IAOC2008
Annual Conference to be Held in Zurich, Switzerland Reykjavik, Iceland
Thursday and Friday, May 15-16, 2008 June 12-13, 2008

Save the dates! Thursday and Friday, May 15-16 June 12-13, 2008, for IAOC2008, the Annual Conference of the International Association of Online Communicators, to be held in Zurich, Switzerland Reykjavik, Iceland. For more information go to this recent post.

Two days of whirling-dervish paper presentations, plus panels and our keynote speaker, M.I.T. Sloan School of Management research scientist Peter Gloor, who just wrapped up a week on IAOCblog discussing research into workplace communications.

Our theme for IAOC2008 is "Transparency vs. Anonymity" in online communications. In a stroke of good timing, Forbes Magazine just published a feature story by Victoria Murphy Barret entitled "Anonymity & the Net." It's in the October 15 cover date issue going on sale today.

The IAOC's first European conference in Brussels, Belgium -- IAOC2006 -- was a great success. We plan to build on our European base in 2008. Make your plans today and join us in Zurich in May Iceland in June!

STEVE O'KEEFE
Vice-President, IAOC

I am always amazed about the coolhunting qualities of the Finns. I am currently teaching our annual virtual COIN/Coolhunting seminar at Helsinki University of Technology and as happened to me the previous three times, the cool trends being set here just blow me away. It starts with well-known things like the Finns’ ubiquitous use of mobile technologies. Nokia communicators are everywhere. They are used as browsers in the restaurant, to call up Google and resolve the burning question of which is the oldest church in Finland. To find the restaurant in the first place, the communicator of course also includes a navigation system which easily guides us there through the narrow streets of Helsinki. And when we take a taxi back to the hotel, we pay the taxi driver using our cell phones. Quite different from the US where most taxi drivers in New York still want to be paid in cash!

Finns are also eager users of blogging and social networking. They were among the early adopters of LinkedIn, and they are currently actively embracing Facebook extensions and plug-ins. They even coined a new term for people who buy tech gadgets to obtain the right to belong to their own self-chosen digital tribe. “Yhteisöllisyys” comes from the term yhteisö which means “community” or “society” in Finnish. But as was explained to me, Yhteisöllisyys is more than just the Finnish word for community. It stands for a self-selected group of people who get part of their meaning of life from belonging to a loose association or virtual community sharing the same passion for a high-tech gadget. I am not sure if I understood the meaning completely, but from observing my son playing “world of warcraft” it seems to me that he is definitively part of that Yhteisöllisyys. It is not enough do be part of a virtual community, what counts is to be a passionate member of the virtual community. Surprisingly often, what Finns are passionate about becomes a trend very soon thereafter in the rest of Europe or in the US.

Please join us July 17-21, 2006 for a blog program: PR is Getting Personal, with discussion leaders Joost van de Loo, Clo Willaerts and Dana Gornitzki

ABOUT THE TOPIC:
In today's networked world it is no longer a winning strategy to have a safe job and to trust in the authority of your company. Positions change quickly; your manager can become a freelancer, your supplier can be your client the next month.  Commercial communication is more and more becoming the ongoing dialogue between individuals that the Cluetrain Manifesto predicted. Direct-to-consumer PR is only a small element of this pattern.

As a result, personal reputation is now one of our most precious assets. Successful professionals do everything to be seen as trusted networking hubs. How will this change PR? Will our press releases become more 'fair and balanced'? How do we need to adapt our thinking?

ABOUT THE DISCUSSION LEADERS:
Joost van de Loo is a Marketing Strategist, who joined communication consultancy ZN following a career in journalism and marketing. He has a Master of Arts degree in International Journalism from the City University of London, and a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Delft University of Technology. In addition to work at ZN he currently sets up Distinct News International, a company that produces multi-media packaged television news features from India and China. He also consults for ETV and writes for UK-based Diplo magazine. Joost has worked for BBC Four television, the Amsterdam Weekly, Dynamic Zone, and KPN Mobile.

Clo Willaerts is marketing manager of Belgacom Skynet and an avid blogger.

Dana Gornitzki is a Canadian transplant currently living in London, England. A journalist and media expert, Dana's experience has covered the world of print, online and broadcast. From working with film festivals and inside a major public broadcaster to working with emerging brands, Dana's work has a focus of social interactions and its impact on the here and now. Currently, she is exploring the mobile space and is interested in that medium's far-reaching effects from social communities to advertising and consumption habits.

