Disruptive Dialogue Podcast #2 - 03/13/2007

The second edition of the Disruptive Dialogue podcast is now available.  There's still lots of room for improvement, but I now feel it's worth listening to -- so if you haven't listened yet, start here.  This episode of the Disruptive Dialogue Podcast was recorded in Concord, NH and is 31:59.  You can download this podcast as an MP3 or subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you never miss an episode.

Topics:

• 00:31 - Welcome and intro
• 02:40 - Is "live blogging" dangerous?
• 07:25 - 5 themes from the New Communications Forum
• 15:00 - Listeners' Comments
• 21:04 - The value of human interaction in a virtual world
• 25:09 - Pardon the Disruption goes to Poland
• 29:30 - Wrap-up & Closing

Show Notes:

• Steve Crescenza on "live blogging"
• New Communications Forum
• Polish blog post
• Comment from Adam Zand

To Comment:

• Leave your comments here
• Call the Disruptive Dialogue comment line: (206) 424-4733
• Email me your comments in MP3 format (no more than 2 minutes and 5 MB, please)

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TRANSCRIPT:

Announcer: Welcome to the Disruptive Dialogue Podcast, where Chip Griffin explores how technology and innovation changes how PR and marketing pros communicate. To share your feedback, you can call the comment line at (206) 424-4733 or you can email your comments as text or as an mp3 file to chipgriffin@gmail.com. And now, for this week's report, here's Chip Griffin.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to the Disruptive Dialogue Podcast. This is our second episode. If this is the second time that you've tuned in to this podcast, I appreciate it. You're certainly a brave soul. If it's the first time you're here, well, welcome. And I hope that you'll find that it's an enjoyable experience and that we'll have some useful news commentary, information and analysis that you can use to help you better communicate in this new technological world that we're living in.

The show this week, I think, has some very interesting and entertaining segments. I'm going to start with a segment about live blogging and whether live blogging is dangerous. That's what Steve Crescenzo, a speaker at the New Communications Forum, argued in a blog post this week. And that will be interesting to see what you have to say after you listen to that report.

I also do spend some time talking about the themes from the New Communications Forum, which is where I was for the better part of last week, listening to a variety of speakers and taking a Podcasting 101 seminar. In the comments section of this week's report, you'll also hear about some of the changes that I'm going to be making to this podcast, in part, in response to that podcasting seminar that I took with Shel Holtz of For Immediate Release.

And, finally, I'll have two segments that I believe you'll find valuable to listen to. One is about the value of human interaction in this virtual world that we live in. And the final piece is a little bit more light-hearted, I guess, is how I would describe it. And it's about, pardon the disruption, my blog going to Poland." You'll have to stay tuned to the end of this podcast to listen and hear what it is that that means.

So, why don't you sit back and enjoy the rest of this podcast. And I will be back later in this episode to wrap things up.

[music]

Chip: Is live blogging dangerous? That's the question that Steve Crescenzo asks on his blog, "Corporate Hallucinations, " in the wake of the New Communications Forum event. In his blog post that was rather lengthy today, Monday, he decided to criticize blogger Shel Israel for some of the comments that he made during the New Communications Forum event and specifically for the summary that Shel wrote on his blog of a lunchtime panel that Steve was a part of.

Now, first let me say that Steve participated in a number of different portions of the event, and I think he was, frankly, one of the better speakers there. He certainly got rave reviews from others in attendance. And, from everything I understand, he is a great speaker. However, I'm not sure that I agree that live blogging is dangerous.

Let me read a little bit from Steve's post, and then I'll share some of my reaction with you. First, he writes, "bloggers take great pride in live blogging events. In fact, at this conference the planners had to go to great lengths to provide dozens of power strips in all the meeting rooms so all the bloggers could live blog each session, meaning write reports of the sessions while they were taking place."

He goes on to say, "as people sit at live blog speakers and events and get a whole bunch of stuff wrong but publish it anyway, isn't that a little dangerous, especially when the person doing live blogging is a very respected person who has the power to influence a lot of people?"

He then says, "Maybe you ought to just stop typing for a second, listen to what's being said and then go back to your own and blog, using your notes." He says, "I would never try to write and publish an article while the source was speaking, and I've been a reporter for 20 years. I don't think Bob Woodward could do that. In fact, I can't think of a single reporter who would try to do what Shel Israel was doing."

