Is corporate HR and their executive team receptive to social media?

A commenter recently asked:

Curious of your thoughts regarding how receptive HR is in including social media strategy as part of their marketing and media mix. I think for many of us it is a no-brainer, and I believe Executives are beginning to understand the power of social media and the habits of their target, but from your experience, are you finding HR Execs receptive and willing to allocate appropriate portions of their budgets for this?

Julie O’Reilly
Marcom Village

What do you think when you hear “do you have a social media strategy?” Do you think about making media buys to run banners on sites like facebook and LinkedIn; or maybe placing employment messaging within other publisher’s podcasts? In recent years the number of sites where you can place ads and the forms these ads are offered in have increased. The introduction of these options for interactive recruitment advertising is exciting and the possibilities are growing by leaps and bounds. But, this is advertising – which doesn’t happen to be the core compentancy of social sites and mediums. These sites are forums where millions upon millions of potential candidates are connecting with one another, participating in active conversations, and changing the very definition of thought leadership. The potential for social media to completely disrupt how companies find and build relationships with candidates is powerful, if they can be convinced to learn how to harness that potential.

I have spent the last eighteen months speaking with corporate HR leaders at some of the largest organizations in America on this very topic – urging then to adopt social computing in their recruiting and retention efforts. It is just in the last month that I have seen corporate HR realize that they have to begin “thinking” about adding social media to their recruiting and retention efforts. But when I discuss crafting a social media strategy, I am not talking about using these sites for advertising, I am talking about efforts such as:

• Publishing employee-generated content that shows the real soul of the company and tells the stories that make the company what it is.
• Using photo, video, audio sharing sites to help those stories come to life.
• Using RSS to distribute this content outside of the corporate career site.
• Having real FAQs sections where candidates can ask questions, get real answers, and have this exchange be indexed and searchable for others.
• Evolve the definition of “relationship marketing” to include building and cultivating your candidate community on your career site through real two-way exchange of information.
• Encourage recruiters, hiring managers (all employees really) to seek out potential hires and build relationships within online communities.

What is the “right” strategy for one company is not necessarily right for the other. The key is to allow your employees to express their stories in the way that is RIGHT for them, thereby authentically and quite literally showing candidates who your company is and what it might be like to work there.

So to answer Julie’s question, in my experience, “how receptive is HR in including social media strategy as part of their marketing and media mix?” I think that companies are starting to view advertising within social networks as the no brainer, and they are using budget that they already have allocated to interactive advertising, but just changing where those dollars are being spent. When it come to harnessing the power of social media to connect to candidates and literally give them the a behind the scenes view into the making of the organization – I would say, “not so much.” The fear of creating “too much risk” for the organization due to not being able to control the message is the root of the hesitation.

I have spent so much of my time passionately trying to explain to HR execs what social media IS, describing the changing of the guard that is happening, how thought leadership is changing, how the ability to spread and amplify the affect of messages has evolved, all of this can be seen so clearly through growth and impact of social computing – that I have probably done a poor job of making a traditional bottom-line focused business case for why companies would benefit for using social media to attract and retain the best.

Shel Holtz, an author and blogger with 30 years of organizational communications experience in both corporate and consulting environments, just wrote a terrific post addressing the business case for using social media as a communication channel entitled, Business adoption of social media: It’s not about employee rights, where he simply states:

My position on employee engagement in social media is based on my belief that doing so will produce far greater benefit—in the form of enhanced constituent relations—than risk, particularly when it is managed strategically. There are many dimensions to these benefits, some of the most important of which include the following:

• Recruiting and retention—Deloitte is frequently named the best company at which to begin your career. Deloitte is also the company that hosted an employee film festival, in which employees submitted creative videos articulating the company’s values and culture. The best of these are now on YouTube. Deloitte has engaged in social media in a variety of other ways, which in part accounts for the company’s ability to choose from the cream of the crop. Meanwhile, Clive Holtham, a professor at the Cass Business School, notes some California firms “are finding they cannot attract or retain staff because their IT infrastructure fails to meet the demanding standards of the new generation,” according to an article in Data Storage Today. Let’s face it: If employers in the don’t want to pay for the lion’s share of employee medical coverage. They do, however, because without it, they wouldn’t be able to attract the talent they need to implement their strategies.
• Employee engagement—Companies with populations of mostly actively engaged employees tend to outperform those with populations of mainly disengaged employees. Engagement flows from a number of factors, but it won’t flow at all without trust. Once employees are engaged, they produce discretionary effort on behalf of their employers.

In my view, using Social Media to provide a window into what it is like to work for an organization provides validation for a candidate against the marketing messages. This validation leads to a feeling of trust and genuine interest in the company (engagement), credibility (feeling that working for this employer is a good career decision) and ultimately loyalty (retention). I participate in social media everyday, it has become part of how I work, how I provide thought leadership, and how I judge the thought leadership coming out of other companies – that I know the potential for what it could mean for recruiting and retention – literally in my bones. Is it the only way? No, of course not. But the expectations of candidates are changing. They EXPECT to be able to find out what it is really like to work for a company, and they respect the companies that enable that process and help bubble that relevant information up to the top for them.

Shel says:

People may still want to work there even if they cannot engage in social media. The pay, the experience, the benefits all may carry greater weight than the ability to talk about work on a blog.

In general, though, based on dramatic shifts in culture, society, business and communication, most organizations will be well-served to integrate social media into their communication models.

But for any F500 company, it comes down to money – not passion for an idea. So my goal for the next month is to put together that financial business case for why Corporations cannot afford to ignore the potential of social media for attracting and keeping their best people.

Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.

Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.

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Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, social media, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Mash Yahoo! Mash, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friending, blogs, blogging, vlog, vlogging

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River of Reputation

Blogs. Tumblr. Twitter. Vlogs. Google. FaceBook. Syndication. Jaiku. Pownce. YouTube. Myspace. User-Generated Content. Indigenous Content. Del.icio.us. Online Community…. Data streams flowing via RSS, ATOM and furiously converging to create a River of Reputation…. a River of Relevance.

I started playing with Slideroll yesterday and ended up creating this slide show regarding how Employer Brands are affected by ‘Rivers of Reputation’.

This is a work in progress meant to get across the concept of the decentralization of the Employer Brand via the flow of easily accessible information regarding your brand that is being generated by individuals everyday. Let me know your thoughts.

Hat tip to a twitter mention of a conversation between Scoble and Anil Dash. I was also influenced by Brian Solis’s post Lifestreams Channel Online Activity, Creating Rivers of Relevance, discussing data streams and one’s personal brand.

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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.

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Focusing on the corporate careers site as the main destination where companies can connect with and engage talented people is a continuous theme here on EXCELER8ion. It used to be that the corporate careers site was THE destination where job seekers could learn about the company and have their first exposure to the employer’s brand messaging. I now find myself in every client presentation having lengthy discussions about the new reality we face that when someone does a search on Google or Yahoo! when researching your company – it is likely that the search results returned will be posts from the blogosphere, not necessarily the corporate careers site, and not necessarily with a positive message.

This has a huge impact on how job seekers perceive your employer brand – as the information that is found on a blog post is often considered more credible and real as compared to the ‘controlled’ information that companies usually make available to job seekers on the careers site. Since the information posted on the corporate careers site usually does not really portray what it is really like to work for a company this lack of real information is literally forcing them to go to search engines to seek out the ‘real deal’ before deciding if they want to consider a company as a future employer. The result is that your employer brand message can now be found (but not controlled) on dozens, hundreds, and possibly even thousands of sites across the web.

The changing expectations regarding where job seekers can go online for ‘real’ and transparent information about a company are being seen outside of Careers as well. Shel Holtz, VP of New Marketing for crayon, spoke at the New Communications Forum in Las Vegas last week (I would have killed to attend all of Track 1) and he just posted asking his readers what their thoughts are regarding the value of company websites:

A recurring theme here at the New Communications Forum (in Las Vegas) is the value of corporate websites. Speakers from David Weinberger to John Bell (from Ogilvy PR) have reiterated the point: People will search Google and engage in the blogosphere to find out what’s what with a company before they visit the company’s website. Even if they do visit the company website, it’s only to get the company’s point of view, not to make an ultimate decision or establish an opinion.

