Uninstalled

CIRI Seminar - Using Advanced Technologies Effectively

2008-09-30T17:34:00.002-04:00

Yes, I know I've been neglecting my blog. Normal service will be resumed, etc.

In the meantime, a quick drive-by post for the attendees at today's lunchtime seminar at the Canadian Investor Relations Institute.

This was a fun and really interesting session to participate in, given the current market climate and the pressure on Investor Relations professionals these days. These are certainly interesting times for IROs, given the SEC's extraordinary July 30th announcement and subsequent publishing of new disclosure guidance (PDF) regarding corporate websites and blogs.

Any Investor Relations professional who isn't actively seeking to understand how social media can and will impact their job has - as my friend and co-panelist Parker Mason pointed out - their head stuck ostrich-style in the sand. As I was tempted to crack in today's session - when you bury your head in the sand, think about the target you're presenting. Things are a lot more complicated than they were when I was an IRO, but the fact that much more information about public companies is now readily available online to much wider audiences has got to be a good thing, IMHO.

As promised during my session today, here are a couple of quick links to some pages I've bookmarked that should be of interest to IR pros considering a dive into social media:

- a collection of links to blogging policy examples and guidelines, and;
- a growing collection of blog posts and comments of interest to the IR community

For all those who attended today, thanks for coming out. Hope it was useful to you. If you have any follow up questions, don't hesitate to get in touch (mocc AT thornleyfallis.com).

And to Parker and the splendid Natalie Johnson from General Motors - many thanks for your great contributions. I'm particularly grateful to Natalie for agreeing to extend her visit to Toronto so that she could participate in today's seminar - great to get the real-world experience from someone deeply involved in social media at a very high-profile public company.

Next up... more of the kind of blogging I used to do before I got so corporate. Promise.

CNW Group Social Media Release goes live

2008-08-14T14:18:00.002-04:00

As most readers of this blog probably know, my firm and I have been working with CNW Group for some time now on a whole host of Social Media initiatives.

Over this time, we've been helping them study what the market wants, consulting with their clients, journalists, and partners - and tracking the evolution of the Social Media Release concept, from Todd Defren's outstanding pioneering work through to the adoption of the SMR standards initiative by the IABC earlier this year, and beyond.

One of the major initiatives we've been working insanely hard on for the past few months has now come to fruition, with CNW now ready to unveil their first true social media product and service offering.

The main product page, with an overview of the CNW Social Media Release, is here. You’ll see we included a short intro video put together by our friend Mark McKay, as well as some other materials - I love the way Mark explains the SMR concept:

Naturally, we're using a Social Media Release to announce the CNW SMR, which you’ll find here. One thing to note – this is the first and only fully bilingual social media product of its kind (as far as I know). All services offered are available in both national languages.

Tiresome flack that I am, I’m afraid I can't resist including a few more key messages (or, at least, the three things that really stood out for me in the way this came together):

I’m proud that CNW's SMR product is truly social: with moderated inline commenting on every release, and a rich set of sharing and community features;
I like that they're still positioning this as a complement to any communications initiative, not a replacement. To that end, they're including a simple, templated advisory that will be sent across the traditional wire (for free) with every SMR issued – plus encouraging clients to still consider issuing a full-text traditional release, where appropriate;
They're offering meaningful and useful reporting and analysis with every SMR. We've simply hooked Google Analytics up to every release, and will be able to feed full, detailed usage stats to every client – all part of the service. Clients will be able to see where their audience is coming from, what search words they used to find the release, how long they spend on the page, what links they follow, etc.

This is one of the most enjoyable projects I've ever worked on, and I'm really thrilled with the way it all came together. Kudos to Parker, Nicole, Duane and the entire team at CNW Group, and also to Brett Tackaberry, Rob Villeneuve, Ben Watts and all of my confrères at 76design - I think they did an outstanding job on this. Yes, I know I'm massively biased here, but I can't help being excited about the work my team mates have done.

The concept of the Social Media Release is an absolute game-changer for professional communicators. There has been some excellent innovation in this area already, from service providers such as Marketwire, BusinessWire, PRNewswire, and PitchEngine. I'm really proud to be involved in this latest leap forward from CNW.

Testing out ScribeFire's blog plugin for Firefox...

2008-07-10T18:24:00.002-04:00

...with a quick pointer to Paul Johnston's interesting piece: Who am I? Reassessing my online profile.

I have to like the process Paul is going through here; thinking out loud about his early experiences as a blogger and social media experimenter. It's the same tangle of questions many of us - even those who've been playing around with this stuff a long time - are still trying to resolve.

Meanwhile, not sure about ScribeFire yet. I like the idea of a blog tool that plugs directly into Firefox - kind of like the old Performancing or NowPublic plugins. I don't know how long I'll be happy playing with a tool that doesn't support Ctrl-arrow key text navigation combos. I do like the visual UI though, so far, so I'm going to persevere for a while...

Peter Shankman's Help A Reporter Out list

2008-07-09T23:57:00.002-04:00

If you're one of the many PR folk or journalists who read this blog, stop what you're doing right now (unless it's billable stuff for one of my clients, of course :-) and hie thee over to Peter Shankman's awesome HARO service.

In a few short months, Peter has built a list of more than 13,000 subscribers - each of whom is now receiving up to three messages a day with lists of requests and contact info from reporters seeking sources for stories in development.

He's pulling in enquiries from a terrific range of media outlets - from Business Week, to National Geographic, to national and international dailies, to interesting niche-focused blogs and online publications.

The idea is similar, in some ways, to the ProfNet service (disclosure: ProfNet is operated in Canada by my good friends - and great client - CNW Group), but I see what Peter is doing as complementary rather than directly competitive. There's no reason why agencies and reporters wouldn't use both services (and I know some who already do).

Peter's approach is personal, direct, candid, and entertaining - and he takes an active hand in policing the list; mercilessly weeding out any PR folk foolish enough to take advantage of the good karma he's creating. Pitch a reporter on the list with an off-topic or simply lame approach and you should expect to get banned with ruthless speed. Peter has invested his own reputation capital in this thing, and he's not about to let it turn into a spam machine.

Sign up now - it's free and unlimited, and - much like ProfNet - a terrific source of ideas and opportunities for the smart flack.

