Global Neighbourhoods

CNET's Farber Sings Naked's Praise

Dan Farber, one of the writer's I most respect had some incredibly nice things to say about Naked Conversations and my open letter to Forbes magazine. They mean a good deal to me because in 25 years, I have never heard Dan say something  he didn't mean.

What Must PR Do? Part 3

This is the third of God knows how many parts on the issue of how PR can adapt to changing times. You can review Part 1 here and Part 2 here. For those of you who prefer the speedy version, in Part 1, I argued that PR is and always has been a business based on relationships rather than smile and dial tactics. Blogging changes that because there is no longer a small elite band of influencers as there used to be.  We are now all influencers with the power to spread information worldwide in a very short time and this poses a challenge for PR practitioners.

In Part 2, I advised practitioners to abandon command and control message tactics and facilitate communications between clients and the blogosphere. Part 3 tries to show that the opportunity during these disruptive times, is greater for smart PR people than is the threat. Sometime in the last month or two, blogging reached its tipping point. Businesses are no longer dismissing the blogging phenomenon and, except for a few believing readers of Forbes magazine, they are no longer even angry. They just want to figure out what to do about it and how to fit it in to existing corporate boxes and processes.

This is tough.  Blogging is not confined to departmental walls.  While it is most often relegated to marketing, where it can serve as the department's most efficient tool, it is bigger than that. Blogging has begun to show its value to product development, recruiting, business development, customer support, training and just about everything else except maybe sales, where employees actually get to go out and meet face-to-face with customers and prospects.

Business blogging's transformational nature is more easily viewed from the perspective of customer, rather than company positioning. Blogging is a tool to can help companies move customers from the edge of the organization to their rightful --and more valuable--position at the center--where products, services, strategies and policies are determined based on what they really want, rather than what a company thinks they should want.

Blogging is the power tool of this emerging customer-centric corporation. It is causing a great deal of disruption and some PR people will be unable to adapt to the changes. But others have begun to realize that there is a great deal of opportunity here, a good chance for PR to become more important rather than less and in this new role, flourish rather than follow last century's village blacksmith into oblivion.

But if you are a smart practitioner, like an increasing number of PR operatives are becoming, you will see this revolution as an opportunity, not to diminish your business but to vastly expand it.  Here are some tips to what you can now do.  Together they can make a PR operative a facilitator in new ways. Here are a few tips on what to do. Some are redundant with what I wrote previously, but they are offered in a slightly different context:

1. Get over Command and Control PR. It is very yesterday and it won’t be coming back, and besides like Shel Holtz, told us in the book, "You never were in control." Business may be just fine today but it won't stay that way. Tactics cost too much and deliver too little in return.  Even that nice placement in a national publication like—oh say Forbes—just doesn’t have the impact for your client that it used to have. And such media placements no longer generate the gratitude with clients that they once did. Once you see the truth in this, it will have a liberating feeling.  Ask the many blogging PR folk who are today having more fun even as they become more effective on behalf of their clients.

2. Get into the blogosphere. Okay, you can toe dabble for a while longer, but it's time to get immersed. Swim around. Listen to what people who can impact your company have to say. Change your headset from one-way to two-way communications. Be the eyes and ears for your clients.  Use the blog search tools that give you the radar that will protect them from sneak attack and let you be the hero who averts a potential crisis from becoming one. Preserve customer loyalty by helping your clients hear their voices and respond accordingly.

3. Start Blogging now. Talk about who you are and what you know.  Tell stories that interest others and when your clients have a role in those stories bring them in. As a blogger, other bloggers will come to know you and if you earn it, they will trust you. When they do, they will want to give your clients a little boost from time-to-time.  Collaboration is part of blogging's DNA. 

4. Get your clients blogging, or podcasting or video blogging, whichever fits best into their culture. The conversations have already started and they need to join it.   Don’t write their blogs, for them but become their blogging buddies. Fill them with advice.  Point them to interesting bloggers. Serve as their sounding board.  Only review their blogs on rare occasions when a second opinion is really necessary.

5. Use the Harry Truman Rule. Speak plainly. Teach clients about transparency, showing fallibility.  Teach clients to talk about what's really happening with candor. Their readers will become the support system.  They will also become your customer evangelists.

5. Be seen in the physical community.  Every city in the US and a great many in Europe have more than one blog-related event every day of every week. Attend some.  Meet people who are part of this and develop the same sort of relationships that you have already established with other influencers to you client, her or his market, products and services. The better they know you, the better they will trust you, if they find you to be trustworthy over time.

6.  Evangelize blogging.  Find the content that is relevant to each department in the company and keep feeding them social media content that may be useful to them.  Teach them the best way if commenting when they want to and teach them how to use the search tools themselves. 

Dell Falls $200 m Short of Forecast

Dell just announced just a third-quarter shortfall in earnings of at least $200 m from analyst projections according to ZDNet. The company blamed it on  sluggish consumer sales and a faulty component in its OptiPlex desktop PC," ZD's said. Earnings per share came in at 25 cents vs. previous estimates of 39 to 41 cents. They will be laying off a small number of employees.

"When companies make explanations for a shortfall in earnings, they take the two or three most obvious things to blame and focus on them so they can simplify the message. But quite frankly, it is usually more complex than that," said independent PC analyst Roger Kay.

Kay is right.  Perhaps just one of the many word-of-mouth factors has been the abundance of blog-centered word-of-mouth about Dell's incredibly poor customer service record, amplified by Michael Dell's statements a while back that if Dell can't upgrade low-end consumers, then he really doesn't want them anyway.

I currently use a Dell.  He won't miss me, obviously, when my next notebook computer becomes a ThinkPad.

Getting it Wrong

My recent Forbes letter was one of those postings that I labored over a bit and the result has been some very supportive comments.  But there is an irony.  In naming shoddy publications, I should have mentioned the Register.  Instead I said the Guardian, which is, in my opinion, a very legitimate publication.

This goes to one of the painful issues for bloggers.  While a traditional media organization has editors to review our work, we do not.  An editor, would have called me to his desk, pointed at the Guardian in my copy, and asked--"Are you sure you mean the Guardian?" The mistake would have been corrected and my readers could continue having faith in my factual infallibility.

In blogging, we filter after the fact of publication.  I write something and a reader or two jumps in to challenge what I have to say. While it does work, it allows untruth to get out too easily and it causes many of us to get humbled a bit more often than we would like.

One point that must be kept in mind. As bloggers emerge to be a well-read and increasingly respected channel. We really need to work at getting our facts right. Every time, slips like this happen, we put small warts on the face of blogging.  They are difficult to remove, and they give detractors ammunition. We all need to be more careful.

