CorpComm vs. IT: A Mythic Struggle?

A few weeks ago while giving a presentation for work, I stated that the battle for control over the corporate website between communicators and IT teams was a "mythic struggle". IT and web teams want control over the corporate website for security reasons, and because traditionally it was their realm—their area of expertise. In this age of online communication that we live in, the CorpComm team also wants control over the website: they want to be able to update their online information quickly, get information about visitors to the site and generally have at least as much control over it as the IT team.

The reason I was giving the presentation was to help introduce CNW Group's latest product (and the reason I've been so busy lately): the MediaRoom. Hopefully, it will be a peaceful resolution to any disagreements between IT and communications.

What is the MediaRoom?

The MediaRoom is a Web Content Management System designed for corporate communicators. It integrates easily with your existing website, and is easy to use so that the media section can be updated quickly and painlessly. If you can send an email, you can update your website with this. Anyone familiar with blogging tools like Wordpress or Blogger will be able to understand the MediaRoom CMS pretty easily.

As my boss, Nicole Guillot (CNW Group's Vice President, Product Management and Operations),  said:

“In today’s 24-hour media environment our clients need to communicate their messages—or respond to a crisis—with complete immediacy. CNW newswire clients can set up their CNW MediaRoom to automatically post news releases as they cross the wire. They can make any other changes or uploads anytime and anywhere there is an internet connection.”

Examples of the MediaRoom technology in work can be found on the newsrooms for Kellogg's, Match.com and Delta Airlines. I think the only downside of these examples is that they don't show how truly flexible the MediaRoom is, and how much you can do with it.

PR in Canada wrote about the MediaRoom, as did CMS Wire. You can also find out more about the CNW Group MediaRoom offering by visiting Newswire.ca/MediaRoom or by checking out the Social Media Release CNW put out about the MediaRoom.

If you've got any questions about it, I'd be happy to answer them for you (mostly my roommates are just sick of hearing about "content management systems" and I'm still pretty excited about the MediaRoom).

-Parker

Browser PlugIn Idea

Even though I've heard that E is the most commonally used letter in the English language, I'd say that the letter J might be the key that is used most often on my keyboard, and that has to do with the fact that it is the shortcut for Google Reader that allows you to quickly jump to the next post.

I check the RSS Feeds that I subscribe to a couple of times a day, and using the J key (and occasionally the K key to backtrack when I go too fast) I can get through a hundred of feeds in a couple of minutes as I scan the headlines and text for something that interests me.

The other day, as I was looking actually visiting a blog, I automatically went for the J key to scan to the next post. It obviously didn't work, but it gave me an idea:

How neat would it be if there was a browswer plugin that would allow you to quickly navigate a blog or website using only a few keys in much the same way Google Reader works? I imagine the pluggin as working so that it would automatically recognize a Headline or new section and jump to it.

On a blog, it would work relatively easily. On a site with a more complex website, I think it could work as well. Rather than scrolling all over the place though, it would just move onto the next section and highlight it for you.

What do you think? Does this idea have merit?

-Parker

On LinkedIn

A few weeks ago, I found one of my coworkers on LinkedIn and added her as a contact there. The next day, I received an email from her explaining that she didn't really use LinkedIn very often and wasn't sure how it worked or how to use it effectively.

As with all social networking sites, I think you will get out of it what you put into it. I don't actually use LinkedIn very often (I prefer Twitter and Facebook), but I still maintain a presence on the site. My thought is that if someone wants to connect with you, make it easy for them.

To start out, having a completed, up-to-date profile that includes a photo is a must (this goes for most networks). This lets people know that you are actually active on the site, and that your message or invitation to connect won't sit in their inbox for months at a time.

You can take your level of involvement further than just maintaining an up-to-date profile. By answering a question in the Answers area of LinkedIn, I was able to make a good connection with someone that I would have otherwise never met.

