It’s Like, You Know.  And PLEASE don’t “tow the line”, when a “toe” will suffice.

[a word of warning before you read on: I've already been hit with feedback that this is a bit of a heavy rant.]

To that I say: And rightly so.

Why?

Partly because it’s worthwhile re-reading that excerpt below. But also because it’s become increasingly common to see horrendous typos and lackadaisical attitudes when it comes to social media (SoMe) communications. I mean, we’re now down to just 140 characters or less, so is it too much to ask for some level of accuracy (and in turn, a bit of respect for the audience)? When you see an update from a “senoir” executive and he’s referring to earnings as “bellow” expectations (really not surprising, given this rather poor attention to detail), it’s enough to make one shout, if you catch my drift. The odd mistake or “mistype” may clearly be excused, given that the need for speed and tiny keypads are much the norm today. However, consistently poor use — and abuse — of the language comes across as blatantly unprofessional. In the worst case, it may even put some customers off .

SO, please do be careful before you hit that send, save, submit or update button. 

Here are 6 guidelines to remember when blogging, tweeting, texting and whatever one wants to achieve over the SoMe space that still stand true:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print (the word “print” is used loosely here)
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do (hmm…great advice for tweets and texting!)
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, ALWAYS cut it out (ditto)
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or jargon if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I’m sure you’ve figured out these were written much before instant messaging, texting, Twitter, Facebook, etc., came on the scene. In fact, the guidelines are from a 1946 Orwellian essay! 60+ years on, they still make a lot of sense. 

Brilliant excerpt follows:

Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to airplanes (or letter writing to Twitter?). Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes (potentially social too): it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The point is that the process is reversible.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step…

I look forward to your thoughts, counter-arguments, bellows (no, really) and rants in the comments below. If you dare, read the complete—and rather valuable–George Orwell “Politics and the English Language” essay here.

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Got Corporate Presence + Internet Presence + Social Media Presence?

During engineering school, I landed a short stint as an electronics design intern at Xerox Corp. In 1990, before the Internet ramped up to make things like search easier, we relied on good old filing systems to locate datasheets, manuals, parts, specifications…anything that would help us repair aging or recalcitrant office automation equipment. Life was great and the challenges were fun, except for a couple of managers who didn’t like this young whippersnapper’s “filing” system. Only problem was that the team I worked with could always find anything we needed within seconds…until someone came along and filed away our organized “mess”. Result: Frantic searches and unnecessary service delays.

Enter Robert A. Pease (RAP), Engineer, National Semiconductor. I happened to pick up an issue of Electronic Design magazine lying around the office. Ever since I read that first, and now-classic, Pease Porridge column, “What’s All This Neatness Stuff, Anyhow?”  I realized I was not alone in my filing/search methods. Needless to say, it was great to find a kindred spirit. I quickly learned to ignore any interference and perfected a classic filing method (with excellent turnaround time results). I also became an avid consumer of Pease Porridge over the next decade.

With due apologies to RAP, allow to me to take a crack at “What’s All This Web Presence Stuff, Anyhow?” Here’s one definition (you may want to avoid going to the link, where you’d be obliged to skip the ad): A Web Presence (or Web Site) is a collection of Web files on a particular subject that includes a beginning file called a home page. etc. etc. Amazingly enough, I came across several instances with similar disinformation.

Today’s young whippersnappers might remark, “OMG, that’s waaaay off the mark!” Right. To use the terms “Web Presence” and “Web Site” interchangeably is blatantly inaccurate.

So, what is Web Presence (WP), and why all the fuss? Here’s one formula we propose:

WP = Corporate Presence + Internet Presence + Social Media Presence

The trouble is, you can imagine social media flavors  will inevitably and increasingly make their presence felt all the way  back into traditional and corporate channels too.

And that’s the reason for the fuss. It makes embracing a good web presence management strategy, especially an open dialog with customers, imperative for business success. More about that in upcoming posts, along with quick tips for enhancing your web presence.

Meanwhile, feel free to weigh in with your definition(s), filing methods or SoMe insights – we’re open for debate!

PS: Back to RAP, here are links to some of his classics:

- What’s All This Neatness Stuff, Anyhow? (Electronic Design magazine, Oct 1990, includes photo of his “filing” system)
- And, if you need more, here’s the best of Pease Porridge.

