HC+T Update: August 2, 2013

From: "HC+T Update" <shel@holtz.com>

Subject: HC+T Update: August 2, 2013

Date: August 2nd 2013

August 2, 2013
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It's good to be off the road! I've had time to blow through client work but also to write some posts I've been thinking about. I hope your summer is treating you well!

PR must abide by and overcome search restrictions on native advertising

Google has doubled down on its rejection of native advertising, adding language to its official policies that requires webmasters to include the rel=nofollow in links within sponsored content. That means they won't be a factor in a site's PageRank, and they won't be discoverable via search. That may be a mistake on Google's part as the nature of native advertising changes, but in the meantime, we need to follow the rules and find other ways to make sure our content attracts attention. Read more

Slow adoption of social business is a failure of leadership

Senior leaders and board members still don't take social media seriously beyond its marketing role. That could become a governance issue as social data that could reveal significant information that would require a shift in strategic direction goes unnoticed by the very people responsible for an organization's strategy. Read more

This week on FIR

I spent some time with Corey Connors, Corporate Communications Director at the engineering firm Fehr & Peeers Transportation Consultants. The intranet at Fehr & Peers includes an employee activity stream prominently featured on the home page. This view into what employees are up to have raised engagement and has become a go-to destination for virtually all employees. Our chat at the company's Walnut Creek, California, office is now an FIR interview. Meanwhile, on episode 714 of The Hobson & Holtz Report, we cover the demise of the AdAge Power 150, a twitter-themed hotel, the mobile-social connection for B2B marketers, how to derive value from blog lists and rankings, how Huffington Post integrates Twitter into its content, and a report on the growth of the PR industry.

The items here that were published during the last week I found particularly interesting -- and you may have missed them amidst other stories that got bigger play. I select these stories from a pool of items I collect during the week at LinksFromShel.tumblr.com, which you're welcome to peruse. It's the same collection from which I draw stories to report on For Immediate Release, the podcast I co-host with Neville Hobson. These stories also appear in my weekly blog post, The Friday Wrap.

Now you can embed Facebook posts

You can do it with tweets, YouTube videos and Instagram photos, but until this week, you couldn't do it with Facebook posts. Now, hoping to spread Facebook posts into non-Facebook conversations, the company announced that you can embed status updates, videos and photos into blog posts and news stories. All you'll have to do is click the "embed post" option and copy the code into your own content, writes Todd Wasserman for Mashable. Of course, as is always the case with Facebook, you'll have to wait until they roll the feature out to your account. Based on my experience with Graph Search, I'm not holding my breath to see the embed option any time soon.

Google is testing a local news product for Google Now

Employees at Google are the guinea pigs in an experiment to add local news "cards" to Google Now, the search results interface that comes built into Android smartphones (and is accessible on iPhones if you download the Google Search app). Since the primary function of Google Now is to provide contextually relevant information based on your location, the time of day and your interests, adding local news makes tremendous sense. It's also wholly consistent with the social-local-mobile convergence. Christopher Mims wrote about the test in Quartz, quoting Johanna Wright, Google's vice president of search and assist: "It teaches me things about my neighborhood. For example, I found out Miss Mexico came to my son's school, I saw that [the local] Chipotle was giving out burritos, and someone was stabbed in the park near my house. It's very, very targeted to you and your interests." There's no wo rd when (or whether) Google will roll the feature out to the public, but, as Mims writes, "If preliminary testing continues to go well, it seems likely."

Social data isn't finding its way into the enterprise

Social media management within organizations continues to be a haphazard and uncoordinated affair, based on Altimeter Group research reported by Aarti Shah in The Holmes Report. Altimeter's study found that "the average enterprise-class company owns 178 social accounts and 13 departments -- including marketing, human resources, field sales and legal -- are actively engaged on social platforms." Yet all that data being collected from various monitoring efforts remains separate from the enterprise data used for decision making. "Organizations have invested in social media and tools are consolidating, but it's all happening in a silo," according to Altimeter's Susan Etlinger, who wrote the report. Writes Shah, "The companies that are making the most progress on this front eschew the 'ownership' question of social data and instead build multidisciplinary ce nters of excellence that don't follow a traditional org chart."

Digital devices upend TV watching as the top pastime

American adults will spend more time consuming content from digital devices than watching TV, according to eMarketer. According to an AdAge report by Cotton Delo, "Adults in the U.S. are averaging five hours and ine minutes daily with digital media, up from four hours and 31 minutes last year and three hours and 50 minutes in 2011. The amount of time they spend watching TV has essentially stayed flat in that time period. it was pegged at four hours and 31 minutes this year, down slightly from four hours and 38 minutes in 2012." The amount of time adult Americans spend with all media is a whopping 11 hours and 15 minutes daily.

