Disruptive Voice

Add a Syndicated Feed to Boost Your PR Reach

News announcements distributed via a reputable wire service and with social media aspects can appear on multiple websites and end up in prospects’ Google searches. Web savvy companies also post all of their news announcements on their own websites.

 

But many overlook the preference of Internet users to have information pulled to them rather than pushed at them. These users’ preference can be addressed using syndicated feeds. Adding a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or other type of feed to your site allows people who want to stay abreast of happenings with your company to get automatic alerts when you update content on the corporate site, add news announcements or make a new blog posting.

 

People know a feed is available on your site when they see the orange RSS icon or other feed logos. Provide multiple feed options instead of forcing users to choose a syndicated feed they do not already use.

Some popular feeds are:

 

· Google Reader

· MyYahoo

· FeedReader

 

For do it yourselfers, here’s a “How to” for building and using a RSS feed.

 

Intel does a good job using RSS in a way that allows readers to decide what specific content they want to follow. Given the ease of setting up RSS on your site, take advantage of syndicated feeds today to expand the reach of your PR.

Print Media’s Dead, Long Live New Media

I come to bury newspapers, not to praise them.

 

For the second time in a week, I attended a high-tech event where newspaper reporters were present — and no one in the room seemed to notice. Just a few years ago, Washington Post tech reporters would avoid wearing name tags at networking events to keep from being mobbed by entrepreneurs and start-ups seeking coverage. Those days are gone.

 

Newspapers, which begrudgingly added online news distribution to their portfolios, are hurting. As readership plummets, so does the revenue from advertising. In a losing effort to stay in the black, newspapers are dumping hundreds of journalists, most of whom are their best talent.

The list of layoffs & buyouts is astounding:

· The Boston Globe bought out 60 staffers this year, following a 2007 buyout that led to the exit of Pulitzer Prize winners

· The Tampa Tribune offered buyouts to half its staff

· The New York Times cut 100 employees

· The Seattle Times eliminated 200 jobs

· The Modesto Bee unloaded 100 people

· The News & Observer—where I once worked as a reporter—cut 70 folks.

 

The news hole at print newspapers is shrinking fast. Many business sections don’t even carry a tech reporter any more. With the reduced headcount in newsrooms, beat reporters are often regulated to covering only publicly traded companies.

 

This all means you need to broaden your target list beyond traditional print media if you have a business and are seeking promotion. Print newspapers are failing because people are getting their news from non-traditional sources online.

 

Your public relations strategy needs to include niche blogs that cover your industry and Web-based news sites, such as Internet.com, bMighty and the online versions of traditional newspapers.

 

While your company might get lucky and land an article in a large daily newspaper, avoid putting all your PR eggs into this disappearing basket.

 

Social Networks Inside Companies

A recent Harvard Business Review study found that internal corporate communications suck. While working on a paper about the social networks inside companies and how they are used to convey information across the organization, the researchers discovered that, for the most part, corporate social networks don’t exist.

 

But why are companies that invest a percentage of their earning into marketing their products and communicating their value to external audiences so dysfunctional when it comes to creating a united organization in which everyone understands the corporate objectives and how their individual work contributes to the company’s success?

 

The Harvard researchers found that organizations find the best internal communication occurs within separate business units or geographically isolated offices, but not cross-departmentally. In other words, the Marketing team knows what it is working on and how its activities will impact sales, the company’s perception and ecosystem, yet the rest of the organization probably doesn’t have clue about what Marketing is doing or why.

 

Effective internal communications is important. By fixing internal corporate communications, organizations:

- Achieve higher organizational effectiveness

- Improve morale

- Foster a family environment versus an “it’s just a job” mentality

- Engender loyalty

- Reduce employee attrition

- Create a small army of evangelists.

 

Many of the tools that organizations use to promote themselves and to communicate directly with their customers and partners can used to improve internal corporate communications. Here’s a short list of ways your company can keep everyone informed of what’s important to the organization and involved in the business’ growth:

 

1. Use      social networking tools

- Podcasts, videocasts & microblogging tools like Yammer allow you to deliver snippets of information to employees in engaging mediums they already use outside the workplace.

 

2. Blogging

- Allowing executives, middle managers and rank-and-file employees to post to an internal blog opens up dialogue. Imagine allowing Marketing to get feedback on planned campaigns, or engineers inviting coworkers to beta test a new application.

