NevOn

NevOn joins Corante Network

I am delighted to report that NevOn - this blog - is a participant in the Corante Marketing Hub, part of the new Corante Network that launched today:

With the launch and development of the Corante Network, Corante has partnered with scores of the blogosphere's most respected thinkers and writers in specific categories to bring you cutting edge coverage and commentary that will help you stay ahead of the curve, gain valuable insights, and save time. In addition, you'll find various tools and features on the Hub designed to help you find related and relevant editorial.

At launch, the Corante Marketing Hub comprises 20 business bloggers who contribute to a rich offering:

[...] you'll find a mixture of human and machine-driven editorial offerings that aggregate, distill, synthesize, and remix the best writing and thinking from across the Corante Network and beyond. The goal of the hubs: to marry human intelligence and editorial voice with useful technologies to become a trusted and useful tool - one that helps you find and sift through what's worth reading, one that provides valuable context and perspective on the critical issues impacting your industry and interests, and one that engages in and extends the conversations that make social media such a rich and enlightening experience.

I'm very proud and honoured to be part of this group.

Founded in 2000, Corante is the world’s first blog media company, a leader in the emerging social media market, and is helping to pioneer the emergence of blogging as an important and influential form of reportage, analysis and commentary.

Corante’s contributors include many of the most respected and closely-read experts and thought leaders, and Corante's readers, who number more than 300,000, aren’t just casual observers - they're the entrepreneurs, executives, financiers, influencers and other individuals on the cutting edge.

Social Customer Manifesto wins CRM award

Congratulations to Christopher Carfi - his The Social Customer Manifesto blog has just been awarded the 'Best CRM Blog 2005' accolade by the readers of SearchCRM.com.

Well deserved, Chris!

If you haven't encountered Chris' blog before, now's a good time from the communicator's point of view - it's the place where you'll find the social customer manifesto.

Giving time and finding time

I'm currently in the UK, in London, where today I led a workshop for Melcrum on New Communication Technology: Add Value to Internal Communication with Social Media.

This was a full-day workshop which provided a great opportunity to address topics surrounding organizational communication and new media tools in some depth. A terrific group of communicators comprised the participants, all of whom were wholly engaged in the discussions, with lots of questions and questioning. Informal feedback indicates they found the event of great value. The proof of the pudding, as always, will be what they actually said in their formal evaluations which I expect to hear about from Melcrum next week. So perhaps some further commentary here at that time.

As part of this session, I'd asked Euan Semple to give a case study presentation on some of the real innovation he's leading at the BBC in employee use of wikis in particular. A real live and happening-now case study which I know everyone found extremely interesting and useful. Euan, again, thanks for being part of this event.

Off to Paris tomorrow in preparation for moderating the opening session panel discussion at the IABC Europe conference on Thursday morning.

So a rather intense week this week. Things didn't get off to a good start at all when I left Amsterdam yesterday. I didn't have any time to record a contribution for show #89 of The Hobson & Holtz Report before I left. I'd thought that there'd be time once I'd arrived in London late afternoon yesterday, perhaps even a live session with Shel with me on the other end of a real phone line such as we'd done when he was on holiday in Hawaii. Unfortunately, Shel had recorded the show earlier than we'd normally have done it, so for the first time in 89 shows, I'm not part of the show. I was a bit disappointed as you may imagine. (Good example of English under-statement there.)

I won't be live on this Thursday's show either. But this time, I'll have something in the show. By hook or by crook!

The Hobson and Holtz Report - Podcast #89: November 28, 2005

Content summary: AOL Journals update, a cheat sheet lets customers circumvent your IVR system, an ex-Googler starts a blog, replacing press releases with blogs, the future of newspapers, Steve Rubel's high-level discussion on TheNewPR, an open-source marketing example, listener comments, and more.

Show notes for November 28, 2005

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 61-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA.

