We Regret the Error This week in the Tech PR War Stories podcast, David Strom and I talk about corrections. You don't really need corrections online because you can just fix the original story. But maybe corrections are still important as an admission of error. Do we still need them?

Our jumping-off point is last week's dust-up between Steve Rubel and Jim Louderback. Services like Twitter have lowered the barrier to putting your foot in your mouth, and Steve found out the hard way what problems an offhand comment can cause.

The show notes and download page is here.

Labels: journalism, podcast, PR

  ¶ 7:20 AM 0 Comments

  Listen to The New Influencers When I was researching The New Influencers, I recorded many of my interviews. I realized after the fact that these audio exchanges might be interesting to people who want to learn more about the topic. So, with permission from the subjects, I've posted four of the interviews in this section of the site. Several others are in the approval process and I hope to post them shortly.

In the meantime, enjoy these. They're all among my favorites:

• Doug Kaye talks about his boyhood in the Bay Area and how he developed a fascination and facility with sound engineering. He had all but retired a few years ago. Now, with IT Conversations and Gigavox, he's doing the most important work he's ever done.

• David Meerman Scott describes the incredible viral phenomenon that made his self-published e-book the talk of the PR and marketing indsutry. He's now working on his fourth print book , and his life has changed forever as a result of that early experience.

• If you only know of Dan Bricklin as the father of the electronic spreadsheet, this interview will amaze you. Dan is a gifted programmer, but he is passionate about how information is organized and displayed. At one point during this talk, he takes out the Talmud to show its early innovations in hyperlinking. This is an amazing interview.

• Alex Boese was working on his Ph.D., figuring few people would ever read it. Then he started posting some of his work on the Internet and his life has never been the same. He's now finishing his second book, and Museum of Hoaxes gets a million visitors a month

  ¶ 2:07 PM 0 Comments

  PR pros should steer clear of sensationalizing PR practitioners know that research is a great way to get visibility for your clients. However, sensationalizing results is a bad idea.

Techworld writes that Blogs Now Infested With Offensive Content, based on data from Scansafe's Monthly Global Threat Report for March. This worried me until I read, "To be added to the list of those deemed potentially offensive within a business context, a site merely had to contain a single post containing profanity, or worse." In other words, "offensive content" is defined as a single mention of the F-word.

Excuse me? Since when is mild swearing considered "offensive?" Blogs are all about expressing personal opinion, and the inclusion of an occasional expletive is part of the process of self-expression. When used carefully, profanity can actually be very effective in making a point. Under Scansafe's definition, Catcher in the Rye would be deemed offensive.

This is a non-story, and it's a black eye for Scansafe because the company tried to make it a story. Don't follow its lead.

Labels: PR

  ¶ 7:52 AM 3 Comments

  American Idol comes to politics Don't you wish you could vote real candidates off the island?

What surprised me about this article was this tiny nugget (emphasis added): "These shows are intended to spark interest in politics among young U.S. adults. In 2004, they had the lowest voting and registration rate of all eligible age groups."

It seems an anachronism to me that a generation that is so switched on, connected and globally aware should be so uninterested in the political process. I'd think the opposite would be true. Young people vote about everything online, and they contribute their opinions liberally in all kinds of forums. But when it comes to elections, they don't care. That's got to be a challenge to the political parties: make themselves relevant again.
  ¶ 7:34 AM 2 Comments

  David Weinberger's presentation available as a podcast That was fast! Dan Bricklin has already posted a podcast of David Weinberger's April 24 presentation to the Mass. Technology Leadership Council. The first 30 minutes are a fascinating prepared presentation. The next 80 minutes are a discussion that could have gone on for hours.

Thanks to Alex Howard for tipping me off to the podcast's availability.

Labels: events, podcast, social_media

  ¶ 10:07 AM 0 Comments

  Excited to be going to Nantucket Conference I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak at Nantucket Conference, a highly regarded - and very intimate - annual event for top technology executives in New England. I'll be on an afternoon panel next Thursday, May 3, talking about how social media is changing the practice of marketing. Then I plan to hang out and just listen to the wisdom of some of the smartest tech entrepreneurs in the country.

This is a special conference because the size of the audience is limited and the population of lawyers, accountants and consultants is kept to a minimum. It's basically an event for business owners, investors and technology wizards. It takes place this year during a mini-boom in venture capital investing. Good timing and always a great program.

