Andrew Lark

Crazy Ivan vs. The Boy Scouts...

Alan has an insightful post on the latest Oracle vs. SAP skirmish... Is this just playmaking on Oracle's part or a legitimate case of corporate espionage? Either way, Alan makes a key point that the court of law is different than the court of public opinion...

For SAP, which cultivates a Boy Scout brand, this presents the ongoing problem of whether and how to respond to yet another Oracle gambit, not simply in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion. If it deigns to play ball, it will hedge its "Rise Above" philosopy (a little different than Oracle's), stooping to its competitor's aggressive play-calling as it recalls for the marketplace that, c'mon folks, Oracle's the dirty one here. Whether it does this directly or through surrogates, the reminder that Oracle is a media-convicted trash-sorting secret-stealer will be run by way of simple Mirrors, plays that expose the truth, or Recasts, plays that spin the truth. But that, of course, will put one SAP foot into a well-laid trap because it will allow Oracle to run its own Mirrors on SAP's possible new penchant for pinching private data.

Reputation Isn't Just a Motivator For Communicators...

In the era of three letter acronyms - many of which have spawned billion dollar industries - it turns out that reputation is a critical motivator for investments in IT, legal and compliance.

One of these acronyms is PCI - the Payment Card Industry Standard. In short, if you are a retailer or merchant processing credit or debit cards, you need to comply or get fined. But the real motivator is loss of reputation. As Michael says:

PCI is good, strong, it has the right ideas and motives, but it doesn’t cost enough to ignore. £500,000 isn’t enough for a big push, or even the big publicity to generate more talk around a big push. The loss of brand reputation absolutely is.

Just look at the TJMax case. The reputational damage is now in the extreme and a major communications issue. I wonder how many communications teams are working with the IT teams on crisis planning related to IT compliance? If not, get going...

Dialogue-Driven Communications

Great story in AdAge this morning on P&G moving to dialogue-driven communications. They get that it's no longer about "telling and selling".

Procter & Gamble's Jim Stengel described a major cultural shift that is turning the world's largest marketer into a starter of conversations and a solver of consumers' problems rather than a one-way communicator. "It's not about telling and selling," said the chief marketing officer of the company that once lived by that simple mantra. "It's about bringing a relationship mindset to everything we do."

Too often the focus is on a "digital or nothing" strategy - with an emphasis on moving into the interactive realms. Stengel is right that the imperative needs to be different: "the need for brands to be authentic, trustworthy and generous".

And I like this view: "Market share is trust materialized."

Getting Back On Deck... Thoughts On Corporate Blogging

Haven't been blogging much later - just very busy and on the road in Europe for a week with customers and partners.

Interesting pointer from Stowe to an interview by Paul Dunay with Jack Welch about corporate blogging. Jack's advice? Be authentic.

[from Buzz Marketing for Technology: EXCLUSIVE: Jack Welch Discussing Web 2.0 by Paul Dunay]

Buzz Marketing: So what is your advice for companies adopting new Web 2.0 technologies like RSS, social networking, podcasting and videocasting?

Jack: Just be authentic. Be clear in your vision, and have one message and one view that are authentic. I worked somewhere once where they had different messages for employees, analysts and the press. There should be only one message for everyone, and fight like hell to get that message across everywhere you go.

I was asked some similar questions on corporate blogging (which I've always thought was a bit of an oxymoron).

1. Is "ghost-blogging" a no-no: At the heart of any blog is authenticity and the writer's voice. Ghost-writing runs against the very point of a blog which is to engage in a conversation with the community that surrounds you and your company. You can't ghost a conversation...
2. Is there a place for anonymous corporate blog posts (like the Economist?): No. It's hard to have a conversation with an anonymous person. The intent of a blog is not to publish but to converse. I do see room though for participatory blogs where a diverse range of bloggers blog to a single site. I think this is practical for most companies and more interesting for the readers. The Economist is an anomaly in the publishing world.
3. PR person says blogging is “reputation management”. Right or wrong? That PR Person doesn’t understand blogging or the blogosphere – they are contextualizing it through their own lens. And, they are taking a relatively hackneyed descriptor – reputation management – and applying it to a world in which it has little relevance. Various marketing niche’s have tried it with their thesis – brand managers are doing the same with “brand management”. You only have a reputation in the sense that others assign it to you. You earn it. Of course, it could be argued that everything a company does from a communications standpoint is “reputation management” – and that is the problem with the notion. You would hope that blogging would improve and not destroy your reputation right? But does that mean blogging is in fact reputation management in disguise – not at all.
4. How about internal editing of blog posts? This is common. I encourage executives to keep others involved in their posts. They have legal and HR risks associated with every conversation so why not mediate some of that risk. What they do need to do though is time-bound others involvement and be clear on the kind of feedback they are looking for. Blog posts are like bananas – they bruise easily and are best served ripe. They need to let folks know they have but a couple of hours to respond – or a day. This shouldn’t be a highly iterative process that people take a week or so to get done. Too many companies treat the blog post like a press release – at least initially.
5. Other tips: First, participatory media and platforms – from blogs to wikis and podcasts – represent one of the most significant opportunities available to companies to transform their relationship with customers. They represent one of the most significant transformational opportunities since the Internet. Don’t constrain your engagement. Drive it into every corner of your business. Many of the companies I’ve worked with have seen as much value internally as they have externally.

