Lee's 'Better Communication Results' blog

New and improved blog now live

2005-08-20T00:01:00.000+09:30

Well, I might as well release it now - there's only a few things that need tidying up and no doubt you will all forgive me if I attend to them shortly.

My new and improved Better Communication Results blog, hosted by the fantastically helpful Ben Hamilton over at his hosting company, Dynamic Web Hosting, is now ready for your perusal.

No need to adjust your feed reader - I will have Feedburner switch over from this site to the new site's rss feed shortly.

And yes, I know there is a slight difference in how Firefox and Internet Explorer render the site - if you are a css guru I'd love to know what is going wrong.

Brickbats, bouquets, suggestions and glaring errors -- please let me have them all.

CSS expert required - can anyone help me, please?

2005-08-19T19:01:00.000+09:30

G'day

I'm designing my new blog that Ben Hamilton is kindly hosting for me. One of the challenges I am facing is that my page looks slightly different on Firefox than in IE.

If there's a friendly neighbourhood css expert who can advise me what's going on I would be really grateful. Cheers!

WordPress and my new improved blog: Steep learning curve ahead!

2005-08-18T17:05:00.000+09:30

Phew! I've just realised what a steep learning curve I have ahead of me. WordPress is a huge program, and someone used to bending and tweaking Blogger, as I am, is almost totally unprepared for the magnitude of learning required to prepare my new blog.

Yes, a new blog is on it's way -- and so far only two people in the whole world know its location. (are you excited? didn't think so... it's not quite up there with a Harry Potter launch, is it?)

Congratulations on making the digerati

2005-08-18T09:03:00.000+09:30

My congrats to both Shel and Neville for making it onto Feedster's Top 500 list of influential blogs. Well deserved recognition, chaps!

DataFace: oh how wrong can you get it?

2005-08-18T02:24:00.000+09:30

Joshua Manishankar put me onto this site from his interesting article on Deception via verbal and nonverbal gestures.

I don't normally slam someone's efforts, after all we all started somewhere and slamming someone doesn't help them grow.

But...

DataFace is so atrociously bad as a website that I almost cannot link to it, for fear that I might drive traffic to them for all the wrong reasons. As Thomas à Becket once asked, "Is it better to do the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for the right reason?" But here's the link anyway - viewer beware.

What is so wrong with the site? Well, go there and tell me what level of professionalism, trust and ability to solve your headache they are communicating? ('music', for goodness sake!)

Allan Jenkins and I have been enjoying a series of emailed reminiscing moments about the early days of the web -- gray backgrounds, TimesRoman text, no Internet Explorer just Mozilla... I thought sites like DataFace's disappeared over 6 years ago.

Take away thought:
If you don't update your website's look and feel every 18 months you risk being taken for an amateur. Increasingly web-savvy guests to your site will compare their experience on your site with the hundreds of others they visit -- if you don't meet the standards they have come to expect then they are much more likely to click away from you. Very quickly.

Your Jewish Neighborhood: Mrs Shel podcasts

2005-08-18T01:51:00.000+09:30

Forgive me for my slight irreverance, but when I heard that Shel Holtz's wife is 'Michelle', I just had to laugh -- what if Shel in fact isn't married, but has a double life?

Completely not true, of course, as you can immediately tell when you listen to Michelle's new interview-format podcast (or should I say Godcast) on Reformed Jewish issues - Your Jewish Neighborhood.

I've just listened to the first show and I have to say I'm impressed. Okay, I don't have to say it, Shel's a friend after all, but I actually am.

If I cast my memory back to the first podcasts of Shel & Neville, Heidi Miller and myself, we were all pretty amateur. But we had passion, we had heart and we had a mission. Now look at us. (Some would say one of us (aka me) is still amateur, but that would be unkind.)

So the same will happen with Michelle Holtz - and she has the benefit of her husband's substantial experiences and expertise, the result of which is that her first podcast is a considerable cut above the first few shows I put out, for example.

I look forward to hearing many more and expanding my knowledge of a religion and culture that has had such an impact on our world.

Side note:
As part of my Masters studies on Christianity I spent a bit of time wandering through the Old Testament; are the Israeli Jews who didn't permit that marriage (discussed in Michelle's podcast) similar in style to the Inter/New Testament period Sadducees and Pharisees? What IS a reformed jew? Why are they different from, say, orthodox jews? Is the difference based on 'flavour' such as is found in Christianity with its Catholics, Pentacostals, Charismatics, Lutherans, Protestants, and so on... one house of God but many rooms?

I wonder if I can record a comment to/for her show? Will it be played?

Nonverbal communication: getting it so very, very wrong

2005-08-18T01:42:00.000+09:30

I had to laugh when I read Chico's experience of someone who had read a little too much pop psychology. I mean, I also read Psychology Today, but I don't assault people at a bus stop with it!

Chico's story is a fantastic reminder that when attempting to interpret people's motivations by their nonverbal signals, we need to interpret a cluster of signals, not an isolated, one-off gesture.

The 7-38-55 Myth

2005-08-18T01:26:00.000+09:30

No doubt all of us in the business of communication have at one stage or other heard of the three percentages of communication reception: 7%, 38%, 55%

7% - the received percentage of the message communicated by the words you use
38% - the received percentage of the message communicated by your vocal tone
55% - the received percentage of the message communicated by your non-verbal gestures

Ever wonder where those figures came from, other than perhaps from the top of someone's head? Robert Befus clues you in on the actual research that drives those numbers.

Robert's conclusion? The studies used to generate these venerable numbers are too tiny and specific to be generalised across to we working communicators. We should stop holding them up as a 'written in stone' artifact.

Ben's amazing offer

2005-08-17T07:28:00.000+09:30

After much deliberation and forum discussions, I am going to take Ben Hamilton up on his incredibly kind offer.

Ben is launching a hosting service in Queensland, Australia (Dynamic Web Hosting) and has offered me free hosting in exchange for an unbiased view of his service.

I am free to blog praise or blame, whichever I feel appropriate. Having established a bit of a relationship with him, and been a long-time reader of his own blog (even in it's previous incarnation - which I will let him point to if he wants), I have the feeling that the hosting service will be a great experience.

All I have to do now is decide which is better:

have 'leehopkins.com' point to the blog
have 'blog.leehopkins.com' point to the blog and keep 'leehopkins.com' pointing to my website

If you have any views, please post them here. Naturally, I will pop a redirect on this blog to divert all traffic to the new WordPress blog (and Ben will help me import all of my blogger posts onto my new blog).

With the news that blogger is in the sights of at least one search engine (thanks, Shel) the timing is sweet.

Yes, Allan and Constantin, my blogger days are numbered.

Ken Evoy misses the point

2005-08-15T21:20:00.000+09:30

As part of a running forum discussion on blogging, and why Ken Evoy of SiteSell fame won't consider adding a blogging engine to his hosting offering, I posted in the SiteSell/SiteBuildIt forums about how blogs are now becoming far bigger than he originally dismissed.

I still think he is missing an important piece of the pie by not considering adding blogging software into SiteBuildIt. My little old blogger.com account sends me a significant % of my site's traffic. I have replicated my blogger.com posts as static pages on my SiteBuildIt site - they draw nothing. I am drawing interest via my podcast, my blog and my SiteBuildIt website's articles (as per SiteBuildIt's raison d'etre) --- how wonderful it would be if I could incorporate the two textual elements into one.

At which point, a fellow Australian SiteBuildIt! site owner weighed into the fray, asking:

Am I confused with what a blog is only I thought it was like a daily diary. I have a blog (well thats what I call it on my website) and when I add to it I ping the new addition so those with RSS can see what has been added. Is there more to blogging than this, am I missing something?

To which I posted the following:

G'day, X.

Blogging can be many things, depending on how 'into it' you get.

At the basic level, yes, it is a journal. But blogging can be so much more.

For example, with my own blog I belong to a vibrant community of business communicators and PR professionals. We discuss issues relevant to our industry and grow our own personal sphere of influence (aka market reach).

As I blogged today, once you get past the 'entry level' stage of community building, you start to understand the power of comments and more importantly 'trackbacks' -- the latter is particularly powerful in generating incoming links to your site.

I honestly look forward to being corrected, but I don't see that the money I have invested in SiteSell has given me the tools to create trackbacks on any of my pages. I would expect to have such fundamental tools available as part of my package these days -- after all, I could easily host my site at one of any thousands of webhosts for a fraction of my SBI annual fee. But I choose to stay with SBI precisely because I believe Ken has the right business model for online content and thus deserves to keep my business as a 'thank you'.

With blogs now very much part of the mainstream of online promotional activity -- driving, as they do for me, a significant proportion of traffic behind the search engines to my SBI site -- it would be fantastic to be able to incorporate them properly into my site, with commenting, trackbacks and dedicated urls.

And if anyone doubts the power of blogs to capture Google interest, might I suggest you conduct a search on Google for these two search phrases: kensington locks .... and ... "kensington locks"

In the first example you will see the 3rd place goes to a blog; in the second the 4th place goes to a blog.

What's in the blog? Commentary about how the blogosphere has found that kensington's laptop locks are about as secure as a piece of tissue paper.

And it was the acknowledged power of the blogosphere that cost the bike lock manufacturer Kryptonite over US$10m because they failed to pay attention to a conversation among 20million bloggers. There's currently around 32m bloggers, with a new post being created every 2 seconds, according to the leading blog search engine Technorati.

Most of the major PR agencies around the western world are now incorporating blog watching in their monitoring activities. As I mentioned earlier, the NY Times has announced that it takes blogging seriously, in a recent editorial.

Quote:

"It's natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it's also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.” —New York Times editorial Aug. 5, 2005

Blogging CAN be just a simple journal, a listing of one's random thoughts.

But it can also be a whole lot more -- and it behoves the leading hosting company on the web to consider them more fully and offer it as a fully-supported part of their offering, not as a third-party add-on.

=====================

Do you think I went too far, or not far enough?

A challenging week - and a solution at hand!

2005-08-14T20:38:00.000+09:30

G'day fine and gentle readers. The past week has been a challenging one for me, and in the interests of helping others escape potential mental health problems, I will outline some of my challenges --- forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

As you know, I added trackback facilities to my blog a few weeks ago, courtesy of haloscan (as blogger.com accounts don't have a trackback feature). It worked fine for me --- I started trackbacking to other people's posts and all is well, albeit with a few hiccups along the way as I learnt to link to the main post, not the trackback code (oops!).

But then I saw that folks were commenting on my posts but the posts weren't showing up on my blog - they were being captured by haloscan.