BTW, I think they're accepting applications to attend for a couple of more days. You have to request and invitation on the website.

Labels: events, marketing, social_media

  ¶ 6:58 AM 0 Comments

  Ads beamed to your ear My vote for the stupidest marketing invention of the year.

Creepy? Yes. Intrusive? You bet. Personally, I pledge not to buy from any company that employs this annoying technology.

  ¶ 6:42 AM 0 Comments

  David Weinberger's comments provoke thought and debate David Weinberger gave a great talk to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's Social Media Cluster today. David has great insight about the dynamics of social media. In his role as a scholar, he is free from having to worry about the commercial implications of these phenomena and to focus on the social dynamics they create. His views echo mine in many ways: human beings have lived for a million years in an environment in which information was scarce. Now we're moving into an age of information abundance, and this will challenge our institutions fundamentally.

Many people, including David, refer to Wikipedia.org as an example of how much things have changed. Encyclopaedia Britannica used to market itself as the comprehensive source of human knowledge. Wikipedia makes no such claims, yet it is far more comprehensive and scalable than anything Britannica ever imagined. Yes, Wikipedia has its faults, but it is at least honest about its shortcomings, and this paradoxically makes it more credible. Ironically, the historical tendency of media and publishing institutions to build an aura of invulnerability around themselves has actually made them less accessible to the audiences. That makes their mistakes all the more glaring. Put another way, the degree to which you define yourself as infallible creates a disproportionately negative backlash when your fallibility is revealed.

This hasn't ramifications for the future of our information institutions. In the past, people and institutions could define themselves as experts because no one could conveniently challenge their expertise. But we're moving into a world in which expertise is constantly challenged. In fact, experts can maintain their status only by consistently discussing and defending their expertise. They can no longer claim to be the oracle of information on any topic because other people can access information on that same topic so easily. This means that the role of the expert evolves into more of in an aggregator, pulling together different opinions from different souces and drawing conclusions from them.

This is a dramatically different definition of expertise, and it will be uncomfortable for many people in business, politics and academia. But I agree with David that this is the way the world is going. In an atmosphere in which information is freely available to everyone, the expert can no longer claim to be the final word on anything. He or she must admit to fallibility and derive influence from the ability to assimilate many facts and arrive at the most informed conclusion

Labels: social_media, social_media influence

  ¶ 9:55 PM 1 Comments

  My column in Ad Age Advertising Age published my opinion piece this week talking about the similarities between public relations campaigns of the past and blogger-based marketing campaigns of today.

The techniques you use to influence the influencers really haven't changed all that much from the tactics that worked with mainstream media. It's just that the audience has different motivations. Once you understand how to influence these people, you can build a groundswell of favorable opinion that is impossible for the mainstream media to ignore. See examples.

Labels: mainstream_media, social_media, viral_marketing

  ¶ 9:51 PM 0 Comments

  Tech PR War Stories 5 is all about product reviews ...As in how to get them done right and how to avoid driving editors crazy in the process. In show #5, we’re joined by Keith Shaw, product testing editor at Network World and author of the popular Cool Tools column. Keith and David have been in the product testing business a long time, and they share some of the best and worst of dealing with the PR community in this endeavor. Join us to hear how a product can make Keith’s coveted Cool Tools list and also what are some of the most irritating things companies do in pursuit of a review.

In Cheers and Jeers, Paul praises the new social media press release while David bemoans the aggravation of the never-ending cycle of returned phone calls.  ¶ 11:32 PM 0 Comments

  Why most tech conferences suck

For a glimpse at what’s wrong with most technology conferences – and why IT managers don’t attend them – you have only to listen to this podcast of a session called The Future of Search from the Supernova 2006 conference.

I don’t mean to pick on this session or this event. I have great respect for Chris Shipley and several of the panelists. It just happens to be one good example of a sin I’ve seen committed repeatedly at scores of conferences over the years.

Here you’ve got a great topic and people who are well-qualified to discuss it. But they ruin the opportunity BECAUSE THEY CAN’T STOP SELLING. In one five-minute segment I chose at random, I counted 26 references to “we,” “our,” the product name or an insult aimed at a competitor. In fact, Technorati’s David Sifry was the only panelist who talked about the future of search outside of the context of his or her product.

It’s ridiculous. Presented with the opportunity to discuss a weighty, important issue and to look smart, informed and visionary in front of an influential group, the panelists do little more that deliver advertisements. They look foolish.

