Mediablather

Chris Brogan is all about social media. The engineer-turned-marketer has one of the largest Twitter followings, is an active blogger and co-founded the Podcamp series of unconferences, which have been held in more than 40 countries. He currently crafts the content for CrossTech Media’s growing conference series, but he mainly publishes in media of all kinds.

Brogan is a prolific communicator. In addition to his frequently updated blog, he is active in multiple social networks and can usually be counted upon to respond to a Twitter request within a few minutes. His blog posts are full of practical and insightful advice for marketers. In this interview, Chris explains the addictive appeal of Twitter, describes the new conference model that is emerging from social media and updates us on some of his recent promotional projects that leverage online groups and video in innovative ways.

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Paul’s been on the road, and he recently took a tour of the pressroom at the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that’s been awash in controversy. Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell has made it clear that he intends to measure journalists increasingly by the volume of their output. David and Paul think this is a bad idea, although they do acknowledge that journalism is still too opaque a profession to the casual outsider. Journalists need to be more transparent.

Paul just returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where corporate interest in social networks was evident. He thinks big businesses are going to glom on to these tools with enthusiasm. If the CIA can do it, anyone can.

David has a jeer for PR pros who use editorial calendars to pitch executives instead of ideas. Paul remarks on the practice of posting huge PDF files on websites as a barrier to sharing meaningful information. They agree that the best kind of pitch is one that saves the reporter time and trouble. Unfortunately, agencies and their clients are still too focused on pushing executives and messages instead of valuable ideas.

Don’t forget to stick around at the end for Dana’s Pick of the Pod!

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Following a long series of shows featuring interviews with everyong from CEOs to anonymous bloggers, David and Paul reflect on what they’ve learned from these interactions. Paul is impressed by the fact that people who were once hard to reach have now become so accessible.

David is annoyed by the slow adoption rate of collaboration tools and wonders why people fall back to e-mail when such significant productivity improvements are available. Paul thinks productivity isn’t enough. People tend to fall back to the tools they’ve used for a long time, even if they don’t do a very good job.

In Cheers & Jeers, David tells of an interview he has coming up with someone, but he doesn’t know who. The PR person won’t tell him. Paul says he’s now receiving pitches aimed at bloggers, but they look suspiciously like the mass mailings he used to get when he was an editor.

Be sure to listen for bonus features, including Dana’s Pick of the Pod and some amusing outtakes.

Download the podcast (right-click and save): 19:48

You wouldn’t think that a blog that talks about Eva Peron, cervical cancer, and how to get pregnant would have a wide appeal, but these and are topics can be quite compelling. This week we have a mystery guest on the show, Dr. P, a working gynecologist who writes The Blog that Ate Manhattan. She talks about what is like to find her voice and thrive in another profession, how and whom she blogs for, and the kinds of topics that she covers on her blog. Here is one sample of her rather delicious writing style to whet your appetite, as it were, in a post telling women how to get pregnant:

Procreation is like Windows Explorer – it’s built into the operating system. (Weren’t you starting to wonder if Bill Gates was God?) The default mode is pregnant. And here’s the thing - you’ve been using the pop-up blocker! So turn it off already … and let nature take its course.

You can download and listen to the episode here.

I asked ten highly experienced technology journalists their experience with using email and RSS notifications of press releases, and got some surprising results. Now granted this is a very selected group, and completely unscientific. But still.

One finding is that only two out of the ten respondents subscribe to RSS feeds of the companies that they cover. “The PR people are pretty good about harassing, I mean informing me of their press releases,” said Theresa Carey. And while Vaughan-Nicols uses Bloglines to track his RSS feeds, it is mostly to track the various open source community feeds rather than press releases from vendors.

Dan Dern has some suggestions for PR people posting press releases on their Web sites and recommends that each release contain the following information:

1. Not having a fixed URL for each new press release
2. Not date-tagging releases on the summary page (Epson for example omits these)
3. Making subcategories a pull-down list, requiring extra clicks
4. Missing or not easily apparent PR contact information
5. Having releases in Acrobat, but not (also) HTML

He recommends the expemplary HP and Xerox press pages, and mentions Brother as a counter example.

Four out of the ten respondents explicity opt-in to email mailing lists to get notifications of news releases. But they aren’t always easy to find on corporate Web sites: “Sometimes I had to go to extra lengths to find them to get onto them,” says Dern. Rarely do these mailings result in ink, however. One reporter estimated that “fewer than one in a thousand press releases I get are on-target at all. The rest are a waste of my time.” But when a PR person actually knows the beat covered by the reporter, the odds go up astronomically that a release will generate a story: “It helps when a flack that really knows my beat and I have worked with them before.”

