In doing some research this afternoon on some interesting stuff I will be talking about in a few days, I came across New PR from Crispy News, which is a DIGG like service for the PR Professional. While I have lots to say about how cool it is to take such a great tool and make it available for a specific community to create better contextual filters, I really just wanted you to take a gander yourself (if you don’t already know about it)

Earlier this week I found the big PR Blog list being maintained by Constantin Basturea via a click through link when he added this blog to the list. In just a few minutes I have discovered lots of other really good PR Bloggers such as Stuart Bruce who had this to say in a recent blog entry:

We might have to have different conversations with different people using different channels but that is simply the evolution of our profession. It’s not PR 2.0.
A PR Guru’s Musings - Stuart Bruce: Big PR firm falls for the PR 2.0 hype

I had a bit more to say in the comments on Stuart’s Blog, so please contnue reading over there to get my thoughts on the evolution of PR in the era of social media. (it reads better in context of his post and the other comments there, but the bottom line is that I too hope PR 2.0 does not catch fire, despite how easy it might be to hang our hat on that meme)

Categories: New Media, PR Community, Social Media
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I remember sitting at my Guru Communications desk in Miami Beach seeing the Washington Post come online back in 1996. We were in the height of our frenzied growth and struggling against the five headed monster that was our management team. We had just finished launching Isle Bombardier a couple of months beforehand and we were all talking about how big Media doesn’t get it. But the Post did, and that was surprising and refreshing to see.

Reading the article Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers about the brief history of the Post online, I found a few gems that I wanted to share with you.

In particular, this quote from Warren Buffet is extremely relevant to the modern thinking of many of the Web 2.0 startups I know who don’t really have a business model or plan to revenue other than AdSense. I never really understood that form of business model in the early days (which is why I was not able to make Virtual Community Network a big success - I thought we were supposed to try to make money not light it on fire and burn it). While I disagree with the free spending strategy in principle because of the huge risks, I do now see how those risks can be mitigated to ensure some modicum of success.

And Kaiser recalls a conversation with Post board member Warren Buffett in which Buffett told Kaiser to stop worrying about the financial side: “There is no case in history of somebody assembling a huge audience and then failing to make money from it,” Kaiser recalls Buffett saying.
Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

This was the beginning of the “eyeballs” movement - build an audience, make the site sticky and make it viral to grow the audience. I still find it very interesting that today people expect to get to the same “sticky eyeballs” outcome by being “open” and letting their customers easily migrate to competitors. At least today there are standards of quality and methods of understanding audience expectations that make it more possible to create a product/service that really satisfies the needs of the audience.

What really make sense to me in this debate is that it clearly drives competition and motivates organizations with thriving collaborative cultures to make the best possible product in order to prevent people from leaving. It is sort of like an unsatisfied customer relief valve - when the pressure from customers leaving for a competing service get too high, is the company more likely to shut the valve or respond with greater innovation to reverse the flow?

This is seemingly being played out in the Flickr v. Zooomr discussion - especially now since the Flickr Famous Thomas Hawk is going to work for Zooomr. While he says he will still continue to post to Flickr, that does not make sense - he has switched his life to a new photo sharing platform by joining the company, he should make the full commitment to it. While it may be a stab at a brilliant marketing move (keep talking on Flickr about how much better Zooomr is), I feel that such a move is not in the spirit of authenticity that is so prominent in this era of the Web 2.0 Social Contract.

Which brings me back to the brief history of WashingtonPost.com and some of the more recent strategic shifts. To embrace more of the many to many aspects of the covversational Web instead of the one to many model that has been so prevalent for so many years.