- See Lorelle VanFossen’s post on “How to blog.”

 

3. eNewsletters

- Too often companies try to disseminate information internally via email. But everyone receives too many emails already. Condense the news & updates and compile them in an html newsletter that goes to the staff monthly. Include photos & images to keep it interesting.

 

4. Surveys

- Solicit feedback from employees on a quarterly basis and share the results. Sites like Survey Monkey and PollDaddy provide free or low-cost online survey options that compile the data for you.

 

5. Internal      community site

- If you have the resources (web developer & budget) create a secure community site where employees can share documents and presentations, get help on projects, publicly thank project team members, give kudos for new sales, product launches or partnerships, and interact freely.

 

6. Brown      bag lunches

- While technology can improve how we communicate, face-to-face interactions are crucial for instilling a communal sense of purpose and belonging. Senior executives can use brown bag lunches to reinforce messages disseminated through corporate social networking at all the corporate offices.

 

Each aspect of your internal corporate communications plan should have a champion – someone who oversees the activity and ensures that communications are timely and consistent. The new rules of public relations emphasize directly connecting to your target audience. The same applies to your most often-overlooked audience – the company staff.

 

Get serious about your internal social network, and watch your employees from Accounting to the CEO take to it like a teenager takes to MySpace.

 

 

Traditional Media Gets the Brush-off

I attended a networking event that brought together the region’s venerable high-tech organization with the local Web 2.0 community. While mixing with the crowd I met a young entrepreneur who is cofounded new social media network Diditz.com. I encouraged him to engage in conversation with a journalist from the UK’s Guardian newspaper, who was standing adjacent to us. The young entrepreneur, Sohit Karol, replied, “No thanks. We don’t really see any traffic from (coverage in) newspapers. We do better with Mashable.”

 

What a succinct and blunt anecdote that captures the current state of traditional media. Just a few years ago, who would have thought that a blog would be considered a stronger PR outlet for high-tech companies than major national or international newspapers? But it’s true.

 

Mashable, which has a focus on social networking, draws 5 million monthly pageviews. If your company deals with social networking, what social-networking focused newspaper can you turn to for exposure? What about cloud computing, software as a service or voice over IP? Unfortunately, the people your company needs to reach probably aren’t reading the New York Times very often.

 

 

Instead, your audience has increasingly turned to blogs and other new media sources for their information, which is delivered faster and more concisely.

 

If you’ve been chasing print coverage, perhaps it’s time to be more like the young entrepreneur and give traditional media the brush-off in favor of new media sites that address your audience.

Top 5 Voice Mashup Wish List II

My last wish list of voice mashups — apps that voice and calling features could be added to — spurred a few more ideas from colleagues. So here’s a second Top 5 Voice Mashup Wish List:

 

1. iGoogle. A simple yet effective app would be a VoIP call control widget for personal iGoogle start pages. You could activate features such as Do Not Disturb from your most-used web page.

 

2. Twitter or Yammer. The micro-blogging tool Twitter is hot… when its servers aren’t overloaded. Yammer, winner of the TechCrunch50, is expected to take off as well. Yammer is essentially Twitter for the enterprise. One pretty cool idea is to use Twitter or Yammer via a mobile phone or PC to send a text message to your VoIP network to activate or deactivate features. Imagine tweeting to turn on Simultaneous Ring. 

 

3. Social network widgets. If you haven’t tried the Click2Message Facebook widget, I suggest you give it whirl. Click2Message allows your friends on Facebook to call you using any phone simply by inputting their number into the widget. The widget keeps your number private. Well, it’s time to expand widgets like this to more social networking sites, such as MySpace, the Korean site Cyworld, & Hi5, which is popular in Spanish-speaking countries.

 

4. Active contact lists. Contact lists can become more valuable by extending caller ID capabilities to contact lists. Imagine a mashup that pulls info from multiple sources—such as Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn profiles—to give you a 360 view of contacts. Then maybe you can begin a phone conversation by asking about the contact’s political interests (“How about that Obama speech?”) or the last book they read.

 

5. Dating site widgets. Connecting with someone via an online dating site is full of risks. But a widget that protects the phone number of both parties can let women get to know a love interest without worrying about stalking. Users should be able to activate the widget only for matches that interest them, and turn it off when there’s no love connection.

 

Of course, voice mashups are only possible with voice over IP platforms that have APIs and active developer communities. Anymore great ideas for voice mashups?