Yet whenever I looked at my blog and attempted to add a comment to see what is going on, I was able to leave a comment on blogger's comments engine - hence the comment shows up on my blog, the number of 'comments' on a post clearly visible from the front page of my blog.

At first I wondered if it is was Internet Explorer versus A.N. Other browser issue.

It turns out it's not.

Constantin Basturea and Allan Jenkins have both suggested in the past that I should look at moving off blogger, but as I have commented to them privately before, I have my reasons for staying with a free service - one of which is the considerable leverage I get from having a blog address with 'bettercomms' in it.

"Bettercomms dot blogspot dot com" rolls very nicely off the tongue - handy for listeners to my podcast remembering where to go to post a comment or read my blog…

So any move to another service would HAVE to involve a strong consideration of the pnemonics of the new address.

So, a cry for help on this blog brought immediate responses from three exceptionally kind folks: Constantin, Andy Beacock and Rob Baillie.

It turns out that when I auto-installed the haloscan comments and trackback wizard and then manually edited out the comment code so that I could use blogger's comment software, I didn't remove ALL of the code. So if you go to the front of my blog you can see my most recent posts and post a blogger comment there via the comment link.

BUT, if you come to a post of mine via a link to a permanent page (for example, from someone else's blog or from a search engine) then you get to see the haloscan comment software.

Now, here's where it gets even more 'interesting', if 'interesting' is the word for it.

Constantin quite rightly pointed out that blogger.com is great for beginning bloggers, but once you have got a reasonable grasp of the underlying culture of the blogosphere, especially including trackbacks, then one should really look at a more 'grown-up' service. And I know that Allan Jenkins has long been suggesting to me that I move off blogger.

Constantin suggested I have a look at blogsome.com, which uses the WordPress engine for its free blogs. And yes, trackbacks and comments are integral parts of the blogsome offering. Fantastic! So I signed up bettercomms.blogsome.com and prepared to import all of my blogger posts onto blogsome (and along the way pinch some of Allan Jenkins' ideas for my own blog, such as the 'Subscribe' page and the Code of Ethics).

Except that it turns out you cannot import. So I am faced with the dilemma of either sticking with blogger and asking Andy or Rob to very kindly tweak my template to remove any haloscan comments code, and I continue to have the 'uncool' pairing of blogger and haloscan, or else I move to blogsome and have integrated trackbacks but no history other than from the first post I make there.

And, to top it off, "bettercomms dot blogspot dot com" is really easy to say and remember; "blogsome" can easily be confusing -- is it some as in "s. o. m. e." or "some" as in a mathematical sum?

So the point of all this?

Yes, there IS a point to this rant…

If you haven't started your own blog yet, but are thinking of it, then carefully consider your hosting service. Blogger is FANTASTIC as a beginner's service -- great-looking templates, easy to get up and running, easy to pronounce and remember, free.

Other blogging services, free or not, might be more daunting to the beginner -- what with trackbacks and so on -- but eventually you will probably want to take advantage of these advanced tools.

If you have good reasons, as I do, for sticking with a free service, then shop around and consider your options. Blogger is still, I reckon, the best service to start off with, but if you start generating a bit of a community and traffic, moving from blogger to another service may not be as headache free as you would like.

I have learnt this, to my cost.

Oh, and Ben Hamilton quite rightly asked me why I don't host my own blog as I have my own domain name. It's because my website hosting service is SiteSell, which doesn't offer either a blogging tool or access to the server to plop some blogging software on it.

I tell you, what with the hard drive failure, the collapse of my podcast host and now these blogging issues, it's enough to drive a communicator to drink.

I'll catch you next week, but for now I'll have one pangalatic gargleblaster, please, go easy on the ice and ditch the cocktail umbrella…

Update: Fellow aussie and all-round good guy Ben has just emailed me and offered hosting space on his server. This could well be the answer to my prayers! He will let me use WordPress or any other blogging engine on there. I'm not sure how that sorts out the "bettercomms dot something" issue, but all will be revealed in the fullness of time, I am sure. Many many thanks, Ben! Bless you!

Update on comments and haloscan

2005-08-13T08:18:00.000+09:30

A-ha!

Thanks to the superb investigative work of Andy, Rob and Constantin I now know why it is doing what it is. It seems that when I auto-installed the haloscan engine (which was both comments and trackback) and manually removed the comments code I obviously didn't remove all that I should have.

Apparently, and I have replicated it, the comments links on my home page are blogger, but if you come to any of my posts via a direct link you get the haloscan comments. Argghh!!!

Constantin has put me on to blogsome.com and I've registered a "bettercomms" blog. It comes complete with trackback and commenting in the one place, based as it is on WordPress. Many thanks again, Big C, for your help.

Constantin also looked at my website css, and there are a few issues there. But on reflection, the design is 18 months old anyway, so it's probably due for a new paint job. Now that Allan has shamed us all with his superb offering, I guess I have no option but to re-look at my site. Damn your hide, Jenkins!! I'm telling mother... {smile}

Blogger, haloscan, comments, trackbacks… argghh!!!!

2005-08-12T23:56:00.000+09:30

Here's the thing… I added trackback facilities to this blog a few weeks ago, courtesy of haloscan (as blogger.com accounts don't have a trackback feature). It works fine for me --- I trackback to others' posts and all is well.

But then I saw that folks were commenting on my posts but the posts weren't showing up on my blog - they were being captured by haloscan.

Yet whenever I look at my blog and try to add a comment to see what is going on, I am able to leave a comment via blogger - hence the comment shows up on my blog.

A scan through the comments left on my blog and captured by haloscan shows that this capture is still going on - right up to and including now. Yet I cannot see how this can be happening.

So I'm wondering if it is an Internet Explorer versus A.N. Other browser issue.

I use IE, as the client I am working at uses it and all of my clients do too. But if I use, say, Firefox or Opera, does the browser open up the Haloscan commenting engine, not the blogger engine? My own copy of Firefox still shows blogger comments.

Screen grabs by anyone who is able to comment via Haloscan would be REALLY appreciated! I don't want to disable trackbacks if at all possible, but if this continues I may have to.

I know, Constantin and Alan, I should look at moving off blogger, but as I have commented privately before, I have my reasons for staying with a free service - one of which is the considerable leverage I get from having a blog address with 'bettercomms' in it. "Bettercomms dot blogspot dot com" rolls very nicely off the tongue - handy for listeners to my podcast remembering where to go to post a comment or read my blog…

So any move to another service would HAVE to involve a strong consideration of the pnemonics of the new address.

======

And speaking of IE versus Firefox -- anyone with a CSS bent out there who is willing to look at my style sheet and let me know why my website looks different in the two browsers would be my eternal friend. Using what I believe is standards-compliant CSS, my site looks great (my own view, your mileage may vary) in IE but looks ugly in Firefox, particularly the left-hand menu rollover and the amount of white space on the right margin.

If you can help me it would be fantastic -- I would have pulled my hair out by now, but as my photo shows I have none!

Unilever shows where Customer Service is heading

2005-08-12T14:10:00.000+09:30

Tip of the Akubra to Steve Rubel:

Unilever has shown that it understands the new communication channel called 'blogs'. Well done! If a giant like this can do it, why can't smaller, more nimble operators?

Apparently the consumer product giant was actively listening to the blogosphere and they tuned into one voice, Dan Entin. Dan had been lamenting about how he is having trouble getting his favorite deodorant.
Unilever - a huge company with lots of to worry about - took the time to respond to Dan directly via email. They not only let him know that Degree Sport was indeed still on the market, they suggested ways he might find the product at retail using the Unilever website

Haloscan takes back my comments - how did that happen?

2005-08-12T05:59:00.000+09:30

Well, THAT was a surprise...

Just organising a couple of trackbacks and ended up clicking around a few of the tabs in my haloscan account, when I find a swag of comments from folks like Donna Papacosta (really glad to hear from you Donna - I was concerned), Constantin Basturea ("Bashtura" - now we know! {smile}), Ben Hamilton, Tim Yang, Tom, Michael Specht, Seb Kiel, Andrew Beacock, the magnanamous Douglas Johnston, et al...

How come Haloscan has taken over my comments? I thought I'd set it up so that they just ran my trackbacks... Any clues, anyone? Anyone willing to look at my template and advise me on where I have gone wrong? Because it WAS working properly before...

Update: please email me at lee at leehopkins dot com if you are able to help. Thanks!

Change or die: why old processes can kill

2005-08-12T05:48:00.000+09:30

Kathy Sierra has it right. Again. [Gosh, she's a fantastic read - I'd love to meet her in person.]

As she says, "If today's business mantra is "change or die", we should all be looking for ways to make sure we don't fall asleep in the comfort of our working systems. And boy do I know how seductive those comfort zones can be... "

To her list of bizarre 'stuck in the mud' decisions I can add:

* a company who redesigned their website but forgot to add in any user navigation or 'why we changed things around' help, because their expensive web-unsavvy graphic design consultants had been given too much power (a reflection of Hopkins' Law of Brain Fade Consultancy — the more money you pay a consultant, the more likely you are to psychologically invest in their decision, no matter how bizarre or erroneous it might be, and the less likely you are to elicit any independent, check-and-balance advice).

* a former client (I jettisoned them) who viewed 'communication' as something only the owner/manager CEO or the Sales Manager should be responsible for, irrespective of whether they had the skills to communicate a coherent, grammatically half-way-correct message or the ability to say it without offending someone.

* an accountancy & legal firm in the UK who refused to implement a new technology solution (a PC and MS Works) for their secretarial staff, insisting they keep their aging golf ball electric typewriters and manually re-type the same letters over and over again, because 'this is how lawyers work and how we've always done it'. This was in 1998.

The 'this is the way we do things around here' mentality of business is seductive, comforting and usually accommodated to by staff who, in the main, prefer not to rock the boat and jeopardise their employment.

But then, if you are willing to live in this comfortable world, don't be upset when you are suddenly displaced by someone or some country (think China or India) where someone 'gives a damn' or is prepared to work double the hours you do for less pay, or leapfrogs you in the technology stakes because they have a reduced barrier to entry (they don't have to un-learn old processes first).

Desirable Roasted Coffee: sweet as

2005-08-12T05:38:00.000+09:30

Allan Jenkins has relaunched his Desirable Roasted Coffee blog.

If you want to see what a professional designer, in this case his mate Michael, can do to and for a blog, check this site out. It is absolutely fabulous [queue music] and a treat for the eyes.

