Make Marketing History: The Top 5 Made-Up Words Of Web 2.0.

I've just come across John Dodd's fine blog Make Marketing History, which has some extremely straightforward and sensible comments on social media and the like. Starting with:

Conversation
It's a metaphor folks. It doesn't mean that your customers want a conversation with you. They generally want a quiet life without unwanted noise from you. They want the ability to interact with you on their terms, they want you to listen and, most crucially, they now have the ability to have a conversation about you when you screw up. Your focus should be on listening and not screwing up rather than having a conversation.

Make Marketing History: The Top 5 Made-Up Words Of Web 2.0.

Are you a Poet or a Plumber?

Just back from the launch of Poets and Plumbers in Vanløse Bio in Copenhagen where 250 people met up to hear about a new initiative to get the classic and on-line marketing world to understand each other and work closer together. (Disclosure: one of my business partners is one of the founders).

Bringing together the Poets (brands, storytelling, visuals) with the Plumbers (data, processes and ROI) in an online/real world connected way is a great idea.

The presentations and ideas were excellent nearly all round. Two things stood out for me though: that the emphasis is on Poets becoming more Plumber-like and that there wasn't enough emphasis on listening to consumers.

To take the first. For a few years, I've been a member of 26, a group of business writers who have the goal of bringing more creativity into the workplace. That has shown me that even Plumbers can be Poets - I'd like to see more people recognise and work with that. We need to narrow the understanding gap from both sides.

Secondly, there was too much mention of terms such as "online mass media" and "online channels". Despite the fact that many presenters talked about engagement and involvement, not one of them mentioned ways of how to listen. Too much of the talk from Plumbers was about getting people to the shop - instead of getting the shop to the people.

In the context of the general high quality of the event these are minor points perhaps. But when Poets and Plumbers  come together they need to really grasp the idea that the internet is a collection of linked human beings not "demographics" or "users".

EXCLUSIVE! New Media Release group includes amateur

It looks like that my 15 minutes of fame has arrived. The satirical PR blog Strumpette has continued its slightly peevish campaign against social media with a  new video featuring a Brian Connolly interview with the Social Media Club's Chris Heuer. But wait, there's more!

NOTE: This interview was made possible by the New Media Release Workgroup and the tireless efforts of Shannon Whitley, Alison Minaglia, Andy Arnold, Dan Zarrella, David Weiner, David Parmet, Jason Ryan, Michael O'Connor Clarke, Paul Dyer, Paul Pritchard, Steve Kayser, Susan Watiker, and Todd Van Hoosear. Special thanks to Todd Defren for inventing the SMPR.

... says Brian.

Well, I'm honoured to be in the same list and it would be lovely to think that the work will now come flooding in, but the truth is a bit more prosaic. I'm not worthy.

I didn't join the working group because I'm a guru or aspire to guru status, but because I felt I didn't know enough about social media releases. I still don't and that's why I continue to follow developments at close hand, rather than making snarky comments from the sidelines. Certainly, social media releases, rich media releases, press releases - call them what you will - are an easy target and people talking about them can have a tendency to be, erm... unfocused on occasion.

Am I an evangelist? No. Am I interested in new ways to do my job better and help my clients get their messages across? Of course I am.

Why social media is like newspapers - not news stories

Chris Brogan has an interesting take on social media. He suggests companies look at Sunday newspapers when considering how to approach social media. It isn't as daft as it sounds.

Its good to see some more nuanced discussion about the different forms of media instead of the whole "dead tree" mainstream media diatribe. I really get annoyed when people from the online media world trash newspapers on the basis of comparing their business models. For me this is quite wrong. I have spent a lot of energy arguing against the dreaded "web writing is sooo different from writing for newspapers"

Yeah, right. Try telling that to a sub-editor (copy editor in the US) who has to cut down a 700-word outpouring to a 150-word brief, or to write a grabbing headline or standfirst that will advertise the story and work graphically as well. Or a magazine editor who has to work with pictures and typography to create a compelling layout. There may not be hyperlinks, but the good print journalist writes in the hyperlinks so you don't have to go somewhere else to get the story.

It's true many news stories are not suitable for publication on the web - but in the same way that broadsheet articles aren't suitable for publication in a tabloid. A good sub-editor could soon sort that out though.

Too many people look at the newspaper as a content delivery system instead of looking behind this to see a content creation system. Too many people judge newspapers on their circulation and advertising revenue - the business side - rather than the dynamic process of how content is created.

Of course the role of paper is going to be reduced - but don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

A Sunday Newspaper Strategy for Traditional Companies : [chrisbrogan.com]

The subject of objectivity

Objectivity and its implications for ethics in the PR and journalism communities is an issue at the moment and has been neatly covered by Peter Brill at Net.Mentor.

Ethics seems to be one of the new battlegrounds in the media industry. While PR and journalism have always had a love hate relationship, it seems to me that things have been worsened by the advent of social media. It was easier when you were defined by which side of the publishing fence you were on, although as Peter describes there has always been that grey area in trade/business to business publications.

