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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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Monitoring the Blogosphere

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Last week, smart PR blogger John Wagner (On Message) had a great post about monitoring blogs  Use PR Sense when monitoring blogs. He pointed out, rightly, that not every comment merits a response. Sometimes, many times, what a company can learn by monitoring can be just as valuable.

Today, Washington Post has a front page article that provides two examples of companies (ConAgra and HP) that have done just that: paid attention to customers’ online comments and made smart business decisions as a result. First seen on The Bivings Report.

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated said the Press Release

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The actual Mark Twain quote is "The report of my death was an exaggeration."

When it comes to the much maligned press release, no matter how much some might wish the death notice to be true, the press release as a form is actually doing its job just fine. It tells you who, what, where, when, why and usually how.

Well written press releases do so with an economy of language that gives the reporter the facts and encourages him to search out more information to make the story "his." And, as I and so many others have said (many of whom will be linked to below) the press release is only one tool in the practitioner’s kit. The communicator who relies solely on her release to tell the story deserves to be in the Bad Pitch Blog.

So what’s the problem? Why do so many want to read the last rites over the press release?

Here’s my .02 —

There is an awful lot of shoddy PR practice. Full stop. Fluffy, content-free press releases masquerading as news. How can they pitch some of this stuff?

I lay much, but not all, of the blame for this on the press release being used as sales collateral. And I don’t mean the incidental use of a press release in the sales process. I mean the deliberate writing of press releases to be used by sales people with prospects. I think that’s why so much fluffy stupid language crept into the press release, and folks started to forget to make each announcement pass the "newsworthy" test.

The press stopped being the principal audience for many. The form of the release and the practice of PR suffered as a result.

It is okay that press releases are picked up on search engines and used by sales people in the sales process. It is NOT okay to forget that a press release should first and foremost be a NEWS release.

There are other ways to communicate sales messages. Specifically, advertising and direct mail.

There are other ways to pitch more complex stories to a reporter. Pick up the phone and call. If you haven’t been trying to pass off crappy sales collateral as news, the reporter might just take your call.

The practice of public relations is not defined by the press release. Yes, it has its problems, but these will not be solved by getting distracted by the press release red herring. We have to stay focused on the larger issues — how to improve the practice of PR, how to integrate the new media (without throwing out the baby), and ultimately, how to best serve the communication needs of our clients and companies, irrespective of the tool. Need a chisel, use a chisel. Need a mallet, use a mallet. And so on.

There are a lot of bright folks blogging about PR. Below are some of the recent posts I’ve run across.

Tom Foremski is wrong (Kevin Dugan, Bad Pitch Blog and Strategic Public Relations)
Start Spreading the (Fake) News: A Ratings System for Today’s Modern Press Releases, from a new blog I just discovered today, Below the Fold by Gary Goldhammer
Kicking the dead dog — new meme, Tom Murphy, PR Opinions
Is This About PR’s future? – Or Journalism’s??  and Is this the press release of tomorrow?, Todd Defren, PR Squared. Note: in the second post, Todd and team address the critcisms of Tom Foremski’s Die Die Die post

I’ve also written about this more than once. Here’s the link to all my posts in the PR category. Many of them touch this topic.

Foremski seems to really like what the Shift folks did, and while I think it is a great exectution of Foremski’s wish list, I’m hard pressed to see how it is any different than what many PR folks already provide to the media — fact sheets, background materials and so on.

Or that it solves the practice problems we’ve identified, ’cause let’t face it, a crappy pitch will still be crappy, regardless of format.

After I finished writing the first draft of this post and was creating my links list,  I ran across Steve Rubel’s post Everything is a press release. While I appreciate the sentiment, I respectfully disagree. In fact, I believe that the use of blogs and other social media in the dissemination of news is an important adjunct to the press release, but it does not replace the press release. Outside of the pr/marcom industry, we cannot and should not expect bloggers to do the same job as a good PR person in covering all the bases in an announcement.

Blogs can absolutely disseminate news, but we still need the form of a press release in many instances. It is as good a form as any, and if you want to call me a dinosaur for defending it, just pick a cute one. I don’t mind the one in the PR Squared announcement.

Tom Murphy (above) refers to kicking the dead dog. Well, there’s also another phrase that fits this situation:

When it comes to "the press release is dead" meme, that dog don’t hunt.

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Update March 2: Andy Lark weighs in as well, expressing the same frustration many of us feel at the "press release is dead" meme. He wishes we could just stop talking about it. I suspect we will, for a while. Then, someone will start a new blog or something will happen or maybe a new Web 2.0 "thing" will be announced that promises to "revolutionize" PR. It almost doesn’t matter what, but someone, somewhere will type the fateful words, "the press release is dead" or something similar. And even though we are tired beyond measure of this discussion, we’ll all jump in again, to varying degrees. Because if we don’t join the conversation, it will go on without us. And then we really will be dinosaurs.

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Whew.

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I started my marketing consulting business in 2004. For the previous 10 years, I had been employed, in various capacities, and under various corporate owners, at a web and email filtering company. My last position was head of marketing.
 
I really love what I am doing now, and after my blog reading today, I am doubly, triply glad I no longer manage the public relations function at a filtering company.
 
Today, BoingBoing effectively declared war on filtering company Secure Computing, the maker of SmartFilter (and by the way, that is not where I worked. If it were, I would not be writing this post.)
 
It seems Secure is including BoingBoing in its “nudity” category, resulting in the wildly popular blog being blocked lots of places, including entire countries that use the Secure product. You can get the details at BoingBoing.
 
For the record, I think Secure made the wrong decision here, both in the initial decision and the way they handled the issue with the BoingBoing team. And it is really going to hurt them. There are legitimate reasons for using filtering software, but I won’t go into them now. This post is not about filtering software. If you’re that interested, google me and some of the older results will be my public statements and testimony on the subject.
 
What I am interested in are the PR and business implications. Because this will end up being more than just a PR firestorm that will blow over in a few weeks. This will become a business nightmare. Blogs are going to spread the word further faster and more furiously than we ever faced in the old days of the Communications Decency Act. And the folks at BoingBoing have much more clout  — through the blog and their other business and personal interests — than any of the opponents the filtering companies faced before.
 
Figure it out fast, Secure — blogs are more than just “personal diaries” and now, you’ve got the most popular one in the world gunning for you.
 
Like I said, glad I’m outta this space!!!!!
 
 
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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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