Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

For one reason or another, I neglected my feedreader between 1pm on Friday the 18th and around 7pm on Tuesday the 22nd. During this unintended vacation, nearly a thousand posts were published and were waiting for me in Google Reader.

I thought about that number for a second, then clicked "All Items" and then "Read." There was no way I was going to get through them. Why even try?

Up to this point, I've declared RSS bankruptcy a few times. Toss 'em out and move on. Blogs and news alerts find eyes other than mine.

But today I subscribed to another feed. It was different this time though. Normally, I categorize my subscriptions into the following categories:

• Arbitrarium - Wired , Kottke , Subtraction, Seed Mag, Anil Dash, Venture Beat, Bent Objects, etc.
  
• Design - New At Pentagram, Design Observer, I Love Typography, Ace Jet 170 etc.
  
• User Experience - Boxes and Arrows, A List Apart, Copyblogger, Findability, Good Experience, etc.
• Development - Ajaxian, Joel on Software, 456 Berea St, Y! User Interface, etc
  
• Clients - various client blogs and feeds
• Life Logistics - Meetup, Upcoming.org, Gen X Finance, Web Worker Daily, Del.icio.us tagged "toReview", etc.

This time, I added two new categories, bringing the total to eight.

• Daily
• Whenever

Now, each feed gets placed in one of the six above, and in on of the two below. If I get backed up, I click into "Whenever" and then click "Read". Dump the fluff. Since probably 95% of the feeds occupy the "Whenever" bucket, I feel better removing just these rather than all of them. 

Or, so I tell myself.

   

On Saturday, I attended a Board of Advisors meeting for the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication. We got routine updates on various programs. But a subtext for almost every part of the discussion was the future of mainstream journalism.  
 
It seems like every day we get notice of newspapers and TV news operations retrenching in the face of falling advertising revenues.  Heck, we even saw a rumor surface last week that the most venerable broadcast news organization in history – CBS News – was considering outsourcing its news gathering to CNN.  It’s funny how rumors get started, and CBS News was quick to knock it down, but I suggest that it was a notion that did more than just cross someone’s mind.
 
There is no shortage of stuff to read if a reader wants to go online.  About 120,000 new blogs launch every single day.  A few are insightful but most are woefully uninformed and lacking journalistic standards of accuracy.
 
There’s a part of me that is unsympathetic to journalism’s plight.  News organizations are getting their comeuppance for profound arrogance.  Some newsrooms verge on the immoral and corrupt in allowing personal bias to seep into their copy.  As a former journalist, I write this with sorrow
 
I really don’t know how we’re going to get the information we need to govern ourselves if all of mainstream journalism goes belly up.  
 
We have to find a business model in which consumers are willing to pay for professionally produced content.  Today it’s clear that consumers will go to the Web for news, even to traditional sources – MSNBC, NYtimes.com, USAtoday.com.  But we have yet to find a business model that would allow those news organizations to survive financially online.
 
For the good of our democracy, someone needs to figure this out.

To me the goals of the corporate blog are to develop our employees as thought leaders in their individual practice areas, attract the attention of new clients, and engage current clients in dialog. While talking to ourselves is fun, I see the primary audience as our colleagues and clients.

But this is, as a whole, the blog of an integrated marketing communications company and it is a beast of many colors. We have people blogging about programming, PR, lobbying, design, and more.

In a world where there are specialized blogs that talk about the most niche subjects, how can a blog that talks about everything from Python programming to peep jousts be relevant (as a whole) for anyone but ourselves? So while search engines may pick up specific posts that may reach specific audiences, can you imagine anyone outside of Capstrat subscribing to our general RSS feed?

So I ask, is part of our strategy to get people to subscribe to the blog? Or do we want to focus on search engine pick up of specific articles?

If so, can you imagine anyone subscribing to a blog that covers such a broad range of topics (besides ourselves)?

Do we need to categorize our posts and feeds so readers can see more relevant discussion?

If so, what mechanisms can we devise to do this?

I have decided to raise a point of order with the English language, based on evidence which has recently come to bear. I would like to formally request the immediate and unconditional abolishment of the word 'podcast.'

