Recently in People Category

Just a few days ago I praised Forrester’s decision to create individual blogs for all their analysts.  So they finally get it, I thought.  Boy, was I wrong!

Yesterday I noticed how their migration to the new blogging platform was executed:

Yes, that’s the dreaded “The requested page could not be found” message. 

Apparently, for Forrester, moving to a new platform means all old URLs die.

This is just so wrong. Linkrot is a common mistake that companies and institutions make all too often. For this to happen at an institution like Forrester shows me they don’t understand web basics.  Don’t get me wrong, a lot of big companies have made this mistake, but for Forrester it’s inexcusable!

Maybe Forrester should have a chat with Jakob Nielsen.  Check this:

Any URL that has ever been exposed to the Internet should live forever: never let any URL die since doing so means that other sites that link to you will experience linkrot. If these sites are conscientious, they will eventually update the link, but not all sites do so. Thus, many potential new users will be met by an error message the first time they visit your site instead of getting the valuable content they were expecting. Remember, people follow links because they want something on your site: the best possible introduction and more valuable than any advertising for attracting new customers.

At other times, it becomes necessary to re-architect a site and impose a new structure. Even then, the rule continues to be: you are not allowed to break any old links. The solution is to set up a set of redirects: a scheme whereby the server tells the browser that the requested page is to be found at a new URL. All decent browsers will automatically take the user to the new URL, and really good browsers will even update their bookmark database to use the new URL in the future if the user had bookmarked the old URL.

I remember when the same stupid mistake was made by Harvard Business Review back when they switched domains from hbswk.hbs.edu to harvardbusiness.org. Overnight, they destroyed their online ecosystem, as Forrester has just done.

What’s the big deal, you ask?  In today’s connected world, this is brand destruction plain and simple. Not the way to build an attention platform.

In 2000, back when I was working at a large software company, I was responsible for building their online communities. And part of the challenge was trying to explain to executives that “marketing is a conversation” and that conversations occur between people - opinionated, passionate people - not PR departments.

I’d make everyone read the cluetrain manifesto.

People are brands. And like brands, they can be fake or real. The real dilemma is this - is there a line, a demarcation between the voice of the company and the voice of the individual?

My point has always been this: when companies allow their employees to blog, they are strengthening their brand by making connections, building relationships, improving the quality of the conversation with the market, etc. etc.

And yes, there are times when people go off the deep end and act unprofessional. So you’ve got to have an employee blogging policy; and these days that means you’ve got to have a social media policy which covers Twitter, Facebook, and god-forbid, MySpace, along with the rest of the social stuff.

But all of this boils down to common sense; see Sun’s, Oracle’s blogging policy, for example.  The older version spelled it out like this:

1. Do not disclose or speculate on non-public financial or operational information. The legal consequences could be swift and severe for you and Sun.

2. Do not disclose non-public technical information (for example, code) without approval. Sun could instantly lose its right to export its products and technology to most of the world or to protect its intellectual property.

3. Do not disclose personal information about other individuals.

4. Do not disclose confidential information, Sun’s or anyone else’s.

5. Do not discuss work-related legal proceedings or controversies, including communications with Sun attorneys.

6. Always refer to Sun’s trademarked names properly. For example, never use a trademark as a noun, since this could result in a loss of our trademark rights.

7. Do not post others’ material, for example photographs, articles, or music, without ensuring they’ve granted appropriate permission to do this.

8. Follow Sun’s Standards of Business Conduct and uphold Sun’s reputation for integrity. In particular, ensure that your comments about companies and products are truthful, accurate, and fair and can be substantiated, and avoid disparaging comments about individuals.

When it comes to thought-leadership or a CEO blog, the voice of the individual is even more important.

Forrester gets this, finally.  In a recent blog post, Cliff Condon, Forrester’s VP in charge of their social media efforts, explains the company’s official position on the topic of analyst blogging:

   1. Forrester wants more analysts using social tools because it makes for better research.  The research we write for clients has always depended on a rich two-way conversation with experts and practitioners in the marketplace.  The rise of social tools like blogs and Twitter allows analysts to extend that conversation with more people in the marketplace.  The more smart people our analysts interact with, the better our research will be.  That’s the basis of the Groundswell.  Therefore, Forrester is investing in building social tools and associated best-practice training for our analysts so that more of them get involved. 

   2. We are building a new blog platform to provide each analyst with a personal blog.  Our platform today supports team blogs based on the professional roles we serve - such as the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  The new platform we are building will allow our analysts to also maintain an individual blog on their coverage area.  We are doing this so that our analysts can have direct conversations with key players in the marketplace and so clients have the flexibility to engage at an individual analyst level or a team level.

   3. We want to make it easy for our clients.  Our clients rely on us to help make them successful.   They have told us that they are starved for time - they subscribe to our services in part because they conveniently get the insight they need from us and others who join in the Forrester conversation.  Therefore, we can best serve client needs by placing all of our blog content in one place (at blogs.forrester.com), and put it in context alongside the rest of our data and analysis.

