultation process with users, and training on writing for the web.

The financial industry was changing quickly, and we needed loans officers, branch managers and frontline staff to be able to tap into information and feedback loops faster and more actively than we had ever done before.

We made some questionable decisions and some good decisions. But despite the visioning process, the business case, the project charter, the detailed project plan and the input of the steering committee, the creation of a new online communications channel required a huge leap of faith.

What seemed a big risk at the time was in fact just a choice of whether we allowed ourselves to be limited to existing tools and technologies, or embrace new ones. And if so, which new ones. The use of technology wasn't the issue. We were already using faxes, snail mail, e-mail and all the other traditional methods of information exchange. The addition of another channel for communication was inevitable. The issue was one of timing and business priorities.

Will some of the "new" tools become commonly adopted by firms looking for ways to keep a running report on frequently asked questions, coming events notices, project updates, and a wide range of communications both within and without their organization.  I don't doubt it for a second.

When does it make the most sense to adopt some of these tools?  Only when it makes sense. Should you wait until there is absolutely no risk? Not unless your organization doesn't need what social media have to offer.

Shel Holtz has covered this issue from several angles:

Why Are Intranets Stagnant?  More on intranets. Social media in the Enterprise Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.

Tags: intranets, internal communications, business, communications, web2.0

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You Say Bad Design, I Say Not Overdesigned

Web seer Robert Scoble claims "ugly design" or "anti-marketing design" works well for web sites, because people have become suspicious of sites that look too well put together.  In a lot of ways, he's right.

Anyone who has been involved in direct marketing can tell you the most effective solicitation pieces aren't always the fanciest.  They're the ones that slip past people's defences long enough to have an impact.

Graphic designer and all-round publishing guru Robert MacDonald used to tell me that the pitch letters that worked best for him were two or three pages long, with lots of words underlined. By Scoble's standards, they would rate as anti-marketing pieces, because they were made to look and read like they came directly from the keyboard of the hard-working head of a non-profit organization who didn't have time for fancy page design.

However, Scoble's use of Google as an example of ugly design is off base.  It's a remarkably well-designed site, partly because they resist the temptation to load the site up with eye candy.

Pat McCarthy's advice is to focus on usability and search engine optimization first.

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After Blogs, What's the Next Big Thing?

Two years ago, I cared little about weblogs, except for the trendwatching entertainment of seeing their increasing popularity.

Now, I get more news and information from them than from TV.

Next year, who can say?

Jeremy Wright calls MySpace "the new blogosphere."  Steve Rubel points to sites like YouTube, digg, MySpace and Stupidvideos.com as sites with growing audiences and ascending influence.

The rule about objects in motion tending to remain in motion applies in this case.  Web development has momentum. It's taking place across borders, across platforms, across languages.  When a new tool gains traction, it's only a matter of time before another one, with better features and bigger groups of users or visitors will come along.

I won't spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what the next Big Thing will be.  I'll just keep my eyes and ears open, and my mind as unfettered by assumptions as I can manage. And if I come across the next hot trend before you do, I'll be sure to mention it on my blog, or whatever tool I'm using at the time.

Tags: digg   myspace  web2.0   blogs  development   

Canada at the Olympics

   
  Originally uploaded by kk+.

Okay, our fans may still be hosers, but the athletes in Turin have to be some of the least egomaniacal bunch of athletes I've seen in a long time.

Photographer Kris Krug is in Turin as part of a group of Vancouver businesses learning and sharing in advance of the 2010 Olympics.

Tags: kriskrug olympics photos vancouver

Sifry on Threats to Blogs, Search Engines

Technorati CEO David Sifry spoke at Northern Voice today: spam.corporate extortion using network bandwidth and Google Bowling are threats.

Spam -- As Cory Doctorow says, all healthy ecosystems have parasites. The good news here is that in the end it all goes back to a web page somewhere, so in a sense it's accountable. We still have a very strong signal to noise ratio. Search companies and blog hosting companies are talking to each other to fight blog spam. The companies can shut down blog farms and AdSense abusers who scrape content and set up blogs with stolen copyrighted content.