While Shel is looking to discuss the extent to which this is indeed the case – the fact remains that from a employer brand point of view – every day there are conversations that are taking place on blogs about what it is like to work for a company, and those conversations are being indexed and found during searches.

The result?

Companies do not have one careers site – they may literally have thousands. Instead of fighting this reality, I want to to talk about the possibility of breaking away from the traditional careers site experience and provide people with an ‘Un-Careers’ site? (I owe the credit for coining this term to my colleague, Jeremy Shapiro – VP, Hodes iQ).

What to do?

Make the site a destination that aggregates all of the content out there about a company – all of the employee blogs, past employee blogs, personal blogs – all of it – not just the typical careers marketing spin.

Shel discusses how Microsoft did this a few years back (not for careers):

There also are ways to make the corporae [sic] site more of a destination. Microsoft did this by creating a bias-free clearinghouse of content related to the federal and state lawsuits it was facing a few years back. By offering all content—not just that which was pro-Microsoft—the company ensured that, for at least some journalists and others—the Microsoft site would be the go-to destination for documents and other materials dealing with the lawsuits.

I view this as an immediate, no BS way to provide a real and transparent view of the company, and as a byproduct, such a move would also up the credibility of the more “traditional” careers content that might otherwise have just been brushed off as spin. Once companies leverage the social network, instead of hiding from the content that already exists out there – a world of possibilities immediately opens up for distribution of job postings via rss and widgets – but I will save that for another post.

What do you think – will corporate America ever be ready for such a move as a un-careers site?

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Oh yeah, and this video coves user generated content, social media, personal publishing, blogs, online community, video, web publishing technologies like HTML, XML, and RSS and has same great music from deus to go along with it (oops, this is the deus I meant from the music in the video – two new music finds in one!).

This amazing video is courtesy of Assistant Professor Michael Wesch, who leads the Digital Ethnography group at Kansas State University. Thanks to Organic’s Three Minds blog for making me aware of this and Patrick Dunphy (I wish I had a link but Three minds didn’t post one) for making Three Minds aware of it.

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Today, we’re happy to publish a blogswap article on EXCELER8ion and introduce our guest author, Liz Handlin, of Ultimate Resumes. Here’s a little more about Liz and her blog:

“Ultimate Resumes’ mission is to help great people find great jobs. In addition to my work at Ultimate Resumes, I am the Vice President of Marketing for Broadpeak Collaborative. Broadpeak is a professional services firm that provides financial consulting services and executive search for financial professionals. www.broadpeak.us”

This morning I saw Terri Irwin, widow of “The Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, and her daughter Bindi on TV. Seeing them and hearing them talk about Steve Irwin made me wish that all of us could live our lives as he did. I don’t mean wrestling crocodiles, although corporate America can feel like a jungle at times. What I mean is that we should all strive to do what we love and do it with passion.

I don’t know if you watch The Crocodile Hunter on Animal Planet but if you ever have a chance to check it out you should do so. Steve was a larger than life person who clearly loved what he was doing. I saw a retrospective that described how Steve started out. You could see that he had no idea back in the days when he was wrestling crocs in the Australian outback that he would become rich, famous, and reach iconic status. He just did what he loved and he did it with such passion that it was infectious. I don’t even think money was that important to him except as a means to further his goal of wildlife conservation. Who would think that anyone could make crocodiles, lizards, snakes, and spiders seem vulnerable and in need of conservation? Steve Irwin did. And he was so convincing because HE was so passionate about those animals.

If Steve had cared about the kind of career path that crocodile wrestling would take him on back when Australia Zoo was little more than a small exotic animal park he might have decided to do something else for a living. But Steve didn’t worry about that. He was passionate about animal conservation and he had a way of showing us the beauty in animals that are not cute and cuddly. He was so passionate about what he was doing that the world couldn’t help but watch. The success, the money, and the fame all came as a result of Steve Irwin following his passion.

I am not suggesting that you should quit your job and run off to do whatever it is that you are passionate about without a plan. I don’t think Steve Irwin was capricious in any way. But I would submit that if you do what you love the money will follow.

Who knew that Martha Stewart would create an empire out of “gracious living”? She has sold us household hints, cooking tips, books, and magazines and now she is worth billions. But when she started out she was just a caterer who was doing something that she loved and was good at.

What about Joel Osteen? He has grown the Lakewood Church ministry in Houston to the point that they fill the Staples Center every Sunday morning. Unbelievable. Whatever your spiritual beliefs you should check out one of his sermons on TV sometime. He is so engaging and articulate. I think its because he is full of such passion for what he does.

Jodi Smith, owner of Mannersmith is passionate about her job. She has created a successful business and has authored several books on manners. She is doing what she loves and she has become a huge success. I would never have thought that lecturing on manners could lead to such personal and professional success but it sure has for Jodi. She is doing what she loves and the money and success have followed.

So, what are you passionate about? Can you turn your passion into your career? If so, you will never work another day in your life.

Liz Handlin

http://ultimate-resumes.blogspot.com/

This CollegeRecruiter.com Blogswap article is courtesy of Recruiting.com at http://www.Recruiting.com and CollegeRecruiter.com at http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com , a leading site for college students and recent graduates who are searching for internships and entry level jobs.

Technorati Tags: Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter, Liz Handlin, Passionate Careers

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My 2007 Wishes

I am not one for predictions – its not that I mind putting myself out there; rather, Julian can attest to how much I just hate to be wrong . So instead I am going to put out 2 wishes for what will happen with Recruitment Marketing trends in 2007. A company’s employment web site continues to be the top “Source of Hire”. While this fact doesn’t speak to how candidates arrives at careers site destination, we do know that regardless of how they got there – they went there. The majority of candidates will visit the careers section of a company’s web site and it often represents the first opportunity to engage and connect with a candidate. Pair that with the HUGE growth in the popularity of social media like blogs; vlogs; and podcasts and you have the makings of my wishes for 2007:

1. That companies will not spend another dime on media that merely serves to drive traffic to their Corporate Careers web site before they spend that money improving the functionality; opportunities for interaction; content; and design of their sites.

Rather than dropping a bag of money on media – driving candidates to your site – and then having them leave because the site is horrible; difficult to navigate or boring enough to make the experience rate up there with going to the DMV…take a step back and spend that money where it will count – THE destination – the Employment Web site. If you have $250K budgeted that you plan to spend on media – i.e. print, trade pubs, job boards, Google AdWords etc – the best thing that you can do for your company, and your Employer Brand, this year is take 50% of that and put it toward overhauling your careers site.

2. That corporations take the leap and begin incorporating participation and conversations into their corporate careers sites. Companies do not have to have a separate blog, rather it is the easy-to-publish ability to generate real content and the two-way conversation that is the hallmark of blogging that should be incorporated in to the overall careers site. Employment web sites could be rebuilt on platforms that allow for the integration of blogs; private-label social networks; employee videos and even *gasp* the upload of video-resumes. This is something that most HR departments are not willing to do, as it is perceived as too risky. On the other hand, candidates are DYING for real information and real ways to connect to potential employers and even future coworkers to help them make their career choices. If this wish is going to come to fruition, then it will not start in HR. The companies that are using social media effectively are the ones that have had it sanctioned from the top down.

So there you have it. For 2007 I wish to see better Employment Web sites that balance the ‘process’ with interactivity and ways to connect – for real. What are your wishes?

