The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #265: August 9, 2007

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #265: August 9, 2007

Content summary: Shel’s in Denver; new FIR interview posted; two upcoming interviews; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; My Ragan TV launches; how will niche social networks develop?; add your comments to Google News: editorializing the news?; Facebook responds: advertisers can opt out; David Meerman Scott’s Gobbledygook Manifesto; record Skype calls with Callburner; Dan York’s non-shiny-object look at the podcasting book, Facebook demographics and developments, visiting San Francisco; Question of The Week: how to address employees profiting from their blogging; listeners’ comments discussion; the music; and more.

[Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.]

Show notes for August 9, 2007

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Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 62-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and almost live from Denver, Colorado, USA. Download the file here (MP3, 28.4MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon). Listen to this podcast now:

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Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments; or comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR; or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Monday August 13…

Posted by neville on 08/09 at 01:06 PM

  1. Hi Neville,

    Wanted to comment about the company concerned with one of it’s employees profiting from their blogging.

    First, let me see if I have this straight. The employee in question is writing, presumably, a personal blog not related to the company. There aren’t any issues with conflict of interests, competitive secrets or use/misuse of company assets or impact of employees performance. But the employee has gained a growing amount of attention as well as income opportunities from his/her blog.

    If I’ve summarized the situation correctly, I need to ask if or why the company is singling out blogging as an activity of concern. Would the company also be concerned if another employee started selling their paintings at art shows on the weekends? What about the corporate attorney who has his own band that becomes well known and starts getting gigs for pay? (actual situation for a friend of mine) What about the guy in marketing that does voice overs and radio commercials on the side? (something I wouldn’t mind doing) Etc. Etc.

    A generation ago, when companies offered lifetime employeement they could demand - and receive - absolute employee loyalty, included the right to forbid employees from receiving compansation from any other source. To do so was called “Moonlighting.”  In fact, at my first employer after college, a financial institution, there was actually an anti Moonlighting provision written into the employee manual. Getting caught working for another company was grounds for immediate dismissal.

    I don’t think the company in question needs to have special blogging policies or guidelines. Nor, in today’s world do I think you could even enforce such prohibitions.  Instead I think there should policies and guidelines governing overall employee behavior without singling out any spacific activities.

    With respect to this issue I think our company does it right. First, we have policies regarding expected employee behavior regarding privacy, respect, competitive disclosure, conflict of interests, maintaining company reputation, legal/regulatory/compliance issues, etc.

    Specific to this question there is language in our employee manual that essentialy states that employees are permitted be compensated for activites outside of the office as long as:

    * it doesn’t violate any other employement policies
    * is legal
    * it doesn’t impact an employee’s performance in achieving objectives establish by his/her supervisor

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/13  at  05:11 AM

  2. Thanks, Craig. We recorded today’s FIR earlier than usual so this didn’t make it into the show. Listen out on Thurs!

    Posted by Neville Hobson  on  08/13  at  06:50 AM

  3. Thank you for presenting my comments re CNN and advertising. I will be interested in any comments that you get.

    I understand the work that goes into, even a 30sec, audio spots. But I do think Dell’s budget could run to more than one version. Maybe they should run a competition to create some. (that would be very web 2.0).

    Podshow developed something they call DGap to automatically add audio clips into the stream when file requests are served by them (add promo audio to start or finish of hosted MP3’s), but they only have a limited number active at any one time as well. I feel they will have an advantage in using a rule based system, it should be able to make decisions on which audio clip to insert and thus avoid potential conflicts of the sort you referred to in connection with Facebook advertising.

    I see Amanda Congdon addressed the same subject ( in a somewhat more quirky way ) on her blog http://starring.amandacongdon.com/2007/08/03/secrets-to-online-advertising/
    It might be good training material for promoters.

    Also, my comment regarding the episode number may have been unclear as I saw, later, that you do have it in the file name. I was referring to the title I see in my Itunes file listing, it is derived from the MP3 tag described as ‘name’ in the iTunes ‘file info’ page.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/15  at  06:26 AM

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