Talk About Crisis Communications...

In a very distressing story for everyone, it has been announced that the notorious BTK killer has finally been apprehended. It is a horrible story.

Considered from the viewpoint of business communications: what would you say if it turned out that you happened to be in charge of a business or organization that this brutal murderer was affiliated with? Here is how the pastor of the church where Dennis Rader was an active member for 30 years handled it. I can't imagine doing any better, given the circumstances... Indeed, our thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved in this truly horrific story...

Bill Gates says . . .

American high schools are "obsolete" -- that even when they are working as they are designed to work, they still cannot teach everything that students graduating from high school need to know.

Now y'all are relatively fresh out of high school. My guess is that most of you feel that your education was adequate; and yet here is the CEO (or whatever he is now) of Microsoft saying that even if your high school worked flawlessly, you still came to college undereducated.

I wonder what you think of that, from two perspectives: as a college student, and as someone who is going to be entering the work force shortly, where this is the view of your education held by one of the leading business minds in America today?

See the related article here . . . .

Most Popular Business blogs

Here is Yahoo's listing . . . You should be able to get some good ideas for your own blogs here.

Fast Company

Is a magazine you should be familiar with if you are not. It keeps a running contest of "best business blogs" in different categories here; it also has all kinds of interesting articles on business.

Business blog articles

Here are a number of articles for those of you thinking about actually using blogs to help you start or run a business....

Academy Awards Producer's Blog

Okay, sorry I've been away for so long. Very busy on some other projects.

But here's some cool news: Gil Cates, the Producer of this Sunday's Oscars, has his own blog for the event here . . .

Fired, then Hired, for Blogging

Okay, here's another way that blogging can help your business ambitions. If you blog well enough, there might be a headhunter out there who finds you, and gets you a job. See the whole article here....

Investment Banks blogging?

"ThinkEquity Partners, a San Francisco emerging growth investment bank, launched a web log, or blog, Thursday to attract analysts, bankers and others interested in discussing growth companies." Read the whole article . . .

Intel CEO now blogging

According to the San Jose Mercury News, which requires free registration...

Wall Street Journal's view of blogs

Peggy Noonan, a famous former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, praises you bloggers....

Hear what NPR thinks of you

now that you're blogging. Inefficient? Narcissistic? An angry mob? (Listen to Mike Pesca of NPR complain about bloggers here.)

You are now part of 38%

of Internet users who know what "blogs" are, according to a recent Pew study...

Business Week advises you ...

to start your own blog!

Business and Rhetoric

Hey, y'all, here's a great article on Business and Rhetoric...

So How Important Are Communication Skills in Business, Anyway?

A newly released study from the National Association of Colleges and Employers has some answers...

Why Study Rhetoric in Business Communication Class?

It so happens that an article just came out today discussing the importance of this subject. This is of course a super-abbreviated treatment of the subject, but it is worth reading...

Bloggers Strike CNN

If you haven't followed this story, you really should read it. Yesterday Eason Jordan, head of CNN's news division, resigned because of comments that he had made suggesting that US troops had deliberately targeted journalists.

For better or for worse, this is definitely something that bloggers made happen. Eason Jordan and Dan Rather would still have their jobs well into the indefinite future were it not for bloggers. The lesson, I'm sure, has not been learned by either the MSM (mainstream media) or the corporate world . . . yet! But the lesson is: news media corporations, and corporations in general, have an enormous new vulnerability, and that is due to the blogosphere. The vulnerability consists in this: they are now accountable --which is to say, they are subject to intense scrutiny and reporting--at levels that they never had to endure before. The sooner they understand the implications of that fact, the better it will be for them.

Blogs the Death of Traditional PR?

An article in the Economist discusses the role of Robert Scoble, one of the first Microsoft bloggers.

It reads, in part,

Does Robert Scoble, a celebrity blogger on Microsoft's payroll, herald the death of traditional public relations?

ROBERT SCOBLE, known in the blogosphere as “the Scobleizer”, is a phenomenon not just because he has had an unusually strange career of late, but because his example might mark the beginning of the end of “corporate communications” as we know it. Mr Scoble is, first, a blogger—ie, somebody who keeps an online journal (called a “web log” or “blog”) to which he posts thoughts and web links several times a day. But Mr Scoble is also an employee of Microsoft, the world's largest software company, where he holds the official title of “technical evangelist”. Those two roles are intertwined. It was his blogging prowess that led to his job, and much of the job consists of blogging. ...

