Entries Tagged 'Advertising' ↓

Watch the video.

Great creative, great concept, great content. Love it! But, where are the viral hooks for people to share the video? No email to a friend, no embed code for a blog, Facebook, or MySpace, no nada. WTF? From a social media perspective this is like calling a Quarter Pounder with Cheese a Royale with Cheese.

Shannon, thanks for showing this to me luv - it made my day!

Thanks to one of Shannon’s partner’s in crime (hat tip Laura) we have the following representative example of old fashioned marketing colliding with today’s consumer.

The inspiration for the movie comes out of Microsoft. Surprised? You shouldn’t be - Microsoft has proven more than any other company that if you get out of the way of your people, your people can save your ass.

In this example Microsoft employee Geert Desager AND Microsoft’s Belgian communications agency Openhere have been turned loose in the blogosphere with some good ideas, a blog, and some video production talent. The result? Here’s what Geert has to say on their results after two weeks.

“Another small update:

• more than 75.000 views of the movie
• more than 240 incoming links
• more than 250 comments on the blog”

What a couple of people at Microsoft did, and even more importantly, what Microsoft DID NOT DO (try to stop bloggers like Robert Scoble), is what makes it possible today for Geert and Openhere to do this.

Today this outreach continues and has continued to evolve with stories like Geert’s and Microsoft Recruitosphere pioneer Heather Hamilton. To these people, The Scoble’s, The Hamilton’s, their bosses, and bosses bosses go the thanks! Not only does Microsoft win in advancing their products and services but they also build a stronger employer brand and employee culture. Moves like this make it easier on the recruiters at Microsoft to land their next software guru. It’s a nice contrast to the tyranical employer brand that Apple is presently building for their abusive blogging and employee communication policies. Apple would do well to go back and watch their famous lemming commercials while consulting Wikipedia with a keyword search for “Orwellian.”

Well done Geert, and Robert and Heather and the legions of other Microsoft talent who have helped move us forward. Everyone in corporate america owes you and Microsoft our thanks, and not just for Excel or Word.

– Jules

p.s. Check out Openhere’s about page. I love their pitch (even if it isn’t a pitch).

“Openhere is an agency where open-minded people work for open-minded advertisers. “

You get the idea that soon the agencies that pretend to hold these values will be replaced by ones that really DO believe in what they’re selling. We believe.

Today we’re continuing a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. This is number V. Although my Father writes mostly on politics these days over on his blog YankeeWombat, I believe our mutual interest in areas like media and technology are appropriate fodder for a blog like EXCELER8ion and RecruitingBloggers.

Big Chill II

by Lorenz J. Gude

Expressing strong - perhaps I should say edgy - opinions on a blog can make a person unemployable. Kim du Toit for example.

"….the shock of discovering that my website made me unemployable by corporate America came at a vulnerable time. Desperate to become gainfully employed after closing my consulting business for the business failure that was Did Today, I put my resume out for work (and it is a fairly impressive one, I have to say). As most of you know, the corporation that offered me a job disappeared from the face of the earth after finding my website. To this day they’ve never returned my phone calls, the cowardly lickspittles. A few months more got me several calls, but after ?due diligence? those calls too dried up.

I gave up looking."

Kim du Toit is a ‘he’ by the way and very much a man’s man. To put it neutrally he is a gun enthusiast and 2nd amendment gun rights advocate. He started his blog before he realized it might be a problem, but he wasn’t naive about the consequences when he contemplated starting a business. He knew that Google would make his blog easy to find - particularly with an unusual name like Kim du Toit. His software venture ‘Did Today’ probably failed for lack of backers because of his blog. He discussed the possible impact of his outspoken blogging history with his wife before trying to start the business.

"In the end, we decided that attempting to rewrite the past three years, or trying to cover it up, would be worse?Google will not be denied?but at the same time this blog could be a liability for the company.

Well, it was, just this past weekend. A prospective investor, check in hand, decided to do a little last-minute research, and Googled ?Kim du Toit?.

He?s no longer a potential investor.

His reasoning was pure business: having an outrageous conservative gun nut womanizer as CEO might become a public liability in years to come. And he could be right."

