Though this has been a trend that is akin to the frog happily boiling in an ever increasing pot of hot water, the reality struck me today as I saw this Wall Street Journal article about how Facebook and Zappos approach hiring. Facebook, of course, is the social networking platform that has become the largest social network on the planet and Zappos, the sexy company that was just acquired by Amazon and has made its name, not on selling shoes – its core business – but in its company culture and parties.

In the WSJ article, the writer begins with the statement, “For fast-growing technology start-ups, there are many approaches to employee hiring and retention.”

While Zappos is a great company, and their acquisition by Amazon (which is a technology company) certainly places them in the ranks of great Internet success stories, they are a glorified shoe store, using eCommerce, web marketing and buzz to execute on their core business. They are not a technology company.

This is not a pissing match over labels. If calling a company a technology company when they are not was harmless, I wouldn’t care. The reality is that it is a harmful trend that is hurting the real tech community. This is not about Zappos. This is about the hundreds of people who hang out on the social networks, using the technologies built by real technology companies and technologists, and who call themselves technologists because they use the tools.

Photo by rutty on Flickr

These are the people who go for job interviews that they are not qualified for hanging their hats on social media experience.

Being in social media does not make you part of the technology community.

The real technology community is made up of developers, I.T. architects, and even highly trained engineers with C.S. degrees. For the record, I have neither a C.S. degree or any degree at all. However, I have been slinging code for 10 years now and it continues to be my primary business, despite public speaking, book writing and social media engagements. I am a technologist. A marketer or a salesperson may be highly trained marketers or sales people, but they are not technologists in most cases.

Here are some thoughts. These are common. I’m not simply being a little over the top.

• The most you know about memory leaks is when Firefox crashes. Do you know why? Can you debug it? Do you understand the concept of a memory leak and why it happens?
• You don’t know how or why an API is important. If you have to ask what an API is, you’re not a technologist. You don’t have to know how to use it, but know what it is. If you don’t know why an API might be important, you’re also not a technologist.
• Your evaluation of a good website is based on the UI and layout. Great design is important and great designers are hard to find. That doesn’t make them technologists. Though there are some who straddle both worlds extremely well. A website is not just a website because of the appearance. It’s about how data is used. Remember this video?

• It doesn’t matter if a site is built in a compiled language (Compiled PHP, .NET, etc) or not. Yes it does. Why?
• Your approach to business does not include principles of Object Orientation as understood by developers. OOP is huge with developers. Ask any Java, Ruby or Python developer. Can you apply these principles to business too? They do apply…
• The most exposure you’ve had to XML is RSS. And at that, the most you’ve had is adding a feed to Google Reader.
• Your idea of working for a web startup is as ‘community manager’. Yeah, there are some great community managers. They are people people, not technology people. Additionally, community managers are meant to be liaisons between users and developers. Stop calling yourself a tech person if you’re a glorified PR person.

Again, if this was simply a matter of labels, it would be no big deal. Social media expert? Go for it… Everyone is a social media expert. Entrepreneur? Unless you’re building the product yourself, you’re probably not a technologist. Businessperson? Sure. CEO material? Quite possibly. Don’t call yourself a technologist.

You’re HURTING us. This market is filled with people looking for work right now. And recruiters are out in force looking for the one person who can fill the role of two people and save their client money. So by you walking in the door and taking jobs you’re not qualified for simply because you can do some marketing, strategy and you know how to hack on a website, you’re hurting this industry of highly qualified, professional people.

Stop carpet-bagging on our industry and call yourself what you are. You are highly qualified marketers. You are highly qualified journalists. You are highly qualified business development people. You are not technologists.

As an independent, self employed consultant, times can sometimes be tough. In fact, in many way, it’s a feast or famine game. You go through spells where clients don’t pay, they pay late, or you just can’t get the business going enough to generate the income needed to run the business, and sadly, sometimes to pay the bills. So bank runs are important. They are pivotal moments where you might go from pennies in the account to plenty of money to fill the reserves. Those bank runs are always personally fulfilling because it’s a statement that, hey, I don’t have to go find a “real” job now… I can continue to press forward pursuing the dreams I’ve tried to find on my own for these past years. That deposit of some check is a rewarding thing that, honestly, sometimes makes the difference between having the will to go on or just quitting outright.

On Wednesday, I finally received one of these very important checks that was long overdue from a client. With a diminishing bank account, I jumped in the car late in the day and trucked the 45 minutes through rush hour traffic just to get to the bank and find they were closed. When I called their customer service toll free number, I was informed (inaccurately, as I later discovered) that the drive through was still open. Since there was a problem with my Visa debit card, I couldn’t simply make the deposit at the ATM machine so I thanked the representative and tried the drive thru. As I said, I discovered it was closed as well.

Irritated, I jumped on Twitter and went ballistic, venting about how I was going to close my account and find a bank that was closer. I was livid and was letting the world know. These bank runs are not small things for me. They take gas and money and time away from my book. I have kept this account because I always valued the 1st Mariner Bank Customer Service, though, but even that wasn’t going to be enough to keep me banking 45 mins away from home.

@FirstMarinerBank contacted me on Twitter late on Wednesday and commiserated a bit, but did little to actually help my problem. I didn’t expect that he (or she) could, but it was nice to talk to someone nonetheless.

Thursday morning, I got back in my car and drove from Bethesda back to Columbia, Md. where I made the deposit into my account and had one of those personal victory celebrations in my head. I could breathe easier. About an hour afterwards, without prompting by me, I recieved a DM from @FMBCustServ (who might also be @FirstMarinerBank – I don’t know) notifying me that he (his name is Matt Sparks) had saw the deposit go into my account and would work hard to get it cleared for me by the weekend.

Fascinating.

I received another check yesterday as well (but sadly, not before I made my bank run) and thanked Matt, telling him I’d be making another deposit today (Friday) and thanking him for his efforts. And I did. Today, I went back to the bank (that’s the third bank run in three days, if you’re keeping track at home) to make a deposit and, convinced that I’d be stupid to leave the bank after their exceptional show of support, not only made the deposit and didn’t close my personal checking account, but also opened up a new business account for my company.

About an hour after this process, I received another DM from Matt letting me know that he also saw that deposit and noting I’d be able to have money for the weekend. I already did, but it was a nice personal touch.

This is the way customer service should be. As a customer, I may not know what I want or need. Going the extra mile (not wearing the minimum amount of flair, if you will) is what keeps customers around. If we, as customers, feel valued then we are going to value you even more.

It’s the economy of trust.

Well done, Matt Sparks and 1st Mariner Bank. If you’re local to Baltimore, this is the bank you should be doing business with because they get it. If you’re in Suburban DC, as I have been since October, it might even be worth the extra drive to do business with these guys.

This post and DMs shared with permission.

At some point, however, I came to find my voice on this blog. I wrote in an authoritative way on topics that I was knowledgeable about. I challenged assumptions made in industry, and brought a common sense, no bullshit approach to conversation. I’ve been rewarded with many fans, followers and friends. Literally, my brand, personal or otherwise, is golden. As it should be.

This blog is not a make money quick kind of venture. In fact, I think I made $35 last time I got a check. Not much more than beer money, but that’s fine – I make my money because of my blog, not via my blog. I don’t play the game of SEO, link building and trying to get the most page views. That is a game played by a few power players who have worked the system and built up alliances. I have built my authority and stature, not on making money with my blog or by selling someone elses product in return for a kickback. I have not worried about how many pageviews and selling CPM advertising. I am worried about the quality of the content, the truth in my writing, the community that pays attention and, basically, changing the world one word at a time.

This is my value. This is why when I talk about Government and the web, even though I’m not one of the Goverati, people pay attention. This is why when I write about marketing, I get listed as a top marketer despite not being one. This is why when I examine technology policy, executives from technology companies email me.

This is the real shit. This is not fraud. This is not get rich quick scams.

I’ve said it many times, the most recently being at the excellent Bootstrap Maryland event… You do not control your brand. Your customers do.

I do not control my brand. My readers do. My community does.

My brand is not destroyed by Google bombing my name or brand into search engine rankings. When I get negative press, I let my community protect my brand. It makes no sense for me to engage in a protectionist way since I can’t protect my brand anyway.

This morning, I woke up to this story, where Jeremy Schoemaker attacks my brand and my name. Besides the fact that the post is completely schizophrenic and not very well thought out, much less executed, let’s look at the marketing techniques and think about brand. The title of the post is loaded up with my name and brand. He makes sure to this because that will weigh higher in the Google index. Indeed, his post is the 7th SERP in Google when you search for my name after only a few hours. Whatever.

It doesn’t change my business. It doesn’t change my brand. In fact, it doesn’t change my authority because my trust is with you, my community. On Twitter, I am being defended. Fine, whatever. I appreciate it.

In today’s online world, I am constantly hearing about companies who are afraid to converse because they don’t want disagreement. They lose the conversation. In some cases, they try to erase bad publicity.

Conversation is going to happen. Negative conversation is going to happen. The reality is that bad PR doesn’t kill a company. How the customers or community respond make the brand.

Class is adjourned.

“The List”

Have you seen the press & blogger list at CES? It’s pretty unbelievably large, with 3398 identified members of the media, and there’s no way to get off the list, even if you aren’t coming to the show anymore. So these 3398 people are all getting pitched by the 2700 exhibitors. This means we have a ton of noise, with virtually no signal.

“The Prune”

Any half-decent marketer’s first task with the list was culling it. Got a mobile gadget? Get rid of the home AV bloggers and media. Got a speaker? You can ignore the auto guys. Unfortunately it seems that most companies didn’t do such a great job pruning. For my personal blog, I was surprised to get contacted by PR reps with products that were way out of my typical coverage area. It may seem like a lot of work, but internally we managed to pare down the list by 90% in less than a day, and it was time very well spent.

“The Outreach”
If slicing up the media list is a science, then writing the outreach pitch is absolutely an art. My favorite pitches to receive are (1) short, (2) funny/entertaining, (3) direct & to the point, and (4) contain all the information I need to act on (especially including links!). Considering the hundreds of emails the typical CES media person is receiving, the more the pitch can stand out from the crowd yet still convey the necessary info, the better. The worst pitches I’ve received don’t include URLs for more information, try to be too coy or clever, try to make mountains out of molehills (if you sell CD storage cases, you simply don’t have EXCITING NEWS AT CES this year), or otherwise complicate the process.

“The Followup”

I don’t have as much of a clear rule here. There are times when the follow-up is useful, warranted, and welcome. Others it’s annoying and borderline harassing. My recommendation to all is no more than one follow-up email, and no phone calls unless the individual has made it clear they *want* phone calls. Don’t send 5 reminders, because nobody likes a pest. I do appreciate those who send a quick extra note with their contact info and a reminder of where at CES their booth/demo is, and leave it in my hands to make the decision.

“The Meet”

There’s no better way to screw it all up than meeting the blogger/journalist in person, and then asking them some question that utterly reveals you have no idea who they are. I don’t care how you handle it, make a cheat sheet, print something out in the morning, but if you’ve taken the time to ask me to see your demo, you can take the time to be *remotely* familiar with my blog. I don’t expect you to have ready today’s post, but you should know something about me or my style or my content. At the same time, I think bloggers who schedule appointments for demos/briefings should also take the time to read the materials/website for the company/products they plan to see – it’s a two-way street.

