Gloria Goodale of the Christian Science Monitor quoted me in her piece “Meet the fake Steve Jobs,” on the popularity of fake CEO blogs.

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Tags: fake ceo blogs, fake steve jobs, joel postman

Along with co-presenter Jeff Brainard of Socialtext, I’ll be doing a three-hour workshop on wikis at the Ragan Communications Social Media for Communicators conference, billed as a “Web 2.0 Summit for Internal Communications, Public Relations and Marketing professionals.”

The event is co-sponsored by the Public Relations Society of America, and will be held March 5-7, 2008, at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas. The wiki workshop is from 9:00 a.m. — 12:00 p.m., March 5.

Here’s a description:

Put wikis to work for you … and watch your productivity soar

Forget Wikipedia—there are hundreds of other ways communicators can use wikis to speed up projects, improve collaboration, eliminate e-mail overload and more. Wikis have made it to the big league. More than three-fourths of executives responding to a 2007 McKinsey Global Survey say they plan to maintain or increase their investments in Web 2.0 technologies, and about a third say they are investing in wikis.

Communicators are using wikis to bring together internal and external communities for event and project management, planning, collaborative discussions, group calendars, reference manuals, style guides, document libraries and many more applications. And once a wiki is deployed, teams quickly find new uses for it. Whether you’re already using this hot tool now or have never seen one before, this session will help you embrace the world of wikis. Joel Postman, Principal of Socialized, and Jeff Brainard, of Socialtext, will explain the benefits of using wikis in detail using a number of actual case studies. You will:

• Plan, launch and manage a wiki—in real time!
• Learn how leading companies are using wikis
• See the important features of typical wikis—and how to use them
• Develop strategies to “sell” the benefits of wikis in your organization
• Understand the importance of “the gardener”—also known as the community manager of the wiki

Let me know if you’ll be at the conference on March 5 and we can meet up!

My podcast about Web 2.0 in Corporate Communications has been posted by the Silicon Valley Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), as part of its new podcast series “The New Conversation.” Thanks to Laura Roman, Communications Director for the SV IABC, for inviting me to participate and for producing the podcast.

Click to listen.

Tags: Joel Postman, Laura Roman, Web 2.0, podcast, IABC, new conversation, silicon valley

Facebook is great for professional networking and for connecting with colleagues. Swell. Don’t get me wrong. I really like these people, it’s great to stay in touch, and we can continue to learn from each other. But if I drank, it would be the social media equivalent of hanging out with the same bunch of guys every Saturday at the corner bar.

I’ve always maintained a very strict personal policy (I’m big on personal policies) of not trying to connect with people through social networking that I did not have some legitimate connection with in the first place. I have generally limited myself to established friends, co-workers and former colleagues. I then got really adventurous and extended my networking to people with the same job and title. But sometimes talking to like minded people about the same topic day in and day out can result in complacency, staleness and circular thinking and discussion.

So I chose to bust out of my safe little circle of friends. My New Years’ resolution for 2008 is simple: do things differently. Take a different route to work. Try a new restaurant. Treat people differently. Take chances. This has actually changed my social networking strategy, and as a result, my use of social networks has become more far more rewarding in just the past few weeks.

Late last year, I formed a Facebook group called “Yesterday is the Day Before Today.” It was meant as a bit of word play on the name of the Geoff Livingston / Brian Solis book “Now is Gone.” My dear friend Amanda Chapel sent invites to the group to her Facebook friends, thereby connecting me with a bunch of really cool, interesting people doing things totally unrelated to PR and social media. Can you imagine? This was a watershed event in my use and enjoyment of social networking.

Through Amanda I met Geo Geller, a fascinating artist, photographer, writer and thinker who describes himself as an “insultant for hire.” Really, he’s the coolest guy on my friends list. Through Geo, I met a bunch of other interesting people, who I will not name here out of respect for privacy. All I had to do was overcome my fear of rejection and click the “add as friend” button, or in many cases, people added me. Ergo, I must be sort of cool! (That’s part of how I finally broke through the artificial barriers imposed by my social networking policies. If people I perceived as trendsetters were doing it, I reasoned, I could do it, too.)

I now try to connect with someone new every day on Facebook and Twitter, and will start doing the same on other networks. Usually I search for common interests, like PR or social media or speech writing, but other times, I try to connect simply because someone has a cool blog, (you might find this shocking), because someone is attractive and has a cool blog, and once, because someone had a really cool name. I now use the flimsiest of excuses to broaden my network and therefore my perspective and opportunity to learn and grow.

Tags: geo geller, amanda chapel, geoff livingston, facebook, brian solis, now is gone

Hi,

Today I launch my new venture, and my new blog, Socialized. The mission of Socialized is to provide companies, and their PR agencies and in-house communications staff, with the strategy and implementation to design, integrate and measure social media in a corporate environment.

I’m currently Executive Vice President, Emerging Media, for Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley tech PR agency. (I negotiated for this title when I joined the agency. It’s the best title I’ve ever had.) I’ll be leaving Eastwick at the end of January to focus fulltime on Socialized. Prior to joining Eastwick, I spent close to 20 years on the corporate communications and marketing side.

There’s a reason many large companies, particularly those in the Fortune 500, are slow (or completely unwilling) to adopt social media. They don’t know what the heck “the conversation” is, and if they’re a publicly held, or well-managed private company, no CFO is going to approve a P.O. for “opening up the brand.”

So what is social media, and how can you use it in your communications mix? I won’t attempt a definition. But a simple list of social media includes blogs, podcasts, online video, communities and social networks. All of these things have potential value in corporate communications, but those of us who advocate for adoption of social media need to do so with an understanding of the way large corporations work, and how they measure success. Of course, they love return on investment, but it’s not always easy to measure this with social media initiatives. Sometimes social media can help build the brand without delivering measurable results like leads or revenue. Basically, it’s a difficult sell.

A couple of things about social media have become clear to me in the last five years. That’s where I got the idea for Socialized. I was involved in early social media discussions at Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. Even from inside the company, there are strategic, political and organizational influences that need to be understood and managed in order to bring new thinking into the company. I’ve learned that. There’s also a reluctance to let go of “the message” and surrender control to anyone who comes to the company blog or newsroom. If you don’t understand that, you shouldn’t be taking to a public company. Ever heard of Reg FD? When your CEO can go to jail for an errant blog post, the stakes are high.

Socialized was created to help businesses adopt social media within the framework of their existing communications and business strategy. That’s a really important distinction. It’s entirely possible, for example, that a CEO blog is totally inappropriate given your corporate culture, your market, or your objectives. We can help you figure that out.

I’ll try to use this blog to talk about social media from this perspective. I have a couple of other blogs I am going to revive. Hyde Park is my consultancy and blog for executive communications. I used to dabble in speech writing (note I spell it both ways for SEO), so I am offering speechwriting, presentation design, speaker coaching, etc. through Hyde Park. And lastly, Techneuroti, my personal favorite, will be for the random, irrelevant rant, most often communications-related, but not always.

If you’re interested in any of these topics, I hope you’ll read the blog, add it to RSS, or even do a guest post.

Thanks!

Joel

Tags: blogs, communities, Eastwick communications, hyde park associates, joel postman, podcasts, Social Media, Socialized, techneuroti, video