He is too harsh on himself with ‘womanizer’ in the usual sense - he doesn’t brag about extramarital exploits, he just posts erotic, not pornographic, pictures of his favorite women movie stars at the weekend on his blog. The rest is a succinct summary of his corporate liabilities. It’s just my opinion but I think what really makes Kim edgy to corporate America is that he enthusiastically reports incidents of citizens defending themselves with firearms against armed robbers and burglars and the like and makes no secret of the fact that he prefers it when the criminal ends up dead. I think it is important to recognize that the NRA (National Rifle Association) probably wouldn’t want to be associated publicly with his outspoken opinions, even if they agree with him privately. That is an important distinction. Public bodies, like the NRA and corporations cannot be associated with outrageous personal positions. It just isn’t what we think of as ‘professional’. So I would say that it is probably a good rule to not post material on the Internet that might be seen as ‘unprofessional’ or controversial if you ever want to work for an organization sensitive to such things.

A second easy lesson here it is that if you are going to blog about edgy stuff - make it anonymous. Blogging is not only more public than we think it is, it also stays around and can come back to haunt you. Sure you can take down your blog, but there are cached pages available and then there is all the material on other people’s servers that has been written about you. A good example of someone using a pseudonym effectively is Neo-neocon. She is a member of a very liberal family and profession in the very liberal northeast part of the US and blogs anonymously to make it easier to keep the peace. Even if her friends and family that disagree with her politically discover her blog, the anonymity makes it so they don’t have to bring it up. I would speculate there would be limits to how far employers would normally go researching your history on the Internet - the CIA and other tightasses excepted - and that in practice most people will just have to make it a common sense rule to mask their more edgy material with anonymity in order to steer clear of unemployability.

We all get to see events through the lens of our own obsessions but bloggers are particularly blessed in that they can share their obsessions with their fellow netizens. Take the case of Representative Foley and the inappropriate e-mails and instant messages he sent to a 16 year old House of Representatives page. My interest is in the - hold your breath - media aspects of the incident. That’s right, I’m going to skip right over all the good stuff and talk about McLuhan’s idea that we remain unconscious of the potential of new media long after they come into general usage and go on thinking they follow the rules of their predecessors long after we should know better.

What do we have here in media terms? Love/lust letters on the Internet. As McLuhan predicts the content of new media are at first just the content of older media. Old wine in new bottles. What we miss according to Mcluhan is that we see only the wine and miss that the new bottles are not the same as the old bottles. Thus Gutenberg printed the Bible - the most in demand book at the time which had previously been produced by hand. He didn’t think of printing magazines and newspapers as his successors did- much less get it that novels might be a good seller. We think the content is the whole story and miss that the new medium works by different rules and has different potentials than its precursors.

Rep Foley’s e-mails have been described as over friendly, the instant messages as sexually explicit - just like heaps of love/lust letters that have gotten previous generations in trouble. I’m not denying that there is a clear case of sexual misbehavior and misuse of power here. That is a content issue; I’m focusing on the form here. What I am saying is that this is yet another case of someone thinking that their behavior on the Internet is transitory like private conversations - or ‘what happens in Las Vegas’. The nature of the Internet is that it remembers. Keeps copies, caches copies, backs up copies. What happens on the Internet stays on the Internet, but not like Las Vegas - it stays forever and can come back to bite you. Rep Foley just didn’t get this aspect of the medium as future generations undoubtedly will. It feels anonymous and/or private when it is not. Future public figures will be more careful of what they say on the Internet as a matter of course and will back quickly away from any statement that could be used against them - just the way they do now when microphones are pointing at them. I don’t think that Rep Foley would have expressed his sentiments so freely in a signed letter because he understands the rules of signed love/lust letters. Yet old fashioned love/lust letters are much harder to find than e-mails and IMs. It occurs to me that he might well have been cautious enough not to say the things he did on the phone - again because we are all aware that a phone might be tapped. Perhaps he didn’t realize was that he would have actually been safer from discovery chatting up his pages on the phone.

From the point of view of political content it was supremely embarrassing that Representative Foley was responsible for legislation designed to protect children on the Internet. From a media studies point of view using McLuhan’s ideas, it is a supurb example of how individuals are unconscious of the real characteristics of an emerging medium. No less a techie than Bill Gates denied on the witness stand having said things that were clearly in e-mails from himself carefully preserved by Microsoft’s thorough back up procedures. The Medium is the Message

Technorati Tags: Kim du Toit, Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, Corporate Blogging, Blogging Policy, Blog Policy, Rep Foley, Foley Scandal

Today we’re continuing a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. This is number IV. Although my Father writes mostly on politics these days over on his blog YankeeWombat, I believe our mutual interest in areas like media and technology are appropriate fodder for a blog like EXCELER8ion.

