This afternoon, with thoughts of the Beyond Blogging 2006 Symposium experience sitll fresh in our minds, I sat down with David Wickenden, Dan Horowitz, Coleman Hutchins and Peter Klaus to discuss the event, the takeaways, the impressions and the next steps.

Since I woke up this morning at 545am EST (which is usually when I go to bed out in San Francisco) I am in need of sleep before writing much more. The good news is that since this resonated with everyone so strongly, that the conversation will continue into the forseeable future. More to share on Monday on the event itself, photos to come over the weekend and the Webcast of the entire event will be posted by the middle of next week.

Thanks to everyone for coming out, and to my friends at Fleishman Hillard for this great opportunity to be a part of the discussion.

Download as MP3 (11MB)

Categories: New Media, Podcasts, Media Relations, Blogger Relations, From Event
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So what does Beyond Blogging actually mean? I have asked a lot of people that and received some very interesting answers. But I think to really get Beyond Blogging is a matter for the framing question. I.e., is the question really about what is Beyond Blogging, as in what does the future hold? Or Is it about going beyond blogging today, to imply that there is much more to this whole phenomenon. From my perspective, Beyond Blogging is about creating a deeper understanding of the best practices that work today while setting a path towards what we need from technology to do a better job for our clients in the future.

As Howard Rheingold says, “What it is -> is up to us”, so let’s get involved in the conversation and start trying things out, seeing what works and sharing what we learn with one another. It’s a about letting go of what you know and how things have been done in the past and looking for better ways to serve our clients - to create the most impact for their organizations, to tell their stories in ways that reach their intended audience. Now more than ever, the people who build these Web tools are open to the process of co-creation - my friends at BuzzLogic have been working very closely with a few key communications firms ever since they began development on their soon to be released software and will likely continue to do so forever. [Disclousure: I am an advisory board member for BuzzLogic]

So why now? What’s really different? Everything - and nothing. As Joe Kraus says, “It is easier than ever to launch a company, but just as hard as ever to build a business.” For me, what is really different is that we are finally in the throws of the Knowledge Economy and on our way to the next evolution, the Wisdom Economy.

In the knowledge economy, the value is no longer based on what you know, it is created from the unique way in which you apply what you know. It is found in the unique value of your relationships, the richness of your experience and your ability to adapt the insights you have gleaned from past failures and success in new ways for new situations. While we learn much from the patterns and protocols that have worked for us in the past, we need to think like Edwards Demming and Tony Robbins - we need to strive for Constant and Never Ending Improvement - finding better ways to accomplish our client’s goals as Tom Foremski suggests in The New Media Release.

Beyond Blogging is also an understanding that this new era of “social media” and Web 2.0 is about more than a technological revolution - it is about a fundamentally different way of viewing the world. It is a Chaordic world, not one in which the old world “Command and Control” hierarchies will work much longer. It is not a world of lies and cover ups - it is a world of authenticity and impeccable honesty. It is about filling the funnel instead of cllimbing the ladder - it is about helping one another by sharing what we know and being LoveCats. As I have written with The Noble Pursuit, it is also a time when fear and power are losing their grip on much of the modern world, but runs rampant in the unintegrated gap. It is whole brain thinking. It is about love winning out over fear. It is about the abundant capital of knowledge driving the economy forward instead of the scarcity of resources. It is about respecting the “Z-list” Bloggers as much as the A-List ones.

It is about people first and technology second. It is about you and me, in conversation with one another, asking the big questions or the silly one’s - at a conference table, in the hallway or over beer - enjoying the world around us and doing our bit to help make things right in our own unique way, using our own special gifts.

Yep - I know - all that idealism is fine and dandy, but what is Beyond Blogging for the communications industry specifically? What should we be concerned with as professionals? First you must understand how to work with consumer generated media to further your goals. Word of Mouth is a great practice area, but it can not be bought and sold for its full value. Monetizing it in units is just simply wrong from my perspctive - though it may be what the media buyers of the world want to do, it does not make it right. Its real value comes from the hearts of raving fans and the real troubles come from those that are really pissed off.

The trend I have been watching most closely over the past few years since getting into conversational intelligence and word of mouth has been the use of knowledge to further the goals of marketing. As consumers have access to more and more information, they rely on being able to find out what they need to know - they strive to make meaning out of the noise. So why not help make the meaning for them by replacing some of the advertising and communications mix with messages that teach people the important bits instead of always tugging on the emotional heart strings. While it probably won’t work for Coca-Cola, it might for Diet Coke - in a real sense, a nutrional label is a form of knowledge marketing in itself.

