Going out on top - happy new year

I’ve always been a sporadic blogger so it’s not that big a stretch to become a non-blogger - at least in this forum. Business has been booming - taking an increasing portion of my time. We’ve re-designed our website, re-calibrated (I love that word) our business and I can’t pay attention to this blog anymore. But, everybody likes to go out on top, so I find some small degree of solace knowing I am STILL the #1 Sidewiki comment on the Twitter homepage!

Blogging less here means I have more time to read blogs I enjoy. My favorite blog: 3QuarksDaily.

Blogging less here also means I can pay more attention to my theatre blog, where my heart is these days: markrosenyc.com

All bloggers should support the struggle for freedom in Iran. Image below from Tehran 24 | also check FRONTLINE: Tehran Bureau for updates and THE LEDE, The New York Times

Five PR bloggers worth following, derived from random scans of intelligence, original thinking and personality in the PR blogosphere: #1 tomforemski - leadoff batter | #2 occamsrazr - the Leonard Cohen of PR bloggers | #3  [chrisbrogan.com] - the merry prankster of social media | #4 Richard Edelman - the Philip Roth of PR | #5 Loren Feldman - incendiary pupeteer

Some favorite posts:

• Alex Rodriquez Comes to His Senses - What Next?
• MLK & RFK Brothers In Battle
• Google Sidewiki is PR Game Changer
• Kristen Revealed
• So you want to break into public relations?
• What is Your Wikipedia PR Strategy?
• Mahatma Gandhi & Business

HAPPY NEW YEAR. Peace. Health. Freedom. Prosperity.

PRBlogNews, launched June, 2005. Archived, December 30, 2009.

Corrupt Bloggers Kvetch - Where’s the Swag?

There’s a very revealing guest rant by professional ’lifestyle’ blogger Krizia in Pro Blogger: PR People Getting Pushier with Bloggers Since the Recession.

Krizia is perturbed that PRs are now asking questions about the value of all their free giveaways; the cash, the swag is drying up for product placement on Krizia’s EatSmartAgeSmart blog. Before bestowing gifts and favors PR people are asking pesky questions like: 

• “How many unique users?”
• “How many page views?”
• “How fast can you get our review on your site?”
• “Have you won any awards in the past?”
• “Send us links to past reviews you’ve written.”
• “What angle will you take with this feature?”

In other words, publicists were getting hip and demanding the same standards they apply to legitimate media. When we get a hit inthe Daily Newswe know the circulation, target readership, ad equivalent value - in print and on the web.  Why not with bloggers? 

EatSmartAgeSmart has all the markings of a commercial enterprise that treats ‘content’  like ad-filler. Where’s the PR value in editorial in an outlet that obviously crafts stories as thinly-disguised ads to pump individual blog traffic and ancillary business for a larger blog network? (see Glam Media description below).

I know this is beauty/fashion/lifestyle blah blah, and that’s the way it’s done in these industries. But these sprung-up-on-the-web media properties are competing with established, verified, legitimate media outlets that are converting their readers to the web.  If you’re a publicist you’ll choose mass media or Trade pubs before spending billable time on corrupt bloggers who publicly kvetch about the lack of swag coming from PRs. 

Blogger Relations - a credible pitch

A few days ago I got a perfect pitch. I hope Alex doesn’t mind if I reprint it verbatim here:

Hi Mark,

My name is Alex King and I’m the Director of Marketing at a small MIT startup called WebNotes. Thanks for your post on Mandy Stadtmiller- I just read her column and thought it was hysterical!

Anyways, my firm is building research tools for PR firms to help out with the daily news scan process and I was curious if you might be interested in writing about us. I’d love to show you a demo and even give you access to the software.

I hope all is well,
Alex

We did a Go-to-Meeting Demo. I asked questions and I signed up for the same two week free WebNotes Demo vailable to everybody. No free giveaway. No PR. No hustle. No quid pro quo. No money changing hands.