Download the file here (MP3, 24.7MB), 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 the free Juice (formerly known as iPodder), DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

In this Edition:

Intro:

• 00:29 Shel introduces the show
• 02:15 What the show is about
• 02:37 Where to send comments
• 03:20 Shel received his copy of "Blog Marketing" from Jeremy Wright.
• 03:56 We now have 66 listeners on our Frappr map
• 06:03 Our 100th show is coming up; send us a new opener!
• 07:00 The future of PR and required skills for PR professionals will be the focus of Thursday's show

Listeners' comments discussion:

• 08:26 This week's comments
• 08:30 Josh Hallett on the Metro Orlando blog and its dismal fate
• 10:45 Howard Harawitz on discovering military blogs
• 12:40 Uri Levanon on Ping-O-Matic
• 13:19 Robert Scoble on the FIR book review of "Naked Conversations"
• 18:33 David Jones comments on NewsClip, an RSS newsreader for Blackberry devices

News:

• 20:47 An update to the AOL Journals story
• 27:16 A few items that fall under the notion that transparency is critical in today's environment
• 27:40 First, Paul English has created an IVR Cheat Sheet
• 30:42 Second, a former Google executive has created a blog for former Google employers called Xooglers
• 33:18 Shel revisits the press release vs. blogs discussion with a note on General Motors
• 35:26 Jim Sinkinson gives us a shoutout
• 35:31 Shel idents the show

Features:

• 35:43 The future of newspapers
• 45:55 Going the Distance, a new initiative from Steve Rubel
• 52:25 Shel plays a commercial that's an example of open-source marketing

Outro:

• 56:50 Shel outros the show: Where to send comments, where to find show notes
• 58:23 Music from The Podsafe Music Network, "Fire Escapes" by Supercreep

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are now 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. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 5Mb attachment, please!). We'll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Thursday, December 1...

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel's and my podcast blog.)

The evolution of trust as led by Amazon

Daily Telegraph: A record number of Britons, fed up with the crush, bustle and hassle of the high street, will do their Christmas shopping online this month, according to new figures. Internet stores are expected to take at least £5 billion, a rise of 45 per cent on last year. The growth has been fuelled by cheaper prices, the spread of fast broadband connections and greater confidence about shopping online.

Too true. While I live in The Netherlands, much of the Christmas gift-purchasing in my household will be for family and friends in the UK.

So a favoured shopping destination for us is the Amazon UK website. There, we can find nearly every gift we have in mind - usually researched physically by looking at actual items in bricks-and-mortar shops ands then buying them online for all the reasons the Telegraph says.

This is especially the case with books, movie DVDs and music CDs. Why am I going to buy books from a local bookstore here in Amsterdam, or in the UK when I travel there, and pay the sticker price (which for English-language books here usually has a stiff markup, sometimes up to 100 percent, when the price is quoted in euro) when I can buy the same books on Amazon for at least 30 percent off the sticker price, and often discounted much more? And if I have the purchases delivered to a UK address, there is no delivery charge.

That's the key, in fact - researching your planned purchases offline, and then making the actual purchases online. Price is a big influencing factor, as is convenience.

But for me, it mostly comes down to trust in the online place I'm buying from. That trust goes far beyond just the feeling of confidence you need to have that an online retailer will safeguard your personal and financial data.

As an Amazon user for some 10 years now, my trust is in their ability to simply deliver on their mission "To be Earth's most customer-centric company" (and I've yet to experience anything that damages this trust).

That works for me and thousands of other shoppers.

A very interesting and evolutionary development at Amazon looks like it will take trust to a new level - customer-editable product information in the form of "ProductWiki."

This will enable you to read what others shoppers say in describing a product - not just the official commentary from a product manufacturer - as well as contribute your own description. It's a beta service and it will be interesting to see how it actually develops and when it rolls out.

More power to the customer!

Who cares about Windows XP N?

CNET News: A major U.K. retail store and three of the largest PC vendors worldwide still have no plans to sell the version of Microsoft Windows that does not contain its media player, five months after the version was released. Microsoft started offering Windows XP N, a version of Windows without a bundled media player, in June of this year to comply with last year's antitrust ruling by the European Commission.

