The embeds of the future will work for the company, and be paid by the company to provide news about the company in a multitude of formats. Print, newsletter, video, blog, podcast, moving billboards, tattoos — whatever it takes. Because the bits and pieces of Corporate America that have a story to tell will still have their stories – just no ready outlets.

How is this different than what you have today? Surely there are corporate PR departments and external agencies already doing these things, right?

No.

What is required is an internal producer who writes in external voice — like the neutral point-of-view so often described by Wikipedia. People can smell marketing and propaganda coming around the corner, and they know when the pitches and puff pieces are missing that edge of neutrality. An accurate and fair piece is accurate and fair, no matter who writes it.

It’s an interesting theory, but it seems to presuppose dual marketing communication efforts, with separate departments of “Straightforwardness” and “Hype”. That may work at some companies, but in most cases I think it will be more practical to try to infuse straightforwardness through multiple parts of the marcom effort.

My more specific quick responses include:

• That sure sounds a lot like Robert Scoble in his Microsoft days.
• It also sounds like “community managers” at MMO game companies. (Both of the MMOs I’ve played have had great ones.) They often only use one or two channels (forums and the associated general website), but otherwise they fit the bill.
• Ike’s views fit very well with mine on the future of the information ecosystem.
• I’m getting ever more sympathetic to the idea that you need people whose main job is external communication of a straightforward kind. Reasons include:
  • Senior executives who write great blogs commonly don’t keep them up. And even when they’re active, the blogging is pretty sparse. E.g., among companies I follow closely, Vertica, Aster Data, and Netezza have all done some outstanding blogging in the past, but do very little of it now. Only Dave Kellogg at Mark Logic really keeps going.
  • It’s not obvious that senior executives are wrong to spend their time at something other than blogging. One of the greatest vendor blogs ever was Jonathan Schwartz’s at Sun.  Umm — how sure are we that he actually did much good for his company with that effort?
  • I frequently tell vendors “If you tell Story X in your own words, I’ll gladly point to it or post it for you.” They usually agree this is a wonderful idea — but then usually don’t free up the rather limited resources that would be required to take me up on it.
• That said, the kinds of people who provide customer support (pre- or post-sales) are often very well suited to fill the role Ike is describing. At least, that’s the case in enterprise tech companies.
• The media mix isn’t really as complex as Ike was suggesting. It basically falls into two groups: Text, and audio/video.
• That said, text/graphics and audio/video media people are increasingly the same. (Just think of sports media, where the newspaper folks make their big bucks on radio or TV. That’s a harbinger of the future. Or think again of Scoble.)
• One flaw of Ike’s idea is that in its pure form it only makes sense for companies large enough to have multi-person PR staffs. Other firms would have to use part-timers, or outsource.  And if you’re going to do that, might it not make more sense to pay part of the cost of sponsoring, you guessed it, an independent blog?
• I know that’s text/graphics-only, or at least text/graphics-mainly, but I happen to think audio/visual business news/PR is minor anyway. People may give enough attention to, for example, listen to audio from a company if it purports to teach them something. But news ABOUT a company? Who’s so interested in that to sit still for audio/video, unless they happen to be employees, or investors in its stock?

Bottom line: I think he’s wrong about some of his detailed views, but Ike Pigott is directionally very right in suggesting that newsmakers will increasingly become content creators for news about themselves.

And to the CBS employee who was fired and threatened based on this story – we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.

That’s a remarkable offer to make, one that is very rare for traditional media to match. As such, it’s a strong (albeit very partial) answer to the ongoing handwringing about the future of investigative journalism.

By the way, I once got an analogous offer — but it was from a company, not a media outlet. In 1994, I broke the news that Sybase’s development efforts were a train wreck.  Gartner Group accelerated its research on the same issue, and went out with the same story*. Sybase faxed libel threats to Gartner and me. I quickly reached out to Sybase competitors for help.  Oracle’s and CA’s general counsels walked me through the legal issues (without overstepping the bounds that would have led them to be “acting as my lawyer”). Larry Ellison promised by email to pay my legal expenses if any. Charles Wang of CA was too cheap to match the offer — but he sat in personally on my call with his lawyer.

*Tony Percy admitted the causality to me a few years later, after he’d left Gartner.