I also always say that social media is social, and that when you are requesting to add someone as a contact don't just send the templated "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn" message. Instead, personalize it. Remind the person of how you met, or if it is someone you know well send them a quick hello or maybe why you'd like to connect with them on LinkedIn. Just as a personalized, relevant pitch letter to a journalist can go a long way, a personalized, relevant inviation to connect on LinkedIn is worth a lot more than the service's pre-written invitations.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago after receiving a whole bunch of the pre-written inviations in a row, then recieving one that was personalized. In the future, I'll probably remember that one connection more than any of the others.

Now, this is by no means the definitive guide on how to use LinkedIn, and if nothing else has gotten me interested in learning more about it, and being a bit more active there.

LinkedIntelligence, the unofficial blog for information about LinkedIn, has an exhaustive list of "Smart Ways To Use LinkedIn."

Dave Taylor has a good article about LinkedIn, and notes one of the reasons why you should have a detailed profile:

"It makes you more findable for others, but even more importantly, when you initiate communication with someone else, the first thing they'll do is go and check out your profile. Even if your profile isn't that great, the fact that you've spent the time trying to make it comprehensive will tell them that you're serious, that you respect their time and attention, and that you want to use LinkedIn to its fullest capacity."

An article from last August called I Got My Job Through Social Networking was an interesting read, provided some interesting advice about asking for recomendations on LinkedIn. However, I feel odd about asking for recommendations on LinkedIn. it just seems forced.

What are your thoughts on the recommendation system on LinkedIn? Do you have any LinkedIn advice?

If you're on LinkedIn, feel free to add me as a contact: http://linkedin.com/in/parkermason

-Parker

The Convergence of Phones and Computers

In what I would say is a very smart and practical move, it looks like Nokia is considering entering the laptop industry. Why does this move make sense? Because as Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasuvo says "we don't have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a mobile phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging."

From that same interview with Finnish media, he adds that "hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone."

Similarly, Taiwanese manufacturer Acer, traditionally known for making computers, has unveiled its new line of mobile phones. Unsurprisingly, the phones are Wi-Fi enabled smart phones that will be running a Windows operating system.

Echoing the Nokia CEO's remarks, Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci said that "for a large part of the world population the first opportunity to connect to the Internet will be via mobile computing, either through smartphones or netbooks."

In a few years from now, I think that you will be hard pressed to make a distinction between a personal computer and a mobile phone, as they will essentially be the same device.

A few years ago (even a year ago), people were rushing to develop websites specifically for mobile phones. These plans seem to have fallen by the wayside as now mobile phones are capable of handling rich content just as easily as computer-based web browsers.

Similarly, it should come as no surprise that mobile banking is expected to explode over the next few years. As TMC.net reports, mobile phones are expected to be used for more than $860 billion worth of transactions by 2013, creating revenues of over $10 billion for banks and other service providers.  I couldn't find any information about the growth of the online banking industry over the next few years, but I imagine that it was pretty similar to what is expected for the mobile banking industry.

(thanks to Textually for pointing some of these stories out!)

-Parker

Game Developers are Just Like Musicians

Right now, everyone's attention is focused mainly on music piracy. That's because people have figured out how to get music for free (or download it easily for a small price) for a long time. This is due to the fact that the average size of a song is only a few MBs, and an album is generally less than 100MB. Downloads are quick, and "piracy" so easy that it has become commonplace. The reason that downloading isn't as widespread for movies and television shows is because the files are so much bigger, and often greater knowledge of which media player to use is needed. Pretty much every audio track you are likely to download will play on your mp3 player, as well as on your computer somehow. It seems that few video files will play on a basic install of Quicktime or Windows Media Player, and that often additional plugins are needed (and yes, I'm sure that if you are reading this blog you know how to download and play movies easily on your computer - you aren't the people I'm talking about).

However, I think that this will rapidly change. People will quickly realize how much media they can get via the computers and lawsuits like those initiated against file sharers by the major music labels might be directed at those sharing movies and television shows.

And that is why it is so refreshing to see the stance that some indie game developers are taking. Like the independent musicians before them that have managed to be successful while giving away their music for free, these developers can do the same.