But none of this detracts from the core point of my previous post.  The Forbes cover article will remain hopefully a lowpoint in business journalism for some time to come.  I say hopefully, because it was such a shoddy piece, and I hope no one manages to slither under it.

Fogg's Diamond of Emotion

Rookie Blogger BJ Fogg posts a great diamond-shaped graphic mappingthe range of customer emotions where delight is at the top of the diamond-shaped graph.  I would of opted for ecstasy--but delight is pretty high up there.

Juicy Fruit Blog Chews off Leg; Bites Dust

Well it happened faster than a stick could rot a gum. Juicy Fruit had lowered the bar on blogging so that anything could slither over with its blog, that David Weinberger, and BusinessWeek's Heather Green were among many to considered just about the worst ever--myself included. I just had the pleasure of inserting a paragraph about it into the final draft of Naked Conversations and this morning discovered it was gone... GONE and in its place was a button that would allow me to watch TV Spots of the Juicy Fruit Lame ads. I just wish I chewed gum so I could boycot the stuff.

Scoble on Riya Blog

I used to say that Microsoft was like oxygen. It's simply everywhere and we have to live with it.  I'm beginning to think the same is true of Scoble. My client Tara Hunt at Riya just posted a photo of Michael Arrington, Riya's first alpha reviewer.  In the photo, some geeky guy is pointing at him. I know that geek.  It's Scoble.  He's everywhere. Now, if everyone he meets, just buys one book... .

Hugh on Storytelling

Hugh discusses the irony that blogging has built Thomas Mahon's Savile Row tailor business into a flourishing success while a full-blown spread in the Sunday New York Times generated just a little blip. This is exactly what happened when FireFox enthusiasts chipped in for a two-page ad in the New York Times, as we reported in Naked Conversations interview with Firefox co-founder Blake Ross.

As Hugh sees it, "the future of marketing is being able to create stories other people will want to tell, " which is a direct confirmation of Seth Godin's newest book. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know how much a violently agree with both Hugh and Seth.

But, I don't think storytelling is only marketing's future.  I think it is the backbone of marketing's entire history. Humans simply love a simple story well-told. We have been sharing good stories ever since we were huddled in circles around fires in caves, and telling stories with berries and blood on the walls of those caves.

There's only one communication more powerful than story-telling and that is the conversation. In that, we have the essence of why blogging is so powerful.

Hugh, if you are Gaping at this, I look forward to actually meeting you face-to-face at Les Blogs in Paris five weeks from now. You are one of the masters who pulled me in to the blogosphere.

An Open Letter to Forbes Magazine

To: Daniel Lyons, Forbes Magazine

RE: Attack of the Blogs Cover Article

Dear Daniel,

I don't know you and you don't know me, but I do know a few editors and reporters at Forbes and have been reading it for more than 20 years. I've found it to usually be both intelligent and provocative, although written as if it were catering to stock market shorters. Last February, I was flattered to be covered by Forbes Online's former reporter Arik Hesseldahl for my work coaching a start up called Jambo Networks, for whom I devised a blog strategy that helped an unknown company get onto the playing field for very little marketing cost.

I was embarrassed for both you and Forbes today, when I read your one-sided, fact-bashing diatribe. I would have expected this level of journalism to have come from other sources such as the New York Post or the online Guardian.  Most people understand that charging Yahoo! and Google with conspiracy to libel is like accusing SBC or Verizon with conspiracy to slander. I would have thought Daniel, as one of the journalists, who still not only has a job, but has one for a respected business publication, that you, or your editor would be wiser than that. I would have thought you had more class.

As for the case of Gregory Halpern, I had not heard about this until you raised it.  So I did what I usually do.  I Googled him. The first blog mention was #16, and it was one written by the English Guy, a blog whose author, like me, does not doubt that Halpern had been maligned by a verbal sniper who used a blog for his weapon.  Certainly, you are familiar that verbal snipers have for centuries used print media toward the same ends. In J-School, Daniel, did you not study about James Calendar who managed to slander John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson before he was found mysteriously floating face down in the Delaware River? Are you not aware of what crap Joseph Pulitzer shoveled out to make the millions now being doled out in the prized named for him? Do you never look at the two surviving New York tabloids or see headlines in Supermarket tabloids about Aliens who made Hillary Clinton their love slaves?

I know you would never do such a thing, Daniel, and if you did, Forbes would help you join the 100,000 American journalists who have lost their jobs in this country since 2001.The fact that your profession is among the fastest shrinking in the country makes you want to reach out and punch something that is flourishing when you are not. That would explain your inane thrashing at Yahoo! and Google.  They have certainly hurt traditional publications--but not by web hosting, as you imply, so much as by providing a more efficient and effective advertising system that has diverted so many dollars from paychecks like yours.

I write this without glee, Daniel. I was educated as a journalist and spent a dozen wonderful years doing it. I had the ethics of balance drilled into my head in college and slapped into my forehead by gruff editors, long since gone who shaped the ethics of my life, whose ghosts leaned on my shoulder when I recently co-authored my first book. In those lessons I learned the dangers and stupidity of stereotyping any group, particularly 20 million of us.

We are a diverse lot, and yet the blogosphere has often demonstrated the wisdom of a crowd of this size. We are also a self-correcting and forgiving group for the most part. For example, you mentioned Kryptonite, a company that the blogosphere did indeed soundly thrash. But on this book blog, Donna Tocci, Kryptonite's classy PR representative got to argue Kryptonite's case and move the needle for her company in the eyes of the blogosphere. All she had to do was join the conversation. She got more traction from that, I would guess, than the Letter to the Editor that Forbes once told a client of mine to write after he was falsely maligned by your publication and saw his stock dip as a result.

Which brings us back to your guy Halpern.  If you read the sidebar to your cover article, the first suggestion erases your stated claim that when the blogosphere strikes, there is nothing you can do. Halpern could have started his own blog.  He could have joined the conversations at other blogs.  He could have stated his side of the case, and people would have listened.

As far as the silliness of calling us a lynch mob, Daniel. My free advice to you is to be very grateful on a personal level that your charge is without merit.

Sincerely,

Shel

Naked Conversations Final Revisions

Less than 10 minutes ago, I finished revisions to the Galley Proofs.  While others have been giving it a quick read and serving up some very kind comments, I have been going through all 288 or-so pages word-by-word, comma by comma.