In a recent all-company meeting, Caroline Little, WPNI’s chief executive officer and publisher, spoke of recent online innovations. “We set out, very purposefully, about two years ago, to leverage the medium of the Internet, to create more possibilities of conversation and to drive people to come and stay on the site: With blogs, comments on blogs, Technorati [links], comments on articles, a broader and deeper opinion section,” she said.
Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

I refer to this shift as moving from being the “Town Crier” to becoming the “Town Hall” - moving from the idea of media as voice to the idea of media as place - a venue where the conversation happens. From trying to control the conversation to facilitating it amongst peers. The Post does understand this better than most big media companies, but not completely. They still think the game is about driving people to the site and keeping them there, which is an ad revenue model rather than being a social one. This was further evidenced by their position looking out at the world from inside the organization.

Washingtonpost.com, they realized, wasn’t a completely separate product; it could also help market the larger Washington Post brand. Audience spikes around big news events sent a strong message: Readers yearned for the authority of The Washington Post’s reporting.
Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

Internet usage always spikes around big news stories - email volume, IM volume, hits to the big authoritative news sites and now so does the amount of stuff people contribute to the conversation through their Blogs, Podcasts and Vlogs. Yes, people need to have a trusted, authoritative voice to turn to, but this is no longer the Post by default. In all fairness, the strategies that the Post has taken are in the right direction. They are willing to experiment a little, they are embracing conversational methods and they have a really bright team of folks working for them.

But the jury on relevance and authoritative voice is still out and probably won’t render its final judgment for another 10 years. Personally, while a track record and brand loyalty is important, I now judge news sources on the merits of each piece they publish. I am just as likely to stumble on a Washington Post story as I am one from the New York Times. What matters most to me now are the filters like TechMeme, TailRank and Digg. Then it comes down to the people I trust and then the organizations. Until I can build a more personal relationship with Post reporters (neither myself or them have the time to do so), I will only have a limited amount of trust that I can give the organization.

This fundamentally misses the most important point, that Greg Narain paraphrases nicely

Is anyone really dealing with the relationship that’s held and the realities of maintaining that connection and loyalty over an extended period of time? Socialtwister 2.0

That is the problem with social media - and that is the opportunity.

technorati tags:beyondblogging, washingtonpost, zooomr, flickr, web2.0, socialmedia, conversation, newmedia

Categories: Conversation, New Media
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As an unconference enthusiast, I was delighted when my friend and BrainJams Patron Chris Pirillo announced he was going to embody many of the principles of the Unconference as part of his Gnomdex 6 event later this month.  I was more delighted when they sold out the other day (I bought my ticket back in February) and I was rolling on the floor laughing when I read Dave McClure’s post on the Braintrust mailing list about

“creating a startup to securitize the market for trading in Gnomedex tickets, futures, and related derivative products. i’m currently raising a $10M series A round to fund the venture, and interested high-net worth individuals should email me off list.”

But seeing Chris’ post about Senator Edwards speaking to the social media world of communicators, creators, developers and contributors (highly amplified influentials) really blew me away.  According to Chris,

“Sentator Edwards will quickly turn his time over to the Gnomedex audience, fielding questions and fostering discussion over how technology could and should play a role in our world.”

This is fantastic news.  Congratulations to my friend Chris Pirillo who has been doing amazing things with social media since long before we ever called it social.

Categories: Blogging, politics, Unconference
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I hope we will have some good news for everyone soon about what is going on here. I have been working behind the scenes on some very exciting plans, but can not talk about them just yet.

A couple of other important news items to share with you briefly:

1. In case you were not on planet earth earlier this week, Microsoft’s face to the Blogosphere, Robert Scoble has left Microsoft to join a Silicon Valley podcast network called Podtech. I heard the news at Vloggercon before the story broke - but out of respect for Rober’ts wishes to hold off on the story until Tuesday, said nothing about it.
2. Just over a week ago Tom Foremski announced plans to work on establishing some standards around a new press release format. My conversations with him around this seemingly played a role in this new development as we have talked about it several times since our podcast. Last night I agreed to help manage this process with him while at the Society for New Communications Research dinner.
3. In the company news front, Google has announced that it will begin to sell Adwords by Dayparts. MediaWeek has some basic coverage and Search Engine Watch had a few more details. Personally, I thought this should have been happening several years ago, but am very happy since it should create higher efficiency in marketing campaigns, but it will also drive the per click prices up for any product/service that gets sold into the working world. If it also drives down the number of wasted clicks, everyone should come out ahead.
4. Bloggercon is sold out, but people are still adding their names, so if you can make it to San Francisco next week, it would be great to see you there.