Technorati Tags: career site, careers sites, careers web site, employer brand, employment brand, employment web sites

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40 minutes after I finished posting about the speed at which information flies around the web saying:

In the Web 2.0 world, we have CEO’s blogging; employees blogging; reporters blogging; all with trackbacks and permalinks. The speed at which a story can spread for all to see in the blogosphere is dizzying. Social media and its uncoordinated actions of individuals – many voices, tones, and resulting comments – introduce a level of unpredictability into the equation that has to be managed.

… these official internal Jobster communications were forwarded to me by a reliable source requesting anonymity.  The information was not meant as Organizational Terrorism – the intent was to share the real internal communications and take the place of the blogo-speculation that has come about in the absence of hard facts.
The first e-mail was sent out last week. The second was sent out last night. What would your reaction be if your company sent this to you? What type of employee experience does this provide?




Technorati Tags: Jobster, Jobster Layoffs

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EXCELER8ion was nominated for The 2006 Recruiting.com Best Blog Awards.

Thanks mom!

Care to get your vote on? Cool, just click here and pick your top 5. Go ahead, we’ll wait until you finish up.

As I type this I am sitting here and wondering how voter turnout will be in comparison to the general elections here in the U.S. (which is at an all time low right now)? My guess is that our close knit community will be highly active, often returning each day (after clearing browser cookies of course) to Recruiting.com’s voting page to stuff the ballot er, I mean to vote just once for the bestest-bestest blogs ever.

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How would you complete our headline?

Blogs themselves cannot transcend borders or cultures but people can, and people are. People are creating blogs at the rate of 100,000 every day and Technorati is now tracking 57 million blogs overall. And people are because blogging is a multi-mode communications medium where you can use the written word, graphics, audio, video and animation to connect and tickle the senses and synapses of your fans, friends, community, customers, partners, vendors, readers, associates, peers, professionals, associations, someone please stop me!. People are because blogs let you connect with other people from all walks of life, anyplace, anytime, in any subject, and in most any modality. As long as you’ve got a way to participate (including consumption and simple commenting) you’ve got a place at the table. Good ideas and content still trump status or position in the ‘real world’ and anyone can become a someone with an important voice. If blogging was about nothing more than reading and writing it would be powerful. I would never underestimate the power of the written word, but the thing is, you have to get people to read for it to have any effect! Without the kicker of other presentation formats like podcasting and video blogging, blogging would lack the pop culture appeal to become a super mass medium like T.V.

Blogs are borderless

I’m always happy to experience another example of how blogs can help us traverse borders and cultural differences in life – even languages. I have found that the more people you interact with, the richer your life becomes. There’s a modifier and accelerator to this experience. The more dissimilar people are to you or your own experience, the more you can expand your mind and perspective. Travel does this for us, be it the fully immersive, in-person version (the kind where a passport is especially handy) or a virtual version made possible by the web – like blogging. Just last week I saw a link coming in to EXCELER8ion from a blog called ‘Bloggingham.’ I went to Bloggingham and was happily surprised to find it published in a different language (Danish as it turns out). Not that this is the first time a foreign language blog has linked to us, but I am always excited by this none-the-less. Jonas of Nottingham, as I’ll call him, added us to his blog roll and quoted Shannon in a recent post. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t tell exactly what language Bloggingham was written in (it looked Germanic and that’s as far as I got). Every attempt of mine to translate the site failed. Without a way to translate the site I was at a loss to read Bloggingham which left me chagrined. I wanted to get to know a little more about Jonas. Given that Jonas clearly had no problem reading our blog (or maybe he just has a working translation tool), I put it in my mind to send him an e-mail. Before I got too far in contacting Jonas I saw this great image on his blog about what blogging means to different people:



Even though the blog post on Bloggingham was in Dutch, I could see that the collage was in English and I wanted to know more about it. I saw that a reader of Bloggingham Trine-Maria had posted a comment and linked to what appeared to be the original PDF document. The file is published on CK’s blog (Christina Kerley) with the related story here. In quick succession I had jumped from one Danish blog (Bloggingham) to another (hovedetpaabloggenblog) and on to a U.S. Marketing blog (CK’s blog). Talk about flattening the world – try that one out before blogs were mainstream.

People make connections – blogs are facilitators

Back to the human aspect and the human network. If Jonas of Nottingham didn’t bother to check his blog stats and notice all the traffic coming from English speaking countries he probably wouldn’t have put this post up, declaring his intent to start publishing in English. Which brings me to the point about blogs that I want to drive home and put in the carport for the night. It’s about people. And yes, I “get it” that it’s still a minority of people, and hopefully I’ve addressed that point by my comments on how blogging is a multi-mode medium.
So here’s my version of that headline:

Blogs transcend borders, languages and cultural differences because people power blogs

So what’s your version? If you can think of some to add I’ll group them up and send them over to CK for us.
–Julian

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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

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/30/big-chill-ii/feed/ 0 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/29/big-chill/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/29/big-chill/#comments Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:47:37 +0000 Lorenz http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/29/big-chill/ a
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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

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/29/big-chill/feed/ 2 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/21/corporate-blogging-and-network-dynamics/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/21/corporate-blogging-and-network-dynamics/#comments Wed, 22 Nov 2006 03:31:49 +0000 Lorenz http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/21/corporate-blogging-and-network-dynamics/ a
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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

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/21/corporate-blogging-and-network-dynamics/feed/ 2 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/20/corporate-blogging/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/20/corporate-blogging/#comments Tue, 21 Nov 2006 01:39:17 +0000 Lorenz http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/20/corporate-blogging/ a
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Today we’re continuing a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. 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

by Lorenz J. Gude

I have become aware of corporate blogging through the work of my son and daughter-in-law who, among other things, have been working on helping corporations get their own blogs started. One thing they experience is that there is both resistance and enthusiasm for corporate blogging. What I mean here by corporate blogging is employees blogging on behalf of their company trying to advance its cause, not frustrate it, or pursue personal agendas. In this post I want to explore why some companies first reaction is concern about the negative potential while for others it is an opportunity to take advantage of a new avenue of communication to their customers and even their potential employees.

My understanding of what happens in any culture when a new medium is introduced has been heavily influenced by the work of Marshal McLuhan. He is most remembered for his work Understanding Media which contains the famous dictum, ‘the medium is the message’. However, it is his earlier, much more scholarly work, The Gutenburg Galaxy that has convinced me of his lasting usefulness as a theoretician through which to understand the arrival of phenomena like corporate blogging.

McLuhan argued that when a new medium emerges people tend to focus on content, not form. For example, when Gutenburg invented movable type, monarchs immediately saw the potential for the presses to be used for political agitation against them and brought in Draconian laws controlling every printed page. Conversely, it took 300 years for interchangeable type to morph into the system of interchangeable parts we all take for granted today. Innovations that emerge as people come to grips with the implications of a new media environment are difficult to see at first because no one can see the new environment. Indeed, at first, they can only see the innovation in the context of the old environment.

Many of the people who run corporations have grown up in the media environment dominated by TV, while the rising generation has grown up in a transitional TV to Internet environment. From the perspective of the older media environment corporate blogs look like a highly risky new conduit for content already conveyed reliably to the public through regular customer relations, marketing, and PR channels. For the advocates of corporate blogging the new medium looks like an opportunity to reach the public more authentically and directly than traditional advertising and public relations. Consequently, when some corporations consider blogs they tend to see risk while others see opportunity. The bottom line is that 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. And yes, negative publicity is one danger but the larger one is to cling to a world that no longer exists and fail to positively engage the new media environment.

