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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