Most of the changes that were required involved numbers.  From the time I submitted the manuscript in August until today, all the number have grown.  Products we hinted about now exist.  Products, such as Google Blog Search, that we had heard nothing about now are available.

Blogging just keeps getting bigger and bigger; better and better.  There was one sour note, however and that was that my very last update in Naked Conversations was to address the recent Forbes cover story likening all of "us people" to a lynch mob. I'll be posting more about that later.

Right now, I'm going downstairs, giving Paula a big smackeroo and popping open a beer. Ot's time to party.

BR, PR, ShmeeR--It's All the Same

There's a whole bunch of bloggers, some whom I respect closely who are talking about Public Relation vs. Blogger Relations. For example, this contribution from my friend and client, Tara. It seems to me that we have too many situations with a "vs." in it. It also seems to me that people frequently confuse Public Relations with Media Relations.

Before I became a recovering publicist, I used to put my clients through a positioning exercise.  I would draw a big circle on a whiteboard a label it "Sphere's of Influence," which we then divided into pie slices that invariably were labeled: "trade press," business press," "analysts" "large customers" "partners" and so on. The central idea was that each of these influenced each other and each needed to be approached in a logical sequence and in different ways, with varied messages that ultimately needed to stitch together. Even back then, I was passionate that they key to PR success was to generate word of mouth that got other people to say your company, products and services were valuable, reliable, important or all of the above.

These days everyone considers "PR" a dirty two letter word. I don't.  I think it has a tainted image that goes beyond the tainting it legitimately deserves, and the way to repair the taint is to restore credibility in the word of mouth food chain.

Blogging is a new and imperitive component of that word of mouth food chain.  It is now a significant chunk of the pie called "Spheres of Influence." It is a force that professional communicators must reckon with if they are to build awareness, enthusiasm and understanding for company attributes.

But blogging is just a piece of a slice of an existing pie.  It will do bloggers well to think more about how we fit in than how we differ what already exists.

Jack Nork Likes Naked Conversations

Jack Nork, the Mason Technologist writes that Naked Conversations is "extremely well done and that he found himself nodding his head and talking back and this only after three chapters.  Shh! Let's not give away, the book's exciting conclusion until he gets to it.

Thanks for the kind words, Jack.

Why Starting a Blog is Like Starting Email

I've been talking to a lot of people who are at the edge of starting blogs and fairly nervous about it. One of the fears is that once they start, they won't have much to say. While this actually could happen, I think it is unlikely.  I've been struggling to say why, but an idea just came to me while I was getting bored editing my Naked Conversations Galley Copy.

Remember when email just started up? We all marveled at it, but were unsure what to say to our friends.  So we forwarded jokes and we passed along information we received from friends who got it from sources unknown and it turned out to be false. Over time, people got to understand the email channel and how to use it and to that most of us have too little time to enjoy a good joke. We also learned to be extremely careful about sending along potentially damaging information from unknown sources.

Now we are swamped in email--email that we cannot live without. I just suffered a week of email woes while traveling and a day later, I'm still scrambling to catch up with my work. We are mostly prudent in what we send and we understand the problem with the channel is that bad guys continue to gunk it up/

Blogging is like this.  It is new and many people don't know how to use it.  But once they use it, they will find an endless amount of things to say. People go through trial and error, but they learn to be accurate and relevant, and they become less fearful of the channel.  Finally they will wonder how they spent all those years living without it.

Birth Imminent For 2 Babies

Startups are my first love. I've been working with them almost exclusively for over 25 years. I am now in a positiion to do less consulting and more writing and speaking.  I have only two clients now, and the work I do for both is quite similar. I have persuaded both of them to abandon traditional broadcast marketing and PR and stake their futures on blog-centered word-of-mouth strategies.

By coincidence, both plan to introduce their products--in limited quantities--tomorrow. Both will do it without traditional press releases, press tours, flashy website streamers, gaudy parties or distribution of clever little chatchkas--all the expensive stuff that are becoming less effective even as I write.

Oh Yeah. One more thing they share in common: both will offer endusers breakthrough technology, or so it seems to me.

Riya, formerly Ojos, is using recognition technology that let's you find all your pictures of yourself, or mom or that conference you attended, in your collection, on their site or in the collections of other cooperating Riyas members.  It solves the primary problem photographers have had since early last century.  It lets you find the few pictures you want among the thousands of pictures you have, sort of like Google for digital photography. Personally, I think it's as valuable. I have been working with Munjal Shah, it's brilliant co-founder CEO since August and helped him start his Recognizing Devon site, which has already built up a not-insignificant following--not just among the digiratti but among entreprenuers who appreciate his sharing the joy and frustration of his startup experience. I also hlped Riya find the inimicable Tara Hunt, the Canadian Rogue Marketer who has moved to Silicon Valley and has since done a dazzling job of evangelising Riya into the bloging community in the hope that they will spread the word about Riya.

Riya goes live to a few hundred hundred pre-registered alpha users tomorrow. I think this is the beginning of something big.

I started working more recently on a blog strategy with Stanford Professor--author BJ Fogg, who's two-year saga reaches a crescendo tomorrow when YackPack, an extremely simple way for very unsophisticated computer end users to have sequential audio conversations with friends, family and affinity groups. I am in love with the simplicity and elegance of their technology as well as its ability to extend both conversations and storytelling. The YackPackers showed it at the recent DemoFall conference where they were the only company to win both a DemoGod and INNY Awards for Innovation. I showed the product to my 85-year-old mother-in-law who loved it.  It's the first time in her life that she actually wanted a computer, because she could talk to us and her great-grandchildren as well as have a very easy way to leave her personal history behind for unborn generations of her family.

I met with YackPack yesterday, and BJ surprised me by starting a blog early this morning. It's excellent, I think, but a bit long, just like this posting is. Other YackPack employees are being encouraged to start their own blogs and I've heard at least two more will soon start.  They are not company blogs corporate blog, but individuals blogging about their lives and work. The company is ideally suited for this strategy because it has a remarkably open culture.

YackPack also launches tomorrow to about 1500 users. They've already cut a small handful of nice deals but I cannot yet talk about them.

If their technologies proveto be as good as they look right now, I think both these companies will become models for the Conversational Marketing that Naked Conversations so passionately advocates. I think any entrepreneur, investor, marketer looking for new models on how to market efficiently, effectively and honestly should watch these two companies closely.

The Media Dragon Loves us

Jozef Imrich, who wrote a gripping book about his escape from Communism, has written a long and glowing review of Naked Conversations in his Media Dragon blog. In it, he called us a "global treasure," likened Robert and me to "creatures with two legs and eight arms," compares us favorably with Aristotle. Gosh. He also lists all the links so far that refer to our Galley copy or review it. I hadn't realized there were so many.

