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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Chrysler’s labor site is fine, but it’s not social

Steve Lubetkin has taken issue with my view that GM did the right thing in keeping its UAW negotiations behind closed doors, but acknowledging such in its blog.

A few quick responses to Steve’s thoughtful post:

Steve writes:

...for all its novelty, the GM blog pretty much slapped down any visitors who wanted to talk about real issues like GM’s massive financial losses over the past several years, or the important cost, environmental, and design issues confronting the industry.

And with good reason. Fastlane is about cars. Period. It has attracted an audience, as Steve notes, of “passionate car and truck enthusiasts.” The conversation with these people has informed GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz’s decision-making. What, if Steve suggests, GM had peppered Fastlane with posts about labor, finance, and the like? Simple: Those passionate car enthusiasts who don’t give a damn about labor and finance would have gone away and GM would have lost what Lutz has characterized as the best intelligence he’s seen in all his years in the industry. Personally, I applaud Lutz for not giving in to the pressure and keeping Fastlane true to its purpose.

Steve much prefers the new Chrysler labor microsite:

They’ve got a comprehensive multimedia blog site called ChryslerLaborTalks07.com that includes management interviews, videos, audio, and huge media briefing books articulating management’s viewpoint on the issue. There is a lengthy audio interview with the SVP of Employee Relations, and a range of video clips related to the labor discussions.

I like it, too—and other things the “new” Chrysler is doing—and I bet people at GM are paying attention it it. But wait a minute. What in the world makes this a blog? I’ve dug into it and I don’t see anything remotely blog-like about it—no authentic human voice, no ability for readers to comment (take a look at all the critical comments to Fastlane posts and tell me it’s only happy talk), and, indeed, no conversation at all. The Chrysler site is, in essence, an information clearinghouse. Microsoft produced the same thing during the antitrust litigation of a few years back, and did a better job because it provided unbiased information and content from both sides of the issue. This is no knock on Chrysler, but I don’t see anything social about ChryslerLaborTalks07.com at all. There aren’t even embed codes for the videos—just the ability to download them.

What’s more, as far as I can tell (and I may be wrong, since I didn’t see the site until Steve pointed it out to me), the Chrysler bargaining updates don’t say a damned thing about the nature of the negotiations—just that they’re continuing. How is it transparency to say something like this:

We are making constructive progress in the Company’s national labor contract negotiations. Chrysler and the UAW have agreed to continue bargaining past the expiration of the national contract (September 14). We cannot speculate on when a tentative agreement will be reached. Once an agreement has been made, it is subject to ratification—a UAW internal process—and then implemented.

That, my friends, is corporatese. It’s the kind of non-news that finds its way into press releases and infuriates reporters.

Regular readers will know that you’d be hard-pressed to find a more passionate advocate of the business adoption of social media than me. But the notion that transparency means opening absolutely everything to public view is patently absurd. What about employees’ medical records? Merger or acquisition negotiatons? New product strategies? Even Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz blogged a request to employees to stop leaking new-product information.

Having been involved in some union talks (as a media relations staffer, not a negotiator), I can think of nothing that would sabotage a potential agreement faster than opening the these highly sensitive talks to public scrutiny. Can you imagine the vitriol that would spew from both sides in a public forum, poisoning the atmosphere in which negotiations are taking place?

The Chrysler microsite is jut fine, but again, it’s not a blog, it’s not social, and it didn’t reveal anything about the nature or subsstance of the negotiations—as well it shouldn’t have.

If you’ve been involved with labor negotiatons and disagree, by all means, weigh in!

10/20/07 | 5 Comments | Chrysler’s labor site is fine, but it’s not social

Comments

  • 1.Hey, Shel. Thanks for a good, thought-provoking opposite viewpoint. However, I think if you listen to the audio interview with Chrysler's SVP of Employee Relations, you will see he goes into a great deal of detail about the structural cost issues that the company is trying to resolve in the negotiations. He talks about the cost burdens in very specific details. Again, a listener may not agree with the company's point of view about these issues, but they are absolutely articulating what they believe the specifics of those issues are.

    If they are not offering a way for readers to give feedback on the site, that's certainly open to question. I was more taken up with the fact that they had gone many steps beyond GM's terse "we're not gonna talk about it post that impressed you so much."

    They should provide a way for people to challenge them and question them. That would make the conversation more two-way. But as you and I well know, these are big companies that frequently believed in limited communications with their own management employees over the years, so it's hard to beat them up too much if their baby steps in the social media are not 100% right the first time. Let's hope they tinker with it a bit.

