Monday, September 05, 2011

Take the FIR Listener Survey 2011 and help shape the show of the future

Ever since Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson started the For Immediate Release podcast series in 2005 with The Hobson and Holtz Report in January of that year, finding out what our listener community thinks and wants has been important to us.

During the past six years, we’ve done two formal listener surveys, once in 2006 and one in 2009. Both provided us with invaluable information about our listeners’ thoughts, their likes and dislikes, and their suggestions. Those surveys also gave us some insights into changing needs as time went by - our needs as presenters as well as those of our listeners.

Today, we’re launching the 2011 listener survey in which we seek similar insights.

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A few things have changed in three years. The main show is now once a week rather than twice. We have three sponsors today, not two - Ragan Communications and CustomScoop are joined by Pollstream. Tools like Friendfeed and Twitter play an increasingly-significant role in connecting the listener community.

And some things don’t change: we’re still fortunate to have a team of correspondents, established and valuable elements of The Hobson and Holtz Report podcast.

So we want to know how FIR and, specifically, The Hobson and Holtz Report, are in tune with our community. Is it a podcast that contains the content we think that people want? What about specific content elements in each show? What do you like best? Least? Where do you listen? How do you get hold of the MP3 files? Do you have suggestions or recommendations for us? And more.

So if you’re a listener, we’d like to ask you to invest 20 minutes of your time and take the FIR Listener Survey 2011. It’s open now and closes at midnight GMT on Tuesday September 20, 2011. We’ll announce the results after the close.

You can start the survey right here:

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Thanks for your help and for your support.

Posted by neville on 09/05 at 11:42 PM
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The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #615: September 5, 2011

Content summary: Vote for FIR on Podcast Alley; it’s Labor Day in the US; Lionel Menchaca interview is up, interviews coming with Jeremiah Owyang, HSBC, Mark Dollins, Mark Hillary; game-based marketing book review is coming; Neville’s impressions of last week’s Ealing Tweetup; the FIR Listener Survey 2011 is ready; listener comments discussion; Ragan promo; News That Fits: HSBC launches social media newsroom in the UK, Michael Netzley in Singapore reports on corruption in India and more, the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop, the rise of the social enterprise, PRSA and CIPR initiatives on the state of ethics in PR, Pollstream promo, Dan York reports on weight-loss exercising and more; music from Black Furies; and more.

Get FIR:

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; and Pollstream: helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for September 5, 2011: A 65-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

FIR Show Notes links
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 show notes home page for info.

FIR on Friendfeed
Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. 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.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday September 12…

Posted by neville on 09/05 at 10:14 AM
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Wednesday, August 31, 2011

FIR Interview: Dell Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca

We first spoke with Dell’s chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, in an FIR interview on January 12, 2007, not too long after Dell’s first blog was launched. We spoke with Lionel again to find out how the blog and the company’s overall social media approach has evolved in the intervening 4-1/2 years. The interview was conducted using a Google+ Hangout. An audio version is available.

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About our Conversation Partner

imageLionel Menchaca is a nearly 17-year Dell veteran and chief blogger at Direct2Dell, Dell’s main corporate blog.  Over the last 5 years, Lionel has authored hundreds of posts on behalf of Dell. Since launching the blog in July 2006, he helped expand it into Chinese, Spanish, Norwegian and Japanese and continues to work to further extend Dell’s global presence. Before launching Dell’s blog, Lionel was one of the main architects behind Dell’s blog monitoring process begun in April 2006.

He works with a team within the company to coordinate activities and content across all of Dell’s internal and external social media initiatives including the Dell Community Forum and IdeaStorm.  These initiatives have one thing in common: to open direct lines of communication between Dell employees and their customers to improve the products and services Dell offers.

Lionel also serves as a technologist to help Dell define new software to monitor and engage in conversations in the blogosphere, and to facilitate collaboration among the Dell teams that respond to customer feedback. He’s also been a catalyst in Dell’s efforts to build its presence in social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Google+.

An avid fan of computer hardware, gadgets and Web technology, his early career included a stint at quality assurance and tech support for game developer Origin Systems and hardware and advanced operating systems technical support at Dell.