Here they are, the first pictures of the IAOC European Conference in Brussels !

Susan Fitzgerald and Don Dunnington kicked off with an introduction on the IAOC and explaining the - for us Europeans - strange set up of the conference (moving from table to table...)

You can see the pictures on a trial wiki we're testing out.

We're in the first paper presentation session till 3:34PM. We have 25 people right now, more to come for the next session and the full day tomorrow.

Updates regarding the conference will happen on the wiki.

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let you know that the agenda for our Brussels conference is taking shape.

Below an overview of topics and speakers but... We need every promotion possible to make sure that this event is a success, also in Europe. Some ideas to spread the word:

Blog about it. Several high profile PR/Communications Bloggers have already done so. Here's a selection:

Guillaume du Gardier, who hosted Blogging Europe on IAOC in June, announced today, "I am leaving my entrepreneur's life" to join Edelman, "the only independent global PR firm, counting 1900 employees in 43 countries worldwide and 272 M$ in 2005."

Guillaume was founder of a Paris PR boutique, PR Planet, and Blogging Planet, a European agency focused on RSS and all its related applications, such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts.  In addition to his PR Thoughts blog, Guillaume recently launched a podcast. Among his first interviews was IAOC member Philippe Borreman (IBM Belgium and Luxembourg) who talked about  IBM’s use of RSS, blogs and wikis and the company’s embrace of micro media (13.24 min.).

It seems to me that PR pro and marketers now have in their hands great tools to track what is being said about their brand in the online world. Ok, the technology is everything but new, but it's now so easy to use for anyone who takes the time to understand the way it goes that it would be so sad not to get use to them.
Seting up a RSS feed thanks to Feedster, PubSub or that kind of tools is dead easy and brings a lot's of help to follow what is being said on a specific topic or brand.
Nevertheless, I have to say we our far away from the common use of those tools in France that still seem to be in the hands of bloggers only... Don't even imagine to talk about "tags" or "taging conversations", only few will understand.
Most of the time, if marketers know what RSS is about, they see it in it's more common use, syndication of information coming from a blog or say a web page, not like a channel that might be use to share so many different kind of informations that might also not be coming directly from a single web page...
However, RSS makes information so quickly available it should be used by every PR/marcom ... To track or to spread information. It happened several times with some of my clients in the past months that informations poped up in the blogosphere at at time where the official press release was still on progress... Thanks to my RSS feeds tracking subscription, I've been able to see it quite in real time, and to ring the bell at the Corp. headquarters, helping things move quicker by this way. The last two times it happend, I was the only PR blogger in the international team, and the first able to react... So isn't this an added value ?
In our world lead by information, I think it is essential to follow what is being said in the online world, we now have the chance to see so many tools poping up day after day to help us monitore trends, topics, issues, it would be a real mistake not to integrate them seriously in our daily work.

Again, PR pro and marketers should be in my opinion the first to understand and use those tools, unfortunately, if you heard about the last PR inepsy, you'll see that our industry is definitely not  up to date...

The common attitude of Italian companies is that nobody reads online media, and therefore the investments and efforts devoted to creating and growing the online presence are negligible. Part of the problem is due to PR agencies, which are usually not able to communicate to online media.

Instead of investing in the improvement of their understanding of online media, these agencies try to convince their clients - and unfortunately often succed - that online media are useless.

Because of this situation, blogs are still far away from the corporate world. Apart from a couple of online media CEOs, like Mario Lupi of AdMaiora (online advertising), there aren't other company executives blogging.

Online branding efforts are limited to the company's web site, which is usually either very static or very "flashed" (including music), but always quite poor in contents. Comprehensive branding efforts, which leverage the contents of the company web site in order to spread the presence across the Internet are still largely unknown.

Italy is still a country where the visibility of a company can increase over 500% in one year only by changing PR agency, or by appointing the right PR manager. The same applies, with the opposite sign, by choosing the wrong PR agency or PR manager.

Therefore, when the problem is still the development of a decent press release or an appropriate pitch, the use of blogs for branding or corporate purposes is still quite far away. This doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't PR agencies or PR professionals able to master the tools of the trade.

Foreign companies trying to improve their reputation or brand awareness in Italy should look for the appropriate partner to place their efforts in the right direction.