Where I Am From - by Charlie

2008-06-26T13:53:00.002-04:00

Another quick drive-by post, slipped in between the long bouts of writing.

Yesterday was the kids' last day at school. For the last few days, they've been shipping home giant bags full of project work completed over the course of the year. Leafing idly through Charlie's pile of stuff while on the phone, I came across a folder titled "Charlie Autobiography".

The entire work is a thing of absolute joy, guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes and a lump to the throat - for his parents, at least. I'd love to get the whole thing scanned and up onto Charlie's blog at some point, and I will do when time (and Charlie) permits. For now, here's one quick taste of the piece.

At the front of the Duotang binder, right after the wonderful illustrated title page, Charlie has inserted a short poem, written at some point in the past school year. I know I'm in danger of gushing with parental pride here, but seriously - he wrote this at age 10:

Where I Am From

I am from Mississauga,
Where none of my family was born,
But where my parents first lived in Canada.

I am from Canada,
But the rest of my family is Irish,
I smell the soda bread baking
While the fiddle music plays.

I am from a family of 5,
My Mom, my Dad, my sister,
And a brother who looks up to me,
His big brother.

I am from a love of soccer,
Passed to me by my Dad, from England,
Where they play all day long.

I am from wanting to be looked up to,
To be known around the world,
To be talked about for many years.

~*~

I have a feeling you will be, Charlie mate. You will be.

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present...

2008-06-25T11:50:00.002-04:00

A drive-by post, fired into the ether between bursts of proposal writing, to say three things:

1. Roy Greenslade is absolutely right. This piece in today's Guardian is precisely what I've been trying to say for the past seven years of blogging, here and elsewhere. Amen, Roy, amen.

2. Delighted to hear that Doc is out of danger, out of hospital, and blogging up an insightful storm.

3. Never, ever feed the trolls. You're better than that.

Praying for Doc

2008-06-20T00:02:00.002-04:00

I'm not a very good Catholic, not even a terribly good Christian. It's hard for me to find the faith some days under all the doubt. Fleeting moments when I feel it; great long arid stretches of time when the inner skeptic is winning. I try.

So whether the prayers of a skeptical Catholish optimist will amount to a hill o' beans, who knows - but I'm fervently offering them up tonight as they're all I've got.

My old friend, inspiration, and blogfather, Doc Searls, is in hospital right now, fighting pancreatitis brought on as a miserably unlucky side-effect of an ERCP examination.

How he got there is a long story, which you can read back through his recent blog posts to piece together. In short: he's not well.

The good news is that he's managing to blog from his hospital bed - and not just stuff about the various tests, diagnoses, symptoms, and other indignities he's suffering through.

A couple of days ago he posted one of the most thought-provoking pieces on the state of the 'Net I've read in a long time - proving that his mental capacity has been in no way dimmed by his body's debility.

Reading stuff like this from Doc, or his contributions to the Cluetrain Manifesto, essays such as World Of Ends, his Linux Journal articles, his scores of blog posts, or any of the fantastic (and still remarkably relevant) pieces archived in the Reality 2.0 category at Searls.com - I'm struck by what an immeasurably dumber place the world would be without him.

It's fitting that one of the world's leading advocates for keeping the Internet stupid (in a good way) is one of the most luminously intelligent people we have on the side of light.

So get well soon, Doc. We need those neurons firing for a good few years yet.

Update: Third Tuesday Toronto Tonight

2008-06-17T13:24:00.003-04:00

Just a quick note for those of you heading out to tonight's Third Tuesday with CBC Search Engine's Jesse Brown - we are still in the same venue as always, Fionn McCool's at University and Adelaide, but they've kindly offered to move us into a bigger room for tonight's event.

If you come in the front doors, from Adelaide, don't head right and up the stairs to our usual room - turn left into the City Bar section, where you'll find all of your usual Third Tuesday friends (and more).

Other than some issues with the sound system (which I believe we've resolved for tonight's session) the one other piece of slightly negative feedback we've received about recent events is that it has been getting kind of crowded. This is a good problem to have, of course. I'm hoping that this lateral move into a somewhat bigger room will make it more comfortable for all.

Also - if you haven't signed up to attend yet, you don't need to worry about the fact that the Meetup page has been showing us as over-subscribed. We now have rather more space to accomodate everyone.

See you tonight!

Jesse Brown comes to Third Tuesday: searching questions for the host of Search Engine

2008-06-12T11:41:00.002-04:00

We're big fans of the CBC Radio One show Search Engine here at TFC, and of the host, Jesse Brown's, dry wit.

So I'm absolutely tickled that Jesse has agreed to be our guest for what will be the last of the 07-08 season of Third Tuesday Toronto meetups (before we go on hiatus for the Summer months).

Here's the writeup we posted to the main Third Tuesday page:

Jesse Brown is the host and one of the producers of the CBC Radio One show Search Engine. A journalist and humourist, Jesse has worked in many different forms of media, including print, television, and radio.

Since its launch in September, 2007, Search Engine has won praise from followers of Internet culture, in Canada and worldwide, and has attracted a thriving, engaged community of listeners with an interest in the social, political, and cultural impact of technology.

Designed as a collaborative, open source radio show, Jesse and his colleagues at Search Engine utilize the show's blog to communicate and collaborate with listeners. The radio stories feed off of opinions or information gleaned from listener commentary, and feature stories on the show typically spill over into healthy, sometimes heated discussion in the blog comments. Jesse also openly encourages listeners to suggest improvements and changes to the show itself, and continues to tune the show format based on listener feedback.

Jesse broke into media at the age of 17 by founding a city-wide underground student newspaper. He was honoured by Ryerson University with their Udo award, "for noteworthy contributions to the field of Journalism," and remains the youngest recipient in the award’s history. His radio program The Contrarians ran as a summer replacement series on CBC Radio One. His satirical column The Experiment ran for two years in Saturday Night Magazine and won a National Magazine Award for Humour.

Come out and hear Jesse speak about the ideas behind Search Engine, the power of the community, and the future of open source broadcasting.

I'm particularly grateful to Jesse for agreeing to do this session, as he'll be fresh back from a flying visit to China, reporting on the "Great Firewall" for the CBC.

