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Just noticed in The Times (UK):

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Stephen Payne: a hotshot lobbyist who can get you into White House

[ Snip ... ]

Dos is exiled from Kazakhstan after setting up his own political party, Atameken, at the end of 2006. He was forced to flee following threats to his life.

Before that happened, however, he acted as an adviser to Timur Kulibayev, the billionaire son-in-law of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh president, and a man of considerable influence within the country.

Dos said that in the autumn of 2005 he had been asked by the Kazakh government, via Kulibayev, to arrange a visit by Cheney. The intention was to improve the country’s international standing.

Dos had spent several days negotiating with Payne. A deal was eventually agreed, he said, and he understood that a payment of $2m was passed, via a Kazakh oil and gas company, to Payne’s firm.

The following May, Cheney made a brief trip to Kazakhstan. His visit was remarked upon in the media at the time, both for the lavish praise which he publicly heaped on Nazarbayev and for the stark contrast between this and a speech he had made just a day earlier at a conference in Lithuania in which he had lambasted Russia for being insufficiently democratic. Now he was lauding Nazarbayev, who has effectively made himself president for life and in whose country it is an offence to criticise him.

“Why did Cheney castigate Russia’s imperfect democracy while saying not a word about Kazakhstan’s shameless travesty of the democratic system?” said one newspaper following the visit. “Cheney’s flattery of the Kazakh regime was sickening,” said another.

Dos believes some of the money paid to WSP may have found its way to “entities” connected to the Bush administration.

In order to test which channels might be available to foreigners seeking influence within the US, Dos agreed to approach Payne, at The Sunday Times’s request, with a fabricated story about Akayev wanting to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the world. Akayev was not aware of the approach to Payne.

Via the Wall Street journal’s All Things Digital

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Guardian Media Group Buys paidContent for $30 Million

… it’s nice to get a wee bit of recognition.

Going back almost 5 years now, I co-founded a small Web 2.0 startup called Qumana.  Our aim was to make it easier for bloggers to assemble snippets of content and then stitch together and publish blog posts that had a rich mix of text, images and audio, video or slides, for example.  

We also offered bloggers the unique capability of inserting advertising into a blog post whenever, wherever and however they wanted … if they wanted to use advertising.  But bloggers could use Qumana without using the advertising function.

We ran out of money about 2 and one-half years ago, but left the web site up.  People continue to download the tool and use it with satisfaction.

It was also a factor in our decision to put things on hold that Microsoft came out with the blogging tool LiveWriter, an almost direct clone of Qumana.  We now sometimes talk of Qumana as LiveWriter for OS X.

There’s still a lot of potential, in my opinion, for such tools to be integrated (with RSS and Twitter, for example) for use in the enterprise setting.

Anyhow, here’s a nod of recognition from a magazine focused on OS X tools.

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Via Bertrand Duperrin (whom I enjoyed meeting in Montreal in May .. a very clever and passionate fellow who scours the Web for everything related to Enterprise 2.0).

The network era has been here and has been growing and is here to stay … and there is an opportunity to use technology to help us all, organizations and corporations included, become less technocratic.

At least that’s how I interpret Lee Bryant’s thoughtful and well-put-together presentation.

I share his belief that large organizations won’t be disappearing any time soon.  I also think that many large corporations will be comprised of many small and some large networks, and those networks are made up of people … their brains, their emotions, and their motivations.

It more than time for organizations large and small to recognize that the machine metaphor and assumptions about machine-like structures and dynamics can’t cope effectively with complexity and ongoing change as well as resilient human networks in which understanding and positive motivation reside.

Dare I say that this presentation reminds me of the concept I call “wirearchy” ?

Thanks, Lee, for this clear and compelling presentation.  I wish I had been at Reboot this year … aiming to make it to Copenhagen next year.

Perhaps I’ll see you in Montreal at WebCom this fall.

  

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Via Lois Kelly’s Bloghound, via Marketing 2.0 …

A brief commentary on a recent Forrester survey noting that corporate blogging (to external customers and markets) is often not working out that well.

Personally, I am not that surprised.  There is a plethora of writing over the last two years (including some on this blog) suggesting that there’s a lot of adaptation to corporate cultures, management processes and management styles that will be be most useful when moving into a new way of working with information.

This survey does not seem to address social computing inside the firewall.  I would be greatly surprised to find a significantly different result, except perhaps where a project or team has indeed migrated to a new way of working.

Using blogs and wikis to good effect in any comprehensive way will, I think, involve a lot of “soft” organizational change.

“The soft stuff is always the hard stuff” … an OD mantra.

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Forrester: disappointment in corporate blogs

July 10th, 2008 Lois Kelly Posted in Communicating, Conversational Marketing |

A recent Forrester survey of 189 companies found that 38% rated blogging marginal to marketing and 15 % said blogs were irrelevant. My experience is that many who get into blogs have unrealistic expectations, set irrelevant measures and “ROI” goals, and view blogs as a campaign tactic, which they most definitely are not. (Another observation: many quickly run out of things to blog about, often a sign that they’re not passionate or knowledgeable about their field.)

The bigger point is that people today expect a more social, casual style of business communications. In writing style. And in being able to post a comment or talk back.

The value of blogging done right is that it breaks the old corporate speak iceberg. Soon there will no longer be a corporate Web site and separate blogs. Good business Web sites will be blog-like in style and the ability for people to comment.

However, this means that businesses need to be more interesting, provide more valuable content and ideas to people who take the time to go to their site/blogs, have a point of view on trends in their industries, and thoughtfully respond to comments.

It also means that many, many communications and marketing people have to relearn communications skills.

By way of today’s Globe and Mail …

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