Lionel earned a degree in archaeological studies from University of Texas. He lives in Round Rock, Texas, with his wife, Aileen, and two children, Louis and Mia.

Lionel is on Twitter at @LionelAtDell.

FIR on Friendfeed
Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. 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.

To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full RSS feed.

This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Posted by shel on 08/31 at 11:49 AM
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Interview upcoming on Altimeter Group’s Social Business Readiness survey

Your FIR co-hosts are planning an interview for next week with Altimeter Group‘s Jeremiah Owyang about the release of a new study, “Social Business Readiness.” The study was released today - the presentation is embedded below. In preparation for the interview, we’re sharing some of the study’s highlights in this post. Let us know in comments here or in the FIR Friendfeed room if there are any questions you’d like us to ask Jeremiah.

Social Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare
View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang

Companies are at various stages of integrating social media into their business processes. (Interestingly, a third of the companies surveyed reported that their social media efforts aren’t meeting business objectives.) At the top of the pyramid are “advanced companies,” those that are defining best practices. The 18 companies (out of 144 surveyed) prepare for social business by…

Establishing baseline governance

All 18 advanced companies provide open access to social media for professional use. Five require approval, seven allow employees to engage providing they abide by guidelines and six actively encourage employee participation. None discourage the use of social media; instead, these organizations support employee use of social channels with policies and education. Most of the advanced companies (72%) offer means by which policies are reinforced and employees learn about policy updates and revisions. Of of the 144 companies surveyed, 74% don’t have such baseline processes.

Adopting enterprise-wide response processes

Enterprise-class companies maintain some 178 corporate-owned social media accounts across the spectrum of platforms. “As workflow across the enterprise becomes more complicated, consistency and efficiency decrease, while risk increase,” according to the report. 14 of the advanced companies surveyed have established processes for conducing triage on issues that arise to ensure efficiency and consistency and minimize risks. The Air Force’s response matrix is one example. The report points to H&R block’s needs assessment as another. Thirteen of the advanced companies also prepare for worst-case scenarios (while 56% of all 144 companies are unprepared for a social media crisis).

96% of companies with a formal crisis plan in place felt prepared for an event, compared to only 22% of those without a plan.

Developing ongoing education programs

Most of the advanced companies surveyed (72%) keep their organizations’ social media practitioners up to speed on social media with programs such as brown bag lunches, speaker series and internal conferences, while only 34% of all companies have ongoing education programs in place. Best practice sharing is another characteristic of advanced companies, something only 35% of companies across the board are doing.

Education reduces risk, according to survey respondents. “For example,” the report notes, “companies with a policy in place are more likely to have employees who know how to safely represent the brand in social media, 62% compared to 23% of companies that did not.”

Best-practice sharing and leading social media through a dedicated, shared central hub

In larger organizations, up to 13 different business units are actively engaging customers in social media. The chart below details the extent to which various company functions are formally involved in customer-facing social media efforts:

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“Without proper coordination, this widespread adoption can result in a fragmented customer experience, duplication of resources and increased costs,” according to the Altimeter report. Advanced companies embrace scalable leadership models to minimize that risk. At the center (or hub) of this hub-and-spoke model is a center of excellence, a cross-functional group responsible for coordination the company’s social media strategy, governance, training and education programs, along with research, measurement frameworks and vendor selection. These teams routinely include corporate social strategists, social media managers, community managers, web developers, education managers and liaisons from business units.

The center of excellence (which is the actual name given this group by 16 of the 18 advanced companies identified int he survey) are well positioned to address issues and crises that may arise. Seventy-three percent of companies that have established these teams have clear leadership on social strategy, compared to only 31% among companies without such teams.

Fifty-three percent of companies with a center of excellence “report benefitting from a coordinated approach to social media, compared to just 21% of companies that do not have this team,” the report says.

Despite the steps advanced companies have taken, the study found that even the most forward-looking organizations lack the following attributes:

  • Applying social media feedback—Sixty-six percent of companies have no process ini place for using insights from social media to fix probems and improve products and services.

