Dave Donohue: nerd-in-residence

Tim O’Reilly writes (prompted by this post from ex-InfoWorld blogger Jon Udell) that the one real Web 2.0 app that has yet to materialize is a universal address book. Some of his commenters note that OpenID could get us there, but until it gets beyond Wikipedia and Technorati (and into, say, MediaMap) it’s not going to be that useful for the average PR person.

It’s too bad, too. Despite the best efforts of companies like LinkedIn and Plaxo (I use both), it’s practically impossible to keep your Rolodex together when moving between computers. I’ve got a Windows laptop at work, a Mac at home, and a Samsung mobile phone, and no way of cohesively keeping my address book together, much less keep up with reporters and PR peers in a very mobile industry. Despite my best efforts, I lose track of people. Thankfully, my employer uses software that provides mobile email sync’d with our corporate contacts, or when I’m traveling I’d be sunk keeping in touch with the ones I do have contact info for.

And that’s a shame, because I’d like to get in touch with some of those old contacts. For example, about ten years ago, Bob Metcalfe was writing a column, From the Ether, that closed each week’s InfoWorld on the inside back cover. Somehow or another one of my pitches to him resulted in him writing a column devoted exclusively to one of my clients. I thought that this was pure, blind luck. I know a thing or two about pitching now, but then it was a shot in the dark and I got lucky – how else could it be that a 24-year-old at his first PR job could successfully convince the man who invented Ethernet of anything?

My social network is what made that happen. Coincidentally, my old boss at a telecom analyst firm in Washington happened to be speaking with Bob about something and mentioned my name and that I’d moved over to PR in San Francisco. I’m 99% sure that’s the only reason Bob opened my pitch. If I wanted to find that old boss today to work his network, could I?

Nope. Not via Google, not via LinkedIn, not via Plaxo. If I needed to find him in a pinch, I could start making phone calls, but by the time I worked all the degrees of separation it would be days. In our industry, we need information in hours or minutes.

Tech PR is a relatively small – often described as incestuous – industry. Keeping in touch with everyone you’ve been in contact with over a decade shouldn’t be that hard, but it is. Not only do phone numbers and email addresses change, but so do screen names across a practically infinite number of services, not to mention IM handles as that medium becomes ubiquitous in the industry.

Tim’s post has prompted me to start entering the growing stack of business cards that are on my desk from my last couple of trips to NYC. But what I want is what he is asking for – a Web 2.0 address book. In an industry where relationships are paramount, it would make all of our jobs easier.