But now, PR professionals and journalists are meant to be all things to all men and also have to compete with all men when it comes to breaking news, spreading news and having an opinion about. It's difficult to feel sure about yourself when the basis for your existence starts dissolving. The results?

• Established media pour scorn on bloggers and social media sites for their lack of professional rigour and pandering to the lowest common denominator
• Bloggers ridicule PR people for treating them like a 'channel' and publish their names to shame them
• Bloggers condescendingly refer to the 'msm' (mainstream media)
• Traditional PR people ridicule those who are experimenting with and even developed social media tools
for drinking too much 'Kool-Aid'.
• 'New' PR people can't quite seem to work out whether they are in PR, marketing or advertising and are trying to grab as much territory as possible to make sure they don't get overrun by the departments with the big budgets.

All in all it could be pretty depressing - I for one have a foot in all these camps and I know others as well. After years of knowing what to do and how to do it, its hard to be confronted every other week with a new idea you have to take a position on. But, you know what? I think it is pretty exciting. We are on a moving escalator and no amount of whinging or complaining or disagreeing is going to stop the escalator. (Although sometimes it is difficult to see whether it's going up or down).

I'm not depressed because I try and look for the wood and not the trees. I have a sneaking sympathy for all sides. So until things change again I'll carry a newspaper because it is still the ultimate format for readability and portability, I'll keep a tag on my industries through trade mags and the growing number of web sites that complement them, I'll post on forums, receive messages on email subscription lists, follow my friends on Facebook, keep tabs on my professional life through LinkedIn, read opinions on blogs fed to my RSS reader and use Twitter and Jaiku because I might need to know about them in the future.

Despite their differences, most people in these various camps, despite what their detractors say and what they say about others, are not looking for what's best, but what works. That can only be positive.

Skype investor buys Danish free paper

Slightly batty Danish IT investor Morten Lund has taken over control of the Danish free newspaper Nyhedsavisen (Newspaper in English). The Danish media have reported the story with a mixture of amazement - the paper has made a loss since it launched in October 2006 - and glee. The glee of course coming from the fact that one of the many upstarts in their business is losing money faster than they are - slightly faster anyway.

But hang on. While Morten gives the impression of being slightly disorganized in his blog writing he has made some shrewd decisions over the years about where to put his money (such as being an early investor in Skype). He has a thoroughly good grounding in the workings of advertising, media and the internet that could stand Nyhedsavisen in good stead.

While most reporters have focused on Morten buying a newspaper, it'll be interesting to see how much paper is actually involved. I'd take a bet that what he has actually bought is a content platform that spans the virtual and the real worlds.

Morten Lund køber Nyhedsavisen - Medier & reklame

» Measuring the influence of social media

Edelman and others have released a good white paper that looks at the challenges and possibilities of measuring the influence of social media. The white paper is an attempt to further the discussion started in July last year on Edelman's  Social Media Index (SMI).

 » Distributed Influence white paper (or son of SMI) sixtysecondview: Sixty second interviews from pr, media and politics

PR Group’s Journalist Survey Identifies Blogs’ Influence on Traditional News Coverage

There is more and more information coming out about how blogging affects mainstream news gathering - rather than if. This makes a nice counterweight to the "all bloggers are bigmouths with their own agendas" idea that some PR and communications people have been pushing.

PR Group’s Journalist Survey Identifies Blogs’ Influence on Traditional News Coverage

Online newspaper advertising presses forward

Forwarded without comment...

Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) report that advertising expenditures for newspaper Web sites increased by 21.1% in the third quarter of 2007 versus the same period in the previous year.

In dollars and cents,that represents a total of $773 million in online ad spending in the third quarter. The increase is the 14th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth for online newspaper advertising recorded since the NAA started tracking online ad spending in 2004.

Online newspaper advertising now accounts for 7.1% of total newspaper ad spending, compared with 5.4% for last year’s third quarter.

On the downside, total advertising expenditures at US newspapers were only $10.9 billion for the third quarter of 2007, a 7.4% decrease from a year earlier.

“Broad economic issues are impacting our industry the same way they are impacting other media,” said NAA CEO John Sturm. “The continued fallout from declines in the housing market clearly affects real estate, recruitment and retail advertising.”

Old-fashioned PR with a web spice

Heather Yaxley has a great post on her blog about why Social Media isn't the be all and end all of PR.
I have to admit to moment of euphoria where my enthusiasm with the social media release tends to overshadow everything.
Today was a good counterpoint to that. Today was a good solid - traditional - grind of a day building up a media list of relevant journalists for a new client. Where I have bought in lists in the past for some clients, this time it is all handbuilt and checked with phone calls to the editors to check if they are interested - before the release goes out.
Although I haven't been able to get through to everyone and have reverted to emailing some of the really busy ones, it has been a good learning experience in an industry that I don't know well enough yet. Chatting to editors, if you can get their attention, is a rewarding experience and best done before the "are you going to use it?" phone call - which incidentally I hate (along with all other PR practitioners I should imagine).
While this part of the job hasn't changed for years, I did it by cross-referencing database info with internet searches, and logging the time and contacts with two different web-based applications. Which brought it home to me how social media really is important but still just one tool in the toolbox.