Allan and Michael have seamlessly married the traditional website with the blog and the intersection between the two is completely seamless. Fantastic and amazing work.

Beautifully laid out, sharp and snappy, it is just sooo easy to navigate around. Damn your hide, Jenkins - you've raised the bar so high some of us may never reach it! Well done, my friend.

iTunes: cannot add my podcast because Australia doesn't exist

2005-08-07T18:23:00.000+09:30

Now, THAT's frustrating!

Went to put my podcast into the directories for iTunes, so had to download the latest iTunes first.

Fair enough - that's called 'Marketing'.

Downloaded and installed it okay. Nice looking interface...

Went to add my podcast through iTunes -- have to create an account. Which wants my credit card. Which won't recognise Australia as a country, therefore won't let me create an account. Grrrrr.....

What if I don't want to buy anything, therefore not give them my credit card details?
What if I don't live in the US, UK or Austria?
Grrrrrrr.....

Anyone know of a workaround?

The Alfred Deakin Debate: Barons to Bloggers

2005-08-05T09:01:00.000+09:30

My local friendly newsagent gave me an industry-only clipping over a fortnight ago, before I went on holiday, and it's an advisory notice on an upcoming book. Well, the book is now out and I'm keen to get a copy.

Entitled "Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power" it is the first publication in a series produced in conjunction with the Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures.

The authors ask where the media's frontline is now and who is there. They ask if the rise of the blogger challenges the authority of traditional mainstream media and does it represent a failure in traditional media outlets?

As I said, I'm keen to score a copy -- when I do I'll post a review.

Review: Build a Better Podcast

2005-08-05T08:39:00.000+09:30

Because of my failed hard drive this slipped under my radar, for which I can only apologise for the delay in commenting about it.

Max Hansen released his first Build a Better Podcast podcast a little while ago and I finally got a chance to listen to it. There's now a second podcast in my iPodder to listen to.

He mentions me in the podcast, so that automatically gives him bonus points in my books! {grin}

Max reminds me very much of one of my favourite authors - Garrison Keilor. Rather than frenetically rushing to make his point and leaving listeners exhausted, Max takes a suitably relaxed approach to the technicalities of podcasting, letting us soak up his nuances and experiences. In a world that is ever-increasingly shorter and faster, it's nice to be deliberately slowed down.

Thanks, Max (and you've made me think of dusting off my old SM57, too!)

How to be heard: useful read, thanks Ben

2005-08-05T08:31:00.000+09:30

For those thinking of starting their own blog, but not sure, might I suggest you take the time to read Stephen Downes' essay on blogging, "How To Be Heard".

It's a long but entertaining read, and certainly gives any would-be blogger the best advice I know of in any one place.

Many thanks to Ben Hamilton for the heads-up.

As Ben points out in his next post (he beat me to the punch) there are certainly arguments for making everything shorter and faster paced (do you read Seth, Ben?) but, like Garrison Keilor, sometimes a measured, in-depth pace is better. Plus Stephen's essay made the bus journey into work this morning zip by...

BCR #15 now ready and awaiting your download!

2005-08-03T23:02:00.000+09:30

After a fortnight's break, I'm back in your headphones!

This week I discuss effective communication activities:
5 presentation secrets that will change your life. Download the show right now.

Comments/Notes/Links: FIR-Hobson & Holtz, Heidi Miller, Sebastian Keil, Debbie Bailey

Source article: Effective communication activities: 5 Presentation Secrets That Will Change Your Life

Of course, if you subscribe to my podcast feed you will have already have downloaded this into your iPodder, iTunes, Doppler or some such.

At just 11 minutes and 08 seconds long — and worksafe — it's a bargain!

Feed Digest: Live blog updates on my main website

2005-08-03T15:41:00.000+09:30

Thanks to Andy Beacock's heads-up, I have successfully installed a javascript version of Feed Digest to my website, showing visitors to my site the last 7 blogs I've posted, updated within minutes of posting here.

Fantastic tool - thanks for the tip-off Andy.

Coffee with my trolley

2005-08-02T22:47:00.000+09:30

I had originally planned to set up a separate blog with non-communication ideas that occur to me at all hours of the day and night.

One of the ideas was for a shopping trolley that comes with a coffee cup holder.

Then I realised that it's hard enough running this blog; two blogs would be a nightmare. So I was mulling over whether to post or not, seeing as how the idea has nothing to do with business communication, other than perhaps an example of how a supermarket could communicate its concern and care for grumpy old men like me.

Then I read of a new breed of shopping trolley about to be launched in Australia. Reading the text, though, only did two things:

It reminded me that this invention had already been launched in England many years ago
There was still no coffee holder.

As the last line of my original un-post says, over to you enterprising designers...

Shopping trolleys need a cup holder.
My wife is always having a quiet joke at my expense, seeing as how my aging Mitsubishi Verada doesn't have a cup holder but her Subaru WRX Impreza does.
But when we were out foraging in our weekly Saturday morning shopping expedition recently I was struck by how difficult it is to manage a trolley with over-steer and bad wheel alignment while holding a large takeaway cappuccino in one's hand.
Looking around, I noticed similar couples equally challenged by the desire to push a heavy trolley with one hand and hold onto a cup of their beverage of choice with the other.
So I thought, there's a useful add-on that can be fashioned by some enterprising designer -- they can sell the idea to the retailer as a useful customer service.
After congratulating myself on such a mental leap, I then realised that an even better add-on would incorporate both a cup holder AND a magazine/newspaper tray, so that one can read one's magazine AND keep one's cup safe.
Over to you, enterprising designers...

Brand YOU becomes even more important than ever

2005-08-02T22:15:00.000+09:30

I know that Tom Peters has been banging on about this for years (and I'm a Peters fan) but sometimes it takes another event for the penny to drop.

It did for a friend of mine when he read of Atkins' demise. Like me, he had tried and successfully implemented many of the diet ideas from the Atkins Diet, thus the untimely demise of Dr Atkins came as a shock to many.

As Seth points out (picking up a riff from Tom Peters' Project 50 and Project You work):

The only security you have is in your personal brand and the projects you've done so far

If a blog or podcast are great at showing your thought leadership (and many of us believe they are), isn't it time to start one or both of them for yourself?

There's one born every second

2005-08-02T22:09:00.000+09:30

Courtesy of the beeb, Technorati reports a new blog post born every second.

What is clear is that the blogosphere is highly varied, with blogs coming in many shapes and forms, whether they be professional or for personal use. Blogs have been used as campaign sites, as personal diaries, as art projects, online magazines and as places for community networking.

And indeed, for thought leadership.

Service levels: My own podcast returning soon...

2005-08-02T13:01:00.000+09:30

G'day friends,

Numerous emails to me over the last few days have convinced me of the need to let everyone know that, due to various tech problems occuring whilst I was on holiday, episode #15 of Better Communication Results the podcast will be available this coming Wednesday evening, Australian time.

After hard drive failure and various technical challenges, normal service is slowly returning. Please continue to bear with me...

And thanks Nev and Shel for keeping my spot open on FIR - much appreciated. And after two weeks of silence, it's good to hear your voices, too!

Crisis management: would your Legal department even allow you to run a blog?

2005-08-02T10:49:00.000+09:30

I've been following the conversation with Kryptonite's Donna and Shel over at 'Once Was Red Couch' and it struck me that one of my major clients has the potential to run the same risk as Donna did, albeit for different reasons.

As Shel & Neville commented on today's FIR, blogs are a channel that allow any company almost-instant access to the public. My particular client has a presence on two websites (one their own, one a third-party reseller). They have much greater access to changing the content on their own website than that of their reseller's. But even changing their own website is a major change process, involving different teams and the obligatory Legal sign-off.

Perhaps it is only CEOs or other extremely influential power-owners (such as GM's Lutz) that can deliver any communication via an unregulated channel. Corporate lawyers everywhere must be shivering in their socks...

Scholars who blog

2005-08-01T11:26:00.000+09:30

Wow -- this is impressive; a list of academics who run blogs.

Put together by Suzan Herzog (who vehemently claims that this list is by no means exhaustive) , it's a very useful jumping-off point for pools of deep water.

Susan also links to a blogroll of academics, including Professors, who blog.

Recommended browsing.

And apologies...

2005-07-29T10:31:00.000+09:30

...to Donna for passing on her details to Shel and Neville, and in particular raising their interest over the INA.

I was putting together a podcast with an audio report from Donna about her disappointment with the INA and her distancing herself from them. But my hard drive crashed so I had no chance to get the word out.

Having just read her post about the whole issue I am saddened that I didn't follow journalistic protocols, but I'm not a journalist. I admit I should have checked with her first.

Donna, if I have caused any damage I am truly sorry. Let me know if you still want me to play your report on my next podcast.

Thank you's

2005-07-29T09:59:00.000+09:30

Just wanted to say 'thank you' to some very kind folks who mentioned me even though I had dropped off the radar.

Heidi Miller very kindly mentions my blog and podcast in her Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter #15 podcast. Heidi just gets better and better at this podcasting thing - as indeed a professional presenter should. If you haven't already caught her shows, you need to catch up. NOW.

The marvellous Shel Holtz mentions me in an extremely erudite (as always) post on why 'amateur' podcasting won't die and he continues to keep me amused over at his travel blog (hey, Shel: guess who is going to be staying in Melbourne in December in a hotel with a proper ironing board and iron?!). I'll be back recording shows for FIR and my own podcast next week, Shel.

And thanks again, Seth, for sending me that ebook. It lead me to ChangeThis and some superb manifestos, including Tom Peters (I had stopped reading him for some reason, lack of time to read everything I want to read probably). His TomA[h]to manifesto is superb!

Normal posting/recording will resume next week.

And yes, the holiday (nearly two weeks instead of the planned one) was superb. It helped me realign some aspects of my life, including organising how I am going to fit in two Masters subjects this semester as well as cope with podcasting, blogging, husbanding, fathering, customer servicing, reading, thinking...

One of my decisions was to not post as often, and perhaps reduce my own podcasts to fortnightly. Let me know what you think...

p.s. and it was great to see a great web designer's business is growing. I worked with Darren on a project and he's a fantastic designer.

One size fits all - off the planet and out of touch

2005-07-29T09:41:00.000+09:30

It's been nearly a fortnight since I last set foot in the blogosphere. What's happened in the meantime - anything I should have worried about?

1/26th of a year is a long time for the blogosphere: 14 days, 336 hours, 20160 minutes, 1209600 seconds…

Did I really miss anything by not being plugged in, anything that couldn't be collected from my aggregator once I eventually got it working?

