Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Corporations have no memory. And they discourage you from having one, too.

08.31.2011 by David Murray // 14 Comments

One of the reasons some of us cloying humanists whine pitifully about corporations having so much sway over American culture is that corporations are agents of social Alzheimer's disease.

Yesterday I saw a bewildered Facebook post from a member of MyRagan, a social networking site for communicators that was created by the only company I've ever understood deeply, Ragan Communications. (I started working at Ragan when I was 23 and worked there full time and as a freelancer until I was 39.)

"To show how little time I've had, I didn't know myragan.com was no more. Today I was looking for the myragan blog of the photographer who used to provide photography tips. I can't recall his name, alas. Boo hoo."

This came as a surprise to me too—a sad surprise. For in the spring of 2007, the year before I left Ragan's freelance employ, I had a carpal tunnel-plagued hand in launching MyRagan, which was kind of a MySpace for communicators.

"It's not just MySpace," Mark Ragan claimed in MyRagan's early days, "It's MySpace that's fused with good journalism. So that you're actually going to have something that no other site has. You're going to be able to go to this site and read the latest news. You'll be able to look at controversial stories that are happening to communicators. You'll be able to see stand-up reports from our reporters at conferences and events. But you'll also be able to leap from those stories to the social part of it."

In February of 2008, Mark Ragan talks about MyRagan, still in its adorable infancy.

"It's really exciting," Mark added, "that a communicator who's working on a particular problem in Sydney, Australia, could send a bulletin around the world and and get help with that problem from a communicator in, ah, Namibia."

Okay, so he was a little overheated on the thing.

Well, we all were.

In the first week, in the first month, were signing up by the hundreds and thousands and then more thousands.

I remember being absolutely flabbergasted, after all those years of leafing through IABC directories and scrolling through subscriber lists to find communicators to interview for Ragan Report stories, to see what seemed like every communicator in the world staring at me from the computer, reachable by a mouse click.

I breathlessly compared the early days of MyRagan to having a huge, round-the-clock house party with thousands of communicators spilling in and out of the house, sleeping on the lawn, breaking things and then complaining drunkenly about broken things.

It was exhausting. It was heady. It was great.

And now it's gone. Boy, you take your eye off a thing for four years …

What happened? I went online, and discovered that myragan.com was now just an undated web page.

MyRagan has closed shop …

But don’t worry …

Ragan still has myriad social media options for you.

When MyRagan launched in the spring of 2007, it was the first—and only—social network for communicators. The site grew steadily, even as more players entered the social networking space, among them Facebook and LinkedIn.

During that time, MyRagan members shared advice, asked questions, commiserated over lousy bosses and obnoxious clients, and ranted and raved about language errors.

Let’s take a brief moment to remember all the fun we had—

And now that we’re done with our moment, here’s some great news: There are a variety of websites and online communities where you can continue to share, learn, complain, and laugh.

There’s our flagship site Ragan.com, plus …

PR Daily, the must-read daily news site for the public relations, marketing, and social media industries.

Health Care Communication News, the must-read daily news site for those of you in the health trade.

HR Communicator – the essential morning newsfeed for human resources professionals.

Plus …

PR Daily Facebook page.

PR Daily LinkedIn group.

Ragan.com LinkedIn group.

The Ragan Communications Facebook page.

That's it?

What happened to the "the latest news"? What about the "controversial stories that are happening to communicators"? And the "stand up reports from our reporters at conferences and events?" What happened to "being able to leap from those stories to the social part of it"?

Now have to go to a half-dozen places to get all that—if we can get it at all.

This is progress?

No, it's shit.

But it's not in Ragan's interest for us to remember the golden promise that MyRagan offered—the cozy community where communicators from Sydney and Namibia and Doylestown, Ohio, could meet and exchange ideas and share feelings simultaneously with keeping informed on all the latest happenings in Communication Town.

It's not even in Ragan's interest to explain to us what happened to Communication Town. Did all the smart kids get tired of the town and move away? Was there a plague that wiped out the population? Was there simply no money in it for Ragan?

I forwarded all of the above to Mark Ragan and asked for his response. Here's what he wrote:

I think the MyRagan.com social network could never have survived in the age of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and now Google+

We could have kept it on life support, but the business case simply wasn't there. Besides, the platform had grown stale.