“The Close”

Following up after the show is your job, not that of the blogger. If you promised someone a review unit, it’s on your to-do list, not theirs. Also, you should make a point of reading their coverage of the show prior to the follow-up. If they didn’t write about you during the show, don’t be hurt or offended, and by no means should you close the door. Similarly, if you are a blogger and your brief mention of a company hit your “CES recap” post but doesn’t make their Press page, that shouldn’t be unexpected. For both sides to keep in mind: not every demo deserves a blog post from every blogger.

CES is a wacky time of the year for a couple of hundred thousand people. Many of us haven’t slept much since the Thanksgiving Break (or longer for our international visitors). I’d call it controlled chaos, but that implies one can control such a wild beast. That said, it somehow works. Those 96 hours are a magical time of year for me personally, and while I’m already tired of both receiving and giving pitches, I’m still getting revved up for the show. See you in Vegas!

It is the death of life and the birth of a new holocaustic life. We’ve never actually had an actual nuclear winter on a global scale, though the threat is there as more and more nuclear weapons proliferate the globe. Many science fiction stories have been built around the concept of a nuclear holocaust and life after.

Although it’s a dark time, sometimes proverbial nuclear winters are necessary. They are the times when you throw away everything you know and begin from scratch. A chance at a new life. A rebirth. It’s a time to correct all that is wrong and hopefully get on the right path over the long haul. Economists call it “corrections”. Historians call it the “end of an era” or the “decline of an Empire” – depending on the context.

As someone who is not experienced in an actual nuclear winter, let me describe a few things that I’ve learned from proverbial “nuclear winter”

Photo by nogoodreason

1. All Assumptions are False

In a nuclear winter, life is not as you expect. Landmarks are gone. People you know are no longer in your world. You can no longer go to the grocery store and instead have to live off the land.

If you’re in a business that is facing massive layoffs, you cannot assume that the way things always have been will still exist in the world post-layoffs. You cannot assume that, even if you retain your job, your “new” job will remain as it was. You will likely end up giving up responsibilities due to business strategy objective shifts and maybe doing some new work due to the need to backfill for laid off colleagues.

You cannot assume that, because we’ve lived in a world of thriving internet startups, that you the lay of that land will remain the same in an economic holocaust. You can’t. It’s just not a safe assumption. Ask Seesmic.

2. Live Off the Land

In a nuclear winter, as described earlier, you simply can’t go to your Whole Foods and buy your hipster organic food. The reality is is that even if you could go buy organic food, it’s likely tainted from the fallout in the water, ground and air. No, you live off the land. You find the bugs and plants that carry an innate immunity to radioactivity or that have evolved enough to live and thrive in a nuclear landscape. Because you have to survive, and that’s more important than getting your Venti Soy Chai at Starbucks (that don’t exist).

More and more companies that continue to emerge these days are bootstrapping. Companies like AwayFind, who launched the other day, are bootstrapping and not taking angel investing or venture capital to stay alive. They are not taking a devaluation just for the infusion of cash. They are succeeding the old-fashioned way – a method that might take a lot more runway, but that ensures that 100% of the value of the company is retained by the principals. If you can live off the land, do it. It might be awhile before you find yourself a Starbucks in the nuclear wasteland.

3. There is Always a Remnant

During any nuclear winter in any story, you’ll always find a remnant. It might just be a small village of survivors that are doing their best to build a community and survive. They may have built a wall of scrap metal around their community to keep raiders away, but they are surviving.

At critical times where the status quo is challenged, the companies that are the hardiest and most cost-efficient are the ones that survive. While companies like AIG require an infusion of cash (or, as I call it, a crutch) to stay afloat they continue to splurge on non-necessities. Companies like this are doomed to failure.

While the auto-industry, built around an inefficient union mentality that, at one end, limits innovation because it de-incentivizes that innovation, and at the other hand overpays under-qualified individuals to do jobs that are worth half of their paychecks, struggles to figure themselves out, they will eventually have to declare bankruptcy. During that bankruptcy, they will be forced to cut, by some estimates, 50% of their workforce while updating their approach to union labor to ensure survival. There will be a remnant, and that remnant will figure out what needs to happen to survive the wasteland.

4. That Bridge Used to be the 14th Street Bridge

I’ve been playing Fallout 3 recently, which is set 200 years after a nuclear war between the United States and China. The setting is a region called “The Capital Wasteland” and is, in essence, the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region.

Throughout the game, you can find indications of what used to be. I recognized, in my wandering around the Capital Wasteland, a landmark that could only be the 14th Street Bridge. I would not have recognized it from anything other than geographical position. There were no distinguishing features and it was largely destroyed and falling into the isotope-filled Potomac River, but I knew it was the bridge.

Practices will change throughout life, but principles and patterns remain the same. It is the essence of the Chaos Theory which states that though the universe appears to be full of chaos and disorganization, it is entirely made up of fractals and patterns at an atomic and sub-atomic level. More simply, there are patterns and principles that remain true, though practice, execution and manifestation of those principles change.

In the communications, newspaper, and television industries, as well as many large businesses, people are wrestling with how to do business in a world that is dominated by the internet and then, only recently. They see chaos, where they should see patterns. The principles of public relations is to communicate effectively with the public. The practices of public relations, however, are shifting and the ones that adjust are the ones that will survive that nuclear winter.

5. Know Your Immune System

In a nuclear winter, there’s no one looking out for survivors except the survivors themselves. If there are doctors, they are few and far between. If there is a support community, you have to look hard and not trust anyone. It’s the nature of the new dog eat dog world that such a holocaust causes.

Companies right now are scrambling to figure out “what’s up”. They are looking at their profit margins, cash in hand and extending their runways as far as they can extend them. Investors are reassuring their portfolio companies that there should be a way to survive if they are smart and proactive, but the reality is that in a nuclear winter, no one really knows.

Even if a portfolio company manages to get that C-round and the $15M investment they need, it will be on a down valuation. In layman speak, that means it becomes, in essence, a high-interest loan where the company gets the cash they need but give up a larger stake in the company to make it happen.

The big banks are getting bailout money, but giving up controlling stakes in their companies in some cases. Rollups are likely with smaller companies needing an infusion of cash. People are being reassured that they will retain their jobs, and being laid off the week after. You can trust no one in a winter except yourself. I reiterate my recommendation from a few weeks ago, though. If you have a stable job, stay in it. If you are an entrepreneur, don’t seek shelter in a stable job. Survive, survive, survive…. then rebuild.

If you’re fortunate enough, you’ve been hit with this spam a dozen times in the last week. It is shadiness at it’s best and I will not hesitate to out PR individuals or firms, regardless of how much “clout” they have in the social space, if they do this to me again. It will not be automatic, although it might be. You’ve been warned.

The spam is a nifty little trick where you publish an event, group or picture of a product, service or event. Pretty typical Facebook activity, really.

Spamming PR people then use Facebook’s “tag” feature, something that is more in context for photos where you can tag someone that is in the photo and they receive a notification that they’ve been tagged. People like me are tagged in Facebook content where we have no context with the expectation that we will be notified of the content (event, whatever) and will click through and maybe cover their product.

So. Not. Cool.

Facebook, can you please put some granular privacy controls including “Friend groups” and “Group privacy” to allow us to control who can tag us, or rather who can NOT tag us?

Also, it would be fantastic if we could flag inappropriate conten t with cause. I would flag such spam content (which isn’t necessarily spammy, to be clear, just how it is delivered to us is) with the explanation that the content was delivered as a spam PR pitch.

PR firms, shape up. You are not relevant just because you connect with us on Facebook. Give us some credit.

We think of companies like Dell and JetBlue as examples of companies that “get it”. Even this weekend at WordCamp where I hammered the ideas of Marketing, Message and Brand, these companies came up as examples of companies engaging in the social space, including blogs.

But these broad examples are still the exception to the rules. Most companies still don’t realize that they need to be in the space, engaging with not only customers but possible customers.

I met one gentleman this weekend who owns a construction business but is an English major. He decided he would start writing DIY and home improvement stories in the form of a blog and is making big waves.

I’d say most home improvement companies don’t blog. They probably aren’t on Facebook. Probably not tweeting on Twitter.

There’s a company here in the Baltimore area that has a radio spot. In the radio spot, the owner says he personally goes to every job site every day until a job is done. When that’s the way most companies operate, it’s easy to think there is no time for social media.

Here’s the secret sauce, though, that many are missing. Your customers are behind the walls of social networks and on blogs talking about you somewhere. Trust me. You can’t afford not to be part of the conversation, and there’s no legitimate excuse not to participate.

With the economy the way it is, it is truly a cheap way to market, do public affairs and drum up business. Why wouldn’t you do it?

There was one session, in particular, where an audience member asked a speaker talking about software that is currently monitoring only main stream media outlets, “What do we do about monitoring and responding to bloggers?”

The response blew me away. “We don’t do anything about bloggers because we haven’t figured them out yet. Until we do, we won’t be doing anything about them.”

The context here being, of course, the software product.

Software developers understand that software is built on complex sets of logic. If this happens, then we do that. If a user clicks here, then this thing is going to happen. The speaker was saying that until bloggers could be broken down into a logical algorithm, the software won’t incorporate blogs.

My snarky response, expressed only in my own mind, is, “We’re human. If you can’t figure out how to approach us as humans instead of machines, maybe you should get out of the public relations business.”

On Friday, Chris Brogan wrote the same thing from the opposite side:

I have an anti-robot stance on Twitter. By that, I mean to say that I don’t want to follow things that aren’t people (with all due respect to Bruce Sterling’s spimes). I just don’t need to add something automated into a place that’s inherently human.

He goes on to say that his anti-robot stance is being challenged because someone who is using an automated posting system is actually offering something of use and now he has a crisis of conscience.

Folks, we’re unnecessarily complicating our lives. Sometimes a bit of common sense is needed to overrule our warped sense of logical rules. PR folks should look at blogger coverage, not in some automated way that has to fit into specific guidelines in order for them to know how to respond. And Chris needs to stop worrying about artificial rules he has created for himself. You made the rule, you can break it.

I have rules on Twitter too. I don’t follow sex-bots. I don’t follow spammy people. I don’t follow people that have disparate ratios of followers-followees. Except for the sexbot rule, I’ve broken every one if I needed to.

I’ve done the same thing with LinkedIn and Facebook.

Rules are made to be broken by sound human rationalization.

Step 1 – Get Your Action Plan Together

Your PR Action Plan will contain information unique to your business, but here is what you’ll want to include:

- Media venues you’d like to pursue for a story

- Marketing Messages that are short and tell your story

- Events You Are going to be speaking at or have a booth there to promote

- Newsworthy Stuff About Your Firm

- Any Awards you have won and any partners that might be important

- Timeline for Execution

Step 2 – Identify Your Targets

Once you have a PR Plan in place, it’s time to get smart with a good dose of research. In this day and age, the media are constantly bombarded with hundreds of emails, faxes and phone calls. The challenge for you is figuring out how to stand out and get noticed. Before pitching any media member or sending out a single press release, ask yourself:

“œWhy is this reporter going to care about this particular story? Is it really newsworthy?”

Develop a list of media venues and a targeted list of people that are interested or report on your space. By conducting the appropriate research upfront, you’ll avoid wasting time, money and effort later on. Plus, you’ll create valuable relationships with key media members who can help publicize your business.

