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.

MacWorld vs. CES: The Battle for Twitter Buzz

[I'd been wondering what the difference in traffic was and hadn't had time to run a hashtag first.  Luckily, Mashable figured it out for all of us.]

Blogging and Social Media Tools to Declutter Your Life

[Scott Hepburn's thoughts on several useful tool.  Disclosure: includes ShareThis, an OutCast client]

How to Stop Twitter Becoming a Waste of Time

[Great stuff as usual from the TwiTip blog.]

Dell Social Media Guides

[A series of well-done video tutorials.]

Phish Summer Tour Announcement

[Yes, I'm a fan - but their announcement today was a great example of how to use video, sharing tools, and - of all thinks - skywriting to spread the word virally.]  

Poll on BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange

[My effort to measure the PR community's awareness of the BusinessExchange network.]

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:

• “and the JavaOne PR takes its toll: if i don’t answer a morning voicemail, that doesn’t mean “please call me four more times”"
• “PR People… if I didn’t reply to your email, what makes you think I will reply to you on Facebook?”
• “this PR freak who spammed me on facebook won’t leave me alone now. he keeps msging me. had to block him. any wonder why i’m so down on PR?”
• “Bloggers keep putting pitching guidelines on their blog, & keep getting bad pitches cause mst PR firms pitching never read blog”
• “NOTE TO PR PEOPLE AND ENTREPRENEURS: I am far less likely to talk about you or do what you want if you DM me than if you just beg in public.”

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:

• Robert Scoble:  “I hate Facebook and Twitter direct messages.  I can’t answer those, so don’t even try.”
• Sarah Lacy:  “facebook is for friends, not press releases”
• Rafe Needleman:  “Twitter pitch? Ok, but direct only, and provide link and reply email in the Tweet.”
• Rafe Needleman:  “A pitch on IM? Ugh. A least make sure I want to hear it before you start. Better yet: EMail”
• Stowe Boyd:  “I am shifting permanently to twitpitching as the sole medium for companies to pitch me.”
• Stephen Baker:  “Our common love of the Rolling Stones does not a relationship make.” [OK, that's a paraphrase I took some liberties with.]

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m in the Bay area for the next two weeks – going to the TechCrunch 40 tomorrow morning, doing several days of client work onsite in Palo Alto, and spending the rest of the time at our sunny San Francisco offices.  I’m meeting up with Dave McClure and Kyle Arteaga while out here, and would love to meet any other readers or folks who I know only from the blogosphere.  Drop me a line via email or on Facebook if you want to meet up in SF, the South Bay, or anywhere in between.

Katie Hafner wrote a great overview of Wikiscanner in today’s New York Times.  This story has gotten legs since Wired News uncovered the tool last week (I can’t locate a link to the original story anywhere – if someone bookmarked it, would you comment below?).

If you or your client have ever broken Wikipedia’s rules on editing or providing content without an objective point of view,  the NYT article is a must-read.  However unlikely it is that you’re called out on it, if you are, you want to have some good responses ready.

If you haven’t, then I still recommend the article, as well as my post from April this year that offers some words from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on how PR people can successfully interact with Wikipedia content.

I have been accused, sometimes correctly, of zoning out a bit during long calls and saving myself by blurting out something about RSS feeds. RSS is an important technology to those of us in PR, but for a long time, PR (and the tech industry in general) was fond of phrases that ended up on the Bullshit Bingo board.

Today, c|net’s Michael Kanellos gave us a new top 10 list of terms to avoid. If you’ve ever struggled with an executive who insists on making “inflection points” the centerpiece of their keynote or product managers who talk about Web 2.5, you’re going to bust a guy laughing at it.

I read this on the beach (today is the last day of vacation…sigh) and it just cracked me up:

I’m always looking for new PR bloggers to follow. I’ve found several very good ones via The Friendly Ghost, a UK-based blogger at an unidentified agency. The Friendly Ghost has mashed together a formula based on Technorati Authority, Google Pagerank, Yahoo! links, etc. and ranked the most influential PR bloggers.

