socialmedia – Climb to the Stars

Blogging in Internal Communications [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence que j'ai donnée aujourd'hui à Zürich sur les blogs dans la communication interne.

First of all, let me thank all present for their participation, and Nils (Enzaim Communications) in particular for making this happen. I also appreciated having Stefan Bucher amongst the audience — it’s particularly nice when fellow bloggers show up, share their experience, and to top it all tell me my talk was interesting to them, too. Thanks!

Two months ago I gave a talk titled “How Blogging Brings Dialogue to Corporate Communications”. This one is quite similar, but focused on internal communications.

As I explained, the dynamics involved are very similar. It’s about having conversations, whether it’s behind the firewall or outside on the big bad internet — about engaging with people (employees, customers, colleagues) rather than talking at them.

Although the talk I prepared was very similar (with some added stuff specific to internal communications), it did of course turn out rather different. Different people, different questions. I like it (particularly with small audiences) when instead of giving a lecture-like talk, there are lots of questions and I am derailed from what I had planned.

That’s a bit what blogging is about, isn’t it? Having a dialogue. So, when the setting permits it, I try to do the same thing with my talks. My impression is that people get more out of them that way. (Do feel free to correct me if you think I’m mistaken.)

You should probably go and have a look at the notes from my previous talk, as I’m not going to rewrite everything here. I’ll just concentrate on what seems to me was the important additional stuff we talked about. If you were there and want to add things to what I’m writing here, please feel free to leave a comment. I’d be very happy if you did.

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If you look at the slides, they’re very similar in the beginning, aside from slides 9-10-11 in which I try to clarify the difference between blog and wiki, as I was told confusion was common.

Content on blogs is organised based on the time they were written. From an editorial point of view, blogs also put the author(s) forward. He has a very different status from the commentators, who are guests on his blog.

Wikis, on the other hand, are organised solely through the links created between the various pages. The focus is on the documentation produced rather than on who produced it. The various author voices tend to merge into a uniform community voice.

Both blogs and wikis are part of the larger class of tools one can name “social media”. These are the online tools which help us publish information in a way that connects us to other people, and encourages us to engage in conversations and relationships with them. You’ll also come upon the expression “social software” used with roughly the same meaning (though the emphasis is in this way more on the technology than on its usage). “Social tools” can be considered a wider category including all technology that explicitly connects its users to one another. (I have to say, though, that many people — I included — will sometimes use these terms interchangeably.)

Short version: it’s “social media” that is important in this discussion, more than “just blogging”. I’m talking of “blogging” inasmuch as it is a popular incarnation of social media.

We spent quite some time commenting the blog examples I showed. These are of course examples of blogging externally, because unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to find examples of internal blogging on the internet ;-).

There are a lot of “damage control” or “crisis” examples, because blogging is a good tool to use in this kind of situation where real communication is required.

Here are a few quotes I read out. First, the beginning of the open letter to Palm on Engadget:

Dear Palm,

Man, what a crazy year, right? We know things haven’t really been going your way lately, but we want you to know that we haven’t given up on you, even though it might seem like the only smartphone anyone wants to talk about these days is the iPhone. It can be hard to remember right now, but you used to be a company we looked to for innovation. You guys got handhelds right when everyone else, including Apple, was struggling to figure it out. And it was the little things that made those early Palm Pilots great — you could tell that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to think about what made for a great mobile experience, like how many (or rather, few) steps it took to perform common tasks.

The problem is that lately we haven’t seen anything too impressive out of you guys. Sure, over the past few years the Treo has emerged as a cornerstone of the smartphone market, but you’ve let the platform stagnate while nearly everyone (especially Microsoft and HTC, Symbian and Nokia, RIM, and Apple) has steadily improved their offerings. So we’ve thrown together a few ideas for how Palm can get back in the game and (hopefully) come out with a phone that people can care about. (And we’re not talking about the Centro / Gandolf.) Read on.