  • Integrating social data into existing systems—Nearly three-fourths of companies are not integrating customer data generated from social profiles and interactions into customer relationship management (CRM) systems, support programs, email marketing and other systems.

  • Formal measurement strategies—Only 25% of companies have measurement frameworks that inform decisions about how to use social media across the enterprise.

  • Cohesive, mature technologies—Less than a third of companies have standardized internal tools for monitoring, analytics, community management and other dimensions of social media.

The Altimeter Group works with its clients to adopt the company’s Social Business Hierarchy of Needs (another adaptation of Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy). We’ll talk with Jeremiah about the model when during our interview on the results of the study.

Posted by shel on 08/31 at 08:35 AM
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Monday, August 29, 2011

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #614: August 29, 2011

Content summary: Shel’s in San Diego; listen to this week’s Friday Rock Show with Neville as guest presenter; listener comments discussion; Ragan promo; News That Fits: community management trends from Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang, Dan York reports on the Irene social media hurricane and more, the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop, was Irene a hurricane of media hype?, the Mortons/Peter Shankman airport steak event stimulates multiple-channel conversations, Michael Netzley reports from Singapore, Pollstream promo, Boehringer is a good example of how pharma can confidently embrace Facebook; music from The 5 Man Army; and more.

Get FIR:

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; and Pollstream: helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for August 29, 2011: A 56-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

FIR Show Notes links
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 show notes home page for info.

FIR on Friendfeed
Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. 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.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday September 5…

Posted by neville on 08/29 at 09:08 AM
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Monday, August 22, 2011

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #613: August 22, 2011

Content summary: FIR listener survey live next week; Shel’s video interview with Lee Hopkins is up; some impressions of Asia from Shel’s three-country trip for IABC last week; Eric Schwartzman’s workshops cancelled outside North America; no Michael Netzley report this week; SNCR call for entries for the 6th Annual Excellence in New Communications Awards; listener comments discussion; Ragan promo; News That Fits: report on mobile (it’s remaking the industry, QR code use gains ground, web apps gain ground on native apps), Dan York reports on Google Motorola HP and more, the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop, how can iPads lead to better customer service as British Airways and others experiment, Hangouts emerging as source of greatest innovation on Google+, Pollstream promo, Neville’s solo on next week’s show as Shel’s on the road again; music from The Birdinumnums; and more.

Get FIR:

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; and Pollstream: helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for August 22, 2011: A 71-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

FIR Show Notes links
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 show notes home page for info.

FIR on Friendfeed
Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. 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.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday August 29…

Posted by neville on 08/22 at 10:05 AM
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Sunday, August 21, 2011

FIR Interview: Lee Hopkins on Twitter and symbolic convergence theory

Lee Hopkins, FIR’s first correspondent and a social media strategist, has been working on a Ph.D. that originally focused on communication and virtual worlds. He recently shifted his attention to whether the decades-old communication theory of “symbolic convergence” is applicable to Twitter.

In this FIR Interview, co-host Shel Holtz met up with Lee in Sydney, Australia, and recorded a brief video interview about the research. You can read Wikipedia’s explanation of symbolic convergence here.

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About our Conversation Partner

imageLee Hopkins is the CEO of Better Communication Results, a consultancy that has assisted companies worldwide to communicate better for better results. He has consulted to a range of organisations, from the medium sized up to the multi-national. Lee holds Honours degrees in Applied Psychology and Sociology from the University of Surrey in England, a Management Diploma from Brunel University in England, and is currently conducting doctoral research at the University of South Australia in order to achieve the award of Doctor of Communication. He is looking into how the tried and tested ‘Symbolic Convergence Theory’ can be applied successfully to today’s online conversation milieu in order to create positive outcomes for organisations and their publics. He has hosted his own podcast and co-hosted another with Alan Jenkins (the return of which we continue to anticipate).

Lee blogs at leehopkins.net. Follow him on Twitter at @leehopkins.

FIR on Friendfeed
Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. 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.

To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full RSS feed.

This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Posted by shel on 08/21 at 02:27 PM
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