"We're all here because we love making games first and foremost," said independent games developer Steve Swink, echoing similar statements from independent musicians that just want people to hear their music.

The quote is from an article on Techradar called Is Free Really The Future of Gaming? that looks at these issues from both the perspective of the smaller, independent developers like Wink as well as larger studios like Sony and EA.

The article also raises the question about whether or not advertising is really the solution to creating free medium. This applies to media besides games, and I'm inclined to think that advertising isn't really the solution.

Rather, I think that companies will work more in tandem with game developers. The obvious example is of a car company working with a game company to create the virtual experience of driving the car. To move beyond this will be more difficult, but nobody said that business is easy. Similarly, I've been seeing more and more examples of corporations teaming up with musicians to essentially sponsor a song or album, and offer downloads of it for free as a way of promoting their product.

Games have also been using the add-on content model, in which the initial game experience is free but you can buy upgrades or customization for a price. With this model, they once again have something in common with musicians that have discovered they can give their basic music away for free and charge for scarcer goods like vinyl LPs or t-shirts. The game developers will just have to create demand for in-game goods in a similar way.

-Parker

iPhone Unpopular in Japan? I'm Not Surprised.

The first time I ever owned a cell phone was when I moved to Japan to teach English in August of 2004. With the help of some friends, I picked out a phone that cost one yen (about one cent Canadian) with a fairly reasonable month plan.

It was a flip phone with one large, very bright color screen on the inside and another smaller screen on the outside. The phone was capable of taking photos and video. Similar to a Blackberry, the phone could also send and recieve emails.

The web browsing capabilities were limited only in that I don't think there was much mobile content out there at that time, most of that which was there was in Japanese too complicated for my limited vocabulary and was otherwise difficult to navigate on such a small screen.

The phone was capable of playing mp3 ringtones. I never investigated whether or not it would work as a music player because I had just upgraded my Panasonic Shockwave Discman (!) for a buggy, Toshiba Gigabeat mp3 player.

The point is that this was one of the cheapest, least complicated phones available in Japan in 2004.

Five years later, it doesn't really surprise me that the iPhone isn't very popular in Japan and that carrying one around would be considered "lame."

-Parker

What is a Social Media Release? (PodCamp)

Although I wasn't able to attend PodCamp Toronto this year, I've been doing my best to catch up on some of what went on there. One of those sessions was a live recording of Inside PR, and I just got a chance to listen to it today. During the course of that recording, one of the audience members told Inside PR that she had recently listened to a webcast where the moderator asked the panel of PR pros what a a Social Media Press Release was, and that they couldn't answer (the fact that a panel of apparent PR professionals couldn't explain what a SMR was is another blog post altogether...).

Fortunately, the Inside PR guys were able to answer the question for her, and I really like their answers.

David Jones made the point of saying that the Social Media Press Release (though I prefer the simpler term Social Media Release) is really just "an online, electronic press kit" and that "it is a place to put multimedia content around your client's traditional, static, text press release."

"It is just an easy place to point people to get content," he adds. This is similiar to what Martin Waxman says when he notes that the Social Media Release isn't a magic bullet - just because you've created a release with multimedia content around doesn't mean it will result in coverage for your client. It is a part of  a strategy (see #4 on Mitch Joel's list of ways to pitch a writer), but only one part and not the whole thing.

I would also like to add to Terry Fallis' point about breaking out and seperating the quotes in the release. It does make it easier for people to quickly see what is being said and by whom, but I think it is only a stylistic choice. Seperating the quotes can be dones just as easily in a traditional news release, and it all comes down to what the writer thinks the best way to tell the story is.

If I remember correctly, some of the early thoughts on styling a SMR called for breaking out the quotes and providing the information in point form. Again, they are both just stylistic choices.

On a related note, I'm impressed with the quality of the live-recordings of Inside PR. The audience participation also really adds to it, and I think the team should look for more chances to do these.

-Parker