If you haven't hooked into Search Engine yet, I can highly recommend it. Along with Spark, Ideas, All Things Considered, and Quirks & Quarks, it has fast become one of my favourite radio shows - and one of the select few podcasts I always listen to. You can get the podcast or listen online, here.

The audience for our Third Tuesday events in Toronto has been growing strongly over the past few months, so sign up now if you're interested, before all the spaces are filled.

We're meeting at Fionn McCool's, 181 University Avenue (entrance around the corner on Adelaide), starting at 6:00 next Tuesday, June 17th.

And if you can't make it in person, but have questions you'd like to put to Jesse, drop a note in the comments, below.

It's terrific to see how Third Tuesday has grown in the space of just 20 months. There are Third Tuesday events running from coast-to-coast, in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and now even New Brunswick. (Next season, we really need to look to the Prairies, I guess...). I think a big part of the success is the simple fact that these are all free events, pulled together by enthusiastic volunteers.

Of course, we wouldn't be able to keep Third Tuesday growing without the support of the sponsors too, so a quick and entirely justifiable plug for our friends at CNW Group is in order. They've been our national sponsor for the whole of this past season, and we're immensely grateful for their support in covering the hard costs of the sessions.

Hat tip, also, to Third Tuesday Montreal sponsor, Massy Forget , and Third Tuesday New Brunswick sponsors, Radian6 , propelSJ , YourTeam Online and Evolving Solutions. Thanks to all of you for supporting the community.

Whither the Social Media Release?

2008-06-11T10:42:00.002-04:00

The splendid Todd Defren makes an excellent point, here, about the right way to look at the Social Media Releases as a communications vehicle.

Thought I'd cross-post and expand on my comment to Todd's post here...

Through my firm's relationship with CNW Group, I've had the benefit of an extraordinary education in the inside workings of a major international wire service. In addition, given the amount of work we do at Thornley Fallis in the social media universe, I've looked at countless examples of Social Media Releases, and worked on more than a handful myself.

From this perspective, it strikes me that Todd's observations are absolutely right.

In summary, Todd contends that communicators should not be issuing Social Media Releases over the wires. He says:

While I sincerely applaud how far the wire services have progressed in all-things-social, I am unconvinced that “distribution” is the Big Issue for Social Media Release adoption. It’s not about distribution, it’s about empowerment and conversation.

Amen. There's nothing particularly social about the act of distribution - no matter how one chooses to tweak it. Making a news release more social doesn't mean spamming it out to more people via wire, via email distribution, or via ads in RSS feeds.

It means opening up the format to encourage more interactivity, engagement, creative repurposing (or what one might call "coverage") and, yes, conversation.

Hence, hosting SMRs on the firm's own social media newsroom is precisely the right thing to do.

If a well-crafted SMR can be considered an "opening statement" or conversation catalyst, you want to set yourselves up as a magnetic centre for that conversation, and encourage the juice to flow around your conversation starter as people add to, comment on, applaud, detract, or otherwise embellish and extend your statements.

At the same time, much of this stuff is still terra nova for professional communicators and their clients and employers alike. There's a lot of cautious exploration and experimentation, lots of hedging of bets while people watch to see which way the various standardisation initiatives are going to go. Things will settle down somewhat within the next year, as the IABC Working Group on the Social Media Release (of which I'm a member) gets its collective teeth sunk into the issue and comes out with some solid recommendations.

For now, Todd's point about issuing a traditional release that links off to a more social artifact makes awfully good sense. That's certainly what we've been advising clients to do. At the same time, however, I think the wire-based SMR will still play a role for many clients, as a good middle ground - and it will evolve into more than that over time.

One of the challenges faced by many of the clients I’ve been dealing with is the extant gap between their Web operations and their communications function. The corporate and agency PR folk, quite often, just don’t have any sway over what happens to their Web newsroom, or much of the rest of their online activities for that matter.

Yes, we all know that’s broken and wrong, but it is still very often the case. The frustrating reality is that they may not have the budget or ability to quickly change their existing newsroom into something more social. One of my favourite clients, as an example, is still fighting with their corporate Web marketing department to stop them posting news releases as PDFs (ack).

Setting up a standalone, blog-based social media newsroom that links back to the corporate site is a great interim option, for sure, but it’s far from ideal. To accrue the maximum benefit from any conversational karma and Googlejuice created, that newsroom really ought to be a core part of the main site. If your website isn't social enough, don't fix it by slapping up a lean-to social site next door: build a better darn site.

This can be a frustrating discussion to have. With any reasonably large corporation, there’s a good chance that the newsroom will be one of the most frequently-updated, content rich, and search engine-friendly parts of the site. Any right-thinking webmaster would surely want to look at the newsroom as a great engine for driving link traffic and organic search results. Sadly, the discussion doesn’t always go that way.

So for firms who don’t have social media newsrooms or who lack the budget or ability to change their existing newsroom in the short term – the wire-hosted SMR still makes good interim sense, as long as there are a lot of links to drive clickjuice back to the main corporate site.

Meanwhile, comparison Todd (and Jeremiah Owyang before him) draws between the function of an SMR and FriendFeed is a good one, and I wholeheartedly agree with his point that its "Social Media aggregation and engagement prowess" is something any SMR provider should hope to emulate. I think Todd and I are also in agreement that Jeremiah's prediction ("...the Social Media Press Release, will reincarnate as Friendfeed") is a bit of a stretch. The two things may achieve similar goals, but they start from entirely different points of origin.

One last, quick, fairly obvious observation – when we’re all talking about "wire distribution" here, we are, of course, really talking about online "distribution" (i.e. posting) on the newswire service’s Web site. There ain’t an actual wire in the world that can handle much more than standard ANPA-formatted ASCII text right now, although things are certainly evolving apace in that world too.

This seems like a pedantic distinction, perhaps, but I often find myself having to point out the difference between what an actual wire service does and what email/downstream Web distribution models are all about. One of these things is not like the other, but all of them will end up being entirely different from the way they are now - and increasingly similar, no doubt. That's a good thing, I think.

A panel I'd really like to see at mesh '09

2008-06-10T16:42:00.002-04:00

One of the big factors that makes mesh ("Canada's Web Conference") such a success is, of course, the founders.