Step 3 – Build Your Story Idea Library

Once you have your plan in place and know who you are going to target, you really to create a list of story ideas and a library that gives you a schedule of news that keeps the buzz and momentum going about your company. Startup Nation has a great list of 5 Ways to Create Your Own News. Here they are:

1. Take part in a community event, or create your own. Give something back and encourage others to do the same.
2. Create a brief report or “˜top 10 list’ related to a big trend in your industry that will help others solve a problem. Provide your expertise without asking for anything in return.
3. Submit an opinion piece to your local newspaper about a current news item. This can help build awareness for your business.
4. Give a presentation at a local community college, business group or other organization where your target audience attends. Provide valuable information without giving a sales-pitch and invite pertinent reporters. You’ll establish yourself as an expert and meet potential new customers while increasing your chances of obtaining media coverage.
5. Find success stories and promote them.

Step 4 – Create a Media Kit

You have probably heard of one, but what the heck is one and what is in it?

It is a package of information that allows reporters to get the data they need about your business quickly and easily. You want to include facts about the business, business background, bios and news about the company.

Don’t forget to have an online version so that reporters can access the information at all times to meet tight deadlines. This will help you save time and money in printing and shipping fees.

Step 5 – Generate a few Press Releases

You will want to get started writing a few press releases to get the momentum going. Startup Nation has a great write up on places to publish your press releases and tips on writing them. As they state “it should include some kind of business news, announcement or event that you send to targeted media members, partners, customers, investors, sponsors, and other pertinent people. It should be short, truthful, interesting, and easy-to-read.

I have found that it is good to maybe find a freelance writer to help you craft it. This is because you might not be a good a writer as you think you are or don’t have enough time to really write something from the outside looking in.

Another idea is to set up your web site to have your press releases and news in an RSS feed so people can subscribe to in a feed reader and have it delivered directly to them. Just another channel, but a great one nonetheless.

Step 6 – Get Out There and Start Talking

So you have your plan, your target list, your media kit and a few press releases. So what’s next? Get out there and start talking to people. Always be networking to find new resources for your press releases and most importantly, always be available. Being available to answer questions or provide a quick quote when a reporter is on a deadline can get you press you never even expected.

Thus, the Twitter Pitch was born.

I’m releasing a new plugin that I hacked together over the weekend called WP-Twitterpitch that I’m also running here at Technosailor. Check out the navigation for a demo.

WP-TwitterPitch is all about getting the pitch delivered to you in the form you want to get it delivered – in other words in Twitter format. If you’re like me, then your Twitter direct message box is a lot like your email inbox. Personally, I don’t want to get pitches from PR companies in certain email inboxes. For whatever reason, I may not check them or they are personal, etc.

Twitter, however, provides the ultimate quick-messaging system. This plugin provides a template tag that you can drop anywhere in your theme. Clicking the link provides lightbox-like functionality for a “pitch form”. Using the form does not require a Twitter account (but does require that you have a secondary Twitter account you can use for this purpose, since you can’t send Direct Messages to yourself via Twitter). Note: Your WP-TwitterPitch Twitter account must follow the account that is being pitched and vica versa. This is a one-off action (hopefully, depending on Twitter) and only needs to be done when setting up WP-TwitterPitch.

Messages sent from the form are DMmed to the account getting the pitch and the form is limited to 140 characters or less. The beauty of linguistic efficiency.

Installation

1. Upload the

   1	wp-twitterpitch

   folder to the

   1	/wp-content/plugins/

   directory

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Edit Admin options to include Twitter ID to pitch, Twitter ID and Password to send Twitter pitches

as, as well as a message to “pitchers” that will be displayed in the form after the pitch has been sent.

Place wherever you want the link to appear

Direct Download Link

Well, it’s happened again. This time, the “outage” has occurred on a publicly editable wiki and lists PR Firms.

It’s caused quite a stir.

The story, in a nutshell is that Gina Trapani, lead editor of Lifehacker got tired of being spammed by PR agencies send press releases and pitches to her personal email address, despite notices “everywhere” to pitch tips@lifehacker.com. So she published a wiki with agencies that have pitched her personal email address (later made it editable only with attribution) and provided details on how to filter that list through Gmail filtering.

The topic has now been floated by some in the PR industry who have their panties in a bunch over this thing, that a blacklist be created for bloggers. I’ve avoided the whole controversy until last night when Geoff’s lunatical rant pushed me over the edge.

In those comments, I welcome the concept of a blogger blacklist. In fact, I want to be at the top of that list. See, it’s not that I don’t want to be pitched. I do. But pitching should come from some sort of rapport or relationship, not simply because of social ranking in the blogosphere. Even if the criteria were based on status in a particular niche of the blogosphere that was relevant to the pitch, that would be much more palatable than cold call spamming in the name of public frikkin’ relations.

Please put me on this blacklist. In fact, can I start it for you? Done.

I hope and pray this keeps the riff raff out of my inbox. Riff raff includes PR professionals or agencies who have not taken the time to understand us as bloggers. They don’t take the time to read our blogs. To know our audience. They leave voicemails about super secret meetings associated with events that we’re not registered for in cities that we aren’t in. They send us form letters addressing us as Site Owner. They don’t pay attention to how we want to be pitched.

See the PR agencies and professionals that can pitch me any day of the week know me or have some kind of professional rapport with me. They don’t need a blacklist. They wouldn’t even know I was on the blacklist. They don’t need to.

Is this too much work? Maybe. Should PR people care? Probably. I mean, really… If you’re spitballing top tier bloggers hoping to get the vehicle for the message, then you probably don’t want to include those top-tier bloggers, the biggest complainers, the most vocal advocates for change, in that list.

Some bloggers, like myself, will put our own names on that list.

Putting away all the foofoo, let’s think about some practical solutions to this problem. I think it’s high time that the PR community finance the creation and support of a third party broker that would maintain the authenticity, privacy, trust and relationship with the blogging comunity. I’m talking about an OpenID sort of trust-based system that includes the trust-relationship management as well as a CRM tool/plugin-in for sending communications in a standardized way. This tool would provide the recipient a means of “opt out” as well as trust-based ratings, reviews, advocacy and management.

PR Agency A sends me a press release via the system. I approve and can either create positive feedback or abstain (neutral feedback). If Agency B pitches and I don’t want it, I provide a negative feedback item that stays on an Agency’s permanent record.

I will gladly work with PR firms to create this tool. I think it’s essential for the healthy relationship between bloggers who legitimately want or need to be pitched and PR professionals who need to make a living and want to do it in a constructive, productive, ethical and moral way.

In the meantime, this stuff is not going to end soon. Agencies need to recognize that. Jeremy Pepper rightly points out that training is not happening. Spitball pitches or pitches in a way non-conducive to blogger cooperation (Gina’s issue) will not help.

As much as I’m a blogger, I have a degree of communications savviness too. We all want this to work well. Let’s create the tools to do it.

1. Social Media is only as valuable as what you put into it.
2. Your Blogging success is not based on the number of pageviews, but the number of “conversions” (forget advertising here, folks. Think deeper)
3. Your company needs to be blogging because you can then facilitate the conversation that is happening anyway
4. Presence Marketing can be the most effective use of social media. Read: Twitter rocks
5. You can be more effective as a well connected, thoughtful blogger with 500 subscribers than you can as a “powerhouse” blogger with 500,000.
6. Search feeds can be more important than blog feeds
7. The best networking happens over alcohol, after 10pm
8. Ask questions, receive feedback, take action.
9. Great business is birthed out of great community which is made of great individuals with great ideas.
10. Share and share alike.
11. Don’t be offended if someone criticizes you.
12. Be honest and constructive, not destructive
13. Laugh at yourself
14. Don’t oversell by spinning.
15. Recurring sales come from trust.
16. You cannot control your brand, but you can influence how it is percieved
17. There are valuable things in social media. Everything else is not valuable.
18. Early adopters are geeks, but they are also filters.
19. Never say never, but if concerned, proceed with caution. But do proceed.
20. Generations change. Practices change. Principles remain the same.
21. A blog is the best resumé someone can have
22. Your archives will always be there. It’s your chance to shape what they will look like.
23. Think differently about the value of traffic. It may not be as effective as you think it is.
24. Do not be afraid to be vocal.
25. Think clearly and coherently and shape your words, but spend more time thinking than you do writing.

What would you add?

BarCamp es un concepto de conferencia muy interesante… es en realidad una desconferencia a donde asisten los que quieran y las presentaciones dependen de los asistentes, por lo cual la conferencia se va desarrollando dinámicamente sin agenda previa. Este año, más de 300 personas asisitieron a la segunda edición de BarCamp Miami, organizada por Alex de Carvalho, Brian Breslin, Chris Saylor y Nick Dominguez.

En BarCamp los asistentes que deseen realizar alguna presentación (algún producto, concepto, idea, servicio, etc) se anotan en una cartelera y las presentaciones proceden de acuerdo a ese orden. Esta vez las presentaciones ocurrieron durante toda la tarde en más de cinco salones.

Entre las presentaciones podemos destacar:

• ubuket
• popego
• BricaBox
• GottaLoveGeeks
• scrappybusiness
• microformats
• coworking
• el mapa social
• Google Gears
• Rails
• OpenID
• Aviary
• Assembla

El nombre BarCamp tiene una historia interesante. Existe una conferencia llamada FooCamp, organizada por la editorial O’Reilly Media y llamada asi por las siglas de “Friends of O’Reilly” (Amigos de O’Reilly). El concepto de FooCamp es que la agenda de la conferencia es dictada por sus invitados. En programación se utiliza mucho el término “foobar” para designar una variable temporalmente. Por lo general, si utilizamos una variable llamada “foo” también usaremos una variable “bar.” (Cosas de hackers… ¿qué les puedo decir?)

Y ya que existía FooCamp, pues ¿por qué no BarCamp?

Technorati Tags:
conference, conferencia, FOWA, FOWAMiami08, future-of-web-apps, Miami, networks-sociales, PR, relaciones-publicas, social-networks, webapps, barcamp, foocamp, desconferencia, unconference, BarCampMiami, BarCampMiami2008

So, Geoff is a friend of mine but I told him I’d give him an honest review of this book, and honest review I will do. Overall, the book is brilliant. I’m glad this is not “yet another book on blogging”. It doesn’t provide a how to. It doesn’t provide options for choosing your platform or describe how to subscribe to RSS.

It’s obvious that this book was written mostly for executives. This is not a bad thing as Executives are the ones steering companies and the reality is that if companies don’t embrace social media, they will be left behind. It is presented in a very philosophical way, describing the challenges that companies face today when it comes to the social media landscape, brand management and public relations. The simple message is, “Hey guys, you need to get what is going on today and you need to do it fast because Now is Gone”.

The book starts with an intro from Brian Solis who you may remember was a member of the PR Roundtable discussion hosted here in November, 2007. I love Brian, but the foreword was too lengthy and off-putting. As a reader, I wanted to get into the meat of the book and it seemed to take awhile to get to that point.

Geoff makes some common sense analogies between social media mirroring real life. It stood out to me that people do not like to be controlled but they will allow themselves to be influenced – as long as you don’t try to control them! His 5 steps to the basis of an effective social media message could probably be broken out further, but were effective for the book:

1. Giving Up Control of the Message
2. Participating in a Community
3. Is Your Community Social Media Savvy?
4. Dedicating the Resources
5. Ethics and Transparency

This book as a whole is a slam dunk, effectively communicating a message that is very much needed and, is very timely at a time where companies are embarrassing themselves more than ever in their engagement with social media. In that way, this book could not be more timely.