The complete list is revealing. Steve Rubel is at the top, naturally. The Bad Pitch Blog, one of my favorites, is number 25. There are many more useful sites listed as well.

In case you’re curious, this blog is ranked as the 62nd most influential amongst PR-centric blogs worldwide, sandwiched between Clogger and Josh Morgan. To illustrate why this ranking – like all rankings – is flawed, I somehow ended up higher on the list than David Strom and Paul Gillin’s Tech PR War Stories, which is a must-read/listen. The podcasts they host are invaluable.

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 :)

My review of Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams’ Wikinomics just ran in the July-August issue of Communication World, the magazine of the International Association of Business Communicators. The full issue requires a membership and subscription, but the review itself is available right here.

Trevor Cook and Lee Hopkins from the excellent Australian blog Corporate Engagement have just published the second edition of their Social Media white paper. Like the widely quoted first edition, this update is an excellent and free resource for any PR person who needs to learn about social media from scratch, and worth a download. At 57 pages, it’s also a substantial read.

Those of us on the agency side would be hard-pressed to find a client exec with enough time to digest all of that content, so I was also very glad to see Michael Totty’s primer on Enterprise 2.0 technologies from Monday’s WSJ. It focuses on the three main tools – blogs, wikis, and RSS – without diving into too much technical detail, but more importantly, it cites several examples of corporate blogging cultures and some old school companies like Northwestern Mutual Life.

Actually, pick between your top 10 and your top 6. But do go visit Guy Kawasaki’s post of Margie Fisher’s Top 10 Reasons PR Doesn’t Work, many of which focus on flaws on the client side. Then read Dave McClure’s sort-of-rebuttal, which focuses on his top 6 PR firm no-no’s.

The posts and their comments are driving an interesting discussion about what’s right and what’s wrong in tech PR. The two posts aren’t necessarily at odds, but it’s a much more interesting discussion than the usual “PR is a dinosaur in a transparent Web 2.0 world” opinions that come up now and again.

As I mentioned earlier this month, I’ve ended my online-only experiment and my print publications are now filling my mailbox again.  I drew the line at newspapers, however.  I read the WSJ online and get the NYT delivered only on Sundays.   None of those are a replacement for RSS feeds and online-only news sources (news.com and IDG News in particular).  It’s just that magazines feel better in my hands.

The tech PR industry talks a lot about print vs. online and what outlets reach which readers.  People smarter than me are figuring out that reach, but this morning I was happy to see that Doc Searls still reads the newspaper.  If Doc reads the newspaper in print, then the medium has a long life ahead of it.  His post was prompted by Andy Kessler’s op-ed in the WSJ today discussing A Future for Newspapers (also on andykessler.com if you don’t have a WSJ subscription).

Both are worth reading.

It’s difficult to work in tech PR and escape talk of another bubble. Sentiments that had been (excuse the horrible, horrible pun) bubbling under the surface came to a head last night when Mike Arrington posted his thoughts on the topic. By the way, should you ever doubt the sphere of TechCrunch’s influence, check out Techmeme – his post is squarely at the top, having spurred at least 19 other posts, including a couple from BusinessWeek, where Mike’s views are being discussed.

At any rate, while this kind of is-it-or-isn’t it discussion didn’t happen in Bubble 1.0 until it was much too late, I’m noticing a lot of odd coincidences between 2000 and 2007 lately. None of this makes me think that Bubble 2.0 is upon us – rather that as with Mark Twain, reports of the death of the tech economy, and with it tech PR and tech media – have been greatly exaggerated.