It almost goes without saying that this thing wouldn’t be even a fraction as good as it is, year over year, without the passion, energy, and intelligence invested in it by Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Rob Hyndman, Stuart MacDonald, and Mike McDerment.

And yet, other than the one Third Tuesday group hug we managed to pull off just before the mesh conference in 2007, there really hasn’t been an opportunity to get the five founders up on stage together and have them share some of their insights into the state of the Web in Canada (and things of that ilk).

They’re a group of really smart, experienced, plugged-in, and genuinely interesting chaps. Without any cheesey attempt to blow smoke up their fundaments, it would be great to see a big panel session with the five founders at mesh next year, perhaps as a way to wrap up the whole thing.

This year, as in previous years, the last panel sessions of the second day came to an end in their respective rooms, and people then hung around, not wanting to let go of the buzz, eventually wandering off in groups to the various after-parties. It felt like it needed one last group session to bring everyone back together again, in an attempt to summarize or group-grok the overall conference before ringing the closing bell.

Logistically, this might be difficult - it would require opening the big conference space at the MaRS centre back up into one big room after being divided into three separate spaces for the main body of the conference - but I'm sure that would be doable somehow. Perhaps rejigging the agenda of the second day, to put a 15 minute break in after the last panels...?

I get the impression the mesh founders feel more comfortable acting as foils to their headliners, rather than playing the role as frontmen themselves (which is a credit to them all, of course) – but this just seems like an idea that wants to take shape.

Heh – call it the mesh mosh. Throw the five guys up there in front of the assembled hordes and try to get one huge closing conversation going. I think it would be a terrific way to end what is already a great conference.

Recipe for Summer fun

2008-06-08T17:09:00.003-04:00

Take one trampoline and one regular garden sprinkler. Add kids.

The business card I'm just too polite to create

2008-06-05T23:51:00.003-04:00

I keep getting these promo messages from Streetcards, trying to entice me to order a new set of Blogcards at super, extra discounted prices.

I’m very happy with my Thornley Fallis cards, and not convinced I really need or want to restock my old Blogcards, thanks.

They can be fun to hand out at bloggy meetups. And they were kind of useful back in the summer of ’06, when Jeneane Sessum, Chris Locke, and I put together the world’s first (and shortest-lived) Gonzo PR Agency, just so that we could help launch one product on the unsuspecting American masses. On a whim, I'd ordered a batch of Blogcards with the name of our virtual agency - damn skippy - and I've still got a few of them lying around.

On the commute home the other night, I thought of a new card I would like to create, though. Except that I'd be far too chicken to ever actually use it.

Still, the idea's not doing any good rattling around the back of my head. Best I purge it and offer it up to anyone who's feeling snarky enough to do something with it.

Picture yourself stepping off a crowded subway car, and passing one of these to the stranger next to you, just before the doors close, parting you forever...

(click for biggy version)

The Innovation Entropy Problem

2008-06-05T22:46:00.002-04:00

Mathew Ingram posts an insightful commentary on the Wall Street Journal's fascinating piece about the Ballmer-Gates transition at Microsoft, and Michael Kowalchik chimed in with some excellent comments of his own, and a repeat of one of his earlier posts that is well worth revisiting.

As I commented at Mathew's blog, I lived through a very, very similar nightmare a number of years ago, while working for what was, at the time, one of the biggest software firms in Canada, a darling of the TSE.

We’d been blisteringly hot for a few years, having risen to the top of the market on the back of the corporate shift to Windows 95/98 and client-server networks. Our main competitor had got stuck supporting an old, DOS and Netware-based product and a big installed base. We were the nimbler, more innovative company that had its Windows-native product out first.

Somewhere around about the middle of ’98, though, a few of us were starting to get really worried. Almost 40% of our annual revenue was coming from maintenance contracts at that stage. We were comfortable, in other words; too comfortable. The company had developed something of a bloated, complacent, bureaucratic feel.

Our biggest concern, from a product perspective, was the rise of the Web. We had been trying to squooge our product into something vaguely Web-ready for a while, but it was basically a trainwreck. We learned the hard way: you just can’t slap a new coat of Web paint on a clunky old piece of client-server code. Remember when software firms used to describe their products as “Web-enabled”? Yeah, that was us.

There was a big 2-day management off-site meeting that year. At one point, in the midst of a lengthy debate in which we were trying to come to consensus around precisely how screwed we really were, I floated the suggestion that a solution to our problem might be to take some of our best people, fund them, and cut them loose to hire a brand new team and grow their own thing.

Get them to start up a completely new company, unencumbered by any of our problems but with the experience, knowledge, and collective expertise we had developed over 15+ years in the market. The core of my idea was: let’s create our own best Web-based competitor. Let’s cannibalize our market share, before someone else comes along and drinks our milkshake for us.

Alas: much argument, no agreement, and – in truth – not enough corporate cojones to commit to such a madcap scheme.

Meanwhile, one of our very best resellers – a company that had built their entire (very successful) business by developing add-on tools and custom solutions around our core product, was secretly developing a pure, Web-native competitor to our cash cow. They did precisely what I’d proposed – setting up a separate, arms-length company to launch this thing once it was built (keeping their hand in the whole thing well hidden from us).

Then they took two years to slowly slim down (and ultimately close) their original business, with almost all of the people they “downsized” coincidentally getting hired by this new kid on the block. Before we even realised what was happening, they were kicking our arse in every client pitch.

You can guess the rest. We slipped slowly into the doldrums, only to be put out of our misery a year or so later through an acquisition.

The upstart competitor went on to greater and greater things, ultimately converting a sizeable chunk of our former client base to their much shinier new product. They were, in their turn, also acquired for an almost indecently large amount of money, and the founders all got very rich.

Meh.

Mathew and Michael's posts also put me in mind of another rather lengthy diatribe I posted way back in the very early days of this blog and, heck, if one Michael can re-run old posts, so can this one...

I mentioned this Marketing Aforethought piece to yet another Michael - Thornley Fallis colleague, Mr. Seaton - a couple of days ago. Just re-read it and pleasantly surprised to discover that I still agree with me, seven years later.