The big three social networks invest millions of dollars in software upgrades, applications and mobile integration. They could offer our members far more bells and whistles than we could ever dream of programming into the site. As those networks got better, it was increasingly obvious that ours had become stagnant.

Like so many other media companies, we decided to create communities on LinkedIn and Facebook. After all, that's where are readers wanted to be. I don't know of a single customer of ours who doesn't have a Facebook or LinkedIn account. To think that our audience would continue checking in with MyRagan.com in addition to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn would have constituted serious denial.

Finally, our four major news sites are so throughly integrated with social media today that MyRagan had become superfluous. Today a reader can share any of our stories in seconds by clicking on any one of the share buttons on the page. If they comment on a story, that comment can link other readers
directly to their Facebook, Twitter of LinkedIn profiles.

What happened to MyRagan.com is really the story of social media today. With giants like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter dominating the landscape, there's very little room left for other communities. One can see this with the introduction of Google+. How many Facebook users will create new profiles and begin posting status updates to yet another social network? I love Google+, but if I had to gamble on its survival, I would bet that it has very little hope of challenging Facebook.

I hope that helps.

And David, I haven't been able to locate your profile on Google+

Slacker.

A thorough explanation, and candid too. So why didn't he give his customers such a full accounting, so they, who had participated in the MyRagan community, might also learn the meaning of its slow withering and eventual death?

Because most of them probably didn't ask. Because it's no fun to talk about failed things. Because Mark was onto bigger and better things.

Mark acted as any businessman would given such a situation—as any businessman must. You don't ask customers if it's all right to discontinue an unprofitable product line, and you don't call a press conference to announce the cancelation of a service.

But now our communities—our communities!—are increasingly being designed, built, maintained and occasionally torn down by corporate executives and their necessarily narrow interest in "the business case."

If we can't escape this inexorable march toward a private-sector-run public life, we at least ought to try to remember the steps we took on this strange journey, in case we ever want to follow our footprints back out.

(And Diane, I think the photographer's name is Jim Summaria.)

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Facebook, LinkedIn, Mark Ragan, MyRagan, MySpace, online communities, Ragan Communications

Somebody set internal communication back 30 years. But it wasn’t me.

06.01.2011 by David Murray // 32 Comments

When I was editor of the weekly communication trade publication The Ragan Report in the 1990s, all I had to do to get a raft of letters was refer to an employee publication as a "house organ."

The operative phrase was: You just set employee communication back 30 years!

Silly, I know, to think you could set a whole profession back 30 years just by using old terminology.

But I do miss the underlying assumption, that this was a profession progressing. Progressing in all sorts of ways—from top-down to interactive, from "babies and bowling scores" to strategic, from corporate platitudes and stilted language to human candor.

These days, if you were going to set the profession back 30 years, in which direction would you push?

Aussie communicator Paul Murton remarked on a blog the other day that he was talking to a colleague, and they came to a discouraging conclusion:

while the importance of ’strategic’ internal comms (linked to business strategy and engagement) started rising in management eyes (say) 5-10 years ago, it now seems it’s now more often taking a back seat to tactical communication that just keeps people informed as an afterthought. External comms, PR, investor relations, marketing comms are still where the investment goes and internal comms teams are being depleted (and paid less in less-senior positions) in companies all over the place.

Is it just two people in Sydney who think this, or is it more widespread?

Ah, yeah. It's more widespread.

In 1996 on Ragan Communicaton' behalf I launched a thing called the Journal of Employee Communication Management. In my first editor's letter, I called it "The Harvard Business Review for internal communication." It came out six times a year, and each issue contained six practitioner-written essays, of 3,000 words each. These case studies, confessions and clarion calls would generate rebuttals, spark year-long debates and serve as the bases for keynote conference sessions with titles like, "Employee Communicator's Manifesto."

Sounds like 1896, doesn't it?

The journal thrived in the first few years of publication, remained profitable for a number of years after that, and lasted until about 2008, when it died, not because the Internet made such journals obsolete (the Harvard Business Review is still coming out). Mostly, it died because there weren't enough people in the whole world who were actually thinking about employee communication to write 36 decent essays every year, let alone read them.