Some examples:

• The news remains focused on the Internet’s role in financial markets and how tricksters can make things dangerous for investors. On August 25, 2000 the victim was Emulex, temporarily wiping out $2.5 billion of its market cap. Last week, it was Apple, whose investors lost $4.5 billion thanks to a hoaxster playing games with Engadget in what Caroline McCarthy calls the “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment of our time.
• Similarly, the Web’s going to put print journalists out of a job. Just ask the March 27, 2000 edition of the Wall Street Journal, though to be fair that article is much rosier than its headline would lead you to believe. While this is happening with some outlets, as Dan Gillmor reported over the weekend, companies like Dow Jones are attracting very nice
• On December 28, 2000 the New York Times covered a little company called Blogger (The NYT article was actually preceded by the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead in the excellent “You’ve Got Blog”, but I can’t find my bookmark for it and neither can Google). It notes that the Guardian in London had implemented a blog to point online readers to other sites, thus breaking “a fundamental rule of commercial Web publishing: keep people on your site for as long as possible.” Today, BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker is noting that Arrington has succeeded where BusinessWeek didn’t in making CEOs cry, which I think is his way of getting a laugh. Still, we’re all familiar with the underlying competition for readers’ attention that’s still making headlines in 2007.
• Most personally, Kara Swisher noted her own memories of Bubble 1.0 today in response to the TechCrunch post that started it all. In addition to giving a bunch of tips to anyone who wants to hang up on people like me, she noted some war stories from the first boom, including:

“I [had] one start-up exec tell me with a straight face that his company was ‘pre-revenue’ ”

I’m not sure how many times Kara heard that, but I know that she heard it at least once. Unfortunately, I know because I was there, and my ex-boss was the one who said it to her. This afternoon we had a nice email/comment exchange laughing about it.

What’s promising for all concerned is that people like Kara are noting that she finds “the landscape quantum levels higher than the mostly ridiculous roundelays of world-shaking claims by subpar start-ups that took place in the last bubble” and that “the new companies, for the most part, are actually useful and much more disciplined and with much less lofty goals”. That’s a hopeful note, since in her new role with Walt Mossberg at D she must be getting pitched by every tech startup under the sun.

If I had a point in all this other than that I’m dating myself and remember far too much about the year 2000, it’s that markets are always going to ebb and flow and that media outlets are always changing. However, PR people with the ability to follow those changes and establish longstanding relationships with influencers will always remain relevant so long as they can help influence a discussion.

After a long period of trying to go completely digital, I’ve renewed subscriptions to several print publications that I can’t do my job without. As dependent as I’ve become on RSS feeds, I always feel as if I’m missing the occasional important story in a print book.

That’s how I came to find Scott Kirsner’s story titled Take Your PowerPoint and… on page 73 of the May 14 issue of BusinessWeek. It’s the highest-profile coverage I’ve seen of unconferences, and includes mentions of several of the tech industry’s best-known unevents, including BarCamp (which is referred to as one event, though it’s really many) and DemoCamp. I was surprised to find that the unconference concept has spread to other industries so quickly, and learned about ArtCamp.   [As Greg Beuthin kindly pointed out below, WineCamp is another of Chris Messina's efforts that is more related to a beautiful setting rather than the equally beautiful beverage].

What struck me about this piece was its coverage of several individuals who are very well known to those of us in tech PR as bloggers, but who are making their mark in the broader business community for their work beyond the blogosphere. Dave Winer is being sought out by BusinessWeek not because he’s the protoblogger, but because he knows that big, dark rooms + PowerPoint sometimes = snoozefest. Doug Gold, who runs Mass Events Labs with David Berlind, chimes in with his views about the future of the conference business. Kirsner also provides great coverage of Chris Messina and Web2Open, which was semi-integrated with the much larger O’Reilly Web 2.0 show that received heavy coverage as usual.

I don’t know enough about the economics of the conference business to tell whether unconferences will supplant Moscone Center-sized shows. My best guess is peaceful coexistence – for every BarCamp, there’s a D: All Things Digital that features vendors clamoring for the spotlight. What I do know is that there’s a new generation in tech PR made up of people who don’t know Walt Mossberg as the guy who reviews consumer tech for millions, but as the guy who runs D with Kara Swisher.