Bandwidth Extortion -- One of most dangerous threats to the Net: the number of telecom providers is shrinking. We have given the telecoms a local monopoly. Now they're saying they want to introduce preferential service for those who are their direct customers.

The breakage of traditional Net infrastructure is bad for innovation. Smaller companies can't afford to pay the predatory pricing taht the telcos are suggesting (protection money for best bandwidth access). The bandwith providers are going to go behind the scenes and get protection money from big companies that want to have preferential treatment on the Internet.

Google Bowling -- This scares Sifry more than secret blog networks boosting a site's Google Juice. The Google Bowlers discredit those sites that rank ahead of them on the search engines, by targeting their competitors with links that get them booted out of search engines. The net effect is that the Bowler's favoured site moves up in the ranking, without appearing to have done anything unfair to improve their search engine ranking.

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Sifry says that Technorati has been tracking blogs since Nov. 2002, and the numbers have been doubling every five months over the past few years. This can't go on. It can't continue to grow forever, but he thinks things are still growing.

Tags:
northernvoice2006 northernvoice sifry googlebowling

Albrycht Challenges Readers to Change the World

If something you did in 2006 could make the world a better place, would you do it?

That's the question Elizabeth Albrycht is asking New Communications Blogzine readers. The European blogger points readers to challenges from the 2005 State of the Future report, issued by an American NGO. Each year the American Council for the United Nations University produces its report.

This year, the challenges include four that Albrycht thinks are most relevant to communicators:

- How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes?

- How can the global convergence of information and communications technologies work for everyone?

- How can the capacity to decide be improved as the nature of work and institutions change?

- How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions?

Albrycht's challenge:

"Pick one challenge and devote some of your time in 2006 to working to solve it. Report on your progress throughout the year via your blog. Tag your related posts with the Technorati tag Global Challenge (Global Challenge) and let’s regroup at the end of the year and see what we’ve accomplished. Actions don’t need to be big ones! Even small steps count."

For more, read Albrycht's post on News Communications Blogzine, and check out a previous post on her CorporatePR blog (and my post about it).

A List of 2006 Lists

Prescience from the pundits:

Shel Israel - Blogging Predictions, including "After a few major metropolitan newspapers die, dailies will begin to understand that blogs are part of their solution, and will start incorporating neighborhood bloggers into their system." Not Too Geeky responds.

Seth Godin - Internet marketing in 2006 - 1) Inventory of adsense begins to catch up with demand ; 2) Thumbnail photos show up in adwords; 3) Web pages get DRAMATICALLY better at teaching and interacting ; 4) Several large marketers cease to do TV; 5) The Supreme Court bans email attachments. (Thanks to B.L. Ochman for the link.)

Trevor Cook - Looking forward to 2006, including "RSS will become ubiquitous" and "The record companies will fight back."

Robin Good - New Media Predictions 2006, including enormous growth in "news mastering," blog advertising and podcasting. Mark Hamilton adds his comments.

Red Herring - Microsoft's Challenges in 2006, including executing product transitions, pushing Vista to business users, getting the XBox 360 buzz back, overhauling security and refreshing its online strategy.

Airbag Industries - 2006, including "A design blogger will jump the gun and make 2007 predictions in October 2006. It always starts earlier than the year before."

Gartner Group - IT themes via Science Library Pad, "Choose 2006 tactics towards a 2008 strategy," " Insist on agility - in the heart of the organisation," and "Push beyond 2005 comfort zones - in value focus and technology."

Lee Lefever - The social networking consulting takes a year off to travel the world and write about it, so he lists the topics he would cover if he were covering the online beat in 2006.

And looking back at 2005:

Jeremy Wright, Fineman PR's Top 10 Pr Blunders here (no link on their home page - now that's weird). 

Interactive Mapping Tool - Use it for Good or Evil?

