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Okay, okay, what's with all you folks who talk up Skype all the time and are never online on your Skype accounts to talk to? I mean, c'mon, folks, it's so much more personal than using just regular old instant messaging. If you've on Skype, then actually show up once in a while, huh?
Oh, and I'm "tombiro" on there when you actually get to it.
In defining the success (or failure) of a blog project, I find that many people who are used to traditional statistics such as those having to do with "big media" sources are compared against, and that just doesn't fly. Sure, readership is important, links are important (very), and the development of community in commenting and such as huge. But people are kidding themselves if they think every site is going to pull statistics like Boing Boing. Gauging what your overall readership should be / could be / you want it to be is definitely a really tough part of the job when talking about starting a blog, and I'm sure that there are blogs that people have kicked to the curb after three months just because they didn't have 5,000 daily visitors already.
This morning, I caught a pointer from Dave Winer to a great post by Rex Hammock on this very subject.
I'll try not to yank too much of Rex's thunder here, but I want to make sure you go read the whole thing. In the third full graf, Rex says:
If you believe the size of your audience is the measure of success, don't blog. If you think how many people link to your site is the measure of success, don't blog. Blog because you want to have a voice in a conversation. If you run a business, blog because one day, I promise, you will be glad you have a place to respond when the conversation is about you. Blog because there are two or three people who actually matter in your life or work, or who share your passion for a particular topic.
Not everyone will (or should) have the most successful or popular blog on the 'net. Things change, there are trends, but continuing to persevere and put together great content, links, and other information can only benefit you in the end. It's not necessarily about volume - although it definitely helps with traffic, most of the time - but in the interest of your time, (and as Rex's #7 tip suggests) take those two or three or five things you see every day that you would probably email to friends, colleagues, family, and publish them to your blog with what you have to say about them. It does work, and people do notice.
Business Week's Stephen Baker writes today about the chance for advertisers to get their claws into either the data of users on the iTunes service, or into the podcasting realm. He's suggesting the possibility that iTunes could offer a different "level" of service, where people could essentially pay for anonymity.
This of course, takes into consideration the belief that Apple would only be in it for the money. Do we think that the folks behind the iTunes Music Store would give advertisers access to demographics about the users on the system unless they were paid hush money by the public? It's a directory, for one thing, and it's not like ITMS is going to start hosting advertising on its system from anyone, perhaps, other than the music labels who might want to have a say. They're not in that business right now, and I don't see why they would need to be. Having podcasts in iTunes software isn't the differentiator in using the software in the first place. The UI and ITMS as a whole is, IMHO. They're not going out of their way to host a directory of podcasts, and I don't see them looking to drag a bunch of animosity into the picture anytime soon.
Out in San Francisco for a few days on business, and will be going to tonight's GETV Turns 1000 event at House of Shields. If you're in town and are planning on going, hit me up via email or IM. Looking forward to it!
Otherwise, I'll be in the city until tomorrow night, when I'm taking the redeye back to the East Coast. Drop a line if you're free to meet up in the next day or so.
Well, Mike's "tagged" me on this one, so here goes:
Four Jobs I've Had
Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over
Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation
Four Favorite Dishes
Four Websites I Visit Daily
Four Places I'd Rather Be
Four Bloggers I'm Tagging
This week, Keith O'Brien's "What goes online" column in PRWeek discusses how the expectations that public relations firms would die off at the same rate that media outlets did (or somewhere therabouts) is off base, and that adaptation and re-focusing would keep many firms is on point. I won't comment too much, as this piece stands alone, but to say that the ship has definitely sailed when you have an executive of a Fortune 500 company say to O'Brien that agencies "don't have to maintain their own blog, but if I say, 'Technorati,' and they don't know what I'm talking about, the interview is over." Wow. In a way, I'm not surprised, and pleased to hear that at least one person out there has this kind of knowledge and knows how to utilize it to his or her company's benefit when assessing the abilities of a public relations firm.
Earlier in the piece, O'Brien says:
First of all, the PR spend is miniscule compared to ad buys. True, public relations has traditionally experienced difficulties with measurement, but technology is changing that. CEOs have begun moving communications professionals to the C-suite at such a rate that PRWeek have the words "newly-created position" as a keyboard shortcut. And yet, communications expertise is still currently undervalued. Marketing budget-conscious Fortune 500 would be foolish to slash PR budgets in half (from high seven-figures to low seven-figures) while keeping a $40 million ad spend. The marketing shave, if any, will come from traditional advertising.