Well, we're not reporters. Live blogging, to me, is taking notes of the event in real time. And, in fact, when I live blog Demo or New Communications Forum or any of the other events I've been to, I always make clear that these are real-time notes and thoughts that I take as I'm listening. They're not intended to be a formal post. They're certainly not intended to be a magazine article or something else of journalist quality. I simply take the notes that I would otherwise take on a piece of paper and put them on my blog instead to share what I've picked up with the world.

Do I make mistakes? Absolutely. Do I get facts wrong? You bet, I do. But that's the whole point of note-taking, and I think that Steve is not construing live blogging correctly. I think he believes that it is something on the level of what a journalist would so, whereas I would argue that it really is simply note-taking to share the experience with others who could not be in attendance. It's certainly not dangerous.

Now, if there are facts wrong, that's the beauty of blogs. There's a place where you can comment on almost every blog and share your perception of events. Or, if you happen to have a tape of it, by all means, turn it into an MP3 file and post it online. I think, for the most part, bloggers are trying to get the facts right when they live blog. I know I do. I think that Shel was trying to do that when he took his notes.

Obviously, Steve believes that Shel got the facts wrong. If so, so be it. But it's certainly not a risk to the republic to have incorrect facts out there, as long as they can be corrected. Certainly, I think it's a service to others, who cannot be in attendance, to be able to share in some of the experience and learn from panels and speakers that they might not otherwise be able to listen to.

Steve points out in other parts of his blog post that perhaps the panel that he was on was not the best one that he'd been on. In fact, I think he said that it was the worst panel he had ever been on. And that may be true, and perhaps that's really the root of this frustration over the particular facts in dispute. But the fact of the matter is that live blogging does a service. It is not an ego thing on the part of the bloggers, at least not this blogger. In my case, I'm simply trying to share with colleagues and with others who may be visiting my blog for the information that I've been able to pick up.

So, what do you think? Is live blogging dangerous? Should I stop doing it? Should I put down my laptop and instead pick up a pen and paper? I'd argue no, but let me know what you think, and we'll talk about it more next week.

[music]

Chip: Influence, control, purpose, risk and transparency. Those are the five themes of the New Communications Forum, in my opinion, after having spent two days listening to a variety of panels and speakers tell us about their experiences and their philosophies on using the new media space for communications.

Let me take you through these one by one. Influence. Influence is something that is held by many people in the blogosphere and the rest of social media. It is not something that is held in just large established institutions, in fact most of the large established institutions that are in the social media space don't have nearly the influence of the individuals who are out there.

And by individuals I don't just mean consumers, I mean experts, people within companies. If you look for example at a Robert Scoble, who was at Microsoft for a couple of years and was a blog evangelist for them, he had his power as an individual, not necessarily because he worked at Microsoft. In fact Microsoft as an entity has very little influence within the blogosphere, but there are individuals within that and other companies who do have influence.

Understanding the dynamics of this influence are very important to trying to figure out how to communicate your message effectively to bloggers, podcasters and the like. And you have to understand that influence is something that can be developed rather quickly in the blogosphere. It doesn't necessarily take years of training and expertise in order to put out a shingle and establish yourself as an expert, you simply have to be diligent about it.

I have a good friend for example, who has become an expert in bacon. She has written a blog called baconunwrapped.com which covers all things bacon, and she's managed to make quite a name for herself online and gets linked to quite a bit. She's not a culinary expert, she never went to culinary school, she just loves bacon and reads and writes a lot about it.

The second thing that I think people need to understand about the blogosphere and social media is control. And control may have been the word that came up in virtually every session in Las Vegas. Control is something that corporations like, it is something that social media space does not give. In fact, social media despises the nature of control. They despise the way that traditional media is perceived to control message.

Whether you agree with it or not, it's the way most bloggers and podcasters think, and if you're going to communicate effectively with them, you need to understand this. You need to be willing to, in their words, give up control, allow a dialogue to occur between you and your customers. Allow discussions to occur between your customers. This is how the blogosphere perceives control: it's something that should be in the hands of consumers. In fact, a number of speakers said that outright, that that's where control does lie.

I would argue when some of the speakers, including Shel Holtz and others, agreed that control really lies with nobody, and if you believe that even the consumers are in control, you are mistaken, because everyone can have their own viewpoint. It is almost a situation where chaos reigns and to navigate that is very challenging. All you can do is to be open and up front about what you're trying to do and share information, and enjoy joining the discussion.

But you have to do so with a purpose, and purpose is the third theme that I took away from the new communications form.

Too many companies these days are simply jumping into the social media space because it's hot, hip and happening. If you jump in and you start a podcast or you start a blog and you really have no idea what you're trying to accomplish with that tool, you're not going to be successful. You need to be able to define clearly what your goals are and how this tool that you're using helps you accomplish it.