Well, nothing life-threatening, no.

The mainstream national media kept me informed on more London bombings
Land Rover's PR team 'enjoyed' the transformation of a client from a rabid fanatic to a rabid antagonist, their own silly fault and something for which there is ample historical blogospherical (?) precedent (as an aside, perhaps we should run some contests to see how ludicrous and self-referential we can become via syllogisms based on the word 'blogosphere')
I missed producing two reports for FIR
I missed producing two of my own podcasts
…err

Well, not a lot else. Perhaps my wife was right all along about how comparatively unimportant the blogosphere in particular and the internet in general are.

Sure, there was hot air a-plenty, much discussion and disagreement between folks (which is to be welcomed -- as Tom Peters says, you WANT creative types to vehemently disagree), but did the world fall apart because I wasn't plugged in?

No.

Robert Scoble may have considered me dead, but I was just enjoying a holiday (partly planned, partly dictated by a failed hard drive).

The very nice Seth Godin sent me an ebook he'd written which I had previously read, but had lost in a previous hard drive failure (history definitely repeats for me, I just sometimes don't learn from it) and so was very grateful to read again.

I got a couple of nice emails from online friends offering me condolences over my hard drive and a peaceful holiday. That was unexpected and very nice (especially since it turned out that one of the readers of my blog was someone more important than me -- but then isn't everyone, really?).

But perhaps one of my clients is right -- the wheels won't fall off the pram just because they aren't blogging corporately yet. Their only real risk from not blogging is not having a tactic in place for dealing with criticism/death-by-blogging; but apart from that there is, I suggest, no life and death need for them to commence blogging other than to simply build up competency before it becomes a marketing necessity, like having a website once was.

And has it has not been proven that companies who were early adopters of websites back in the mid 90s cashed-in to a massive extent just because of their website. In 1995 I built my first website (for a business I part-owned at the time) - I'm still working for a living.

Blogs are great at showing one's thought leadership (owning an intelligent blog immediately differentiates we business communicators from the other 99% of our colleagues) and for making ideological connections that span geographic divides. But apart from a very few exceptions, blogging and its nascent sister podcasting have yet to prove their economic worth as either promotional or knowledge management tools outside of our own fraternity. I blog and podcast precisely because I love to do so, not for financial gain (although I'm not turning down any clients who come via those routes).

And my desire to blog frustrates the blazes out of my wife, who'd rather I not bring my noisy notebook to bed with us.

Sure, blogging is important, but let's get some perspective here. The advent of blogging technology is as important as the advent of www technology, but the technology is still very young and with plenty of room for improvement (I detest the loops I have to go through to trackback to someone's post, for example).

No one died from not having a website; there are still plenty more businesses around today that don't have websites than businesses that do and bizarrely they are surviving. Perhaps my nearly-14 days of being unplugged is a useful reminder to me that life is very long, one size does not fit all and there is still much to learn.

Or is anything less than evangelical enthusiasm infra dig?

All quiet on the Western Front

2005-07-17T13:28:00.000+09:30

Arggghh!!!

I bought a lemon!

Having almost completely backed up my notebook's hardrive, but not having backed up Outlook, my hardrive failed. Without warning.

I was backing up simply because I wanted to format+c: to reload Windows and try and partition my drive (everything is on C: which is a very dangerous place to have things - and PartitionMagic wasn't co-operating with Windows for me).

I am now without notebook for at least two weeks while it gets sent to Sydney for repair.

So please accept my apologies for the non-arrival of my podcast and my FIR report, as well as replies to your emails.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, but that is at least two weeks away, not the one week my wife and I had planned...

Seth's purple car

2005-07-15T22:52:00.000+09:30

I know, I know... I'm supposed to be on holiday.

But when you get an email from someone as mind-bogglingly brilliant as Mr Godin you sit up and take notice.

He very flatteringly took the time to email me and thank me for thanking him for stretching my brain.

As I pointed out to him, I have sent his idea of a teenager's car to loads of friends -- and his email has strengthened my resolve to email it to Mitsubishi and Holden (the two car manufacturers here in Adelaide).

Okay, so NOW I'm on holiday -- but thanks heaps, Seth, for making my millenium.

(and thanks to Andy for the instructions on how to do my first trackback)

The wheels on the bus go round and round...

2005-07-15T08:47:00.000+09:30

Having been firmly reminded by Donna of the importance of giving good heads, I saw this post's headline on a bus this morning and it instantly cheered me up (try living with a teenage boy for testing your stress levels! {grin}).

I found myself humming the song over and over again in my head, bringing back wonderful memories of my estranged step-son in England (long story, don't bother...)

But that's not why I am posting...

Actually, I was deep in thought about 'stuff' when I saw the ad on the side of the bus. I was ruminating about what I'd miss in my week without rss feeds. And above all the usual delights -- Shel, Shel's hilarious blog on travel, Neville, Rubel, Jack, Amy, Kathy, Scoble -- but the person who's ideas I will miss the most is Seth Godin.

I've been reading his stuff since his first publications. I haven't got all of his books (despite them regularly appearing on my 'Christmas Wish List' on our fridge) but every day his posts stretch me, grow me and make my brain sing. Just love his little cotton socks...

Lee goes on holiday - is Lee dead?

2005-07-15T06:10:00.000+09:30

I still have to get my head around Scoble's recent multiple assertions (latest one here) that you either be first into the conversation or be considered dead.

That's easy for a well-connected A-lister with tons of time on his hands (okay, maybe an exaggeration, but blogging IS a part of his job), but what about your average SOHO businessperson who is juggling family, business, travel and community responsibilities?

Should your blog be the only window you have into the world and the only front door that guests can enter by?

And does Scoble cease to exist (like radio announcers fear) if he goes on holiday?

Blog versus website - usability issue

2005-07-15T05:50:00.000+09:30

Following on from the 'Net Rage' report by Catalyst that is definately shaking up a few heads within our community, I am going to take the break to think about how I can improve the usability of this blog for non-blog-savvy guests.

I've already added a 'What is RSS' button courtesy of Alexandra Samuel, and I've added the word 'blog' to my tag on the masthead, but there is no doubt much more I can do to make it easier for the first-time visitor and blog-newbie to navigate around the site.

Blog terminology is a very 'in-group/out-group' thing; I have only recently installed trackback facilities on my blog and still don't know how to use them properly (and thanks to Andy for further help with this). It took me a long time to get to grips with the vastly different mindsets needed for blogs and websites.

Update: link to net rage report and Alexandra's rss buttons updated; thanks to Graham for pointing out my links were screwy

Holidays are here again...

2005-07-15T05:29:00.000+09:30

Just a heads-up...

I'm off next week for a break. My wife has insisted I don't bring my notebook so unless something really big happens and I can find a web cafe I will be sotto voce.

It will be interesting to see what happens to my subscriber numbers if I am not posting...

Donna, if you can still send me that mp3 I would love to put it into my next podcast (which I will record before I go). I'm fascinated to learn the difference between nanocasting and narrowcasting (if, indeed, there is one). And thanks for the link to Crawford Killian's fantastic blog on English usage, Ask the English Teacher.

Oh, and yes, I agree that giving good heads is crucial... (I wonder how many people will follow the link, Donna {wink}
Aside: I think the coding for the page is 'broken' - you may need to fix it up a tad.

Podcast Number 14 now 'live'

2005-07-14T06:01:00.000+09:30

Show no. 14 is now available for download and this week I discuss the importance of a communication strategy during a time of strategic change

Comments/Notes: Donna Papacosta and the INA; Heidi Miller's new blog; why podcasting won't go away; blogging for promotion

Of course, if you subscribe to my podcast feed you will have already have downloaded this.
At just 8 minutes and 51 seconds long — and worksafe — it's a bargain!

Backbone have blog

2005-07-13T11:39:00.000+09:30

Backbone, who gave us the Backbone Corporate Blogging Survey I've mentioned a few times now (a great read) now have a blog of their own.

You can subscribe to their rss feed by cutting and pasting this link into your rss reader, or visit their blog to download the Survey (and if you haven't already I suggest you do).

Podcasting gets professional

2005-07-13T10:30:00.000+09:30

One of the subscribers to my blog, Donna Papacosta over at Trafalgar Communications, belongs to an interesting group that I didn't realise existed - the International Nanocasting Alliance.

Recognising that internet radio is different from terrestrial radio, and keeping 'podcasting' in its grass roots corner, the INA is encouraging professional broadcasters to consider the internet as a way of transversing global markets (a totally different audience from the broadcaster's local market) with different business models and different audience attraction and maintenance issues.

Rather than deliver content to a broad audience (hence 'broadcasting'), the INA works with broadcasters to deliver nano content -- content delivered to a very small but highly interested audience.

If you are a professional broadcaster looking for a way of narrow-casting to a specific audience (and an audience reach that has a business model attached to it) you should check out the INA.

And if you are in Canada and are looking for a seasoned, highly experienced communicator to sculpt your message, you might want to check out Donna's resume (pdf).

the blogger code

2005-07-13T01:09:00.000+09:30

It comes from having too much caffeine in my system...

It's 1am, I'm highly unsuccessfully trying to set up a network connection between my notebook and my desktop (both winxp) and nothing is working.

So I browse through my rss feeds to keep up to date and come across, via a convoluted string of links originally starting here, to the blogger code.

A marvellous waste of time!

My blogger code: B2 d+ t- k+ s u-- f+ i+ o x e l- c- (decode it!)

Blogging your way to a new and better job

2005-07-13T00:43:00.000+09:30

Trevor Cook has a link to a great post by Matt at CitizenSpin who quotes...

Don't you love the blogosphere and it's meme-spreading ability?

Apparently,

Time spent on your resume or CV could be better spent blogging according to an article in the latest edition of The Economists Intelligent Life (Summer 2005, p141). The article Blogging up the Ladder suggests that an intelligent blog can be an aid to creating and individual online brand, which in turn can be used to further your career.

At least a blog gives you the opportunity to prove you can:

string two words together
string two ideas together
communicate your passion

Why podcasting won't go away

2005-07-12T23:20:00.000+09:30

I was listening to Neville and Shel's very kind comments about my weekly report on FIR #49 this evening and something they said about the difference between the voice and the written word struck me.

They are, of course, right; podcasting won't go away.

It won't go away precisely because there are inflections and meanings that can be communicated by voice that just cannot be replicated in print (or screen/blog).

I can archly comment on something, enthusiastically endorse something else, bury my sarcasm deep (but not so deep as to be unnoticed) on something else.