A couple of days after the Demo Alex followed up with email to see if I needed assistance.  Be professional, be personal, be persistent. In PR, media relations, blogger relations, bottomline, that’s all you can do. If you do that, you’re way ahead of the game.

EatSmartAgeSmart is in the Glam Media network.From the Glam Media site: Glam Media is the pioneer and global leader of Vertical Media—a revolutionary new media model that connects premium brand advertisers with millions of consumers with like-minded passions online through large and growing vertical content networks. With more than 1400 publishers worldwide, we cover the topics people are passionate about. We know how to find and engage these audiences with the right content at the right time—and brand advertisers are taking note. In the past year, 23 of the top 25 brand advertisers have engaged with passionate consumers on one of the Glam Media Networks. With a reach of 55 million unique monthly visitors in the US and more than 125 million uniques globally, it’s no wonder Glam Media is in the comScore Top 20 Web properties and a Top 10 AdWeek Display Ad Publisher.

Who is Worth Following #5

  The continuing scan for signs of intelligence and fun in the PR blogosphere 

#5 Loren Feldman

Loren Feldman, the ganza macher of 1938 Media, is a pupeteer, satirist, performer in search of an audience, anti-Web 2.0 fixture in Web 2.0 circles, videographer and other things. He’s not in PR (although he is a PR master) and he’s not a blogger but he is definitely worth following, if nothing more than for entertainment… although you do get valuable information from Loren. As much as he will rail against it, he is addicted to this social media thing, otherwise he wouldn’t have an audience.

In the old days, a couple of years ago, I would hang with Loren at the Friar’s Club or a Deli somewhere on the east side as he was trying to find his place in the new social media world order. I don’t know if he’s found it but he did find Michelle Oshen - they got married, settled down like a nice nebbisha Long Island couple with shiny cars and a small dog and together became an anti-Web 2.0 power couple.

Although Loren has been thankfully domesticated he thankfully has not mellowed. He still could be the last Jew in the Warsaw ghetto lobbing a hand grenade - leading the symbolic if largely futile assault against repression. In his first event, The Audience Conference, New York City, November 5 -6, 2009, Loren is finally commanding the big stage where he is the lead player. I can’t figure out what The Audience Conference is, other than a day of fun and catharsis with some well-connected Web 2.0 types, but it is not, as Loren insists, about Twittering, Facebooking, YouTubing, blogging and all that - except that’s what all The Audience Conference speakers and performers do (even the music people are probably heavily involved in web promotion). 

Why follow Loren? Because he makes all this serious stuff fun and proves that we are involved in a visual medium that requires performers to reach out to an audience.

THE AUDIENCE CONFERENCE: The speakers range from large traditional media organisations with Dan Farber of CBS, though the recording industry with Warner Bros. Music CTO Ethan Kaplan, advertising with Crayon’s Joe Jaffe, HR and internal audiences with Frank Roche of iFractal and new media players like Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, not to mention Musicians like Adam & Mia and Writers like the inimitable Andrew Keen of “Cult of the Amateur” fame with more being added. 

Who is Worth Following is a continuing PRBlogNews series based on random scans of intelligence, original thinking and personality in the PR blogosphere: #1 tomforemski - leadoff batter | #2 occamsrazr - the Leonard Cohen of PR bloggers | #3  [chrisbrogan.com] - the merry prankster of social media | #4 Richard Edelman - the Philip Roth of PR | #5 Loren Feldman - incendiary pupeteer

I Am #1 Sidewiki Comment on Twitter Home Page!

It could change at any moment. I could drop to the bottom or be eliminated by a vindictive Google algorithm or maybe I’m hallucinating … but as of this moment, I have the #1 Sidewiki comment on “the entire site” of Twitter, ahead of the venerable Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land, and the mega-blog, Tech Crunch.  How did this happen? Nobody knows. What does it mean? Probably nothing.