So fortified — and with PR maven Simone Otus doing her best to talk sense into her Sybase clients — I faxed back a pair of two-page letters.  One explained the basis for my written opinions, demonstrating there was NFW I was guilty of libel. The other outlined a proposal for reducing hostilities.  The whole thing simmmered down. Sybase’s sales and earning fell apart a couple quarters later, exactly when I predicted. Management was replaced by people much more friendly to me (Mitchell Kertzman, Dennis McEvoy, et al.). Some outstanding folks got involved in analyst relations (at various times Rob Cooley, Dave Taber, and Merv Adrian, which is pretty much a Hall of Fame class right there).  And all was cool.  But I digress …

Anyhow, my main point is that the new information ecosystem is constantly evolving new ways to fill the roles that traditional media are, at least in part, vacating. TechCrunch’s bold act of investigatory journalistic commitment is just one example.

And while it’s now almost 15 years old, my Sybase story shows another way this can work. I’m a self-employed analyst and writer now, just as I was then. But even so, I can afford to research and write contentious things, without concern for legal intimidation.

1. People have deep-seating cravings to opine, educate, and otherwise expostulate. Many will gladly do it for free. And labor represents the lion’s share of information-industry costs.
2. What’s more, a significant fraction of news is something large organizations have a vested interest in releasing. To the extent that’s true — and there certainly are major exceptions in areas such as debunking and investigatory journalism — ordinary enterprises can be and indeed already are a major source of resources for the information ecosystem.

Here are some of the species I believe will thrive or at least survive in the part of the ecosystem focused on enterprise IT news:

• Presenters of news. Vendors with stories to tell will take increasing responsibility for telling them deeply and well. Their economic motivation is obvious. And sometimes it goes beyond money. One of the most effective vendor blogs is surely Kevin Closson’s, and I know from talking with Kevin’s boss’s boss that Oracle was as surprised as anybody when his blog burst into popularity.
• Analysts. Whether they’re part of a big firm or independent like me, analysts play an important role in shaping perceptions of technologies and products. Getting paid directly for our written reports, whether on a subscription or one-shot basis, is nice — but it’s not essential. We can consult to vendors, users, and/or investors. We can get paid quite well to speak or write, courtesy of vendors’ marketing budgets. Some firms (not mine) have nice conference businesses. Do I miss the hundreds of newsletter subscriptions I sold annually at $347 each in the 1990s? Sure — but considering the production and direct mailing costs, not as badly as one might think. And I’m certainly pleased that my readership is much wider now than it was then. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I also have many more clients (subscribers-only of course excepted).
• Multi-revenue-stream print-news-like organizations. The computer trade press is shrinking — and moving online — but it’s not dead yet. Writers like Chris Karnacus and Eric Lai still do solid reporting for stalwarts such as Computerworld. Computerworld’s revenue seems to be an eclectic mix of traditional-style ads, pointers to vendor-supplied or -sponsored information, conferences/events, and who knows what else. But they’re still in business, and somebody like them always will be. Yes, reporters have such wide beats that they can’t develop their own expertise the way they used to, and have to be more reliant on us analysts. So be it. The news still gets reported, ethically and responsibly. For those who value the press as gatekeeper/validator, it’s still there. But to get the complete story, you probably want to also check …
• … blogs in general. (Plus forums and other social media.) Some bloggers are vendors. Some are journalists. Some are analysts. Some are trying to promote their small consulting firms. Some have nice user-organization jobs, but are burnishing their “personal brands.” For some it’s a pure labor of love. None of us drives enough page views to generate much conventional ad revenue — but trade press perhaps aside, we also don’t much care. And as a group — with our commenters helping too — we keep each other in line.

Yes, the trade press has been eviscerated, and subscription analyst firms have their issues too. Even so, for somebody who sets out to read up on an IT subject and make an informed judgment about it, I can think of no time that the available resources were any better than they are now. And if they exist — and if you have enough understanding of how computers access data to be an IT professional — you can usually find them easily via Google. So I don’t think tech journalism is dying out in some dangerous way.

Similar stories could be told in other sectors as well, with somewhat varied details. In consumer technology, page views actually are numerous enough to matter. In sports, fan forums and talk radio play a bigger role.

