Global Neighbourhoods

I'm restoring @#$#&%$ CAPTCHA Feature

A while back Jeremiah Owyang became about the 10th person to tell me he hated the CAPTCHA feature I had activated on this Typepad account. This is the thigamajig that asks you to identify a string of characters when leaving a comment.  He said it discouraged him from leaving as many comments as he might.

Like most bloggers, I want as many comments as my readers will give me. Blogging is not about publishing as much as it is about conversations. Even when my friend Jim Forbes is leaving a comment telling me I'm dead wrong on my contempt for fake Steve Jobs, I want comments.

So, following Jeremiah's I turned off Captcha and allowed unmodified posting of comments. On the first day I received 17 spam Comments, on the second day 34.  On the third day, the number was over 60 when I decided to install Comment Modification.

Comment modification meant that I had to read comments before they would get posted. This has slowed the conversation down. Unless I have time to read them as they come in, some Comments have been delayed for 24 hours before i got to them.  Plus, I still have to pour through the spam crap every day, which has become both tedious and depressing.

So, I have restored CAPTCHA because I have no other options.  I have to say that this is one area where Tyepad seems to me to be doing a worse job than other sites where the character strings are more legible to the human eye.  other sites have simple math problems to solve.

Besides, Jeremiah hasn't left me a single comment in the entire time that CAPTCHA was turned off.

I hope you will all keep those cards and letters coming

Voice of a future employee: 'Let me blog.'

Kyle has some nice things to say about Scoble and Naked Conversations, but that is not why I am pointing to it. I am pointing to it because he is in college and about to graduate, and he wants to start his career with a company that will let him blog.

He writes: " "Of course businesses should listen to what their customers are
saying," I think to myself. And "Why wouldn't a company want to be
transparent and open to the world." (OK, I am not that naive, I know
there are good reasons not to, but let me go on.)

I think there are more and more future star employees like Kyle and employers need to pay attention now, if they want to attract the best and brightest members of the next generation.

Josh Hallett Says Blogging Hot in the Enterprise

[Josh Hallett. Photo by Shel]

I always learn something interesting or useful when I listen to Josh Hallett of Hyku, Inc. speak. His recent appearance with Alex Kim from SolutionSet at Third Thursday, the marketing/communications networking event, hosted at VOCE Communications in Palo Alto was no exception.

As a web consultant, Josh's clients are overwhelmingly large and global.  As a social media company consultant my clients are small as mine are small but still global, thanks to the internet.

One of Josh's main points, confirmed as well by Alex Kim, is that the social media tool of choice in the enterprise these days is the blog.  This is in striking contrast to what I'm seeing from the corner of the field where I sit. From where I sit attention has moved on to online video and particularly online social networks.
A few attendees were disappointed in Josh's other comments, particularly those that made IT sound like a barrier.  Yet almost all the feedback I get says this is true. But I have always found that Josh's enterprise insights are accurate and if he says blogs are hot and online video is not, then I tend to assume he is accurate.

This confirms the argument that blogs are normalizing. I sit on the edge of technology, where early adopters are,well, adopting early. Enterprise is slower to adopt and slower to adapt and as they begin to immerse themselves in the blogosphere, the geeks in Silicon Valley are getting excited about new technologies.

What is most interesting to me is that the timeline has gotten so much shorter.It took about a dozen years for the enterprise to accept the PC.  It took about six years for them to see the value in wired networks.  It took about three years for IT to accept that notebooks were less of a threat to corporate security than was originally feared.

Now, less than 18 months after my world was euphoric with the excitement of blogging, they are being ingested into large corporate bellies. The world is moving faster and faster or so it seems to me.

Shel Holtz weighs in on Ghost Blogging

In the heat of most blogging arguments, Shel "It depends" Holtz is Mr. neutral.  He prides himself in seeing the merits of both sides of an argument. Although I am very different than that, I have usually admired it. Sometimes it has frustrated me, because I knew that Shel believed as I believed during some controversies, but chose to speak with greater ambivalence.

That is why it gave me so much pleasure to read his post this morning on ghost blogging. He's against it, because:

"... blogs were created and popularized by people who were fed up with traditional business communication channels. They had had enough of fabricated quotes in press releases and speeches read by executives but written by professional speech writers. These people wanted authentic conversations with real human beings. A ghost-written executive blog is the opposite of what blogs were created for; it is counterintuitive to the 10th tenet of Christopher Carfi’s Social Customer Manifesto: 'I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.' "

Shel, thanks for taking a side on this one. I know it was probably difficult for you, but once you get used to it, maybe you'll do it more often.