Dear Palm: It’s time for an intervention

And two days later, the response of the Palm CEO, Ed Colligan

Dear Peter, Ryan and Joshua:

Thank you for the very thoughtful post about Palm. I really appreciate the fact that you guys and others care enough to take the time to write such a comprehensive list of actions. I forwarded it to our entire executive staff and many others at Palm have read it. Although I can’t say I agree with every point, many are right on. We are attacking almost every challenge you noted, so stay tuned. Let’s remember that it is very early in the evolution of the smartphone and there is enormous opportunity for us to innovate. We have only just begun to fight!

Thank you for taking the time to write. I really do take your comments to heart and I know the team at Palm is totally committed to delivering the best mobile computing solutions in the world.

Ed Colligan

Not bad, huh? This is the kind of openness people want to see more of.

Corporate types will always be concerned about negative comments, which is a valid concern; however, if you’ve got a product or service that’s worth blogging about, your fans should be coming out to support you — which they have, in Yahoo!’s case. Also, by allowing full comments, and better yet, responding to some of them, you gain a valuable sense of integrity and, as loathe as I am to type these words, “street cred” — that you just can’t buy.

Negative comments are the price you’ve got to pay for having a Real Blog, and companies that have them deserve to be recognized. It shows that they believe in their own business, and they respect their customers enough to allow them to have a public opinion on their business.

Yahoo’s Blog Takes Its Blogging Lumps, Like a Real Blog Should

We talked a lot about negative comments and what to do about them (they can actually turn out to be a good thing if you respond to them openly and honestly). We also talked about ghost-writing (don’t!) and human relationships in general. Things that are true for offline relationships, I find, are also true for online ones you can establish through blogging: if somebody is willing to recognise they made a mistake, for example, or acknowledge that you are upset about something, it goes a long way. Same is true on blogs.

Here’s a link to the corporate blogging 101 I mentioned in passing and I said I would point you to.

I also skipped a bit quickly through the Do/Don’t lists, so here they are again:

DO:

eat your own dog-food

trust your bloggers

read other blogs

be part of the community

use a feed-reader

link! even to competition, negative stuff

be human

learn the culture

use an existing blogging tool

discuss problems

define what is really confidential

give existing in-house bloggers a role (evangelists! learn from them!)

tag, ping, use the “kit” and other social tools

DON’T:

try to control

use a ghost-writer or outsource blogging

“roll your own” tool

ignore established blogging conventions, they’re there for a reason

copy-paste print material in posts

use corpspeak

force people to blog

write happy-clappy stuff

write blog posts or comments as if they were e-mails (starting with Hi… and ending with a signature)

be faceless (signing with the name of the company instead of the person)

Employees know (and so do internal communications people) that the best sources of information are usually one’s direct boss and… the cafeteria. If you think about it, your boss is probably one of the main people you actually have real conversations with. You don’t often have a real conversation with the CEO — but you probably have regular briefings with your boss. Hopefully, you have something resembling a human relationship with her/him.

The cafeteria or the corridors are the informal networking spaces of company life. And often, these informal relationships can actually be more useful to your work than the hierarchy. “Networks subvert hierarchies”, says the Cluetrain.

Well, in a company in which employees can blog, subscribe to their feeds and leave comments on each other’s blogs, the online space can become a kind of “virtual cafeteria” — only in the public eye. This might sound scary to some. But you’re not preventing people from having conversations in the cafeteria, are you? By having these conversations online, in a “public” space (which may still be behind the firewall), you can help them be more efficient if they’re positive, and debunk them more easily if they’re rumors.

RSS is an important technology to be aware of. It’s the one that allows people to subscribe to blogs, comments, or other sources of news. In a company where employees can have their own blogs, they’ll need to learn to use an aggregator, which will enable them to create their own news channel. One can expect an employee to know best exactly what sources of information to follow or people to stay in touch with to get her work done.

People who work remotely, who are on different sites, different silos, or who simply have different working hours can all benefit from the online cafeteria.