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/20/corporate-blogging/feed/ 3 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/18/the-medium-is-the-message/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/18/the-medium-is-the-message/#comments Sat, 18 Nov 2006 21:51:27 +0000 Lorenz http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/18/the-medium-is-the-message/ a
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Today we’re beginning a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. 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. Shannon and I tend to focus on social media, and specifically how this medium is contributing to a meaningful shift in communications and marketing that we’re all grappling to understand. From some of my conversations with my Father on blogging, and its wealthy cousin, corporate blogging, Dad has taken to writing some pieces on the topic, which is what I’ll be sharing with you. To start us off, Dad, aka Lorenz or The Yankee Wombat, gives us an intro to Marshall McLuhan and some of his seminal ideas on media that are still highly regarded (and relevant) today and at the same time, still largely misunderstood. Largely misunderstood? Pah! Not by me, because all of this is over my head to begin with! Many of us in the blogosphere, and in much more finite terms, the Recruitosphere, fear that we spend too much time tossing around the same tired views, voices and inside jokes and to that Shannon and I say, YES, let’s not lose sight of the big picture. So read on, and take this as a part I of X in a series on understanding this new medium, er, message from an observer with a valuable viewpoint.

The medium is the message

by Lorenz J. Gude

Anyone who has heard of McLuhan has probably heard his most famous quote “The Medium is the message.” I studied McLuhan quite a bit in connection with my teaching about media in the seventies and eighties. What I have realized lately getting interested in McLuhan’s thinking again and referring to it in some of my blog posts is that while McLuhan’s famous dictum is still well known it is not well understood. McLuhan is making a point about form and content. The medium – handwriting, print, TV, blogging – whatever – is ‘the medium’. The message – ‘meet me in the square at 6:30′, ‘Texas election tied’, ‘Tsunami relief delayed’ – whatever – is the content. What McLuhan is saying is deliberate nonsense – on the face of it. The message, of course, is normally the content.

What McLuhan was trying to do was shock us into awareness of the importance of form as opposed to content (or message) by means of an outrageous statement. He failed. I find most people don’t get it. I certainly didn’t until I read McLuhan carefully. What he is saying, put in a more balanced way, is that the form of our communications media have a large effect on us but we miss it because we are understandably focused on the content that is being communicated. The phrase “Content is king” reinforces the basic truth that we select what we consume in any medium by the content. The remote control, for example, enables us to instantly make decisions about content while watching TV. Content is what grabs our awareness like the figure in a picture, while we take the background – the medium – for granted.



Of course in this particular famous picture the figure and the ground are ambiguous – so we can see it as two faces or a vase. What McLuhan is asking us to do is make a similar switch of awareness from how the content is impacting us to how the medium is impacting us.

McLuhan developed his thinking at a time in human history when new media – TV, radio, mass circulation magazines, motion pictures were all changing our day to day experience of the world. A hundred years ago most people were farmers. They saw the occasional newspaper. Read a few books if they were so inclined. Most of their time was taken up with work – with hay and cows and chickens and eggs. No TV, or movies or radio. McLuhan was struck by the indisputable fact that the media environment had been drastically changed in the 20th century. Today I sit here at a computer most of the day. I happened to grow up on a farm with cows and chickens so I have a reality based picture of what it was like 100 years ago, but I don’t live in that world at all any more. Most people today in the developed world have had absolutely no contact with a world where cows and chickens are a more important part of their everyday experience than TV. We take these changes for granted; McLuhan warns us not to do that.

McLuhan was amazed when he began to look into the effects of this sort of change of environment on human beings. He searched for evidence of changes caused by living in different media environments. One of the things that got him started was a phenomena noticed by the British when they began to give civil service exams in India. They discovered that examinees passed the tests with high marks because they could remember word for word the entire text book the exam was based on without always fully understanding the content. McLuhan argued that they could perform this prodigious feat of memory because they came from an oral culture. Writing was rare – everything of verbal importance was heard, not read, and then had to be remembered precisely, if it were to be preserved. What McLuhan theorized was that differences in the media environment change the emphasis we place on our various senses. Therefore it impacts the way our brains develop and the way we experience the world. In this case literacy reduces the importance of the process of hearing and remembering and increases the importance of the sense of sight and reduces the necessity to remember the exact wording. McLuhan called that shift in sensory emphasis sense ratio.

Now lets skip forward to our own time and look at an example of the very different media environment we live in. We live in a period when the media environment in terms of where we get our news is changing from the near total domination of TV to a mix of TV and the Internet. McLuhan didn’t live to see the Internet, but an analysis in McLuhan’s terms of the changes introduced by the Internet would begin with some fairly obvious observations. The first might be that TV and the Internet, while both using a screen, engage different parts of the brain because TV is dominated by visual content and the computer screen by print. In my experience computers have made me much more aware of how emotional TV is. Lets do a thought experiment. Take the Iraq war and close your eyes and see what images you remember. I get burning tanks, the aftermath of suicide bombings, stills from Abu Ghraib. I don’t know what images you get but I am pretty sure they will have a strong emotional element. If you read news and blogs on the Internet about the Iraq war then think of what stands out for you from that experience. It will probably be more about ideas and interpretations of events. What I notice is the great variety of different views expressed by bloggers and the relatively predictable view of events that the media presents. I see that dissonance because as a student of McLuhan I am looking for it. Because I am less concerned with content I am not swept away by each competing point of view but very impressed in how a change in the media environment is changing the way we see events. I notice that the established media are accustomed to framing events in certain ways and that bloggers frame them differently. The bloggers break the monopoly the media have enjoyed in the framing of events. This is exactly the kind of thing that McLuhan was saying we miss when we focus exclusively on content.

I’m no genius when it comes to media. It wasn’t until I started using the Internet and happened to not have a TV at all that I got it that TV is so emotionally manipulative. I first saw it when I visited my son in the US and he had a large screen TV. I became aware that every time the news came on my stomach clenched, and that I was moved into upsetting emotional space. Once I noticed it, McLuhan gave me a way of understanding that it was the medium itself that was a big part of the reaction – not just the content. I could read about the same events on the Internet with much less emotional reaction. To the extent that kind of difference is caused by the medium in question, that medium, while not the whole message, is very much a part of the message.

Technorati Tags: Marshall McLuhan, blogging, the-medium-is-the-message

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/18/the-medium-is-the-message/feed/ 3 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/06/top-ten-tips-for-lunching-a-recruiting-blog/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/06/top-ten-tips-for-lunching-a-recruiting-blog/#comments Tue, 07 Nov 2006 04:00:50 +0000 Shannon http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/06/top-ten-tips-for-lunching-a-recruiting-blog/ a
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You may be a reader of blogs. You may even participate in blog conversations through commenting. But, starting your own blog and becoming a ‘blogger’ may be daunting. Such apprehension is often driven by a real fear of the unknown. While I can only speak for myself, there are a myriad of natural reactions / assumptions that may keep you from starting a blog:

• No one would care about what I have to say
• In some circles being a blogger has a stigma attached and the word is almost a pejorative
• People will think that I have too much time on my hands
• What would my employer think
• I am not technical and would never be able to set up a blog
• I don’t feel that I can safely write in a real and authentic way

When I hit ‘Publish’ on my first blog post in December of 2005 – my stomach dropped – I even felt a little nauseated. Naked is how it is often described in the blogosphere. And honestly, for me, blogging is a lot of work – work that I love, but work nonetheless. But, I never hesitate to emphasize, that I am so glad that I took the leap as the rewards have come in heaps. Having a blog has provided an outlet:

1. to publish what I think about Interactive Recruitment Marketing and Employer branding. The public nature of blogging has forced me to think in ways that I may not have if I knew that no one could see it.
2. to refine (and often rethink) my ideas.
3. to engage with others from inside, and outside of, my industry. When people are gracious enough to share their point of view on a topic – negative or positive – I have the privilege of learning from their ideas.
4. to connect with people that care about the topics I am writing about. These are not just virtual connections. I have been able to meet and talk with many of the people I have connected with online – at various industry events and via phone.

These connections are immediately deeper upon initial live contact because we already know to a certain degree what one another stands for. Further – the live interactions may have never taken place, we may never have met one another, had we not connected online in this type of forum first. We actively look for opportunities to meet live. I have learned more, and met MORE real people with which I share similar interests, than I did in all of those years of acquiring a top notch education.