As the influence of bloggers continues to grow, we need to be mindful that their sphere of influence grows well beyond their blogs. A post from Berlind means that thousands of people read about your client, but a positive impression on David might mean an influence on the future direction of MashupCamp (note: David is very clear that coverage from the blog doesn’t imply a relationship with a conference). The same people who are clamoring for attention on Dave Winer’s blog need to know that Winer’s now considered enough of a thought leader to be offering expert commentary to BusinessWeek.

It’s great to see all of these folks getting the attention they deserve from BusinessWeek, and it’s a great reminder that the same names we’re pitching for the blogs of today will be tomorrow’s experts commenting in the WSJ, New York Times, and elsewhere.

Apologies.  I have been absent from my blog for some time.  Spring is always very busy with client work, and I’ve also just completed a review of Wikinomics that will be published soon in a magazine near you (details to come).

In the meantime, Ken Auletta at the New Yorker has written what I think is the definitive work on how the WSJ’s Walt Mossberg came to his position and the extent of the influence he wields with consumers.

It’s a fascinating article.   Set aside some time – this is, after all, the New Yorker.

Last week, my old friend Billy James passed on David Strom’s announcement of a new podcast series he and Paul Gillin have put together called Tech PR War Stories.

I’m enjoying these. There are three podcasts thus far, and they’ve kept a witty edge to them – some of the horror stories sound a bit like Kevin Murphy’s (excerpt: “PR pitches fascinate me. They make me feel like a dog that has dozens of people stroking it, all trying to find that one special place that makes its leg kick”).

If you’ve been doing this for a while, you will find a lot to remember, but younger PR people will find a lot of context (I’d say history, but it makes me feel so old) in these as well. Our industry wasn’t always Web 2.0-centric.  The brands from the good old days have largely changed, but  the core competencies remain the same and there’s lots to learn from people who have been around the block and share their stories. I recommend checking these podcasts out.

Earlier today, my wife and I had lunch with some friends at Mas here in our hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia.  One of our companions stopped herself in mid-sentence and blurted out “Helen Thomas – what an honor!” and I turned around to find myself face to face with Helen Thomas, the great White House correspondent.

Like many people who have been in PR for years, I have been fortunate enough to talk and dine with some remarkably influential journalists, but today’s chance meeting really took the cake.  She stayed at our table for several minutes, listened to me blather on about how much I thought of a speech she gave that I attended at the National Press Club ten years ago, and politely asked questions of each of us.  She also introduced us to one of her dining companions, Maggie Kilgore, an influential journalist who covered the Vietnam war for UPI.  We also joked about some of the remarks she made in an interview in the most recent Vanity Fair.

They were in town to speak on a journalism panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book this afternoon that I wish I had known about in advance as I suspect it was fascinating.

It was the coolest thing that has happened to me in a long time.  She stood maybe five feet tall in heels, but had the presence of a giant.

Edelman’s London office recently asked Hugh MacLeod to give a presentation on blogging (I guess Steve Rubel can’t be in two places at once) and he generously shared his notes yesterday.

He’s captured some baseline information on corporate blogging very succinctly. I don’t know very many people who can speak with complete certainty when asked about what a client’s corporate blogging strategy should be, and the next time someone asks me, I’m pointing them to Hugh’s post.

He notes in his presentation that while he’s not really involved with Sun, he’s a regular reader of Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. That blog is Sun’s most impressive marketing effort in years.

Also noted – and I’d forgotten about this – is the Wikipedia list of corporate blogs. Unfortunately, the Powers That Be (read: Angela Beesley) decided it was spam and removed it from that otherwise very useful entry. I am hoping that Angela will allow that list to be posted at Wikia, the commercial venture she co-founded with Jimbo Wales.

I’ve also just installed Hugh’s widget (the cartoon you see if you scroll down and look on the right), which I hope amuses some readers.

I have been struggling with the Twitter phenomenon. It is the darling of the blogosphere at the moment. Steve Rubel, the first blogger I read every morning, is a huge fan. I couldn’t figure it out – at first (and still now, to an extent), it seemed like a glorified update of an IM status window that bothers people. Kevin Dugan’s take is a lot like mine – but he’s got a hilarious cartoon as well as some very revealing Blogpulse trends.