And now I see the former publisher of that journal promoting its 20th annual Corporate Communicators Conference by promising, "No abstractions. No pie-in-the-sky theory. Only: practical tips and strategies that you can use tomorrow."

Reminds of what my dad used to say, when the family seemed at a standstill, "Let's do something, even if it's wrong."

But he was joking.

Communicators, where are you going?

And for the love of house-organ cheesecake*, why?

* A free tube of Preparation H to the first geezer who can tell us to what I am referring here.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Corporate Communicators Conference, employee communication, internal communication, Paul Murton, progress, Ragan Communications, the Journal of Employee Communication Management, The Ragan Report

Dreaming of the global communication community that never was, and explaining why not

11.09.2009 by David Murray // 7 Comments

I had dinner the other night with old pal and IABC stalwart Wilma Mathews. She told me she's helping the association celebrate the 40th anniversary of its emergence out of the International Council of Industrial Editors.

Not to be outdone in the Department of Musty Ledgers, I told her I'd read most of the back issues of ICIE's Reporting magazine, from the 1960s. As we talked, I remembered that amid its wonderful photos of communication conferences where people sat around tables full of employee publications smoking cigarettes and pipes, the magazine contained a regular "international" column in those pages. It was a dry snoozer, written by some token Brit.

And I thought, isn't that still the case? Isn't it still true that whenever you see the world "global" or "international" next to any piece of communication, your eyes glaze over in a desperate attempt not to roll back into your head?

Why is that? Why are we instinctively repelled by all things global? Why does our bullshit detector go off whenever someone mentions the word? Or is it just me?

A couple of years ago when I still worked for Ragan Communiations (and when Tom Friedman's book was still newish) I wrote this column, titled, "The world is flat—but still quite large." I reproduce it here, with the permission of Mark Ragan, in hopes that Wilma Mathews or someone else will tell me why it is wrong.

The single most commonly asked question in the world may be, “Did you read Tom Friedman’s book, The World is Flat?” Actually, no. They don’t ask that question much in China or India, the countries the book is mostly about. In those developing nations, people are too busy developing their nations to ask questions, let alone to pretend they read 600-page books.

That’s only the very first lesson Ragan Communications editors learned beginning a little over a year ago when we set out to bring together Friedman’s flat world—at least the communication corner of it—into one happy, international Web site, Ragan.com.

Make no mistake, the communication business is increasingly global. But it’s got a long, long, long way to go before Ragan readers are sharing ideas as easily with Denmark as we are with Delaware. For a bunch of reasons, most of them lost on us a year ago, all of them instructive to all of us who (still) hope to communicate globally:

1. Far-flung communicators are somewhat interested in Ragan’s site, and Ragan editors are interested in them—but they are not interested in each other! We just requested, received and then rudely rejected a piece written by a very smart communicator in a developing country in Eastern Europe. Why? The piece was a survey of what’s happening in the communication business in that country. Interesting to us? Yes. Useful to our main audience of communicators who don’t work in developing nations? No.

To show us he wasn’t angry at our rejection slip, the communicator insisted in an e-mail that our editor was “a kind of person that makes at least one person on the ‘periphery’ [his term] feel his ideas are welcome.” Then he went on to explain the situation better than we could have, and to nearly make us cry:

“It is good to have someone like you at this position so from time to time we at the ‘periphery’ are able to present something for the ‘center.’ But it is good to remember that the relationship center-periphery will always be asymmetrical. In other words: Assuming that the center is (or should be) interested in the periphery as much as the periphery [is interested] in the center is a big mistake leading to lower self esteem. I used to make this mistake quite often several years ago.  Today, I treat every my exposure at the ‘center’ as rather unusual and I appreciate it very much.”

Take that, Tom Friedman.

2. Communicators in only a handful of countries—U.S., U.K., maybe Canada—have any plans to do business internationally. So when you try to motivate them to contribute to an international Web site for the exposure it will give them—and, if they’re consultants, perhaps the business it will bring—they look at you like you’re nuts. And you are nuts, to think that someone in Omaha is going to read an article on face-to-face communication from a consultant in Johannesburg and say: Dag nab it, expenses be damned, we’ve just got to get Stephanie over here to work her South African magic on our managers!