What does knowledge marketing mean? What does it look like? AdSense is one example - simple short text blurbs that must avoid hyperbole. It is Campbell’s Soup offering a series of alternative recipes for using its soup in other dishes. It is AdSense sending an email newsletter that helps advertisers better optimize their campaigns, helping them get the most from the service offering. It is American Express offering small business expertise as part of their Open program. It is a hundred other uses of producing media and applications that help people move from being a potential customer to being a loyal one who is selling your products for you and teaching their peers all the tips and tricks that they learned along the way. This approach creates natural word of mouth amongst your most highly valued customers and may take the form of an advertisement, a web site, a brochure, an email newsletter, a non-profit tie-in or any other form.

In short, it is about a fundamental shift in the framework and focus of the traditional communications agency from handling the public relations, Web site content and crisis communications to one that helps companies in all aspects of their outbound communications. It is about helping clients organize their knowledge assetts and figuring out how to best communicate them to the appropriate audiences in the most appropriate manner. It is about working to ensure the congruency of communications across all customer touchpoints - from press relations, to blogger relations, to internal communications, to sales scripts, to advertisements, to customer service centers and everything in between. Most importantly, it is about really listening to your customers and your markets, being engaged in the conversation and just keeping it real.

If you want to know more about this, come talk to me at the event tomorrow morning over at the Mayflower hotel - would be glad to hear your feedback and see what we might figure out together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, New Media, User Generated Content, Media Relations, Blogger Relations, Word of Mouth
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On Tuesday I spent part of the afternoon with Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher at the beautiful DeYoung Museum, talking about everything from lanyap to domaineering. With no room at the wildly busy museum for a couple of podcasters on this sunny San Francisco afternoon in Golden Gate Park, we headed to my house to setup Greg Narain’s old podcast rig on the backdeck (in the backyard as I unfortunately say).

I wanted to talk with Tom about his somewhat infamous blog post called “Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!“. In this podcast interview, Tom shares some very, very important insights on the future of public relations and we joke about starting a company to help begin the transformation. Most importantly though, Tom provides some great ideas on how to improve relations with both journalists and bloggers. He really gets this stuff, you should listen in and find out for yourself.

The New Media Release is an evolution of the current industry practices, designed to make it easier for journalists to tell the important stories by focusing on their own insights. This follows up on some of the ideas Coleman Hutchins wrote the other day in his post “The Press Release Isn’t Dead - It’s Multipurpose, Evolving.”

Photo Credit: Kristie Wells
Download the MP3 (9.2MB)

Categories: Media Relations, Blogger Relations, Word of Mouth
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One of our panelists for the event, Todd Tweedy of Boldmouth, has just released an excellent Word of Mouth (WOM) Marketing Research Study with Osterman Research entitled Perceptions, Practices & Ethics In Word-of-Mouth Marketing. One of the most important elements he addresses in the report is how you can never co-opt authenticity and get away with it.

I will be doing a phone interview with him later today which we will release as a podcast from here. If you have any questions you think I should ask him, please post them here in the comments. I think this is an important practice area for communications professionals to understand - it certainly goes way Beyond Blogging in many real ways.

Categories: Blogger Relations, Word of Mouth
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As you may know, I have been down in New Orleans for the last few days for an event we held last Thursday and also to attend this year’s New Orleans JazzFest which just wrapped up yesterday. While on the festival fairgrounds on Saturday, I took the opportunity to seek out the “Media Relations Tent” to perhaps see what was going on there and which of my old friends I might meet again. Instead, I came away with a simple story, some lessons, and some practical advice I would like to share with you.

I was fortunate enough to have a few minutes to speak with Matthew Goldman, the Press & Advertising Director for New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and ask him what, if anything they were doing to deal with Bloggers as citizen journalists. I was very clear that I was not asking this because I was hoping to get some special privileges, but because I wanted to get an understanding of their view on “how to handle bloggers“. His simple answer, “Nothing. We already have to turn down too many photojournalists and others who want access as it is.”

I understand his perspective. Which of the attendees would not want special access privileges to one of the biggest music festivals in the country. I can imagine there would be lots of people trying to take advantage of their ability to publish to their Blog in order to get ‘on the inside’. This is seemingly a constant battle for media relations people. It is certainly a known problem with traditional events such as shareholders meetings and conferences. There is always too much to be done and too little time so we must choose where to spend our scarce resources. With everything going on post-Katrina, it was hard enough to deal with all of the ‘real’ influentials out there with platforms like the Times and the Post - Bloggers are simply not the highest priority when you need to worry about where your favorite volunteers are now living.