CommonCraft: Social Media in Plain English

2008-05-29T19:49:00.003-04:00

Lee and Sachi LeFever have done it again. If I had an ounce of the talent and native smarts these guys have in their pinky fingers, I'd be happy:

Funny, brilliant, and absolutely right.

Another way to look at Mesh08

2008-05-24T11:27:00.002-04:00

I love this Flickr photoset from Twitter user deadprophet showing his notebook from the Mesh Conference earlier this week.

The page below appears to be notes taken during my Social Media and the Enterprise panel, and the later session on Measuring Social Media (including a certain quote from Dave Jones that will live on in misinterpreted infamy):

Social Media and the Enterprise - a follow up thought

2008-05-22T22:17:00.002-04:00

Something occurred to me in the panel discussion I moderated at Mesh '08 earlier today - something I wanted to say at the time, but didn't want to chew up precious discussion time listening to my own voice. I'd already babbled on far too long in my dopey Star Trek-inspired intro.

The lady from Harlequin, Jenny Bullough, said one of the smartest things on the general topic of employee training, blogging policies, and social media best practices - she summarized Harlequin's advice to staff as: "don't do anything stupid". Amen to that.

The anecdote I was tempted to recount at this point is one I've referenced several times in the past. It's still one of my favourites, and particularly appropriate in this context, I think.

Many years ago, my friend Doc Searls introduced me to a story about a guy named Earl Gilmore (now sadly dead, alas). Earl founded a software company called Business Application Systems some time around 1980. This was way back when you could call a startup something as simple and literal as "Business Application Systems" without fear of ambiguity.

As Doc tells it, when's company started to grow, he felt it necessary to put an employee manual together. Earl's entire manual consisted of two pages, with one rule per page:

Rule #1: Use good judgement.
Rule #2: Violate Rule #1 and you're in deep shit.

To my mind, that still stands as one of the best, general purpose, all-encompassing policies I've ever come across - and one that's pretty close to the spirit of the approach Harlequin is taking. Good for them. OK, so it wouldn't pass muster with many corporate lawyers and gimungous HR or internal legal departments - but if you hire well, trust people, manage with clarity, and have confidence in their judgement, I think it works.

Blog smart. Or get dooced.

Mesh 08 Wrap

2008-05-22T21:24:00.003-04:00

Another excellent day at Mesh.

As always at this event, the mingling, nattering and "meshing" in the breaks between sessions is as - if not more - useful than the sessions themselves. So many fascinating, smart, opinionated, interesting people to hang out and swap ideas, stories, and URLs with.

Personal highlights today: excellent keynote session with co-founder of Club Penguin, Lane Merrifield and the closing panel on Social Media Measurement, featuring Katie Paine, David Jones, and Sylvain Perron, expertly moderated by Stuart MacDonald. Great stuff - hoping they'll post that session up on MeshTV so I can go back and listen to all the really clever and useful things Katie and the chaps had to say.

My own gig seemed to go pretty well too, I'm relieved to say. I was trying really hard to listen to what the panellists and audience were saying, so that I could help keep a healthy, reasonably contiguous conversation flowing - but it's such a challenge to try to ensure that the great questions raised by audience participants are properly addressed, while also giving as many people as possible a chance to contribute. I felt we could easily have turned this topic over for the whole afternoon, and still only have scratched the surface.

Many thanks to Dave Fleet (ably assisted by Brad Buset), Connie Crosby, and Mark Blevis for their great live-blogged synopses of the session. There were other live tweets and may be other blog posts too, which I'm sure I'll stumble across in my secret, guilty ego-surfing in the days ahead.

Thanks also to the panellists - Chris Reid from Yamaha Motor Canada, Natalie Johnson of General Motors, and Jenny Bullough from Harlequin. Takes some courage to come out and represent these giant enterprises in a social media setting, and I think they acquitted themselves well.

Dave Fleet was kind enough to allow me to cut and paste his live-blogged transcript here. It's not quite the same as being there, but I think it gives a good taste of the stuff we covered:

1:33 davefleet - At the panel on "Social Media in the Enterprise"
1:33 davefleet - MOCC just revealed his geekdom
1:35 davefleet - Chris Reid (Yamaha), Natalie Johnson (GM), Jenny Bullough (Harlequin Enterprises) on the panel
1:39 davefleet - Johnson: As a company, having a blog lets you establish your own 'voice'
1:41 davefleet - Reid: Says Yamaha is the only motor sports company in Canada that's participating in social media
1:41 davefleet - Reid: When he blogs, he's not Yamaha speaking to customers, he's himself
1:42 davefleet - Michael O'Connor Clarke (http://michaelocc.com/) moderating the panel

1:42 [Comment From Brad Buset]
All three have spoken of being the brand online, now what about listening....
1:44 davefleet - Johnson: Just launched "I Am Saturn" website. Customer couldn't get roadside assistance, had to leave car at side of the road. Customer went to their website and told their story. PR team "went to work" to fix it/"make the situation better" for them.
1:45 Brad Buset - http://imsaturn.com/ not Iamsaturn.com

1:45 davefleet - Website is http://imsaturn.com/

1:47 davefleet - MOCC: Has social media brought cultural change to your organization?
1:47 Brad Buset - 1. Christ --> yes, opened eyes and sped up responses
1:47 davefleet - Reid (Yamaha): Yes, and it's still growing. Opened eyes to value of responding quicker and more directly to customers
1:47 Brad Buset - *okay, not '"christ", but "Chris" , not that good of a panel
1:48 davefleet - Reid: Customers aren't primarily bloggers. Lots of aliases, lots of bashing on forums. Blogging has allowed them to take the conversation out of that venue.
1:51 Brad Buset - Put out by Michael OConner Clark (MOCC) - can you use social media in the enterprise without top-down support
1:52 Brad Buset - Dude in the audience says yes - as long as you have direct managerial support, the right people using it and some technical help
1:53 davefleet - Johnson: Agrees - you need top-level support. If you don't have it (including IT), it can move very very slowly
1:54 davefleet - Bullough: Sometimes the challenge is middle managers not lower ranks or upper management

1:54 Brad Buset - Interest piece from Ipsos Reed re: c-suite media adoption. Long story short - they're getting into it in a big way http://tinyurl.com/4rrpnu