Big Chill

by Lorenz J. Gude

What happens when a company just prohibits employees from blogging?

Got this in my work mailbox today. Hand delivered.

—– Newspaper policy on personal Web sites and Web logs (blogs)

Editorial staffers (editors, reporters, and photographers) may operate personal Web sites, Web logs (blogs) or chat rooms only with the prior approval of their editor. Such Web sites, blogs and chat rooms may not contain content dealing in any way with the subject areas that the employees cover or reasonably might be expected to cover. The editor may withdraw approval of an editorial staffer’s operation of a Web site, blog or chat room at any time.

It is especially important that editorial staffers do not express personal opinions - on their Web sites or in their blogs or chat rooms - on news subjects or issues that they cover. Such publication of personal opinion casts doubt on their impartiality, ultimately calling into question the newspaper’s commitment to fairness.

Editorial staffers who have their own Web sites, blogs or chat rooms must notify their newspaper editor of the existence and the address of these Web publications. Staff members and correspondents agree that —– Newspapers can access and review these personal Web sites, blogs or chat rooms at any time. Editorial staffers will, when requested to do so, provide reasonable assistance to —– Newspapers in retrieving any archived or deleted materials from such Web sites, blogs or chat rooms.

An editorial staffer who violates this policy will face disciplinary action up to and including dismissal.

Have they made themselves perfectly clear? I think so. Did it work in this case? I have every reason to believe it didn’t and I don’t believe most of us would be inclined to meekly comply simply because it is just too easy to circumvent such a policy on the web. Anonymous blogging isn’t that hard to achieve and with a bit of advice from your friendly neighborhood hacker you should be able to frustrate ordinary attempts at discovery. I’m no lawyer, but it would seem to me an unfair dismissal suit would be pretty easy to bring against a company trying to stifle their employees to this extent particularly because there is some indication that the memo was aimed specifically at the blogger involved. From a bit of investigation my surmise (and it is only that) is that the blogger switched to blogging anonymously and that the company chose not to pursue him. In short, I suspect that the blogger was able to successfully call the corporate bluff in this particular case.

I’ve talked before about how Eric Raymond’s book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (available free on line here) tells us how networked media actually work as opposed to say print media. The company above is thinking in terms of the way print media works. Just like monarchs who insisted on licensing and controlling printing presses after Gutenberg invented movable type, this newspaper thinks it can shut down the blogger by simply prohibiting his means of publishing. The flaw in their thinking is that they are trying to shut down a multi node redundant network designed to resist atomic attack as if it were a choke point such as a printing press. This mentality is laughably transparent in another part of the memo which prohibits using the newspaper’s computers.

Editorial staffers who operate their own Web sites, blogs or chat rooms may not use —– Newspaper computers or other office facilities for that purpose. They may not work on their Web sites, blogs or chat rooms during office work hours.

We know from McLuhan the broad reason for the blindness. Emerging media are seen in terms of existing media. Here we have an example of a legacy media company trying to control an emerging medium with legacy tools. McLuhan talked about this phenomena as driving into the future with eyes fixed firmly on the rear view mirror. Applying Raymond we have a cathedral like, hierarchically structured organization trying to control a person with anonymous access to the bazaar like structure of the Internet.

The exact nature of the employers concern is further revealed in this paragraph. .

Editorial staffers who operate their own Web sites, blogs or chat rooms are not permitted to trade on their newspaper positions. They may not link their personal sites, blogs or chat rooms to the —– Newspapers’ Web site nor to —— Newspapers’ articles. Personal Web sites, blogs or chat rooms may not use column names or any other identifying information or wording that connects the writer to —– Newspapers.

They seem to be aware that there might be some kind of synergy between blogs and their product and all they see is competition diminishing their product and damaging their brand. They apparently see no upside, no new potential to exploit, which is exactly the blindness that McLuhan predicts will accompany the advent of any new medium.