We are crazed by Sidewiki since it launched Sept. 30 because Google has essentially “wrapped” the web with virgin space to add content. We’re pioneering new content turf here - we can have impact, influence, see our name immediately without the bothersome obstructions of search mechanisms. Google mysteriously ‘ranks’ these comments and stores them in your Google profile.

I say ‘mysteriously’ because several Sidewiki comments I posted to The New York Times and other sites have disappeared althogether. BusinessWire has taken pre-emptive action by inserting its own Sidewiki comment that is identified as “Page Owner.”

It’s not quite Afghanistan-Pakistan or Yankees-Angels but Google Sidewiki represents such a disruptive force to the web that PR people, SEO mavens, developers,  and advertisers are at odds as to what it means.  So far, generally across the web, comments have been sparse and respectful although we don’t know how many Sidewiki comments Google is deleting or archiving.

That’s the point here - Google is calling the shots, we’re scratching our heads and playing catch-up. #1 today, sayonara tomorrow.

Related: Big Pharma and Google Sidewiki: A Sink or Swim Situation? - 10/15/2009 AdvertisingAge

PR/Media Week in Review 10-11-2009

Letterman started the week on a guilt-trip with his wife about all the creepy things he has been doing, including ‘the women’ - not just ‘woman’ -  he has been sleeping with. His on air confession/campfire funny story was widely seen as a PR masterpiece but it was his subsequent stumbling and bumbling and fear - will I lose my job? Lose my marriage? - that played like a real life serial drama, fueled by media speculation, that boosted ratings and kept advertisers in place. Remember Johnny Carson also had brief - very brief - moments of on air intimacy, a breaching of the late night show game face, that played well.  It doesn’t help Letterman that the protagonist in this story, the would-be extortionist, has a pit-bull media hungry attorney who is avery aggressive about spinning ‘the rest of the story.’ Meanwhile,  Letterman is virtually muzzled by his position and, presumably, his wife. How many times can you say you’re sorry?  It’s been reported that Rubenstein is representing Letterman, of course. It’s now in the stage of PR for a highly-public legal case. Maureen Dowd nailed it in her op-ed column Men Behaving Madly.

So much of baseball is PR. On field quick interviews. Long, post-game press conferences. Crisis communication - the latest steroid story, moving a team to another city. New York is the media capital of the world and the Yankees are the #1 sports franchise in history and they have been supplying drama, making news, all season long and now big-time in the post season. Manager Joe Girardi calls Yankee Stadium, and by extension any ballpark the Yankees play in, ”the big stage.” We’ve been waiting for A-Rod take take his star turn on the big stage and this could be the year.

This year A-Rod has learned that despite the $25 million a year he gets to work, his pimary obligation is to HAVE FUN. He learned that from Mark Texeira, who is an aw-shucks, hard running, uncomplicated, un-pretty home run banger who is also a dazzling fielder - a guy who full-throttle loves playing baseball. And Texeira does all this for a measly $180 million over eight years, $2.5 million a year less than A-Rod. As long as the Yankees play like this, nobody will quibble over those salaries.

The real story is that you can now Twitter the Yankee game right from the MLB site. Always be Twittering, pitch to pitch, that great swell of Yankee tweets if you can’t pay $1,000 a ticket to be there in person.

This week we launched Who is Worth Following, a continuing PRBlogNews series based on random scans of intelligence, original thinking and personality in the PR blogosphere: #1 tomforemski - batting cleanup | #2 occamsrazr - the Leonard Cohen of PR bloggers | #3 #4 and #5 coming next week.

P.S. - There in no truth to the rumor that Barack Obama is up for the Cy Young Award, based on the pitch he threw out opening day.

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Social Business By Design

Sometimes you run across a presentation that says it all, even without sound. Social media goes beyond PR - it’s key to a new way of doing business.

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Google Sidewiki is PR Game Changer

The gig is up.  Any client who thought they could escape social media is now in it, whether they like it or not. Google Sidewiki, launched a couple of days ago, is a PR game changer - it exemplifies, perhaps more than any other application, how social media has infiltrated all communication and can undermine any PR strategy that does not consider social networks.