This week, I read Rafe Needleman’s Newbie’s Guide to Twitter, and it started to make some sense. I still don’t think it’s going to become the Next Big Thing (for me), but I can see why it’s on the rise. Even the New York Times is distributing news via its Twitter feed (edit: I just saw that Dave Winer also has used the Twitter API to create something similar from the NYT’s RSS feeds).

Since I can’t help but read about Twitter every six minutes due to its ubiquity, I started thinking of how it might be useful for PR people.

I have an idea. PR is built on relationships. All other things being equal, a journalist or blogger will answer a call/email/IM from someone they know and trust before an unknown quantity, especially when they’re on deadline. Now, it’d be suicide for them to let their Twitter network know that they’ve got a free second – they’d be inundated with pitches.

But what of the reverse? If I were to post to twitter that “I’ve got some hot news” or “Let me know who’s got a second for a good pitch”, and those people that I have a relationship were to respond (e.g. “hit me” or “not now, dealing with earnings”, etc.), could a new pitch medium develop? Or at least a better way to avoid those “Hey XXX, got a minute?” calls?

I’d be curious to hear what people think of this idea. If there’s anyone who’d prefer not to comment publicly for fear that their twitter name will be abused, feel free to IM me or please use the contact link above.

Last night, I enjoyed the company of over 1,000 peers at Tavern on the Green for the 2007 PRWeek awards. My employer, OutCast Communications, was a finalist in the Technology Campaign of the Year category, an award we won in 2005 with Fortify Software; in 2003 with Good Technology; and in 2001 with Salesforce.com.

This year, I was very pleased to be there when Ingres won Honourable Mention in the Small Corporate Communications Team of the Year, and even more so when I was a guest at the table of EMC, which won Honourable Mention in the Large Corporate Communications Team of the Year category. The presentation that everyone received as they exited noted that:

“The media can be a skeptical bunch. EMC, a leader in the field of data storage, experienced this firsthand while it was in the midst of a buying spree, snapping up 17 companies in three years. The communications team was faced with attempting to promote EMC as a single brand after facing scrutiny from Wall Street and the company’s investment community. The One Voice Campaign was hatched to capture, consolidate, and simplify the messages of these companies under the EMC umbrella. The initiative aimed to effectively communicate the company’s acquisition strategy, portraying the moves as a critically strategic stem for maintaining EMC’s competitive advantage. The success was evident through a series of business stories portraying EMC’s successful transformation into an information-management powerhouse.”

Congratulations to all of the winners, finalists, and nominees from last night’s awards dinner. And thanks to PRWeek and the night’s sponsors for throwing a party to remember.

Full disclosure: I’ve worked with EMC for several years now, and I couldn’t be more proud of the recognition that their team received last night.

Any social media news that’s making waves tends to dominate Techmeme, and today I was surprised to see how much attention USA Today’s Web design has garnered. Editor Ken Paulson explains their take, and while Steve Rubel and Michael Arrington both wrote extensive posts on the social media features they’ve rolled out, and there certainly are a number that will be useful to PR folks as well as readers.

The full list of new features is laid out here. USA Today certainly is ahead of its competition with this move, and I expect their advertisers will be pleased as well – this will drive many people to register for USA Today’s Web community, and it will be better able to prove its readers’ demographics as a result.

update (3/5/07):  Don Dodge did an analysis of the comments that have been posted on USAToday.com.  To say that readers don’t initially like the redesign is a bit of an understatement.  I’m surprised.

Scott Adams is an engineer, and this strip illustrates a fairly widely-held belief among engineers that PR is all about press releases and booze.

But that doesn’t make this any less funny :)

Check out this week’s Dilbert strips, which are devoted to PR, starting with Monday.

I should preface this by stating that search engines and search engine optimization are a complete mystery to me, and always have been. In my mind, the methods that the SEO community uses to raise its customers’ rankings involve a trip to Hogwarts and a magic wand. They certainly earn their paychecks.