All through the power of the voice as a communication channel.

As they said, some podcasters are able to express more of their personality through the spoken word than through the written. I may be able to express my knowledge through the written word, but it is the spoken word that emphasises the importance or relevancy of that knowledge. It is the spoken word that is able to communicate more than just mere knowledge (because knowledge is not enough to survive these days).

In business, no matter what your business is, you need to be able to communicate. You can communicate through various mediums: print, screen, iconography, visual design... and through voice.

Neville and Shel's podcasts are knowledge-fests; Adam Curry's are entertainment-fests; my little podcasts and audio reports are hopefully a hybrid of the two.

And I am grateful for the opportunity to express my knowledge through the medium of my voice.

Podcasting: a fabulous how-to guide and a sceptic's view

2005-07-12T13:07:00.000+09:30

Thanks to young master Rubel for this.

Kirk McElhearn has put together a fantastic 'how to' on creating a podcast. Kirk goes into mics, Audacity, publishing and links to other resources. Great reading!

Update: I was listening to Heidi Miller's great (as usual) podcast this morning and amid the noise of the rabble that makes up my travelling companions heard her mentioning something about a great podcasting article. It turns out, having just scanned her show notes, that the very same Mr McElhearn has published a shortened version of the above article over at his own blog, kirkville. Apols to the ever-delightful Heidi for not putting the two together earlier!

And to balance that, Mark Cuban has a scathing view of podcasting as a business tool, asking us to consider history before we proclaim podcasting as the 'next big thing'. The comments he has attracted also make this a fascinating read. (thanks to blogspotting for the 'heads-up')

Jack Kerouac and The Essentials of Life

2005-07-12T12:57:00.000+09:30

Thanks once more to the wise and witty Doug for a fantastic link piece on Jack Kerouac and his 'List of Essentials' for both writing and life.

I love the line about trying never to get drunk outside yr own house...

Holoscan has deleted my comments

2005-07-12T07:56:00.000+09:30

Thanks to the ever-wonderful Alan Jenkins and the marvellous Stuart Bruce for pointing me towards haloscan for trackback thingies.

Hmmm -- have added Haloscan's trackback facility (which gets bundled with Commenting) but it has wiped any previous comments to my posts.

As the famous Toyota ad says down here, "bugga!"

Might have to visit haloscan again to figure out how to undo the commenting change.

Update: have sorted it now, with help from blogger help and haloscan user forums. The old comments are back...

And the ever-helpful Andy Beacock has also let me know he's put haloscan's trackback facility on his blog, so if I need any help... Cheers, Andy!

Typical, isn't it? Saw trackbacks on others' blogs and determined that I needed that facility on my own. Finally get it installed... do you think I can find many blogs that have trackback urls to their posts? More often than not they don't. But at least I now have the facility, anyway...

Off topic, but my student memories sadly jogged...

2005-07-11T14:42:00.000+09:30

Richard Whiteley, doyen of Countdown for 23 years, passed away yesterday.

As a mature uni student I spent many a happy hour counting the clock while he smarmed and grinned through the screen, while Carol Vorderman blitzed everyone with her maths skills and good looks.

Sad to see you go, Richard.

How do I trackback?

2005-07-11T08:30:00.000+09:30

Look, I'll confess my ignorance right here, right now...

I see Trackback links on others' blogs, but because blogger doesn't have trackback facility I don't know what they are or how you tap into them.

Obviously I want to pay the compliment forward when I find something of value on someone's blog.

Do I link to the blog post and the trackback software searches the web and finds my post link, or is there a special code I need to copy from the original blog post and paste into my link?

I stand with my lack of whuffie exposed (and thanks to the wonderful Kathie Sierra for the link to whuffie)

IE and bloglines extensions

2005-07-11T08:06:00.000+09:30

Great extensions for IE over at Dan Grisby's blog if you are looking to add bloglines or technorati extensions

Podcasting: a waste of time? Not in my books...

2005-07-11T07:45:00.000+09:30

Dave Taylor has a fascinating think-piece on the valuelessness of podcasting as a business promotional tool.

What's of interest is not just Dave's views (always a good read) but also those of the commentors ("commentators"?).

Having worked in radio as a DJ and producer for a couple of years I agree with David Lawrence that the poorly-produced shows will die once the novelty wears off -- people are going to come back to what radio has learned to do so well, which is package and brand.

Doing the 'radio' things -- like proper intros, outros, signature tunes, audio inserts, etc -- doesn't have to mean 'selling out' (maaan), but it can raise the professionalism of the production and make it easier for the listener.

And I get favourable reviews of my own podcast on other blogs, which drives traffic to both my blog and my website. So all in all a useful business promotional tool for me...

Blogs versus website articles - a case of delayed gratification over spontaneity

2005-07-10T19:44:00.000+09:30

A friend was asking me about why I have just posted some fresh articles on my website, since I spend most of my writing time blogging.

"Because of the long tail" I answered. "Blogs are great for meeting my spontaneous needs to communicate. But full articles, rather than blog posts, are where I get to crack my knuckles, spread my fingers, and write at a deeper level.

"Article writing is a form of delayed gratification. It seems to take much longer for the search engines to catch up with articles on my website than it does posts on my blog. But the resultant stream of traffic to my website lasts longer than a (usually) flying visit by readers of my blog."

This long-tail effect is also why I take the effort to submit my articles to article databases. One good article can generate quite a few long-term links into my website, whereas a blog post is only good for a day or two.

Blogs are great for immediately satisfying my need to communicate, full articles on my website are better for the delayed gratification of traffic that is more enduring.

Blogs: easy to write; appeal to my spontaneous nature
Articles: harder to write; appeal to the rewards that can come from delayed gratification

Whilst they are much harder to write, the sense of satisfaction that comes from writing a complete article, posting it on an articles database and having it rated by others is fantastic. For example, I am a 'Platinum Expert Author' over at Ezine Articles (that's only one rank less than 'Galactic Imperial Space Commander', allegedly).

I use Jason Potash's EzineAnnouncer to submit my articles to the various article databases; to great effect, I might add. He has just announced a new tool -- ArticleAnnouncer (audio interview about it here; look for the post titled, "Oh no… here come the critics!") -- which looks really cool, and I may have to lash out and give it a go.

Nonverbal communication: new articles on my website

2005-07-09T23:41:00.000+09:30

I've just posted three new articles on nonverbal communication, dealing with time, touch and an overview of the subject (including how we use our eyes and hands).

I've linked to them all via a new index page dealing solely with nonverbal communication, as well as my regular articles index page.

You'll find a total of eight articles on nonverbal communication on my new nonverbal communications index page

Enjoy!

Blogging and perspective - any psychological research?

2005-07-09T09:54:00.000+09:30

John Cass, one of the authors of the Corporate Blogging: Is It Worth The Hype? report, emailed me and asked me this:

How does a person's perspective on the world change? Has there been any research on having a blog and what it does to a person's perspective on being able to communicate and contact with other people?

Off the top of my head I can point him to research looking at online identities and cognitive dissonance, but nothing that looks directly at blogging. Anyone know of any research?

Brilliant: guess the google

2005-07-09T09:49:00.000+09:30

Hat tip to Jack for this, who got it from Frank, who... I love the power of the blogosphere to spread memes, don't you?

Grant Robinson has created a stunning game where you have to guess the search term used on google to pull back the resultant bank of images.

As Grant says,

After creating Montage-a-google, several people wrote to me suggesting I make a game based on the same technology. Montage-a-google is a simple web app that uses Google's image search to generate a large gridded montage of images based on keywords (search terms) entered by the user. Guess-the-google reverses this process by picking the keywords for you, the player must then guess what keyword made up the image - it's surprisingly addictive.

Fabulous stuff!

CastBlaster - thoughts so far...

2005-07-08T08:08:00.000+09:30

Downloaded Adam Curry's CastBlaster beta and have given it a quick run-through.

Great tool that would no doubt be of value to podcasters who, as Todd Cochrane says, record live to the hard drive. But there's another type of podcaster, one who employs the cross-time recording capabilities that downloadable audio allows.

For example, in recording my report for The Hobson and Holtz Report, I may record different segments at different times. I also edit out my umms and ahhhs and bits that don't 'work' like words running into each other, mispronunciations, and so on.

A simple 7 or 8 minute report can take up to 3 hours to record and edit -- but I choose to take that amount of time for three reasons:

Out of respect for this show and its owners
Out of respect for its audience
Because I detest delivering shoddy work

I therefore use SoundForge to record and edit my voice, then Audacity to mix the various elements together and output to mp3.

But I can definitely see a use for CastBlaster and its 'live to the harddrive' paradigm for putting together my own Better Communication Results podcast and I'll give it a try for my next show.

OneNote as notetaking tool

2005-07-08T07:57:00.000+09:30

As I have blogged recently, I have been using OneNote for a week or so now as my primary knowledge management tool. I use it to jot down notes for my work, thoughts for my blog posts, and so on.

Haven't come to grips with the intricacies of it by any means, but definitely enjoying using it.

One really nice feature is that it cuts and pastes really tastefully into my blog posts. When I use UltraEdit (a hangover from my code-cutting geeky days) I have to manually enter extra line feeds to break up the text into paragraphs on my blog, even though I've broken the text into paras in UltraEdit. But OneNote carries across the paragraph breaks into the blogger text entry blocks.

It also carries across any links. I haven't tested if it carries across formatting such as bold and italic, but no doubt I'll test that soon. And who cares if it doesn't? Not having to re-enter double linefeeds as paragraph breaks is a real time-saver for me.

And I am doubly impressed that with SP1 it now offers password protection. Very handy for keeping all of my username and password data easy to find, as well as login addresses for emails, ftp for sites and so on.

OneNote? - definitely a recommended tool for knowledge management and bloggers.

Condolences and prayers

2005-07-08T05:33:00.000+09:30

My condolences and prayers go out to the people and their families affected by the bombings in London.

Happenings like this and 9/11 scare my youngest daughter to tears, and I am not far behind her.

Irrespective of one's religious or political leanings ("one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" as was said in the last James Bond movie), the taking of innocent life is always to be condemned.

One hears/reads of people that we care about are safe and we breath a sigh of relief and are grateful, but immediately one thinks of the anguish that families must go through when they don't hear good news, or hear nothing at all.

Many here in Australia sometimes smugly think that we are immune from the risks of terrorist activity, being so far away from the major centres of the world. But many are also scared that the 'Coalition of the Willing' raised our country's profile as a target. And our borders are so large that they are impossible to police; our saving grace being our isolation from other major land masses.