Thanks, Jozef.  Thanks for being a continuing support during this project.

Winners & Sinners in Austin

I am speaking at The Blogging Enterprise in Austin on Nov. 2.  Steve Rubel is keynoting and it looks like a pretty good event.  I had this hit-myself-on-the-forehead moment in the car a few minutes ago, when it dawned on me that I better start writing my talk.

The subject is blogging winners and sinners. Of course, I have some ideas of my own, but I'd love to hear suggestions. I plan to name names, and since this is their hometown and I know they will have representatives in the room, I will discuss Dell in a way to make Jeff Jarvis proud.

But I want also to explain what the criteria are.  So my add-on question is: In blogging what does it take to make a winner or a sinner? If I use what you say, I'll attribute it to you if you wish.

Also, I am free the night of Nov. 1 for any blogging dinner or event related to the conference. I would hate to have to sit alone in my room that night in the dark.

Blogs: They Just Don't Integrate

Besides being considered rude by some attendees, something else happened at BlogOn which disturbed me and that was the number of times I heard traditional marketing executives talk about how they want to use blogs to extend their intergrated marketing solutions, thus extending the brand.

This just won't work, and hopefully it never will.  Let me tell you why. Integrated Marketing Solutions, are an attempt to take a series of messages and push them out to a company's constituency.  They are devised and polished by committees, then the work is divvied up by ad and PR vendors as well as internal folk. The key to it is to puish the message out and this is supposed to improve brand awareness.  We'll get to that latter thought in just a minute.

Blogs are an example of from one-to-many communications. They fail when they push. They are downright assaulted by a great number of blogosphere denizens when they appear crammed with the marketing jargon of yore. Hugh McLeod finds such blogs and gives them Lame Awards, which is as damaging as a bad review of a Broadway play in the New York Times.

Back when I was taking Marketing 101 courses in college, I was told that brand is about how people feel about your company. To an increasing degree, Integrated Marketing Solutions, make people feel distrustful of companies and corporate messages.

Conversely, the success of blogs comes from the concept that people respond best to quiet speaking that informs audiences and triusts them to make wise decisions. They help brands in ways you cannot imagine by letting people see real, fallible humans doing real jobs. They build trust. 

My advice: don't try to integrate your blogs.  Trust your employees to talk and they will most likely behave in trustworthy ways.  Trust your target audiences to be intelligent and they will become your champions and that is a powerful way to build your brands.

Clavier Reviews Naked Conversations

Jeff Clavier who remains the first and only person to have his galley proof autographed by both Scoble and me has written an entirely kind review of Naked Conversations. Thanks, Jeff.  You were the first and it was very sweet for me.

If you do review the book, please ping me.  Sometimes the RSS "ego feeds," as Jeff calls them are slow, as most of us have learned over time.

Stirring it up at BlogOn

I spoke on a panel last week at BlogOn and I seem to have caused a bit of a stir, or so it appears by what I've been reading in the blogosphere.

eWeek's aging Spencer the Kat wrote that I " antagonized the marketeers by saying blogging will reduce all PR people to careers in food service ..." Referring to the same incident, publicist-blogger Jeremy Pepper cited me for having created the conference's rudest moment.

By my recollection, my entire quote was something to the effect of:

"Blogging and the social media are indeed disrupting marketing, particularly PR people.  I see PR practitioners today in a change or die situation. They need to move from traditional command and control practices to listen and participate.  For those who don't, I see a future for them in the restaurant service industry."

I certainly did not say "all," as the Kat claimed and anyone knows me will tell you that I may enjoy a little controversy but I am very rarely rude. This is almost a direct lift from Naked Conversations chapter called Survival of the Publicists. The link is an early version and the restaurant service comment has been added to it as it is published. My intention was not to be rude.  I said what I said without joy because I was in the PR business for about 25 years and it makes me quite sad that the business has a seriously tainted image.  It also, as traditionally practiced, is rising in expense and of diminishing effectiveness.

PR folk need to become facilitators.  They need to use social media to listen to what is being said about their clients and to help their clients hear and understand what is being said. Taking shots at the messenger is an old and perhaps traditional practice--but it seldom diminishes the truth in the message.

A Les Blogs Kind of Day

One of the remarkable things about this entire book experience has been building friendships with people I have never met, some of them quite strong.  Then there's the strange moment when you actually meet someone and realize with some surprise that you have never laid eyes upon him and in the real world the two of you are strangers.

Last night I had dinner with Loic Le Meur who heads Six Apart in Europe. There was no gap.  It felt like I was meeting and old and trusted friend. Loic was instrumental in giving Robert and I some of the best stories in Naked Conversations.  He set up interviews with me including one with the amazing Michel LeClerc, one of France's best-known and most-respected business and social leaders. I was excited to learn the Mssr. LeClerc will be speaking at Les Blogs, which means I will get to meet him too in person.

Loic has done Robert and me the honor of inviting us to be co-keynoters at Les Blogs in Paris Dec. 5-6.  It's a bigger honor still when I see the diversity and quality of the two-day roster he has assembled. He and Olivier seemed surprised at how excited I am to be speaking there.

Robert and I will be addressing a few hundred serious business bloggers from at least 16 countries and Loic wonders why I am excited? I never dreamed I would get to do something like this.

My wife Paula is coming and will watch me speak. We are also spending several extra days playing tourist.  We have never been there together and neither of us have been there in a great many years.  Thanks to Loic, we'll always have Paris.

Galleys Are Out; Reviews Coming In

The Galleys seem to all be out.  If you were supposed to get one and did not, please email me. Neville Hobson and Michael Gartenberg have been quick to review and kind in their comments. Thanks to you both.

Our official Cover

Thanks to Jeremy and Brian for the compliments on our place-keeper cover over at Amazon.com.  Below is one that Robert and I like better.  Please let us know what you think. Click on the image for a pop up.

Naked Conversations Miracles from Hoboken

Today was my wedding anniversary as well as the holiest day in my religion. I find some symbolism in the two milestones for our book occured today. This morning we finally agreed on a cover and it's one that Robert and I simply love. We'll be posting an image of it as soon as a few tweaks are finished. It's a big deal to see your name on a book jacket, even if it is just a .pdf file.