 

Voice Mashup Wish List

This week Web 2.0 Expo storms into New York, and many innovative companies will make news announcements. Among them will be BroadSoft, which will announce its Voice Mashup Contest winners.

 

BroadSoft and Ribbit really got the telecom industry and Web developers thinking differently about voice services this year. While telecom service providers have watched their margins become thinner as their services increasingly become commoditized, these two companies began to push voice as an application that can be added to other business and consumer applications.

 

So, here’s a short wish list of voice mashups I would like to see:

 

·  An iPhone VoIP application. There’s been plenty of blog chatter that we can expect as many as 100 VoIP apps for the 3G iPhone. Wouldn’t it be great for one of those apps to be carrier-grade for secure business use?

 

·  Sticking with mobile devices for a sec, how about a mobile VoIP & IM app for social networking. Nimbuzz.com has an API that’s just waiting for a money-making VoIP platform.

 

·  Open-source CRM applications. Telecom service provider SimpleSignal recently announced its success in delivering a mashup of salesforce.com with BroadWorks to SMBs, proving the productivity enhancements that come from adding calling features to CRM. So let’s see more voice mashups with open-source CRM apps like vtiger and SugarCRM.

 

· Online collaboration tools. Anyone who has used Basecamp for project management and collaboration has probably had to call one of the team members or participate in a conference call. Shouldn’t you be able to make that call or launch that conference from within the tool? Adding calling features to Basecamp, Zoho or Google Apps makes these online tools vastly more useful.

 

What voice mashups are on your wish list?

Raise your visibility with Slideshare

Recently I directed a PR client to Slideshare.net as a social media tool for raising his company’s profile on the Web and among developers. In under a minute, the client had found a 70-page slide deck on voice mashups from a recent conference he was unable to attend. That day, he told at least five colleagues and associates about the slide deck and Slideshare.

 

This story shows the viral, word-of-mouth effect of Slideshare. But Slideshare can do even more to promote your business and products. Posting your PowerPoint slides on Slideshare increases the exposure of your solutions and expertise to your target audience.

 

Potential customers can find your presentation via Web searches or searches on Slideshare. Posting you slide deck also can improve your website’s ranking on Google and other search engines. Adding tags, keywords in the summary and a keyword in the title can drive up the search rankings of your materials.

 

Use PowerPoint slides you have presented at conferences or to prospective clients to get started. Make sure you include contact information on your final slide.

 

By the way, posting your presentations on Slideshare is free. So there’s no excuse for not taking advantage of this powerful social media tool.

Happy Birthday Skype

Two weeks ago, Skype celebrated its 5^th anniversary. For the telecom industry, the birth of Skype on August 29, 2003, marked a milestone in telephony evolution: the beginning of the public’s mass adoption of IP-based telephony.

 

Skype says the more than 100 billion Skype-to-Skype call minutes over the last five years and more than 338 million registered users have made it profitable. Later this year, Skype will roll out its Skype Out service to the British and Italian customers of wireless carrier 3. Skype Out will allow 3's Skype customers to call the home and wireless phones of non-Skype users.

 

Consumer comfort with using a non-traditional fixed-line phone service allowed U.S. cable companies to effectively grab market share from teleco giants with their digital voice offerings. Cable’s rapid growth in telephony services (with nearly 6 million customers, Comcast is poised to become the third largest phone carrier in the U.S.) has helped traditional phone companies begrudgingly see the potential for carrier-grade VoIP services.

 

So, Happy Birthday, Skype.

Using the Blogosphere

Do you monitor the blogosphere? Keeping track of what is said about your company, your solutions and your industry online could prove to be a PR goldmine.

 

When blogger Om Malik wrote a piece for BusinessWeek.com on the crowded field of online storage companies, the article discussed the industry’s failure rate and focused heavily on the larger companies in this space. But upstart Carbonite – which was left out of the conversation – seized the opportunity to get coverage.

 

Carbonite’s CEO sent Malik an email that countered the points of the article and gave the blogger a new angle to write about: Evidence that consumers are willing to pay $50 per year to have their computer data backed up online automatically.

 

The result was a second write-up by Malik in his GigaOm blog that featured Carbonite’s David Friend.

 

You too can take advantage of what’s being written in the blogosphere. Monitoring industry blogs and news sites should be part of your PR strategy, so that you can respond to posting and inject your company into the coverage.