I would suggest for the next book, however, (There will be another one, right Geoff? :) ) that fewer callouts be used. It seems that call outs were half the book and if that was the intention, you might as well have made them part of the book. :) That’s a minor point though.

Bottom line… 4 out of 5 stars (does that mean anything anymore?). Job well done. Go buy Now is Gone (aff) today.

Distribución de Boletines de Prensa

Para distribuir boletines de prensa al mayor número de personas posible, están SanePR y PR-Web. Fáciles de usar, gratis la primera y paga la segunda, estas herramientas enviarán sus boletines de prensa a través de internet, a los servicios de noticias, buscadores y webs sociales. PR-Web es un poco más completo en sus opciones de distribución y análisis.

Interacción con los Usuarios

Para interactuar con los usuarios, Facebook permite crear grupos y páginas de productos. Los grupos permiten a los miembros conversar entre si, publicar contenido y hasta servir de moderadores. Las páginas de productos son un tanto más estáticas, pero permiten a los usuarios indicar su preferencia por el producto. Ambas opciones son buenas como métodos de distribución de información y recepción de comentarios de los usuarios. También podemos crear aplicaciones en Facebook que permiten a los usuarios relacionarse alrededor de nuestro producto o mensaje.

Twitter es otra herramienta ideal para diseminar información a un grupo de usuarios. La conversación puede ser de ida o de ida-y-vuelta si preferimos.

Second Life es un universo virtual en el cual podemos crear una presencia tan elaborada como queramos. Empresas como Sun, Pontiac y Reuters han creado versiones de sus oficinas en Second Life, donde los usuarios pueden obtener más información, probar nuevos productos y hasta asistir a conciertos y entrevistas.

La herramienta más básica para informar y recibir información de los usuarios es un blog. Estos permiten darle un toque más humano a un producto o marca, y pueden ser tan informales o frios como haga falta.

Análisis de Competencia

Parar terminar, Google Trends permite realizar análisis de competencia sencillos que pueden indicarnos si existe algún producto de nombre similar en un mercado de interés, o cuál de varios productos genera más búsquedas en Google.

¿Tienes alguna otra herramienta que recomendar? Anótala abajo en los comentarios.

Other phrases such as, “Never trust a chef who won’t eat his own cooking”, or similarly, “Never trust a skinny chef” have come to represent the sentiment that the best vote of confidence in a product is when the owner/producer/creator also uses it.

Last night, Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter blasted this message out to his Twitter followers:

looking at an email receipt from iTunes for a vampire series I apparently bought””but I haven’t any vampire shows!

Fairly innocuous, I suppose. I hope the series was Buffy. Sarah Michelle Geller is HAWT. The point is, unlike many CEOs and company spokesgroupies, Biz is not promoting Twitter outright. He is not telling people the multiple virtues of Twitter, or explaining best practices of Twitter. Perhaps because Twitter doesn’t lend itself to a defined set of rules defining what it is or what it should do, but that is beside the point. Biz’s endorsement of his own product is a plain, everyday use of his own product in a non-promotional way.

Marketers need to get this. CEO’s need to understand this. PR people need to learn this. Your best sales technique is the technique that is not a technique. It’s just use. We’re watching you and how you use your product. The best time to sell is when you are at your least salesy.

Your thoughts?

So here we go. The final question on this Friday.

What advice would you give to your own industry in engaging the other side?

Brian Solis: Chris Anderson summarized it best, “I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that.”

What’s it going to take for PR to reflect that sentiment and honest plea for relevance? It should be common sense. But it’s not. Common sense is all too uncommon in almost everything we do these days.

So to help PR “pros” stop pissing-off bloggers and reporters and start building meaningful relationships with them, here is a list of things to live by:

1. Remember this is about people
2. What do you stand for? Answer that first before you try to convince people that are busier than you why they should take time to stop what they’re doing to pay you any attention.
3. It’s more than doing your homework. To some doing homework is building lists. Figure out what your are representing and why it matters. How does it compare to other things. What do people need? What are their pains?
4. Practice saying it aloud in one-to-two minutes or less to a friend or in front of a mirror. Seriously. It works. If you don’t get it no one else will.
5. Less is more. Find the right people, not just because you read their profile in a database, but because you read their work and understand their perspective.
6. Engage in conversations outside of when you need something.
7. Build relationships not lists.
8. Humanize the process and remember that this is about people
9. Stop whining and making excuses. You are responsible for your actions so arm yourself with what you need to be successful.
10. Stop sending press releases without summarizing what the news is and why it is IMPORTANT to the individual person you’re sending it to.
11. Remember the reputation and the future of PR is on you. If you’re not in this to do your job better, then ask yourself why you’re here. If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem.

Marshall Kirkpatrick: Let people know how you’d like to communicate but also, get over yourself, roll with the punches and deal with standard operating procedure. The good PR agents will do a good job and the rest will always be there. Ultimately, I’ll happily write about a great product that came in with an awful pitch and I turn down the opportunity to cover crappy products that come in via great pitches all the time.

Marc Orchant: I work both sides of the fence so I guess my advice would be to both side to do the following: be respectful, clear, and consistent.

On the PR side ““ know who you’re pitching and don’t waste the blogger’s time with pitches that are way off topic. Deliver a well- crafted pitch, supported by as much relevant information as you can assemble. When I get a pitch that contains a logo, screenshot, “money quote”. and sufficient background on the company or product, I have everything I need to begin thinking about what my coverage will look like. If I have to go fishing for this information, the odds are I won’t.

On the blogger side ““ invest the time in educating a PR contact abut who you are and what cover. This information should be on your blog. If it’s not, assuming that every PR rep has read the last month’s posts (or more) and intimately understands your topical focus and opinions is wishful thinking. There are simply too many blogs out there and he tools that do exist for researching the medium are less than great. So make it easy for the people pitching you to do so effectively. And when they miss the target, try first to course correct before blowing them off – especially when dealing with agency folks. You may not be interested int he client they’re representing today but who knows about tomorrow?

Doug Haslam: From the PR side, the first thing I would say is: “it;s not the other side.” Of course, this applies to all media. I approach PR as on the one hand helping our clients get attention, but on the other hand helping proifessional communicators get good stories. Stop worrying about “closing the deal” and start worrying about helping media present stories that will engage, educate or entertain their audiences.

Cathryn Hrudika: Re: PR Roundtable-My answer to Question #5Inbox
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Question #5: What advice would you give to your own industry in engaging the other side?

Cathryn Hrudicka: First, I would advise other PR professionals and initially resistant clients to get over their fears and misconceptions and learn all they can about blogging, podcasting, vblogging, and relatively new mobile apps, like Utterz. Next, they should do some creative thinking about how they could use these resources to have a real conversation, build community, brand themselves and share their messages. I would encourage them to start their own blogs and other channels for their own content. Next, they should learn about the key bloggers, podcasters and other content providers they might approach who would be interested in their story or news. They should learn about these journalists’ individual beats, preferences, styles, and approach each one accordingly.

I would advise other colleagues and clients to learn about the key social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, etc., and strategically create profiles on the ones most relevant to their audiences and their messages. Then they should observe how people converse with each other on each network, and figure out how to enter the conversation. Instead of simply learning new ways of “pitching,” or simply making promotional announcements, it’s really all about the conversation and the innovative ways of interacting that are possible now.

Indeed, they should keep up with the newer, constantly evolving ways of writing “social media press releases” and developing an online media room-but first, it’s how each blogger and content provider wants to be approached. We have to continue this dialog between PR professionals and content providers, because the technology, social networks, channels and protocols will continue to evolve at an ever-increasing rate. As mentioned in previous blog posts, the practitioners on “each side” will do a better job when we all have a more open, ongoing conversation.

Thank you all again all panelists. I hope this series has been productive for both sides and all involved. Talk to you next week!
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Forward

We continue the conversation today with our panelists.

Is “outing” a wayward PR agency or individual an effective way of dealing with the problem of misfired pitches?

Brian Solis: Quite honestly, I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often as it has been a serious problem for decades.

Chris Anderson’s post sent a jolt that reverberated throughout the entire industry. It was a painful reminder that complacency and spam do not belong in PR.

There are also several blogs dedicated to exposing spectacularly horrible moments in PR as well as exposing bad pitches and the people behind them ““ and they’re gaining in popularity.

The game of PR has largely been enjoyed the comfort of existing behind-the-scenes and this exposure and public ridicule is forcing PR out of its comfort zone, which at the end of the day will only make PR stronger and more effective.

Now whether or not running the names and email addresses on the Web was a good thing, however, is complicated to assess as there are many factors and ramifications for doing so.

On one hand, it scared the sh!t out of everyone and brought much needed attention to the need to improve things in PR. On the other hand, it starts to raise privacy issues and taboos that can lead down a scary path affecting everyone involved in the business of public relations and media publishing. And, all of these conversations at the moment are only addressing the symptoms of much bigger problems that face PR, including unrealistic metrics and a complete misunderstanding of how PR really works by clients and corporate execs.

Exposing names and contact information is a steep penalty to pay and quite honestly, it’s somewhat irresponsible. There are other ways to get the same result and impact without forcing individuals to publicly pay the price for the ills of entire industry. Note, my only reservation here is names versus contact information. Running names is a leap, but I can support it. Running contact information crosses the line.

I think that “some” lazy flacks have learned their lesson and many more have been alerted to the fact that they are the epitome of what’s wrong with PR.

Very few PR “Pros” are out there building relationships with the public or people. Most don’t bother to spend the time to really learn about what they represent, why it matters, and how it’s different than everything else out there. And, without that understanding how can anyone realistically believe that influential reporters and bloggers are going to pay attention to their generic pitch?

Marc Orchant: Only as a last resort after trying to deal with them directly. If they’re unresponsive and refuse to show any courtesy or respect for the value I place on my time I suppose I might call them out publicly.

Frankly, I’ve never had to consider this sort of doomsday scenario. I think a unilateral “outing” with no prior attempt at achieving a more diplomatic resolution is unprofessional and ill-tempered.

Marshall Kirkpatrick: I don’t know yet, it’s only been a few weeks since I first tried it. To be honest, it’s such a huge problem that I don’t know if my experience in calling out specific people was worth the cost it incurred in hurt feelings. I don’t think I would do it again and I’ve apologized personally to all of the wayward airheads (I kid!) that I called out a while ago on my blog.

Cathryn Hrudika: I know that “outing” incidents have happened recently, and I suppose one can see pros and cons. On the one hand, if a large PR firm is “outed” that has been notoriously slow to get the message, or a particularly egotistical and seemingly lazy PR practitioner, there is a tendency for some people in the industry to feel smug and think it has done some good, even if someone suffers public embarrassment or a reputation is damaged. In one sense, this seems to reflect the current mindset of a society where tabloid stories pass as news, and potentially damaging, confrontational accusations pass as “therapeutic confrontation.”

Personally, it’s not my style. I prefer honest, open discussions, like the constructive one we’ve been having on this PR Roundtable, where real information is exchanged as well as individual opinions. If someone, an individual or a PR firm, needs to be confronted, then I think it should be done with a certain amount of civility and respect, or else, in private. Some of the recent cases we’ve seen smack of mere ego gratification by the “outer,” rather than serving any real constructive or educational purpose. If an individual blogger or editor felt that he or she needed to confront an errant PR professional, surely it could have been done respectfully on a one-to-one basis, or in pitch guidelines that could have been posted on their blog or web site and also delivered to the agency in question. The only positive result might be that a few of these “outing” episodes did set off a much needed discussion about how we need to update and improve public relations practices, and what next steps should be taken. After all, if we are attempting to model the ongoing conversation, rather than the spam pitch, then let’s also model it in the way we handle an errant-or perhaps uninformed-practitioner.

