Communications Counterculture

Longtime communications and social media guru Shel Hotlz posted what for him almost rates as a rant, or at the very least some honest venting, at the pushback many organizations are now giving to Web 2.0 practices in corporate communications.

His post

Best quote: “Companies ignore the fundamental changes to communication at their peril.” That’s about it. We’re not talking about a few new tools to use in the same kind of PR, media relations, internal communications and marketing practices of the past 30 years. I think it’s becoming increasingly clear we’re talking about a complete shift of the ground, and the path that these new tools (blogs, wikis, video sharing etc) have us on will take us to a completely different place than where we were stuck for so long. Pushback comes from those who are scared to death of change (read: the companies Seth Godin regularly refers to as dinosaurs headed for extinction).

I opened my email at work this morning and got all excited - comments from the Communications Counterculture blog to moderate! Five of them! Cool.

Then I logged in to moderate them. All spam. All five of them.

Welcome to blogging in the real world, I guess.

This isn’t marketing and communications related per se, but it’s an example of a cool Web 2.0 app that could (and will!) be used in marketing and in communications.

I saw a post on Boing Boing today about Bitstrips, the site that lets you create your own comic strips, using 2D avatars you customize to look like whomever you want, in no time flat. I created one about me and a fellow co-worker/friend in 15 minutes, and they look surprisingly close to real life.

So, introducing the Dilbert of corporate communications - I present “Office Supplies“:

Go try it yourself - it’s free, and it’s pretty damn cool.

The fields of marketing and communications are not the same (except where I work, at Edmonton Public Library, where for whatever reason they are lumped into one department: “Marketing and Communications”), but they are related. So even though this is a communications blog, here’s something cool I discovered in the marketing world recently.

In fact I came across something this week that seems to have the potential of something that goes against the well-established way of creating marketing campaigns (what are the words - disruptive? Purple Cow?)

I saw a piece on Martin Lindstrom’s video blog about something called BootB. The concept is this: clients and creatives create accounts on the BootB website. (Clients at this point include UNICEF, Lego, and Disneyland Paris). Clients post project briefs (including budget $$$) to the site, and creatives can submit their pitches and ideas to the client, who picks the one they like best and awards the project to the winning pitcher. BootB takes 10 per cent. That’s it. Clients can be anyone, anywhere in the world with a great idea, not just big expensive ad firms, and the pitches are actually anonymous until the winner is selected, so the client is literally picking the best idea, without knowing who it’s coming from.

What an interesting - dare I say “Web 2.0″ - way of doing this. I’ll certainly be watching to see how the use of this site develops in the next few weeks and months, but at least conceptually, I think they’re onto something.

Yesterday, the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) launched a new service for members - an online blogging and collaboration platform called eXchange. I tried setting up my own blog, to see how it went, and am very impressed with the implementation of the new system. It’s based on WordPress but everything behind the scenes is already set up for you, so you just have to sign in, click “create a blog” and away you go. Very cool, and it’s clear lots of work went into preparing for the launch of this service. Very impressive initiative.

Question is, do I need another blog? What would this one be for, if I did? (I blog on my synth-pop band Caffeine Sunday’s Blogger site and also did a specific limited-span blog on Vox, chronicling my successful National Novel Writing Month experience last November. Nothing at my day job yet, Communications Officer with Edmonton Public Library, but I’m working on it). What I came up with, off the top of my head, was something to raise the prospect of a counterculture within the communications world. This is because, of course, I’m in the communications profession, but I’m also currently reading Peter Block’s outstanding book The Answer to How is Yes, which is helping me rethink (rediscover, actually) how I view corporations, workplaces, careers and life. It makes me wonder if there are others out there in IABC land who feel like the conventional ways of doing things in our field - PR, staff communications, marketing, and so on - just don’t feel right.

It makes me wonder if anyone else out there thinks, like me, that there must be a better way. If there is, it would be a communications counterculture, and I want in.