Perhaps one benefit of the internet and communication technology in general is that I don't have to travel to Melbourne or Sydney (or London or NY or Madrid or Paris or [name your city of terrorist activity]) nearly as much as perhaps my late grandfather did when he was a travelling salesman for a communications technology company after WWII. He travelled all over Europe, repeatedly, for his employer. I don't know if he ever feared for his life in the aftermath of the war as much as Londoners have had to after the IRA atrocities in the 70s and 80s and now muslim extremists in this current generation.

But I also say a prayer for those innocent muslims who will inevitably be caught up in a racist reaction to the London bombings. Here in Australia, after 9/11, police and security guards had to protect muslims from the emotional outpourings of irrational Australians. Thankfully, much good work was done by all faiths coming together to condemn the racist backlashes and work towards re-integration of muslims back into a largely secular (and unfortunately rascist) society.

'Peace in our time' seems such a long way off.

Visibility, pre-selling yourself and common sense

2005-07-07T09:23:00.000+09:30

Thanks to Scoble for this: as I was just emailing back to Heidi Miller on a question she was asking me (a great conversation), just having a blog and no support material (e.g. a website, some photos, a video of yourself) risks creating a lop-sided portrait of yourself.

Scoble advises we all consider getting out more.

Doug Johnston and To Do Lists

2005-07-07T09:16:00.000+09:30

Just love this cartoon - superb!

Many thanks to Doug for sharing a brilliant satire (and so true) about teh stress that 'To Do' lists can inflict on us mere mortals...

What you can do with RSS

2005-07-07T09:05:00.000+09:30

Hat tip to Ben.

Tim Yang has created a wiki on all things RSS, cunningly entitled 'things you can do with rss'

A great read - thoroughly recommended for non-geeks who are wondering if rss can do more than just fill bloglines accounts...

BCR # 13 now live - how plantar fasciitis can help your website communicate better

2005-07-06T14:15:00.000+09:30

Edition no. 13 is now available for download and this week I let you in on a little secret - how the medical condition plantar fasciitis can help your website communicate better!

Of course, if you subscribe to my podcast feed you will have already have downloaded this.

At just 5 minutes and 39 seconds long — and worksafe — it's a bargain!

Links: Andrew Beacock; Fred Zelders; Neville Hobson's experimental blog; SearchIt!; heelspurs.com; Nick Usborne; Content, Traffic, PreSell and Monetize (CTPM) online model

Source article: Plantar Fasciitis

Two more articles up on my website

2005-07-06T11:13:00.000+09:30

Two more articles put up on the website:

Non-verbal communication: Brand Identity Design and the Role of a Visual Vocabulary by Erin Ferree
Cell Phone Do's And Don't During A Meeting by Scott Ginsberg

Check them and all of the other 59 free articles over at my website.

Enjoy!

Newsletter now online

2005-07-06T11:10:00.000+09:30

Yes, slightly (aka 'very!') late, but finally there.

The June issue of my monthly newsletter on business communication tips is now available for your persual over at my website.

Subscribe to receive every issue and access the June edition all from the one page!

Enjoy!

Myers and great customer communication

2005-07-06T10:25:00.000+09:30

Really impressed with Myers.

I bought a new headset mike a couple of weeks ago, after my trusty unknown-brand headset snapped in two.

The new Sony DR-220 headset worked fine for a day, then started really playing up. The sound lost its bottom end and the entire mic audio starting wavering in and out.

But I had thrown the receipt away with the packaging (after all, it did work when I tried it) so I totally understood when the nice chap at the sales desk apologized but said he couldn't accept my headset back and replace it with a working one.

As he said, he needed the original receipt to prove to the manufacturer/wholesaler that it was under warranty.

I was disappointed, as I had spent $60 on it, but I totally understood the sales person's position.

I wandered down to 'Information' to see if there was any hope of an appeal process. So they contacted a senior manager, Michael, who came down and 'checked my story out'.

To his credit (as far as I am concerned) he accepted the headphones back as a 'return' and gave me a $60 gift voucher so that I could go and purchase another headset.

To me this demonstrated great customer care.

He was able to discern that I was genuine and not trying to return something they hadn't sold me. He didn't know that I was a shareholder of his company (and neither did he need to know).

But what impressed me most was not his sympathy for my situation, but that he chose to override the company's returns policy and solve a customer's problem.

In my eyes, he communicated more about the values of Myer than any glossy brochure full of marketing BS ever could.

Myer is currently facing a challenge for market share from a rival upper-market department store chain David Jones. But here in Adelaide, on a sunny, wintery Tuesday afternoon, one manager named Michael sold me on continuing to shop at Myers.

OneNote as a blogging tool

2005-07-06T10:23:00.000+09:30

I've had Microsoft's OneNote software since I got office 11, but apart from installing it once and not understanding it, I haven't touched it.

So when I came across Chris Pratley's blog on OneNote (via Scoble) I reasoned that I really ought to get back in touch with this note-taking software.

Others had commented before to me about how useful it was. I am rather skilled in Word, and use UltraEdit as my text editor of choice, rather than Notepad (a hangover from my html coding days when Notepad would put all sorts of bizarre page breaks into code), and so saw no value in learning yet another sophisticated text editor.

That was before I read Pratley's blog.

Now I see that OneNote is far more than a note-taking tool. As Pratley intimates, it's a Knowledge Management tool.

Yes, it's yet another piece of software I need to learn, but if it helps me organize my life better, then rock on!

New RSS specs? One person's view

2005-07-04T13:49:00.000+09:30

Tristan has written a fascinating potential specification for RSS, seeing as how different groups are writing different extensions to the basic 'formula' and especially in light of iTunes making a huge noise in the podcasting world ("podosphere"?).

Note: the link is sometimes dodgy, but go the the top of the site and look for the link called "RSS and Media: Can't we all just get along?"

Hat tip to Nova for this (and the blog post about the cat video is amazing!)

Thanks, Max

2005-07-02T12:12:00.000+09:30

Max Hansen has restarted his blogging efforts after a long pause.

Not sure that I deserve to be mentioned in the same blog that discusses Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Einstein, but I'm very flattered that he finds value in Better Communication Results the podcast.

Wimbledon is over for moi

2005-07-02T02:02:00.000+09:30

Oh Lleyton -- once again our hopes were dashed against the mighty rock of Federer.

As Newk was saying in the commentary box, if only our Lleyton would have gone up to the net more - just about every time he did he won the point.

Ah well... now that Lleyton's out it's off to bed.

Nighty-night...

Debbie Weil's B L O G

2005-07-02T01:55:00.000+09:30

Don't know about anyone else, but I'm certainly interested to see how her book pans out, especially now that Scoble and Israel have set such a high standard over at 'Once Was Red Couch'.

I don't always agree with what Debbie posts on her more usual blog, but she is usually provides a great read on the CEO blog, so I await with interest more in-depth content than the discussing of title and subtitle.

But good on yer, girl, for snaffling a no-doubt nice contract...

Blog stats

2005-07-02T01:46:00.000+09:30

I see that Andy over in Lancashire has started using MyBlogLog.com.

I've been very happily using StatCounter (as recommended by Blogger) and think their stats are great, especially as they're free (always a price point that appeals to me).

BCR #12 finally here

2005-07-02T01:01:00.000+09:30

Been flat out like a lizard drinking (which, for non Australians means 'extremely busy' )...

Edition no. 12 is now available for download. Of course, if you subscribe to my podcast feed you will have already have downloaded this.

And in this week's edition I give you seven ways to make a GREAT first impression! At just 6 minutes and 52 seconds long — and worksafe — it's a bargain!

Corporate Blogging Survey

2005-07-01T11:48:00.000+09:30

Backbone have released the results of a survey of corporate bloggers.

Their discovery? That it is a company's blogging strategy that will produce the strongest community goodwill, and that goodwill brings the most marketing and sales returns.

Interesting reading... and hat tip to young master Rubel for the link

Email triage

2005-07-01T11:32:00.000+09:30

Hat tip to Jack for this link to the mathmagenic Lilia who cites a 4-page paper on coping strategies for email inboxes.

Great read!

Currently giggling inanely to myself...

2005-07-01T10:22:00.000+09:30

Read a post by Alexandra on domain names and sleeping -- the last line just cracked me up!

BCR and FTP woes

2005-07-01T09:52:00.000+09:30

Argghhh!!!!

I recorded edition 12 of Better Communication Results the podcast during the week and uploaded it via Dreamweaver's FTP interface.

Have been flat out like a lizard drinking (for non Australians: 'extremely busy') so didn't get around to posting the link onto my blog until today.

Went to check the link and found that the mp3 file wasn't sitting on the server where it should have been, but don't have access from where I am at the moment to move it around.

Apologies -- my latest podcast should be appearing in a podcatcher near you within the next few hours...

Communicating with intent: The importance of earnestly being

2005-06-28T09:37:00.000+09:30

Reading a few posts on this morning's bus ride to the city, I am struck by the locquacity of some of my peers.

I loved Pete Shinback's views on why CEOs don't transition from the dining table to the bedroom; Shel clearly and aptly (again and as always) highlights the difference between strategy and tactics -- blogs are great but they may not be the answer to your question, it depends on what question you are asking and why.

For example, one of my clients has no formal KM (knowledge management) plan at all. So, I will forward them a copy of Suw Charman's case study on a pharmaceutical company who has introduced blogs (without calling them blogs) as a KM tool, with what would appear some success.

Similarly, another company I am acquainted with has a bunch of employees who are flat out trying to get all their work done in order to meet their tight KPIs. They are probably going to find it hard to introduce blogs as a KM tool, simply because no one has the time to a) learn the software, or b) time to post. The company needs to look at it processes and its staffing levels before it can consider the luxury of blogs.

From what I can tell, anecdotally, there is a 'take-up' rate of around 10% for internal blogging -- that is, around 10% of the workforce will go to the trouble of setting up their own blog and regularly posting to it.

Sure, the numbers may vary from one company to the next -- there will always be outliers -- but from what I can tell the engagement rate with blogs is probably a fair indication of the engagement level of employees; the happier you are at work the more likely you are to want to contribute to the company's pool of knowledge. The more unhappy you are, the less likely you are to contribute by blogging -- and only an employee with a 'fire me' wish is going to slag off their employer (for everyone to see) within their own company walls (as Chris Hannegan quite rightly points out - and hat tip to Neville).

Now, it is the rare employer indeed who can boast a workforce of more than 50% who are pro-actively engaged, who are looking for ways to make a positive difference to the company.