I have a mondo affinity for words, don't get me wrong. I can write 'mondo' and 'affinity' next to one another in a sentence, and most of you get my meaning. But sometimes, certain junk words can be gummy enough to stick to our regular-usage muscle. Once Merriam-Webster writes them into law, such words can wreak havoc in contexts worldwide for generations.

Sitting around Innovation Station this morning, I was privy to an internal discussion of a client's expectations, as they pertained to a podcast. After several minutes of furious debate, it became clear that 'podcast' brought absolutely no clarity to the scope of the project. In fact, I contend that attaching that handle muddied the waters.

The term podcast was coined in 2004 with the splash of Apple's iPod. The ensuing cultural revolution of handheld entertainment and communication solidified the 'i-' prefix, and '-pod' as the suffix of the compartmentally-hip. At it's inception, the iPod was an mp3 player, designed for portable audio. The term became synonymous with portable, streamable audio cross-media, and soon the podcast was born, a portmanteau of 'iPod' and 'broadcast.' Used to describe organized audio presented over the Web, the podcast separated itself in that one could subscribe to a podcast feed and have installments pulled down to their device automatically. Well that was all great, but in just a couple of rabbit-speed gestational periods, the iPod gave birth to the video iPod, which gave birth to the iPhone...and now you have rich media for nearly all of the senses at your fingertips. And who hasn't heard of RSS by now? You can practically get your groceries via RSS these days. Bloggers everywhere found themselves stumbling over the clunkiness of describing the New Hotness as video podcasts, or rich media podcasts, or vlogs, or...or...

Merriam-Webster gleans the list of words we use every 10 years or so, adding and striking thousands upon thousands of words based on their popularity or obsolescence. The last major revision came in 2003. So you see, folks...WE STILL HAVE TIME. According to M-W (we're tight like that), they receive thousands of letters every year formally petitioning the addition or deletion of all types of words - but they are quick to add that there is no tangible way to directly sway the jury. I would very much like to meet one of these verbal illuminati and invite them to dinner, but that is beside the point. As frustrating as democracy itself, the only way to truly affect change is to encourage others to support you. So today, I implore you. Walk with me. Help our clients understand the Beast. Help us understand our clients. There just is no podcast anymore. There is only the webcast. There is only the blog. Both are the gryphons of our wired world, and no content is off limits. Just add adjectives to describe the nature of your content, and we will build it to perfection.

First off, blog isn't something you contract or a symptom of a cold.

Remember when you were 10 and you would write in your sweet Lisa Frank diary every night about the boy you thought was cute in math class. Well imagine that diary, but on the Web so everyone could ready it. Okay maybe take out any embarrassing stuff, blogs can basically be about anything. Everyone from your five year old brother to your 80 year old granny is doing it. A Web platform that allows for posting content, images, links to other sites, videos, etc. oh my. The topics can range from politics to art and the style can range from serious to hmmm...out there.

Some blogs will never be read by anyone other than very nice family members, but some are becoming "it" resources for news on politics, wars, global economy and, most important to me, celebrities. They provide an unbiased sandbox to sculpt and reshape information as you see it. With this freedom comes a caution, you can't always believe what you read.

So as the lines blur, rules will be defined for blogs and something new will emerge in its place. But for this brief moment and in typical blonde fashion, happy belated birthday blogs!

Last week on their Internet Explorer blog, Microsoft celebrated the first anniversary of Internet Explorer 7's release by putting out a post touting IE 7's rapid uptake and tightened security.

Predictably, when this hit the blogwaves some experts jumped in to question a few rather dubious claims in the post. But the real news happened a few screens down in the comments section, where a deluge of scorn and frustration was heaped on the Internet Explorer team by the general public - the regular people who use and build the Web.

Microsoft is widely regarded as being pretty good at advertising and marketing it's products, but they've occasionally been conspicuously unable to perceive irony in their messages. Microsoft proclaimed they were fighting for their "Freedom to Innovate" in response to the U.S. Department of Justice's anti-trust action a few years back... action launched of course because Microsoft's monopolistic practices were squishing innovation . But it's one thing to ignore what your customers are asking for, then brazenly lead your marketing with, "We Heard You". It's quite another to bring that kind of thinking over to your corporate blog where unhappy customers are free to call you out.

