Andrew Lark

Apple...

For those that read this blog regularly (aside from my dog), you know I'm pretty quick to slap Apple about. They are arguably the finest technology company around, but not as imperfect as the media would have us believe (or, as their products actually are - I'm a big user...).

One of the things I do love about Apple is their willingness to celebrate the heroes. They did this on the sad passing of Rossa Parks, turning their home page into a memorial of sorts. The cynic might say that this is all about traffic, clicks, SEO... yeah, yeah, yeah.... But this is the most prescious and valuable "real-estate" Apple owns. And it isn't blind - click on it and you get to a memorial. And, they link out to the National Civil Rights Museum.

Mike points to this not being the first time Apple has done this.

Tags: Apple. PR. Participatory Communications. Public Relations.

Off to China

I'm off to China for a week. Gadling has a great pointer to Chinease blog sites - The China BLog List.

On Stuff...

Forbes has a terrific roundup of people chatting about important stuff. Like Communications.

Measuring the Chatter....

Steve has a great post on measuring the chatter using Ice Rocket and other tools. I'm a big fan of Ice Rocket and like Steve tend to use this more than Blogpulse. With tools like these there is no excuse for PR not to start speaking to the conversation in its dashboard.

Our challenge as communicators is to now move to understand the impact of these conversations on purchasing and other customer behaviors. Then we go from speaking about the conversation in the context of communications to demonstrating the value of conversations to the business.

Wasting Time...

AdAge reports that reading blogs is costing US businesses. Here are some of the highlights:

• U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.
• Currently, the time employees spend reading non-work blogs is the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs.
• About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis.
• Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.
• There is strong evidence of workday blogging. Server traffic for Blogads, a network of sites that take ads, spikes during business hours, reflecting page views on about 900 blogs. FeedBurner, a blog technology company, also sees a jump in work-time hits.

Blog breaks? What a great idea! The assumption of course is that reading non-work related blogs makes you unproductive. Sometimes unproductive acts - like taking a break - are the very acts that make us most productive and give us new insight.

I do think a huge amount of time gets wasted on the web every day - whether blogs or just mooching about. There are a great number of blogs that can help workers use their time better and become more mindful of what will make them more productive or not - even if that means taking a blog break.

What AdAge doesn't touch on is for more training of workers on how to get the most out of the web and blogs. There are all kinds of techniques for catching yourself zoning on digital content and surfing about. Simple tools like a good RSS reader make the blogsphere a very productive place to be.

Ok, stop wasting time and get back to work.

Great Comment...

Mark Dill posts a great comment on my entry below on Technology Policies Run Amok. More than often comments get lost unless folks are really inclined to click on through. Here is what Mark had to say:

I'm in the middle of revitalizing an Intranet for a large corporation. We have lots of discussions about content management as well as blogs and wikis. One of the reasons I'm here is that nothing is off the table. Effective companies will understand transparency or what I have called for years now an open system. You can't be sloppy about these things, and everyone involved needs to understand that freedom demands responsibility. Think about this way. Employees that criticize their leadership in blogs aren't saying anything they haven't said in other conversations for years. It's just now they have an unprecedented public forum. Professionalism will foster policy development. But the reality is that technology is enabling much deeper visibility to management and operations. Like every other pervasive technology change, people that embrace it prosper and those that think they are powerful enough to resist such advances will endure great pain. But just because something is new and different doesn't mean those basic change management rules don't apply. It just might mean a company's executive team needs a history lesson.

Brand Blogs...

NYT covers the emergence of brand blogs. Communicating to, evangelizing and even spurring the development of brand blogs should be a key activity for any communicator and marketer. Ken Ross of NetFlix is quoted:

"In addition to viewing blogs as another media channel, it allows us to keep our pulse on the marketplace," said Ken Ross, a vice president of Netflix, the movie rental company based in Los Gatos, Calif. One of the best-known blogs about Netflix, hackingnetflix.com, was started last November by Mike Kaltschnee, who lives in Danbury, Conn.

"I post anything I find interesting, and it turns out 100,000 people a month find it interesting, too," said Mr. Kaltschnee. He also started a blog about Trader Joe's, the specialty grocery chain based in Monrovia, Calif., at trackingtraderjoes.com/.

When it comes to Netflix service, postings about scratched discs or torn return envelopes generate dozens of comments from readers. "It's sort of like the unadulterated truth about Netflix," Mr. Kaltschnee said. "We hope that Netflix reads these things and notices trends and fixes them.

All the more reason for branding, marketing and communications to be joined at the hip. More than anything, this points to the emergence of complete brand transparency. Here bloggers are diving deeping into the brand and product than any analyst or journalist could on an ongoing basis. It gets at a deeper trend of brands being evangelized and laid bare.

Technology Policies Run Amok

In the "stupid is as stupid does" category, Wired reports that companies are blocking access to blogs as part of their standard security policies:

...companies worry that employees might leak sensitive material -- perhaps inadvertently -- while posting comments to blog message boards. In a survey of over 300 large businesses conducted in conjunction with Forrester, Proofpoint found 57.2 percent of respondents were concerned with employees exposing sensitive material in blogs. That's higher than the portion concerned with the risks of P2P networks.

Communicators need to get engaged in setting clear policies and communicating them. What is even more ludicrous is the suggestion that blogs be blocked for reasons of "productivity over security". Technology companies, like Proofpoint, that suggest this should spend more time on the productivity benefits and articulating a value proposition around that.

Ragan Communications Summit

Spent Thursday and Friday of last week at the Ragan Communications Summit in Chicago. A great event focused on communicators. If you attended and are looking for a copy of my Keynote, you'll find them all here

The master presentation is a big download so you might prefer it in bite sized chunks - Part One and Part Two. I strongly recommend that you take time to watch the brilliant E.P.I.C animation.

Chris Shipley Heads Downunder...

Chris heads downunder to speak at Electronics South. Profiles an interesting Kiwi company, Visual Footprints. There is a ton of innovation occuring in NZ. Lots of that has to do with being at the edge of the planet.