Even though I still feel that I am relatively new to blogging professionally, I get asked often if I have any tips for a new blogger and wanted to put together a top-ten list of what I have learned. Creating this list was inspired by a recent post covering 21 tips – you can find that here.

Top Ten Tips for Launching a Recruiting blog

1. Don’t be afraid to let readers know that you are a real person. Include information about you and about why you blog. This can take the form of a ‘Welcome message’ on a side rail; a full ‘About Us’ Page; Pictures; Contact Info or all of the above. One of things that makes blogging so compelling is that it is usually content written by real people – not just company PR; White papers; or brochureware. ‘No bullshit’ is core of true blogging. The more readers can connect with a real person – the more people can relate to you.
2. Go ahead and turn comments on – for better or worse (just be sure that you have a good spam protector installed or activated. We use Akismet.). There are many blogs that have turned on comment moderation for various reasons or even require people to register before commenting. We have done neither of these as we just aren’t inundated with comments (that would be a great problem to have) and I believe that commenting is a bit of an impulse buy. I don’t want to introduce any kind of delay in gratification for the commentor.
3. Make Sure that you have your RSS feed turned on and visible on your blog. If you have some control over your feed – I recommend changing it to a FeedBurner feed as it provides a friendly nontechnical interface for readers that are grabbing your feed and it provides feed metrics. Further – I encourage the use of the universal orange RSS icon and use easy to understand words like ‘grab my feed’ vs. ‘Syndicate my site’. The goal is to make your content updates as easy to consume as possible for anyone interested. To that end – services like FeedBurner even allow you to offer blog updates via email. For those that feel the geek factor is too high with RSS – offering an email option breaks down that barrier.
4. Build some content before you proactively notify the blogosphere or search engines that you have a blog. 5 posts is a good rule of thumb. You may even want to do a little future content programming by making yourself a list of topics that you hope to cover on your blog. While there are posts that come during moments of pure inspiration – most bloggers get to a point where they ask themselves – “so now what do I write about”? It is bound to happen – that is why there are so many blogs that have “gone dark”. If you’re really going to be a ‘blogger’ – it gets into your blood and you will work through those moments. How you work through that is a moment of truth for bloggers.
5. Add a “Submit to Recruiting.com” bookmarklet to your posts. Read the post that I just linked to to get the code and insert that code in the HTML for your post. In WordPress – you click on the HTML icon in your rich text editor bar to bring up the HTML code. In Typepad, you click the HTML tab when you are writing this post. This will make it very easy for readers to submit your post to the recruiting.com community site where your content exposure will increase dramatically.
6. Once you are ready to launch – go claim your blog on here is a great link for tips on doing that and other SEO tips. Get the Google Sitemap plugin available for most blog platforms and turn it on.
7. Begin connecting with other bloggers – start commenting on posts in the Recruitosphere. Most bloggers LOVE comments and thrive on the interaction. By adding to the conversations on recruiting blogs, the authors will often recognize you and seek out your blog (this should go without saying, but be sure to add your blog address to the URL field in the comment form).
8. If you link to other bloggers via your posts or your blogroll – the blog that you linked to receives a notification. This is another action that will often prompt a blogger to notice you and check out your site. Often people will reciprocate with a post that mentions you along the lines of – “I just found this great new blog in our space”. Not everyone will do this – so don’t be offended. In addition to interacting and adding richness to the community – these inbound links directly affect your search engine rankings as well.
9. Frequency. This is an issue where every blogger needs to figure out what works best for them. The more often you post – the better your traffic. For those of us that work during the day and/or blogging is not a sanctioned part of the job – keeping up that kind frequency can be hard. There are bloggers that have to be disciplined about it and set aside a specific time every day or every week to blog. My posts tend to happen on the weekends or after my kids are in bed – so between 10pm – 2am
10. Promote your blog in as many natural ways as possible. For example, put a link to your blog in your email signature; add it to comments on blogs and forums. Add it to your LinkedIn profile. Add a link to your RSS feed as well. Put links to both in your MySpace or Facebook profiles. Participate in Recruiting Blog Swaps when they are happening. Be a guest author on other blogs – most bloggers love good free content, and if they respect your ideas, offering up a guest post can be a match made in heaven.

There is my top ten gathered from what I have learned this last year. Of course, I forgot the most important one – have fun, connect to others, and make it a continuing learning experience that enriches your life and work. OK, that was more than one.

Next, we will follow up this post with a top ten list of “What Not To Do” when blogging.

Blog on.

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/06/top-ten-tips-for-lunching-a-recruiting-blog/feed/ 8 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/05/your-employees-are-blogging-how-yahoo-uses-employee-blogs-to-recruit-talent/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/05/your-employees-are-blogging-how-yahoo-uses-employee-blogs-to-recruit-talent/#comments Mon, 06 Nov 2006 03:53:54 +0000 Shannon http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/05/your-employees-are-blogging-how-yahoo-uses-employee-blogs-to-recruit-talent/ a
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As a person who focuses on employer branding and recruitment marketing everyday – I get excited when I see companies doing really smart things online to build their employer brand and attract talented people.

Tonight – I came across one of the SMARTEST tactics to date, and it was by Yahoo!. Here is how it happened: I am giving a talk on Thursday called ‘Creating Great Employment Brands Online’…so I sat down and did a Google search on ‘Employer Branding’ on my new Google Custom Search Engine – popula8ion - to see what my peeps are saying about this topic. Then I did a technorati search to see if the ‘blogosphere according to technorati’ had anything else to offer me.

Here is a screen shot of the Technorati SERP and look what I found in their Sponsored Links:



Do you recognize that URL from the recruitosphere? If you don’t – that is http://www.jobsearchmarketing.com – the terrific blog by Matt Martone, a Recruitment Media Sales Executive over at Yahoo!.

My first reaction was that I couldn’t believe Matt was buying text ads on search engines to promote his blog. After all, he works for Yahoo! – what could he possibly gain personally by paying for an SEM campaign to attract readers to his blog? If you have your own business – that is one thing. But if you work for a company – what would make it worthwhile to spend your personal money like this?

I am so intrigued. So I click on his ad (sorry to skew the numbers Matt ) – and here is what I see this time:



If you aren’t connecting the dots the way I did – the text ad on Technorati links to a specific post on Matt’s blog called – “What’s it like to work at Yahoo!“. I think that this is a recruitment marketing campaign!

Yahoo! is leveraging the fact that their employees blog and using Matt’s to recruit talent. (OR Yahoo! has a KICK ASS employee referral program and Matt IS using his own money as he is betting that he will make more money from an ERP bonus than the cost of this SEM campaign). Yahoo! is leveraging their employee bloggers to recruit talent. SO smart. I love it. The post is complete with a recruitment video that you can see here if you’re interested:

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, recruiting blogs, employer brand, employment brand, employer branding, employee blogs, recruitment marketing

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/05/your-employees-are-blogging-how-yahoo-uses-employee-blogs-to-recruit-talent/feed/ 10 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/04/womma-how-to-connect-to-a-blogger-for-marketers/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/04/womma-how-to-connect-to-a-blogger-for-marketers/#comments Sat, 04 Nov 2006 16:29:34 +0000 Shannon http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/04/womma-how-to-connect-to-a-blogger-for-marketers/ a
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“How do we market to bloggers and become part of what they are discussing?”

Because I am a blogger, I get asked this question on a regular basis. Traditional Marketers, and even hiring managers, are beginning to sense the power of the conversations going on in the blogosphere (the recruitosphere specifically in my everyday) – and they understandably want a piece of that action.