Slashdot reports that Windows XP N is a sales flop. Hardly surprising, and surely indicates that most people who use Windows really couldn't care less about what the politicians and vocal critics in the mainstream media say and do regarding a PC operating system.

Dell is one of the PC vendors mentioned in CNET's story. When I bought a new Dell computer in August, it came with Dell's OEM version of Windows XP Pro which included Windows Media Player.

I don't actually use Media Player, preferring Winamp and iTunes for playing and managing music. If Windows XP N minus Media Player had a cost advantage, then it might be different. But it doesn't:

[...] Earlier this year, PC World--the U.K.'s largest computer store chain--said that it would not stock XP N since the full version of Windows XP was the same price, thereby offering a better value to its customers. A PC World representative said Thursday that this situation hasn't changed and there had been "no demand" for XP N, as far as she was aware.

So do I care about this news and the EC ruling? Not at all. Which, I suspect, reflects what many other Windows users think.

Snowed under - a literal tale

"Winter weather arrives," said the headline of my late-evening post on Thursday. The light covering of snow in Strasbourg didn't really match the optimistic headline, but my journey back to Amsterdam last night certainly did.

After a relatively uneventful journey up the A61/E42 autobahn in Germany, the first heavy snow started falling about 20 kilometers south of Venlo, the border crossing into the Netherlands. And it snowed, hard and fast. By the time I got to the German/Dutch border, motorway traffic was down to a crawl in the face of driving snow blowing hard from the west.

I think this storm caught everyone completely by surprise. The motorway hadn't been salted or gritted, so it wasn't long - literally a matter of minutes - before the road was covered in snow in spite of heavy traffic. The further I drove, through Venlo and onto the A67/E34 motorway west towards Eindhoven, the worse the conditions became until somewhere between those two towns, the motorway traffic came to a complete standstill in almost blizzard conditions with snow piling up all around us.

This photo is one I took in a rest stop in between Venlo and Eindhoven, which I'd pulled into because the windscreen wipers couldn't shift all the snow and I needed to manually clear it away, and the washer jets were frozen up.

Boy, it was snowing hard and bitterly cold, and with a very strong wind. Getting out of the rest stop was tricky with lots of wheel spinning in the snow, which I estimated to be about 8 centimeters deep. All this had fallen in just a couple of hours. (You can't really tell how hard it was snowing from this small pic - click the image for a larger version.)

Things got worse heading north at a crawl on the A2/E25 from Eindhoven towards 's-Hertogenbosch. The dashboard thermo in my car said the outside temp was around minus 2 Celsius (about 28 F) so it wasn't long before the paved motorway began to resemble an ice rink.

In two separate places, I saw two cars which had spun off the motorway into the ditch, one car completely overturned and on its roof (in both instances, the police were there).

You couldn't drive fast in such conditions, but that certainly didn't stop some from doing so. Crazy, stupid people.

After passing through 's-Hertogenbosch heading towards Utrecht, things gradually deteriorated until, not far into the journey on that stretch of motorway, all traffic ground to a halt and then proceeded to crawl, at first-gear speeds, for the next 90 minutes or so as the snow continued and the road conditions became very treacherous for driving at any faster speed. I'd say we covered perhaps 5 kilometers (3 miles) in those 90 minutes.

At one point, I saw on the other carriageway a convoy of snow ploughs and gritters proceeding abreast across all the motorway lanes, getting rid of the snow and ice. All while it was still chucking it down with snow. These were massive trucks, surreal-looking with their orange flashing lights and bright spotlights like beacons in the darkness as you peered through the car windows into the white-speckled night. And behind that convoy, a queue of vehicles which stretched for miles and miles behind. No one made it home for dinner on Friday night.

Then, eventually getting to Utrecht, it was like passing from one dimension into another where suddenly there was no snow, no ice on the road and no strong winds. Not even any rain.