Championing 'blogs' as the salve for all of your KM needs is somewhat presumptuous at best and downright unethical at worst. But for the 'stars' within your company who WANT to contribute, who WANT to be part of the success of the company, blogs may well be a great outlet for them.

And if senior management join in the conversation (even though the conversation will often appear a one-way monologue -- how many interal blog posts actually get comments to them? Not many, I would guess) then even better -- any grass-roots initiative embraced and encouraged by senior leadership has a better chance of success.

More to follow once I have digested two of Amy's contentious posts (and the other one is about her very lucky husband!)...

Update: have corrected the link to Suw's study

My favourite Douglas Adams quote

2005-06-23T13:08:00.000+09:30

For whatever reason (I have no idea why, myself) this wonderful quote from the late, great—nay magnificent—Douglas Adams popped into my head.

From The Salmon of Doubt: "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

Update:

I just googled and found the quote, and a wonderful page full of his more memorable lines.

Is blogging a beast of burden, a monkey on my back or a tool for networking?

2005-06-23T08:47:00.000+09:30

Having created the space to ponder longer over what sort of 'beast' blogging is or can be, I am delighted to find that it can be many things (roll of eyes as the reader goes "Duh!")

I guess for a SOHO consultant like myself blogging can achieve a greater profile. Indeed, Neville has stated several times that his blog is his only online presence. Similarly, whilst Shel has a website (with RSS feed, too! ha ha - Scoble has an interesting comment about sites without RSS) Shel's blog would be, I would think, how the majority of online visitors find him.

But having had a good look at my own stats for both my blog and my website, I must conclude from the data that my website is still (by a significant amount) my primary 'outreach' tool.

Sure, there is a 'longtail' effect here -- my website has been around a lot longer than my blog (by several years). But the effort I put in (before blogging came along) to writing and submitting articles to article databases has certainly paid off in terms of traffic [info on why articles are so good at generating traffic]).

Of course, the question for a SOHO operator is not so much the traffic (although that helps with Adsense revenue) but the conversion ratio of traffic to client. And here again I have to confirm that the website has brought in more clients than my blog.

All that said, I am increasingly finding two models at work for SOHO business bloggers:

1. The pure connection strategy of bloggers like Steve Rubel, Debbie Weil, Neville Hobson, Robert Scoble and to a lesser extent Shel Holtz (as Shel fits more into a middle ground between 1 and 2);

2. The commentary/think (with a link) strategy as exemplified by Amy Gahran, Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra, Doug Johnston, Nova Spivak, Hugh MacLeod, Paul Graham and Scott Rayburn inter alia.

I have toyed with strategies 1 and 2 and I have found that strategy 1 takes up a lot of time, but is less ego-centric. Strategy 2 gives the reader a better insight into the poster's mindset, but posts are less frequent and therefore risks a potential drop in one's google and technorati profile.

So, on balance, I will probably go for a mix, like Shel does, of Strategies 1 and 2. Which is a daily commitment, to take up Amy's point (and its follow up), but feels most comfortable for me. After all, what IF someone reading my blog DOESN'T also read any of my sources? At least I am passing the baton on...

And I am still very taken with Nick Usborne's business model of providing a way of the reader to gain more information by linking to an article on his website (although I would still use full feeds on my blog). Nick's business model is outlined in an article (on plantar fasciitis, of all things!) I wrote quite a few months ago about a different site I found that used the same model.

Podcast apologies

2005-06-23T08:40:00.000+09:30

Due to a slipup with my ftp software I didn't realise that the mp3 of my latest edition of Better Communication Results the podcast hadn't uploaded to the server.

Massive apologies!

It's there now, so please feel free to download it or, better still, subscribe via RSS and drop each and every sparkling edition into your iPodder or Doppler.

Still unsure what RSS is? There's great information on what RSS is over at my website.

Blog Express Vs GreatNews - redux

2005-06-22T17:15:00.000+09:30

Ahhh... of course the one great feature that GreatNews has that BlogExpress doesn't is caching of feeds, allowing me to read the headlines and text on my notebook on the bus.

So I'm going back to GreatNews -- I just wish it had the tab facility that BlogExpress has...

Previous articles: Great News vs BlogExpress - the Free Reader Wars

BCR podcast # 11 is here - nonverbal communication, kinesics and copywriting

2005-06-22T16:23:00.000+09:30

Edition 11 of Better Communication Results the podcast is now ready for your listening pleasure!

And in this week's edition I talk about how you can use kinesics to enhance your copy (and all the best copywriters do!)

Download it now and listen to it immediately - just 9 minutes and 27 seconds long, 8.7mb in size, and work-safe.

Or have your Doppler or Ipodder feedcatcher automatically download this and every new podcast of mine by hovering your mouse over the following link, then copying and pasting the shortcut into your feedcatcher: subscribe to my podcast feed

Links: TheCopyDoctor.com

Source article: Nonverbal communication: kinesics

Note: you can find the source articles for nearly all of my podcasts over at my communications mp3s page on my website. And you can find all of my articles on communication there on my site, too.

Why reading your email before sending it is so important

2005-06-21T08:21:00.000+09:30

Here's something interesting: yet again research seems to support my original conjecture.

I have long held that before sending an email with a joke in it (or a sarcastic comment, or a pun, or similar) you should always read the email to yourself out loud.

Now research seems to be supporting me in this.

According to research by Prof. Justin Kruger at Illinois's Urbana-Champaign, and shortly to be printed up in the JPSP, we overestimate that our audience will find our witty bon-mot as equally delightful as we do.

Kruger suggests we can counter this "everyday egocentrism" (the natural tendency to see things from our own perspective) by reading aloud, in a dead-pan voice, the email we are about to send, or at least in a tone inconsistent with the intended message.

Kruger found that by forcing participants to read aloud their message first, a lot of overconfidence disappeared.

Great advice. Perhaps by reading the emails aloud first you will be less likely to have that fantastic joke fall flat, or have the world laugh at you, not with you (Heinz said they'd help clean up).

Source: Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J., & Ng, Z. (in press). Egocentrism over e-mail: Can people communicate as well as they think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

BCR podcast # 10 is now ready for your delectation

2005-06-15T03:29:00.000+09:30

Well, the flu is finally on its way out of my system (slowly, slowly...) so I have put a new podcast together.

Edition 10 is now ready for your perusal!

At just a shade over 5 minutes long, it answers that perennial question, "Podcasting in business - why should I?".

Download it now and listen to it immediately.

Or have your Doppler or Ipodder feedcatcher automatically download this and every new podcast of mine by hovering your mouse over the following link, then copying and pasting the shortcut into your feedcatcher: subscribe to my podcast feed

Links: Audacity; Feedspring; Doppler; BlogExpress
Source article: Business communication solution: Podcasting in business - why should I?

Note: due to feedback from fellow Aussie Anthony over in China (sounds like a great gig, mate!) you can find the source articles for nearly all of my podcasts over at my communications mp3s page on my website.

Great News vs BlogExpress - the Free Reader Wars

2005-06-14T08:52:00.000+09:30

Well, I've used Great News as my primary reader for a few weeks now, in a longitudinal (well, for the blogosphere it is) study.

Conclusion: I'm going back to BlogExpress.

Why: Because I really value BlogExpress' tabbed views. I can flip between different posts and blogs and not lose them (handy when putting together a podcast)

Next trial: BigContact's flash-based rss feed player

Previous posts relevant to this: update on trial; full or partial feeds; initial download

Amy has it right

2005-06-13T15:15:00.000+09:30

I know that Neville is big on links (as in who links to you) but more and more I've been thinking about content over links, that content is king on websites and it should be on blogs, too -- at least for some bloggers.

If I run a pubsub or technorati search on my name some the links that come up are those who reference an article of mine where I am expressing an opinion (like Ben Hamilton did just the other day, here and here). But no links come up just for a quick post pointing off to someone else's post.

So it was really refreshing to read Amy Gahran's post today on "Why Daily Blogging Usually Is a Bad Idea". I'm a long-time fan of Amy...

I agree with her. Blogging takes up an extraordinary amount of time, as does podcasting (my latest upcoming report for FIR took 3+ hours to record and edit, for just 8 minutes and 02 seconds of 'airtime').

Now, don't get me wrong. I am very happy and also extremely flattered to be a part of FIR, and so will continue to take the time to contribute to it as long as Neville and Shel will have me.

But I'm joining Amy on a quest to post less, but post higher quality. For me -- a person who loves words and how they can create something magic -- I shall be returning the Content King to his throne.

And I don't buy the 'blogging is great for your search engine ranking' anymore. Does no-one honestly expect Google to adjust its algorithms to compensate for the current profile that blogging brings to search engine results? What is a search engine's job, after all -- to deliver search results of quality content of interest to the searcher. If a result page is full of blogs that are just "found this link" posts, then the search engine has failed in its mission and the searcher will disappointedly click away.

Aside: it's also interesting to witness the staggering decline in traffic visiting my website that has coincided with my decision to divert considerable resources to blogging. I don't see many visitors to my website coming from my blog, however my podcast certainly does draw traffic to my website...

And I like the model that Nick Usborne has -- use good content to draw people to his main delivery vehicle, his website. Whilst I still agree with Shel et al about the need for full feeds, I see no reason why compelling copy cannot draw an interested reader across to a full article on your website.

Serif v Sans Serif for print media

2005-06-10T10:28:00.000+09:30

Thanks to Luc Devroye at McGill Uni and his great collection of typography links I was finally able to track down some research on font type and readibility/usability in print media.

He pointed me to Kevin Connolly's thesis at the University of Calgary on legibility: "Legibility and Readability of Small Print: Effects of Font, Observer Age and Spatial Vision" (1998).

I also found Kathleen Yoshida's workshop on 'Avoiding Font Fiascos' (pdf) which contained some useful exercises on legibility to work through for the reader's own understanding.

It seems the popular jury is out on whether serif or sans serif fonts are easier to read in long bursts. But I still hold to the 'old rule' that long text is less tiring on the eye with a serif font than a sans serif. Of course, it depends on the font you are using (a really complex serif font is more difficult to read than a simple sans serif) but if one sticks to the time-old, boring fonts like Times Roman then one can't go wrong.

Update:
And I've been reading FontLeech and Typomancy blogs - very interesting reading if you have a secret love of fonts (as I do)

EPIC 2015 - WOW!

2005-06-10T09:08:00.000+09:30

WOW!!! I've finally taken 15 minutes out to watch what everyone is talking about. This is AMAZING stuff!