Second. Just do it. Get going internally and let it evolve. If you get it, get going. Don’t spend hours on consulting fees or hanging with PR people, web teams and lawyers. The technology is available as a utility. A blog can be created in minutes.

Third. The rewards significantly outweigh the risks. But the biggest rewards come not from writing blog posts but rather the comments and resulting dialogue. You shouldn’t look at this as a publishing mechanism but rather a “conversation machine”.

Other tips:

• There are no corporate bloggers – there are just bloggers. Be real. Be authentic.
• Blogging is a conversation. You need to move from transmitting to participating.
• You don’t need a blog to be blogging. Start contributing to others blogs with comments and thoughts.
• Never, never, never spin, lie or pour smoke into the blogosphere. Straight-talk will win you kudos.
• Give it time. Don’t expect raving fans at day one. In fact, expect the opposite for a bit. The blogosphere is very critical and self-correcting. Take feedback and tune accordingly.
• Have fun. This is a relatively informal medium. Revel in it.

Thoughts... Comments...

Fed-up Agencies Quit Punching the Clock

Yeah! This is something I've been trumpeting for years. It's time agencies threw out timesheets and focused on the value they bring to their clients. You don't measure value in minutes or buckets of clips, but rather in terms of ideas.

Crispin Porter & Bogusky's bold deal with Haggar, struck last year, in which the agency took an equity stake as part of its compensation, stood out as a rare exception from the sad status quo of agencies selling ideas as if they were pork bellies to be traded by the ton. "We're in the intellectual-property business," Crispin's Jeff Hicks said at the time. "We don't sell time."

Ok, I get the value of time sheets in terms of measuring productivity and time spent on a clients business. But why over-emphasize it? Why not focus your talent on what really matters - Ideas!

PR agencies are going to once again have to follow the lead of ad agencies (I fear) on this one - especially as communications continues to be transformed around content and participatory communications:

Agencies' moves into content creation -- such as Bartle Bogle Hegarty, New York's co-production last year of an MTV special that's set to become a TV show -- is another factor for rethinking traditional labor-based compensation models. Agencies might share syndication revenue or retain rights to creative content. When Crispin created a video game for Burger King, it was paid a fee in addition to what it is paid to create advertising, one executive said, although the agency does not receive a percentage of sales.

Update: My wife and Jesse inspired me to add to this post.

I bounced this off my wife last night and she made a very good point. What about all the tactical work that goes on inside a communications agency? Like it or not, lots of work that agencies do relates to block-and-tackle communications and not just the big idea. How do we charge for that? In this respect, counting the hours might make more sense.

So perhaps what we need is an overlay - where agencies can build and participate in the upside of idea generation (and by default the downside). Reflecting on this, perhaps what we need is more blended models rather than the one-size-fits-all model of today. I believe today's model kills "ideation" as an activity by confining it to the scope of billable hours. It also has the effect of nuking what I call "idea entrepreneurship" - the creation of ideas that transform business models and models.

Central to the tenet of "idea entrepreneurship" is that agencies co-invest with clients - they put up the hours and nouse, the client contributes products, services etc. The only agency I know of that is doing this today is Arnell Group. Measurement gets easy in when "idea entrepreneurship" is at play. Great ideas = Great dollars.

A Blogger Isn't A Blogger When...

They are paid to post on a blog other than their own. They then become a freelance writer, journalist, hack, whatever you want to call them.

The move by CNet and others to pay bloggers based on page views is no different than previous payment terms - such as words or stories - made to journalists, so, why call bloggers anything other than that? All that has changed is that the payment is more aligned with the reader/viewers interest level.