1:54 davefleet - Bullough: Can be effective to show them how their competitors use social media. Get support more easily
1:57 davefleet - Johnson: If you're not out there, having your people talk in this space with other people, you'll lose out
1:58 davefleet - Audience Q: Can you give some specific examples - when you talk about social media spaces, what exactly are you talking about? MySpace? Your own?
1:59 davefleet - Bullough: Had great success with a series of podcasts
1:59 davefleet - Bullough: Podcast series called "meet an author." H/ever, had runaway success with "meet an editor" series that lets authors meet editors
2:00 davefleet - Johnson: http://www.igotshotgun.com/

2:01 davefleet - Reid: Concerns on how to do it internally. Externally, could have gone with Facebook etc. Internally, as a blog with clear terms of use, put legal department at ease
2:03 davefleet - GM encourages employees to participate on Facebook etc. Educating employees about these forums. Doesn't 'plant' people
2:04 Brad Buset - same for Yamaha -- they use it to protect the company, and to protect the individuals
2:04 davefleet - Reid: Clearly tells employees not to represent the company in blogs or other forums. Does it to protect the employee and the company
2:05 davefleet - MOCC: Talk about the policies you have in place for your own social media activities - blogging policy? comments policy? trackback policy? how to respond to negative comments on external blogs?
2:05 davefleet - Excellent question
2:05 davefleet - Bullough: Yes. To summarize - don't be stupid. Don't blog about authors, don't get personal
2:06 davefleet - Johnson: Does have a corporate blogging policy. Worked with other departments to develop it. Took a while to develop.
2:07 Brad Buset - Bullough: If you have a strong enough community, they do the policing for you. Similar to the Privacy panel from yesterday in that the best defense to be out there, build your brand until people know you, and allow them to make the call
2:07 davefleet - Johnson: They do moderate for offensive/foul language. They do post negative comments though. Criticism is fine.
2:08 davefleet - MOCC: Should be a disciplinary offence if you start anonymously commenting on other sites.
2:08
2:08 davefleet - Reid: Employees are not to represent the company publicly. He has an exemption though
2:11 davefleet - Mark Blevis: How do you educate employees/brass on how to use the tools
2:11 davefleet - Reid: It really helped to bring in an outside expert
2:12 Brad Buset - Another similarity from personal brand - education is key for support and management
2:13 davefleet - Q: What did you do to convince management that this is a good thing?
2:14 davefleet - Johnson: VP of Communications jumped on board and said he thought it was a good idea. Championed it.
2:15 davefleet - Government timelines for responding to mail don't work online. How do you deal with this in your co?
2:16 davefleet - Reid: In the blogosphere conversations gain critical mass in short order. Use the blog to stay on that while the corporate response is developed.
2:17 davefleet - Q: What are you keeping in mind when making sure that your involvement in SM doesn't backfire?
2:17 davefleet - Excellent audience questions at this panel
2:18 davefleet - Johnson (GM): Can't make sure nothing backfires. Educate people so they can go out there and respond.
2:19 davefleet - Johnson: If you're used to press releases, having a conversation with someone can be a little scary. It takes time.
2:19 davefleet - Q: Do you have a risk management plan?
A: (GM) No
2:20 davefleet - Q: How does social media appear on your annual budgets? Does it get its own line item, or folded in to other items?
2:21 davefleet - A: (GM) Yes, it is at GM
A: (Harlequin) No, however 'top brass' has a good understanding of the costs. Already established the unit though - mainly ongoing costs (???!)
A: No
2:22 davefleet - Q: Doesn't sound like social media is an important part of your companies yet. Still hamstrung.
2:22 davefleet - A: Panel doesn't seem to agree with that one.
2:22 davefleet - Q: How many GM people are dedicated to social media
A: (GM) 5
2:23 davefleet - So social media is at a starting point, not at a success point
2:24 davefleet - Q from @thornley: Bob Lutz was one of the first high-profile corporate bloggers. However, there have been four posts since he last posted. Is there strategy to maintain it as a corporate blog?
2:24 davefleet - A: Lutz is the strongest voice on the blog, not the only one
2:25 davefleet - Q: How have you met regulatory disclosure rules?
2:25 davefleet - Bullough: They trust their employees
2:25 davefleet - Johnson: Agrees with Bullough. Blogosphere is just one way you can communicate. Just like another medium, don't reveal information that would affect the company financially on there
2:26 davefleet - Q: How do you measure success/ROI?
2:27 davefleet - Johnson: This is a relatively new area. What she terms success is people starting to engage and connect. Do they look at GM as an innovative forward-thinking company?
2:28 davefleet - Johnson: social media fits in the top part of the sales funnel, not close to the sale
2:29 davefleet - Bullough: Agrees with Johnson - not about ROI, it's about return on engagement
2:30 davefleet - End of panel. Great Q&A

And that's it. Mesh '08 is a wrap. Hope those of you still ligging around at the after-after-party are having a blast. Till next time...

Comment flakiness

2008-05-22T15:46:00.002-04:00

Haloscan comments are b0rking on me at the moment, dammit. If you've left a comment and don't see it posted - don't worry. I have email copies, and will ensure your comment is up there as soon as Haloscan stops puking. Well... unless, of course, your comment is just calling me a fat paddy or something.

Mesh 08 Conference Day One Thought

2008-05-22T10:59:00.002-04:00

First day of this year's Mesh was a bit of a curate's egg for me, for a couple of reasons.

First, as I'm still fresh back from vacation and haven't even had a chance to get into the office yet, I've been trying to get as much catching up and work done in the space between the meshing. I had to tune out a few times during the day to get some billable hours in.

Secondly, the sessions I attended fell into one of two categories at opposite ends of a spectrum of quality - they were either just OK-ish or utterly fantastic. In the latter group, Michael Geist's truly outstanding keynote was just inspiring. Geist kicks righteous arse - he's a national treasure and one of the most important voices Canada has to contribute to the global conversation on topics as diverse as privacy, copyright, activism, poverty, technology and law. Smart, insightful, bold, and he gives good PowerPoint.