You have to remember, these are only tools, they are not the end in themselves, they are merely a means to an end, and until you focus on that and figure out how you're going to use it effectively, you won't be able to do so. And that means taking some risk, and risk is the fourth theme that I've identified from the new communications form. You have to be willing to take some risk, you have to be willing to stick your neck out a little bit.

That doesn't mean that you do things that are reckless, far from it. What you want to do is, you want to take advantage of the technology and the techniques that are available to you, and you have to be candid. You have to go out there and expose yourself just a little bit. You have to show that you're human and if you make mistakes, you just deal with them when you do. None of us are perfect. No company, no individual can claim to make no mistakes. So take some risks and be willing to deal with and admit mistakes as soon as they are made.

In fact, there's an argument that can be made that a powerful apology has more impact for your company than never making a mistake at all, because it shows a) that you're human and b) that you're willing to do whatever it takes in order to solve a problem. In fact Jet Blue I think has demonstrated this aptly in recent weeks by going out on a limb and really defining themselves as the reformers within the airline industry in the wake of their so-called hostage situation where passengers were stranded on a plane on the tarmac for ten hours. So take some risk and see where it leads.

And the final thing that I took away from the new communications form and this is something that I've preached in my white papers and in other media over the past several months – is the importance of transparency is absolutely essential, that when you're communicating in the social media space that you don't pretend to be anything that you're not, that you don't try to deceive someone, that you don't try to be less than forthcoming about the facts and who you are and what you're speaking about. That's the kind of thing that has got a lot of companies into trouble.

We saw the infamous Eddleman Wal-Mart situation. We saw a number of situations over the past few months where the transparency of communications, organizations or companies has been called into question, and that's just a pothole you don't want to step in. And it's not really whether or not you have disclosed enough, it's whether you appear to have disclosed enough. So where possible err on the side of over disclosure. So to sum up the five themes: influence, control, purpose, risk and transparency. If you take nothing else away from the blog posts and the other commentaries on this podcast about the new communications form, those five themes should serve you well.

[music]

Narrator: Now it's time for listener's comments. You can join the discussion by calling the comment line at area code (206) 424-4733 or you can email your comments as text or as an mp3 file to chipgriffin@gmail.com And now here's Chip with this week's feedback.

Chip: So believe it or not we actually had a few comments for last week's podcast. I say believe it or not because obviously it was the first ever Disruptive Dialogue Podcast and I didn't expect a huge amount of listenership and frankly I was rewarded.

I had a number of friends and colleagues and family members who did take the time to listen to it and provide their feedback, and I've got two of the pieces of feedback here that I thought I would share with you to give you a feel for the general reaction that I got. And I will talk a little bit about some of the changes that I intend to make going forward with this podcast to try to respond to some of this feedback.

So the first one was an email that I received from Sarah Adams, who is our marketing director at Custom Scoop. She says, “Chip, I wasn't crazy about the deep intro voice. It sounds a bit creepy. For future improvement, the sound level was very soft and your tone of voice sounds a bit ‘Bob Ross’, ‘Joy of Painting’ or AM radio.”

Will Sarah, those are both true and hopefully I have improved a little bit on each of them, on the deep intro voice. It was creepy. It is gone in this week's podcast. Let me know what you think about its replacement.

As for the sound level, I've been able to take some advice from Shel Holtz of the ‘For Immediate Release’ podcast. I attended his Podcasting 101 seminar, out in Las Vegas last week at the new Communications Forum. He provided a lot of tips, tricks, techniques and technology that I can use to try to make my podcast better and more enjoyable for you, the listener.

One of the things that he suggested was a piece of software called Levelator. What Levelator is supposed to do is to even out the sound broadcast so that they intro music, for example, isn't much louder than my speaking voice, which was the case last week.

It will also help with my interviews. For example, when I interviewed Sarah Wurrey last week, her voice was at a different volume level than mine, and that was a bit awkward. Also, some of the segments as I recorded last week were louder than others. Hopefully the Levelator will clean all that up and make the podcast sound a little bit more professional and a little bit crisper.

As for the AM radio comment, I'm not sure I can help with that. I am an AM radio kind of guy. Another listener had told me that I sounded a bit NPR. And in response I suggested to a correspondent by email that I would attempt to be a little more BBC this week. Perhaps if I try to demonstrate some of that reserved British enthusiasm, without the accent of course, it will be a little bit of an improvement over the dry reportorial style of NPR. You let me know if I have achieved that this week.