Tonight I saw a very interesting post from Lisa Barone – and apparently a lot of other people did too, as its highly placed at Techmeme and thus being discussed by many people as I type this. She believes that Google indexes new Wikipedia articles much faster than it does the Web at large, and also expresses some of the same frustrations with Wikipedia that the PR community does. Specifically, that a non-expert community weilds so much influence over content – in our case, a client or a company – that features at the top of Google’s rankings.

As I said, in my mind Google’s search algorithms are a combination of Greek, calculus, and black magic. While I certainly am not suggesting, as Lisa does, that anything “fishy” is going on between Google and Wikipedia, if new articles are being indexed as fast as she says then Wikipedia just became even more influential than it is already.

And that means that we, as a PR community, need to find a way to work with the Wikipedia community through the discussion page function. Wikipedia isn’t getting any smaller, and Google’s not getting any less useful. Anyone have any particularly useful examples of influencing Wikipedia content without editing an article itself?

update:  [via Steve Rubel] The Google-Wikipedia correlation/relationship seems to be tightening up.  Apparently 50% of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google (I am not sure why this surprises me.  Doesn’t most sites’ traffic come via one search engine or the other?  But still, a high number).

Microsoft’s PR machine has always been formidable, its marketing machine equally so. The growth of Robert Scoble’s blog during his tenure in Redmond certainly changed the way that some end users viewed the company. Following Scoble’s departure for PodTech, Microsoft lured Jon Udell away from InfoWorld. I’m often surprised when people think of Jon as InfoWorld’s premier blogger, as I generally equate him with his Byte column and his role in InfoWorld’s test center. No matter how you think of him, his new role as a “Microsoft Evangelist” is a coup for Microsoft.

Last week, Microsoft scored again when Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg agreed to take an Evangelist role as well, reporting to Jeff Sandquist (as does Jon, presumably, though I don’t know for sure).

Together, the three have an excellent opportunity to communicate in a one-to-many fashion using media that have far more credibility than a press release does. I’m wondering how Microsoft PR feels about this. If I had to bet, I’d say that PR has very little if any say in content on Channel 9 and Channel 10. However, there’s no question that Microsoft users are increasingly turning to people like Jon, Jeff, and Michael as they follow the giant.

All of this makes me wonder how big the Evangelist organization at Microsoft is going to get. These guys have freedom to stray from approved messaging that PR spokespeople don’t enjoy, as evidenced by the occasions when Scoble’s love for the Mac was clear to his readers. Is the Evangelist role one that truly pushes cutting-edge Microsoft products and services, or a mechanism for the company to put a human face on its defense against criticism of security concerns and other frequent knocks? Probably both. I’ll be watching with interest as this plays out.

On the Vista front, Microsoft’s got its work cut out for it. Three out of four Vista reviews apparently include references to Apple’s Mac OS X. People like Walt Mossberg and David Pogue influence a heck of a lot of consumers. Microsoft will always win in the corporate market, but the Vista launch just gave a huge amount of free publicity to Apple.

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.

Today’s Weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal offers what has to be the highest-profile coverage to date of the power of bookmarking services’ power users and the influence they have on consumers. These “Wizards of Buzz” include one 17-year-old high school student now being paid $1k per month by Netscape to do what he was doing for free on Digg. In includes profiles of power users on Newsvine, Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Netscape, among others, and also provides a comprehensive overview of each of those services.

[Full disclosure: My employer represents StumbleUpon, but I do not work on their business, nor have I ever met one of their executives. To tell you the truth, I probably should use their service - but I don't.]

Authors Jamin Warren and John Jurgensen provide a good layman’s overview of the payola schemes that some (including the PR industry) have tried to employ to gain influence with these services and their users. The WSJ identified these users by analyzing over 25,000 submissions to these sites, using software from Dapper – I’m previously unfamiliar with Dapper but will have to check them out.