From that point, some 40 kilometers from home, I made the remaining journey in less than 20 minutes, arriving here at just gone midnight. Then, spent another 20 minutes watching local TV reporting on the chaos on the roads and railways because of the snow storm.

Quite an experience.

The Hobson and Holtz Report - Podcast #88: November 24, 2005

Content summary: The Washington Post offers content mashups, IBM lets employees podcast internally, recording with Waxmail, our review of Naked Conversations, Richard Edelman's post on PR's readiness for discontinuous change, it's time for annual predictions, pro- and anti-IKEA websites, Amazon's new product wikis, character blogs, a report from Dan York, why CEOs don't blog, listener comments, and more.

Show notes for November 24, 2005

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, an 74-minute conversation recorded live from West Hills, California, USA, and almost live from Amsterdam, The Netherlands..

Download the file here (MP3, 29.8MB), 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 the free Juice (formerly known as iPodder), DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

In this Edition:
Intro:

• 00:30 Shel introduces the show
• 00:58 Shel gets personal about his Thanksgiving trip to LA
• 02:22 Neville traveling for today's and next Monday's shows
• 02:51 We'll dedicate much of next Thursday's show to PR skills required for working in the Web 2.0 world
• 03:59 Where to send comments to FIR
• 04:46 What the show's about
• 05:14 What we have in mind for our 100th show on January 9, 2006
• 06:25 Fifty-two listeners have added themselves to our Frappr map

Listeners' comments discussion:

• 07:34 This week's comments
• 07:36 Several comments from AOL Journals owners in response to Monday's commentary on AOL adding advertising to blogs
• 08:53 AOL Journals comment from Kelly talks about efforts to reach AOL on the issue
• 10:36 Another AOL Journals comment from Peachy
• 11:56 A final AOL Journals comment from Judity Olivia Heartson
• 12:07 Shel on AOL's history of bad PR
• 12:57 An audio comment from Clarence Jones kicks off with a discussion of Google Base in response to Neville's remarks on Monday's show
• 16:44 Clarence addresses the AOL Journals discussion
• 19:00 Clarence works in retail, not PR, but enjoys the show
  
• 19:36 David Jones offers to provide some Canadian content
• 21:43 Steven Davies comments on Neville's review of the University of Sunderland new media conference and invites Shel to the next one
• 22:21 Peter Chen offers a link to Drupal.org and to a podcasting paper he's written

The Show:

• 23:29 The Washington Post is encouraging and spotlighting mashups of its content
• 27:53 IBM is encouraging employees to podcast internally
• 32:35 Neville weighs in, beginning with an explanation of how he's recording his comments
• 33:34 Our review of the book "Naked Conversations"; Shel Israel has posted to the "Naked Conversations" blog about it
• 35:32 Neville has received a copy of "Blog Marketing" by Jeremy Wright
  
• 36:00 Richard Edelman writes eloquently about the PR profession's readiness for discontinuous change
• 39:19 Predictions for 2006 are undoubtedly on the way
  
• 40:24 Positive and negative sites about Swedish furniture retailer IKEA
• 43:15 Amazon.com is launching product wikis
• 45:30 Blog Business Summit blog has a piece about how Gourmet Station has dealt with negative reactions to his character blog
  
• 47:18 Shel comments on the audio quality of Neville's contribution
• 47:58 Mark Ragan, CEO of Lawrence Ragan Communications, gives us a shoutout
• 48:10 Shel idents the show
• 48:20 Dan York's report
  
• 48:35 Dan finds that the PR firm that he thought "got it" really doesn't
• 50:31 A Firefox trick for searching within websites
• 52:13 Dan thanks Neville for the Frappr map
• 52:25 Dan comments on Heidi Miller's audio comment Monday about her recording experiences
  
• 53:50 Why aren't more CEO's blogging?

Outro:

• 61:04 Shel outros the show: Where to send comments, where to find show notes
• 63:04 Don't forget to contribute links at TheNewPR wiki
• 64:32 This week's music from the is "Kenny's Last Dance" by the Marriott Jazz Quintet

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are now 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. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 5Mb attachment, please!). We'll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Monday, November 28...