This definitely echoes some of the sentiments I had heard while attending an Association of National Advertisers (ANA) event last summer. Ad spend is down for some companies, or at least is shifting from traditional (read: broadcast and print) to interactive / online / mobile opportunities. It was stated by more than one executive speaking at the event that outreach and relationships were a necessity in today's world, which is where, for the most part, public relators (actually a word!) and corporate communicators will come in.
First off, let me say that I've been sitting on this for a bit now, and have been trying to come up with the best way to discuss this subject, as it's awful touchy - and chose to do so tonight. Something that I think frustrates the blogging community about public relations is how bloggers are approached and treated by agencies and staffers. While I think that most firms talk a good game, not too many of them have executed so successfully on "pitching" bloggers on a regular basis. Additionally, one of the things that bloggers enjoy doing most is fact checking, to the extent that "fact check your ass" became a phrase that got pretty popular with many of them. That's why I thought it wise to comment on this item from sometime in Q1/Q2 of 2005 by Weber Shandwick's Mike Spataro. [Also of interest - this article was, at least as of a week or two ago, found here - or at least that's the URL I had bookmarked to finalize this blog entry.]
I'm sure you're already rolling your eyes at this, but part of the reason I'm doing this is that some of it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to how PRfolk are perceived by the world of bloggers. And I was a blogger before I was working in public relations. Now I don't know Mike personally, but I have had occasion to speak with him last fall, and this is by no means personal. Plus, Weber Shandwick is another firm within the IPG family, just like MWW Group.
So without further ado....
Blogs (let's go with blogs here, not weblogs, Web logs, or any other form) are not exclusively ""websites written by one person," nor do they have "no advertisers to please," across the board. In fact, I'd venture a guess that while "pleasing" Google for its AdSense product is about as easy as a) not setting up a spam blog and b) not telling people to click on your links, it's still something to think about. Many a blog is probably carrying some form of advertising, contextual or otherwise. And just because some bloggers (even a majority of those in that survey) have said that they blog "as a form of self-therapy" doesn't mean that the concept of making money - even a little bit - doesn't cross their minds, or the minds of many others who ramble and comment on everything under the sun on their personal blogs. The mere fact that Google's Blogger product allows for easy monetization of a blog*spot hosted (Blogger's free hosting site) blog tells me that there is demand for some form of advertising. To clarify, the hitch here is that advertisers, most likely, need the blogger's real estate far more than the blogger needs the revenues from the advertiser in order to survive. But that doesn't mean that bloggers don't worry about their content when it comes to whether or not advertisers will drop some coin in their pockets.
Also, what hits me the hardest here is when I read the "rules of the road" that are included in the piece. Now don't get me wrong - they're all spot on. Knowing what bloggers write about on a regular basis, figuring out whether or not they are receptive to hearing about you, following protocols that make sense and provide the blogger with something they actually want, not something you want them to have (there IS a difference) are all excellent suggestions. However, I can say with absolute sincerity that saying that you have "a comprehensive database of the most popular blogs broken down by industry category and contact and how they like to interact with PR professionals" and having one that is used properly by your staff are, in fact, two different things.
In mid-December, the folks at Gawker made an example of a PR staffer from Weber Shandwick who had been persistent at pitching that blog about the "Ultimate KFC Fan Contest," something that was, to be honest, totally irrelevant to the readers of Gawker. But as Jeremy Pepper noted over at Media Orchard about two months ago, "he likely was told to go with the list and pitched." Now obviously none of us knows *for sure* what happened inside W/S in this case, but does this seem like something where a seriously vetted database was used to pick blogs to reach out to? Not in my eyes. Sure, Gawker is an extremely popular blog, and even a snarky, obnoxious mention of your client or event would probably have good results should you get "chosen" to have something show up there, but who actually thought that Gawker (or its readers) really needed to be getting information about a contest about being KFC's biggest fan? For me, this is a big strike one as to saying one thing and doing another.
The second one, and this is where I have personal experience in the situation, is with regard to another pitch that was received at a blog I do some writing for, AdJab, that covers advertising and marketing. On September 22 of 2005, we landed a tip from someone at this same firm, who was working on this same client, letting us know all about KFC's new "Choose Your Sauce" interactive site. While I will give the pitch about a 5/10 for its overall creativity, the fact of the matter was that AdJab had already covered the story. 15 days earlier. A cursory search of the site for "choose your sauce" would have shown this. In my opinion, I wouldn't consider that "knowledgeable outreach." It felt to me like "AdJab is a blog. It covers advertising and marketing. This is an advertising and marketing story, I'll send it to them." and not much more than that. Am I going out on a limb for saying that? Perhaps. But when my polite response to the firm stating that we had covered it two weeks earlier, with a link to the coverage, was responded to with nothing that seemed like what I had said had sunk in, I didn't have a good impression as someone trying to assess whether a firm was trying to provide the blog's readers with good content rather than just blasting off semi-rewritten press releases that were made to look playful. If anything, I really took home the fact that the way this account was being monitored across the blogosphere was incomplete.