Why were users upset? Well, consider that in the time since IE 7 was released...

Firefox went 2.0, and released beta versions of 3.0. Scores of extensions - a la carte features Firefox users add in to customize their browsing experience - have been improved or newly released this year.

 

Safari released 3.0 Beta, including a new version for Windows that feels lighter, faster and smarter than IE 7.

 

The strangely overlooked Flock released a 1.0 version. While IE 7 finally adds the same level of RSS support other browsers have had for years, Flock gets social media right, and is a glimpse of what IE might look like three versions from now.

 

Opera has committed support for next-generation technologies like HTML 5, SVG and future versions of JavaScript, while IE is still struggling to fix buggy, incomplete support for decade-old standards.

 

...And for the people who either want to or have to use IE, watching Microsoft let a year go by with no new improvements highlights lessons un-learned - not something to celebrate.

A special variety of animosity came from Web designers and developers who can't ignore IE because of it's broad market share, but are growing weary making Web pages for 2008 that have to work in browsers from 2001 (IE 6), and are frustrated with lack of progress in IE 7. Microsoft realizes it needs these people - what could MS have been thinking when they provided the time, place and catalyst to turn them into an angry mob? They might as well have handed out the pitchforks and torches!

You can learn from your customers with your corporate blog. When it's time for a mea culpa, your corporate blog might not be a bad place to put it out there (hint, hint). Your corporate blog can be a very powerful weapon in your communications arsenal, but as with any weapon, it's never a good idea to point it at your own foot.

 

Contempt for the traditional corporate Web site?

I read a great article by a Web strategist I have grown to like and trust named Jeremiah Owyang , who is foretelling the end of the Web site as we know it.

I have to agree on some points and disagree on others.

I agree the corporate Web site as a marketing institution will erode and its relevance will slowly give way to a more conversational mode but having been in the corporate Web site development biz for 14 years, I believe the change will go as slowly as everything else has. 

Recall how blogging's maintream entrance was celebrated? Then lagged and lagged and now, with RSS being understood and adopted, blogging is the light and the new way. 

Jeremiah makes the point that the corporate Web site is irrelevant today. I know what he is saying and I too am on the futurist side of the argument but I have a few dozen corporate clients with highly engaged customers who are no where near ready for this shift. In fact they just started to get the corporate Web site thing in that last year or so. At the risk of sounding like a slow-adopter or a curmudgeon, my bet is that the corporate Web site will continue to thrive while  more conversational or "social" approaches to corporate marketing begin to succeed. I believe this will take at least 3 years if not longer. 

 

As corporations shift Web marketing money toward the social Web, I imagine they are asking themselves a few hard questions. 

As corporations become hip to the idea that social media is worth the energy and attention, they are setting up shop and looking for good thinkers and writers to help them hang the corporate Web 2.0 shingle. Some have been doing it for years, like Cicsco , Sun and a company I've been lurking at called Coudal Partners .

Several things come to mind. First, corporations are starting to ask themselves the buy vs. build question. Should they buy a small blogging outfit who understand everything about getting the platform developed. Team and workflow, design, content management, video and sound and so on. They are also realizing that they have to either solicit good writing and thinking from internal folks or hire on someone capable of extracting the subject matter expertise from the internal ranks. This is the build. Perhaps there is an internal Interactive team ready to go and a bunch of people that are willing and able to enter their cogent thoughts into a blog on a daily or weekly basis. Perhaps neither option works and they have to outsource it until they gain enough comfort to go it alone.

The second thing that came to mind is that there is the whole strategic part that corporations' corp comm folks often overlook. The whole reason a corporation would venture into this space is to join the conversation. It would seem they want to get a message out there and have people engaged, right? Well that takes some strategy. For instance: search, linking, relationship building. Also, blatant marketing blogs are not handled very well in the conversations that attract people. They are typically blacklisted. This means there is likely more risk in alienation than chance of success unless there is a real good strategy to keep the ship afloat. 

I wonder how many corporations have quietly (with or without intention) emerged onto the blogosphere fully equipped to engage thousands only to find no one showed up.