He can imagine blogs completely replacing press releases within ten years.....

The truth is, nobody yet knows how corporate blogging will evolve.
This caveat is especially important because it is probably “only a matter of time” before a serious blogging embarrassment leads to litigation, says Joseph Grundfest, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Read the whole article ...

Blogs Behaving Badly

See here...

PR firm helping corporations blog

If you have an interest in helping companies develop their own blogging strategies as part of the advertising and PR work, you might either send a resume to these guys, or watch what they are doing...

From ClickZ News...
"Public relations firm CooperKatz & Co. has launched a new practice to help clients implement a communications strategy through blogs and other consumer-generated media.
The service will be led by Steve Rubel, CooperKatz's VP of client services, who writes about the convergence of PR, blogs, and other "citizen media" on his own "Micro Persuasion" blog, which lends its name to the new practice.
"We think there's an opportunity here for major companies to get engaged in the blogosphere, initially as a listener," said Andy Cooper, agency principal. "Many smaller companies get this immediately and start paying attention. Many larger companies we've seen are not as tuned in yet. This is a way for them to get started by systematically listening to the conversations that are occurring, particularly the ones related to issues that are important to their business."

If you want, read it all.

Can You Be Fired for Blogging?

In reference to class discussion yesterday... Although no company (except I suppose the CIA) can positively prohibit you from blogging privately or anonymously, here is a good reminder that what you blog anonymously may not stay anonymous...and it can cause big problems.

Corporate Blogging Blog

Here's a site to give you an idea about how blogging can work in corporate environments...

Could Blogs Have Averted a $6B+ Disaster?

Here is an interesting take on blogs--that they can be used for customer service by way of improved communication to the end-users of a product...

Using Blogs for Project Management

This seems like a good application for business blogging. You could experiment and try setting one up for your team project, if you wanted...

$7,500 available for Tsunami Ideas

Although this proposal has to originate from faculty at USC, if you can think of anything where students could be pro-actively involved in responding to future disasters, talk to me soon. Deadline is coming up; see details below...

The Provost is offering grants to USC faculty up to $7500 for seed money or planning for tsunami-related activities: teaching, research, or outreach. The projects would be to help alleviate the suffering caused by the recent tsunami, as well as to strengthen societal responses to future disasters. Attached is the Call for Proposals. Deadline is February 22

Tsunami and Business

One area that some of you might want to explore is the way that businesses responded--and perhaps are continuing to respond--to the Tsunami disaster. Here is what Amazon did--very admirable, I think!

Biz, Religion, and Communication

These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to “persuade” them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he’d be back if they didn’t close up shop. Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

BizBlog Assignment

Okay, 302 students, here is your bizblog assignment. Check this blog periodically for news, information, tips, etc.

The short version of the assignment is this: create your own business-related blog (or bizblog). Like the other major assignments in this class, it is worth 250 points. These points are going to be based on a number of factors: a) quality of the blog; b) quantity of postings; c) a brief presentation to the class about your blog. More information and details can be found below.

I know that some of you already are familiar with blogs, and some of you aren't. So this first post should help us all begin from more or less the same starting point.

1. What is a blog?
   
   This is a blog, short for web-log. There are lots of blogs out there in cyber-space, on every conceivable topic. I'll give you some examples of different blogs below, but if you are looking for more on this topic, check out Wikipedia's entry on the topic here . On the extraordinary power of blogs to shake up the corporate world, see this article on Dan Rather's demise from a recent blogstorm.
   
2. Why are we doing a blog in a business communication class?
   
   In my view, this could be one of the most exciting opportunities of your entire education at USC. You know how people always want to get in on the ground floor of a great business? We've all heard stories about secretaries at places like Microsoft or Disney Studios who became multi-millionaires because they got in on the ground floor of hugely successful companies. Well, this is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a form of business communication that can be a platform for your entire career; and to become an early expert on a form of communication that every business will be studying like mad over the next few years in order to use properly. I believe that blogs are winds of a gathering storm about to blow through the world of business, similar to the way that PC's transformed the business world in the 80's, and the Internet transformed it in the 90's.
   
   Extravagant claims, you think? Maybe. But here's a few things to consider from the recent news...
   