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Last month, some of the bHive core team went on a weekend hike up White Mountain Peak (wiMp, 14,252ft) in INYO National Forest. The third highest peak in California, it is both fair weather and friendly… only insofar as you do not take it for granted. Boy, were there simple lessons learned from this day hike? Certainly, and all are as applicable to practicing Web Presence Management (WPM) as they are to life!

All Sugar and No Salt is as fatal to your Customer as it is to the Hiker
By some miscalculation, we all carried and snacked only on sugary stuff on our uphill hike. Big mistake. The idea was to ease our way to the top on “power” snacks, eat one of those ready-to-cook “real” hiker meals and cruise on the downhill hike. Not only did our systems reject the sugar even before we reached the top, but there also was not one tiny sheltered spot for us to light our backcountry stove. The terrain was barren and winds howling. In hindsight, a few saltines, nachos or even junk food like chips/crisps snacked periodically would have helped a lot.

What’s the parallel here to WPM? Corporate communications are like sugar. Customers, like your system, will reject it to the point of fatality if that’s the only diet they are fed. However, a contextual Social Media (SoMe) practice will keep your Customers trusting and engaged, just like the right pinch of salt snacked periodically keeps the system healthy and balanced. In salt, we trust (in just the right doses, of course)!

“Done that Altitude” is PAST, “Must Do Attitude” is PRESENT
Our hiking team has had its moments. Latitudes stretched, longitudes tested. And, some record altitudes attained, all in good health. All, however, in the past still did not adjust our attitude, what’s a wiMp by any other other name?

What indifference! Continue to be stuck in the past on the only ways you have talked to Customers, taking them for granted, and rest assured the wiMps will become IMPs – InsurMountable Peaks (or, Problems). What worked then is past. What must be done today is to engage in each uphill task with full transparency and deference (or, empathy). Always respect the Mountain, high or low. We need to Listen and Learn from our Customers – and give them a Voice — daily … today, everyday!

The Curious Case of Turtle Tao
We met a septuagenarian on our climb. He was on a solo road trip from Colorado to hike in Utah and California. Let’s call this gent Turtle Tao. He was ahead of us in the morning when we were driving from the campground to get started on the hike. He was driving slow-and-steady on the single-lane dirt road. Needless to say, us can’t-wait-to-calculate-return-on-investment-(ROI) types “forced” him to yield so that we could get there sooner. We started the hike much ahead of Tao. Surely enough, he caught up with us within the hour! He gave us company for the next 1-2 hours and then moved slowly ahead even as he seemed to accelerate without increasing his speed – walking or breathing. Finally, when we reached the summit Tao was there, again pleasantly inquiring after us. Offered me a sandwich bite and did take some summit pictures for our ROI. We lost sight of Tao shortly thereafter in our downhill delirium. He was the proverbial Tortoise, seemingly slow but surely steady and earnest. We were the insolent hares…already at the finish line with ROIs and dashboards!

There seems to be this raging, current fixation on SoMe ROI. Hopefully, we all do not forget that the main goal of Social Media (and WPM in general) is the trusted ongoing engagement it facilitates. Not the arrival at any specific end points or summits. To twist a famous traveling quote: “the point of this WPM journey is not to arrive.” Instead, the engagement and participation it enables are to be enjoyed, to be learned from, and ultimately… to be continued.

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Thinking about moving to the cloud? Here’s some sound advice and recommendations:

• Take time upfront to work out your deployment strategy (on S3/EC2, for example) with your vendor
• Make sure to consider things like redundancy, failover, and disaster recovery
• Last but not least, run tests on server sizing – ensure that you have an idea how many transactions or users can be supported seamlessly on various cloud server instance sizes

I won’t take credit since the suggestions above aren’t mine, they came directly from a client who’s just done this successfully (please feel free to add your own feedback/experiences to the list — positive and/or negative– in the comments) .

Re: migrating to the cloud, a quick scan of these case studies highlights how Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) give companies the building blocks needed to scale and keep up with demand. The categories outline how AWS S3 and EC2 have benefited companies that provide application/media/web hosting, backup and storage, content delivery, e-commerce, search engines and other similar offerings.

There seems to be a dearth of B2B companies in the list, and I wonder why?

A host of other organizations can reap substantial advantages over dedicated hosting  …even more so, one may argue,  in today’s challenging times. And this definitely holds true for B2B companies making the move to the cloud, regardless of their size or product portfolio. Now is the ideal time for companies to position themselves for future growth. Moreover, why leave money on the table?