The second Naked Conversations milestone came into our hands via FedEx from Hoboken, NJ. The first galley proofs arrived at our doorsteps today. I wasn't sure what a Galley Proof actually looked like. Publishers no longer have galleys in their make up rooms.  A Galley Proof looks very much like a book, except it has a plain cover. But there, below the title, were the words in nice tasteful boldface: "Robert Scoble and Shel Israel."

Thank you Wiley for this wonderful anniversary present. I have no idea what this has to do with Yom Kippur.

Galley Proofs Update

I am told the galley proof have been printed and will be sent out to everyone next week. For Robert and me this is yet another exciting milestone on the road to being published. To those of you who are about to review Naked Conversations, I hope you are in kind moods.

Google's Blog Doesn't Converse

My namesake, Shel Holtz sings praise for the Google blog, and sites what I consider a lame article om PR Week, that lauds Google's blog for giving "a voice to the company brand." I always thought a brand was about how people felt about your company making the comment seem a bit inane to me.

As for Shel Holtz, he usually has a superior eye for quality and I have a hunch in the case of Google's sorry blog, he must have blinked while checking it out. As Mike Manuel pointed out, the Google blog allows no comments, but that's just the start. The blog never links to other companies. It never makes note of anything happening in the marketplace, except when it's Google. Even the linking policy is myopic, connecting primarily to people, and content that are inside of Google.

In short the Google Blog doesn't join the conversation--and with all good deference to PR Week, blogging is about two-way communications bringing companies and constituencies closer together. This doesn't work unless a company uses the technology to enable itself to listen.

School Threatens Indian Blogger into Quitting

This story has lots of moving parts, but I'll try to tell it as simply as possible. An longterm IBM-India employee Gaurav Sabnis followed up on his personal blog on his own time with new information on an India Uncut magazine article that revealed the India Institute for Planning and Management (IIPM) had vastly overclaimed its academic performance in recruiting ads for new MBA candidates.

Gaurav's writing seems moderate and credible to me, and certainly was did not appear to be inflammatory.  IIPM first responded with a silly legal letter which Gaurav posted. When that didn't work, IIPM, who buys a lot of IBM computers went to Gaurav's boss and verbally rattled sabres. IBM chatted with Gaurav who then offered to put a disclaimer about his views being his own and not his employers, which did not satisfy the school who most decidedly did not act with the graciousness one might expect from an allegedly highly credential academic institution of higher degrees.

Instead, the school threatened IBM, telling them that if Gaurav was not fired immediately, a student protest would be held and students would burn their Thinkpads in protest. Gaurav wrote that he wished to keep his right to free speech, yet wanted to do nothing to embarrass his employer.

So he resigned. Personally, I think he should have hanged tough.  If the school had arranged the protest and burned valuable computers, they would have looked stupid and petty.  It also would have undoubtedly ignited further investigations of the school's claims which I have a hunch hold water about as well as a collander.

This is something new. Robert and I found no incident of a blogger resigning because a customer got irate and used ugly tactics.  IBM would be wise and gain the most admiration, by refusing to accept Gaurav's resignation and sending a cannister of gasoline with some matches to the school officials. That's the best way for a powerful and respected company to act against the threats of customers who display questionable integrity and tactic reminiscent of the American Mafia.

Corporate Blogging Winners&Sinners

I'm the wrap-up speaker Nov. 2 at The Blogging Enterprise and my assigning topic is Corporate Winners & Sinners in blogging.  Since the event is in Austin, I most certainly will discuss Dell Computer as a sinner.

Naked Conversations is filled with winner-sinner anecdotes, so I will have no trouble filling my hour upon the stage, but I'm wondering if I'm missing something that may have occurred since we completed writing the book at the end of August. Do any of you have something juicy about a corporation that has done something wonderful or awful since September?  If you send me something new, I'll mention you in the talk.

If you'll be in Austin, I hope to see you at the event.

Technorati-Edelman Blog Survey

Through that Rogue Tara, I've learned of an interesting and useful blogger survey conducted jointly by Technorati and Edelman PR.  Tara gives an excellent executive summary in her post.

As Ye Blog, so shall they Comment...

Andrew Carton, who became my friend after I interviewed him for Naked Conversations, dropped by for dinner last night and we had a great time discussing ideas until way too late.  Just as he was leaving, we started discussing Comments and my Living Room Policy, which essentially says, that if I consider you rude or you won't tell me who you are, I'll simply throw you out of my blog. I noted that nasty comments had been a problem, but not recently.

Andrew made a very wise observation: For the most part, people use the same tone and  language in their comments as bloggers use in the original posting.  If you swear a lot in your posting, then people tend to swear in comments.  If you use a rude or harsh style, then comments follow suit.

He's right of course.  But I had not noticed until he mentioned it. I like Andrew.  He has a fine mind and a pure heart.  I'm guessing he'll turn his Treonauts into a very successful business.

Interview: Dave Copithorne, HearingMojo.com

Dave Copithorne had one of the most successful careers of anyone in technology PR. At Miller Communications, he was instrumental player in the meteoric successes of two startups, Lotus Development Corp. and Compaq Computer. When Miller was acquired in the late 80s, he and three other Miller colleagues founded Copithorne and Bellows, which became one of the most successful technology PR firms in history.  When that agency was, in turn, acquired by Porter Novelli, Dave somehow ended up being president of the acquiring organization.  He left this successful career to spend more time with his family and put his hand into helping start ups in the Boston area.

Then he woke up one morning to discover he had lost 80 percent of his hearing in one ear and 60 percent in the other, probably from an incurable ailment called Meniere’s Disease, mixed with an auto-immune reaction. He could no longer use a regular telephone. While he could understand a single speaker in a quiet room, he could not decipher conversations in a group. He gradually learned lip-reading and other coping skills, but the intensive phone calling and group meetings that had been a large part of his life as a consultant simply weren't possible anymore.

I’ve known Dave for the more than 20 years. He is extraordinarily a positive thinker. It takes someone like Dave to envision a business opportunity in a situation like the one he found himself facing.  And it took blogging for that business to evolve a viable model. HearingMojo.com is a comprehensive site for the hard-of-hearing community and the industry—device makers, educators, medical practitioners who serves them. Dave provides frequent coverage and analysis of anything that happens to impact the community ranging from issues, advocacy and legislation to technology and medical innovations. It provides personal stories, coping information, business and general news, and a lot of product information. Dave writes with intelligence and passion, but in a decidedly unemotional style. This is a blog about what people can do about a problem, and you can’t find a trace of self-pity anywhere in his frequent and often lengthy postings.