I’ve struggled to explain the power of social bookmarking sites to friends and colleagues in the past because I couldn’t steer them to any one resource.  I agree with Mike Arrington that those unfamiliar “may be left somewhat confused by the whole crazy ecosystem” after reading the article, but I think he’s mistaken about the rest of us not learning anything we didn’t already know.  For me, putting faces and backstories to Digg, etc. user names put a human face on this trend.

I’m also plannning on steering people to the accompanying WSJ podcast.

Speaking of bookmarking services…

IDG Communications SVP Colin Crawford runs that company’s online ventures, and he’s posted some interesting hints at the direction that they’re going.  He’s more candid than some of his peers have been, and I think it’s worth reading.  Some of the highlights:

“Going forward IDG Communications will define itself as a web centric information company complemented by expos, events and print publications.”

That’s interesting in that print is put on the same tier as events and expos.  Either that means that IDG’s events and expos business is pretty lucrative (and it well may be; the IDG events I attend are generally packed), or print revenue is on a serious decline.  Of course, a publishing company moving from print to online isn’t exactly news.  The really interesting hints come here:

“…today’s media has to deal with a world of social connections, networking and collective actions enabled by the Internet.  The more enlightened in our media world will figure how to allow their audiences freedom to create and share their knowledge and content and to mash it up in a way that engages users.”

This is something I want to keep an eye on.  IDG’s online properties, Computerworld in particular, have pushed blogging of late and there’s a lot of value for readers, but a lot of it is repurposed content from its normal online coverage.  The “freedom to create and share” comment makes me wonder what else Colin has in store.  Wikis?  User-generated video submissions?

No matter what, it’s something for our industry to follow.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, editorial director at Linux.com, posted earlier this week about the fact that he gets 30 pitches a day that basically all use the same intro – what he calls “the most over-used phrase in PR”.  I’m not going to repeat it here, because I want anyone reading this to click through and see if you’re guilty of using it.  I know I’ve been known to drop that phrase infrequently, but it’s just been erased from my PR lexicon as a result of his post.

I think this illustrates something important about the disconnect between people who are used to pitching proprietary enterprise software but don’t adjust their tactics to fit the style of the open source community.  In my experience, writers and editors for open source-centric outlets tend to actually use open source software.  When pitching someone who has the chops to run their own Red Hat or Debian server, the fastest way to the circular file is to sound like everyone else who doesn’t understand what they’re pitching and thus tries to make their pitch sound like the most earthshaking news of 2007.  I’m not suggesting that the PR community needs to start running Linux servers at home, just that an understanding of and focus on end user benefits – especially when pitching editors who happen to be end users – can go a long way in keeping a pitch safe from the delete key.

Today’s Paygrade column in the Wall Street Journal discusses exactly how much bloggers do and don’t make, as well as the way their workdays are constructed. Good stuff to understand as we all learn how to work with bloggers.

For PR professionals, social media has resulted in journalists sharing their pet peeves (and, for lack of a better word, PR turn-ons) online for all to see. Three of the most hilarious examples have come from Computerwire’s Kevin Murphy. Most recently, he’s thrown out three tricks that journalists see through, and last month he taught readers how to spin bad earnings news, but his real gem is How to Blag an Interview.

This excerpt doesn’t do his advice justice, but hopefully you’ll get the idea:

“Interviewees generally come in threes.

There’s the Main Guy, the Other Guy, and the PR Bodyguard.

You can tell which is the Main Guy because he sits in the middle. You can tell which is the PR Bodyguard because he has longer hair and wears a skirt and smells nicer. Whatever remains is the Other Guy.

Sometimes, a fourth person will enter the room and sit down about ten minutes into the interview. This person was either parking the car or taking a piss. They can be safely ignored.”