There are a variety of reasons to connect with a blogger. Here is the short list of how I have been personally contacted by companies outside the blogosphere:

• Companies that make their business selling to my reader segment
• Companies looking to heighten awareness of their services or research
• Companies looking to initiate some BR (vs. PR)
• Hiring Managers and Recruiters, looking to bloggers that have the skills you need for a certain job and you want to connect with them
• People that are looking to network with other professionals
• People trying to combat some negative publicity and want a blogger to address it

The problem of course is that, from the outset, the approach is all wrong. All of these approaches achieve their end – not mine. So essentially every exchange take the form of asking for a favor. While I don’t respond negatively to such marketing attempts – there are other bloggers out there that clearly do and relegate such practices to the level of erectile dysfunction spam. Every blogger is going to respond differently to incoming promotional requests of one variety or another. The bottom line is that you actually have to get to know what specifically a certain blogger writes about – what their interests are. If you have content, a product, or a job opportunity that adds to whatever topic they are dicsussing – then that may represent a synergistic opportunity to reach out and make a real comment on their blog referencing whatever information you are trying to share.

It is a really slippery slope – and trying to market through bloggers can very easily backfire with the blogger posting a rant about you and your spamming company. To try and help marketers navigate these waters, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has developed a public draft open for comment called “The WOMMA Ethical Blogger Contact Guidelines”. The draft attempts to give marketers a 10-item checklist to ensure that they acting in an appropriate and ethical manner when communicating with bloggers.

According to the WOMMA site, “…its intent is to give clarity and guidance to marketers who are working and corresponding with bloggers, and to ensure that their efforts adhere to the standards set by the WOMMA Ethics Code.”

WOMMA recommends that all companies that have (or may have and they just don’t know it) employees representing your company and company brand by participating in online discussions with bloggers:

1. Provide a copy of the Ethical Blogger Contact Guidelines, along with a copy of the WOMMA Ethics Code, to all personnel reading, writing, and commenting on blogs.
2. Prior to corresponding with a blogger, review each of the 10 ethics principles.
3. Create a monitoring program to ensure that your staff is complying.

The checklist itself (while still in an open draft version) is supposedly representative of specific outreach behavior and marketing practices that are deemed ethical by bloggers. If you are a blogger, or plan to be soon, do these resonate with you?

10 Principles for Ethical Contact by Marketers

• Review these guidelines before initiating any contact with bloggers.
• Share these guidelines with vendors, agencies, and staff.
• Keep disclosure and transparency top of mind.

Remember: Consumers come first, honesty isn’t optional, and deception is always exposed.

For more information, visit www.womma.org/ethics.

---

1. I will always be truthful and will never knowingly relay false information. I will never ask someone else to deceive bloggers for me.
2. I will fully disclose who I am and who I work for (my identity and affiliations) from the very first encounter when communicating with bloggers or commenting on blogs.
3. I will never take action contrary to the boundaries set by bloggers. I will respect all community guidelines regarding posting messages and comments.
4. I will never ask bloggers to lie for me.
5. I will use extreme care when communicating with minors or blogs intended to be read by minors.
6. I will not manipulate advertising or affiliate programs to impact blogger income.
7. I will not use automated systems for posting comments or distributing information.
8. I understand that compensating bloggers may give the appearance of a conflict of interest, and I will therefore fully disclose any and all compensation or incentives.
9. I understand that if I send bloggers products for review, they are not obligated to comment on them. Bloggers can return products at their own discretion.
10. If bloggers write about products I send them, I will proactively ask them to disclose the products’ source.

In my opinion, the is a really good start. The grayest area is number 3 – “I will never take action contrary to the boundaries set by bloggers.” The problem comes back to that you don’t know what those boundaries are unless you actually read and monitor a particular blog. There has to be real and honest reasons to reach out and connect – no ‘blast’ alerts or releases. Rohit Bhargava, the VP of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy PR, recently said it best:

Listen, participate and respond. This may be fifth in the list, but is perhaps the most important. If you look at every instance of personal media marketing horror stories, from the Kryptonite Bike Lock, to Dell Hell, to Walmart … each could have been managed far better if the companies involved had listened, participated and responded to issues or problems raised on blogs. This is important at all times, and particularly after launching new campaigns and marketing efforts as well.

If marketing or other outreach efforts only focus on the needs of the marketer – pushing out content – then all they are doing is treating bloggers like any other traditional media outlet. Social Media has streamlined the ability to build real and meaningful connections with consumers, partners, and potential employees. Treat this like any other media outlet, and you may quickly feel the sharp tongue of the blogosphere.





Technorati Tags: word-of-mouth-marketing, word-of-mouth-marketing-association, womma, blog marketing for dummies, buzz marketing with blogs for dummies, blog marketing ethics, social media optimization, SMO

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/11/04/womma-how-to-connect-to-a-blogger-for-marketers/feed/ 3 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/18/we-come-as-we-are/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/18/we-come-as-we-are/#comments Thu, 19 Oct 2006 04:57:42 +0000 Julian http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/18/we-come-as-we-are/ a
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So this Manimal wrote us (or phoned us) and asked us out on a date. He told us we could be one big happy blogging family and not give anything up in the process. Well, actually I can’t remember what he told me because he’s a smart Manimal and spent all his time chatting up my girl (and who can blame him). I have to tell you that
Shannon and I thought twice about getting cozy with this Manimal, but in the end our positive experiences with him and our appreciation of his work were so pervasive that they motivated us to get on board. At least that’s my story of how we have come to be part of RecruitingBloggers.com. It may have been that he kept calling us and bugging us as well. And then there’s that whole Canada based plot that he and Jason Davis have to take over the entire Recruitosphere and annex Seattle, NYC, California and South Florida as new Provinces. Blame Canada eh!

In considering whether this project made sense for us we concerned ourselves with marketing silliness like would having duplicate content on our site and RecruitingBloggers.com hurt our Google rankings, what it might due to our oh-so-important online persona
and brand and…well you know. Let’s just say we caught ourselves taking EXCELER8ion just a little too seriously. It’s not that those things aren’t worthy of some consideration. But you have to ask yourself the right question. Is blogging about page views, unique visitors and fishing for some new clients or is it about community and connecting with people? “It’s about none of that!” you yell – it’s about satisfying our egos! YES! So in that vein why wouldn’t we all want to be authors in untold communities? Well, the effort for one of course. But Manimal says we don’t have to do extra work and can just cross post. Perhaps. I think the jury is out on that still but we’re game to figure it out.

I read some quote about 10 years ago (can’t remember the source) that was something along the lines that having context for a given situation raises your IQ by 10 – 20 points. It really took me by surprise when I first heard that, and then the more I considered it, the more it made sense to me. So the context of the RecruitingBloggers site, and the community to be built there, may in fact alter how you come to see or interpret the various authors and their posts. It is a different lens that you’ll be looking through after all. That’s one point about context. The other context is the one that our decision was made around for doing this and that is based on what we find valuable about blogging. And what we find valuable is the connections we’re making with real people. People like Ami Givertz, Jason Davis, Michael Keleman, Jason Warner, Heather Hamilton, Dennis Smith, Zoe and Gretchen (hey, they don’t have last names do they?), Yvonne LaRose, Regina Miller, Josh (definitely just “Josh”), David Manaster, Jim Stroud, Astha Parmar, Jim and Frankie Durbin, Gautam Ghosh, Michael Specht and his son BJ, Stephen Fowler, Steven Rothberg, Easton Ellsworth and so many more (you get the idea). We also value that blogging helps us develop our thoughts on business and our areas of marketing and social media expertise (there’s some gratification in working some brain fart through to some semi-coherent conclusion). It makes you sharper in the way that doing a presentation over and over gets your speaking points down to ‘just the good stuff’ or how your elevator pitch eventually becomes so well rounded that you could communicate it to your President, your six year old, and your pet Jack Russell Terrier
Scooby equally well (Ruff, Ruff, yap, yap – rohkay!). It’s not that we don’t get the occasional client because of our blog – we do (and sure we value that) but finding money isn’t as fun as finding someone to work with that you can appreciate and vice versa (and still make money eh!).