Well, there is lots more to talk about, but that is all for now. Have a great weekend - it looks like most of the US should be pretty nice outside. While you all are enjoying your Saturday, I will be participating in Rails Day 2006…

Categories: Blogging, New Media, PR Community
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Last night I wrote a post on my blog about FeedBurner. I’d finally gotten around to setting it up and I think it’s a great tool for anyone who publishes a feed. For those unfamiliar, FeedBurner is a service which takes your existing RSS feed and allows you to add enhancements to it. One of the most popular features is the ability to gather analytical data such as how many people are subscribing to your feed and what articles they’re clicking to. It also makes your feed look nicer in a browser, and makes it easier for users to subscribe. For a real world example, see the Beyond Blogging 2006 feed on this page.

The basic FeedBurner services are free and easy to setup. If you’re a TypePad user, things just got even easier since they recently added a new feature to seamlessly integrate the two:

Connect your TypePad feed to FeedBurner

Since they’re both owned by Six Apart, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar integration into MovableType type down the road. Regardless of what platform you use, if you’re a blogger who publishes a feed, FeedBurner is a free and easy way to make it better.

Categories: Blogging
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Last week I gave a presentation at the NetSquared Conference as a memeber of a panel on tagging and aggregation. The audience was Non-Profits, but the lessons I shared from our experience with BrainJams and Web 2.1 applies equally well to any organization. There are five main takeaways I wanted to get across, which I will share with you in summary here:

1. Tags are the foundation of Web 2.0 as we move from searching to finding. The analogy I use is that “Tags are the shining beacons in a storm of information that guide people to their desired destination [online].”
2. Every event, community and organization should have a well publicized tag - just like every brand/organization has a well publicized URL.
3. You can get exposure into existing communities through related tags, but only if your comments, articles, posts and bookmarks are truly authentic and add real value.
4. Eventually when an audience for a given tag grows very large, something like TagSpaces can be used as a way to target your content for a particular audience segment.
5. Organizations and independent advocates must learn to leverage Paramedia to truly tap into the power of Social Media.

While the panel went over well, this did remind me how much I hate PowerPoint as a presentation medium - especially when you don’t have a good sense of the level of understanding your audience has. The unconference works much better for me personally, though I do understand why there is a need for a more linear format - especially given my proclivity for tangental thinking and expanding the topic of the conversation beyond the original question. Still, I think it went over pretty well and now I have a basic Tagging Presentation I can use as the basis for future conferences.

You can download the PowerPoint to get a better sense of the material - it is available to remix under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share Alike License.

Categories: Tags
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After a bit more delay than we had hoped, the webcast is now live and available for you to view and share with colleagues.  Some background on the Webcast is available on our Blog here, or you can go and enter your basic contact information to access the Webcast. Thanks to our partner Vodium for putting this online with us.

Categories: Uncategorized, Blogging, From Event
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I’m sure like many people, it seems that every time you turn around someone is talking about word-of-mouth, some articles even make it sound like it was just invented a few years ago. But the reality is the WOM has been around, well, since as long as humans could talk. I mean, seriously, is there much difference from one of our very early ancestors saying, “I found some good berries down by the stream?” to people today showing off their latest cell phone?

Studies show that even with the Internet boom a significant percentage of WOM still happens face to face.
One of the areas that grassroots and word-of-mouth communication always played a critical role was in politics. Successful campaigns never forgot the impact that personal communication played when it came to election day. For the past several years, we’ve been applying this same model to marketing campaigns.

