Given the slowish rate of posts here (roughly four a year), I want to make sure that anyone who visits knows to follow me on Twitter, where I’m much more active.
Of course, there are a lot of things I’d like to write about here, but 99% of my time is spent on clients, so I don’t do it that often. You’ll hopefully find the Twitter stream valuable.
Categories: Uncategorized
I first remember PR people being publicly flogged when Josh McHugh, Dan Roth, and Scott Woolley (later joined by Caroline Waxler) started The Buzz Saw in 1999. Similar observations about the quality and frequency of PR pitches have been made in newsrooms and on bar stools since long before my time.
Twitter has become today’s Buzz Saw. It’s not just a back channel for people to bitch about SXSW and Gnomedex – it’s frequented by frustrated journalists, analysts, and bloggers. If you work in PR, these Tweets should disturb you:
Why the hate? One reason is that too many – WAY too many – PR people are looking at social media as the ultimate shotgun approach. If an email or a phone call goes unreturned it’s tempting to message someone on Facebook, dm them on Twitter, send an IM or two, call and email them again, etc. Saying that you exhausted all those options might placate a boss or client for a little while, but in all likelihood you’re seriously hurting your chances for future dialogue with the person you’re trying to reach.
In the PR industry’s rush to show how social media-savvy it’s become, too many people are focusing on distribution rather than consumption. Hitting someone on every number, address, and social media account they have isn’t “reaching out” to them. It’s annoying them. The proof is in the links above.
Social media has changed many of the rules for PR, but not the most important rule: You can’t effectively pitch someone unless you’re reading what they’re writing. What leading influencers are writing isn’t limited to news, opinions, and trends. Often they’re telling us exactly how and where they do and don’t want to be pitched. This is the kind of information that’s never going to be found in Cision or MediaMap:
Similar sentiments can be found from practically every blogger I’ve pitched in the past six months. These folks are generous in providing PR rules of engagement, and it’s just silly not to be aware of them. Even sillier not to follow them.
Following a blogger’s rules of engagement is no guarantee that you’ll get their attention. However, when paired with awareness of what they’re following and participation in the discussions they’re driving, it’s an important way to build a relationship.
Bombarding people with a social media shotgun is the quickest way to make sure a relationship never develops.
Categories: Blogging · Facebook · Media relations · Twitter · Uncategorized
Tonight I finally migrated this blog to wordpress.com, which saves me about $100/year. However, in the course of the migration my email service was interrupted. If you’ve emailed me within the past five days, I probably didn’t receive your message. Please email me again.
Categories: Uncategorized
Yesterday Matthew Karnitschnig wrote an outstanding overview of the latest ways that BusinessWeek, Forbes, and Fortune are responding to Web competition – and to Conde Nast’s Portfolio. For example:
“Still, both Fortune and BusinessWeek are responding. BusinessWeek is narrowing its focus by emphasizing core business coverage and retreating from lifestyle areas. [emphasis mine] The shift is reflected in the redesigned magazine, which sports a cleaner look. Gone is the magazine’s “Executive Life” section, which included lifestyle pieces on subjects such as New Zealand spas and powder skiing in New Mexico.
In a world of nonstop information and ever busier schedules, BusinessWeek’s readers want a concise take on the week’s business news, says BusinessWeek President Keith Fox. “Readers want an intelligent filter,” he says.”
Louise Story at the NYT has a related piece in yesterday’s paper, focusing on ways in which BusinessWeek’s redesign were at least partially in response to Web properties.
I find these kinds of articles to be invaluable. In PR, it’s so easy to fall into the trap that press has just one side – editorial. In reality, there are an awful lot of folks on the publishing side who are busting their humps to keep afloat in an ever-changing world. It’s important to understand both, and these two articles definitely helped my understanding.
Categories: Publishing · Uncategorized
Like many music fans – especially those of us trying to avoid heat and humidity – I spent much of Saturday trying to tune in what I could of the Live Earth shows being held around the world. Even on Charlottesville’s relatively archaic cable system, I was able to juggle performances in London, the US, Sydney, andTokyo via Bravo, CNBC, NBC, and the Sundance Channel. I understand that US-based satellite customers and those with the means to hack into Intelsat’s feed actually got to see quite a bit more over the course of the day.
On Tuesday, I was shocked to see how poorly the event fared by conventional broadcast standards, at least in the US and UK. Here in the US, it came in dead last, beaten handily by Fox Networks’ reruns of America’s Most Wanted, of all things. While the US live broadcast pulled in less than three million viewers, MSN is claiming that it streamed the Live Earth feed more than 10 million times over the course of the day, surpassing by far a record set by Live 8 in 2005.
Those numbers are by no means apples to apples. Streams misfire, users log off and on, you name it. Clearly, however, they indicate that a sizable portion of the lucrative audience of youngish music consumers was watching Saturday’s happenings via their MacBooks, laptops, or something other than their TVs. If they even own TVs.
I’m no broadcast expert and rely on some brilliant colleagues to help me understand the mysteries of radio and TV, but as far as I can tell grand-scale events like Live Earth are finding their true audiences on the Web. That has an impact for advertisers, for sure, but for PR people it creates a huge opportunity to extend the shelf life of a broadcast. Some users will rewind their TiVo’d hours of NBC coverage for some finite amount of time, but you can still watch Live Earth days later right now via the Web, and that will continue to be the case for weeks, if not months.
Simultaneously, the page view – the metric that we all used to use to benchmark the success of, well, everything – was more or less laid to rest this week as well. Online video was specifically cited as one of the drivers behind that decision. It’s not just Google/YouTube that is causing this sea change; upstarts like Revision3 are helping push individual program even as social networks like Facebook make video sharing available to millions of enthusiastic members.
I’m glad I’m not in the advertising game. They have to figure out how to monetize content. We, on the other hand, have a huge opportunity to create it for a lucrative audience that is unmistakably moving towards online platforms. Elinor Mills at c|net is promising a short-term analysis that should educate all of us.
The fun is just beginning :)
Categories: Events · Measurement · Publishing · Video