Also mind-expandingly wonderful was the discussion "Does Location Matter" between CBC's Nora Young and the charming, brilliant, and just flat-out interesting Bill Buxton. One of the entertaining things about this session was that, of the five different people I've discussed it with in the hours since it ended yesterday afternoon, I've heard five different versions of what Bill and Nora's conversation was actually about. I think that's evidence of the depth and breadth of what was a really valuable hour for me. A recording of the session should be up on the CBC Spark blog sometime soon - well worth downloading.

I didn't even attempt to live-blog or tweet yesterday's proceedings - but a tip o' the bowler hat to Dave Fleet, whose stream-of-consciousness live blogging efforts prove that he has the remarkable ability to both listen, type, and think all at the same time. That's a lot harder than it sounds.

Now happily ensconced in the second keynote at Day Two and looking forward to the Social Media and the Enterprise session I'm contributing to this afternoon.

Mesh 08 - Social Media and The Enterprise

2008-05-21T11:58:00.002-04:00

Turns out that this will be my third year not just as attendee, but also as on-stage participant at the Mesh Conference.

The guys asked me to moderate a session on Thursday afternoon on "Social Media and the Enterprise", which sounds like a really good fit for the kind of thing my day job involves these days, so I was more than happy to say yes.

Here's the session description:

Corporate communication certainly hasn't gotten any easier. "Media" used to be a defined thing, and people broadly knew the rules. But in the age of social media, blogs, comments, reviews, ratings, friends, groups, videos, etc., etc. - well, it's a brave new world. Learn as top communication and marketing experts Natalie Johnson from General Motors USA, Chris Reid of Yamaha Motor Canada and Jenny Bullough of Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. share their stories and practices in taking their organizations' communications and relationships online.

Note that this is social media and the enterprise, as opposed to in the enterprise - which gives us a nice broad scope to work with. We're not just talking about wikis inside the firewall, but get to dig into what GM, Yamaha and Harlequin have been doing in the wider social media world both externally and internally.

Here's some of the questions I'm thinking of posing to kick the conversation off tomorrow. If you can think of others I should add - drop me a comment, email, or tweet:

Why should enterprises adopt social media?
Can a large enterprise actually be social – or is “enterprise social media” an oxymoron?
Where have you deployed social media in your organization (inside or outside the firewall)?
What have you learned from listening to the crowd?
According to a recent comprehensive AIIM study, 44 per cent of organizations identified Enterprise 2.0 as “imperative” or “significant” to their goals. Despite this, nearly three-quarters also said they had a vague familiarity at best of what exactly the catch-phrase means. Discuss.
What policies have you implemented to manage the adoption and use of social media tools by your employees?
What advice would you have for large enterprises scared about submitting to the social media soup?

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

2008-05-21T09:19:00.002-04:00

We're back. Just about recovering and getting onto Toronto time - glad we had the long weekend to ease ourselves back in. The vacation was, in case you're wondering, immense. Utterly superb, invigorating and relaxing in equal measure. Think I gained about 10 pounds from being constantly fed (and "watered") by friends and family at every stop.

Tons to catch up on, and lots I should post. Right now, I'm parked at the opening session of Mesh '08 - I'll have time to post some vacation notes at the weekend, I hope. In the meantime, you can get a taste of the trip (if you're so inclined) at my Flickr page.

The Exile's Return

2008-05-02T09:34:00.004-04:00

One last quick copy & paste post before we jet off, just because it seems so appropriate:

The Exile's Return
(John Locke, 1847-1889)

T'anam chun Dia! but there it is -
The dawn on the hills of Ireland,
God's angels lifting the night's black veil
From the fair sweet face of my sireland.
Oh! Ireland isn't it grand you look,
Like a bride in her fresh adorning,
And with all the pent-up love of my heart
I bid you the top of the morning.

This one brief hour pays lavishly back,
For many a year of mourning,
I'd almost venture another flight,
There is so much joy in returning,
Watching out for the hallowed shore,
All other attraction scorning,
Oh: Ireland don't you hear me shout,
I bid you the top of the morning.

Ho, Ho, upon Glen's shelving strand,
The surges are wildly beating,
And Kerry is pushing her headlands out,
To give us a kindly greeting,
Now to the shore the sea birds fly,
On pinons that know no drooping,
Now out from the shore with welcome gaze,
A million of eaves come trooping.

Oh! Fairly, generous Irish land,
So Loyal, so fair, so loving,
No wonder the wandering Celt should think,
And dream of you in his roving,
The Alien shore may have gems and gold,
And sorrow may ne'er have gloomed it.
But the heart will sigh for its native shore,
Where the love-light first illumed it.

And doesn't old Cobh look charming there,
Watching the wild waves motion,
Resting her back against the hill.
And the tips of her toes to the ocean,
I wonder I don't hear the Shandon bells,
But maybe their chiming is over,
For it's a year since I began,
The life of a western rover.

For thirty years "A chuisle mochroi",
Those hills I now feast my eyes on,
Ne'er met my vision save at night,
In memory's dim horizon,
Even so, 'twas grand and fair they seemed,
In the landscape spread before me,
But dreams are dreams, and I would awake
To find American skies still o'er me.

And often in Texan plain,
When the day and the chase was over,
My heart would fly o'er the weary ways,
And around the coastline hover,
And my prayers would arise that some future date,
All danger, doubting and scorning,
I might help to win for my native land
The light of young liberty's morning.

Now fuller and turner the coastline shows
Was there ever a scene more splendid!
I feel the breath of the Munster breeze,
Oh! Thank God my exile is ended,
Old scenes, old songs, old friends again
There's the vale, there's the cot I was born in
Oh! Ireland from my heart of hearts
I bid you the "top o' the morning"

Off to England and Ireland - lighter blogging ahead

2008-05-01T23:38:00.004-04:00

This will probably be my last post for a couple of weeks, unless I get to squeeze in time to blog on vacation. Tomorrow we jet off to the UK and Ireland - heading home for the first time in five years.

It was Dad's 70th birthday a few days ago and Mom turned 70 last year. So there's a giant family party planned for the weekend (what we used to call, as kids, a WFD - I'll let you work out for yourself what that stands for). The farflung Clarke clan and many, many friends will be descending en masse on Stowe School - near to where Mom and Dad live - for what promises to be the hooley of the century. (Of the 21st Century, that is of course. The greatest hooley of the 20th Century was day Leona and I married).

