84: Mumbai Attacks Spotlight Citizen Journalism

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India over the Thanksgiving holiday dramatized the increasingly important role that citizen journalists are coming to play in the reporting of breaking news.  For hours after the attacks began, bloggers and Twitter users provided eyewitness accounts while professional journalists and television crews rushed to the scene.  Not all of the information that was reported was accurate, and this has raised questions about the credibility of eyewitness reports in an age when everyone can be a journalist.  David and Paul discuss some of the lessons the incident has taught us.

Here are a few stories that dramatize the role that citizen media played in the coverage.:

• A couple that survived the Mumbai terrorist attacks are interviewed on Charlie Rose.
• On The Media interviews Arnab Goswami, chief editor of one of the Indian English-language TV networks, about their role.
• On The Media interviews Gaurav Mishra about whether all the Twitterers were responsible or aided the terrorists.
• Amy Gahran on PoynterOnline talks about lessons learned and how Twitter uses can do better with real-time reporting.
• And Mindy McAdams has ten rules for online journalists here.

David and Paul also remark upon the blockbuster announcement out of Detroit this week that the city’s two largest dailies will scale back their print operations and move much of their journalism online. Is this a bold new innovation or a Hail Mary pass?

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83: Those Snarky Dudes from Woot.com

Woot's Toon at the office

To the classic retail marketer, the wild and wacky Woot.com does everything wrong.  The online retailer, which typically sells only one product at any given time, adorns its site with critical and sometimes sarcastic descriptions of the merchandise it sells.  Woot won’t hesitate to tell visitors when one of its sale items is mediocre, but it will always give them an astonishingly good price.  The result: merchandise flies off of Woot’s real shelves, and the company’s fanatical fan base waits eagerly for the latest offering to appear each day, at midnight CT no less. Two from Woot’s St. Louis offices, Jason Toon and David Rutledge, describe the retailer’s unlikely secrets of success.
 

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82: The Joy of Search

In the arcane world of search engine optimization, HubSpot of Cambridge, Mass. has made a name for itself by simplifying and automating the process. HubSpotCEO Brian Halligan knows a lot about how search engines work and how businesses can optimize their Web presence for search results. He calls it “inbound marketing.” Forget about playing games, Halligan says; it’s all about delivering quality content. HubSpot offers some free utilities — Website Grader, Twitter Grader and Press Release Grader – that can help. These services assess your site’s search performance and suggest ways to improve it. HubSpot also offers a suite of low-cost, do-it-yourself tools that marketers can use themselves, without paying for SEO consultants. In this interview, Halligan offers some tips for optimizing search performance.

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81: Making connections in Columbus

David recently visited Columbus, Ohio and met with several entrepreneurs and IT managers and came away pleasantly surprised. One of the movers and shakers there was Ben Blanquera. By day he is an app dev manager for a healthcare firm, and his alter ego has him involved in a series of social networking, meetups, and startups that involve connecting geeks from the area together in such forms as Ignite Columbus, and Columbus Tech Life. In this week’s podcast, Paul and David talk to Ben and find out how he managed to pull this off with no money and lots of volunteers, including organizing a conference at the last minute to bring into town some very famous computer industry mavens.

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80: End of a (PC) Era

Volume 1, No. 1

It was the end of an era this week as PC Magazine, the publication that led the revolution in personal computing nearly three decades ago, announced it will shut down its print operation and move entirely online.  TechTarget also shuttered the print editions of Storage and Information Security magazines this week.

David and Paul don’t think we’ve seen the end of this trend; not by a long shot.  Technology titles have led the transformation of the publishing industry from print to online and our hosts expect to see more closures in the coming months.  As staffs are downsized, outside experts will increasingly be brought into the editorial mix, meaning that public relations pros will need to focus more of their efforts on occasional contributors, bloggers and columnists.

Paul sees some good in this. Web 2.0 has opened publishing to a new class of experts who previously didn’t have an outlet for their skills. David sees a problem in the continuing decline of quality product reviews, however. Without institutions that can pay reviewers to go through the long process of evaluating complex products, where is this critical information going to come from?

Here’s a link to David’s eulogy.

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79: The Information-Empowered Viewer

David spent election night flipping back and forth between the news coverage on television and various information sites on the Internet, seeking out background information on the results and candidates. He began thinking about how the Web is changing the way people consume news. PR pros need to assume that readers and viewers will constantly want to check facts and seek background on events in real time. How does that change the way they package information?

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78: The Corporate Blogger

Krista Gleason

Eastman Kodak Company has been transforming itself from a maker of film-based products into a comprehensive maker of imaging products and services. With a growing line of digital photography, output and online services, the company has been trying to remake its image through multiple channels, including social media.

Kodak maintains blogs devoted to products, photography and the business of graphic communications. It’s also active on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other direct-to-the-customer channels. The social media conversations are based on contributions from some 70 corporate bloggers, who provide a constant stream of information about the company, its markets and its customers. Krista Gleason joined the company a year ago after a career in government and she is learning to apply blogging to the company’s public relations efforts. In this interview, she talks about how Kodak manages multiple blogs, chooses people to represent it online and the remarkable freedom it provides its staff bloggers to write about what they choose.

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77: The true cost of reader-generated content

Reader-generated content has caused a lot of excitement among publishers who hope to use it as a low-cost way to generate content. However, a recent article in Folio magazine noted that coordinating an army of readers-as-journalists to produce publication-quality information is messy and expensive. David and Paul believe media generated by readers has its place, but it will never measure up to material from professional writers and editors who can shape, focus and polish their drafts into the finished works that we all read.

You can listen to the podcast here.

77: Judging Citizen Journalists

Consumer-generated media has caused a lot of excitement among publishers who hope to use it as a low-cost way to generate content. However, a recent article in Folio magazine noted that coordinating an army of citizen journalists to produce publication-quality information is messy and expensive. David and Paul believe media generated by readers has its place, but it will never measure up to material from professional writers. They question whether those standards are realistic, though. Consumer-generated media should be measured on its own merits, not those of professional journalists. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments area below.

Listen to the podcast (right-click and save to download): 19:13

76: Spread the Viral Love

This week, our hosts talk about viral marketing and questionable PR practices. Paul’s new book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, shipped from the printer this week. More than 20 reviews have already appeared on blogs, Twitter and the reviews section of the book site. The reason? Publisher Quill Driver Books distributed nearly 5,500 copies in print and PDF form in the two months prior to its release. Remarkably, most of the awareness spread by word of mouth. Paul notes that only 250 people registered for the free PDF, yet more than 5,200 copies were actually downloaded, a ratio of nearly 21:1. Was it a smart idea to give away a book that costs $11 in print? The jury is still out, but Secrets has been as high as 8,000 on Amazon before its actual release, indicating that awareness is high.

David has been writing for The New York Times, among other outlets. He tells the story of a Dutch auto company that ignored his repeated requests for an interview. Why a small company would turn down an opportunity to be featured in one of the world’s most important newspapers befuddles him. Paul has had similar experiences recently. Has traditional media lost that much luster? Paul and David doubt it. They think the level of PR professionalism is sinking.

Stick around for outtakes at the end of this program.

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