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The Week in Review: March 6-10

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A new (and very interesting) client has just come on board,  I had deadlines for some other projects, and I had to take a quick trip mid-week. Time has been tight, so blogging has been light.

So this post is going to be the week in review —  comments on the things I probably would have blogged in more depth had I more time.

Of course, the top PR blogging news of the week was the Edelman-Wal-Mart blogger relations story, starting with the New York Times article on March 7th, and continuing on with commentary from just about every PR/Marketing blogger on the planet. Except me of course. I was at a client 🙂 Check out the great round-ups of the commentary written by  Constantin Basturea and Tom Murphy. And don’t miss Richard Edelman’s post. For more coverage, here are the google and technorati searches on "Edelman Wal-Mart"

My .02 — this really does look like a simple effort at blogger relations, perhaps not the best execution, but not intentionally sinister.  In fact, I think Wal-Mart would be foolish to not engage in grassroots blogger relations, given how well organized its critics in the blogosphere are.

Here’s my take-away from this tempest in a teapot:

First, we have to be fair in our criticisms. Part (but not all) of the outrage about the Wal-Mart outreach was outrage about Wal-Mart in general. You have to put both your friends and your enemies to the same test. If something would be okay if your buddy did it, but it is bad if the evil empire does it,  you are not being fair. This is not dis-similar from what happened in the initial outrage more than a year ago about character blogs. GourmetStation and others were being lambasted for having characters as the blog authors. I pointed out a certain inconsistency using the example of Spencer F. Katt, the PC Week/eWeek mascot for 20-plus years who has both a column and yes, a blog. Somehow, a character everybody knew and liked was okay. It was only the new ones that were bad blogging practice 🙂  Wrong. Be consistent in BOTH your flames and your kudos.

Second, as PR practitioners start reaching out to blogs… as they should, and as most of us have preached, dare I say ad nauseaum, we have to expect mistakes. Given the ongoing commentary on PR blogs about the general quality of much PR practice, we shouldn’t be surprised if some PR agency efforts at blogger relations are better than others. I have no particular opinion about Edelman’s blogger outreach program. Time will tell whether it was good, bad or something in between. I am certain however, that no blogger outreach program will be (or should be) successful without complete transparency. You MUST be completely honest about your role and your vested interests. And not surprised if your entire campaign is published on a blog somewhere.

Again, a comparison. When I started to get a great deal of media exposure as spokesperson for Cyber Patrol in the late 90s, I was very careful to make sure that my public statements passed the ultimate test: would I be embarassed if this were on the front page of the NY Times? Different times, same general principal. Ain’t no such thing as "off the record."

Moving on, conferences. Without a doubt, the model of conferences where the panel is presumed to be the "experts" and the audience the "students" is outmoded. In tech and in marketing, the two arenas where I have spent most of my professional career, the audience often knows as much, or more, than the panelists. I’ve written about this here a bit, and it was one of the inspirations for the Room of Your Own proposal for Business Blogging currently under consideration for BlogHer 06. Our idea is that the panelists are there to kick off the discussion, but in fact the entire audience is the panel, and an active part in building our takeaway "best practices" for business bloggers.

This week,  some smart bloggers asked some great questions about the "conference issue:"

And if you haven’t figured it out yet, Elisa Camahort brings it home: BlogHer is the conference that takes a truly different approach. See you there in July.

In the category of smart business advice:

  • PR Squared has a series of three posts of "bad advice" about customer references which of course are excellent advice for PR and MarCom pros. Here they are:  one, two, three
  • Converstations gives some great advice on how to best write your posts in A Blog Posting Mantra.
  • And Jill Konrath has some great advice on thinking like your customer.

In the news:

And finally, if you stuck this post out this long, you deserve some fun. Don’t miss this clip on trendspotting from the Daily Show. Thanks to Small Business Trends for the link.

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Roadmaps This and That

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So I am finally getting around to trying out Qumana. One too many posts in progress eaten by the "mystical keystroke combo" that closes all my open windows 🙂  And malformed HTML code because I forgot to save my Word doc as a text file before I copied the content.

Just a few things to highlight from this week’s blog reading.

Some more comments on the New York A-list article and resulting discussion of the Technorati 100:
InfoThought: Higher Jumpers Is Not The Same As Lower Barriers, or A-list Change != Rebuttal. While I don’t always agree with everything Seth Finkelstein says, I do think he has a point here. He concludes:
"Having more competitors who can jump over higher barriers is not the same as barriers being low for everyone."
A great post from Jory Des Jardins about Dropping the A-list Mentality

Speaking of Technorati — Technorati Favorites. Not sure what I think yet, except that 50 seems like a small number of favorites when most folks track far more blogs. Who makes the favorites list?Is it therefore an honor to be on someone’s Technorati favorites?