So far, the rough itinerary looks something like this, subject to tweakage:

- May 3: arrive, disgustingly early, Birmingham airport
- May 4: M&D 70th birthday party
- May 5: Thame (Mom & Dad's place). Mighty hangover followed by the after-party party (hundreds of family members and friends will still be in the neighbourhood, so it's
inevitable there will be more drink taken)
- May 6: still knocking around Oxfordshire, nothing planned, AFAIK, other than shopping for a new liver, perhaps
- May 7: to London - planning a trip to the Tower of London (Charlie's choice) + possibly the London Eye (for Lily). Opera tix and dinner booked in the evening with one of my brothers
- May 8: London - morning: Natural History Museum (Ruairi's choice - dinosaurs!). Nothing planned for the afternoon or evening yet. Hoping to catch up with Suw & Kevin, maybe Gary Turner and family too. Drink will, no doubt, be involved.
- May 9: fly to Dublin to see the other half of the family. Visiting, more drinkage, plenty food, old friends, warm family moments, wandering my favourite streets in the world...
- May 16: fly back to Toronto

It's been a long, long time since we've seen the auld sod. Expecting things to be very different at home - something I'm a little nervous about. People have been telling me that both London and Dublin have grown almost beyond recognition in the past few years; Dublin in particular, as a result of the booming economy and the first period of significant population growth in hundreds of years of history.

Hard to imagine that two such well-established cities could alter so much in five years, but then I look around at what the idiots have done to the stretch of Toronto either side of the Gardiner in the same space of time, and... well, I'm aching for home, but hoping it's not all too screwed up.

Meanwhile - also on the Dad front (and on the subject of that Dirty Auld Town), after a four year break, we've finally got the second section of Dad's work-in-progress memoirs up at the Raised on Songs and Stories site.

When I can find a chunk of spare time, I want to spruce Dad's site up a bit - split the content into chapters and work on the navigation. For now, though, at least we've got the words up there, and a few photos. Nice to contrast this shot of Dad's birthplace:

With the venue we're booked into for Mom and Dad's birthday party:

Not too shabby for a gurrier from the North side. Heh.

So - see you on the other side of the pond. Thanks in advance to our kind housesitters and their three giant, scary Rottweilers for taking care of things in our absence.

Incredibly good chocolate delivered by Cluetrain

2008-04-30T23:09:00.002-04:00

I've no idea how much Rick Levine made from his share of the Cluetrain Manifesto profits, so it might be a bit of a stretch to call his new venture "The Chocolatier the Cluetrain Built"... but - however he went about funding this thing, I'm delighted to report that he's onto a winner.

OK - back up. Let me catch you up a little here.

So. The Cluetrain Manifesto - a great website that became a terrific email list, that ultimately evolved into an important book, a ton of media coverage, and a veritable explosion of game-changing ideas - had four authors. Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke went on to do a lot of other high profile things after the success of the original book.

The fourth author (aka the Fifth Beatle, as Jeneane calls him), Rick Levine, opted for a less high profile route. In truth, I think a lot of people figured he'd fallen completely off the map for much of the last 10 years.

Well as Jeneane explains in her post, Rick's been busy. I know he was working on some pretty cool startups for some of those intervening years (hey Rick - do you still own wordofmouth.com? What happened to that one?), but it turns out that he was secretly hatching a plan to create the world's finest artisan chocolatier, in Boulder, Colorado of all places.

I know this to be true, as earlier today we received a stunning sample box of outstanding chocolates from Seth Ellis Chocolatier (thank you Rick!). As you'd expect, from a Cluetrain original, the Seth Ellis site is a blog.

Now, I'm a really big fan of chocolate - especially the rich, dark kind. I turned to the dark side at an early age, shortly after I discovered Cadbury's Bournville and Thornton's Apricot Parfait.

Nowadays, Green & Black's organic (especially the Maya Gold variety) is the treat that makes my toes curl (sign of a perfect partner, btw - La Belle Saucisse bought me a Green & Black's dark easter egg this year. Thank you, Sausage - I love you). And having a brother & sister-in-law in Brussels is, as you might imagine, a very, very good thing indeed for a full-time chocophile.

But this stuff...

O.M.G.

I have no idea who Seth Ellis is or was, or why Rick's chocolatier is named after him - but I suspect he was a chocolate deity of the highest possible rank.

Each of the six hand-crafted delicacies in the Seth Ellis box is a perfectly-balanced work of chocolatey art. Fair trade organic Ecuadorean chocolate, carefully-selected organic ingredients, delicately blended and designed, then presented in a terrific little box like intricate pieces of jewelery. The scent alone, as you open the box, is enough to lift a chocoholic out of his shoes.

The minty one is a treat - billions of miles better than the typical gick that passes for chocolate in North American. Forget After Eights and any other mint/chocolate mashup you've tried in the past - this is to choc-o-mints as a Lotus Elan is to a Honda Civic.

Next, the raspberry truffle. Unreal. Delicately tart and aromatic - not cloyingly sweet like the typical raspberry choccie concoction in an assortment box. Fresh raspberry flavour sliced with sharp, tangy chocolate - bitter enough to have the tip of your tongue sizzling, rich enough to make the back of your palate feel like velvet.

Then there's the candied lemon one - sheer knocks my socks off. Intense, deep, heavenly. Candied Angel pee.

The ginger one - praise the chocolate gods! The ginger one!! Is there anything more perfect than the combination of rich dark chocolate and crystallized ginger? And is there any chocolate/ginger marriage more perfect than this? Two different kinds of ginger for a killer one-two punch of sweet and spicy.

And then... Oh. Oh my. The nutmeg. Nutmeg! Who woulda thunk it?! Nutmeg on a cappucino, sure - but I'd never have thought of building an entire ganache around nutmeg. Bugger me, that's a good chocolate.

There's a coffee truffle in there too - but by the time I hit this point I was comatose from the sheer hedonistic overload. I have become one with the couch; sunk down in a haze of chocolate bliss. I've achieved choco-nirvana.

If you're in the US, you may be able to find Seth Ellis chocs in your nearest Whole Foods Market. If that doesn't work, go here to order some online. Please. You will not be disappointed.

Thank you, Rick. You and your pals at Seth Ellis are chocogeniuses of the first order. My only request: make one with chili!