I also received some very detailed comments from my brother Brian, who is an audio engineer by training. So, as you can imagine, he had a lot of feedback that was very helpful. Among other things in his email he suggested that I try to keep conversational, because I will get better inflections in my voice and the whole podcast will have a lot more energy. So, I'm sitting here now pretending that I am talking to my coffee mug. Well not exactly, but hopefully you get the point and hopefully it will come across as a little bit more conversational this week that it has in weeks past.

Of course it is rather awkward sitting in a room by yourself and simply speaking into a microphone. But hopefully over time, I will get a little more used to it.

Brian also writes, “The intro where you describe yourself in the title of the podcast is a bit strange. It sounds like you tried some pitch shifting effects. I always find it's best to have someone else do those types of things for you.”.

Well Brian, your feedback was rewarded and I did have someone else do it for me this week. And you're right; I did apply some pitch shifting effects to my voice. I was trying to make it sound a bit James Earl Jones. I think instead I achieved a Friday the 13th, the comedy version. Anyway, hopefully this week will be an improvement for you.

He also has some comments on the length of the podcast. This is what he writes, “As far as the overall length, I was wondering if it was perhaps a bit too long. This one was 25 minutes, right? Remember the other article in this month's Wired magazine on snackable content? Obviously podcasts can be longer than five minutes. But think of it more from the point of how many subjects do you need to cover per podcast? Maybe it's worth breaking those down into multiple podcasts.”

Brian, I have to say that that is one area where I disagree with you a little bit. I have been listening to a number of the industry podcasts. And, at 30 minutes or so, which is what I am shooting for each week, I'm actually coming in at the lower end of most of the communications oriented podcasts. I believe it to cover the amount of material that the target audience that I am trying to reach would like to hear, 30 minutes is about the sweet spot.

But I am interested in the feedback that other listeners may have. Certainly, over time, I may adjust up or down depending on what kind of reaction I get to the length and the subject matter of each of these podcasts. So hopefully over this coming week I will be getting some more comments from some more listeners. And I will be able to share with you additional feedback next week on Disruptive Dialogue.

[music]

The value of human interaction in the virtual realm. One of the things that I took away from the New Communications Forum in Las Vegas was the power of face-to-face contact with people who you spend most of your time dealing with virtually by email, IM, blog comments, blog posts and the like.

I think the point was really driven home by a comment posted on my blog by Adam Zand of Topaz Partners. He is an individual that I was able to meet for the first time out in Las Vegas. He wrote, “I've been telling folks that a favorite element of New Com 2007 was meeting face-to-face the innovators that I have met in blogs, podcasts and articles for several years.”

I think that is absolutely on point. The number of bloggers and other individuals that I was able to meet and talk to out in Las Vegas; people who I had never met before, or only met briefly or hadn't seen in quite some time was very powerful.

Now a number of these people are people to whom I link or who link to me. We have a sort of a virtual camaraderie that goes on. But when you're actually able to meet and speak with people in person, it makes all the difference. You are able to put a face and a voice and a personality to the posts that you read subsequently on their blogs.

You are able to interact in ways in the hallway that you just can't do by email. It's that casual interaction that builds stronger relationships. It's that casual interaction that's perhaps spurs an idea or helps you solidify your own thinking. Or maybe perhaps gives you a whole different perspective on an issue that you hadn't thought about.

So I was very fortunate to have some of those interactions out in Las Vegas. On my blog I have noted some of the folks I was able to meet and speak with. But I really do just want to say that the amount of knowledge in this one forum was really tremendous.

To be able to speak with Shel Holtz at length - we sponsor his For Immediate Release podcast that he does with Neville Hobson - but I had never had a chance to really speak with him. And he's actually a very entertaining guy beyond what he does on his podcast. He gave me a lot of good tips, both in his seminar and in other venues. So, I thank him for that.

But I was also able to meet people who are within driving distance of my office in New Hampshire. People who I just haven't had a chance to run into before. People like Adam, and John Cass and I was able to catch up with Katie Payne who I haven't seen in a couple of years actually now despite the fact that she's just about thirty miles down the road and in the same industry that I am in.

So it's really a tremendous opportunity and I encourage all of you who are enamoured with the social media and online space to not forget the importance of those human connections, of those personal interactions. I think that they can really serve you well, and I think that in the current environment, we need to be cautious of over technologizing ourselves in such a way that we lose that human touch and human connection.

And I'm a huge fan of technology and God knows I have more gadgets than just about anybody I know, but we can't use them as a replacement, they really are simply tools that should improve upon our relationships and our networking and should not be a replacement for use of the telephone or in-person meetings. So make a point over the coming weeks to try to spend more time talking to people in the real world and not electronically.