A few key checkpoints, if you’re thinking of introducing blogs in your company (“are we ready?” style). 5 prerequisites:

the management/CEO/company needs to care about their employees. Blogging won’t work well in an “abusive” relationship.
be willing to engage in real, honest dialogue, also about problematic issues (difficult, but often the most rewarding, as with normal human relationships)
blogging takes time, so it should be counted in as part of people’s workload/job
accept and understand that communication cannot be controlled
understand that blogging is not just a technology/tool, that it is mainly a culture/strategy

5 ingredients to “make it work”:

training. Don’t assume blogging comes naturally to people. We “natural bloggers” are the exception, not the rule. The technology is cheap — put money in the training, so people have a chance to really “get” the culture.
eat your own dog food. If you want to get people in your company blogging, do it yourself, too.
blogging is a grassroots phenomenon (bottom-up), so enable it (top-down), knowing you can’t “make” people blog. Create a blog-friendly environment.
read blogs and comments. This can easily be 50% of the workload involved in “blogging”
speak like a human being.

There… that’s about it. Did we talk about anything else important that I missed?

Talk: Being a Blogging Consultant [en]

[fr] Notes d'une conférence que je viens de donner en Serbie sur ce qu'est le travail d'une "consultante en blogs" (notez les guillemets). Je préfère en fait me définir comme une spécialiste de l'internet vivant (celui des dialogues et des relations humaines) et de sa culture. J'interviens partout où ce genre de connaissance est utile à mes clients.

Here are some rough notes of the talk I gave at Blogopen, reason of my presence in Novi Sad, Serbia. I hope they can be useful to some. Number between square brackets refer to slide numbers (presentation on Slideshare embedded below).

If you have notes of this talk or by any chance have recorded it, please leave a link in the comments.

update: yay! some short recording snippets. see the end of this post.

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[1] [2] Two years ago I was a teacher, and if you had told me then that I would be here in Novi Sad, talking about what it is like to be a freelance blogging consultant, you would probably have seen me make a face like this:

[3] Later on I’ll tell you about what a “blogging consultant” like me actually does, but first of all, here’s my story. I grew up with computers in the house, discovered the internet in 1998 and soon after created a website. I started blogging in 2000 and gradually built a small reputation for myself online. By the time the Swiss media discovered blogs in 2004, I’d been at it for a while. When they started looking for Swiss blogs, they found me, and the phone started ringing.

You know how it is with the media: once one journalist has written about a person or a subject, all the others follow. I started giving interview after interview, exciting at first, but somewhat tedious after some time. But I was lucky to have very good local media coverage, which did help people find me or hear about me.

Just before the press started to show an interest in me (and blogs), a friend of mine asked if I could explain to her how to make a website. We sat together for two hours, and I told her how the internet was made of servers, and websites were in fact files that lived on those servers, files you can make in a text editor with special markings known as HTML, with CSS to control the visual aspect. She said “wow, you’re really good at this, you should get people to pay you to do it!” I was a bit skeptical, but thought it would be cool. So just before my first appearance on TV, I created a professional website (just a few pages, and if you look at it now, it’s really out-of-date — I’ll be working on it during the “Website ‘pro’ day” in a bit over a week). And on that website, I made a page saying something like “I’ll explain to you how to make a website, this is how much it’ll cost”.

Shortly after my TV appearance, I was contacted by a school who wanted me to come and talk about blogs to a class of teenagers. It went surprisingly well and I really enjoyed it, so I added an extra page on my professional site saying “I give talks in schools”. Little by little, through word of mouth mainly, I started having clients. And at one point about 18 months ago, I started having enough clients that I could consider quitting my day job (teaching).

That’s how I became a professional blogging consultant.

[4] So, what does a “blogging” consultant do? It’s not just about blogs. Actually, one of my ongoing struggles is to find a “job title” to define myself. “Blogging consultant” already existed, and people knew about blogs, so it wasn’t too bad.

[5] Blogging is more than it seems. It’s a tool, but it’s more than that. It’s also a culture, and if you’re a company or an institution, blogging is a communication strategy. We see companies and media corporations using the blog tool to publish press releases or official documentation. That’s using the tool, but they don’t get the culture, and they haven’t changed their strategy. (You might want to see the notes on my talk “How Blogging Brings Dialogue to Corporate Communications” if this topic interests you.)

[6] One expression we hear a lot in this kind of context is “social media”. Traditional media go in one direction. Journalists write, people listen (or put their fingers in their ears). It looks like this:

With social media, on the other hand, we have a new type of media (well, reasonably new) where conversations take place. Communication goes both ways:

So basically, being a “blogging” consultant has a lot to do with social media. (Understanding and explaining it.)

