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-Take the Web2.0 Awareness Quiz. Lots of fun. [via Joel]
-A Wired story on wikis has been put on a wiki for community editing. Don't edit the quotes but feel free to move the content around or make other changes as you see fit.
-Flickr adds geo-tagging. I'd comment more but my keyboard is a bit wonky after I drooled on it while playing with it.
-Yet another clueless company making an awkward and untargeted pitch.
A bunch of goofy characters get together for a good cause, to promote net neutrality.
[via Adrants]
I find an fun symmetry between this post by Josh Hallett, where he calls companies who visit blogs but don't contact the bloggers "prank callers" and Robert Scoble's taking Google to task for going to the New York Times to announce their Google Apps project.
Josh expresses the frustration (something I've had myself) of bloggers who are writing about a specific company or industry but who aren't being contacted by people at the company or in that industry. The frustration doubles when you see visitor traffic from a company you've talked about in your stats. And he (and I) is not just talking about the occasional accidental Google search that brings someone around your place. We're talking about concentrated hits, all coming from one company. It's great that they're monitoring, but now is the time for engagement. Bloggers have the potential to do a great deal of good and a great deal of harm. But having dropped someone a line every now and again can do wonders. Damage can be mitigated - or at least you can get your point of view across - if you, as a company representative, have made yourself available as a resource for a blogger.
Then there's the story of Google Apps, which was announced in the New York Times and other mainstream, old-media outlets. Scoble lists the number of search industry and tech bloggers that would seem like no-brainers to include on a media list for a launch like this by Google. Almost none of them were given any sort of heads-up or asked to take part in the announcement. The sole exception was Om Malik, who passed on the offer because of the embargo requirement.
So why did Google go to the MSM over bloggers? There's lots of speculation and I'm not going to engage in that. But those bloggers are the "influentials" that a company - in this case Google - needs to be keeping tabs on and accommodating. Eric Eggerton is even outright asking if it's better to leak to bloggers and let an announcement build until it penetrates the MSM instead of going big and then seeing if a conversation follows.
If you work for a major company have you identified your base of influentials?
BONUS READING: PR people love them some blogs but don't know quite how to use them for their benefit just yet. Most companies, though, still have no idea what RSS is.
If you find yourself just not having enough blogs or RSS feeds to read, both Mack Collier at BMA and David Armano at Logic+Emotion have round-ups of highlights from existing blogs or pointers to new blogs that have launched. Get your RSS readers ready and carve out a few more minutes in your day to keep up with these great outside-the-mainstream voices.
One of the things I keep noticing as I navigate the murky waters of the PR world (would that make it Waterworld? I hope not.) is that it seems to be dominated by women. I first realized this in college when the classes and the PRSSA chapter I belonged to was something like 75 percent made up of women.
The reason I bring this up is this podcast interview with Sharon Barclay of Blanc & Otis. While her specific focus is on tech PR, the points she makes are also applicable (and applied by her) to the larger industry as well. Her contention – and it’s backed up by some research – is that women gravitate toward PR for a couple of reasons:
1) It’s one of the few areas of practice where women have the potential to join C-level management. The other being Human Resources.
2) Women have more “white matter†in their brains that give them the ability to be better liars or at least make people more comfortable with the stories they spin.
I can see the first one. While we can debate the workplace prejudice that makes this an easily defendable statement till the cows come home, it does seem to be at least as true as any other vague, general statement you could make about one gender’s experience in the entirety of the business world. The second one seems like a pretty cynical way to say something I’ve thought ever since I saw the 10 to 1 female/male ratio in my classes, that women are better communicators. That wasn’t so hard, was it?
Where her argument starts to lose validity is where she says that jocks and less-than-stellar students also are attracted to communications and PR because it’s an easy course of study and doesn’t require much actual talent. Personally I think that’s an affront to all the incredibly bright people I’ve met in this industry. I’m sure she meant to say something a tad different than that but that’s how it came out. I don’t think it needs to be commented on further, so let’s just move on.
I think Barclay is good for questioning why PR is an industry that lends itself to such a un-paucity of women and looking for the reasons that lead to the women to choose PR over other careers. Unfortunately there seems to be too much reliance on stereotyping and too little attention paid to individuals.
[Thanks to Sean for passing this on.]
After hearing reports and rumors that an iPod Factory in China might be violating child labor and other laws, Apple had one of two options:
1) Deny the reports outright and question the character of anyone making such claims
2) Be open and honest about the issue, launch an investigation and make the results public
Thankfully the company chose the second approach. They created a team of employees from human resources, legal and operations teams to audit the factory and interview employees. After doing just that they found there were no major violations of their Code of Conduct (child labor, for instance, was not found to be used) but there were some places where the factory fell short either in terms of the letter or spirit of the regulations. Apple has begun working with the factory (which houses more than just Apple employees) to expand housing, clear up pay scales and make other immediate improvements. They've also engaged the services of Verite, which specializes in monitoring workplace conditions, to ensure ongoing compliance.
In a time when so many companies defend, defend, defend until they're forced to acknowledge error and then scramble to fix both the problem and their reputation, Apple chose to take the narrow and more difficult path. Part of this is because they know how many MP3 players are waiting for the first sign of weakness to pounce on Apple's market share. But I think part of it is because they realize that it's far better to maintain a good corporate reputation than to develop a plan to fix it.