[music]

Chip: Pardon the Disruption goes to Poland. I thought I'd end this week's podcast with a little bit of a lighter segment and so I thought I would talk about the message that I saw on my RSS reader when I woke up one morning early last week. And I saw that a Polish blog was linking to something that I had written for Custom Scoop.

It was a white paper on crisis communications and obviously I don't speak Polish so I turned to an online translation engine to try to find out what was being said: was it positive or was it negative? Did they think that I was a genius or did they think that I was some moron out there pontificating? In reality the truth is somewhere in the middle, but I did get a kick out of the translation.

The headline as it came out through the translation engine was, "Business Depression and Monitor" and as I read through the translation I realized that they probably were indeed talking about the crisis monitoring publication. But I really couldn't tell if it was positives or negatives, so I suspect it was probably more informational. So what does this all mean other than it's kind of funny that I'm being written about in Polish?

Well I think that it does teach us a couple of things that it's important to keep in mind when dealing with the blogosphere. The first is, just how global it really is. Shel Israel is working on a book called "Global Neighborhoods" and the general premise is that the technology of the internet and the social media space today is breaking down barriers in ways that go beyond even what Thomas Freedman talked about in "A World Is Flat".

And indeed, this particular post suggests very much that, if the Polish PR industry is paying attention to what is being said in a white paper in America on crisis communications and media monitoring, we're clearly getting into a large world. The second thing is the need for effective monitoring. I found out about this because I was using monitoring technology to try to figure out what's being said about my company. And if you're not already doing that you should do so, whether it's using a free service like Technorati or Sphere, or using Google or Google News to track media and blog search.

These are important things to do because you need to understand when you're being spoken about, even if it's in another culture that perhaps you're not focused on. To understand what people are saying is very valuable and will provide powerful insight and frankly early warning in many cases. But the third thing it made me realize is that there are real challenges in covering foreign blogposts and in particular those that are in foreign languages.

One of the things that we've seen in the numbers is that foreign language blogs are actually growing at a faster rate than English speaking blogs. And for large multinational corporations, this is going to be something that they're really going to have to pay attention to, and there really are no good solutions today. And that includes my own Custom Scoop.

None of the services out there do a tremendous job of being able to track the foreign languages. In some cases, as with Custom Scoop, we can actually track the foreign languages, it's really more a question of being able to provide the context.

As we've seen here, the online translation engine didn't do a very good job of converting the Polish to English so that I could understand what was being said. And until we have better mechanical means for doing that and better ways to understand and track what's being said in these foreign languages, we're all going to be unable to really get as much information as we could out of some of these foreign language blogposts.

Nevertheless, we ought to be paying attention to them and of course, the other lesson is, perhaps I should learn my Polish, and then I can go ahead and understand what's being said on this blog, and perhaps even leave a comment in the future.

[music]

Chip Griffin: Well that brings to an end this second episode of the Disruptive Dialogue Podcast. If you've continued listening this far, which if you're listening to me you have, I really appreciate it. It's been a labor of love over the past week to try to improve this podcast and hopefully it has shown that I have achieved something in the past seven days.

Of course, a lot of this podcast was dedicated to the new communications forum and I hope that between this podcast and the content on my Pardon the Disruption Blog, that you feel like you were there, and that you have been able to take away some of the information that I gained from attending.

Of course, I'd encourage you to attend that event in the future on your own, it is very valuable and I'm glad I went this year, but if you weren't able to, hopefully I've filled a little bit of that knowledge gap for you. We heard my commentary on Steve Crescenza's attack on live blogging and I think that's an issue that probably won't go away.

I know that there are other speakers who feel just as he does, that we ought to put down our laptops and pick up our pen and paper and just listen, but I'd be curious as to what you think.

We heard about the Pardon the Disruption blog being picked up in Polish, I of course had a chance to talk about the importance of human interaction, even in this electronic age that we live in. And of course I shared with you some of my ideas for changing this podcast, going forward.

So please make sure that you keep your comments coming and that you share your feedback so that I can continue to improve this podcast. I really do want to make it as valuable to you as possible because if I have no listeners and I have no feedback, I have no podcast. Thank you very much, and I look forward to speaking with you next week.

[music]

Narrator: For show notes and for more information about this podcast, please visit www.disruptivedialogue.com Or visit Chip's www.pardonthedisruption.com to share your feedback you can call the comment line at area code (206) 424-4733 or you can email your comments as text or as an mp3 to chipgriffin@gmail.com.