Blogging helps us find people we can have great conversations with and many times a doorway to true friendships. When you consider these things that we value how could blogging for another site really hurt us? Will we meet less people than before or make less interesting connections? I doubt it based on this being such a relevant and similar forum to what we’ve already gotten plugged into with EXCELER8ion. To contrast what I just said, I’ll compare our experience with Newsvine, a social media news site. My experiences with the Newsvine product were all good ones but the community left me flat. I’m SURE there are interesting people on Newsvine but for me the experience was like being at a dinner party and not having anything in common to talk to your table partner about – forced, uncomfortable, tedious. That probably has a lot to do with how I ended up there (interest in social media vs. a hard core news junkie and specifically one interested in politics). So as Newsvine is about news and political news more than anything, Digg.com is a community that is rabid about tech stuff, gadgets, web 2.0 sites, Ajax (not the cleaning kind) and Firefox (not the video game). If those things make your heart skip faster then you’ll probably enjoy your activities and interactions in those communities. So on Recruitingbloggers I think we’ll all be in good company.

A Manimal got this group of people together and together we now have the chance to become a community. And maybe our community will grow and evolve or maybe it won’t. But I can tell you that because of people, (I mean Manimal) I bothered to put aside a lot of other pressing deliverables today and write these thoughts down. So, here’s to our favorite Manimal who has led us to this precipice, and here’s to the bloggers who joined us in our folly, and here’s to you for coming to join in on the conversation. Won’t you sit down and stay a while? We’d love to talk.

Julian and Shannon
RecruitingBloggerna8ion

Technorati Tags: RecruitingBloggers, Blogging, Business Blogging, Recruitosphere, Recruitment Blogging

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In my last post I discussed how a corporate blog impacts employer brand by enabling prospective job candidates to find out more about a company than they typically find on the careers section – even if the corporate blog doesn’t overtly speak to recruiting or specific employee related issues.

In fact, except in some standout cases, it may be that the blogs that aren’t focusing specifically on recruiting will be viewed as more authentic by potential job candidates than the true recruiting blogs.

It is possible that the Fortune 500 companies that are allowing their employees to blog about their job, their function and their company openly and honestly (and with integrity) may actually have an advantage over the ‘recruiting blogs’ that represent the voice of a recruiter whose job is to sell top talented candidates that may be a match on working at the company. Despite this possible advantage – most corporate blogs fail to acknowledge this and forget to take simple steps like providing links to job search; benefits info; day in the life profiles etc.

In my opinion, the ideal situation would be a blog where both voices are represented – the recruiter that can offer up information about who they are looking for and why, as well as employees that are empowered to blog about their jobs and company. At some point in the process of engaging and connecting with readers – the reader may very well decide to explore job opportunities at the company. Doesn’t it only make sense to provide a link at the right time/place that says something along the line of:

“We understand the value of our people. Would you like to discuss the possibility of working together? Click here to learn more”

Why doesn’t this happen more often? It is related I think to companies still learning what it means to truly have a recruiting culture. That it is the job of every employee to seek out and recruit top talent to work along side them. Only when this ideal is coursing through the veins of a workforce do you tend to see a blending of corporate communications and process with recruitment communications.

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/15/bridging-the-gap-recruiting-blogs-vs-corporate-blogs/feed/ 0 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/13/corporate-blogs-impact-employer-brand-whether-thats-the-intent-or-not/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/13/corporate-blogs-impact-employer-brand-whether-thats-the-intent-or-not/#comments Sat, 14 Oct 2006 01:35:41 +0000 Shannon http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/13/corporate-blogs-impact-employer-brand-whether-thats-the-intent-or-not/ a
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Before I continue looking at the Fortune 500 blogs and evaluating whether or not they are using their corporate blog to recruit talent, I should take a step back. I would say that simply BECAUSE these companies have blogs – they are impacting their employer brand and attracting prospective job candidates whether or not that is the intent. Not that this is unique to blogging. I believe that ALL corporate communications impact employer brand and present an opportunity to attract talent and engage employees – they make an impact whether they were meaning to speak to that audience or not.

If companies have already decided to remove their veil and are partially (or more fully in the best examples) exposing themselves via a public forum like a blog – WHY NOT include a careers message? It could be as simple as a link to ‘job search and apply’ – to as open and transparent as full discussions with interested readers about company values, beliefs, and work environment.

Virtually everyone that is new to social media in the business of recruitment marketing jumps to the notion that companies just aren’t willing to give up control of their brand and open up their juicy insides to possible negative comments. While most companies I come into contact with aren’t ready to just start blogging – I am shocked that more aren’t at least monitoring what is being said in the blogosphere from a recruitment and retention stand-point.

It usually takes about 5 minutes of explaining that social media actually enables companies TO REGAIN CONTROL of their brands before eyes begin to light up. Once I explain that blogging platforms allow the moderation of comments to prevent spammers and vulgar content – minds open up a little to the possibility that a company could actually ADDRESS and participate in what is being said about them by providing a forum for two-way communication and interaction.  Great companies will learn that it is OK to let go of traditional employer brand control, and utilize forums like blogs to allow their employees to openly represent the company with transparency, authenticity, and most of all, integrity.

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]]> http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/13/corporate-blogs-impact-employer-brand-whether-thats-the-intent-or-not/feed/ 1 http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/11/fortune-500-blogs-amd-amazon-and-cisco/ http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/11/fortune-500-blogs-amd-amazon-and-cisco/#comments Thu, 12 Oct 2006 04:21:45 +0000 Shannon http://www.exceler8ion.com/2006/10/11/fortune-500-blogs-amd-amazon-and-cisco/ a
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Since I last wrote about this subject a few weeks ago – 10 new blogs have been added to the Fortune 500 Blogging Wiki. There are now 40, or 8%, of Fortune 500 companies that have official corporate blogs. Here is the updated list:

Blogging F500 Company	Corporate Blog - Using it Directly to Recruit?
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.	AMD Notebook Tester – NO
Amazon.com Inc.	Amazon Web Services Blog – NO
Cisco Systems, Inc.	Cisco High Tech Policy Blog – INDIRECTLY
CSC	Team CSC
Cox Communications	Digital Straight Talk
Dell, Inc	one2one
Eastman Kodak Company	A Thousand Words
eBay	eBay Developers Program Blog
Electronic Data Systems	EDS’ Next Big Thing Blog
Ford Motor Company	Bold Moves
General Electric Company	GE Global Research blog
General Mills, Inc	Real Baking with Rose Levy Beranbaum
General Motors Corporation	FastLane Blog
Google	Google Blog
Hewlett-Packard Company	HP Blogs
Honeywell International	HoneywellBlogs
ING Group	My Cup of Cha
Intel Corporation	Intel Geek Blogger
International Business Machines	Guide to IBM Blogs
McDonald’s Corporation	Open For Discussion
Microsoft Corporation	MSDN’s Microsoft Blogs
Motorola Inc	Snowboarding Team blogs [lame]
Nike Inc	Nike Basketball Blog
Oracle Corporation	OraBlogs
Southwest Airlines	Nuts about Southwest
Sprint	Things That Make You Go Wireless
Starwood Hotels & Resorts	The Lobby
Sun Microsystems Inc	Jonathan Schwartz
Texas Instruments	Video 360 Blog
Time Warner Inc	Jason Calacanis’ Blog
The Boeing Company	Randy’s Journal
The McGraw-Hill Companies	Blogspotting
Tribune Company	The Swamp
Viacom International Inc	MTV News Correspondents
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.	Wal-Mart Facts
Wells Fargo & Company	Guided by History
Whole Foods Market, Inc.	The CEO’s Blog – John Mackey (inactive since June)
Xerox Corporation	Palo Alto Research Center
Verizon Communications	PoliBlog
Yahoo!	Yahoo! Search Blog

So Who’s Directly Recruiting from the Corporate Blog?
The following info is from my own review of the sites – if you have information to add or correct, please leave a comment and let me know. Here is a break down of the first three:

1. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. – Not that I can tell as the blog is in German. I translated the categories in MS Word and found one possibility – ‘mobiler einsatz’ which means mobile employment – but found no direct recruiting info; job openings, or info about the company culture in this category. I actually met two really great recruiters at a recent Jobster dinner down in Hollywood, Hazeef and Sal. Hey – do you guys have any input to add about what AMD thinks about using a blog as a way to connect and engage potential candidates in the AMD employer brand? …especially if they don’t speak German
2. Amazon.com Inc. – This blog has been running since Jan. 06. While Amazon has several blogs, none of them speak to recruiting or the employment brand.
3. Cisco Systems, Inc. – The blog that is listed as the main blog on the F500 wiki doesn’t use their blog to address employment related issues. But they do have another blog that has been live since April 2006 called News@Cisco with the tagline = “People and events transforming the network”.