I hope that adds some clarity to what we are working on - I’ll share more as we move closer to roll-out later in the quarter.  However, I felt it necessary to add to the conversation now since there has been discussion about analysts’ brands and the Forrester brand.  The fact is we want to do everything possible to give analysts a high degree of visibility. Giving every analyst a personal blog is a step toward that goal. Our analysts’ reputation and our own are tied together.  Our new blog platform is being designed to boost them both.

Every now and then, a CEO or company founder asks me one (or both) of these two questions:

1) must I have a separate blog from the company site?
2) do I have to use my name on the blog?

My answer depends on the individual. It's quite simple, really.

If I think they're a thought-leader in their industry - that's to say their opinions and ideas lead the field - then I often encourage them to blog under their own name on a blog that stands outside their company domain (more on that in a second).

The key assumption is that they are thought leaders. If  I don't get this assumption right, we are all wasting time. There's no point setting up a double-loop model if you aren't going to have something important to add to the conversation. Here's what to do instead: have a company blog, put your press releases on it, and talk about your products. Have your agency Twitter and Facebook away to their heart's content.  Just don't call it thought leadership, because it isn't.

So, now that we've established that, let's look at what is thought-leadership. 

How do you know you are a thought leader?  Here are some clues:

1) people you've never heard of start emailing you long (relevant) notes about something you said on your blog

2) your clients start reading your blog - so do analysts, journalists, and others you respect

3) you notice your blog gets ten times more traffic than your company website

4) you start getting calls from prospects asking for your services (and products)

If these four things don't happen, (1) you're not blogging right, or worse, (2) you aren't a thought leader.

Now let's talk about individuals and why using your name is actually a very good idea.

Authenticity. People relate to other people.  We see this in entertainment: Oprah, Martha Stewart, David Letterman, Elvis, Bob Marley; in sports: Shaun White, Cristiano Ronaldo, Pele, Ali (and unfortunately Tiger Woods); and in business: Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Jeffrey Immelt. So if you're the founder or CEO, and you have a message worth getting out, you want people to know who you are. The connection is personal not corporate.

Passion. If you believe fiercely in what you say, do, and think, then it is this passion that people want to connect to - directly. Without that PR person.  Passion can't be staged.

Trust. Your voice as an individual is far more trustworthy than a faceless corp. And you are believable when you believe.

Findability. People search for names.  So if you write a book, they'll search for you, the author. "Byron Katie"* gets 10X more searches than "The Work," for example.

Longevity. As a person, you live till you die. You may switch companies, or labels, or publishers.  You, the brand, stays constant. Your attention platform is how you go direct to the customer, no resellers necessary. Your followers stay with you forever.

Ideas. Companies don't have good ideas, people do. Good ideas originate in the heads of your people.  These are your thought-leaders. Don't make them anonymous thinking this will help your company; it won't.

The Brand. Too much has been said about you, the brand. A company can renovate its brand by hiring an ad agency.  You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to be real.

Lately, even large companies are seeing the benefits of using thought leaders as ambassadors for their brands. 

So we see Don Tapscott and Tammy Erickson* at NGenera, JSB* and John Hagel* at Deloitte, Chris Meyer at Monitor, etc. etc.

At academic institutions we see examples like Vijay Govindarajan* at Dartmouth and Tom Davenport* and Larry Prusak* at Babson College.

The CEO blog works well for startups and SMBs as well: Gaurav Bhalla* for Knowledge Kinetics, Francis Cholle* for The Human Company, Dean McMann* for McMann & Ransford, Phil Townsend* at Townsend and Associates, Bob Freling at SELF, and Steven Feinberg at Steven Feinberg Inc.

When a blog is shared - i.e. when more than one executive participate -  then it is alright to pick another name, usually connected to the topic we want to blog about. See: Steve Lesem* at Mezeo, Gray Hall* at Alertlogic.

* disclosure: Tammy Erickson, JSB, JH3, VG, Tom Davenport, Larry Prusak, Gaurav Bhalla, Francis Cholle, Dean McMann, Phil Townsend, Bob Freling, Byron Katie, Steve Lesem, and Gray Hall are some of my clients.

What would you do if you received something like this in the mail from a starving artist?

Don't toss 'em!

Vijay Govindarajan on the HBR blog: The U.S. Must Grab the Lead on Green. High time our business leaders started leading, as VG encourages them to do. 

According to VG:

At the company level, many energy businesses are unwilling to cannibalize their existing services and their current investments. At the national level, the same dynamics are in play. Aided and abetted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the traditional energy lobby (oil, coal) is using its political and economic muscle to stifle innovation in alternative energy and clean technologies.

Don’t get me started on the losers at the US Chamber of Commerce!

Click and play... stay positive.

My client, Dean McMann, discusses the "customer intimacy" journey on his site:

This is what we are fed daily... small wonder we don't watch the news!

The courage of MLK is what makes us admire him most. Like Gandhi, like Nelson Mandela, like Malcolm X. Every once in a while we're blessed with leaders like this. And, what do we do? Generally speaking, we kill them.