It would seem preferable for PR industry trade associations to take a more proactive and progressive role in training their members adequately in newer public relations and social media techniques. Most of the effective re-education and discussion I’ve seen has been in nontraditional organizations that were created in the past few years by a small number of progressive PR and marketing professionals, such as the Social Media Club-not in the more traditional trade organizations. This training and mentoring should also occur in college and university programs in marketing, communications and public relations, so that younger PR professionals entering the field receive the most up-to-date guidance in the ever-evolving changes that are occurring in our industry.

Doug Haslam: Is it effective? Yes. No PR person wants to see their name on a “bad pitch” list and would do anything not to be publicly ridiculed. I have no problem with outing in that sense, though I wouldn’t necessarily take part in that sort of behavior unless severely provoked. What Chris Anderson did in his Long Tail blog– publishing the email addresses of 300 bad pitchers — is a real price PR people must pay, whether fair or not. The best answer to a “bad pitch” complaint is to send a good one– it’s worked for me.

The final segment of this roundtable is tomorrow. The panel will wrap up address with some takeaways for the industries they are in. Hopefully someone takes away some wisdom from these folks who are in the trenches of the industry.

Brand is a matter of some discussion – and we did that yesterday.

How can bloggers engage public relations better?

Cathryn Hrudicka: The lines between public relations professionals and media content providers are blurrier than ever, as many PR pros also blog, and produce podcasts and video content. So we’re playing one role in one context, and the other role at other times. That should give us better insights as PR professionals into how to converse with bloggers on behalf of our clients (or ourselves), because we know what it’s like to be a blogger and have other people pitch us. It’s also vital to realize that bloggers are very individualistic in their preferences, content and styles, and approach each one accordingly.

Bloggers could engage PR people more effectively by learning who the key PR representatives are for the people or topics they’re most interested in covering. The bloggers could be more proactive in approaching PR people to request background information or access to an interesting subject to interview. Actually, the top bloggers who also have more traditional journalism backgrounds are already doing that. There are so many bloggers, though, some who are lesser known, and it becomes difficult for PR pros to keep track of them all, what each of their individual preferences are, and what they prefer to cover. Bloggers could work at cultivating relationships too, instead of thinking of all PR people as “flacks” to be avoided.

Several prominent bloggers have made it a point to tweet on Twitter, announce on Facebook or on their blogs how they wish to be approached by PR pros, what topics interest them and don’t, and the best ways to contact them. For instance, B.L. Ochman has provided samples on her popular “What’s Next?” blog, of good and bad press releases and examples of how she wants to be approached by PR people. She has stated a preference for short, concise pitches with bullet points. In contrast, Robert Scoble (Scobleizer blog, PodTech) has mentioned that bullet points put him to sleep, and he prefers imagery and description in PR pitches. At various times, he has also requested that PR pros contact him via Twitter or Facebook messages, rather than by email. It is very helpful for bloggers to provide specific information like this so that PR professionals know immediately how to most effectively and efficiently participate in an ongoing conversation with these bloggers. Being aware of what events specific bloggers attend, and making a personal connection with them at these events, is also a key to forming an ongoing relationship.

Marshall Kirkpatrick: We can tell PR people exactly how we want to be communicated with, we can be flexible when they need something else and we can expand our horizons regarding our area of coverage. For example, I would like PR people to send me their clients’ OPML files, to send me bullet points about any release ahead of any launch, to provide access to the product or service being pitched and to be available to answer questions instead of asking me for an hour long CEO phone call.

Further, I’ve been considering a revision of my standard policy against covering mobile technology. I get so many pitches for it, it’s clearly a direction things are going in.

I also think that bloggers can be friendly with PR people and show them how to use tools like RSS readers and Twitter, when appropriate.

Brian Solis: I think it all starts with couples therapy.

Blogger, “All they do is spam with me this and that! They don’t care about me and my needs!”
PR, “They never listen to me”¦It’s like whatever I say is ignored no matter how important it is to me. They just don’t care!”

Seriously though, bloggers can benefit from maintaining a strategic and advantageous relationship with the right PR professionals. Love them or hate them, good PR people can still be a helpful part of the news and information process. They can and will work for you.

I think we all learned that running the names of lazy PR flacks in a public forum is definitely one way to send a clear message. Social Media is fueled by people and their peers, so running things in the blogosphere definitely makes things very personal. But there are also other ways to ensure that PR people “think” before approaching bloggers.

One way is to send positive feedback to those that do it right. Send notes to management in regards to those who do it wrong and remind them how to do things correctly. Or, simply block the individual from contacting you again ““ but in the process let them know why.

We recently had a lazy PR associate who ignored repeated points of advice on how best to reach out to bloggers. Aside from the lip service we got, he continued to do things the spammy way”¦blasting lists of targets with impersonalized messages with inappropriate news releases. Within one week, this person was called out by two bloggers, one of whom decided to cc: everyone at my agency lambasting his approach and well, basically, calling him stupid. Names are one thing, and probably inappropriate, but the message was loud and clear and this person was now directly humbled among his peers. And, most importantly, it spotlighted a problem that required correction, while also reinforcing the need for other people on our team to remember that this entire process is about people. One news release doesn’t matter to everyone! Subsequently this person is no longer with us.

Yes it takes time for you to respond rather than ignore things, it also takes an unusual level of patience and understanding, but it helps PR adapt and learn. Using the example above, one email affected 15 people.

Another way bloggers can work better with PR is to clearly say somewhere how they wish to be contacted, what they are looking for, and advice for cutting through the clutter. Submission forms are not helpful.

We should all be in this to learn together. And, for those that don’t want to learn or embrace evolution, then they’ve sealed their own fate.

Evolve or die!

Doug Haslam: Use them to help you. Tell PR people what you want, and let them in on the conversations, so long as they participate as, well, a participant, and not just a bald shill. The best way to increase the percentage of quality communications from PR is to post a policy somewhere on your blog or site that sets down your rules of engagement– do you want press releases? Would you prefer to hear from PR in comments? What topics do you want to hear about? There is nothing PR people like more than being told how to communicate with you.

Marc Orchant: I have a great relationship with many PR folks and I think the secret is to take the time to get to know them well enough to be able to speak frankly with them. I try to always make a point of educating a PR firm representative what my areas on interest and focus are. If they pitch me on something completely unaligned in their enthusiasm to get some coverage, I can then reference back to that conversation and remind them of where my interests (and those of my readers) are.

Just recently, I sent a quick “no thanks, not interested” response to a PR person (internal to the company in this instance). She replied asking if I would prefer not to hear about the company any more. I told her to please keep me on her distribution list but to understand that I would only follow up or write about their news if it was relevant. I’m interested in the company, think what they’re doing has value, and occasionally find something they’re doing appropriate for my readers. By clearly laying out the ground rules for engagement, she doesn’t have to waste cycles following up with me and I don’t have to expend energy saying “no thanks”.

There will always be unsolicited and completely inappropriate pitches landing in my inbox. I’m resigned to that. Too many PR “hacks” simply shotgun a press release to a big list hoping something will stick. And I’ve found a simple solution. It’s called the Delete key. If I don’t know who the sender is and find the pitch completely off topic to my blogs, it’s gone. If that rep really want me to cover a story, they’ll follow up (the good ones do) and we’ll begin establishing better communication and understanding.

That’s it for this segment of the Roundtable. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the panelists views on “outing” wayward PR folks. This should be interesting.

Yesterday we discussed the challenges facing Public Relations professionals as it pertains to social media. Today, we discuss branding in an open, internet driven society. I think you’ll like what they have to say.

What does the concept of “brand” mean to you and how do you see the concept of brand protection (or the concept of “open source brand”, so to speak) being transformed in the internet age?

Doug Haslam: Brand is the concept of you or your company– what people think when they hear your name. What has complicated brand in the Internet age is that individuals now have a ready means to develop and promote their personal brands. Further, personal brand and professional brand are intertwined. Any communications an employee makes, whether on behalf of the company brand or not, affects the company brand in ways small and large. Likewise, anything the company says or does reflects directly on the personal brands of the employees. This intermingling of brands should affect companies’ thinking, from blog policies to employee morale and larger internal communications policies.

Cathryn Hrudicka: A brand is more than an identity or logo; it’s the markets’ and your clients’ experience of you, what you stand for, your special value, what benefits you or your company offers, what customer service experiences you provide, and more. It is the sum total of how you communicate in writing, design and graphics, audio, video, print collateral, online, in your blog, everything. I feel PR and social media are an essential part of branding, and that branding messages used in advertising and marketing campaigns need to be included and coordinated with PR and social media campaigns, even if the communication styles are a bit different. For example, I’ve recently taken on a very cost-effective branding campaign for my new company services under the banner of Creative Sage , which is successfully crossing boundaries between social media, public relations and marketing, and each area is enhancing the other, which is ideal.

Tomorrow, the panel will discuss blogger engagement of social media. Stick around.

How can we protect brands on the internet? It’s more of a challenge, but certainly the concept of a trademark still holds weight in a court of law. I’ve found, though, that if you are strongly represented all over the internet, in a practical sense it becomes foolish for others to encroach upon your brand, and those who try are becoming more recognizable to the general public as scammers. You do have to be more vigilant in searching regularly for those who would violate or defame your brand (or your clients’ brands); and PR professionals spend more time now in online discussions defending a brand or responding to criticisms, false claims and defamers. It’s an unfortunate side effect of having a major Web presence. I’m an optimist and think that the accessibility of the Web and number of social media outlets and blogs will continue to create more intelligent discussions and debates that can ultimately enhance a brand. It certainly offers PR professionals more opportunities to fight back against defamers, false and negative claims against their clients. Anything negative usually offers a positive opportunity as well-we just have to see it.

Marshall Kirkpatrick: The word brand has negative connotations for me, but let’s pretend it doesn’t for the moment. If your brand is at all based in the reality of your actions, then you should have enough staff capable of acting that way and who are actively engaged in social media.

I was just reading a comparison of Miro and Joost, for example. The Miro brand will be protected and extended by having people actively blogging, twittering, commenting, etc. in ways that promote free and open culture in general. Friend me on Twitter and pass me interesting news about DRM, Creative Commons, etc.

If you’re Joost, you should have a rich, probably European guy regularly do interviews about mainstream media’s embrace of innovation, with leading bloggers covering online video. Both of those companies are doing a good job of protecting and extending their brand using new social media.

Marc Orchant: “Brand” may be one of the most bandied about and least understood terms in the PR and marketing business – and this is not a new thing. Many of the same questions about what constitutes a brand were being debated 30 years ago when I began my career in the publishing and advertising businesses. To me, a brand is the promises a company makes to its customers and how well it keeps them. That may sound a bit soft and fuzzy but I think it ultimately defines how consumers experience, relate to, and choose which brands they want to associate themselves with.

