Company Handbooks Changing With the Times (and Other PR Blog Jots)

Company Handbooks Change With the Times
BL Ochman--What's Next
The Internet has been vexing employers as a possible time-waster and productivity-killer for quite some time now. Guidelines about using it have started creeping into company handbooks for employee behavior. BL Ochman laments that some companies appear to be retreating in fear from social media, and praises those who embrace it. Social media policies that make sense are becoming de riguer at the smartest companies. "Protecting intellectual property is key, of course, but social media, like Twitter, is used by smart companies like Zappos, Dell, Southwest, and H&R Block for networking, PR, customer service, raising the company's profile with key influencers, attracting employees, research, learning, broadcasting company news, driving traffic to the company website, and increasing search rankings."

Does the Echo Chamber Matter?
BlogWrite for CEOs
Uh-oh, it's another person going off on social media, declaring it a waste of time for professionals everywhere! Debbie Weil gives an excellent rundown of Alan Weiss's dismissal of social media, and rebuts some of his points. She does relent, however, that some of his arguments are a solid reminder that often, social media enthusiasts and evangelists do exist within our own bubble. "It may be that Weiss is deliberately stirring the pot with phrases like "the Web is a good place to do research... but it's a lousy place to find and meet clients" and "I have no idea who Hugh McLeod is or Robert Scoble." The latter is catnip, of course, for those of us who congregate in the social media space. But a good reminder that we are, to a certain extent, in our own bubble."

Pants on Fire
Communication Overtones
A communications exec at CBS news has crafted a rebuttal to the now-infamous Andrew Cohen rant against PR flacks. Kami Huyse thinks he made some good points, but disagrees with his analysis that PR flacks DO lie, but only because their clients lied to them--something he calls "secondary lies." "Sometimes this happens, but I am not sure that it leaves us less responsible for those lies and our dogged defense of them. He makes a point that public relations and journalism are two sides of the same coin, the hacks and the flacks and he makes the point, "If you don't look good, we don't look good, so play nice, huh?""

Measurement Follies
Naked PR
Some have suggested that perhaps Facebook outpaced MySpace as the social networking king, ie, that it had the most traffic last year. Jennifer Mattern puts a couple holes in this argument, noting that the ways in which we measure such things are frequently, devastatingly, inaccurate, and should not necessarily be our yardstick. "Google also makes it clear that pages that aren't indexed don't count in the trend stats. So for example, if someone visits my Myspace profile directly, they won't count, because it's private and therefore not indexed (that should remain true whether they're taken to my full profile or just the barebones page telling them it's private). It would also mean that if you go to something like your private admin area (in either site), and your settings allow you to be automatically be logged in, you very well may not be counted in this data unless you visit a public page. These kinds of sites have a lot of private areas, so Google Trends really can't compare them accurately."