So if we're to add anything to the list of "do's and don'ts," it's that the last thing you should do before firing off that "pitchy" email to a blog is making a last-minute check of whether or not the bloggers have already covered the story - because the one thing that's ultimately telling when people say "we've been reading your blog and thought you might be interested in xyz" is when you've already covered xyz. If our firm's executives are out doing one thing while our staff is never being trained or at the very least given some realistic "direction" to follow when clients and firms are trying out how to contact bloggers, then all we're doing is talking in front of the class (and to our clients) about how 2 + 2 = 4, meanwhile we're just yelling "It's 4, 4 I tell you" when no one is looking, without knowing how to get there.
This is why I was definitely happy to see that Weber Shandwick had hired Jeremy Pepper, who most would recognize for his POP! PR Jots blog and his ability to stay on top of what's going on in the PR / blog world. Sure, it means some fun, "internal" competition between Interpublic firms when it comes to the world of online media, but at the end of the day it's an improvement to PR as a whole. As our "new" world continues embracing "new" media, it's important that there are people who bring a blend of common sense, PR-ability, and knowledge of how today's opinionated souls think and work to the table on a daily basis. It's something we try and incorporate into our everything here at MWW, and I would expect that other PR agencies who haven't reached this conclusion yet are probably in for a rude awakening.
[update 2/13] Also, check out Jeremy Pepper's post on ethics and PR blogging, which mentions this post. Jeremy makes some excellent following points to my own, and poses a sort of "call to action" that the rest of us should probably pay attention to. No wiki necessary.
Hello fellow bloggers and blog-readers - I wanted to let everyone know that Sun Microsystems [Sun is a client of my employer, MWW Group] will be hosting a panel discussion entitled "The Economics of Sharing" at the company's Santa Clara Campus Auditorium on Tuesday, February 21 from 10:30a.m. to 12:30p.m. The event will be moderated by Andreas Kluth, technology correspondent for The Economist, and the panel will include Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive officer, Sun Microsystems; Timothy Bresnahan, professor of economics, Stanford University; Philip Evans, vice president, Boston Consultancy Group; Raman Khanna, founding managing director, Diamondhead Ventures; Elisabeth Rhyne, senior vice president of international operations and policy, ACCION International.
The panel and subsequent Q&A will take place from 10:30-11:30a.m., and lunch with the panel and moderator will follow.
More information about the event, including driving directions, can be found here.
We'd like to offer the opportunity for interested parties to attend - to do so, please send an RSVP to participate@mww.com, or you can contact me with any questions at tbiro@mww.com.
The printable invitation can be found here.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with PR Week's Keith O'Brien about tagging and social search for an article that showed up in the January 23 edition of the magazine, "Marketers: Start your search engines." During our conversation, we spoke about a variety of topics, and a few quotes of mine ended up in the piece (believe me, this isn't an ego-driven post). However, one of the things we discussed more that wasn't included was what the inclusion of tagging in the enterprise would be. One example cropped up a bit ago, with the use of the Outlook Tasks feature in the popular email software by way of tagging.
This afternoon, a little birdie dropped something else I hadn't seen before in my inbox, and it's something pretty cool when it comes to tagging and social bookmarking. Take a look at this press release from PR Newswire, and see if you notice anything new and interesting. Then, see what's after the jump.
That's right - PRN has added an "Add to del.icio.us" feature to its press releases. So now, with just a few clicks and a login to del.icio.us, you can tag and ship off any press release that you want. Some people (including myself) have been critical of the newswires and how they've adapted (or slacked off) when it comes to new media tools. While neither of the "big two" - PR Newswire or Business Wire - have done everything right, both have shown a some smarts by adding features such as RSS Feeds or allowed interested bloggers [ahem] to take part in what used to be journalist-only features of the sites and services. In this case, if there was ever a truly simple way to get in front of bloggers and others who might be interested in your story, this was it. Oh, and PR Newswire did a great job here, too. =)