And in politics, every blogger can weigh in, no matter what her ostensible specialty. Community political activists may need to carry the torch on some investigative reporting — so they will. Yes, it’s all a lot messier than a simple model of “Trust Walter Cronkite and your local morning paper.” But in the end, it will serve the readers/viewers/listeners at least as well.

Related links

• A few days ago I posted some of the classic links in this discussion, along with a few bullet points of my own views.

• As has been the case for a decade and a half — if you have the time for that much detail, there’s nobody better to read on the subject than Steve Outing, whose online-news mailing list is where I learned and debated a lot about these subjects in the mid-1990s …

• … except that Alan Mutter may have slightly surpassed Steve.

• But the single best post I’ve seen on the subject is by Steven Berlin Johnson, if by “best” you mean “most in agreement with my way of looking at things.” He uses the word “ecosystem” too, and — much like me — uses tech journalism and political news as his two paradigmatic examples.

• Mark Hirschorn kicked a lot of the discussion off with a doom-and-gloom article in the Atlantic.

• As he is for most trendy and depressing IT topics, Nicholas Carr was on the case fairly early.

• Paul Dailing spoofed the whole “Newspapers are dying” meme. He’s just as fatuous as the worst of the pundits he attacks, but it’s a pretty funny piece even so.

• Mark Morford took a similar position, but with a lot more intellectual substance (and some humor too).

• Academic publishing is going open-access. I.e., academic researchers are increasingly insisting that their papers not be controlled by publications that restrict access to subscribers. MIT has taken the strongest stand, but Harvard, Stanford, and the National Institute of Health are also on the bandwagon. This recent Slashdot post is a good jumping-off point to a lot of other links on the subject.

Jeremiah’s blog and my most active ones – DBMS2 and Text Technologies – have a lot in common. Specifically, they are multi-hundred-page websites, featuring dense material meant to be read by busy, tech-savvy people. And so my core advice boils down to: Make it as easy as possible for people to find and recognize what is interesting to them.

In particular, I suggest:

• Your home page, category pages, and so on should have many visible posts each. To effect this, make your post excerpts short. It’s better to show the reader many title + short excerpt combos than one long post; that way, there’s much more chance he will notice one or more posts that seem intriguing.

• Take every opportunity to offer additional posts to your readers. For example, I give “recent posts” pride of place atop one of the sidebars. And I link to other of my posts whenever it seems to make sense, as in my posts on MapReduce and database diversity.

• Use your category pages. There’s controversy as to whether blog category pages are good or bad for search engine optimization (SEO). The naysayers worry about “duplicate content,” while the fans point out how on-topic a category page can be. But leaving SEO aside — for human users category pages are surely good things See, for example, my category pages for data warehouse appliances, DATAllegro, or Twitter. (If you prefer tag clouds to category hierarchies – or want to use both – that’s fine too.)

• Having good search is obviously important. It’s hard to get, however, which is one reason search not a substitute for category pages on the like. (But stay tuned for what I hope will be very exciting news in that area.)

• Make your post titles highly visible. The more that post titles catch the site visitor’s eye, the more chance she has to be intrigued by them. There are many ways to achieve this goal graphically, of course. My blogs, for example, use a bold font and a strong-looking separator bar atop each post.

• There should be a maximum length to your posts. If you don’t think that your interested readers will make it all the way to the end, break your posts up. (Most of the time, at least; one of the joys of the blog format is that there are no absolutely space limits.)

• Especially in long posts, use visual cues to highlight important points. That’s what I’m doing with all the boldface in this post. Help people skim your posts rather than reading them word-for-word, if that’s what they want to do. They – and you – should be able to get much of the benefit of a full reading that way, at a fraction of the total time investment.

• Leave space to be promotional. Your blog has objectives. Whatever those are, you probably should spare some sidebar space to advance them directly. With multiple blogs, I use some of my most prime space to encourage readers to visit the other ones too (you probably don’t have the same need), and to sign up for my integrated feed (you too should devote high-quality space to “asking for the subscription”). I also make room to promote most of my service offerings. If nothing else, you should at least provide a visible link to your company’s website! It’s amazing how many high-quality, commercially-oriented blogs omit that very basic feature.

