Cedar Mill Communications

According to a still in progress Kent State/BurrellsLuce study some 3 out of 4 PR professionals don’t monitor blogs. That’s pretty consistent with the finding that only 18.5 percent say they work for organizations that use their own blogs to facilitate communication with key stakeholders.

Given this state of affairs, the question I’d like to pose is what will become of blogs? To be sure there are a lot of blogs, and there are some that are doing very well. But given this study, blogs are not yet mainstream. If we look at the Geoffry Moore “Crossing the Chasm” model, it’s not a given that blogging in general will cross the chasm. While it’s perhaps in the tornado, it has not yet made it to mainstreet USA. Will it?

Along a similar vein, what shape will blogging take? Sure it’s fun to “talk amongst ourselves” or write a journal about visits to Aunt Marge. In that sense, blogging is nice way to use the Web. But the bigger question for those of us in the PR/marketing/communication biz, is will blogging someday usurp traditional or mainstream media (I’m trying to avoid using the somewhat derogatory MSM label).

What I find interesting is how some of the bigger blogs are becoming pretty much like any other media outlet. They have multiple reporters, they certainly have some technical help behind the scenes, and most likely some sales and marketing folks helping to bring in those sponsor dollars. Hmm, sounds pretty mainstream to me. From a PR perspective, I think we all know how to work with these type of outfits.

All of which brings me to my final thought: If blogging does succeed in crossing the chasm, does anything change?

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If you’re one of those people who has to look at press releases all day, I’m sure you’re fed up with unintelligible jargon that ends up being passed off as interesting or relevant day in and day out. Apparently jargon-filled documents have a modicum of meaning or they wouldn’t keep happening.

While jargon may come with the territory in some industries, there are certain words that need to stop being used (or mis-used). The most offensive in my book are unique, seamless and leverage. These at one time useful words have been worked into the ground by corporate types so as to be rendered moot. Now we get sentences like “our unique and seamless integration leverages our leveraged integration seamlessly and uniquely.” Huh?

I’m to the point where I edit those words out in every document I see. It is probably a futile effort to ween folks off of them, but I’m not giving up the fight.

For all of use who have launched really technical products, here’s a vid you might find humorous. Jargon to the ‘nth degree.

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Despite my earlier rant about the slowness of Outlook, which is slightly better with a lot tweaking, there are some things about Microsoft Office 2007 that are pretty cool, but with a caveat.

As has been duly noted by many reviewers, the ribbon interface is a good thing.  What I really enjoy about it is that using Office is actually fun. Maybe it’s just the newness factor, but it’s fun to click around the ribbon thing and find little nuggets of functionality.  But the one new thing that I find truly useful is the smart art feature. It let’s me instantly turn any list into a cool 3-d chart of my choosing.  The effects are pretty good and add a lot of pop to slide decks or documents.  Once everybody starts using Office 2007, smart art graphics won’t be a big deal. For now, however, I’m loving having the coolest PowerPoints around.

The caveat?  Unfortunately, slides that incorporate the smart art, can’t be edited by anyone using older versions of PowerPoint. In any sort of collaborative environment, this is a problem.  But, I’m still using the Smart Art. 

 When I get a chance, I’ll put up a few examples.

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Northeastern University together with backbone media published a thorough study (must be nice to have many willing arms and legs) on what makes a corporate blog successful. Presented in blog format with comments and trackback of course, the study provides lots of tips from a cross section of corporate bloggers on what worked and what didn’t. It’s a virtual recipe on how to make a corporate blog really work.

Althought there is much that goes into making a corporate blog a successful addition to the business communications mix, here are the five factors the successful bloggers identified. No real surprises, but worth bearing in mind:

1. Culture
2. Transparency
3. Time
4. Dialogue
5. Entertaining Writing Style and Personalization

Assuming a level of success — and who doesn’t want to be successful — corporate blogs are a powerful way to change public perception about your company, to bring the company culture to life, and to keep a finger on how your company is doing. Given that, you would think that every company would have a thriving blog strategy by now. But from what I can gather that simply isn’t the case. The true blogging success stories are limited.

Why?

In my experience, there are three main factors.

First, is time. The CEO is supposed to be the one blogging, but rarely will blogging take precedence over closing big deals or keeping the board happy. So even if a blog gets going, posts are few and far between. As a result, the blog gradually fades from existance, leaving the vague impression that blogs may not be viable.

Second, companies aren’t convinced that blogs are a good idea and will be effective. Sending out press releases is tried and true. Fear of the unknown is a major obstacle. Often lawyers raise the red flag. Are blogs a fad or a truly something the company has to embrace? Who knows? Maybe, maybe not.

Third, the blogging and social media skill set is non-existant at most companies. Most people in marketing, PR and Web development are so busy trying to meet business demands that they don’t have the time to develop new skills sets. As the Northeastern University study indicates, blogging is becoming part of the curriculum and these students will start flooding into the workplace soon. So the skill shortage is likely to end soon.

Many of the skills that make for good blogs are those of good reporters and journalists. Over time, I think we’ll see reporters and editors finding jobs within company as the official blogger or podcaster inside companies. Those will be fun jobs to have. With a daughter in J-school at U of O, I feel good about her job prospects and writing/journalism in general.

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Like most people in communications, and in fact business in general, I spend a lot of time writing, sending or reading email each day. The application of choice over the last 10 or so years has been Microsoft Outlook.  It has its flaws but overall I like it, and have always moved to the new version when it became available. Each new version has been an improvement, so I was excited to see what was new in Outlook 2007 and installed the beta.

Overall, I liked the beta but noticed that everytime Outlook checked for new mail on a POP account, my computer would slow significantly, almost to the point of not being usable.  I chalked that up to beta software, figuring that the problem would be solved in production versions.  I’ve just recently moved to the official released version and, if anything, the problem is worse.  If I were on a slow computer or had a slow Internet connection, I could see this.  However, I have a modern dual-core CPU and 1 GB of RAM, so that’s not really this issue.  I also have Outlook 2007 running on a Vista computer, and while the problem isn’t quite as bad on Vista, it’s still there.

I’ve checked a lot of threads, and a lot of people are having this problem, and so far, there doesn’t seem to be a solution. If you are thinking about an “upgrade” to Office 2007, my suggestion is to wait until Microsoft posts a fix to the Outlook slowness problem.  It’s very difficult to be productive with your computer essentially locking up for 30 seconds or so every time there’s new mail to be downloaded.  This is a huge bug and very disappointing from a company like Microsoft.

As an aside, I’ve done a lot of work for Microsoft and have a ton of resepect for them. I’m confident they will get the problem fixed, and overall Outlook 2007 is a step forward in usability and convenience. For for now, beware the upgrade.

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This blog provides lots of information about Cedar Mill Communications, a general communications service and consultancy.  If you are interested in our services — which are professional and affordable — we would love to talk to you.

 While we have many years of experience at writing, we can always improve. An ongoing journal helps us to stay in top form, and we hope we can impart some tips and insights that you, our dear reader, will find helpful.  

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