With the exception of the fact that some of us wear pants (and, if presenting to an old-school crowd, ties) and smell, at best, the same as Main Guy and Other Guy, everything he describes is completely accurate. If you’re new to the industry, you want to avoid this scenario badly. That will be hard to do, because the spokespeople you’ll be with default to PowerPoint mode, and:

• they got financing by showing many VCs the same presentation over and over again (if you’re with a startup)
• their internal marketing and product requirement documents – which are of critical importance to engineers who bring any vendors’ products to life – are communicated using PowerPoint
• when not acceding to your demands to go talk to the media, they gave the same presentation to their sales force and their partners and they’re comfortable with it
• without your guidance, they probably don’t understand the importance of sharing a unique story with the journalists they’re presenting to

Regarding the last – that’s incredibly important. By the time the meeting takes place, your client or your company will likely have spent hefty sums on airfare, cabs, hotels, meals, and your counsel. It would be a disservice to deliver something cookie-cutter. It will impact coverage, and if you’re really unlucky a journalist will call you out on it on his or her blog :)

I’m grateful to the journalists who share their thoughts on PR with us. Off the top of my head, Jeremy Wagstaff at the Wall Street Journal sticks out. He’s explained why “PR greetings card and spam” can often get mixed up at holiday time and why close relationships between PR pros and journalists can backfire because of the need for journalists to have sharp teeth. His blog is worth reading, and we’d all be better off to follow two of Jeremy’s cardinal rules:

• “Pitches should never be made by phone without an email requesting a chat first. Phone calls are no longer as acceptable as they were; they are now as intrusive as a foot in the door.

• PR people should find out if their mark has a blog, and if so, read it. For background, and to make sure the person is not on holiday or in the middle of a gender-change. It’s good to include some reference in the pitch to the fact that the blog has been read but there’s really no need to be smarmy. (’I’m a huge fan of your blog since before you started writing it and your post about how spammers are really annoying was just so spot on I had it tatooed in its entirety on my children’s foreheads.’)”

I’d love to compile a directory of more insight from folks who are literally besieged with pitches all day long, and I’ll do my best to do it here. If anyone has suggestions, please do submit them as comments below. Thanks!

Brisbane Creative, an Australian design firm, “launched” a Web 2.0 spoof site at www.uselessaccount.com. It’s a brilliant marketing move: by parodying the look and feel of every Web 2.0 application, they’ve managed to gain a ton of attention from those that follow the industry. It’s been IM’d or emailed to me several times today, but more impressive is how they managed to catch Michael Arrington’s eye. His TechCrunch post is the kind of recognition that should drive a lot of inquiries to the Brisbane.

At this point, TechCrunch is the one RSS feed that the Web 2.0 would take with them if they’re stuck on a desert island, and my guess is that there are a lot of TechCrunch-reading entrepreneurial engineers out there with big ideas for real Web 2.0 services but since they’re – well, engineers – graphic design isn’t their strong suit. I hope the funny Australians hear from a lot of them.

A colleague pointed out that their FAQ jokingly suggests that hate mail be sent to Kevin Rose from Digg. These guys dropped all the right names!

It’s been a good week for viral marketing. In another campaign, Fortify Software created a fictional country populated entirely by hackers as a means to spread their message at this week’s crowded RSA Conference. The Hackistan Ministry of Information can tell you all about it at their web site. The blogosphere is starting to pick up on it, which is great to see. [Full disclosure - they're an OutCast client and I helped spread the word]. The beauty of stuff like Useless Account and Discover Hackistan is that they spread the word themselves. There’s a lot more room for this type of thing in our industry. Even last week’s Boston Scare is an example. Sure, Turner Broadcasting is paying the city of Boston $2 million in lieu of being sued by the folks who responded to the threat, but in doing so they’ve basically guaranteed the success of their own viral marketing campaign, since WAY more people know about the show they were promoting than they would have had Turner taken out $2 million in advertising.

Technorati Tags: PR, Viral Marketing, Web 2.0

A colleague shared this material from Harvard Business School’s online curriculum. It details, among other things, the debate over the Wikipedia article on Enterprise 2.0 (which now redirects to Enterprise social software). There’s a lot of valuable material in there, but perhaps the most important for PR pros is the section on Wikipedia’s AfD (Articles for Deletion) process – violating that process is a quick way for a PR person to damage their reputation in the Wikipedia community.

Technorati Tags: PR, Wikipedia