This is important in a country where very few large organisations do.

So full marks for effort.

No doubt, Telstra’s re-entry into the fledgling field of corporate social media will be generally applauded within the small band of people who care passionately about this stuff.

But looking at Telstra’s new blog, called, in best marketing speak, Telstra exchange, I can’t help feel a little sad and a little more convinced that big corporates and social media don’t really mix – well, maybe a little bit, maybe as a little superficial gloss on the dull, besuited hearts of the corporate world.

Edgy, it’s not.

I guess this new approach is consistent (or ‘aligned’ in suit-speak) with Telstra’s new more co-operative approach to government and media relations.

Getting along with people is generally the best strategic approach, but it often makes for less interesting copy.

And the new blog was launched on a day when Telstra had to backflip on a PR disaster – a fee to pay your bill.

The media release on the backflip contained this wonderful example of the PR genre:

“I have listened to the community debate and believe that the way we introduced the fee did not align with our commitment to put customers back at the heart of our business,” Mr Thodey said.

“It is now clear to me that introducing this fee across our existing plans was the wrong way to encourage customers to move to electronic payments.

“We designed the fee in a way that exempted more than a million elderly, pensioners and disadvantaged people but it was still unacceptable to many of our customers.

Well, I guess that’s better than just saying ‘we got it wrong’ or ‘it was the wrong thing to do’.

Earlier today I linked to some musings by Steve Rubel about the blending of media and social media to the point that they are now the one and the same thing.

I think this is true, or will soon be true, of corporate communications.

Your social media effort will only be as good as your overall comms approach.

There’s not much point trying to get a social media fig leaf to cover up an unchanged culture where nothing is ever wrong, it just doesn’t ‘align’ sometimes.

Still, Telstra are having a go and that puts them ahead of just about every other big organisation in Australia.

And, it’s unfair to be too critical. I just wish..

Says (spuiks?) Lee:

But as a loyal and valuable reader of this blog, I’m giving you just 7 days to naba free copy of the Twitter Mastery for Business report as a way of saying “thank you” for being a part of my community.

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1. It may simply be the case that Australian business is always a follower rather than a leader when it comes to innovation in the areas of management, human resources and communication
2. Poor Australian broadband coverage and speeds mean that participation in social media overall is less.
3. Australia’s political system, with compulsory voting, ‘closed’ party preselections and tight party discipline, discourages the sort of citizen participation that flourishes through web 2.0. This is important because corporates tend to learn new communication techniques from their political colleagues.
4. Related to number 3, Australia has long had a restricted media diet and a tendency to rely on, and be comfortable with, a small number of information sources.
5. Consequent on 3 and 4, Australia has a fairly tame civic culture with limited debates and a preference for avoiding great public controversies, a suspicion of public intellectuals and an inordinate respect for ‘authority’.
6. Consequent on 3,4, and 5, Australian businesses feel a lot less need to get involved in public advocacy around issues that affect their businesses. This is also evident in the fairly limited activity levels of business groups like the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group.
7. Most of the people active in corporate affairs functions in Australia have spent most of their careers in the relatively calm, and small, ponds of Australian media and politics and they are in their comfort zones in these closed clubs. They actively discourage business interest and adoption of social media.

There may be other reasons too?

New technologies seem to follow a certain pattern of adoption.

First, they are rejected as useless.

We all know the amusing anecdotes that involve famous people predicting that telephones and computers were just fads.

Websites were not seen as necessary 15 years ago, but within  a few years everyone had one and now they are essential.

If you don’t have a good website, you’re not going to be taken seriously.

Especially as we now live in a world where people google everything, whether they researching a potential purchase or checking out a business contact.

During this transition from uselessness to ubiquity, we hear a lot about ROI.

What’s the ROI for the fax machine, the website, the mobile phone, the blackberry.

Part of the problem here is that ROI grows exponentially with their adoption.

Like the fast disappearing fax machine. If you are the only person in the world with a fax machine it is pretty useless.

But once most of the people you do business with have them they are invaluable.

So quizzing people about the ROI of things sounds clever when they are relatively new, it sounds a bit less clever when everyone has one.

If you want to be in business and get taken seriously there are things you need like a mobile phone, a web address, an email address and a business card.

My argument is that pretty soon that list will include blogs and other social media accounts, like twitter and linkedin.

When people want to check you and your business out, they will look for your blog.

They expect your blog will tell them a lot about who you are, what your views are on key topics, whether you are insightful or a bit obvious and so on.

They will google your name – what will they find?

What will your future boss or client or customer find?

Will they find lots of people linking to you with approving comments, or not?