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel's and my podcast blog.)

Winter weather arrives

Sitting in my hotel room in Strasbourg, France, late evening, catching up with email (always a constant task!), I look out of the window to a world of white. Yes, it's snowing here.

I arrived in Strasbourg late this afternoon after a pretty pleasant drive down from Amsterdam. About 700 kilometers and four countries in total (Netherlands > Belgium > Luxembourg > France) to get here. For the first time, I used a TomTom portable GPS navigator. Excellent - it guided me precisely to my destination without any navigation errors, so I'm quite impressed.

One of the great things about European motorways is that you can drive pretty fast over long distances. My return route to Amsterdam tomorrow night will likely be via Germany where I can take complete advantage of those high-speed autobahns and really motor!

That, of course, depends on the weather now. So back to the snow. A light covering so far but likely to be more overnight. Bitterly cold out there, too (a relative term of course: compared to winter temps in, say, Winnipeg, Canada, 'bitterly cold' here is positively tropical).

But it does look like Europe is heading for a severe winter by some accounts.

FIR Book Review: "Naked Conversations"

In this edition of For Immediate Release book reviews, Neville and Shel discuss "Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers," the new book on blogging and businesses by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, to be published in January 2006.

The Book:

"With a foreword by Tom Peters, author of such business bibles as 'In Search of Excellence,' this book uses more than fifty case histories to explain why blogging is an efficient and infinitely more credible method of business communication. Blogs are easily linked, allowing information to spread rapidly, and blog readers are active, not passive, participants in the communication. Business and marketing decision-makers will find themselves excited about the possibilities after just a few pages." (Promotional text.)

The Authors:

Robert Scoble is a technical evangelist at Microsoft and maintains the popular blog Scobleizer. Besides blogging, Scoble is part of Microsoft's Channel 9 videos team producing educational and evangelist mini-films targeted towards students and professional developers. He is Microsoft's best-known blogger whose blog is read by millions of people annually and is the top-ranking business blog among Technorati's Top 100 blogs.

Shel Israel writes and speaks about blogging, communications and innovation. He also consults with startups as a senior strategy and communications advisor. He is editor-in-chief of Conferenza Premium Reports, the leading newsletter covering technology industry executive conferences. A self-proclaimed recovering publicist, Israel spent more than 20 years as a PR executive specializing in technology startups. He played a key strategic role in introducing some of technology's most successful products, including PowerPoint, FileMaker and Sun Microsystems workstations.

The Review:

Download the 32-minute conversation here (MP3, 12MB), or sign up for the book reviews RSS feed to get it and future reviews automatically. For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you'll also need a podcatcher such as the free Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon. To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, sign up for the full RSS feed.

• 00:22 Shel and Neville introduce the review
• 00:45: The story behind the book's development and the role of the book blog
• 03:47 About Robert Scoble and about Shel Israel
• 05:06 What the book is about and the nature of its content
• 11:52 A concise run-down of the table of contents
• 13:14 Neville describes what he likes about the book
• 16:00 Shel and Neville discuss the international focus
• 16:39 More likes
• 17:28 Blogging with passion
• 18:02 The 'doing it wrong and doing it right' contrast
• 19:11 How the authors recognized others who contributed to the book's development
• 20:17 The book's not perfect, says Shel
• 21:18 No issues to criticize, says Neville
• 21:58 Here are some examples, says Shel
• 25:46 The acid test for what book buyers will think
• 27:16 When the book's coming out and where to buy it online
• 29:21 Our overall conclusion
• 29:48 About this podcast and where to find For Immediate Release.

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
Publisher: Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Hardcover, 272 pages.
ISBN: 0-471-74719-X
Publish date: January 3, 2006 (UK), January 17, 2006 (USA).

Podsafe intro and outro music - On A Podcast Intrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel's and my podcast blog.)