So what’s the upside? In this case an employee is writing a column that management happens to disagree with. There is a very simple win win here. Hire him to write it and publish it in the paper. Because this blogger is to the right of the newspaper, I immediately think of the very liberal Minneapolis Star Tribune and their famous right of center columnist James Lileks. It is an old and superb legacy media policy to have a range opinion that differs from the paper’s institutional stance - i.e. editorial page policy. It even has a legacy name: Op-Ed. All I can see that this paper has accomplished is to reduce its circulation potential. It also failed to recognize that the bazaar had, as Raymond predicts, found real talent - right under their nose. Talk about dumb….er…. driving into the future with eyes fixed on the rear view mirror.

I have by no means exhausted this topic of the negative reaction by corporations to blogging and hope in future posts to apply other theoretical ideas to understand the nature of the process of corporations finding their way with this new medium. The role of theory in this case is quite straightforward. Those with something to lose are naturally, and often wisely, wary of the new. Better understanding of what is happening, better theory, can help find a way to take advantage of the new while protecting against the down side.

Technorati Tags: Marshall McLuhan, Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Newspapers, Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Blogging Policy, Dooced

Today we’re continuing a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. This is number III. Although my Father writes mostly on politics these days over on his blog YankeeWombat, I believe our mutual interest in areas like media and technology are appropriate fodder for a blog like EXCELER8ion.

Corporate Blogging and Network Dynamics

by Lorenz J. Gude

At the end of my last post on corporate blogging and McLuhan I wrote:

McLuhan?’s ideas may be of genuine use to the advocates of corporate blogging to help corporations recognize that, like it or not, they are operating in a new media environment with both new dangers and opportunities.

McLuhan isn’t much help identifying those dangers and opportunities - he just tells us that they are going to be there and why we ignore them at our peril. For the particular dangers and opportunities created by a new medium you need a theorist who is interacting with the new medium in question. To see corporate blogs in that perspective we need to back up a little. I first wrote about the application of Eric Raymond’s ideas to blogging in general here:

Eric Raymond?s The Cathedral and the Bazaar provides a powerful general explanation of the phenomena of Open Software - Linux in particular. Raymond?s book - available free on line here and well worth reading - is about two different styles of software development. To grossly simplify, the cathedral style is that used by hierarchically organized companies like Microsoft or IBM. The bazaar style is used by open software development projects like Linux. The former uses tightly held propriety code developed by a well supervised team with assigned roles. It is the tried and true method of engineering that has been used to successfully build battleships, bridges, software, and, well, cathedrals for a long time. The latter style, in apparent defiance of common sense, openly posts source code on the Internet where any interested party can change it any way they want, scrutinize it for bugs, and post suggested fixes. The amazing outcome is that Linux has become serious competition for Microsoft even though its developers are all unpaid volunteers. Raymond?s explanation of this phenomena is convincing. Linux can muster a large number of volunteers world wide who bring very different backgrounds and abilities to the code they review. What has emerged is that those best qualified to spot problems and those with the skills to fix them (usually different people) are ?found? by the net - in much the same way that buyers and sellers find each other in a bazaar. Raymond characterized this phenomena as Linus?s law: ?Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.?

The principle that Eric Raymond has elucidated here does not just apply to computer programming, but, I argue can be extended to networked media in general. The network, the Internet, makes any project that requires only attention and labor accessible to anyone with a computer and a connection. You can’t mine coal or manufacture car parts with only a computer and an Internet connection, but you can tackle anything that only requires your labor and skill. What the network does is connect skills and attention to a particular task and greatly improves the chances that the persons with the most appropriate skills and the time to put them to work will come in contact with the task.

Blogging has already demonstrated that it thrives in the networked environment. There are 40 million of us the last time I saw a statistic. In this post I want to focus in on a relatively new kind of blogging - corporate blogging - and how Eric Raymond’s ideas might help understand and implement it better. With a corporate blog you have a subset of the Internet - the corporate network which is a reflection of a sharply defined entity called a corporation that is normally an organization created for the purpose of supplying goods and services on a for profit basis. The sharpness of the line between the privately held corporation and the public is a critical aspect of corporations that allow them to make a profit. What crosses that line - money, information, people, goods and services are all carefully controlled to maximize the survival and profitability of the corporation. Success and control are closely linked. There are the controls over money both internal and governmental that attempt to keep corporations honest and profitable and find out quickly when they are not. But information is also tightly controlled in the interests of protecting the money. Not only does Dupont keep its formulas secret, it and every other corporation, carefully cultivates what the public knows about the corporation. It protects its ‘brand’ like a mother tiger, and works hard to avoid negative publicity.