Here’s how Google spins it: What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web? What if you could add your own insights for others who are passing through? In other words - what if Google can turn everybody into a content producer and then rank and control all that content?

Now they can, and they will.It means that on this blog page you, or anyone with an easily installed Google Sidewiki app, can write notes that are then visible to anybody else. The general public - adversaries, friends, competitors, your nephew - can enhance your web page without your consent or knowledge.

This is what it looks like (left). In a way, every web page is now a blog, with unmoderated comments open to everyone.

Google will somehow rate these Sidewiki comments, through one of their mysterious algorithms, and present the most relevant first. You Sidewiki comments are then stored in your Google profile.  Sidewiki comments can be Tweeted, emailed, Facebooked.

So, my buried Google Sidewiki comment “Mark Rose is a big fat idiot,” follows this blog forever, and can be blasted out through other channels. Only Google could come up with something this insidious and mind blowing. Google Sidewiki is ready for Internet Explorer and Firefox, soon for Google Chrome. Download Google toolbar with Sidewiki.

What does this mean for public relations?

It means that all clients are now IN social media, whether they know it or not. Google is further connecting social media channels and controlling major social networks, such as Blogger and YouTube.  This is further proof, if we needed any, that a PR strategy that does not include social media has a huge hole in it.

Three questions to ask:

1. What’s your social media PR strategy?
2. What’s your Wiki strategy (Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Google Sidewiki)?
3. What is your social media news creation and delivery mechanism?

These can seem like esoteric questions but just asking them moves you in the right direction. The primary function of PR is no longer “How do I get the media to cover me?” It’s now “How do we impact our audience through our own media?” Google Sidewiki further re-defines media, when anybody can ‘report’ their opinions and facts on any web page, or words, phrases, or sections of a web page. What makes this frightening from a PR perspective is that all this content is subject to Google’s ever-changing algorithms. It makes Google the most-powerful social media company out there.

From Google: In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you’ll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed.

PR Poised to Rebound Says Top Exec Recruiter

When Dennis Spring talks we listen. Why? a) he’s the only PR exec recruiter smart enough to advertise on PRBlogNews. b) he’s seen ‘em come and he’s seen ‘em go, recessions that is c)he was tough enough to play basketball at Sheepshead Bay H.S. in Bklyn.

Spring says he sees “renewed hiring activity” recently and he is “actively seeking candidates for financial communications, health care, non-profit and consumer positions starting at $80K annual.”

“The good news is that people who are getting hired during this slow recovery are commanding base salaries similar to what they had before being laid off,” Spring, President of Spring Associates, told PRBlogNews exclusively.

So, economic indicators are pointing up, Bernanke has declared the recession over, but PR always lags the economy by about a year, as Spring told PRBlogNews May, 2007.  Still, Spring’s outlook is considerably brighter than it was February 12, 2009, when we were in the depths of a grim economy. There are signs of improvement - cautious hiring in a variety of PR specialties.

“The searches we’re handling are highly specialized and narrowly focused on specific skill levels and industry knowledge. Social media skills are definitely needed today, more so for agency candidates,” says Spring.

Spring says that his firm regularly scans social media channels for A+ candidates, although a phone conversation and a face-to-face meeting are necessary to take full measure of the candidate.

Many candidates, especially the younger less experienced ones, tend to exhaust all of the social media venues for sometimes months before contacting us. I feel this is a mistake. We should be contacted first. Not only because we may have a brand new search with their name on it, but also because the candidate will now have another promoter and advocate in his/her corner. What’s wrong with that? - Dennis Spring

The Official PR Salary & Bonus Report is compiled from Spring Associates’ proprietary database of more than 21,000 credentialed corporate communications and agency public relations professionals nationwide. Founded in 1980, Spring Associates, based in New York, has emerged as the premiere public relations executive search consultancy through innovation, relevancy, and results.

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