Corporate ClueTrain

In Chapter 4 of "We the Media", Gillmor specifically takes on public relations and marketing types with some rules he has developed. He starts, though by confessing, "I'm always glad not to be doing PR or marketing."

I'll confess that my combination of MBA and now Journalism coursework, I'm appreciating all sides of the discussion, but I would still be glad to be doing pr or marketing work. Here are his rules, and my commentary...

1) Listen hard. Check. I've blogged about this here. In any context, you can never listen enough. Listening builds trust. You also cannot have a conversation if one of you is not listening while the other is talking.

Here is Sun's contact us page. There are a million different ways for a customer to talk and for Sun to listen.

2) Talk openly about what you're doing, and why. Check, check. This is transparency. I learned the hard way a long time ago. I was working for a company that was building a new plant, but wanted to keep it a secret to surprise the customer (go figure). When the customer specifically asked, "Are you building a new plant, right next door to us?" my boss replied, "No, why do you ask?" This customer looked at me and just shook his head. When my boss left the room, he said, "Do you honestly expect me to believe that you are not building a plant, when your plant has already told my plant?" I told him that we were, indeed, building a plant and he was relieved to know the truth. But, we both were confused about why my boss would lie about something like that. All my boss could say was that it was going to be a great surprise to the customer when it was finished. All the customer could say was that it was an insult to be left out of the process from the beginning.

While Sun appears to be very open about everything they are doing all over their site and across all of their communities, The Press Community of Sun, focused directly at the media, makes it easy for the press to find the latest news and information about Sun, whether it is generated internally, or externally.

3) Ask questions. There are customers who know more about your products and services than you do, and may also have interesting ideas for new products that you might not have thought about before.

At the bottom of most Sun webpages, there is a question asking how useful this page was to the user, expecting a response.

This site met my need today.
Select --> 6 strongly agree 1 strongly disagree

4) Syndicate your information to the widest audience in the most efficient way. Good point. You can never communicate wide or well enough. Brian Russell, founder of audioactivism.org touched on this theme when he spoke to our class about podcasting. His goal is to educate people about media literacy, with a focus on storytelling. The Cluetrain mentions that PR people aren't as interested in stories as journalists are, prefering happy endings and not the complexities of life that a story implies. There is a growing interest in storytelling in the nonprofit world, and Andy Goodman is a consultant doing an excellent job helping organizations do this.

At the bottom of the Sun employee blog page, there is an XML buttom for the combined RSS feed for the site.

5) Help out by offering more, not less. Here, he is encouraging firms to keep a lot of information on their websites so that journalists can find it and then customers can, too. There have been studies done in the pr literature that have found that it is not always easy for journalists to find the information they need on a corporate website. The links are not labeled well or the information is not tailored to their needs. Companies do need to think about who their publics are when they put websites together.

Looking at the community page for Sun, you can see that they think broadly about their publics.

6) Post or link to what your people say publicly, and to what is said about you. Brian Russell calls this "link love." The Cluetrain talks about a hyperlinked world, where information is decentralized, which leads to more innovation.

The press community includes links to articles about Sun in other media, as well as executive blogs. There is even a link labeled "Contrarian Minds".

7) Aim carefully at people who really care. Marketers are notorious for sending information out to more people than really care about them, which means that they are probably leaving out people who really do care.

Sun has a way for people to register to become part of the Sun community. This enables them to direct their information at people who really care.

8) Correct your mistakes promptly and honestly. I have noticed that newspapers are getting better at this--putting corrections on the front page. Maybe corporations can take a cue from this.

I did find one instance on the Sun site of an apology for a software glitch.

9) Thank the people who teach you new things. I can't count the number of times that I have given feedback to a company, because I cared about that company, and that feedback has been ignored or worse, been met with resistance. Firms don't often understand that if we are willing to actually tell you what is wrong, we actually do care. When we take our business and leave, we have decided that you are not worth telling what is wrong.

Jonathan Scwartz's blog publicly thanks Larry. I don't know enough about the industry to know who Larry is, but when you go to his blog, you can't help but notice it.

10) Experiment constantly. Risk-taking is not easy nor popular, but it is the only way to grow. Innovation is what keeps people inspired and interested in your company. Otherwise, they will always go to see who else has something new.

There is a page under Research that lists all of Sun's projects and that status of each. That is both openness and a commitment to innovation.