   From Sunday's Financial Times:
   
   “It started with a simple gripe posted on a weblog the blogger was unhappy that his new cellphone did not work as advertised.
   It wasn’t long before other angry bloggers chimed in with their own stories, flooding the “blogosphere” with a stream of complaints that culminated last month in a class action lawsuit against the second-largest wireless network operator in the US.
   The lawsuit against Verizon Wireless and the way it came about highlights the challenges that weblogs, popularly known as blogs, pose to corporations.
   Blogs are online journals people create to share their thoughts and opinions on any subject imaginable. Internet experts say some blogs are adept at synthesising public opinion and can be a powerful force companies ignore at their peril.
   Tech-savvy people have for decades shared their views through obscure internet chatrooms and bulletin boards, but easy-to-use blogging software and powerful search engines are now creating vast and efficient “word of mouth networks” where tens of millions can compare information.
   “If companies don’t understand that and don’t learn how to track what people are saying, they are going to be hit violently with PR problems that they don’t understand or know where they are coming from,” says Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee who writes a popular tech blog..."
   
   Or consider this from yesterday's LA Times:
   
   Ask Jeeves Inc. plans to announce today that it has acquired the maker of Bloglines, a Web service that lets users keep up with online diaries and news sites.The deal could help Oakland-based Ask Jeeves compete with larger Internet search companies — such as Google Inc., which owns Blogger, a service that hosts so-called weblogs.Bloglines was created by Trustic Inc., a start-up based in Redwood City, Calif., and has emerged as the most popular of the services known as RSS aggregators.More and more Web publishers, from bloggers to major news organizations, are distributing their online postings through a technology called Really Simple Syndication. Bloglines lets users subscribe to RSS feeds and display them on a single Web page so they can keep up with websites that interest them without having to check each site for updates."This is the next way you're going to see people searching for content and consuming content," said Gary Stein, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research. "It's exciting that one of the main search engines has made a move to bring this type of search into its fold."
   
   It is clear that multi-national corporations are just now awakening to the power of blogs, and they are trying various ways to harness that power for their own uses. Just today, in fact, we see MSNBC.com trying to get into the act. But it is not just major media firms that are slowly seeing the power of blogs: even CEO's of major companies are launching their own blogs. For example, George Soros, international financier and multi-billionnaire; Jonathan Schwarz, President and CEO of Sun Microsystems; and Bob Lutz, the Vice Chairman of General Motors, just to name a few.
   
   However, sometimes the major corporations make colossal blunders, such as this one by McDonalds, where they tried to start a fake blog, and got reamed for it in the blogosphere.
   
   
3. But what about ordinary people like us?
   
   This is the cool part, in my opinion. The real power of the blogs lay in ordinary people. I don't think the CEO blogs listed above are really very good or interesting, to tell the truth. I think that the most interesting ones are ones at much lower levels on the food chain, so to speak. Some of them are actually approved by management, and people can actually blog at work as part of their jobs. Microsoft did this as an experiment, as I understand; now they encourage it. One of their more well-known blogs is here--good for you to be familiar with if you're looking for a job. And on the better blogs, there are lots of good links--for example, on the MS blog just mentioned, there is a link to a Business World blog--which might give you lots of good leads for this assignment. But Google, despite hosting the blog service this blog is on, just fired someone for blogging at work!
   
4. Okay, how do I get started?
   
   Before you do anything at all, I'd suggest that you simply browse a number of different blogs. I think that the most read, and probably the best, blogs are political, and you can learn a lot from them about how to go about making a good blog. See these very popular examples: Instapundit, Daily Kos, Powerline, and TKS.
   
   
5. Okay, now what?
   
   Start your own blog. You can use e-blogger; it is fast and easy; see the masthead on this blog to get started. You can use any blog creator you wish. But send me an e-mail with your blog address right away--no later than Friday.
   
   
6. What's my ultimate goal?
   
   At first, just experiment and read a lot of blogs; post whatever you want that you think is interesting.
   
   Then, after you've begun to get a feel for blogging, begin to develop a theme to your work--it might be on the power of blogging in your field, or on doing international business. Anything that is business-related is fair game. It can be about advertising, PR, accounting; or about business ethics and scandals; about whatever you want.
   
   Ultimately, you want to post regularly, and make good quality comments, on some topic related to business.
   
   Eventually, you'll want to make a presentation to the rest of the class on your work--not in the least so that you will get more comments on your blogsite!
   
   Enough for now; more details to come....