The blog is emerging as the nexus of a marketplace between the manufacturers, medical practitioners, and resellers of goods and services on one side and the hearing impaired on the other. In some ways, it resembles Andrew Carton’s Treonauts , except  Dave’s providing a platform for the buyers and sellers in the  hard-of-hearing  community instead of Treo mobile communicators. When we interviewed Carton for Naked Conversations , he told us he wanted “… to fill a void of what is lacking elsewhere and that he wanted to reflect not only his own views but those of an  established community not being served elsewhere.”  Carton has emerged from that point to  be generally recognized as the most influential single member of the Treo community. Copithorne has just begun, having posted less than 70 times, but it seems to me that he’s headed into that same position of influence over his community.

Following is excerpted from our conversation with Dave.  If we ever write a sequel, to Naked Conversations, HearingMojo will certainly be a bright example of a blog-based business that makes a big difference:

Q. Why did you start HearingMojo?

There's a terrible lack of useful information for people who need hearing assistance products.  Hearing-aid and hearing-assistance companies historically have been terrible marketers.  There are some typical trade publications for audiologists who control the distribution channel but almost zero information published for end users.  There's a real need for a publishing service that meets the needs of all interested parties.  The more interactive and searchable, the better; the more of a conversation it facilitates between buyers and sellers, the better.

Q.  What’s your market opportunity?

The baby boom generation is losing its hearing at a predictable rate. The over-50 population bulge is now hitting and younger people are losing their hearing at unprecedented rates due to environmental noise.  All this should result in the hearing assistance industry growing at a double-digit pace, but it isn’t.  Lack of information, denial, products with the wrong features designed by people who don't understand what hard-of-hearing customers really need, and lingering stigma equating hearing aids with stupidity have resulted only in single digit growth.  We need better products at lower prices. The good news is there is a wave of new manufacturers and distributors who see the opportunity.  There’s a lot of cost-reducing activity underway to take advantage of new standards in digital technology and communications standards such as Bluetooth. We are starting to see more useful, attractive and interesting products that are increasing demand among young people and reducing stigma. HearingMojo wants to be an objective and independent source for people who need this information, thus serving needs on both sides of the vendor-buyer relationship.

Q. So, how big is this market ?

The global market for hearing aids and cochlear [inner ear] implants is currently about $3 billion annually, and the market for other kinds of hearing assistance products, such as amplified phones, portable microphones with RF transmitters and receivers, Bluetooth earpieces and the like, is probably another $3 billion.  With healthy organic growth rates, I see a $10 billion global industry by early in the next decade.

Q. What made you decide to do this via a blog?

HearingMojo is addressing a true global market.  Only two of the top seven hearing aid manufacturers are based in the U.S.  Three are in Scandinavia and two are elsewhere in Europe.  Several dozen other much smaller manufacturers are located all over the world. Technology and component suppliers (DSP chip makers, software makers, other component makers, etc.) are located all over the world. Little of the industry is located in Asia-Pacific right now but demand from that region is huge, making the opportunity clear.  Standards are being globally adopted, making the customer base interested in the same products and information worldwide.

A blog is the cheapest and best way to reach a worldwide audience from my home office. Already HearingMojo has a global following, even though we’ve just started.  I get nearly as many search-engine hits from Europe as I do from the Americas and a very healthy number from India and Asia/Pac. HearingMojo generates the most traffic when I post substantial product information, and the search engines make it amazingly fast and easy to find.  For instance, yesterday I did a Yahoo search for "bluetooth hearing aid," and HearingMojo.com was hit #3.

I believe that if I can increase the number of entries tenfold and increase the number of links correspondingly, I will end up getting a ton of hits just from staying high up on the search engines.  Then if I can facilitate a community dialogue, it will enhance the experience of manufacturers advertising and selling through the site, because readers will amplify the editorial and broaden the information about all products.

Q. It makes sense, but how will you scale?

As my community builds, I think it will attract repeat readers.  The community of audiologists who recommend and fit assistive technology is especially eager to engage, and I expect to build a subscription email list of readers who  want to see a digest of everything that gets posted, probably on a weekly basis.  Combined with the search-engine hits, these readers should generate qualified traffic for hearing-aid companies and manufacturers and distributors of other hearing-assistance products.  Matching up this global community and creating a dialogue between qualified buyers and sellers would not be possible to accomplish in anything but a blog format. 

Q Why not sell products on HearingMojo.com?

I want to be an independent and objective information source  and selling a specific line of products would distract me from that goal.  Plus there are a lot of people more qualified than I am already setting up retail presences on the web.  You will see a lot of hearing-assistance products coming online and selling through many, many outlets ranging from high-end audio stores to cellphone carrier sites to snazzy retailers following the retail model for eyeglasses and contact lenses -- upscale "For Eyes Only"-type stores stocked with all kinds of hearing enhancement products mixed with slick  ecommerce options.

That's not my expertise. I’m better-suited to follow a traditional publishing model, providing excellent information for customers, facilitating the interaction between them and  suppliers --  providing strong click-through rates to advertisers and taking a "commission" in that way. I hope by the end of the year to have enough content on the site and enough traffic to build the business organically with backing from advertisers who find they are able to establish a healthy ongoing dialogue with customers through HearingMojo.com.

Q I’ve known you a long time and you’ve always been a “Big Picture” guy. So what’s your next step?

I'm trying to maintain a narrow focus on the hard-of-hearing niche.  But if this comes alive in the right way it will be an interesting model for "business blogging" that may be a little different from the models people are talking most about right now.  Most of the discussion now is about how established businesses can use blogs or tap the independent bloggers out there to reach their customers better.  It's still the traditional marketing idea brought to you by traditional marketers, who are thinking of the blogosphere as yet another medium to exercise, among all their media options, as they develop their marketing mix. 

What I'm looking at, though, is an independent information site that is built from the ground up as a blog market conversation, a site that sits directly between customers and the companies trying to reach them, that facilitates the interaction between the two in an independent, calculated and very efficient way.  Nothing new here if you've read Cluetrain Manifesto -- I'm not talking about marketing as a verb or marketing "to" or "at" consumers; I'm talking about creating a "market" in the original sense of the word, a place where buyers and sellers meet and greet each other and have a conversation, where a ton of information is exchanged very quickly and efficiently, where there's haggling about value in ways that sets market prices as fairly, efficiently and quickly as possible, but where there's also a healthy sense of community and shared purpose. 

We're #132!

I never heard of Ads on Blogs until today, but we've been getting some traffic on this site from them. According to their site, they conducted the Feedster Survey that ranked Naked Conversations #305. In the AdsonBlogs new survey we rank #132, just three slots below KungFuMonkey. Maybe that means we'll soon be making some chimp change from AdSense.