Perhaps this plays well to the audience of investors and journalists who hang out at this type of event, but it’s an example of the reason you never see CIOs in the audience. They know that a panel stocked with vendors is going to be one long sales pitch, and they have entirely too much of that in their lives already.

Marketers, please don’t do this. Don’t force your executives to be “on message” all the time. Give them a chance to show what they know and to enlighten their audience. Let them admit that their competitors have good ideas and build on those ideas. Let the audience trust them. There’s nothing that undermines a speaker’s credibility faster than engaging in the kind of embarrassing behavior that you see in this all-too-typical session.

Labels: marketing, transparency

  ¶ 6:11 AM 0 Comments

  A distant mirror Media Post's coverage of Google's DoubleClick acquisition has a timeline of America's greatest ad agencies. Check out this one (emphasis added):

1873: Foote, Cone & Belding founded as one of America's first advertising agencies. One of its founders, Fairfax Cone, states: "Good advertising is always written from one person to another. When it is aimed at millions it rarely moves anyone."

So, 130 years after Fairfax Cone said that, the marketing profession is rediscovering the fundamental truth of those words.

Labels: advertising

  ¶ 6:57 AM 1 Comments

  Come hear David Weinberger's social media insights on April 24. It's free!

Last month, I wrote from the New Communications Forum in Las Vegas about a great keynote presentation by David Weinberger. Now here's a treat: if you are in the New England area, you can hear David speak about the changes that social media are already causing in markets and institutions and all it’ll cost you is a drive to Waltham, MA.

As a co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, David is one of the fathers of Web 2.0 and he is on the leading edge of thinking about it. His insights about why people blog, podcast and contribute to Wikipedia will amaze and delight you.

Join us on April 24 in Waltham from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. to hear his thoughts. It's a free service of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. All you have to do is write “guest of Paul Gillin” in the additional registrant’s field.

All the details are here.

Labels: blogging, social_media

  ¶ 1:06 PM 0 Comments

  Tech PR War Stories # 3 is about loose lips, death threats and the future of print This week in Tech PR War Stories, David Strom and I talk about the Fred Vogelstein briefing memo and his Wired article. David says Google has become the new reputation management tool. IDG is transforming itself into an online company with the announcement that Infoworld will become a Web-only property. Paul asks whether print even matters in this market any more. And finally, we discuss the lessons learned from threats on Kathy Sierra’s life and how Tim O’Reilly brokered a rapproachment with Chris Locke.

Download the podcast here.

Labels: journalism, podcast, social_media

  ¶ 8:44 PM 3 Comments

  Interview with Trib's new owner barely mentions digital media threat Kevin Allen, a smart young writer who works for Ragan Communications, knows my rather strong opinions about the future of newspapers. He sent me a link to this story about Sam Zell’s acquisition of the Tribune Co. and asked for a comment. Here’s what I said:

"I would never want to be quoted questioning Mr. Zell's wisdom or insight, since he is clearly a very successful investor. I was struck, however, by the fact that neither the Tribune article or the video interview went into any detail on the challenge that digital media presents to newspapers. In fact, I could find the Internet mentioned only once in the Tribune article, in the first paragraph.

"This seems curious to me, since online competition is clearly the biggest challenge facing newspapers these days, particularly in their classified advertising businesses. Longer term, the newspaper’s value proposition as a timely source of information is under siege. This article seems more interested in the Tribune's ESOP plan and ownership stake in the Cubs than in the serious long-term problems facing its industry.

"It’s been my experience that people of Mr. Zell's age are almost incapable of relating to the culture and lifestyles of today's digital youth. This is not their fault, for it’s almost incomprehensible to someone who grew up in the 50s or 60s to relate to the always-connected, always-interacting lifestyle of today's teens. It's hard enough for me, at 49, to understand it. I would think that anyone buying a newspaper today would have to look at what they’re going to do to court this next generation of consumers, who have almost no affinity for newspapers. The fact that this critical issue was not addressed in the Tribune interview or video is a glaring omission, in my view. I can't believe the editors didn't bring it up.

"Apparently a lot of them aren't even paying attention to it. As reported last week by MediaPost, “The first Newsroom Barometer survey--conducted by the World Editors Forum and Reuters--found that a staggering 85% of editors and news executives of 435 polled were optimistic about the fate of their publications.”

"As they say, denial is not just a river in Egypt :-)"

Labels: journalism, mainstream_media

  ¶ 8:37 PM 0 Comments