If you have any interest in how technology and new media will change the way we interact, you need to watch this. Phenomenal creativity and intensely thought-provoking.

There's a shockwave version of EPIC 2015 available - you will need Macromedia Flash Player to watch it.

THIS is why external blogging is so important

2005-06-09T15:57:00.000+09:30

Steve Rubel has an interesting find.

He's #3 on Google for 'Kensington Locks'. Who are Kensington Locks? The locks that the majority of laptop owners around the western world use to secure their laptops -- and there's a video doing the online rounds showing how to break a Kensington lock really easily, with just scissors, duct tape and a toilet roll.

{Update 14th June: Today the post you are currently reading is #4 on a search for 'kensington locks' at icerocket.com}

If you remember, Kryptonite (the bike lock people) suffered a similar fate wherein within 6 days the whole blogging world (currently 31.6 million of us and exploding) found out that their 'totally unbreakable' locks could be easily broken with a Bic ballpoint. It cost Kryptonite over US$10M and incalculable damage to their reputation. (For more info on the Kryponite fiasco, scroll down this blog til you find the text ': THE KRYPTONITE FACTOR'; it's about 1/4 way down the scroll).

They could have easily avoided the resultant PR and brand equity meltdown if they had been paying attention to the online blogging world.

Rubel's post needs reading -- then perhaps it will become clearer why we need to blog externally to customers, if for no other reason than to have some say or impact on Google results.

73 year old VP of GM and how/why he blogs

2005-06-09T15:55:00.000+09:30

Debbie Weill has a great post today on her interview with GM's Gary Grates, VP Comms for North America.

"Bob Lutz, our 73-year-old vice chairman, was on a plane coming back from Europe when he started writing a response to some posts about GM he'd read on other blogs. He said, 'What do I do with this?'"

Grates told GM's communications techies to drop what Lutz had written about the new Saturn design into the Movable Type template being readied. And [the GM] Fastlane [blog] was born (on Jan. 5, 2005)...

"The worst thing we (GM) can do is make (blogging) a process or a program that needs to be serviced or funded." Currently about 3 techies and 3 or 4 communications managers work on the blog but it's not an official part of anyone's job description. Grates and several direct reports review the hundreds of comments posted to Fastlane before they go live. They usually get the comments up within 24 hours.

And yes, Lutz writes all his own posts and then emails them to the tech staff who drop them into the blog." As for what Lutz chooses to write about, "He juxtaposes his response to reader comments with what he wants to write about next," Grates said. "There's no science to it."

So proof that blogging from the top need not be a hard thing to do -- all that is needed is willingness to engage with the external community.

Passion versus mere ability: is knowing more the answer?

2005-06-08T08:24:00.000+09:30

Great post from Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users on being better at something and getting a buzz from being better at it.

She points out that what matters in business is not what you sell, but what you teach. Teach people about your product and/or industry and they will want to engage more with you. More engagement equals more sales, which in turn equals more sense of enjoyment for you.

She uses the example of Red Bull: not content with doing what every other soft drink company would do (give free drinks to DJs at nightclubs), they have set up the Red Bull Music Academy to 'give back' to its target community. In return, you can bet they foster some passionate advocates in that community. Passion very often converts into unpaid evangelism. Unpaid, unsponsored, 'from the heart no strings attached' evangelism often leads to massive sales.

Great reading.

When YOU communicate, are you talking at people or are you engaging them in an educative process?

Blogging: an heretical question

2005-06-07T21:42:00.000+09:30

Hmmmm......

Something's been tugging on my coat sleeves this past few days and as much as I try to ignore the intrusion, it just won't go away.

It all started with a few comments on the IABC Cafe about blogging and comments and visitors and lurkers and re-invention and ethics and issues an' stuff.

Then today one of my clients asked me this:

What if the novelty of blogging wears off in seven months? How much would it have cost us?

The question was equally one of fiscal as it was of opportunity cost.

We all know that blogging can take up time: time to consider a piece of information just received, time to consider one's viewpoint, time to put that viewpoint down in some sort of coherent form.

It is recognised—but I don't have the facts to hand, sorry—that whilst the growth in the number of blogs is trending steeply upward, there is a percentage (low/medium/high?) of blogs that start with a flourish and die a quiet death, due to lack of posting by the owner.

Now, this could be for any number of reasons, but perhaps simply a lack of ROI (intrinsic and/or extrinsic) drove the blog into extinction as other more 'interesting and less time consuming' pastimes turned up.

So here I am, faced with no answer to my client's question. Blogging is still relatively new—how do we know that new internal company bloggers (who have been given the opportunity to blog for all the right Knowledge Management reasons) won't decide, after a little while, that the effort outweighs the novelty or that they've run out of things to say?

Does blogging risk running the same race as other 'key' management 'must haves' like any number of initiatives we could name over the last two decades?

Seeing as how my own list of influential bloggers ('sneezers' as Seth would say) come from a tight circle (we kind of all read each others blogs and those of some A-listers) are we just spinning our own wheels?

For a long time today I was disheartened.

Then, via circuitous route (I looked at who was subscribed to my blog at bloglines, then looked at the blogroll of one of them and found an interestingly-named blog in a subject area dear to me) I came across a fantastic blog that just lifted my heart and made me fall in love with blogging all over again.

This is the reason why blogging works: not because we all rehash each other's editorials, but because every now and then we find someone saying something that touches us deeply, in a well thought-out, quiet, introspective manner. Not shouting from the rooftops, but whispering quietly in a chapel.

And the power of blogging struck me again—blogging is Everyman's chance to publish something of value to another human being somewhere in the world. Not just inane crap or rehashed news, but insight, wisdom and quiet passion based on quiet reflection.

Whether that works for organizations is a different question, to which I have no answer other than "I think so..."

Email exceeds phone as communication tool, says report

2005-06-07T13:44:00.000+09:30

According to this PR piece from Reachon.com, email has exceeded the phone as a favored communication tool for work and play. Findings show:

20% stated that checking emails first thing in the morning delayed them taking kids to school on time,
26% stated that they made it to work late,
15% stated that they checked emails via PDA in the bathroom

Up and downward comms is key to engagement

2005-06-07T09:56:00.000+09:30

Thanks to Neville Hobson for this.

Northwestern University conducted a very large survey of U.S. companies, looking particularly at the link, if any, between organizational culture and financial performance. This was no simple survey:

A total of 110,000 surveys, with three dollar bills attached, were mailed to prospective respondents in the 100 markets involved in the study. A total of 37,036 customers completed the survey, resulting in approximately a 34% response rate, with the number of respondents per market ranging from 271 to 472 (mean = 366.7). [...] To test for non-response bias, we followed up the mail survey with a telephone survey of 2,000 non-responders.

Of the many key findings, I found this fascinating:

The key organizational characteristic for explaining employee satisfaction is organizational communication (a measure of the downward and upward communication in an organization).

Further into the report, the following results were noted:

The key organizational characteristic for explaining Employee Satisfaction was Organizational Communication, a measure of organizational climate. Organizational Communication represents the measure of the downward communication in the organization, i.e. the effectiveness with which information about the organization is sent and received by employees, and the upward communication in the organization, i.e. the effectiveness with which information is sent from employees to people in higher level positions. The analysis in this study shows that Organizational Communication accounts for 45% of the variance in Employee Satisfaction, while none of the other 13 organizational characteristics under study were found to have a significant impact on Employee Satisfaction.

And the best tool that I know of to communicate both up and down the organization is blogging — the ability to share knowledge as well as feedback to higher levels what the view looks like form the ground floor.

Link to full report

BCR podcast # 9 finally here!

2005-06-06T22:41:00.000+09:30

Well, the flu is on its way out of my system (slowly, slowly...) so I have had the energy to put a new podcast together.

Edition 9 is now ready for your perusal!

At just a shade over 12 minutes long, its full of great info on how to identify some organizational communication barriers and how to overcome them.

Download it now and listen to it immediately.

Or have your Doppler or Ipodder feedcatcher automatically download this and every new podcast of mine by hovering your mouse over the following link, then copying and pasting the shortcut into your feedcatcher: subscribe to my podcast feed

Link: Melcrum's report on Engagement

Minding the Planet - Was Douglas Adams right?

2005-06-06T14:06:00.000+09:30

Nova Spivack's 'Minding the Planet' is a fascinating read when you have a spare 5 minutes or so to consider all that he writes about.

Researchers in Europe have created a massive computer simulation of a universe so that they can study black holes, etc.

All of which makes me wonder if we are in danger of being destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and that the mice really do run everything, after all.

Brave companies blog

2005-06-06T13:56:00.000+09:30

Courtesy of Rubel...

"A growing number of companies are stepping softly into the blogosphere, following a path blazed by Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and others in the technology field. The Internet journal format, they find, lets businesses expand their reach, generate product buzz and encourage consumer loyalty - while bypassing traditional media."
Link to full story

GreatNews - update on user trial

2005-06-04T23:51:00.000+09:30

Well, I've been playing with GreatNews for over an hour now, with mixed reactions.

I've imported my BlogExpress feeds, and rearranged them into channels in a style directly ripped off from Allan {smile}; instead of "First cup, Second cup" and so on, I have "Cappuccino; Darjeeling; English Breakfast and Green Tea". I must say it is a delight to organise myself this way, so thanks Allan for the idea...

Likes: the two-column layout; the ease of managing the channels; the feeds I receive from Shel and Allan are now full, not tiny.

Dislikes: the graphic branding lozenges I created for my podcast and blog feeds don't appear in GreatNews whereas they did in BlogExpress; the order of feeds within a channel is dictated by whether the first letter of the feed title is upper or lower case -- so Shel's 'a shel of my former self' was steadfastly at the bottom of my cappuccino channel until I went through a couple of hoops to rename it in caps. I also miss BlogExpress' neat way with tabs, which GreatNews doesn't feature.

So I am heavily leaning towards changing to GreatNews as my blog aggregator.

I'll keep trying it for a few more hours/days and see if the novelty wears off...

Cory Rudl dead -- VERY sad news!

2005-06-04T21:32:00.000+09:30

This is really sad.

Cory Rudl, a pioneer of online marketing and phenomenally successful at it, was killed at the race track, doing what he loves - driving fast cars.

I have bought several of his packages over the years and devoured his stunning online sales letters. It was he who first gave me hope that money could be made online. I have watched over and over again a set of his videos on internet marketing. His 'Insider Secrets' course is brilliant.

My prayers to his new family.

Thanks to BL Ochman for the news.