The IULM University in Milan has recently carried out a research on the Italian blogosphere, with 600 online interviews. Italian bloggers are mainly young: 40% are students, 20% employees and 15% self-employed. Half of them are "mature" bloggers active for more than 6 months, while 9% are newbies who have just started blogging.

Italian bloggers are frequently online to search for information. The majority of those interviewed updates the blog at least three times per week, and 21% declares of writing on a daily basis. In addition, 65% of bloggers reads the blogs listed on his sidebar, 31% those of his friends, and 55% those of his readers.

The main blogging platforms are the following ones (april 2005):

Splinder: 114.695 blogs
Excite Blog: 15.078 blogs
Bloggers.it: 10.853 blogs
Tim i.blog (moblog): 8.703 blogs
il Cannocchiale: 8.286 blogs
Aruba: 4.820 blogs
iobloggo.com: 4.630 blogs

The following platforms do not release their figures: Digiland Blog, Clarence/superEva, DiaBLOGando, Blogs.it (Radio Userland), Tiscali Blog, Virgilio Blog and Leonardo. It is also difficult to estimate how many blogs in Italian are based on international platforms like Blogger or TypePad.

The Italian blogosphere grows at a 5% monthly rate, which is dramatically low in comparison with other countries, but - on the contrary - is rather high if you consider that Italy is one of the European countries where Internet penetration amongst individuals is lower.

Are Spanish companies listen to the conversation that is taking place in the blogosphere?  I must say yes.

Are they doing it professionally and on a daily basis like with press clippings and using this knowledge in one significant way for the brand?  I have to say no.

Individual employees know the importance of "listen to what the internet is saying", but it is hard for them to make the whole company asume that what is going on in the internet is crucial to the brand.

The reaction of many people -even PR practitioners- with blogs is: "Just another bubble that will  burst".

But there are people from major Spanish companies that are trying to learn more about blogs and are doing their best to figure out how can they use them for different purposes. 

Big companies -both national and multinational- like Telefónica, Vodafone, Paradores de España, Siemens, Repsolypf or Sanitas count with these employees... but some of the companies don't even know it.

Again, I believe it is a matter of time. 

Don't want to be unfair with all, but the majority of the Spanish marketing managers are more concerned about GRPs and massive advertising campaigns, than with the reputation of the company in the internet.

I think they are going to see it more clearly when a huge crisis burst and it will be too late then.

---

Octavio Rojas will launch his book "Public Relations: The effectiveness of the influence" in Spain. There is a microsite available of the book (in Spanish).  http://octaviorojas.com/librorrppini.html

He is looking for an editor to publish it in English and/or French.  Volunteers? ;)

He has a personal Web site: http://www.octaviorojas.com and a blog: http://octaviorojas.blogspot.com in which he offers articles and news about communication, media and PR on a daily basis.

He is member of the Media Bloggers Association and of Bitacoras.org, the most influential blogging organizations in the USA and in the Spanish speaking countries.

It's time to launch the last day of this week at the IAOC blog, we will talk about tracking tools and practice but also probably sharing some additionals thoughts on the topics of the previous days, time has not always been so easy to find to say all we wanted to say, so this will be a good opportunity to add some ideas.

See you tomorrow.

It's also right in France, as Tom and Octavio already said it for their country, it's not always so easy to get informations on internal blogging experience, mainly because if it's internal, then it's secret...

I won't be talking here about  employee blogging experience as the one of Microsoft in France, I rather consider this as external communication as soon as the blogs are open, which is the case with Microsoft France.

I've been recently interviewing Didier Masse, e-Communication Manager at Steria in France to learn more about their experience in internal blogging, which has been very positive in term on internal circulation of information but also helped raised new projects thanks to sharing ideas.

As PR pro, I've been using blogs to share informations with our clients regarding ongoing campaigns, which is also a very good way to store informations and to keep track of what has been said...
At Blogging Planet, we've been using a blog to develop a private and secure platform to help a european PR Manager communicate with his local agencies, and by this way store and share information on one single place rather than sending out tons of emails and receiving though so many answers, difficult to track, difficult to store...

We've also been seting up a private blog for the french users club of Genesys that the marketing manager is using to keep in touch with the customers and inform them about the coming events, studies available, seminars, etc...

I wonder if internal blogs might have more impact on corporate communication or more added value than external ones, let's see in the futur where the trends will go...