And we will be discussing this approach, “From Politics to Potato Chips” with our colleagues and clients at the Clorox Company at the Word of Mouth Basic Training 2 Conference scheduled for June 20-21 in San Francisco. There will more than 60 other speakers presenting case studies and “how to” sessions. We’ve arranged for a special $125 discount code for colleagues and associates.

Here are the details

WORD OF MOUTH BASIC TRAINING 2
June 20-21 — Hilton San Francisco
Register at http://womma.org/wombat2
Use discount code “beyondbloggingsentme” for $125 off

Categories: New Media, Events, Word of Mouth, PR Community
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This is a podcast interview I did with Andrew Noyes, the Associate Managing Editor for Washington Internet Daily and Associate Editor for Communications Daily. Andrew wrote a nice bit of coverage on some of the important highlights from the Beyond Blogging 2006 event last Friday. We wanted to go ‘beyond’ the reporting he did and get some more of his perspective on the subject. He is obviously another one of the bright people from DC who ‘gets it’.

We talked about several of the big pitcure topics discussed at the event as well as the personal/professional Blog debate and how Blogging and Journalism can co-exist. Unlike several of the mainstream media people I have met over the last year, he sees the advent of Blogging as a positive occurence, as it is a great source for story leads. This is definitely a podcast you want to hear…

Notes: The show was recorded using Gizmo Project from my iMac in San Francisco to the conference room telephone at Warren Communications News in DC. It is 17:59 in length and has pretty decent sound quality given the VOIP to POTS connectivity and the use of iSight as my microphone. If you don’t get Washington Internet Daily yet, you should take advantage of this free trial offer they have to see why it is a must read for yourself.

Download as MP3 File (2.2MB)

Listen Now:

Categories: Conversation, Authenticity, Podcasts, Word of Mouth
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Funny that Steve Rubel’s post “I Like Companies that say ‘We Suck’” came out when it did - guess the universal consciousness is bubbling up a big world-shifting idea once again. I have been working on a post all week about a similar topic, but I think Steve’s focus on companies admitting their faults does not go far enough. Yes, the tech companies have had a bit of experience with Mea Culpa’s over the years, and this is a requirement for the establishment of trust for an organization’s voice, but the real change that is needed is for companies to embrace all of the truth and their intentions in order to develop real trust within the Commons and amongst its customers. The sort of FUD that Microsoft used to masterfully deploy (and is now being put forth by Google) has no place in the world any longer.

While owning up to corporate short comings is a necessary component of trust, I see it more as philosophical shift towards more openess and being ‘real’ than simply admitting that a company sucks at something. No, I am not talking about giving away your client’s upcoming product plans three months before launch so a competitor can do it instead - that would be harmful rather than helpful. I am talking about letting employees and representatives behave like the real humans they are, rather than simply delivering the corporate spin and enforcing the seemingly hard and fast rules that ‘the system’ dictates.

Part of the problem is much bigger than any one company, it is an undercurrent that is sweeping away the industry. I spoke with Ed Keller about this briefly via email before the Beyond Blogging 2006 event last week. In his press release announcing TalkTrack, he referred to “Marketers”. Summarizing my conversation with him, I inquired whether he meant just marketing people or marketing and communications people. From his perspective the use of the term “marketer” was all inclusive of PR, Advertising, Research, Marketing, etc… Merriam Webster agrees with his definition, calling it “an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer” but I see a need to redefine this understanding - to rebrand the marketing profession with not a makeover, but a “MakeReal”.

From my experience, and from the nature of a conversation I joined on Burning Bird with Shelley Powers in April, I have come to see that many people believe that marketing is evil and as such “Marketers” have a bad reputation. I won’t get into all the why’s here, but the main point was that the non-marketer general public sees the smarmy SALES tactics of some companies as marketing and this rubs off on all other aspects of the discipline. In certain parts of Silicon Valley, particularly the Open Source world and among many engineers, this is one of the leading causes of anti-consumerism. But like most anti-establishment rebellion, it is often more about an assertion of personal power and freedom in a world that seeks to impose power hierarchies and use fear of scarcity to control people who are left feeling helpless within a system that favors the rich corporations over the rights of the individual.

