Richard Giles 2.0

I listened to Cameron Reilly’s paid Telstra gig yesterday (love your introduction-voice mate ), in which he interviewed Mike Hickinbotham, Telstra’s Senior Corporate Relations Advisor.

People that have heard me speak recently know of my distaste for Telstra. I believe that the company is holding Australia back. More on that one day.

Cam does a good job of asking a few hard questions, and cleverly leaves a few things for us to read between the lines. In particular they chatted about Telstra’s “blogging” on nowwearetalking.

Mike is one of the (few) bloggers on nowwearetalking. In his “The scrum” weblog, he recently asked Is nowwearetalking hitting the mark?

I think nowweraretalking is a great case study on how a corporation should not start blogging. It does a poor job, and here are my thoughts.

Firstly, lets look back at how nowwearetalking was launched. I think the press release for nowwearetalking speaks volumes about the company, and the intent of the “blog.” It’s focus is on Government regulation, not the customer.

“In addition to the hundreds of millions that regulation costs Telstra, its customers and shareholders, the cost of regulatory compliance alone is around $10 million every year – enough to upgrade more than 155 rural exchanges for broadband,” Mr Burgess said.

The press release doesn’t focus on why the blog is about engaging conversations, it’s aim was to have the Australian public help Telstra fight Government regulation. Almost 50% of the press release talks solely about how bad Government regulation is for Telstra: of a word count of 441, 214 words are about regulation, and not the weblog.

Hickinbotham confirms that intent on the podcast. Essentially it was launched so customers and shareholders could help it fight Government regulation.

That’s not a great first step in engaging conversations with your customers.

Secondly, according to Hickinbotham, any Telstra employee can get a blog on nowwearetalking if they ask. He clarifies this in a followup to his question about nowwearetalking, nowwearetalking and always looking to improve.

Upon conducting the following podcast with Cameron Reilly (www.telstraenterprise.com), I learned employees interested in blogging start by posting content in the opinions section. If they demonstrate an ongoing interest in blogging, they’ll be given their own blog.

The only other stipulation is the proposed blog doesn’t duplicate a topic covered by one of our 15 bloggers.

What an arcane process! That might explain why there are only 15 blogs on the site.

When Sun Microsystems launched their employee weblog site, they opened it to every employee, and allowed them to discuss anything. It was an automatic process, you simply needed to create your own blog account, and you could go public. No screening required. It had thousand of employees blogging within three years.

The website (lets call it that, it makes more sense than blog doesn’t it) was launched in December 2005. That’s three years ago. Three years and 15 blogs. That’s not a great result from a company point of view. I think it speaks volumes about the Telstra’s corporate culture.

Thridly, it would also seem that Telstra doesn’t have an employee blogging policy. I’m not 100 percent certain on that, it would just seem to be the case given Hickinbotham’s statement on his most recent blog post, “We are currently producing employee blogging guidelines for the same reasons indicated by Cameron.”

However, how is anyone at Telstra ever going to know what they can and can not do with respect to blogs, if the company does not have a blogging policy. It’s rule number one for corporate blogs. And they’re currently producing one, three years after the site launched.

I also found this advertisement on the Telstra site for nowwearetalking. Anyone gets to have a say about the “company.” What about what is affecting me. What about what is affecting Australia. Speaks volumes doesn’t. Telstra is narcissistic.

So, here are a few tips on launching a corporate weblog:

• Start with the customer and conversations in mind (not stamping out Government regulation).
• Allow any employee to blog, about anything they want (don’t setup a process that makes it hard for them to start).
• Have a corporate blog policy (without one, an employee won’t feel an openness to blogging).

However, the single biggest barrier to corporate blogging is corporate culture. If you’ve got an aggressive, insular, opaque culture, then you’re going to struggle to engage in meaningful conversations with your customers.

It’s a big job to change the culture. However, if that’s the case then your company has bigger issues than starting a blog. A corporate culture that isn’t ready for blogging, and isn’t open to transparent conversations with people, is in danger of losing the hearts and minds of it’s biggest stakeholders: customers.

Ooops. Look at that. Tesltra’s already lost the hearts and minds of its customers.

So, to respond to Hickinbotham’s request, “to share your honest opinion of nowwearetalking.com.au.” I’d have to say, Telstra has to change it’s corporate culture before it’ll stand a change with a blog.

Oh, and one last thing. Allow me indulge for a moment.

In the above mentioned press release, Mr Phil Burgess, the then Group Managing Director, Public Policy & Communications, had this to say.

“But there is plenty of regulation that applies only to Telstra, which means that we are subsidizing overseas based competitors.

“That gives those foreign competitors a leg-up against Telstra, and our shareholders and customers foot the bill,” Mr Burgess said.

Here is why there are regulations that applies only to Telstra. Because in any other environment it would be classed as a monopoly.

When Telstra was privatised, it was given the publicly paid for infrastructure. The copper wire and exchanges that services every home. No one else was given that infrastructure, and it would cost billions to duplicate.

Telstra now uses that monopolistic-advantage to crush competitors. It gets away with it, because it was effectively given to them by the Government and its citizens. Now, to protect the nation, we need to ensure we keep Telstra honest, by extra Government regulation.

Now Burgess has left, I can’t say it to him, but I’ll say it to Telstra in general. Stop your sniffling, and get on with the job. You got a bargain, and it would be nice if you used that advantage to look after Australia, or even your customers, not just your CEO and shareholders.

End of rant .