I'm afraid I posted already about blogging internally.

SME's are using blogs following different strategies:

- Isoco, a software and internet solutions company, uses blogs as intranet to share knowledge about the industry.  IT department is in charge of updating the blogs.

Internal blogs should come with a change of attitude of the corporation.  If a CEO launches a blog to let the company what he is thinking but doesn't allow -or welcome- comments, then the "so-called" blog will be something different, but not a blog.

It is all about openess, transparency and a candid interest for what everybody have to say. And I mean everybody.

It is not about reading CEO's speeches.  You have emails for that.  Blogs need discussions.

I must say that I like blogs as intranets, but I love wikis to organize events and share documents internally.

Wikis are able to create a "community" around a document and let people to actually edit, rewrite and complete it.

But if blogs are hard to explain, wikis will be the "next stage".

Let's go step by step.

While Internet blogs grab all the headlines, the potential impact of internal blogging has been relatively ignored.  There is no question that internal blogging (and let’s not forget internal RSS feeds) has the potential to make a major contribution to any corporate organization.

 

Internal blogging can amomgst other things:

* Help the collaborative work process

* Improve knowledge management across the firm

* Provide the firm with protection against the loss of employees

* Provide employees with the right information instantly.

 

These opportunities could have a major impact on the productivity and profitability of any organization.

 

Finding examples of successful internal blogging is difficult as companies often view this as a competitive advantage or have no interest in sharing their experience.  There are many companies in Ireland who have internal blogs, I know of many in Irish technology firms, but the organizations I approached were reticent about sharing their experiences – even though they were very positive about it.

 

As a result, let me use my company as an example of an Irish company using internal blogs.  Cape Clear Software has had formal internal blogs for the past three years.  We use them in a variety of ways and we’re already seeing many benefits.

 

Internal Communications

Although our intranet was not created using blog software, it has since 1999, been published using the same format as a blog with plain HTML files published in reverse chronological order.  The intranet looks like a blog and it inclues entries on everything that’s happening within the organization.  It provides a single source of information on every event, press releases, news story, initiative as well as personal milestones such as new babies, weddings etc.  As someone who has been involved with many failed intranet initiatives, this has been a roaring success.  Most employees have the intranet as their home page (it’s set up as default by our IS organization) and we get constant feedback on entries.  We are currently planning to replace the current HTML structure with a blog platform in the coming months.  The main advantage of moving to a formal blog structure is the automatic provision of RSS feeds which staff can subscribe to and then they will be automatically updated on new events etc.

 

Collaboration

Our engineering organization has been using blogs since 2002 as part of their development process.  There are a number of active blogs covering a range of subject areas such as discussions on new features and updates on specific projects. The blogs ensure that all our engineers are current on the status of any project and have an opportunity to participate in the engineering planning process.  We also have specific blogs for different product releases which are archive once the product is shipped.

 

These development blogs have the additional bebenfit that new employees can quickly get up to speed on projects, status and issues by reading the archived posts.  These blogs also publish internal RSS feeds which provide immediate updates to the entire organization.

 

Knowledge Management

We use a number of internal blogs as central repositories for information on a specific topic. These differ from the development blogs because instead of focusing on a project they act as a single point of access for stories, resources etc. on the a specific technology area.  

 

The advantage of using a blog is that because all that information is published in a blog format it is presented in a consisten manner and is automatically archived and searchable over our internal network, making it simple to find relevant information when it's required. This is a major departure over the traditional ways we managed useful information from a whole host of different formats.  Now there’s a single view that is accessible to everyone and with the published RSS feed that information is disseminated rapidly to the right people.

 

 

Although we're a software company it's not hard to see how these same blogs could be very useful in any firm.  Consider a PR agency.  They could have a blog per account or account team, which provides a central resource for all information on an account. So it would include reports on client meetings, project updates, latest materials, measurement etc. The result is a much simpler and faster reporting process with the added benefit that the agency is protecting itself from the inevitable loss when employees leave, because now there is a repository of account knowledge available meaning that new and existing team members can be skilled up in a fraction of the time.

 

Although internal blogging is often the unsung hero, it has the potential to make a material contribution to the bottom line of any organization. I’m glad to report that many companies in Ireland are already embracing internal blogging.  I forecast that for many organizations it may have a greater impact than the much publicized corporate blog.