Tara Hunt picked up on this conversation with her post entitled “Marketing = Eeeeeeevil!” which contains some other great insights on this subject. While I agree with much of what she says in this regards, I disagree with her push for what she calls “Pinko Marketing“. To me, what she calls Pinko is really just a retelling of the original Cluetrain Manifesto - which she duly credits for much of the inspiration for her idea. The Cluetrain heavily influenced me and was a huge part of my original inspiration for pursuing the development of conversational intelligence software back in 1999 (before everyone but perhaps Intelliseek). While the principles are strong, the use of the term Pinko feels wrong, as does its association with communism.

I believe what we need to be talking about here is “Real Marketing“. As in keeping it real, being real and telling people what is really going on.

It may seem like merely a semantic difference, but there is a more fundamental shift of intention and focus at play here. Real Marketing is about matching products and services with the people who can truly benefit from those products and services. It is not about getting more people to buy something and maximizing market share. It is about getting the right people to purchase a product and helping them to get the most use out of it. It’s not about increasing sales for the purpose of making the numbers, it’s about getting more loyal customers who are obtaining real value from the product. It is about creating maximum efficiency in operations across the board - and that is only achieved by open and honest conversations.

As almost every panelist said at the event last week, we as “Marketers” can’t control the conversation any more - we can, however, participate in the conversation and facilitate certain portions of it. This reminds me of numerous meetings with almost every big client I have had around the issue of enabling open conversations through message boards or open comment systems. They were all ‘afraid’ of what people might say. Afraid that some truth might be exposed in regards to a product short coming, or a design defect, or a bad customer service experience. As I pleaded then, and still plead today - “THEY ARE ALREADY HAVING THESE CONVERSATIONS, AND YOUR VOICE IS NOT BEING HEARD BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T INVITE YOU TO JOIN THEM - THEY DON’T TRUST YOU!”

I have been working on a model of the stages of engagement in a customer relationship since my days of being Chief, eBusiness for the US Mint. While there are many deep things at play here in this model, the most fundamental premise here is that communicating the knowledge a customer needs to move through each stage of the relationship is the key - not advertising and not sales in the traditional sense. In this regards, I do agree with Edelman’s assertions on the potential for Communications Professionals to lead the way in the Social Media future we are just beginning to live today. Communications is conversation, so that is simple enough. I differ with them in that I see important roles for all practicioneers within the “Marketing and Communications Industry”. Advertising still has its place, as does research and an understanding of market segmentation.  What is needed is a more holistic approach that is centered on people.
Real Marketing means the end of empty hyperbole and hype. It is beyond the sales of Word of Mouth Units, the practical equivalent of increasing the volume of the sizzle - it is about increasing the nutritional value of the steak - about getting to the heart of what really matters. It still calls for the proper seasoning to make it tasty to the person consuming it, and we need to listen to whether the person wants that steak pink in the center or well done, but it is not so much about how many people hear that sizzling plate of Fajitas as it travels from the kitchen to the table. It has everything to do with people being able to get near real time information on what is in that dish, how it was prepared and what the people who have tasted it have to say about it. It is about the reputation of the restaurant, the description on the menu, the conversation with the server and the conversation over the shoulder with the person sitting next to you. It is about informed choices - it is about the market of conversation - it is about the market as conversation.

So what to do with this understanding? Blogging is a good place to start because it enables the sort of two-way dialogue that is essential for making Real Marketing work, but we definitely need to go ‘Beyond Blogging’ to make it Real. To really get the most from this however requires a fundamental shift in perspective - perhaps Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements might be a good place to start. Or better still, let’s start a conversation right here and try to get to the bottom of this together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, Authenticity, Word of Mouth, PR Community, Real Marketing
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