How is this that terribly different in its result than a blogroll. Yeah, I get it that a blogroll just lists the blog, while this highlights the recent posts from someone’s favorite blogs, but in the end, not that different in its result –it is a way of finding new blogs based on a reference from a blog you already like or trust. In light of all the conversations about blogrolls, and utility thereof, with some bloggers getting rid of them altogether, I’m wondering what need this actually fills? If blogrolls are too hard to maintain, or even perhaps too political, why do we need ANOTHER favorites? Some other comments on this (by no means all, just the ones I bookmarked):
Neville Hobson, Sharing your favourites

Frappr. I’m not sure how useful this is, but I can see how it can become addicting. I joined the group started by Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz in support of their excellent podcast For Immediate Release, and really haven’t done much with it. Well, this weekend, I got an email that Chris Locke wanted to be my friend on Frappr. I said to myself, "That Chris Locke???" so I felt I had to check it out. Sure enough, it was indeed that Chris Locke of Cluetrain and Gonzo Marketing fame (infamy??) Turns out, he was playing with it, and apparently inviting everyone in his address books. Well, I had exchanged a few emails with him about a year ago, and there you have it. I figured, what the hell, let’s see what happens, so said yes. And over the past few days, friend invites are dribbling in here and there. And I find myself checking people out way more than I did in boring old Linked In 🙂  I even "spammed" a few of my friends with invites!  Still haven’t figured out if how useful this is beyond the entertainment value, but it’s been fun, so thanks Rage Boy.

H&R Block. Miscalculated its own state income taxes, understating its liabilities by $32 million as of April 30, 2005. What can we say. What a PR nightmare. No matter how competent their tax preparers are, or how good their software is, they are going to have to deal with a perception that they screwed up their OWN taxes. Ouch. Seen on Threadwatch.

And to end the weekend, and start your week off with a chuckle, a great ad by HP (seen on Adrants) and a funny cartoon (thanks Neville)

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Today’s Blogthing

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From Blogthings: What does your birthdate mean

Your Birthdate: July 5
You have many talents, and you are great at sharing those talents with others.
Most people would be jealous of your clever intellect, but you’re just too likeable to elicit jealousy.
Progressive and original, you’re usually thinking up cutting edge ideas.
Quick witted and fast thinking, you have difficulty finding new challenges.

Your strength: Your superhuman brainpower

Your weakness: Your susceptibility to boredom

Your power color: Tangerine

Your power symbol: Ace

Your power month: May

Roadmaps Round-up: decision making, pitching bloggers and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

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Finishing up with my blogroll for this week:

From Andrew Lark, Tomcruiseisnuts.com I needed something light after the news of the bombings in London, and this fit the bill.

Another great post from Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users – You’re emotional. Deal with it. She covers the surprising news (VBG) that decisions are most often based on emotions, not logic, regardless of how we choose to justify the decisions. Of course this won’t be a surprise to marketing folks and most women I know, but news like this just might rock the world of a few tech CEOs.

Tom Murphy has an excellent post that lists posts from PR bloggers on the right (and wrong) ways to pitch bloggers. The post that triggered his, from Anil Dash, on how not to pitch a blogger, closed with an admonition about my favorite peeve: PDFs. About four weeks ago, I ripped into someone (privately) who sent me a pitch about a book with at least 3 PDF attachments plus a huge graphic in the HTML email.

Get a simple website, people, post your information there, and include the links in your emails. If you don’t have the technical ability to do this, find someone who does, like a college student or fourth grader. The people getting your pitch — whatever it is — DO NOT want their email bogged down with tons of attachments that they DIDN’T ASK FOR!!!!! It doesn’t matter whether they are on dial up, broadband, corporate network or a blackberry. They don’t want ’em.

BONUS RESOURCE FOR US FOLKS: If you don’t have your own child to help you with this tech stuff, techstudents.net can help you find a college student to do this work for you.

Also from Tom Murphy, I learned about changes Gartner is making to the infamous Magic Quadrant and a new blog (new to me that is): Analyst Equity.

We’ll have to see how it plays out, but I don’t really see how these "changes" are going to make the whole Magic Quadrant process any less capricious. It still sounds like a "black box" where the analyst doing the Quadrant will decide the key elements based on his or her own opinions and biases, and the companies involved will have a devil of a time figuring it all out.