[7] All this kind of stuff is explained in a great book that everybody should read: The Cluetrain Manifesto. You can read it for free on the Internet or buy it as a real book if you prefer. The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in the year 2000, so quite some time ago, but it’s still spot on. It tells us how people are sick of being marketed at and talked at, and how people are already having conversations everywhere about brands, companies, and these conversations are happening on the internet. Companies, politicians, and media empires would be smart to step in and join the conversation. Anyway… read the Cluetrain Manifesto if you have any interest in what’s going on on the Internet.

[8] So, in my job, I don’t just work with blogs. In addition to blogs, sometimes solution require wikis, podcasts, or social networks. [9] Using these tools brings up values like dialogue, transparency, authenticity, and often leads to rethink strategy. [10] Finding a solution for a client can be helping them re-organise their e-mail, set up a mailing-list, or simply build a website. Maybe it requires social tools like Twitter or Dopplr, or they might even want to know about virtual worlds like Second Life.

This is clearly not just about “blogging”. It’s about this bigger world blogging is an important part of.

[11] I like to think of myself as a specialist of the living web and its culture. The living web is the internet of people, conversations, and relationships.

My work is anywhere people need this kind of knowledge. Who needs this kind of knowledge?

[12] Schools, politicians, companies big and small, freelancers, non-profits, media, startups, people…

[13] Here’s a little more about what it means to be a freelancer consultant in today’s world.

[14] The Balance of the Soloist according to Stowe Boyd:

The most difficult challenge for soloists is to find a balance between the various activities that must take place to survive. I like to oversimplify these down to three:

Doing The Work — The heart of consulting — of whatever description — is delivering the work. A soloist has to deliver value to the client in order to make money. Most consulting-oriented people start with this capability: it’s the other two that cause problems, in general.

Marketing and Networking — I have already noted that I principally market myself through blogging, and that I attend conferences: those are the outward signs of a willingness, or even an obsession with networking with likeminded others. When I find out about a web product that sounds interesting (my beat), I sign up for the beta, fool with it, write a review, ask for more info, and very soon I am involved in a direct communication with the company’s management. I read other people’s blogs and comment on their ideas. When attending conferences I try to chat with both old friends and folks I have never met before. I know many consultants whose natural introversion makes such activities difficult if not impossible. But these interactions are just as critical to being a soloist as performing the work, and are likely to take up just as much time!

Prospecting, Contracts and Cash Flow — I am always happy to talk about money, and as a soloist it is imperative to get what you are worth, and then to collect the fees. This is a blind spot for many, and a make-it-or-break-it issue. I know a lot of folks that find it hard — even with people they know well — to ask for a project, an engagement, whatever, and to demand payment later on. It may seem obvious but many consultants only get involved with this as a necessary evil, but it’s not. It’s just as central as delivering the goods and networking.

Stowe Boyd, “Going Solo: A Few Words Of Advice”

These are the three skills the freelancer needs. Often people drawn towards freelancing are people who are good at doing something (the work) and reasonable networkers — and the third part (money) is the most difficult.

[15] the work

This will of course vary from person to person. Depending on your skills and abilities, you will be doing different things. For example:

talking (like this talk I gave — speaking engagements)
explaining — talking with clients to tell them about things they need to understand
solving problems
gathering information (about your client, about a subject you need to know more about)
managing projects
installing tools (WordPress, wikis…)
coding HTML, CSS, or even PHP
doing graphical design in Photoshop (I don’t do this, I’m really bad at it, so I usually tell the client he needs to have somebody else for this)
training — it’s not that easy for “normal people” to learn how to use a blog tool… and more importantly, understand the blogging culture. Linking can be the topic of a two-hour class! (what to link, when, with what text, trackbacks, linking technique… suddenly text has two dimensions instead of one, so it changes writing style…)
“cluetrain 101” — explaining the basics of what the internet is changing to the way we communicate
experiential marketing (I’ll blog more about this later) — where you use a client’s product and blog about it
blogging for a client (even though it’s not something I believe in, and I don’t do it — some people might)

[16] Marketing

blog, blog, blog. And blog more. Demonstrate your expertise. Look at how Thomas Mahon used his blog to demonstrate his expertise at being a high-class tailor. Blog about what you know and what you’re doing.
be a good connected net citizen. Use LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, IM… be out there
talk around you offline
go to events — try to speak! send in proposals! Barcamps are a great place to start because anybody can talk. Get somebody to film you and put it online. If you’re not speaking, publish live notes of the talks on your blog (live-blog). People who weren’t there or didn’t take notes might appreciate yours.
in short, take care of your social capital (whuffie) — your social connections
if you’re lucky enough to have journalists call you — be nice with them. I would probably not be here today if it hadn’t been for the local press in Switzerland.

