63: It is all about small niche markets

That is one big bunny!

As EF Schumacher once wrote, “Small is beautiful.” This week, David is a dinner guest at Chez Gillin in Framingham. We use the f2f opp to interview his lovely wife Dana about her own bunny-related podcasts and related Web properties. We talk about the importance of smaller, more focused markets, which is ironic given the level of alcohol consumption made us anything but focused. The moral of this podcast is to find your passion, develop that passion into a niche and dominate it completely with your various Web-related efforts. (We apologize about the poor sound quality, and promise to do better with future podcasts.) Paul’s jeer is about the frequent rescheduled appointments from PR people and how much time is wasted therein. David has a cheer for Jeanette Maher, IBM’s PR doyenne, and hope we can reconnect with her soon.

You can download the podcast here.

61: We’re Grumpy This Week

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!

Download the podcast (17:24)

60: The Struggle to Collaborate

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

Eating our own dog food

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.

57: How to pitch bloggers with Melanie Seasons

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.

56: The Provocateur

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.

Listen to the podcast (22:51)

53: Changing the World One Podcast at a Time

When Paul was writing his book, he met two mothers who personified the term “new influencer.” Paige Heninger (left) and Gretchen Vogelzang launched Mommycast in early 2005, never expecting it to be more than an intimate chat between them and a few friends. Nearly 300 shows later, Mommycast still has that first-time intimacy, but its global audience now numbers in the millions. The show has big-ticket sponsors, a host of awards and its own channel of family-oriented podcasts. But success doesn’t appear to have spoiled Paige and Gretchen, who still think of each program as just another phone call.

Marketers don’t see it that way. They clamor for a chance to get a coveted mention on the program. In this interview, Paige and Gretchen tell how Mommycast got started, the secrets of staying focused and how they handle inquiries from marketers.

Download the podcast (28:54)

52: Anniversary Party

It’s our birthday! And in recognition of this, our 52nd weekly podcast (okay, so we missed one or two weeks) we convene a roundtable discussion of the new world of business communications.

The stars aligned perfectly: David was in Boston on a speaking tour and some of our best friends and colleagues from our years in media were up for a free meal and discussion. Our friends at Lois Paul & Partners kindly provided the venue (as well as two of our speakers) and our seven participants turned out to encompass a mix of media, marketing and financial disciplines.

The debate got quite spirited at points, with Bob Scheier and Steve Hall famously facing off over the ethics of fact checking. Venture capitalist Bill Frezza had the quote of the evening: “We are in the post-integrity age of journalism.” And Lois Paul and Ted Weismann of LPP recounted with resignation the frustration of convincing clients that it’s about more than just the Wall Street Journal these days.

This podcast runs 56:42, with several minutes of bonus material and the end. This week we launch “Dana’s Pick of the Podcast,” a new weekly feature in which Producer Dana Gillin spotlights the program’s best quote at the end of each episode. For those of you who have always wondered about our theme music, we offer the full version of Meet You In The Heavens by Rebel Soul Band. Enjoy. And post your comments below.

Thanks to our panel:

Lois Paul, President, Lois Paul & Partners

Ted Weismann, senior vice president, LP&P

Bob Scheier, IT/Business Writer

Bill Frezza, General Partner, Adams Capital Management

Steve Hall, Publisher Adrants

Download the podcast (56:42)

Below:

Bill Frezza          Bob Scheier

Lois Paul

Steve Hall

Paul Gillin & David Strom

50: The Social Media Think Tank

The Society for New Communications Research has been studying social media since before the term was created. Founded by veteran publicist Jen McClure in 2004, the nonprofit group known affectionately to its members as “snicker” now counts more than 40 futurists, scholars, business leaders, communicators and other new-media professionals as research fellows. Its signature event in the New Communications Forum, a multi-day multi-track conference that features top speakers and results of the group’s most recent research. It also hosts the New Communications Research Symposium, a more intimate gathering on the east coast each fall.

Jen McClure’s passion for new media is the fuel that drives SNCR. In this interview, she talks about how the group was founded, the four new research studies that will debut at the New Communications Forum in April and what value PR professionals are getting out of their SNCR membership.

BTW, Tech PR War Stories listeners can take advantage of a $100 discount. Just use code NCF08100 when you register.

Download the podcast (16:05)

49: Take it down!

It’s a public relations nightmare: Some blogger posts an angry rant about your company. A few other curmudgeons join in and pretty soon you’ve got a gripefest going on. Or maybe someone gets hold of an internal memo that’s not meant for public distribution and posts it for the world to see. What do you do?

In the old days, we had back-room procedures for handling problems like these, but bloggers and consumer advocacy sites don’t play by the old rules. In fact, your cease-and-desist notice is likely to become more blog fodder.  In the new world of crisis communications, protests and threats don’t get you very far. You need to negotiate, admit when problems exist and not take yourself too seriously. Not that that’s easy, mind you!

Download the podcast here (11:10).