Dave Donohue: nerd-in-residence

Update: TechCrunch is now streaming this from a feed with a much better view of Mike and Sarah.  It’s great stuff.

Sarah Lacy’s new book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, comes out tomorrow.

This evening, my colleagues at OutCast San Francisco will host Mike Arrington and Sarah as he interviews her and gives us a sneak preview of the book.

Since I’ll be here on the East coast, I’ll be watching it on this Qik stream, and hope you’ll do the same. It begins at 5:30 PT.

Update: Steve just posted the lede: “#bwstory Go ahead and laugh at Twitter. Plenty of trivia. But businesses are coming up with all kinds of ways to harness microblogging…”

As I type this, BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker is about to launch a compelling experiment. He’s writing a story on Twitter - using Twitter. Once per hour, starting with the lede at 2:30 PM ET, he’ll post a 140 character Tweet. For the next hour, everyone who follows him (he’s @stevebaker) can suggest edits to his post, or suggest a new 140 character string of their own. Posts tagged with #bwstory will be aggregated at twemes.com so that we can follow his progress in real-time.

His premise?

“The theme of the story is that Twitter is growing as a business tool and is gaining popularity. But it has growth issues. The questions: Will we be Twittering a year or two from now? If so, as I’ve asked here before, will it be on Twitter? Does the community gathered, both users and developers, tie us to that platform? Or will we be “twittering” on other services?”

This is important for several reasons:

• Twitter coverage in BusinessWeek takes it out of the echo chamber and into the mainstream. The fact that he’s apparently focusing on its business uses emphasizes just how many more people will take interest as this story develops. The finished product should allow many early adopters to finally explain Twitter to their colleagues/bosses/SO’s in English.
• This experiment will illustrate the sheer speed by which ideas take shape and turn into editorial on Twitter. It reminds me of Wired’s editorial wiki experiment from September 2006 (which ultimately frustrated Wired’s Ryan Singel), but this should move at a much faster pace and with greater community involvement.
• How many times in your career can you remember BusinessWeek putting out an open call for content, and then propose that you edit that content? It’s an opportunity for all of us to highlight how Twitter has become an invaluable tool for our clients, our companies, and ourselves.

This will be a lot of fun to follow. The PR community is definitely helping at the start - Justin Kistner gave some helpful points on hashtags when the story was in its infancy and makes some good points here.

Like many PR people, I’m still unsure of the best way for our industry to leverage Twitter. Opinions are developing across the board. On one end, Todd Defren made some good points yesterday calling for PR people to go tweet or go home, and on the other, I know a lot of PR people who agree with Kara Swisher in saying that Twitter is relatively unknown outside the echo chamber. I tend to agree most with Sarah Lacy, posting today that Twitter is slowly but surely becoming well-known outside the tech elite, which means we all need to figure it out sooner than later.

Tonight, we got a lesson in how social media tools - Twitter in particular - can do a lot of damage to a brand in literally minutes. It’s a powerful example of how big companies, working in partnership, spin their wheels while individuals trash them in the blink of an eye. Here’s what went down:

Several Bay Area friends and colleagues planned to attend a screening of Iron Man tomorrow night, one night before the movie’s US premiere, hosted by Mike Arrington and TechCrunch. The movie’s been enjoying good buzz, and it seemed like it was about to get 600 more people buzzing. Right? Wrong.

Check out this timeline (all times EDT):

• 8:15 PM: An attorney at Marvel Entertainment emails TechCrunch a Cease & Desist request, stating that the event was legally out of bounds.
• 8:20: Arrington Tweets this news to his 13,777 followers.
• 8:30-9:00: Over 60 comments are posted to the TechCrunch entry, the vast majority expressing outrage. I can’t remember ever seeing a blog post get so many comments so fast.
• 9:04: Robert Scoble (20,000+ followers) notes that the dispute is “spreading like wildfire on Twitter and Friendfeed“

Things just went downhill for Marvel from there - check Tweet Scan. Social media heavyweights like Jeremiah Owyang (6,562 followers) are tweeting things like “No matter how they approach this, Marvel is going to look bad.” Independent of the Twittersphere, as of this post there are 158 comments on the TechCrunch post, including the phrases “boycott” and “most pirated movie ever”, along with the personal contact information of some really unhappy people on Marvel and Paramount’s PR and legal teams who probably won’t get a ton of sleep tonight.

Oh, and it’s headed straight to the top of Techmeme.  (update Wednesday AM:  Mathew Ingram, Daniel Terdiman, and Dave McClure are just some of the bloggers commenting on the PR aspects of the situation)

This has to have been tortuous for the Hollywood folks. My guess is that the lawyer had no idea how widely read TechCrunch is, the PR people (if they even know about this whole debacle) are mad at the lawyer, and that Marvel doesn’t have a Twitter presence to join a rapidly expanding conversation. The fact that Mike bought the tickets via Paramount and that the theatre, the AMC Metreon, seems to be on his side, only complicates things. That’s a lot of bummed out PR people at three big companies who would have to quickly act in concert to mitigate this, and so far they haven’t been able to. Who knows what they could have done if they were monitoring Twitter.

Twitter might not be that far out of the echo chamber yet, but I bet that tomorrow morning Marvel will vouch for its power in Hollywood. The 600 people who will be in attendance if the show goes on are people who can build good buzz - or share bad buzz in a flash. Iron Man will be #1 at the box office this weekend, but its reputation may already be irreparably tainted in Silicon Valley.

We got the good news last night that my employer, OutCast Communications, won the Midsize Agency of the Year category at the 2008 PR Week Awards in New York City. We’re all very proud and grateful today! All the finalists and winners are great company to be in.

One of the things I’ve been doing, other than not posting anything for three months, is trying to figure out Twitter. I’d been meaning to do that, and then accelerated the process at the behest of a client who’s doing amazing things with it. I’ve yet to find the definitive Twitter for Newbies anywhere online, but this video is a very good start. It doesn’t have anything specifically aimed at how PR people are using it, but it’s a great introduction nonetheless.

Their social bookmarking video is also excellent.