Another surprising finding is that PR people still don’t use BCC fields in email blasts, and copy everyone in their emails to the tune of a few a week with some journalists. While the practice is in decline, it still happens “way too often, and from major vendors, too,” said Jason Perlow. You can tell a lot from the names that are copied on the list, says Esther Schindler: “If I see a long-out-of-date e-mail ID on the list, it’s a clue that the PR person isn’t tuned in anymore. If the list is relatively short (say 20 or fewer journalists), it tells me which publications the PR person thinks are important for this release (and implies that we’re their short list). If it’s longer, though, it usually becomes an auto-delete.”

Clearly, we have a long way to go in our industry before the technologies that we actually write about – like RSS feeds — have become common practice for both journalists and PR professionals. And maybe by then we will totally eradicate the “copy to everyone” emails that still haunt our inboxes.

This week we have the privilege of speaking to Pat McGovern, chairman of International Data Group and the world’s most successful technology media executive. McGovern today oversees a $3 billion global media empire that spans more 90 countries and reaches more than 220 million people.

Amidst the constant churn in the information technology market, IDG has patiently grown and adapted through a philosophy of diversification, reader service and global expansion. In this interview, McGovern discusses:

• How the economics of electronic media make it a better business model than print;
• How Scandinavia and Asia are the leading the way in Internet innovation;
• How IDG’s experience with taking a business unit public convinced him of the value of keeping the company private;
• IDG’s new “Internet-first” strategy;
• How investments in Chinese entrepreneurs has transformed IDG’s business.

Pat McGovern’s success demonstrates the power of staying focused, adapting to change, experimenting and sticking with a long-term vision.

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This week we talk to Melanie Seasons, a young PR blogger for Manning, Selvage and Lee Digital out of Ann Arbor. She writes the Fake Plastic Noodles blog and talks to David and Paul about how she works with her traditional PR media colleagues. Her job is to get them to understand the value of new media, and how to incorporate blogs and microsites and other digital techniques into traditional media campaigns.

“Digital PR is common sense, and it isn’t losing control of the message,” she says. She talks about how to approach, pitch, and recruit bloggers by building relationships with her PR team.

Download the podcast here.

Larry Weber didn’t achieve fame and fortune in public relations by spouting conventional wisdom. The founder of Weber Shandwick, the world’s largest public relations agency, Weber has a reputation for blunt talk, innovative strategies and a relentless focus on new trends. Since leaving the helm of Weber Shandwick, he’s wiped the slate clean and is building a new-media PR firm from the ground up. Not surprisingly, he thinks a lot of conventional PR doesn’t work any more. In this interview, he tells why marketers should think of themselves as media people, how influence is dispersing and why mainstream media just isn’t all that important any more. Weber books include Marketing to the Social Web and The Provocateur.

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In their new book, Influencer Marketing, Nick Hayes and Duncan Brown make the case that most businesses are squandering their marketing dollars by spending them on press and analyst relations. In fact, they argue, those influencers have relatively little impact on customer buying decisions. Businesses would be better off choosing the 50 or so people who really do affect those decisions and marketing to them through a coordinated program of highly personal contacts. Some of the categories of influencers they identify might surprise you. In this interview, Nick Hayes makes a case for the emerging discipline of influencer marketing.

This interview was conducted at the New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, Calif. shortly before Paul’s keynote interview with Nick.

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Can a nearly 400-year-old company reinvent itself around customer conversations, brand advocates and online enthusiasts? The story of Fiskars proves that it can. Fiskars makes high-quality scissors that are popular with scrapbooking enthusiasts. The problem was that the company’s brand recognition was low. Scrapbookers perceived one scissor as being pretty much like another. Big-box retailers were also beginning to draw down their inventories, meaning that Fiskars needed to reconnect with small, specialty retailers.

Fiskars engaged new media ad agency Brains on Fire to create an innovative promotional initiative around brand ambassadors. The strategy wasn’t just to throw open the doors to a community. Membership in the Fiskateers club was kept intentionally small. Fiskateers were given the tools and training to evangelize the brand and share their love of scrapbooking. The results: same-store sales tripled after a visit from a Fiskateer. In an interview from the New Communications Forum, Brains on Fire’s Geno Church tells how the program worked.

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