   A recent post, Actions speak louder than words, discussed employees and the need for them to be cognizant of security risks when working remotely on company machines. Another recent post, Promoting Gender Diversity – discussed how Noni Allwood, Cisco’s senior director of Human Resources, views the promotion of gender diversity in the workforce with the eminently rational view that diversity is in everyone’s best interest.

   They do not categorize their posts on the blog, so finding specific employment and work environment related content that would be highly useful to a job seeker is more difficult than it could be. There are no direct links to the careers section of the Cisco site. Opportunities that are being missed in my opinion

   Interestingly, Cisco also has great messaging on their actual corporate site regarding what they are calling – The Human Network. The Human Network ‘micro-site’ within the Cisco site encourages visitors to “discover how the human network brings people together to accomplish great things.” Here is a screen shot of the site:

   

See anything missing? Any mention of the Cisco Humans? The Cisco Employees? A link to careers? Even the upper right hand content box that is entitled ‘Work’ says nothing about working at Cisco.

I am consistently baffled to see opportunities like this one where companies neglect to bring their employment brand messaging into what they are already spending dollars on for the corporate branding initiatives.

Look out for the next three F500 blogs on Friday.

Technorati Tags: corporate blogs, business blogs, recruiting blogs, employer branding, employer brand, employment value proposition, recruitment, social networking, candidate experience

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I have been following Easton Ellsworth’s review of the 10 largest Fortune 500 companies. He has posted a list of his reviews of their ‘business blogging’ efforts so far:

1. ExxonMobil – Yawn
2. Wal-Mart – Ugly
3. General Motors Part 1 and Part 2 – Otay
4. Chevron – Mysterious
5. Ford – Iffy
6. ConocoPhillips – Nonexistent
7. General Electric – Aha!
8. Citigroup – Who?
9. AIG – Barf
10. IBM – Hallelujah!

Of Easton’s list:

• I only know of 2 that are using real blogs (very indirectly) to recruit talent: 1- Wal-mart (Life at Wal-Mart Blog – and there are some fishy things going on here that we will get into later) AND 2- GM (FYI Blog).
• While we know that IBM encourages its employees to blog (within company guidelines) – are there any recruiting focused / Heather Hamilton / JobsBlog equivalents out there for IBM? Maybe I’ve missed it?
• There are some that are blogging pretty well – but are clearly missing out on the opportunity to directly recruit talent from the blog – GE’s Global Research Blog, From Edison’s Desk, is one that needs to add a link to their job search and apply at the very least today.

According to the Fortune 500 Blogging Wiki, thirty, or 6%, of Fortune 500 companies have official corporate blogs (nearly double the number in December 2005). Here is their current list of Fortune 500 Companies that have corporate blogs as of 9/7/06. Drop me a line if you know of any blogs that have been missed:

Amazon.com Inc.	Amazon Web Services Blog
Cisco Systems, Inc.	Cisco High Tech Policy Blog
Cox Communications	Digital Straight Talk
Dell, Inc	one2one
eBay	eBay Developers Program Blog
Electronic Data Systems	EDS’ Next Big Thing Blog
General Electric Company	GE Global Research blog
General Mills, Inc	Real Baking with Rose Levy Beranbaum
General Motors Corporation	FastLane Blog
Google	Google Blog
Hewlett-Packard Company	HP Blogs
Honeywell International	HoneywellBlogs
ING Group	My Cup of Cha
Intel Corporation	Intel Geek Blogger
International Business Machines	Guide to IBM Blogs
McDonald’s Corporation	Open For Discussion
Microsoft Corporation	MSDN’s Microsoft Blogs
Motorola Inc	Snowboarding Team blogs [lame]
Nike Inc	Nike Basketball Blog
Oracle Corporation	OraBlogs
Southwest Airlines	Nuts about Southwest
Sprint	Things That Make You Go Wireless
Starwood Hotels & Resorts	The Lobby
Sun Microsystems Inc	Jonathan Schwartz
Texas Instruments	Video 360 Blog
Time Warner Inc	Jason Calacanis’ Blog
The Boeing Company	Randy’s Journal
Viacom International Inc	Real World/Road Rules Blog
Wells Fargo & Company	Guided by History
Xerox Corporation	Palo Alto Research Center
Yahoo!	Yahoo! Search Blog

Few company blogs are from the CEOs (which may be a good thing depending on the chief) and few seem to overtly use their corporate blogs to recruit talented people to join their team. Why are so many Fortune 500 companies failing to take advantage of this medium to engage in online conversations with potential candidates and applicants?

In the coming days I will begin reviewing the spectrum of F500 recruitment blogging efforts – from those that are just dipping their toes into the ‘recruitosphere’ to those that are doing cannonballs into recruitment blogging.

Technorati Tags: business blogs, recruiting blogs, employer brand, employment brand, employer branding, employment branding, corporate blogs, recruitment marketing, talent acquisition, Fortune 500 blogs

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I continue to be amazed at the degree at which those of us with similar interests can be connected in the blogosphere. There are WAY less than 6 degrees of separation in this little microcosm.

So here is what happened…I am in my RSS reader just now and notice that Heather Hamilton has a few new posts. I was eager to read her posts as she and I finally met at ERE on Wednesday. I wanted to have a chance to talk to her SO much more than I did during those brief 10 minutes, but our paths never crossed again. Regardless… her first post was about how much flying SUCKS with all of the new restrictions and the liquid restrictions are forcing us to become dry old hags in a matter of half a day on the plane sans water or even any dry-lip saving lip gloss. Great post – but here is where it gets really interesting. Heather’s second post is about a blog written by a guy named Cornelius:

By the way, a little plug for Cornelius’ blog, which I just discovered today through Technorati:

CorpBlawg is a web log on corporate/enterprise/business blogging that is maintained by Cornelius Puschmann.

Cornelius is currently a PhD student at the Department of English Language and Linguistics of the University of Duesseldorf, Germany. His interest in corporate blogging stems from the fact that he is writing his dissertation on the corporate blog as a genre, claiming (somewhat optimistically) that he can find linguistic features which are unique to corporate blogs.

So…I tend to have similar author interests as Heather and I TOO am interested in corporate/business blogging. So I go to see what Mr. Cornelius has to say. I click on the link to his blog and there is a post up called: What blogging does to your business. Here is the first sentence that I read:

I’ve just finished reading two interesting pieces (one, two) by the anonymous author of the Yankee Wombat blog. The writer describes corporate blogging in conjunction with Marshal McLuhan’s theory of media and culture, as outlined in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). In the second entry, he also discusses Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazar (1999) which compares the open source model of software development with customary closed-source methods used by companies such as Microsoft.

Now – I don’t know Cornelius from Adam and probably wouldn’t have found him without being interested in Heather’s blog. That Mr. Anonymous (and EXTREMELY INTELLIGENT) author that Cornelius wrote a POST about, the so-called ‘Yankee Wombat’:

that’s Julian’s Dad – Lorenz Gude

He is much more of a political blogger – but he has recently written about business blogging and is gaining quite a bit of attention. He keeps threatening to write some pieces for EXCELER8ion. I wish he would.

It is a small world…but it is a microscopic blogosphere. This had been portrayed as a negative – I view it as efficient.

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