    I'm reminded of my early career at Conrail, when the labor relations people ignored our communications advice about timing of furlough notifications. They would routinely invite the Altoona congressman to come in and be briefed about it, but not tell media relations they were meeting with him. The first thing you know, congressman leaves meeting with Conrail, and media relations people get a call from the Altoona Mirror about furloughs we haven't even been told about. Duh!

    Or worse, they would post the notices in the locomotive shops, someone in the shop would call the paper.

    Things have gotten a little better, a little smarter, but there's certainly room for more improvement, and I am hopeful that these kinds of conversations between communications professionals, out in the open, disagreeing with each other in a reasonable, thoughtful way, will help move the bar on how well companies communicate.

    Talk to you soon!

    Steve Lubetkin | October 2007 | About to leave for PRSA Conference in Philadelphia

  • 2.Thanks for the comment, Steve.

    I do think Chrysler's use of a timely, issues-related information clearinghouse is a good one. My issue is calling it a blog or any other kind of social media tool, since it's not. Remember, GM said they weren't going to talk about the STRIKE (not the labor process) on its BLOG, which would have required COMMENTS. Those comments could have poisoned the entire negotiation as hard-core union activists and anti-union voices went after each other tooth-and-nail.

    Sure, the audio talks about ISSUES, but not the day-to-day status of the negotiations. This is nothing new -- companies more often than not stake out their positions on a contract, as do the unions -- just not on a BLOG. Chrysler didn't, either. They didn't even make the audio subscribable as a podcast, nor did they let anyone comment on the audio...just as they shouldn't have.

    Just as GM used other channels than social media to address its negotiations, Chrysler found another channel in a clearinghouse site. But why anyone would refer to this as a blog is absolutely beyond me.

    Shel Holtz | October 2007 | Concord, CA

  • 3.Shel..
    Thanks very much for your fair assessment of chryslerlabortalks07.com. Thought I'd clear up a few things. Our site was never intended to be, or promoted as, a blog. As you surmised, it's a depository of quickly accessible information. Our intent is to make our data and positions quickly and easily searchable by the public and reporters on deadline.
    Our other goal is to provide "thought starters" for reporters looking for angles, especially during the dog days of the summer between the initial handshake and the crunch to bang out a deal close to the contract's expiration.
    Finally, we wanted the public and our employees to have access to the same information as the media so they could examine it themselves, in its full context.
    We hope the content on our site sparked some discussions and more informed stories.
    The project was accomplished almost completely by volunteers on my electronic media team who gave many hours of their time.
    It's our first crack at something like this, and we've learned a lot through it. Any comments or suggestions are appreciated and will help improve our efforts next time around.

    Ed Garsten | October 2007 | Auburn Hills, Michigan

  • 4.OK,Shel, so it's the use of the word "blog" that sets you off. It's very much like the purists who say it's not really a "podcast" unless you put it on an RSS feed.

    But I think it's fair to say Chrysler used a blog publishing platform, and technology that has been finetuned for podcasting purposes, to deliver the site very quickly with limited resources.

    I think we communications professionals, particularly in our enthusiasm for blogging or podcasting, need to also keep in the back of our minds that the tools used to create what we now call social media are very good technology platforms for rapid deployment situations, and even if our companies or clients never actually want to engage in a two-way conversation, the tools are very valuable.

    We used to praise companies that kept a "dark site" for use in a crisis.

    Today, PR does not live by web alone...

    I think the new paradigm is crisis PR that has a blogging platform ready to use to publish updates, standby links in Twitter (I finally 'get' Twitter), Facebook, MySpace, and everywhere else, that can go live on a moment's, or at least very short notice.

    I'd be interested to know how many of your audience, clients, Twitter friends, whoever, are using this new approach..."dark social media."

    Steve Lubetkin | October 2007 | About to leave for PRSA Conference in Philadelphia

  • 5.Steve, I think there's more then semantics at play here. Blogging software, at the end of the day, is lightweight content management. Kudos to Chrysler, for sure, for using CMS to be able to produce something quickly. But a blog itself is a SOCIAL medium and even Ed from Chrysler acknowledges there's nothing social about this information depository. Again, I have no criticism of what Chrysler has done, but was blogging software necessary? Hardly -- look at AudienceCentral.com, which has provided such a platform for crisis communications since long before blogging (developed by Gerald Baron, author of "Now is Too Late"). So, to reiterate, I think Chrysler's site is great, but to compare it to FastLane -- a conversation between a company and its biggest fans, is comparing those proverbial apples to those proverbial oranges. One is not better than the other. They are completely different, serve completely different functions, and produce completely different outcomes.

    Shel Holtz | October 2007 | Copenhagen, Denmark

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