When blogs are ubiquitous, we won’t keep asking what is the ROI of my blog but more interesting questions like how can I make my blog better, attract more readers, have more influence – and keep the costs down.

So why will everyone have a blog?

First. Because they are cheaper and more powerful than existing websites.

I’m not talking percentages here; I mean orders of magnitude cheaper and orders of magnitude more powerful.

They look better, they load faster – blogs are designed for sharing information and for communicating, they have lots of features to help do these things.

In fact, blogs are websites designed to maximise the power of the Internet.

Second, because search dominates the universe

And you need to be high on the search list when your customers, investors, regulators, politicians, media etc go looking for stuff that affects your business.

You can’t allow a vacuum and you can’t let your critics fill that vacuum.

If I google you or your business and I don’t find anything than that’s a little sad.

If I google you or your business and I find lots of criticisms and no responses, well that’s a little disturbing.

Search engine optimisation is fine, everyone has to do it to some extent.

But the big thing is content – regular, fresh, compelling content.

The media provides regular, fresh, compelling content.

And now so do bloggers.

Traditional corporate websites do not.

If you don’t blog you’ll get left behind.

We’ve seen some social media action in Australia through Telstra.

We are seeing a lot more in the USA.

Technorati found -Most bloggers describe themselves as personal (79%), followed by professional (46%) and corporate (12%). Of course, these descriptions are not exclusive and 69% of corporate bloggers also describe themselves as personal and 65% of corporate     bloggers describe themselves as professional bloggers

One-quarter of US industry associations have blogs, about another third have plans to start blogging.

I think the successful Obama campaign will drive a further sharp increase in social media and social networking.

Especially, if Obama uses social media and networking to build and activate support for his policies and programs while he is in office.

So the era of web 2.0 is rapidly coming upon us.

Web 2.0 is first of all about publishing and broadcasting.

That is re-inventing the Internet as a publishing and broadcasting medium rather than the old idea of document storage.

It is about communities.

Search drives a lot of traffic but so do communities.

Microblogging services like Twitter and social networking like facebook and lots of stuff like friendfeed are also driving traffic.

These services act like personal referrals from people you know – you say I like this article and people on your facebook friends list will also go and have a look ditto twitter and friendfeed.

Ernst & Young uses its facebook presence to recruit people because facebook is where young people – and not just young people – hang out.

Telstra uses twitter, so do Virgin Atlantic, the McKinsey Quarterly and LabourStart and many more will do so.

So I just think it’s inevitable.

But what are the pitfalls.

Content is the main pitfall.

Most blogs fail because people simply don’t post interesting stuff on a regular basis.

And they don’t interact with readers and communities.

If you can’t write or don’t like writing you won’t be a successful blogger.

If you want to start a blog, and you should, find someone in your organisation who loves writing.

If you can’t find someone internally, recruit someone – it will make all the difference.

Have some clear goals, but don’t over-strategize.

Good bloggers do it and learn from their audiences. What do people click on and respond to?

Develop clear guidelines but keep them simple.

Yes, there are issues about disclosure, defamation and so on.

But it is easy to exaggerate them.

Finally, integrate.

Don’t do social media as a stand alone.

Make it part of your overall communications strategy.

Thanks.

THE former boss of NSW RailCorp has told a corruption inquiry the government-owned company was "extraordinarily dysfunctional" when he arrived in 2003.

But is it even worse five years later? Consider:

Trains too long or platforms too short

Arthur Smith rehired

Golf days

Strip club

Bribes and rorts

And that’s just the last week or so.

THE former boss of NSW RailCorp has told a corruption inquiry the government-owned company was "extraordinarily dysfunctional" when he arrived in 2003.

But is it even worse five years later? Consider:

Trains too long or platforms too short

Arthur Smith rehired

Golf days

Strip club

Bribes and rorts

And that’s just the last week or so.

James Carlopio, the director of Bond University’s Centre for Executive Education, says research consistently shows between 70 and 90 per cent of businesses will fail to successfully implement significant strategic change.

Mr Carlopio, a former psychologist, says the problem lies in businesses’ failure to get people to change old habits.

He said businesses often make the mistake of focusing on the technical aspects of implementation and profits instead of psychological barriers.

"Businesses will pay strategy consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with great positioning and strategy ideas, but once the paper is handed back to the company, they’re left to pick up the pieces and nine times out of 10 they will fail on implementing the strategies," he said.

So true.

According to a new survey, an impossible 90 percent of managers think they’re among the top 10 percent of performers at their workplace.

Looks like self-awareness is not a key management skill.