The content marketing disconnect: it's an underfunded priority

While content marketing is a priority for marketers, the budgets aren't there to support it, according to a survey released by digital marketing company IMN. According to a report in Bulldog Reporter's Daily Dog, "Content marketing was a medium or high priority for 90 percent of those surveyed, but for nearly half of respondents (46 percent), it represented less than 10 percent of the marketing budget." The survey also revealed that monthly newsletters continue to serve as an effective tactic, and that communicators who curate content "ran into issues during the process, highlighting the critical need to understand copyright laws and rules associated with this tactic or risk potential legal repercussions."

The legalities of hashtag marketing

Speaking of legal repercussions, the Council of Public Relations Firms (CPRF) posted an item this week about the legal issues surrounding hashtag marketing. Vejay Lalla and Daniel Nemet-Nejat -- attorneys with the law firm Davis & Gilbert -- point out that marketers are using hashtags created by others over Vine, Instagram and other channels in order to enhance their own marketing efforts. "But," they ask, "is a marketer's use of such content lawful? Can marketers rely on a theory of implied consent from a consumer (which we will call '#Consent') as a form of legal consent?" Not always, they assert. "Using hashtags in a real time marketing campaign might not always allow a marketer to secure written consent," which is required in several states. "For example, there is no place on Instagram to include terms and conditions other than on a brand's own Instagram pag e, and the consumer may not initially visit the brand page when engaging with a marketer through use of a hashtag." The post is must-reading for its list of rules that will help you avoid legal blowback.

Kathy Sierra is back; you should start reading her

Due to a shocking and discouraging series of incidents, Kathy Sierra vanished from the blogging scene a few years back. That was a cause for sadness, since her posts were always meaty and though-provoking for anybody working in the online space. Without fanfare, Kathy has started blogging again with a new blog called Serious Pony. She warns there will be posts about horses, but her post, Your app makes me fat gives cause for celebration. With her customary flair and substance, she explains why too many options in a mobile app costs users some of their cognitive resources. "That sparkly, Techcrunchable, awesome feature? What did it cost your user?" she asks. "If the result of your work consumes someone's cognitive resources, they can't use those resources for other things that truly, deeply matter. This is NOT about consuming their time and attention while they're using your app. This is about draining t heir ability for logical thinking, problem-solving, and willpower after the clicking/swiping/gesturing is done." I'm not the only one who's glad Kathy is back. For an appreciation, read Rex Hammock's post

AVEs are evil; don't use them

The public relations industry has been using Advertising Value Equivalency for decades as a means of measuring PR's impact. I've never supported them, and most measurement experts can't stand them. The Barcelona Principles -- a declaration of standards for measuring PR introduced in 2010 by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication and a consortium of global PR groups -- states clearly that "Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) do not measure the value of public relations and do not inform future activity; they measure the cost of media space and are rejected as a concept to value public relations." A sign of the increasing rejection of AVEs came when David Gallagher, CEO of Ketchum Europe, tweeted that too many of the PR entries at Cannes employed AVEs as their metric. On the Emerging Spaces blog, Matt MOrrison adds that Gallagher later wrote, "Too many entrants mistake advertising equivalency value -- the estimated value of earned media -- as a useful measurement of a result, and some as a result itself." Morrison's post is one of the most cogent I've read in explaining what AVEs are and why they should never, ever be used.

I'm speaking on employee audience segmentation at an Expedia conference on June 19 in Seattle.
In August, I'm off to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to teach an executive communications certificate program for ABERJE.
On August 12, I'm speaking to Goodwill staff in San Jose, California.
On August 15, I'm speaking at a Ragan Communications conference at PG&E headquarters in San Francisco.
On September 25, I'm speaking at an Intuit conference for its company communicators and writers on the writer's role in the social visual communication world.
I'm speaking about content marketing and gamification to IABC/Orange County on October 8.
I'll have a speaking slot at Ragan's Intranet Summit in Chicago on October 16.
I have three speaking gigs the week of October 20: one at the Canada regional IABC conference, one at The Mayo Clinic, and one at IABC's intranet conference in New York, held in conjunction with Prescient Digital Media.
I'm conducting a workshop November 6 at Chesapeake Energy Corporation in Oklahoma City, part of a three-day Ragan conference on the role of communications in creating best places to work/
I'll present a webinar on December 4 for Lorman Education on social visual communication. It'll be available to the public.
Next February 6, I'll speak at an industry conference for manufacturers of Omega 3 products on crisis communications. The session is in Salt Lake City.

Summer's a great time to start thinking about a communciation audit

An audit is an involved process that can take months to complete. While other things slow down during the summer, it's a great time to start planning, since vacation schedules and other interruptions don't have to keep you from getting your ducks in a row. HC+T conducts internal communication audits, intranet audits, social media audits, mobility audits and a range of toher deep dives into your organization's communications. Call me at +1.415.881.7435 or email me at shel@holtz.com.

Since 1996, HC+T has helped organizations communicate effectively in the emerging online space using intranets to reach employees and various dimensions of the Internet to communicate with other stakeholder audiences.

HC+T provides a full range of services for large organizations, from speaking and training to communication audits and strategic plan development.

Visit us at Holtz.com.

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