RSS: Well-Fed Again

As mysteriously as the feeds stopped, they have started again. What a relief. If someone at Newsgator helped, thanks.  If not, please disregard previous message.

My RSS isn't feeding me...

... and I am getting hungry. My RSS feeds, which I get through NewsGator stopped feeding me updates yesterday afternoon.  It's only been a few hours since I sent email to Newsgator customer support, but no feeds is making me crazy.  It makes me realize how efficient RSS is and how lame having to go to each site is. This is the thing about technology.  Once you have it, you tend to forget how much certain aspects of life sucks when your supply gets cut off.

That being said, doesn't anyone have a clue what I do do get back on RSS Life Support?

Press Clips & Blogs: Part 3

Lately, I've noticed companies, particularly start ups are running around ecstatically every time a blogger writes something about the company or its products. I enjoy watching this because the behavior is identical to what I used to see companies do when they got a nice hit in a business or trade publication.

In both cases, the coverage can be easily over rated. A single posting, pro-or-con, on a business page or in a business blog really makes no difference. It's hard to remember what BusinessWeek wrote last week unless this week the subject is picked up by another publication.  It's likewise hard to recall what Scoble posted last week, unless it invoked or amplified a conversation.

There's also a big difference in the dynamics of who is saying what. A press clip is what and editor tells readers about what your company said or did. A blog is what customers and your community say about what you said or did. The bloggers ratings are not the key factor.  The key factor is where the conversation goes.

For example, Jeff Jarvis, is a highly ranked and respected blogger, but alone, he never would have hurt Dell.  I was that he hit a nerve among other bloggers who picked up on the tune of "Dell Service Sucks" and kept adding new words to the melody."

My point is this, both press clips and blogs only matter to a business as points on a continuum of public awareness.  Press clips broadcast out to your consituency.  But in blogs, your constituency is often the initiator sending messages to you.

You decide which is more important.  It seems to me bth have real value and the smart communications professional figures out how to take advantage of both.

Qumana Survey: Bloggers Make Chump Change from Ads

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Qumana has a comprehensive survey on what bloggers make from advertsing.  Generally speaking we don't do as well as the panhandler at my freeway exit.

Harriet Miers Has a Blog. Heh.

Someone has started a satirical Harriet Miers blog. This is another form of character blog that I like.  It bites.  It's funny and it makes a few points. You need to remember however, how many people have no sense of humor.  The very first comment, on Harriet explaining why she wore tourquoise today is from someone who took this spoof for real.

I wanted to leave a comment telling Harriet what a babe she looks like in all these pictures and suggesting she show a little more flesh.  Unfortunately the blog is on blogspot and I would have to registrer with them to enter a blog.  Too much trouble.  Too much info. I hope Harriet rules against such stifling regulations once she adorns our Supreme Court.

Brandt Blogs About Google

My good friend Richard Brandt has started a blog on Google.  It is altogether fitting that he should because: (1) he's more knowledgeable on that company than anyone I know, and (2) he's writing a book about it.

Electronic Arts Settles Employee Suit

CNN has announced the game-maker Electronic Arts has settled it's lawsuit for $15.6 million, considerably more than just paying the developers the overtime they deserved in the first place.

Naked Conversations covered Electronic Arts in Chapter 10--Doing it Wrong.  At the time, we wrote the EA has

"... allowed a deep hole to be dug under them. We don’t think it had to be that way. When the story first broke [in a disgruntled spouse's blog in December 2004], they could have responded by expressing sympathy and regret about the situation. They could have turned to their own employees and asked how they felt about working there. They could have explained why conditions were the way they were and how the company hoped to improve them. They could have joined a [blogosphere] conversation that would have at least showed some sympathy to an unfortunate situation, perhaps diffusing the explosive situation. By ignoring it altogether, they will suffer for a long time to come."

The cost in dollars: $15.6 million. The cost to EA's reputation: priceless.

What Must PR Do? Part 2

Blogging is just one of many factors that has changed PR.  PR has other problems, but here are some suggestions in which blogs pay a significant part of a solution:

1. Listen. Really, really listen. Before you do anything, plug in to the conversations that are already going on about the PR profession and about your clients and their markets.  If you completely disagree with what you read, don't respond with the idea of winning an argument. If you do respond, show that you are listening and considering the points being made, whether you like these points or not. You'll discover that a great deal of nastiness goes away, when people know you are listening.  If you use a polite professional tone, chances are so will they.

By listening, you will also start seeing the blogosphere network, understanding who's most influential in your sectors, who your potential blogger champions are and what they write about.

This, by the way, can be a billable service for practitioners serving large clients. Being vigilant on what the blogosphere is saying about a client, can help them build bridges and extinguish fires before they burn out of control.

2. Feed the Bloggers. Before you start pitching bloggers, know what thy cover and from what perspectives they have overall.  Of course, this is also what you should be doing with editors and analysts. Start leaving comments about what they write, leaving your clients out.  Start sending the blogger, by comments, Trackback or plain old email, items that would interest them.  Build dialog and trust before trying to extol your client's virtues.

3. Don't speak with one voice. The "one voice" concept has been one of the great mistakes of the PR culture currently fading. It is the concept that if anyone--an editor, customer, prospect, fellow employee, analyst, investor asks a question of any employee in the company, they will get the same answer in almost the same words. This one voice concept, dehumanizes perceptions of a company. This does not mean that a company and PR practitioner can't sing in harmony.  But the diversity of thinking, of speaking and acting should come out.  A little conflict isn't bad.  A little dissent from a mid-level speaker, reveals attributes of the corporate culture that will help a great deal more than they hurt.

4. Be transparent. Let people know who you are and what you do for a living.  Bloggers want to know where you are coming from, what influences you in what you say.

5. Be Out of Control. Do not attempt to control message or timing as most agencies usually do. Just let employees and the company infrastructure express themselves in their own voices and in their own ways. Just make certain they know precisely what is NDA.  Sound scary? Perhaps, but the blogosphere has been proving that the more you trust people, the more trustworthy they behave.

6. Facilitate, then be quiet. Surveys show that spokespeople are no longer trusted in public sectors, official spokespeople, whether PR operative or famous athletes lack the credibility of a mid-level enterprise employee. The PR operative's job is to set up dialog between other people, and to let each party have a good general idea of what can be expected from the dialog. Then sit down and take notes.  Or better yet, let the two talk directly without you in the room. That novel concept, will show that PR is not trying to be a ventriloquist through the mouth the client.