When I look at the powerful brands in my life ““ Apple, BMW, Southwest Airlines, and Starbucks to name a few ““ I see a consistent pattern of excellence in execution and focus on core values that separates these brands from their competition. They make a promise to me as a consumer and deliver on that promise faithfully over the long haul. This execution earns them a greater degree of “forgiveness” when they misstep ““ and all companies do from time to time ““ that I do not accord to others.

I think that’s the key to “brand protection” is earning the trust (or loyalty if you prefer) that can only come from an established pattern of delivering on promises made, these companies promote two important behaviors that help to protect their brands. They cultivate me as an evangelist ““ something Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba have documented in their books Creating Customer Evangelists and Citizen Marketers (aff). Having built up my personal enthusiasm for their offerings, I become part of the “front line” both in terms of spreading positive messages about their products o services and acting as a vocal defender when those brands are attacked by others.

Brian Solis: The brand is something altogether different today than it was BSM (before social media). The brand used to be something dictated by corporations and reinforced by marketers and ultimately evangelists.

However, these days, many marketing and business executives foolishly think that they can still solely control the brand and the corporate messages 100% when in fact people are also contributing to brand identity and resonance.

Social Media zealots preach that participation is marketing, and indeed it is, but there are ways to do it right and ways to completely f it up. One thing is for certain is that covering your ears to customer commentary taking place in social networks and the blogosphere and repeating “la la la la la” over and over pretending like it doesn’t exist IS NOT participating.

It the era of social media companies have no choice by to relinquish control, well somewhat, to those who chose to discuss it openly, in public forums that are in large part, actively contributing to the extensive influence enabled by social tools.

That doesn’t mean that companies can’t help chart the course of a brand, businesses just need to take into account that people now have voices and there in lies a new opportunity.

Let’s not forget that a good brand, or a terrible brand for that matter, evokes an emotion bond.

The true “open source brand” will acknowledge and leverage the “voices of the crowds” in order to extend and mold brands for both now and in the future – by connecting with people.

Again, Social Media is about people, not audiences, and therefore, brands affect people and in turn evoke responses. The smart marketers will learn how a brand relates to the various markets they wish to reach, why it’s important, different, and helpful, and connect with people directly to help them. This reinforces the brand and service attributes we ultimately hope to carry forward.

I decided it would be useful to try to pull together some respected voices on both sides of the game and have a bit of a “roundtable” of discussion. We’ve discussed five questions, and I’ll be sharing their responses to these questions over the next week. I hope you find something useful in the discussion here. If you have anything to contribute, you’re welcome to do so in comments or on your own blog. I usually turn off trackbacks, but for these entries I will turn them on so you can join in the discussion any way you want.

But first, the participants.

Doug Haslam is a public relations professional with Topaz Partners, specializing in technology clients in the Web 2.0, mobile, storage and networking industries. Doug comes to public relations after a decade in broadcast journalism, and has spent his years with Topaz putting to practice his observations on how new media affect branding, reputation and communications.

Marshall Kirkpatrick lives in Portland, Oregon, has written for some of the top blogs on the internet and consults for companies who want to rock online. For more info see marshallk.com

Cathryn Hrudicka started her original company, Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates, working primarily in public relations, marketing, record promotion, arts management and event production in the entertainment industry. She has also worked on projects for technology and other Fortune 500 companies, universities, museums, major nonprofit agencies, trade associations, entrepreneurs, artists, performers and authors. She was recently quoted in Fast Company by Robert Scoble, about her use of social media, including to brand her new company branch, Creative Sage™, offering creative thinking and innovation training and consulting. She is also an executive coach and management consultant, a blogger, journalist, editor and media producer. She is on the planning committee for the San Francisco Social Media Club. See http://www.CreativeSage.com and http://www.CathrynHrudicka.com.

Marc Orchant is an independent consultant working with a number companies in the areas of new media integration, market and community development, and enhancing personal and team productivity. He is the Technology Editor for blognation USA, part of a global network of blogs focusing on emerging trends in technology and mobility. Prior to blognation, Marc wrote blogs on the Weblogs, Inc. and ZDNet networks. He was named a Microsoft MVP (Windows ““ Tablet PC) in 2006 and 2007. Earlier this year, Marc wrote The Unofficial Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007 for Wiley and Sons, which was published in April 2007.

Brian Solis is Principal of FutureWorks, a PR and Social Media agency in Silicon Valley that “gets it.” Solis also runs the PR2.0 blog. Solis is co-founder of the Social Media Club, is an original member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup, and also is a contributor to the Social Media Collective.

What do you think the biggest challenge is for the Public Relations industry to fully embrace social media?

Marc Orchant: Pinning down the single biggest challenge is a tough question to answer but I think it essentially comes down to redesigning a game plan that better addresses the scope and scale of the social net compared to the relatively smaller field of play in the mainstream media world. The fact is that there are millions of blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and other conversation spaces available to PR practitioners if they know where to look. This demands a bit of “long tail” thinking on their part and I’m not convinced, based on my personal experience, that they have, as an industry, figured out how to do this well.

Pitches that are broadcast to all possible outlets rarely achieve the desired effects. Most credible bloggers who have established a solid readership have done so not by not cutting and pasting press releases but by offering analysis and opinion. So research needs to be done to craft effective pitches that speak to a blogger and, by extension, to their readers.

The best way to ensure that a client’s story is told well is to get into a 1:1 conversation with the top tier bloggers in a particular product space. But setting up briefings with bloggers is difficult because of scheduling difficulties and the payoff is often difficult to measure because the traffic benefit might not be immediate.

Doug Haslam: The biggest challenge for PR at this stage is to stop treating social media as an orphan, distinct from the “traditional” media. While pitching blogs may be different from pitching, say, a business weekly, so too is there a difference between pitching one blog vs. another blog, or one weekly vs. another. The larger point is that all pitches need to be properly targeted, and individualized for the recipient. So, those who would treat blogger relations as a separate effort form other media relations are, in my opinion, making a mistake.

This leads back to all the talk about “relationships” and conversations.” This isn’t something new, but the need to pitch bloggers and other social media has brought us back– or should bring us back– from the brink of “spam pitch” hell.

Brian Solis: What if we asked the question this way, “Should the PR industry participate in Social Media at all?” There are several pundits who have flatly said that “PR is too stupid to participate in Social Media” and therefore shouldn’t have a seat at the new marketing table.

After all, Social Media is about people.

In the eyes of many PR is associated with used car and snake oil salesmen or far worse, lazy flacks that have no clue what they’re talking about.

Yes, it’s true many PR people simply don’t or won’t ever get it. The other thing is that, as in any industry, there are also opportunists in PR who simply see Social Media as a new golden ticket and in turn, are selling a new portfolio of services without having a clue as to what Social Media really is and how it works.

The challenge for PR in Social Media isn’t any different than the challenge that already exists for them in traditional PR. For far too long PR has taken comfort in blasting information to the masses in the hopes that something would stick. Until recently, the industry really hasn’t seriously considered requiring people to learn about what it is they represent, why it matters and to whom, how it’s different than anything else out there, where customers go for information, and how it benefits the customers they’re ultimately trying to reach.

The lack of presence or the drive to inject these questions into the PR process and also take the time to answer them genuinely, without marketing hype, is perhaps the greatest inhibitor of PR’s legitimate entrance into Social Media.

Marshall Kirkpatrick: For many people the biggest challenge will be getting over their tendency to have only two, often overlapping, modes of communication: being condescending and kissing ass. Engagement with social media, like many things in this world, is all about adding value.

In order to add value, PR people should get in touch with their own personal strengths. Are you particularly good at coming up with helpful metaphors or translating between two different people in a conversation? If so, save me from CEO hot-air. Are you particularly fast at what you do and consistently in the know about breaking news, early? If so, help me be early in the news cycle and get your client’s perspective in before the most competitive writers consider
the topic old news. Can you drink more than a normal person can and still be pleasant in conversation? All of these are ways you can add value to the work lives of writers online. When clients will let you add these different types of value, instead of offering nothing more than “access” (the importance of which is rapidly declining) – then I think things are good.

Cathryn Hrudicka: I find that some of my public relations and marketing colleagues “get it” and some don’t. Some are still debating whether they should be writing blogs, let alone participating in a true conversation (not just posting links and events in a promotional manner) on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook and others. I’ve been making a lot of noise trying to educate them. One key is that we do need more specific case studies using social media examples and hard data to show numerical (or even qualitative) benefit to clients. We’ve been starting to produce such data, but it’s difficult, and a bit slow in coming.

In addition to PR and social media consulting, I also do innovation consulting and training in creative thinking, as well as executive coaching, I see similar barriers to innovation in the PR industry as I find in other industries. Ironically, success can be a barrier to innovation. Some of the “late adopters” are actually very successful in their practices and are unwilling to tamper what’s worked in the past to try anything new or relatively unproven. Since PR pros are under intense time and budget pressures, and they are often working in hierarchical agencies that don’t allow them room to experiment and “fail” on specific pitches, they don’t have as many opportunities to experiment with social media. Younger PR pros need ongoing mentoring, training and coaching, and judging from the programs I see at some traditional PR agencies, they are not getting enough forward-thinking training. It is essential to get the C-level principals at a PR agency into social media first.

I have always been on the edge, in that I built the PR side of my business in a maverick way. My earliest PR pitches were more conversational in style, with outstanding results, so social media conversations with media people were always natural for me. You must know how to craft story angles and what each individual media source really needs from a PR professional; do your research on specific media targets and keep up to date with contacts; and have ongoing conversations with media contacts, so they also get to know you and will come to you when they’re looking for an interview subject or story angle. It is vital to view media people, social or otherwise, as colleagues, not just the targets of a “pitch,” which really seems like an outmoded word to me now.

If you found this article notable and you want to hear what the folks have to say on other topics, make sure you subscribe to the feed or come back tomorrow. The conversation tomorrow will deal with the issue of brand in the internet era.

The biggest thing I can give to PR people today is that you have to engage us. I love evrything that Brian Oberkirch has said. Take his entry. Print it out. Print it out 5 times and tape it to every vantage point of your cubicle that you can. Take a few print outs home and stick them on the refrigerator next to your kids artwork. Do whatever you have to do to remember the points he makes.

It’s important. We’ll still have you if you learn how to engage us. If not… well, career changes are always an option. ;-)

Yes, of course I use Google Alerts to do vanity searches on my name, but I’ve found that in the past three or four months, I’ve got more value out of subscribing to search feeds. Now I search for everything – particularly on Google Blog Search. I’ve put much less focus on subscribing to individual site feeds (though I do that too), and instead search keywords and track them around the blogosphere. Actually, it’s been a fantastic way of keeping track of conversations and making sure I’d know about the conversations I need to be in.

I could see PR folks making use of search feed aggregation more than site feed aggregation. Do you use search feeds? Do you use them a lot? Have they begun to take up a significant portion of your reading patterns?

In case you don’t know how to get search feeds from Google Blog Search, this video demonstrates how.

Hi Site Owner,

My name is Cory O’Brien, and I’m the outreach manager for Guerilla PR. We are currently working with RealNetworks to help promote the release of their new RealPlayer®, and I’d like to send you a copy of the premium version for you to review on Suicide Fan.

Real has added some cool new features to the RealPlayer ([link removed]), and it’s now the perfect way to save, sort, search and share online videos. My favorite feature is the ability to download any non-DRM-protected video in the most popular formats to your hard drive with a single click, enabling you to watch them anywhere, anytime, without the need for an Internet connection.