[17] Cash

Often a difficult point, as I mentioned.

how do you actually get to the point where you close a deal?
contracts
you’re worth more than you think! Have friends help you keep that in mind before you negotiate with clients.
will you be paid per day, per project?
how much? fixing the right price can be tough — I haven’t completely figured out pricing yet.
when do you ask for money, when do you not ask? Sometimes it’s not that obvious.

In addition to this, going freelance might mean you have to think about:

insurance
taxes
laws
accounting
invoicing

And also… balancing your personal and professional life. All this “taking care of your social capital” does tend to blend the two — in a good way, often, but also in a way that makes taking days off or going on a real holiday very difficult. Pay attention to that.

[18]-[23] So, looking back… After my initial “no way!” reaction to the idea of being a “blogging consultant” two years ago, even though I went through phases like this

and this

and even

overall… I’m pretty happy about my life as a blogging consultant:

note: I took all the rather cheesy “emotion” photos myself the morning before the talk, because I didn’t have the time and resources to go hunting for good “emotional faces” stock photography… I hope you’ll forgive me!

You can find more stuff about consulting in my del.icio.us links.

Thanks to everybody who attended my talk and gave me kind feedback. Many Serbian bloggers also mentioned my talk in their blog posts, but I’m afraid I can’t understand any of it! Here are the links, though:

As far as I can tell, some posts simply mention me. But if there’s anything said worth to be translated or paraphrased, feel free to do so in the comments! (Just tell me what link it’s about…)

Update:

Thanks a lot to darko156 who filmed two short video sequences and uploaded them to YouTube. Here they are. The first video is slides [4]-[7] (what exactly a blogging consultant is, social media, The Cluetrain Manifesto):

The second is slides [7]-[10] (Cluetrain, social media tools and values — dialogue, transparency, authenticity, strategy…):

Curious about what I was waving in my right hand?

Musique: bénéfices d'une bonne stratégie internet [fr]

[en] This is a description of the benefits a musician or singer can find in implementing a sound internet ("web2.0-ish") strategy (blogs, social software, online presence...). It's lifted from a project proposal I sent a client recently, but it's in my opinion general enough to be of interest to other people. Oh, and check out SellABand.

Pour une personne faisant carrière dans le monde de la musique, avoir une bonne stratégie internet apporte un certain nombre de bénéfices non-négligeables. J’entends ici par “bonne stratégie internet” le fait de s’ouvrir à la dimension sociale et participative de l’internet vivant (blog, outils de social networking, sites communautaires, etc.) et de se “mouiller” dans cette culture. Expliquer ce genre de chose fait partie de mon travail de consultante en blogs ou spécialiste(!) de la culture en ligne (je cherche encore et toujours un moyen concis et efficace de décrire ce que je fais…)

Ce qui suit est une description des bénéfices auxquels pourrait s’attendre un chanteur ou un musicien s’il décide d’investir dans ce média intelligemment. En fait, cet argumentaire est repris presque tel quel d’une proposition de projet que j’ai envoyée récemment à un client. Je le reproduis ici car il est assez général et peut à mon avis intéresser autrui.

Un site web facile à mettre à jour et bien référencé

Aujourd’hui, il est indispensable d’avoir un site web qui soit bien référencé et facile à garder à jour. Les outils de blog comme WordPress sont des systèmes de gestion de contenu légers et techniquement relativement faciles à manipuler.