So while ambitious U.S. consultants are glad to appear in U.K. communication trade publications—because they want to do business in the U.K.—U.K. communicators are less motivated to appear in ours, especially at the rates we pay. How many euros is zero dollars?

And communicators from non-English speaking nations? As they (don’t) say in Italy, fugghetaboutit.


3. More than a half-century since IABC made a big deal out of the word “International”—the association used to be called the International Council of Industrial Editors way back into the 1940s—it still has only one member in Japan, president Julie Freeman told us the other day in an interview. Why? Well we don’t know what Japan’s problem is, but we’ve found that most communicators in places like China and India are working 134 hours a week, obsessed with switching jobs and getting raises every month to fiddlefart around attending chapter luncheons and making videos of them for Ragan.com. Generally, they’re too busy to e-mail us back and explain that our requests are preposterous.

And communicators in developed communication markets like Australia and South Africa and U.K.? They’ve got their own publishers inviting them to speak at conferences and contribute to trade publications they’ve actually heard of!

4. Foreigners can’t write worth a durn! Australian writing is okay when it’s comprehensible, South African writing would be okay if it were ever comprehensible and Chinese writers demonstrate mastery by doing the exact opposite of what U.S. writing teachers recommend: stacking clichés onto idioms (and so on! until the fat lady sings!).

You’d think British writing would be palatable, but no!

We once confronted a Brit contributor about why it takes Brits so long to get to the point, hundreds and hundreds of paragraphs to merely tell us what the article is about or what the author’s point of view is.

About 45 minutes later he said the European style is to “let the reader come to the conclusion on his own.” Or some such nonsense!

Please understand: We do not believe there is a right or wrong in these matters. (We’ve been told that to the European eye, for instance, Ragan’s Web site design is garish, our consultants are noisy and our writing style is vulgar; well, we’ve heard that last bit from sensitive Americans, too.) It’s just that, on a Web site primarily read by Westerners, we can’t publish cliché-ridden Chinese stuff. On a site primarily read by English-speakers, we can’t publish Australian. And on a site primarily read by North Americans, we can’t run articles with their leads stuck up their conclusions.

5. Each national or regional communication community is its own unfathomably complex world. It takes a rookie Ragan editor about five years to fully understand all the specialities, the social and political dynamics of the North American communication market. What makes us think we can have a good phone call with the right person in Bangalore—or 10 good phone calls with the 10 best communicators in Bangalore—and figure out how to serve that market intelligently?

Along our globe-hopping way over the last year, we’ve learned that if you try to market a $300 communication manual in China, within a week someone will photocopy it and sell the damned thing on the black market for a quarter. You can
’t quote a communication guru in Australia because the Aussies think gurus are a farce. It’s hard to get good communication case studies out of India, because it’s culturally untoward to brag about one’s work. And we could be wrong about any of those statements, because they’re merely the threadbare theories we’ve been able to accidentally ascertain.

A truly deep analysis requires: 1. Multiple visits to the region and the meeting, in various contexts, of dozens of communicators. 2. A deep, trusting relationship with a well-connected, super-sensitive, entrepreneurial-minded local communicator.

All of which does make the notion of a truly “global communication community,” if not silly, at least very difficult, even in the age of social media, even with a Web site we can share. (Things were really tough when the only way to get the word to Spain was to set a crate full of Ragan Reports on a steamship in Boston.) This does not mean we should not frequently reach out to the contacts we’ve made around the world. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t surf the Web and the blogosphere looking for interesting perspectives from around the world. Hell, we should favor the publishing of good pieces from afar just for the symbolic value of it. And make no mistake: We accept pretty much every speaking invitation we get to appear at the “periphery,” no matter how far that periphery may be. Ragan editors have been welcomed warmly around the world, and have learned a great deal everywhere we’ve gone.

But the notion that Ragan Communications, IABC, or any other single organization will become a “center” of a global communication community—this strikes us now as naïve, maybe even grossly so.

No, for the record, we haven’t read Friedman’s book. Perhaps we should.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // global communication, IABC, International Council of Industrial Editors, Ragan Communications, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman, Wilma Mathews

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