I could go on at great length, listing important possibilities that did not make the cut on my screen real estate, but might be worth it for you (starting with ads!!). Or I could highlight subtleties, like the just-for-me invisible log-in button my web designer Melissa Bradshaw gave me (just to the right of “Subscribe!”). But this has gotten long enough for a single post. And so I’ll close with a question:

Which aspects of my blog interfaces do or don’t work particularly well for you?

Feedback would be most helpful.

• Get off the stick and blog!
• Social media are a part of life, especially if you have any valued employees under the age of 40. Get used to it.
• The “dangers” of social media are the same as the dangers of other forms of internet communication. If your employees can’t use email or web surf safely, you’re dead anyway. So stop fretting.

The long form of my views on social media — with a little data warehousing thrown in — may be found here.

In somewhat related news, Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal showed his exquisite good sense by quoting me carefully about online presence, and expanding upon my points at length.

Too bad the article is a spoof.

Reflecting on why it has to be spoof could be somewhat enlightening.

1. Reporting on your life. By the way, I had a great first week in Grand Cayman, but now it’s raining heavily, which is a big part of the reason why I’m blogging.  Broadband is slow and my laptop is old, so being online is a bit frustrating, so I’m cutting a few corners in thoroughness.
2. Expressing feelings. That’s pretty inseparable from #1.
3. Bashing those who you feel need bashing. It works, too.
4. Communicating news.
5. Expressing analytical opinions.
6. Promoting your services, opinions, and links.

*More precisely, Hodson was underrating the use cases for a version of Twitter that actually works, but I’ll try to refrain from posting at length again about that problem until I’ve looked into the changes at recent Twitter acquisition Summize.  That said, I think it will take Twitter quite a while, if it ever does, to recover from the terrible loss of momentum due to its lack of scalability.  Certainly my usage has dropped to near zero since the disastrous period in which they disabled the Replies search.

• Wordpress.com provides costless hosting; using your own domain costs money.
• Besides being free, Wordpress.com hosting may provide a little “google juice”, which is the whole SEO point of spam blogging.

But there’s one more factor. Splogs have much higher posting frequency than real ones. 10-20+ posts per day is not uncommon, and 50-100+ is not unheard of. That’s 5-10X the post frequency of even the more active human-written blogs. So let’s assume:

• 10% of all blogs are spam.
• 10% of all blogs are actively written by humans.
• 80% of all blogs belong to humans, but are updated very infrequently if at all.

In that case, over 80% (and indeed probably over 90%) of all blog posts are made by machines rather than by human beings.

I’m not just saying that for street cred. My experiences also illustrate two important points – people use many different kinds of social technology, and social technology is very important to them. When you feel or hear negatives about MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blog reading or whatever – those are indictments of particular services or technologies, not of online social networking in general.

If you think about it, most criticisms of social technology boil down to the same thing, namely Sturgeon’s Law – the famed observation that 90% of everything is crud. (Emphasis his.) Indeed, when you add up inane ramblings, stale jokes, Facebook “cocktails,” empty repetitions of “Hi! How is everyone?”, and those horrible songs people feel compelled to put on their personal websites, 90% seems like a low figure.

The first keys to successful social technologies are obviously that they be engaging and easily accessible. But even if they pass those tests, they will fall under their own weight without sufficiently good filtering mechanisms, and I don’t just mean for spam. Usenet and chat rooms collapsed in a pile of crud. MySpace and Facebook (which I don’t use) are thought to be going the same way. Twitter already has people complain about spam and filtering their follow lists – and it barely has grown past its core geek niche.

I’m working on a blog post just about the metadata and filtering mechanisms needed in Twitter. It looks apt to get quite long. The complicated issue of portable identities isn’t just about what you disclose; it’s about what you want to see, and from whom. The technology of social networking is a huge data management challenge, and most commentators on the subject don’t seem to have realized that yet.

Related links:

• Filtering technology for Twitter (CEP would do the job)
• Microsoft/Yahoo synergies (section on social networking)
• Federated social networking (walled gardens aren’t needed), and a followup

Pretty impressive spamming. Not that it did him any good, of course, except insofar as he was stealing a bit of my content …