Category: Emerging Case Studies
Is urban violence viral? It might be, according to experts cited in this New York Times magazine article. The essence:
CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).
It seems plausible, and interestingly, very similar to our approach to stakeholder management at the office–except in that case, we’re trying to foster the spread of behavior rather than hinder it.
Either way, the central issue is network effects, and in particular, the role of hyper-connected actors within the network. Think of it this way: If someone catches the cold, but only interacts with a few other people, the rate of transmission is likely to be low. If on the other hand the ill person shakes 100 hands a day, well, a lot of people are probably going to get sick. Substitute the willingness to enact violence, or support for your company’s SAP implementation, for the common cold, and it’s clear that not everyone in the network is equal in the effects they exert on the whole. It’s all about dealing with the critical few.
For the seminal academic piece read Rogers; for the seminal popular piece read Gladwell (the book or the original article).
This morning in the Wall Street Journal[1] I read that GM is going to restate results for 2001, and possibly, subsequent years. I then clicked over to the FastLane blog to read GM’s take on the issue and found … nothing. Nothing yet, at least, and I’ll be interested to see if Lutz or others offer an account on the site.
What’s more, I notice there’s not much at all happening at FastLane these days. There are only three posts on the front page, and only five over the past six weeks or so. (compared to eight in May and 11 in June).
When FastLane debuted most new media observers credited the site with being the "right" way for a big company to publish an external blog: posts by senior leaders, not highly spun by the PR group, and a mix of marketing flogs and candid takes on the company.
Now, though, I wonder if the site’s losing its steam. We lose steam at CommLog from time to time, but we also don’t widely promote CommLog as a portal into our firm. If anything it’s a mix of hobby for us and service for clients, with any branding benefits a plus.
Is FastLane becoming SlowLane? We’ll see, but the announcement of earnings restatement is exactly what a company using blogs in the "right" way would use a blog for: to offer an authentic, not-press-release take on the issue to supplement their other communication efforts.
We’ll see if they do.
- Subscription only; here’s a link to Reuters’ story.
Friend, colleague, and CRA client Steve Wilson of McDonald’s is getting some well-deserved recognition for his efforts to bring blogging to the Golden Arches. (This ClickZNews piece is just the latest, and Steve’s been hitting the conference trail pretty aggressively as well.)
Just over a year ago Steve asked that I speak to a collection of McDonald’s leaders and content managers. The topic was the implications of new media (in this case blogs and wikis) hold for internal communication and leadership communication in companies of McDonald’s complexity, and the progress his team has made since then is remarkable.
Steve blogs "outside the firewall" as well, and there’s a nice bio of Steve here.
CIO Insight is currently highlighting what it describes as the story of “The CIO Who Admitted Too Much.”
[T]he CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the heat for a wide range of technologies that weren’t working out.
“I’ll start by saying that the vast majority of system problems we have are problems related to updates,” [CIO Shawn] Schwegman wrote. “These update problems have been manifesting themselves as inventory update failures, missing orders, missing images, incorrect status synchs, etc.”
“At the end of the day, all of these problems boil down to Overstock’s failure (read, my failure) to architect a system that can handle real-time updates properly,” Schwegman wrote.
“I cannot apologize enough for both the number of problems you all have had to deal with and for the length of time you’ve been plagued with these problems. I consider this one of my greatest failures over the last two years and I am terribly sorry.”
The article’s title, which asserts that the CIO admitted too much, misses the mark. Stepping up to take responsibility for what his business partners were ultimately going to blame him anyway is hardly the worst of his sins.
Schwegman did two things wrong. First, when the memo leaked, his lame spin–that “the memo was simplified because he was writing ‘to a bunch of non-technical people,’ and that simplifications may have been misleading.”–exacerbated his problems. Second, after offering his mea culpa, he failed to speak with certainty about the next steps needed to begin solving the problems.