And yet we are moving forward, despite the hatred.

One: donate to Paul Farmer's Partners in Health, and two: cancel Haiti's debt.

My client Gaurav Bhalla has just published an article in the January-February Harvard Business Review titled - Rethinking Marketing.

Along with his co-authors - Roland Rust and Christine Moormon - Bhalla insists that companies must shift their mindsets from a product-centered focus to building long-term relationships with customers.

This can only be done if companies reinvent the marketing function.

Says Bhalla:

"The traditional marketing department must be reconfigured as a customer department that puts building customer relationships ahead of pushing specific products. To this end, product managers and customer-focused departments report to a Chief Customer Officer instead of a CMO, and support the strategies of customer or segment managers."

You can sign up for Bhalla's Customer-Driven Innovation Newsletter and download "Rethinking Marketing" here >>

What a wonderful world. While you were wrapping Christmas presents, China decided to lock up Liu Xiaobo and throw away the key.

Xiaobo's crime?  He drafted Charter 08, which demands the open election of public officials, freedom of religion and expression, and the abolition of subversion laws.

His wife's cell phone mysteriously stopped working so she could not be reached by the press. Nice touch.

Click and listen. This was Steel Pulse live on John Peel's BBC program in 1981.

If this is how the New China plays the world, it looks too much like the Old China.

We need a new strategy to deal with this kind of stupidity. Obama can start by inviting the Dalai Lama to the White House.

This is how the government in the UK is helping the public understand the significance of Copenhagen. 

In the US we've got Sarah "Snake Oil" Palin - who is only too happy to urge a boycott.

Why is she still in the news?

This is something that keeps happening with IBM's FTP server.

I was just trying to download this report: Seizing the advantage. When and how to innovate your business model"...

I have to say, this happens all the time on the site.

What's going on IBM? This is not exactly the best way to win friends and influence prospects.

P.S. - will let you know if I ever get to the document!

UPDATE: Not sure if this is the same document, but I found it on the UK site.

UPDATE #2: Look what I found at Booz >>

UPDATE #3: And this from EY >>

How do you encourage curiosity across a global organization?

"Many consultants out there would rather just give answers and are even afraid to ask questions. We deliberately hire people who aren't like that, even early in their careers, and senior consultants coach them on how to be inquisitive. Sometimes that means asking a client's managers very difficult questions, really pushing them hard to reveal or do things they're not comfortable with--getting a CEO to explain lagging sales, for example, or to acknowledge why a competitor's pulling ahead. Other times that means encouraging constructive dissent--deliberately engaging with people who disagree with you and being willing to probe them on their point of view. That can be tricky, but persistent questioning usually produces the best solutions."

- Orit Gadiesh in an interview HBR, Sept. 2009

Remember when she debuted?  Too bad her purple reign is over...

According to MIT and the Internet, this is who I am (click to enlarge):

Find out who you are here >>

Alan Grayson makes the case for reconciliation at StopSenateStalling.com:

Throughout the administration of President George W. Bush, the Senate passed much of its key legislation by majority vote:

* The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 passed 54-44
* The Energy Policy Act of 2003 passed 57-40
* The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 passed 51-49
* The Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 passed 54-44
* The FY2006 budget resolution and Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 passed 52-47
* The Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act passed 55-45
* The FY2007 budget resolution passed 51-49

Today, under the administration of President Barack Obama, the House has passed bills preventing climate destruction and reforming our broken health care system, while the Senate searches for 60 votes in the face of Republican obstruction. Every day the Senate delays, more people die from lack of health care.

The filibuster should apply to the initiatives of both parties or to neither. Why should launching wars, and cutting taxes for the rich, require only 51 votes while saving lives requires 60?

Why indeed? Go to StopSenateStalling.com >>

If you haven’t heard about free2work.org, you will. This is part of a growing explosion of consumer-education organizations dedicated to exposing “worst practices” among multinationals.

The hope is that if consumers know what is going on, they will vote with their purchasing power and seek out the companies that are doing good. I’m all for it. Who wouldn’t be? Oh, I forgot about the US Chamber of Commerce…

On the academic side of things, we see the same story emerging:

Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s latest book, SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good argues that “the model of American capitalism that worked so well to raise the fortunes of millions of people last century appears to have hit a wall. What’s good for General Motors may no longer be good for the country. In its place must arise a new model of the company, one that serves society as well as rewarding shareholders and employees.”

Maybe Doug Smith was just a little ahead of the times when he wrote On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We in an Age of Me - which to me is still the best book in this space.

Now we see that Bob Marley is going to be sold like soap.

Is this the end of the Marley brand?

Are we going to see Marley toilet seats and diapers?

Here comes Marley Cola, extra sharp.

Or: Marley chewing gum.

Or: Marley underwear:

Or: Marley real estate.

Or: Marley leisure wear.

Or: Marley golf clubs.

Rasta don't work for no CIA, but he'll work for a private-equity firm.

Shame on you Rita and Ziggy. Shame.

This could kill Bob for real.

Step one: Know who you are...

borrowed from Alina Wheeler's Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team  >>