The use of GPS location information continues to be applied to web tools that identify where in the world someone or something is.

Steve Rubel points to KMaps, a service that allows you to provide and receive location information from a home computer, a PDA cell phone, or a Palm PDA. KMaps can host various directories of services, points of interest or what-have-you. And the ability to use the service while you're on the go makes it  that much more flexible.

The potential uses cited are restaurant reviews (see screen detail, right), celebrity sightings, stores, and local events.

Celebrity sightings, as in people clicking their Treos every time they see Paris Hilton trying to catch a quiet latte at a coffee bar. For celebs, who barely have any privacy anyway, this could mark a new low point in celebrity stalking. It's the end of privacy as we know it.

Now, show me how this new technology can be used to make people's lives better, and I'm all for it.

Put it in the hands of bird watchers, and let them share sightings of a rare bird, and I can see how this could save time, make a lot of people really happy, and not cause some minor movie star grief when his wife gets an instant update on who he's been seen with, and where.

Allow prostitutes to keep an eye on each other, and warn others of the presence of a dangerous John, and I can see the real value of a mobile service like this.

Back in March I posted about a similar mapping/information service, Earthcomber.

Revealing My Briefs - Links to Interesting Stuff

• U of S 'Apologizes' to Wilfred Laurier for Pending Victory - The Sheaf

"I should also warn you to not stare too hard at Huskies’ receiver Leighton Heron when he catches his third touchdown pass of the game next weekend.  He only has nine and half fingers, and displays the missing half-finger on a necklace.  Kind’ve gross if you ask me.  He cut it off in front of the Laval players last week just to intimidate them."

• Don't Forget What You Learned in PR 101 - PR Squared

"The ongoing success of any PR program relies on the right access, the right audience, the right actions."

• The New Scourge: Blog Squatters - Todbits.com

When you abandon a blog URL, what's to stop a gambling or porn site from moving in after you?

• Adam Curry's Small Crisis - PR Pops

Another instance where trying to set the record straight on Wikipedia can backfire.

Three posts by Bill Doskoch:

• The Onion on CIA use of black highliters
• Newspaper sets unfair compensation terms for citizen journalists
• Stevie Cameron responds to Globe hatchet job - or see Cameron's blog

Keep it Simple

We've had our new TV for five months now, and when we watch a DVD we still go through a complex procedure that involves changing TV channels, manually flipping through the TV's menu, and praying that some glitch hasn't invalidated our cumbersome but effective technique.

The TV comes with an instruction manual and a remote control that clearly has a button on it for switching to the DVD player. We continue to follow the luddite path of least resistance, because by trial and error that's the one that worked.

The same goes for several gadgets in the house that my technologically advanced children should be able to operate. But the usage is counter-intuitive enough for them to remain stumped for weeks or months. The instruction manual is somewhere around, but wasn't the purpose of buying a gadget to simplify your life, not bog you down in poorly written tech speak that seems to have been run though an automatic translator?

We want our technology to be easy to use. We want it to simplify our lives, not make them more complex and stressful.

Fast Company takes a look at the balancing act at Google, where the extremely complex technology behind the search engine and other functions is sheathed in a strikingly simple design that eschews eye candy in favour of white space and text, ranked in a useful order.

As is typical with clean design, it's not as easy as it looks. But it's worth it. I gave up the news portal concept at Yahoo! years ago, because the customization I could achieve wasn't worth the assault on my eyes and my attention every time I wanted to do a search. I still seek out news, but I try to find portals that are designed for the reader more than the advertiser.

When someone comes to your web site, do they immediately understand the key functions it offers, and the key services you provide? Does it provide a shortcut to the kind of transaction or information exchange the visitor is likely to be looking for? Have you made that first handshake with you as simple and functional as possible?

Look again and think simple. Not necessarily Google simple. But a simple that is appropriate for your site.

Thanks to Judy Gombita for the regular tips, this one about the Fast Company item by Linda Tischler.

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