A recent case in point is one of bHive’s B2B clients, a global leader in wireless LANs and secure mobility solutions. Their Internet/Web infrastructure was using servers co-located at a managed data center to date, and has now successfully moved into the cloud. While they were strategically committed to migrating to the cloud, there were still questions on the process as well as empowerment of their IT team to manage the infrastructure moving forward.

The experts in the bHive’s cloud computing/on-demand services team quickly put any concerns to rest. How? Via a systematic process that included clearly communicated technical analysis, strategy and objectives, followed by working sessions, training and complete documentation to ensure a smooth transfer of skills and expertise. The team got down to work, with the focus on efficient implementation and quick transition of the infrastructure to the client’s IT team.

This B2B client is already seeing benefits that go beyond the immediate 60 percent cost savings in IT capex (projected to increase to over 70 percent over the next 3 years). The most compelling part of using bHive’s services was that the customer’s transition to the cloud was done in a seamless manner with no impact on uptime and performance to users. Another unique aspect of this specific bHive implementation was establishing VPN tunnels that enabled a completely transparent implementation of the cloud infrastructure as an extension of the client’s corporate network.

David Noland, bHive’s typically reticent cloud computing expert in residence, was unusually vocal about this success: “One of the neat things was the ease of migration…even though we had to deal with a range of legacy systems that came from past acquisitions et al, it was simple to create images of the existing servers and make replicas using AWS. Things that would normally take days were literally done in a matter of hours, so we were able to quickly set up staging servers, take OS snapshots, implement flexible provisioning of storage and testing environments. This helped the team to quickly and confidently move the project through to completion within six weeks.”

The B2B client is pleased by the success of this implementation and is looking to expand the scope of the project.  bHive has also worked with companies like Lenovo and Sun to solve specific challenges related to cloud infrastructure. But, given this recent experience, I now think forward-thinking small- to mid-sized companies stand to gain the most. Clearly, this project is a model to other enterprising companies looking to leverage the cloud. Learn how you can benefit too.

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Came across an interesting post on weSRCH.com that reflected upon a maxim used in business circles: Without profits, customers don’t matter. This brought to mind an insight that emerged out of a recent meeting with a harried one-person marketing “team” at a fairly large company (quote): “Without a decent web presence, content don’t mean jack anymore…”

In “The Practice of Management” Peter Drucker said that the purpose of business is to find and keep customers. Granted, Mr. Drucker was writing to an audience of executives schooled heavily in business and who had a tendency to maximize profits to the extreme. Some take this to mean—especially during tough economic times—that it is okay to lose money in order to attract customers. But this can only happen over the short term. Lose money consistently and soon you’ll have happy customers but lose your business.

We see a parallel today, where resource-strapped marketing teams seem to be frozen into inaction. Do you want to have great content and lose your audience? Most companies have a wealth of excellent content, with potential that’s just waiting to be tapped. These typically exist or are created as standard collateral, success stories, application notes and white papers or even take more appealing forms such as (say) flash, video and instructional webinars. All too often, unfortunately, this content simply gets uploaded to a corporate website, buried within pages of fairly static content never to see the light of day. In all fairness, many firms do get creative and repurpose content with calls to action in newsletters, direct marketing and online advertising. Shoot me for saying this… while these traditional approaches may have had merit, they’re a bit tired and running out of steam.

Your content may be king, but it’s begging for more.

The answer is to make the content do the legwork. Its greatness lies not in the words or audio/video themselves, but in what it can do for your business, brand and image. To manage your web presence means to effectively spread your content out there beyond your corporate website, where it matters. Encourage community, sharing and feedback, and make your audience a part of the conversations (in today’s Web 2.0-enabled world, they will do it anyway*). This in turn will further enrich your overall content offering and earn the respect of your customers and prospects.

Content without an audience is like having customers without profits: meaningless and unsustainable. You can now take advantage of content management platforms that seamlessly integrate with corporate and social media channels for efficient distribution of content to audiences. These tools can help even the leanest of marketing teams to manage and grow a high-impact web presence, attract and grow a loyal and attentive audience, and ultimately grow your sales and—the key word here— profitability.

* for example, see theses 8-13 of the Cluetrain Manifesto

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