Ils permettent à une personne n’ayant pas de compétences techniques particulières de publier et d’organiser le contenu du site et de le faire croître au fur et à mesure. Le site ainsi construit contient donc aussi bien une partie “blog” (organisée chronologiquement, qui donne en tous temps et un coup d’oeil les informations les plus fraîches) et une partie “classique” organisée hiérarchiquement (pages “contact”, “bio”, “discographie” etc.). Quelques sites construits sur ce modèle: le blog du CRAB, Groupe Vocal Café-Café et Vibrations Music.

De plus, ces outils séparent complètement le design du contenu du site: il est donc très aisé de changer la ligne graphique du site sans avoir besoin de toucher au contenu lui-même. La structure des pages est également telle qu’elle encourage un bon référencement par les moteurs de recherche (accessibilité, balisage sémantique), sans avoir recours à des techniques de SEO (“Search Engine Optimisation”) parfois douteuses.

En deux mots, gérer un site internet avec un outil de blog permet de le mettre à jour soi-même très facilement et garantit un bon placement dans les moteurs de recherche, en fonction du contenu du site bien entendu.

Tirer profit de la dimension sociale d’internet pour la promotion

Internet n’est pas juste une plate-forme de publication, à la différence d’un média traditionnel. C’est un lieu de vie, d’échanges, de relations, de bouche-à-oreille et de conversations. Cette dimension d’internet est souvent encore mal comprise et son importance sous-estimée. Avoir un site permettant les commentaires du public en regard des publications (une des caractéristiques du blog) est un premier pas. Il existe des également des dizaines de services, centrés ou non autour de la musique, qui permettent d’avoir un pied-à-terre virtuel dans diverses communautés en ligne. En comprenant les dynamiques sociales en jeu, on peut augmenter encore sa visibilité sur internet et lui donner une dimension plus humaine et personnelle.

Rassembler une communauté sur internet autour de soi ou de son travail ajoute un double bénéfice: la communauté est visible, ce qui peut attirer l’attention de personnes extérieures (médias traditionnels ou organisateurs d’événements) et encourager autrui à la rejoindre; d’autre part, les membres de la communauté sont eux-mêmes au centre de leur “réseau personnel”, leur propre communauté, dans laquelle ils jouent un rôle d’influenceur. Cette dynamique existe hors internet bien évidemment, mais elle est décuplée sur internet par l’absence d’obstacles géographiques et la facilité avec laquelle on peut faire circuler des informations dans le monde numérique.

Mettre de la musique à disposition en ligne et favoriser ainsi sa diffusion

Mettre à disposition sa musique en ligne favorise de façon générale sa diffusion, et donne l’occasion à des personnes qui ne l’auraient pas eue autrement de l’écouter et de l’apprécier. C’est la popularité d’un artiste auprès de son public qui va influencer les ventes de CD, et non le contraire. Il est donc intéressant d’une part d’utiliser internet comme véhicule ouvert de diffusion de la musique (afin d’augmenter visibilité et popularité), et également de permettre l’achat de CDs ou d’autres produits via internet, ce qui libère le public des contraintes géographiques. L’utilisation de licences adaptées (Creative Commons) permet de protéger les droits commerciaux tout en encourageant le partage et la diffusion de la musique.

Des sites comme YouTube, consacrés à la publication et au partage de vidéos, ou MySpace, ont déjà eu un impact considérable dans le lancement d’artistes, parfois avec des moyens extrêmement limités. La promotion du matériel ne coûte rien, elle est faite par le public qui lui trouve une valeur suffisante pour le partager avec son réseau.

Se former aux nouveaux médias afin d’être autonome et adéquat

Internet est un média (ou une collection de médias) dont une des caractéristiques principales est de contenir une dimension conversationnelle ou participative. Ces médias sont nouveaux et encore relativement mal maîtrisés en général, et ceci d’autant plus que l’on a pas eu l’occasion d’y être exposés passivement en grandissant. Ces nouveaux médias ont également comme caractéristique de remettre l’individu (avec sa personnalité propre) au centre, de favoriser le contact direct en libérant des intermédiaires, et de mettre en avant les valeurs de transparence, d’authenticité et d’honnêteté. Une formation sérieuse à l’utilisation adéquate de ces médias permettra d’en faire un usage efficace et autonome, et également d’éviter des faux-pas dûs à une méconnaissance de la culture en ligne.