Blogging is not all about well turned phrases.  It's about letting people see there are real human beings inside that corporate entity, real people doing real jobs; real people who have grammatical flaws and typos as well as human frailties.

That does not come through if you use a mouthpiece, no matter how accurate that mouthpiece is. Holtz revisited the argument that a good ghost writer is like someone who signs for a deaf person, who simply and accurately translates what is being said.  This is a subject I know a small amount about and no signer ever gets the exact translation.  There are arguments that interpreters have caused wars by losing subtleties in the translation.

I have been a ghost writer for both executives and politicians. I was very good at capturing the style of the people contracting me. But there is no single piece I ever wrote where just a tiny bit of me has not shined through.

Good call, Shel.

Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers

UK Microsoftie Darren Strange reports that Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers among its 71,000 employees.  Both numbers show significant growth.  As irecall, when Robert and I were writing our first chapter of naked Conversations there were 2500 bloggers among 56,000 employees.  By the time we finished the book in October 2005, the bloggers were topping the 3,000 mark. This would mean that the number of Microsoft bloggers has grown by over 50 percent in about a year and a half.

By percentage, I'm not sure whether Sun Microsystems or Microsoft has more bloggers, but both companies continue to grow and continue to extol the virtues of doing it.

One interesting aspect in Darren's report is that there is no longer any controversy about it. When Joshua Allen, became Microsoft's first blogger, the first call to fire him for blogging came just a few hours later, as we reported in Naked Conversations.

Now it is seems to me, blogging is normalizing at Microsoft and that is what should happen.


Technorati Tags: darrenstrange, joshallen

Adam & Amanda, you've been 86'd

This blog has long had a Living Room Policy, which states that I have the right to take down your comments, if you are an anonymous blogger. I also can evict you for being generally an asshole. Amanda, unless you return under your real name of Brian Connelly of Chicago, I will no longer post your comments here.  Adam Zand, you are hereby banned for being an insufferable asshole.

Early Rise to NewComm Forum

I'm heading to Las Vegas at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning to be one of more than 400 people attending New Communications Forum. This promises to be a really superior gathering of corporate communications and marketing people with a virtual who's who on the corporate blogging consulting side.

I am on a panel, moderated by VOCE exec Mike Manuel, who has done a great job of prepping panelists, something which is not done by moderators often enough. Mostly I am there to meet up with old friends and meet new ones.

I had hoped to be done with my Global Conversations Overview before leaving, but that is not possible. I'm pretty sure I will be able to squeeze off the next significant section before going to be early for a 4:30 am wake up.

Waiting for the Tsunami

I've talked to a good number of people in the last few weeks, many of them living and working in a space that is far away from what we call the blogging community. This is as it should be.  I try to speak to audiences who are not insiders, who are rying to figure out just what is happening with this blogging and social media stuff and how they can adjust whtever it is they do to what is happening.

I recently have come across some steadfast doubters, a mainstream media executive who believes that the reduced classified ad revenue is just a down cycle, that will come back up; a recent commenter who still believes that blogging is just a fad, a resident of one of North America's most sophisticated cities, who believes that blogging may be fine for Silicon  Valley, but will have no impact on the global enterprise where she runs marketing.

And I heard a lot about how blogging is just kid's stuff.  This is a subject upon which I could write a book.  In fact, it is a subject on which I am writing a book.

I have lots of time for people who do not yet understand blogging, who are struggling with how they can adapt to it, who are trying to fathom, just what it is their kids are doing on their cell phones, who are trying to figure out why the integrated marketing campaigns that have worked so well for so long are not working so well anymore.

But at this point in time, after what has occurred, after what has been written, I'm just not going to argue with people who are Hell bent on becoming socially and technically and culturally obsolete. As my Church of the Customer friend Ben McConnell advised when I interviewed them for Naked Conversations,, "don't bother trying to convert the atheists. Work on the agnostics."

My favorite atheist comment came a while ago after I gave a talk to marketing and communications executives. After my talk, the owner of a mid-sized PR agency in New Jersey came up to me and very directly said: "Let me tell you why you are wrong. Record profits.  That's why.  We had record profits last quarter and we are going to have them again this quarter.  And we completely ignore blogging."

I have an image of this New Jersey atheist walking along the beach, enjoy the sunshine and tropical breeze completely unaware of a tsunami gathering height and velocity and heading toward his beech at a speed too rapid for him to avoid.

