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Today’s PR and Marketing Links

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Nice post from NevOn about Microsoft offering an RSS feed of its press releases. Expect we will see more and more companies following suit in the coming months. As he says, it is a no-brainer.

Great article from USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review by JD Lasica: The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere. It is a really good summary of the current debate about corporate sponsorship of blogs and bloggers/"paid blogging." I found the article on PaidContent.org, another site well worth checking out.

Finally from Scoble’s LinkBlog, My 10 thoughts on successful blogging by Dave Briggs, The Closed Circle weblog. Great tips for the beginning blogger, and a new blog for me to check out (see tip one).

Weekly round-up

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Just a few things still in my "to write about" box for this week.

Great post on Brian Carroll’s B2B Lead Generation Blog: Tips for better webinars. His advice is terrific. Two key takeaways:

  1. Webinars and webcasts are part of the overall marketing strategy, not standalone events. They work well when they are integrated with the program, not when seen as some sort of quick fix to a lead generation problem.
  2. Web events are great for prospecting, lead nurturing and building an expert reputation for your firm. They are NOT a source of hot leads that will close tomorrow, so set the right expectation for your sales team.

Part 7 of Christopher Carfi’s Business Blogging Field Guide, the CEO Blog. Be sure to go back and read the whole series, very well done.

Lastly, congratulations, Ellen MacArthur: Englishwoman Sails Globe in 71 Days, a Record

Some people get it: a good example and some good advice

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The example: From Diva Marketing, Corporate Blog Strategies: Toby writes about three blogs developed by marketer Rick Short—one for his company Indium and two personal. This is a great example of how the blogging "medium" can be used in different ways for different purposes – Rick has developed an authentic corporate blog for his company, and also created his own personal blogs, each with the style appropriate for the purpose at hand. Kudos to him!

Rick’s personal McChronicles site

The advice: From Jeff Nolan’s blog: The Dawn of a New Age – Marketification I found Jeff Nolan’s blog from a link on another blog, and I don’t even remember whose. Jeff is a VC and writes about all sorts of things. I don’t know him, but I like his blog because he is often VERY funny. His article offers some of the advice you’ll read here, and on many other marketing blogs, about how marketers should be monitoring the blogosphere. So, if this is the same as you’ll read elsewhere, why do I think it is such good advice? Because Jeff is not a marketing, advertising or communications professional – he comes at this from a different perspective, and we marketers should pay attention.

When is a blog a “fake blog?”

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Lots of conversation today about fake blogs, which got me thinking, just what is a "fake blog?"

The McDonalds fake french fry (FFF, also stands for fake fast food) blog is a creation from McDonald’s ad people, but it was supposed to be poking fun at the "whole food that looks like dead people phenomenon." So is it really "fake?" Or should we criticize it not for being fake, but simply for being lame.

Pepsi Girl blog wasn’t covertly sponsored by Pepsi, so not "fake" in that sense. According to the latest info from AdRants, Pepsi apparently had nothing to do with it, but it was developed as a joke. So it wasn’t authentic, or "real" as we have come to expect of blogs. But does that make it fake?

Here’s a round-up of the fake blog opinions I read today:

Jim Logan ; Matthew Oliphant/BusinessLogs (you’ll find the links to the mentioned blogs in this post); BL Ochman’s original post on the Pepsi Girl blog ; InsideBlogging ; Dan Gillmor ; courtesy Dan, I found Kevin Dugan’s Strategic Public Relations blog and his review of the FFF blog as well as a later post Fake Blogs Should Sponsor Real Blogs ;  Andy Lark

So what’s a fake blog?

On one hand,  I agree with Andy Lark — these were jokes, and perhaps we should lighten up a bit, like ’em/love ’em/hate ’em, have a laugh and get back to something more interesting than a styrofoam french fry that is supposed to look like Abe Lincoln.

On the other hand…. we need to figure out how to tell a blog that has the reporting or opinions of a true live person (whether we think they are a wing nut or not) from a blog that is an invented piece of fiction (funny or sad, effective or lame, it doesn’t matter). Why? Because we rely on blogs to be the voices of real people, people like us with whom we will agree some of the time, and disagree others. People we can respect and trust.

So I’ll make a suggestion… if you want to write a fictional blog, go ahead. Just tell the readers somewhere … like in the "about this blog" link … That’s what we do with books, right. We tell the reader whether they are reading Fiction or Non-fiction 🙂

Now, the big brand marketers are definitely going to continue to try and manipulate blogs. By creating fake/covert ones, or by trying to pull the wool over our eyes about the "buzz" something has (example: the recent Ogilvy-Mather stunt for client American Express. For details, BL Ochman summarizes it here.) And it will probably get more subtle, even as we get better at sniffing out fakes. They just won’t be able to help themselves. In the end, they probably won’t do much damage to their brands.

But, of course, they won’t do them any real good either, and that’s the point that they miss: done right, real blogs can actually help build the brand.

Of more concern to me is the smaller firms who follow in the fake blogger’s footsteps. Their brands likely won’t be strong enough to survive a serious mis-step in the blogosphere. They have to get it right the first time.

Which is why I was so pleased by the news out of NY PR firm CooperKatz today. As covered in MarketingVox: Congratulations Steve Rubel: CooperKatz Makes Blog PR Practice Out of Exec’s Blog.

Steve’s own post at Micro Persuasion provides more detail. CooperKatz’s approach, and public commitment to "doing it right" is a much better example for companies trying to figure out the blogosphere than some of the other examples we’ve been reading about this week.

Do you want fries with that?