Corporate blogging must make its way into this environment that so values control. Furthermore while corporations will take calculated risks on familiar ground, it is much harder to get them to take risks in unfamiliar territory - like with a new medium such as blogging. If I seem to be building a case against corporate blogging it is because I want to give a realistic picture of the difficulties involved. I also want to avoid a too optimistic view which ignores real problems - something that techno optimists are perennially guilty of doing. In Eric Raymond’s terms I am saying that corporations are Cathedral like organizations - hierarchical, controlled from the top down. How do they take advantage of the bazaar like nature of the Internet when considering corporate blogs? The problem is that initially the risks seem to outweigh the rewards, but that once people start doing it successfully, the firm that fails to do it is giving away a possible way to grow and profit. Early adopters of corporate blogging who succeed will gain an advantage - just as companies - for example Wrigley’s Gum - that first took advantage of electrically lit billboards as an advertising medium a century ago did well. The obvious advantage is that the company gets better known through a new channel of communication. It is also an opportunity for corporations to develop the public’s understanding of them both as customers and potential employees to a level not previously possible. Corporate blogging is a quite different opportunity for the company to tell its story and for its customers to respond. Unexpectedly, that bright kid in college who might be your future CEO can get to know what it is like to work for your company and put you on his short list. In short, blogging can improve the quality of the interaction and if you have something to offer it can get the word out to those most interested who might otherwise never know of the company’s existence.

Is that kind of advantage worth the risk of inappropriate blogging - taking workplace gossip and power struggles public or worse putting the kind of destructive material on the Internet that disgruntled employees are famous for? I’ll just say this here - it has worked for the US military - an organization even more concerned with control and secrecy than business. Counterintuitively, milbloggers have not compromised operational security or created massive PR problems. Their fresh approach is, in practice, much more effective than the institutionalized (think Cathedral like) efforts of the military public information effort because they reach out to the public directly. Positive or negative, agree or disagree with them, the voices are authentic, and that makes all the difference. The military also deserves credit for not doing what it would be so easy for them to do - simply issue an order prohibiting blogging. Somehow, an institution not famous for recognizing innovation in a timely fashion got this one right and reaped the benefit of their soldier’s creativity without paying a prohibitive price.

I would argue that the reason the military succeeded and the general approach to ensuring that a corporate blog is a success will involve the right balance of control and openness. You need the control - as with any corporate activity - to ensure that the activity contributes positively to the company. You need the openness to let the nature of networks - the bazaar effect - to work in your company’s favor. There is no way of knowing who on your staff might turn out to be a star blogger. Or what unanticipated approach to blogging they might come up with that benefits the company. It might be the mail girl, the loading dock guy, that loud mouth in sales who no one likes but who always seems to sell the most - it might even be the CEO. You just don’t know, but armed with an understanding of the dynamics of networks it should be obvious that it might not work to just task the PR department to create a corporate blog. Here is an example of an alternate strategy based on Eric Raymond’s theory.

Keep you blog within the company to start with. There is probably already a password protected corporate network not accessible to the public. Open blogging to anyone in the company on your private network. Let them know that if they are good at it it will go onto the Internet and that the prize might even be a good job. The inhouse blogging phase should reveal the talent and both the opportunities and the problems while controlling risk. That’s the place to get the balance right between control and creativity and to create the polices that will let potential corporate bloggers know what they can and cannot do. When the inhouse bloggers are ready for public exposure then you can let them go public with a much clearer idea of what the impact will be. The inhouse blogs can even be kept as a kind of farm team to develop new talent.

This example is intended as a simple demonstration of how to apply a particular theory to the emerging issue of corporate blogging. The larger point I want to make here is that however you do it you must recognize that, in a time of change, risk and opportunity come together and seeing one and not the other is itself risky. Effective corporate people already know this is true in the marketplace. It is equally true, but sometime harder to see, in the arena of emerging new media.

Technorati Tags: corporate blogging, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Milbloggers, Milblogs, Social Media