There’s an interesting conversation about PR and new media going on in the blogosphere right now. First read this by David Weinberger (one of the Cluetrain authors). Among his points:
Now I think PR is entering a phase where it sees itself as helping companies with their public relationships. (”Public Relationships Adding hips to public relations”?) I first heard this term at EdelmanPR (disclosure: to whom I’m a consultant), but I don’t know who coined it. I find the phrase useful because it asserts a connection to traditional PR while pointing to a new dominant possibility. It implies, in line with Tim’s thinking, that PR needs to get out of the intermediation business. It means that more voices have to be allowed to speak from within the corporation, since relationships based on a committee-produced controlled voice will fail. It explains why blogs are such a useful tool: They are public relationships. It assumes there’s persistence to the relationship, not merely press releases thrown in our faces whenever the company has some new crap to flog. It assumes mutuality. It relies on the relationships being based on frankness and transparency.
I heard him make this point at the PR Seminar, and at the time it seemed to strike many of the PR folks there as an insight. David’s post (and you should go read the whole thing) was prompted by this post on “The New Public Relations” by Tim Bray, which also prompted a critical post from Chris Edwards.
Follow those links, too. The points about PR are worth reading, and they illustrate how blogs are conversations as well.
We’ve long advocated for the use of blogs as internal communication tools … executive “from the desk of” blogs, project blogs, department blogs, there are many ways organizations can benefit from using the medium.
A recent column in Darwin managzine outlines some tips so “to ensure that your blog is read instead of inspiring facetious, cheeky t-shirts.” Their tips:
* Keep it conversational and light
* Know your audience and write to them
* Blogs are highly time-sensitive so currency is critical
* Anecdotes are encouraged and expected
* Use links to refer to relevant information
* Be succinct and break-up the text - which encourages “scanning”
You can find the entire article here…
Also of note at Fast Company Now is this FC blog entry about an email CNBC sent to staffers earlier this week announcing the cancellation of Dennis Millers show (be sure to read the deconstruction … its funny, sad, and spot-on). This entry is eerily reminiscent of examples we use in our consulting practice (our favorite: this memo at InternalMemos.com.
The problem here is medium, not message, and as weve written before, its a function of media richness. CNBC made a classic mistake: pushing a rich message through a lean channel. When that happens the message is always misconstrued … in this instance, as being relationally insensitive, and surely for some, cowardly.
(CNBC also made another mistake: waiting until the fifth sentence to deliver the bad news. If you have a hammer to drop, drop it right away. It makes you look candid rather than cowardly. Folks, Im writing to tell you some bad news: This Fridays Dennis Miller Show will be the last. Now let me explain why. … thats the way.)
CNBCs missive reflects the rub of extremely cost-efficient channels like email. Theyre fast, easy, and most of all, inexpensive. But unless the content is lean, theyre also a primary cause for misunderstanding at best, and for damaged leadership credibility at worst.
At least they didnt text “U R Fired :-(” …
I think we all understand that instant messaging (IM) has become a standard way for many professionals to keep in touch with their friends, family, and peers. META Group found recently that:
Instant messaging (IM) is most frequently used at work, not at home, according to a survey of 300 global organizations released today by META Group, a leading provider of information technology (IT) research, advisory services, and strategic consulting. However, META Group cautions that just because messaging takes place at work does not mean it is work-related. According to the survey, 57% of respondents use IM at work for personal reasons. Perhaps more surprising are findings that suggest 56% of respondents use IM at home for business purposes.
The title should continue: “… and that suffer as a result.”
Today’s case study: TransformingUSAirways.com.
What better way to reassure the flying public and shareholders than through the first-person, personal, and timely voice of a weblog? Instead, USAirways conveys information about its bankruptcy and transformation with all the confidence and personalization of … well … a bankruptcy filing. Here’s what greets you on the home page:
On September 12, 2004, US Airways Group announced that the Company and certain of its subsidiaries filed voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. The action is intended to provide the airline the opportunity to implement its Transformation Plan built on lower costs, a simplified fare structure, and expanded service in the eastern U.S., Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. The case will be heard in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, Virginia.
One hopes they’re not also relying on this site to convey information about their transformation to the employee population …
Another interesting piece in the current issue of Fortune describes three current ad campaigns from Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, and RE/MAX that “boast about basically ruining employees’ lives for the benefit of the customer.”
“It kind of surprises me that they’re doing this,” says Maynard Brusman, a workplace psychologist based in San Francisco. “So much in the workplace now is about emotional intelligence and understanding the needs of employees. This to me sounds clueless.”