Mr. Goldman said they had received hundreds of requests from Bloggers who wanted to get special access. Since he was busy taking care of his responsibilities for the day, I did not get a response as to what they did with those inquiries our of respect for his time. I did, however, ask him if they had even considered doing something special for Bloggers to make them feel more welcome or to improve their experience at JazzFest. His answer was simply “No.” While he was very cordial and responsive and respectful to me given how busy he was, you could tell that Bloggers did not really matter to him. It seemed he did not give Bloggers a second thought, except perhaps to be annoyed by how often they kept contacting him.

Still, it is my perspective that this was a golden opportunity lost on their part, and a lesson for all communications professionals who handle events on behalf of your clients.

The fact that hundreds of Bloggers contact you about an event is a big clue that you should do something about it - to come up with a publicly stated policy on the matter other than a traditional press policy. Any time an organization gets more than a handful of requests for conversation about a given topic, it is worthy of attention. When the requesters have a platform to speak to others about you and your handling of that request, even more so - regardless of their potentially limited impact. From my perspective, it is simply a matter of respect. How much you respect that person can vastly influence the amount of respect and tolerance they give you, your event and your organization.

I suggested to Mr. Goldman that they could have perhaps just done something a little extra, to make the Bloggers feel like they belonged, that they had some value and deserved that respect. While he was well within his rights to be dismissive given the situation, I think this is something that needs to be corrected in the future. Blogger Relations should be as much of a required communications channel as a press release or press conference. Either invite the Bloggers into the tent to hold the conversations alongside traditional journalists and really dig deep into the story or handle them differently using separate but equal methods.

Jazzfest could have had a BloggerFest each weekend. This town knows how to party - I am sure it would not have been that hard to setup. As we know from personal experience, all it takes is a location and an invitation - the Bloggers would have ended up practically organizing themselves from there. The feeling of inclusion and value that would be derived from belonging to a special community would be invaluable for the Bloggers and for the event coordinators in terms of the positive experiences that would be had and the petty little problems that would be solved by access to information. This could also have been accomplished with a simple extension of what they were already offering traditional journalists in terms of power outlets, desks and Internet access. They could have even gotten a few donated/sponsored terminals so that Bloggers could do some live blogging from the event and upload photos for their friends to be remote voyeurs on the event via Flickr. It is all about word of mouth and they could have gotten numerous additional positive mentions, which would bring in even more people next year and ensure that many others would come back again.

You don’t need to give them full access to backstage areas and all those other reporter perks. But to give them a special badge that would allow them to bring their high end digital cameras legitimately into the festival would be a huge step in the right direction. As part of the Blogger pass, they could have required each registered photographer and/or Blogger to use a Creative Commons license and/or allow the JazzFest Foundation to repurpose their photographs and articles for promoting next year’s festival. This alone would be one reason to embrace Bloggers - the extra content they create and the permission to reuse it by forming a relationship with them.

I can personally assure you that this sense of ‘inclusion in something special’ makes a huge impact on the quality of the experience. My friends and I were fortunate enough to have passes to the W Hotels hospitality tent and on more then one occasion someone remarked to me how being able to stop into the tent to sit down, grab a FREE beer and use clean restrooms made the day so much better. So much so that he lead off our recent phone call this afternoon by thanking me for getting everyone passes (we stayed at the W French Quarter this trip).

People are already saying good things and bad things about you - the fact that they are doing it in the Blogosphere may not matter to you at all since you are too busy to manage what you already must do, but that does not diminish the need to do something. The point is that this is an opportunity that could potentially become a problem when it need not be. I have not had time to go through all the JazzFest posts as they keep pouring in, but I suspect they will be pretty positive all around - who wants to talk badly about New Orleans these days anyway? So given the situation, I understand Mr. Goldman’s decision to ignore the Bloggers - I just wish he could have seized upon the opportunity to turn some of the happy Bloggers/Customers into RAVING FANS by doing a little something extra for them.

To the question of “How to handle Bloggers?” I respond simply “With respect.” They may not have the reach of a Washington Post reporter, but they do have the potential to make an impact on someone who does. So next time you are planning an event or a project, take a few moments and come up with a strategy for handling Bloggers in a way that respects them as people who publish - regardless of their reach. You need not give away the farm to them, but at least figure out a way to embrace them as someone who cares enough about what you do to invest time into telling others about it.

Queue out to Aretha Franklin “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me…”

We gathered quite a few stories and several personal experiences that have provided some real insights into what is going on down there and what may be needed to rebuild not just the houses, but the community.

Categories: Blogging, User Generated Content, Events, Media Relations, Blogger Relations
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