Further, the move is likely to continue to blur the lines between the independent publication and there so called independent bloggers. Take Information Week whose vendor blogger blogs away in a very self interested fashion only then to be named by the same publication as "one to watch" in the coming year in a full page spread. Self serving? Self interested? Biased? Yep - all of the above. And not an ounce of disclosure or transparency by either party.

As Steve suggests, this should raise an eyebrow - more than an eyebrow. But is very different than bloggers pimping products in post. It is far more subtle than that.

I initially misread a post by Mitch Ratcliffe, taking it (below) to suggest that if we don't pay bloggers in the same way as journalists their posts don't have to be informative or accurate? That isn't what he meant as his comments suggest.:

"at ZD Net bloggers are compensated based on the number of page views they receive and a fraction of the pages in TalkBack, so at the end of the month the size of a check expresses something, but not necessarily our success in being informative or accurate."

I do think though that publications are attaching the mantle of blogger to paid writers and thereby opting out of any sense of integrity that applies to the masthead. Mitch is making an equally important but different point that popularity doesn't correlate to accuracy - anywhere.

This has been going on for sometime, and pointed to by Tom Formenski and others - so Steve's revelation isn't so much that as a rehash. Either way, it's worth flagging as the standards we expect of publications are increasingly compromised and new means of bloggers generating revenue come to fruition.

Nick makes a good point that businesses and workers tailor what they do in response to economic incentives - a shift in the way publishers and journalists make money means a shift in what gets published. But the message also makes the medium. And once fiercely independent online media are being transformed.

Wrong Move By Microsoft

Giving free Acer notebooks to bloggers is a classic misstep by Microsoft - not only does it reak of impropriety, it also shows a clear lack of savvy in dealing with the blogosphere.

Equally, accepting free notebooks from Microsoft is the wrong move for bloggers to take. Keep them and you have zero credibility without disclosing clear as day that the machine you are evaluating it on is worth a tidy $2,200 and Microsoft gave it to you free. Even then, I doubt you'll have much credibility.

Send them back and request a site from which you can download Vista and test it out on your current system. Lets see if Microsoft has enough confidence in it's own products to do just that.

The argument that this is just a product reviews program is garbage. Bloggers aren't professional reviewers - our strength and value is that we aren't. And if it was, the systems would have been delivered with the expectation that they would be returned.

No ethical journalist would ever take a free notebook from Microsoft. Neither should any ethical blogger.

'We're on track to disaster - enjoy Xmas'

I know plenty of great people at TelstraClear in NZ. Their comms team must be spinning in circles this morning after the CEO's Christmas email to employees leaked to the media. Full of motivational beauties like:

"Oh yes, we lack the killer instinct - we are too tame, too lame, and too timid to call ourselves a challenger.

"A challenger winds their opposition, kicks them down to the ground, and then makes them bleed like something from a Quentin Tarantino movie and then finishes them off - fast.

"In comparison, we are like a Walt Disney Bambi character. We are not Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, we are more like Captain Feathersword in The Wiggles, all bluster and no action."

And

Right now, we are on a trajectory to disaster ... we are being out-marketed, out-smarted and out-gunned in the marketplace. We are too slow in reacting and we lack the killer instinct," Freeth said in the message, first published by Australia's Communications Day.

Freeth said their parent, Australia's Telstra, was expecting the $14.8 million profit and that at some point in the next few weeks he would have to inform chief executive Sol Trujillo TelstraClear would not hit the target.

"Two weeks ago, Sol's parting comments to me were he feeds those who feed themselves. Well, based on our current forecast, we will be anorexic and starving by the end of this financial year," said Freeth.

There will be a few employees that this actually does motivate. But one of the key communications rules for any CEO is that when broadcasting, you are communicating to all employees. There is a fine line between straight-talk and inflamatory negativity. And, context is everything - did they forget Christmas all together?

Link to 'We're on track to disaster - enjoy Xmas', says Freeth - 22 Dec 2006 - Business

On Dealing With Analysts

Mike has some good thoughts on dealing with Industry Analysts. Also points to some other thoughts. Worth listening to.

Messages Of Mass Destruction

Kerry continues to miss the point of effective messaging.

As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop [sic].

I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.

It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don't want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to provide real security for our country, and a winning strategy for our troops.

Translated this reads along the lines of:

1. I didn't say what I really said!
2. If you misinterpreted what I really didn't say, your problem I'm sorry,
3. Republicans continue to be worthless, uneducated slugs and what I meant to say is that if you don't get a good education you could end-up like them,
4. It's really a bugger when others report what you say.

How hard is it to say "I'm sorry". As in, "I'm sorry for harping on about this but it's such a great example of bad communications followed by bad messaging and irresponsible leadership".