Imagine this: You’re surfing through YouTube, MetaCafe, or Dailymotion, looking at football highlights, when you finally come across the clip you’ve been searching for. You click the RealPlayer download button that is hovering above the video window, and it instantly saves a copy of that video to your hard drive. Then, with that saved copy, you can easily show your friends, watch it anytime, or even burn it to a disc to watch on your TV. Want to share the video with your friend across the country? Just click the ‘Share Video Link’ button, and they’ll receive a link via email to go check out that very same video.

Though I think that this new player is a useful tool, I would love to know what you think. If you’re interested, please email me back and I’ll provide you with the download codes for a free copy of RealPlayer Plus, which is normally $29.99, and includes advanced features like DVD burning.

In addition, please check out www.guerillapr.com/real where you will find a variety of media that you can use for your post about the RealPlayer. There is a streaming, Flash-based slideshow which can be embedded onto any page, an animated viral video that explains the features, a how-to video narrated by a zombie, and a walk-through video that explains all of the new features.

Again, I would love to have you review the new RealPlayer, so please let me know if you are interested so that I can send you a download code for the Plus version. I look forward to hearing from you, so don’t hesitate to send me any questions, comments, concerns or tips you might have. Thanks!

Respectfully,

Cory O’Brien

Outreach Manager
Guerilla PR, Inc
415.460.****
85 Bolinas Road, Suite #17
Fairfax, CA 94930
*****@guerillapr.com
www.guerillapr.com

So let’s start at the top of this email.

1. He addressed me as “Site Owner”. Is it difficult to figure out what my name is? I mean, here’s a hint – it’s in my email address.
2. He referred to a dead podcast I used to do, but is no longer even on the net. Is this so hard to actually take the time to figure out. You make yourself look like a complete idiot.
3. “Though I think that this new player is a useful tool, I would love to know what you think.” Is that so? Why would I waste my time? Besides, do you really think this is a useful tool or are you just saying that because it’s your job?
4. “Again, I would love to have you review the new RealPlayer.” Don’t hold your breath, Cory.

Yes, I did respond harshly. I never do, but I’m really sick of PR people who think they are making the world a better place for their clients by pitching bloggers but having no idea what our world is like. I’m even more disappointed that an internet company like Real has engaged this kind of agency. Surely they could get more traction by grabbing Livingston Communications or Topaz Partners to do their PR.

hey smart guy-

Quit spamming people with your PR junk. If you had done your homework, you’d know SF doesn’t exist any longer. It doesn’t take a genius.

Go find out how to pitch your PR more effectively. Come back and talk to me after you’ve done so.

Everything you need to know.

You Must Engage the Community

Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: “Joanna.”
Joanna: “Yeah?”
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: “We need to talk. Do you know what this is about?”
Joanna: “My, uh, flair?”
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: “Yeah. Or, uh, your lack of flair. Because, uh, I’m counting and I only see 15 pieces. Let me ask you a question, Joanna. What do you think of a person who only does the bare minimum?”
Joanna: “Huh. What do I thin– Um, you know what, Stan? If you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair like your pretty boy over there, Brian, why don’t you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?”
Stan, Chotchkie’s Manager: “Well, I thought I remembered you saying that you wanted to express yourself.”
Joanna: “Yeah. You know what? Yeah, I do. I do wanna express myself. Okay? And I don’t need 37 pieces of flair to do it. (She flips him off) Alright? There’s my flair. Okay? And this is me expressing myself. Okay? (She starts flipping everyone off) There it is. I hate this job! I hate this g*ddamn job, and I don’t need it!”

[listen - Language included, NSFW]

A lot of PR folks these days seem to have the idea that social media is where it’s at amd that they need us to be effective. They are absolutely correct. They know how many pieces of flair are minimum and many PR agencies do a very good job of meeting the minimum standard. They are out there in Technorati and on the blogs finding out what people are saying about their client. Some agencies even have “proprietary market research” software which checks these conversation out for them and spit out nicely collated reports for the board meetings.

However, there are conversations happening that are impossible to index and in some cases even know about while doing “social media drive bys”. They wouldn’t miss these conversations if they were engaged in the community. By engagement, I mean participating.

As a PR person, you have a 9-5 job or whatever it is. How much conversation are you having on your own time just because you love the community? If your answer is not much, you’re only wearing the minimum pieces of flair.

You Don’t Want to Gamble Your Decisions

Michael: “You think the Pet Rock was a really great idea?”
Smykowski: “Sure it was. The guy made a million dollars. You know, I had an idea like that once, a long time ago.”
Peter: “Really, what was it, Tom?”
Smykowski: “Well, alright. It was a ‘jump to conclusions’ mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor and would have different conclusions written on it that you could jump to.”
Michael: “That is the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life, Tom.”
Samir: “Yes. Yes, it’s horrible, this idea.”

[listen]

The hardest thing for someone who is a relative outsider to a community to do is to break into the community. That’s why it’s important, especially for PR folks, to be smart about how they pitch bloggers, podcasters and other members of the social media. It is far less likely that your client or company will be accepted, for instance, if you blanket social mediaites with press releases and “your message” without taking the time to build community and relationship with them first.

I get half a dozen unsolicited press releases every week and I have yet to offer a bit of coverage for any of them. Without relationship and community, PR messages are likely to fall on deaf ears. Measure your approach. Don’t gamble it away with a “Jump to Conclusions Mat”.

Engage Conversation by Listening First

Peter: “We have to swear to God, Allah, that nobody knows about this but us. Alright? No family members, no girlfriends, nobody.”
Samir: “Of course.”
Michael: “Agreed.”
Lawrence: [from the next apartment through the wall] “Don’t worry, man! I won’t tell anyone either!”
Michael: “What the f*ck is that?”
Peter: “No, don’t worry about him. He’s cool.”

[listen -NSFW]

There’s a tremendous amount of conversation happening everywhere on the net. Notably, blogs are a great place for interaction between companies and customers. Instinctively, PR companies can be a little gun shy about unmetered conversation as it relates to their company. However, this is the essence of transparency, trust and consumer confidence.

Listening is a skill that seems to have gotten lost a lot of the times. My dad uses to tell me that God gave me two ears so I could listen twice as much as I talk. Unfortunately, in todays ad-driven, PR-protectionism market, consumers are told exactly what to believe and traditional mindsets insinuate that we should be realy darn happy that we’ve been “informed”.

People are not stupid, though, and we are capable of making our own rationally (or perhaps irrationally) derived thoughts. Folks in the PR industry should come into the grass-roots mediasphere with the intent that they want to listen and by doing so, earn the trust of those that they are listening to.

Buy In!

Peter: “The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care.”
Bob Porter: “Don’t– Don’t care?”
Peter: “It’s a problem of motivation, alright. Now, if I work my a*s off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don’t see a dime. So where’s the motivation? And here’s something else, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now.”
Bob Slydell: “I beg your pardon?”
Peter: “Eight bosses.”
Bob Slydell: “Eight?”
Peter: “Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motvation is not to be hassled. That and the fear losing my job. But you know, Bob, that’ll only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”

[listen]

There’s something about complete “buy in” that is reassuring and noticeable. This principle may apply to marketers more than PR folks, but the reality is that honest communication is noticeable and dishonest communication is even more noticeable.

The stereotypical picture is of a slick used car salesman who will sell you a lemon without thinking twice. Unfortunately for the used car salesman, they’ve been made and everyone knows not to trust them before they go in. Particularly savvy customers still go in but with the knowledge of cars and places to look to find out if a car is a lemon before he buys it.

Social media people are naturally cynical of anyone telling them what to believe or think. We don’t like it with the press. We bicker among ourselves when someone slings a little mud. We’re certainly not going to let a PR person pitch us on something that is obviously not bought into by the PR rep. Unfortunately for you guys, we generall can tell. The people who don’t buy in are the ones who are not engaging (#1), who are making drive-by choices (#2) and who don’t want to take the time to get the heartbeat of the community (#3).

Speak Smartly

Milton: “I-I said I don’t care if they lay me off, either. Because, I told– I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time then I’m– I’m quitting– I’m going to quit. And I told Dom too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year. And I used to be over by the window and I could see the squirrels and they were married. But then they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler. But I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler.”
Peter: “Okay, Milton.”
Milton: “And, oh, no, it’s not okay because if they make me– if they– If they take my stapler then I’ll– I’ll have to– I’ll set the building on fire.”
Peter: “Okay’ well, that sounds, uh, that sounds great. Uh, I’ll talk to you later, alright? Bye.”

[listen]

Ah, good old Milton. How could I write an article about Office Space and not mention Milton? :-) Well, as it turns out, Milton too can teach PR folks something about social media. Even though you can’t understand him, Milton has demonstrated why it’s important to speak the language of the audience you are trying to reach. Remember that bloggers may or may not be your target audience. We get bombarded by people wanting us to promote events and get togethers and computers and cameras. The problem is that since you’re not speaking our language, you don’t live in our world – you simply drive through – we are not likely to understand you and you are not likely to speak our language.

Before the building burns down, stop and listen to the folks you are pitching. Don’t just read an About page, but read the blog. Even if you don’t understand it. I’m much more likely to lend opportunities to people who have read my blog and have interacted with me via comment or email.

Most PR is still back a few years trying to catch up. Some PR doesn’t have any concept of social media and, successful or not, are losing time and money because they aren’t engaging the social media centers. If you can follow the Rules of Office Space, you will have a huge lead on competitors and have gained the trust and resperct of those of us operating everyday in the social sense.

Phonetics and mashup are all the rage in Silicon Valley web 2.0 start-up naming conventions right now.  When it was Digg, FaceBook and Skype, this was different.  It was cool, fresh and neat.  You could not help but ask yourself, what’s that?!?

Now, it’s not cute anymore (‘sup Pownce and Jaiku!). Instead it signals, “Oh, another 2 dot-bomb.” OK, maybe we’re not there yet, but you get the point.

Branding gurus are charging clients tens, hundreds of thousands for not-so-cheeky plays on phonetics or slamming two words together.  Read TechCrunch, and you’ll find posts littered with examples:

• GigaPan
• Boomj
• TasteBook

Out of the three of these, there’s only one I like: TasteBook. Why?  Because it tells you or at least gives you an idea of what it does.  TasteBook allows users to create and order custom hardback cookbooks (“tastebooks”). BTW, that’s what a company name is supposed to do. Tell potential buyers, partners and investors what kind of business it is.

One must wonder how much longer this latest naming fad will continue.  And if you don’t think it’s a fad, how many eGoofy cos and .bombs can you name in five seconds? Pets.com, eHarmony, eLuminant, etc., etc.

P.S. As a result of this rant and as a tribute to Doug Haslam, I’ve decided to rename my PR firm Shazaaamr.

Usted conoce Twitter, correcto? Es la red social que trae a personas juntas en una conversación penetrante acerca de cualquier sucede en un momento dado. Como Mensaje Instantáneo o como Blogs. Pero en 140 caracteres o menos. Desde Blackberries y teléfonos celulares a applicaciones de la computadora y la red. Twitter es la manifestación de una nueva tendencia fresca de microcontent.

Yo adoro Twitter. Yo lo he estado utilizando desde febrero y mientras yo no fui el adoptador más temprano, yo fui un adoptador temprano. He visto Twitter surgir como el facto “atrás canal” en conferencias, el catalizador para el meetups improvisado y sí, como un dispositivo del marketing.