Apple, Google, Blogging, Microsoft and Sun Micro

I was impressed by the hospitality and professionalism Infopresse showed me as my Montreal hosts. The more I know about an audience, the more comfortable I feel that I can give them what I have that they may value most. Arnaud Granata did a great job of telling me about the attendees.During lunch, before my presentation I spoke with Marie (I never caught her last name or title) who asked my if blogging was so great, why is it hat Google and Apple, two companies who seem to disdain open blogging are doing so well, while Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, the two bloggingest of major companies, are not doing nearly so well.

I admitted to Marie, that this was the question that I dread the most when I make presentations.  So she elected to ask it from the audience at the second I completed my talk. On the same topic, when I got home and started catching up on my reading, I came across this article by my friend Arik Hesseldahl of Businessweek who tells us why Steve Jobs should blog in two parts.

I wish Arik had been on the dais with me because his description about Steve's candor and his willingness to take an ethical stand that could cost Apple revenue make Jobs sound like the stuff that blog heroes are made of.

But I was not equipped to address that from the Infopresse dais. Here, generally speaking is how I did answer the question.

Before you get to blogging, any company needs to focus on great product and in that light, most people feel Apple and Google have given people great products for the most part.  This is less so for Microsoft and Sun.  Blogs are just a tool.

Blogs, however, have worked miracles for Sun and Microsoft, in turning around negative perceptions that hurt the company. Blogs have shown both companies have thousands of employees who are passionate about what they do and who care a great deal about customer relationships.

I think over time Apple and Google will suffer from their less than open blog policies, particularly when a crisis occurs. I think they will suffer more over time because companies that do not trust their employees to blog will fail to attract the best and the brightest young talent possible.

Currently Google and Apple are generally recognized as cool places to work. But when a new generation comes of age--those who are currently teenagers and young adults--when they come into the workplace this may all change.

I may not have said this as well at Infopresse yesterday, but this is how I would have expressed it, if I had been able to submit my response in writing as I am doing now.

BTW, as a sidenote--I have not been Steve Jobs greatest fan over the years, but his comments on Digital Rights Management, followed now by his candid assault on teachers unions caring more about tenure than teaching are brave and commendable stances. Jobs obviously feels he can be heard without blogging and he is obviously right. But the times are really changing (I'm on a Dylan kick today) and sometimes they move fast enough to surprise even the wisest and most agile marketing mavens.

 

JetBlue may not blog, but it is transparent

First off, I'm extremely happy that my horrendous travel schedule did not deliver me to the Northeast last week. Second, I'm a JetBlue fan, even if most routes I'm taking condemn me to United and American Air most of the time.

JetBlue is a young company, who just revealed the first blemish on the face of its seven-year history, and it was a pretty ugly one that left people locked on unventilated planes on the JFK tarmac for up to 10 hours. My wife is claustrophobic.  Had we been on that flight it would have been extremely hardon her.

Still, I had to wince when through Personal Bee, I was directed to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed, where Paul says that the airline company's lack of information to the public could easily have been a case study for Naked Conversation's. If the book were being written now, I'm sure we would be all over this case. Paul might see it going into "Blogging in a Crisis," or perhaps "Doing it Wrong," but he would be surprised to see us put this one into "Doing it Right."

Paul, you may have missed the startling Page One interview in the New York Times with David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue, who described himself as "humiliated and mortified," with how JetBlue customers were treated and how his organization melted down.He admitted that part of the problem, was the low-cost model upon which JetBlue is built and he publicly aired additional problems, such as flight attendants being unable to reach the company to find out if a flight was on or off.

This is transparency and it is a case study for how a CEO can use it. Using a blog would have been a better communications tool, but I think it's important to remember that like a hammer, a blog is just a tool.

JetBlue has sinned, it has suffered and it has repented.  The guy at the top probably ignored a whole bevy of lawyers telling him not to admit any kind of culpability. He says they'll do better and next time the suffering passengers will be compensated.

Naked Conversations began with the statement that we live in a time when most people don't trust corporations.  Personally, I trust this one because of Neeleman's comments.  I will be surprised if they do not do better next time.

And, by the way, when the communications officer at JetBlue, reads ths post, they should pay heed that a blog woiuld be a most efficient commnications tool when your next crisis takes place.




Technorati Tags: jetblue, nakedconversations, infectiousgreed, paulkedrosky