Just so we don't get too cocky...

Bad PR or lazy journalists?

This has not been the week to be in PR. Chris Andersen, author of the Long Tail and editor of Wired, unleashed a tidal wave of complaints and counter reaction by publishing a list of emails belonging to PR people who didn't pitch him in the right way. The post created 300 comments, some agreeing, some disagreeing.

While I agree with Chris in much of what he says, PR bashing is too easy to do for journalists.
I spent 10 years as a trade journalist, before emails really took off, so I can count myself lucky in that. My best friend during that time was a rubbish bin and a red pen. The rubbish bin speaks for itself. Crap press releases weren't invented with emails - they have always been with us. And it is still just as easy to get rid of them.

The red pen was to improve the press releases that were sent. When I was training as a journalist there were two golden rules: never put a release in unaltered, and never print it without ringing up for further information. As far as I can see that doesn't happen anymore.
It isn't the job of the PR person to write the story. The PR person should alert the journalist to the story and then help them get the facts and then get out of the way.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in the past three years a journalist has followed up a press release with a call for an extra quote or an angle more specific to their industry. Many have become lazy. They choose the obvious stories and ignore those that need time or thought. That's not good for journalism or PR.

Web 2.0 = PR 2.0

Just came across this survey here on the Lewis PR website that claims that "web 2.0" has made PR a more visible process.

"The study showed 96 per cent of companies recognise the importance of PR. In addition, almost two thirds recognise that Web 2.0 has made it a more visible process. 60 per cent believe that the advent of consumer journalism had made PR business-critical, with social media seen to be having an impact on profit and consumer satisfaction."

Social media gets ready to take off

There's a great disscussion going on at the moment about the nature of Social Media Releases (SMRs). There are several great bloggers involved - leading lights of the SMR movement, even - and the quality of discussion is very high.
Have a look in the sidebar for the links or go here:
http://www.briansolis.com/
http://www.pr-squared.com/2007/10/the_future_of_the_social_media.html
http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/blog/2007/10/18/storyboarding-another-view-on-how-to-use-the-social-media-news-release/

There's so much happening in this area that it is hard to track, but if you keep an eye on these three blogs then you won't miss much.

I have been a little suspicous about calls for the death of the press release - as it strikes me that it is a case of killing the messenger not the message, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher's press secretary. But I think in the latest version of the arguments we are moving further away from the focus on format and more towards content and context. Social media is getting ready to take off.

The future of the press release

Brian Solis is starting a multi part blog on the future of the press release over at PR 2.0 - Silicon Valley. Brian is one of the leading voices in the movement to open up PR with social media techniques and replace the press release with something better.

I'd like to drop the idea of press releases vs. social media releases because in the end we are talking about a single format (albeit a staple one) in the PR armoury. It isn't about format it is about content - the what, why, who, where, when and how.

In its most basic form a press release is raw content - no bells or whistles, just the facts. That many press releases are abused by the long and laborious route through corporate hierarchies is beyond doubt, but it still plays well to the number one audience - journalists.

It does so because the journalists still write stories in the same format, newspapers print them and news wires, despite their best efforts, still distribute most of their stories in plain text. By insisting of the death of one format over the other or the supremacy of digital over paper formats doesn't really do anything for me but obscure the real job for PR people - getting hold of people not talking about channels.

Talking about social media releases is good because it exposes businesses to an idea that they might not otherwise be receptive to. Physical products drive processes not the other way round. I am advocating social media releases not necessarily because they are better, but becuase they pioneer the idea that you can't control information anymore, you can only take part in the conversation.

I still expect to send out a great deal of press releases in my lifetime, I also expect to speak to a lot of journalists on the phone, text them tips, add links to delicious, blog and, yes, even make a few social media releases available

... and just to prove my point

Morten Lund (who will forever be known as a Skype investor although he does other things) has blogged this. It is a web service that sits on the end of a PDF workflow and converts the files into a virtual book or magazine that is searchable by Google
http://www.pagegangster.com/

Now if you can just combine this with a feed into the local digital printer who can rattle you off a copy and post it to your home address...

The death of print media - again

Forbes has a story about how online media is going to put an end to print media

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/07/16/redherring-print-blogs-tech-media-cx_bc_0716techmedia.html

It's a good story, but in these days when xml is separating content and structure I can't help thinking that the reporter is barking up the wrong tree. The big fuss about paper vs. screen is about a delivery mechanism and how you attach ads to that mechanism. We should be focusing on content and then delivering that content in the way people want it - paper or screen. The production systems need to be flexible enough so people can choose. Its the news that ought to matter, not the box in comes in.

And I wouldn't rule out paper just yet - when everyone is competing for space on a screen, a well-timed delivery of good old fashioned paper might just be a refreshing change. If it were me, I'd make people subscribe to the content and let them choose how they want to read.

Need I say more?

Great new media books

A bit late on this one, but I've been busy. A good list of 25 books that help explain 'new media' . Glad to see the old favourites such as The Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing on the list.

http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/blog/2007/07/02/goodness-gracious-25-great-new-media-books/