More to come

What Must PR Do? Part I

I've received some thoughtful and constructive comments on my earlier post. I'm a bit relieved that I didn't receive some nasty quips that I feared would come. Many bloggers gloat about the professional woes of journalism and PR professionals. I am not among them. With fewer journalists, we have fewer free speakers, and when we incarcerate a few of them, we are all threatened.  But we'll save that soapbox for another day.

I practiced PR for 25 years, more than half my professional life and I saw significant changes during that time. I learned the practice where a great many current heads of technology agencies learned the practice at the legendary Regis McKenna, Inc, the agency that introduced Apple, Intel, Genentech, Sun Micosystems and so many others.

Regis discouraged "smile and dial" PR. This is the practice of hiring a junior person and arming them with a telephone, a prepared pitch and a Bacon's print out of a lengthy media list. The operative would simply call each member of the press and talk as fast as they could, getting cursed by busy reporters who had no interest in the story, hung up on by others, and asked questions they were clueless to answer. Regis felt this annoyed editors and demeaned the profession.  He was right of course. It was true back in 1980 when I was an operative, and the problem has only been amplified over the past 25 years by tens of thousands of operatives using similar tactics over phones and email.

Regis paid his team more and expected them to understand the technologies of his clients as well as their markets and competitive advantages.  Then he encouraged us to know what people were the most influential to that market. Then, he encouraged us to establish ongoing relationships by treating the press--not our clients--as the real customer. Bruce LeBoss, one of McKenna's to executives, used to advise us: "Clients come and go.  But you will grow old with these editors. He was right. I can drop the names of a great many prominent senior editors as close friends.  They were not prominent when I met them.  We were all at the back of the room, learning together. Some got yo the front and others left.

Why should the PR professional of today care about the reminiscence of what some old guy did 25 years ago? Because you are in a profession that is at risk. It is at risk because many systems in place don't work.  You are at risk because the editors you do know are probably less influential than they used to be, and the ones who don't know you have little interest in hearing from you.  You are at risk because your practice has become more expensive for clients even as it has become less effective. You are at risk because PR worked best when a handful of people influenced any market niche, now thousands of people influence it and they are harder to reach and much harder to build an authentic relationship.

There are solutions to this problem, and while I believe the PR industry has entered into a major shakeup, I do not believe that the profession is doomed. But I do believe that the survivors will need to fit into a new model, which is very much like the old model I learned at the old University of Regis McKenna.

PR people need to be facilitators, not mouth pieces and certainly not gatekeepers in suits and nice dresses. I will be writing about this subject in several doses.  There is a good deal to say about it.

Comment Spam: A Cold War

Tris Hussey picks up the Comment Spam conversation with a very thoughtful piece. It seems to me that Comment Spam and Trackback abuse are like the Cold War.  Every time the good guys come up with an adequate defense, the bad guys come up with a nastier workaround deception. I guess it's the same with spam email as well. I'm going to start clocking the hours per week, I spend removing comment spam.

There is a difference from the Cold War, now that I think about.  There was some dispute back then on who the bad guys were. In the case of Comment Spam, there is no doubt about who hey are. I wish every last one of them would go to the window, open it up and plunge to their deaths.

Lamer than Lame, Lower than Low

Interviewing Hugh MacLeod was among my favorite experiences in writing Naked Conversations. We, of course, wrote about Hugh's Lame Awards. This week's Beyond Lame Award is so offensive, that it should have been called the "Below Lame Award."

It seems Tom Coates, who is always a good read, posted a very personal recounting of his 30-year estrangement from his father. He got lot's of comments.  Among the most sympathetic was one from somebody who did not exist and was using the gimmick to direct market in the ugliest way.

How to Dooce a Blogger

Dilbert by Scott Adams has it right.

Buzz on the Road

Naked Conversations referred to ActiveWords CEO Buzz Bruggeman as the Connection King, and of course, in the context of the book we were referring to the blogosphere. But right now, Buzz is out there, driving across the United States, reminding all of us always-on, ubiquitously connected people that there is simply nothing like a face-to-face meeting, particularly with customers and prospects. He’s blogging about it here.

Maybe what secretly motivated him was that he came of age in the 60s, and cross country treks involved buddies in beat up cars with white line fever, on the road or magic bus, trying to find truth and meaning. They smoked all sorts of things and enjoyed great adventures while search for the soul of the country.

Buzz is making his cross country drive from Seattle to Camden, Me, in a three-year-old, low mileage Saab. Like Cassidy and Kerouac in On the Road, he had his car break down on thefirst night out. Unlike those luminaries of the beat generation, Saab put Buzz up in a five star hotel while he waited for the repair. While other legendary ocean-to-ocean drives focus on the wonders and beauty of the US, Buzz has been focusing on customers, prospects and his abundant list of friends.

He’s learned some important stuff for the connected generation. For example, in Iowa you have free WiFi, and while many of us citified techies joke about cows and boring, Buzz is seeing just how beautiful this country is when the people are sparse and the trees and open spaces are abundant. Here’s route is a zigzag sort of thing that lets him meet customers and prospects who know him from his blog, email, web site and phone voice. But now, he’s meeting them and all sorts of things are happening, beyond the joy of live networking. For example:

• He called on two law firms in Salt Lake City, each of whom have five downloads of ActiveWords. By meeting them live and colorful, they are increasing their site licenses to a combined total of 135.

• Salt Lake City’s mayor Rocky Anderson, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Anderson who became prominent for refusing to meet President Bush in protest of the war, agreed to meet Bruggeman as testimony to his being a fan of the Activewords software. The result is a new citywide site license where any municipal employee can download and use the navigational shortcut utility.

• In Draper Utah, Buzz made a random call with an acquaintance at Franklin Covey, Steven Covey’s publishing house where he showed InkPad the new ActiveWords TabletPC software to an acquaintance, who ran to get three colleagues who watch his demo studiously. The publishers want to license the software then resell it for users of their online content libraries, a whole new application for ActiveWords.

But the big tomato of the trip is not the fact that he’s knocking them out of the park in terms of sales. The big part is the difference that the human connection makes.

“You need to say hello and show you have blood flowing through your veins and here is what my product does,” Buzz told us. “Those of us in the tech sector spend too much time talking to each other, rather than going out into the heartland where the customers are.  And you get a lot more out of it if you meet people in their offices not your own.    

Big companies of course have biz dev and regional sales people strewn out in the field. But Information Age based small companies tend to use technology for communication.  Blogging let’s you scale a conversation to global levels, but there is simply nothing like the intimacy of the face-to-face conversation.