Cada vez mas, yo he mirado expendedores saltar en abordar el carro de Twitter, pero yo me pregunto cuántas personas realmente “lo consigue”. Vea, Twitter cultiva transparencia. Las mismas personas que dejan caer pepitas diarias de la penetración profunda en Twitter durante el día, quizan Tweet acerca de tomar sus niños al paseo. Cada vez más, la gente pueden Tweet sobre sus ubicaciones como ellos toman roadtrips con órdenes especiales destinadas para tramar su ubicación en un mapa. Estas mismas personas en el próximo aliento explican por qué es que esta compañía o el político son el trato verdadero.

La energía de Twitter está en la autenticidad y la transparencia. He dicho a menudo que la marca de fábrica no es algo que se puede controlar por las compañías. La marca de fábrica es controlada por los clientes. La confianza es controlada por las compañías. Si los clientes no confían en a compañía, su marca de fábrica es inútil. Si confían en a compañía, esa compañía ha asegurado a vendedor para la vida. La confianza es construida por la autenticidad, por la transparencia. Es la cosa que permite que las compañías funcionen en el siglo XXI.

¿Así que cómo trabaja Twitter para expendedores? Bien, para algunos expendedores, ellos son inconscientes a la transparencia. Por ejemplo usted siempre puede decir quién esta “en la conversación” y así más transparente y confiable, por mirar la proporción de “Seguidores” a “Amigos”. Nunca confíe nadie que tiene un número apreciablemente desproporcionadamente más alto de amigos a seguidores. Los amigos son definidos como personas que usted escucha. Los seguidores son ésos que escuchan a usted. La conversación de un solo sentido es nunca un gran catalizador para la comunicación ni transparencia.

Otros expendedores quizás sigaran mas gente y tendran muchos mas amigos que los siguen, pero si la totalidad de sus Tweets consiste en la promoción de sus productos, usted tiene una calle de sentido único. Otra vez, nunca confía calles de sentido único. Hay dragones en esas colinas.

Yo siempre encuentro obligando tremendamente los productos vía Twitter simplemente por entrar en la conversación con personas. Hay varias gente en Twitter que ha reconocido el poder de Twitter como un medio para la promoción, mas ellos comprometen sus seguidores en la conversación – a veces no relacionado a su producto. El asombrar dinámico aquí es la marca personal.

Cuando un ejemplo, NewMediaJim es un cámara de NBC. El no promueve realmente NBC en lo que él hace, mas todos estan enterados que NBC es su empleador y basado en ese conocimiento, es muy intuitivo leer sus Tweets acerca de sus varias excursiones en su vida de la carrera – entrevistas con gente, manejanadas a bases militares para encontrar con las gente militares que regresan de la guerra, etc. Esto obliga el contenido.

En la otra cara del juego de NBC esta el TodayShow, la fuente oficial de Twitter conectado a la exposición de la mañana de NBC. Aquí está un ejemplo de Twitter que vende ido malo. No hay conversación. No hay apelación de unir en la conversación de opf de comunidad. Es una oficina pública de relaciones que libera los comunicados de prensa sobre Twitter en 140 caracteres o menos.

Si tuve que detallar una Regla de Oro de Twitter, sera:

Píe acerca de otros al menos tanto como usted Pía acerca de usted mismo.

Cerciórese que sus esfuerzos del marketing en Twitter entran en la conversación. Asegure que usted promueva otra persona contento tanto si no más que usted promueve su propio. Cerciórese a personas saben quién usted es. Twitter es personal, así que construye su marca personal. Sólo ayudará su negocio. Confíeme.

You know Twitter, right? It’s the social network that ties people together in a pervasive conversation about whatever is happening at a given moment. Sort of like Instant Message. Sort of like Blogs. But in 140 characters or less. From Blackberries and Cell phones to desktop apps and the web. Twitter is the manifestation of a cool new trend of microcontent.

I love Twitter. I’ve been using it since February and while I was not the earliest adopter, I was an early adopter. I’ve seen Twitter emerge as the de facto “back channel” at conferences, the catalyst for impromptu meetups and yes, as a marketing device.

More and more, I’ve watched marketers jump on board the Twitter bandwagon but I wonder how many people really “get it”. See, Twitter cultivates transparency. The same people who drop daily nuggets of profound insight into Twitter during the day, might Tweet about taking their kids to the mall. Increasingly, folks are Tweeting their locations as they take roadtrips with special commands meant to plot their location on a map. These same people in the next breath are explaining why it is that this company or politician is the real deal.

Twitter’s power is in authenticity and transparency. I’ve often said that brand is not something that can be controlled by companies. Brand is controlled by customers. Trust is controlled by companies. If customers don’t trust a company, their brand is useless. If they do trust a company, that company has secured a marketer for life. Trust is built by authenticity, by transparency. It is the thing that allows companies to function in the 21st century.

So how does Twitter work for marketers? Well, for some marketers, they are oblivious to transparency. For instance, you can always tell who is “in the conversation” and thus more transparent and trustworthy, by looking at the ratio of “Followers” to “Friends”. Never trust anyone who has a significantly disproportionatly higher number of friends to followers. Friends are defined as people who you are listening to. Followers are those that are listening to you. One way conversation is never a great catalyst for communication or transparency.

Other marketers might follow lots of folks and have lots of friends following them, but if the entirety of their Tweets consist of promotion of their products, you have a one way street. Again, never trust one way streets. There’s dragons in those hills.

I always find tremendously compelling products via Twitter simply by engaging in conversation with people. There are a number of folks on Twitter who have recognized the power of Twitter as a medium for promotion, yet they engage their followers in conversation – sometimes unrelated to their product. The amazing dynamic here is personal brand.

As an example, NewMediaJim is an NBC cameraman. He is not really promoting NBC in what he does, yet everyone is accutely aware that NBC is his employer and based on that knowledge, it’s very insightful to read his Tweets about his various excursions into his career life – interviews with folks, drives to military bases to meet with military folks coming back from the war, etc. This is compelling content.

On the flip side of the NBC game is TodayShow, the official Twitter source connected to the NBC morning show. Here is an example of Twitter marketing gone bad. There is no conversation. There is no appeal to join into the community opf conversation. It is a public relations office releasing press releases over Twitter in 140 characters or less.

If I had to detail a Twitter Golden Rule it would:

Tweet about others at least as much as you Tweet about yourself.

Make sure that your marketing efforts on Twitter engage in conversation. Ensure that you are promoting someone else’s content as much if not more than you are promoting your own. Make sure people know who you are. Twitter is personal, so build your personal brand. It will only help your business. Trust me.

The best thing about writing for you (as opposed to communicators) is that you already understand that PR and marketing sucks. I don’t need to argue that point. You know what it’s like to get a ridiculous press release, have a flack ask you to write up their product on the blog, sit through ridiculous ads, or suffer through another BS webinar. You’ve been on the receiving end”¦ and hate it.

The great hope of folks like Shel Israel, Brian Solis, Todd Defren, Kami Huyse, Toby Bloomberg, Chris Heuer and other advanced marketing minds is that social media can correct the wayward ways of this backwards industry. We want to refocus it on the actual community. Marketing and PR should not be about leads, but about serving a community and building good will between an organization and its stakeholders (note this word is not Audience).

Social Media Releases

Let’s start with a simple example.

Nothing stinks more than the inexcusable press release ““ a.k.a. the mindless drivel — that marketing departments use to spam news reporters, bloggers, analysts and their stakeholders. The press release was a mass communication tool, blasted out over a wire mechanism to media outlets. It soon lose it its value to news organizations.

Why? As PR became a popular marketing tool in the 80s and 90s, businesses and organizations filled their news releases with positioning statements, posturing to the media and their target audiences.

News releases are a very self centered activity, and rarely offers actual news, mostly because companies and PR pros don’t understand what media outlets considered news to be, and the news needs of companies’ communities. As a result, press releases usually have no real news value to the media or associated communities. News is something that’s new, and as media are dedicated to business trends or events of significance that their communities care about ““ just like any decent blogger — they ignore news releases.

Though the press release does have some search engine optimization and secondary direct community outreach value, it’s not optimized for ultimate results. Thus the diminished value of news releases.

Enter Social Media Releases

News documents do have value. According to Outsell, Inc. in November 2006, 51% of information technologists (IT) source their news from press releases found on Yahoo or Google News over traditional trade journals (via Brian Solis). To better talk with an organization’s community, releases need to be re-engineered to better serve them.

Originally created by Todd Defren of SHIFT Media, the social media release combines the best elements of new media and significantly streamlines the valuable elements of the news release. The social media release provides new media community members dynamic information, including a bulleted statements of value, additional sources, multimedia content (podcast, video, graphics, etc.).

Readers are provided social media methods of publishing via network tags ( a la Digg, Reddit, etc.), and can use these elements independently or as a whole, really to their tastes. And media members like them, too.

Why? Much less BS. When executed correctly, bulleted facts replace spin (a possible acronym: stupid PR imitating news). Concise readable documents create multiple paths for community members, bloggers and journalists alike to enage in more information.

Coca-Cola entered by taking an approach other than buying real estate and creating a store. Working with the crayon agency, Coca-Cola opted to break into the 3D metaverse by getting out amongst the population. During the Second Life launch event, one blogger in attendance told crayon agency team member Shel Holz that that the event was like a class in “How to do social media right.” Shel’s very successful blog details the results to date, which have already been significant, in turn validating the experimental social media release.

Other examples:

• Eurekster Social Media Release
• Graphing Social Patterns Social Media Release
• GeoCommons Social Media Release
• Cisco Connected Life Contest

What It Means

The combination of outbound promotion and social network attraction creates a new dynamic marketing mechanism. This next generation press release is much more valuable to its audiences, is community centric, and enables widespread dissemination. It creates multiple methods of pulling in community members who may be interested in your service, product or ideas.

This does not mean all social media releases will succeed. Here are the facts. Over spun BS won’t work whether its bulleted or parenthetical; social media-enabled or plain text. Find in this October, 2006 Buzz Bin entry on what I believe to be the content benchmarks of a media-attention-worthy news release. But if you’re on either the giving or receiving side of promotion, then the social media release tactic should be considered a better vehicle for organizations to communicate with their communities.

If you’d like to learn more, visit Chris Heuer’s Elements of a Social Media Release.

Unfortunately for Geoff, yet very fortunate to me – in my eyes – I am no rock star in the PR and Marketing communities. I do my own PR. I do my own Marketing. I do okay, but I’m not a rock star. In terms of that industry, I am but a nobody, a peon. I am guessing most everyone else falls into the same category.

Photo by Danilo “Maso” Masotti

I’m guessing that most people also don’t know about or pay attention to Second Life, the alternate reality digital world that marketers have obsessed over for several years now. Second Life is a virtual reality massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). Users create “avatars” that represent themselves or an alternate reality, purchase land and goods, build things and generally follow whatever path they want that might or might not reflect real lives in “first life”.

Marketers have swooned over this as it allows them to build virtual representations of their companies, events and people. It’s supposedly a great way to market in an alternate life to a subculture that is the Second Life group.

But that’s the kicker. It’s a subculture of reality. Yet hours and hours are spent along with immeasurable dollar values to market in this arena and I question the ROI. I have no issue with a moderate use of Second Life. But if you attend Ad Tech or any of the marketing groups in the DC area, and I venture elsewhere as well, you’ll find that Second Life is the only thing being talked about. Way too much is being invested in this thing.

I’m telling you folks, reality calls!