Ryan Anderson dot ca

One of the things I find really frustrating about the existing blog searches is that it’s extremely difficult to find blogs by region.  I know, the internet has no borders and all that jazz, but in some cases, country of origin really matters.

Currently, I need to reach bands attending Canadian colleges and universities.  Granted, this is a far more specific request than the average user is going to have, but damn, am I stymied.  Technorati is pretty usless for this kind of search, and Google Blog Search even moreso.  So far, blogscanada.ca has been the best way, but the way it’s set up is not terribly conducive to efficient research.

Anyone have a clever way to find blogs by region?  Better yet, anyone have a great list of Canadian music sites?  Maybe a few of them can get together and create a meme along the lines of the “Z-list”!

I would absolutely HATE to work for Sony in their PR department.  I have never seen a company that makes so many increasingly bad decisions about product development, about marketing and about PR. 

The latest, which you’ve no doubt heard about, is the fake blog they launched for the PSP.  In all honesty, I can see why this happened.  When we’re talking about viral ideas for campaigns and creative ways to get our message across, someone inevitably mentions a fake blog or a character blog.  Usually, that discussion leads to something bigger and better, but it always sorta seems like a good idea at the time.  Fortunately, we’ve all had the good sense to can that idea for the obvious reasons that we would look like idiots.

There is no benefit to a fake blog.  It seems like there would be.  Surely to God a seasoned copywriter can put together a much better blog than any kid who actually loves the product, right? 

Wrong.

You can’t fake genuine interest.  Soon enough, people will suspect that you are a paid shill for Sony, and as soon as that happens, you will be found out – especially if it’s popular.

Companies are seeing this whole social media thing happening around them and they want to benefit from it without putting themselves in a position of risky consumer feedback.  The irony, of course, is that there is no way of avoiding consumer feedback now that a million public conversations are being broadcast every day.  You can choose to ignore it, but it’s here to stay, and by violating the cultural code of the social media world, you end up looking ever dumber in the eyes of your publics.

Sony looks utterly ridiculous right now, and it’s all because they wanted to participate in the blogosphere without transparency or authenticity.  It’s the same as spam, when you get right down to it, except in this case Dr. Mumbuto is asking you to buy a PSP instead of sending him your account information.

I’m probably preaching to the converted here, but the lesson in this case is that while the blogosphere can be alluring, it’s not something that you can fake.  It’s not a short-term, one way project.  It’s an ongoing process, and one that needs to be tied into your overall communications plan, not a seasonal advertising campaign.

No matter how much you indoctrinate your corporate messaging into your employees, all the key messages in the world can’t change the immutable laws of mathematics, and you’ll end up looking completely stupid in public.

Consumerist: Verizon doesn’t know how to count

Thanks to Dan for the tip.

I wrote a few weeks ago that I didn’t understand Second Life.  After a few insightful comments, a few more kicks at the virtual can, and reading a plethora of articles about the online world, I now think I do understand it.  Now, I just think it’s stupid.

This is not to say, however, that I don’t think it’s important.  But I think that this is the infancy of metaverse marketing, not the pinnacle.  From a communications perspective, I think the entire concept is fascinating, and if I was still a student, this is probably what I would write my thesis on.  From a marketing and public relations point of view, I think that our bizarre fascination with Second Life is going to blow up in our faces.

What are the reasons to establish a presence in Second LIfe?   At this point, it’s cheap headlines, it’s a minor outlet for sales, and it’s getting your brand in front of a few people’s avatars who probably don’t want you there in the first place.  But now, first mover advantage is gone, PR people are being voted off the island, and yet we persist.  If you have a brand – it must be in Second Life.

There are a lot of things that I think Second Life is great for - the odd meetup or conference, virtual presentations, and of course, naked skydiving.  I also think that in the coming years, the metaverse will provide a number of incredible opportunities for performance, marketing and social communication.

The way I see it, Second Life is the medium-de-jour, and as marketers, we’re at risk of ruining it the same way we ruined MySpace.  We go in hard and fast, build up ad clutter everywhere and all of a sudden, it’s not worth it for the community.  We did the same thing to mobile, and now the advertising lemmings are jumping off the Second Life cliff.

If we, as marketers, really want Second Life to be the next greatest medium, we should be adding to the community, not just covering it in ads. 

Steve Rubel thinks engagement is a myth. “Don’t bother searching for it,” he suggests to marketers. I’m usually on board with most of what Steve writes, but this I can’t buy even for a second. Since most of what I talk about when I do presentations on marketing and PR is related to engagement, I feel the need to clarify a few things.

He talks about what he calls a “systemic issue in the marketing community . . . to create buzzwords to describe new marketing methods.” Well, that one I have to give him. Advertising is full of buzzwords, to the point where it’s almost ridiculous. The word engagement has fallen prey to this tendency, and as a result, a very important piece of solving the advertising puzzle has been neutered and rendered meaningless, right alongside “viral,” “branding,” and so many others.

Ask any ad industry reporter, and they’ll tell you about the countless press releases they get from agencies who “launched a viral this morning.” Just like we’ve overused that word to the point that it is now often used to describe any commercial online, we’ve started talking about engagement as if every ad is by definition engaging.

The truth about engagement is that no one can define it because it’s a myth. It’s sort of like a magical marketing unicorn or Bigfoot.

Steve Rubel

This kind of flippant analysis of the state of engagement is hardly the kind of commentary I would expect from someone who has made his reputation as a blogger by raging against the status quo. While it’s true that we as an industry have yet to agree on a standard definition, it is far from undefinable. Where most people fail to understand engagement is by thinking about it as a tactic rather than an outcome of doing things right.

There’s no doubt that we’re moving toward an on-demand culture. As consumers, we have a million-channel universe available to us at the click of a mouse. As technology progresses to a point where more of the media we consume is on-demand, the more consumers of media DEMAND on-demand. The time where we can put out a commercial message and “reach eyeballs” is fading fast. We have more noise competing for our attention than ever before in history, and we have more technology to play the role of electronic gatekeeper than ever. Most of the eyeballs we’re reaching are now focused on their laptop during commercial breaks, or only seeing a tenth of the message as it is fast-forwarded on their PVR.

This is where the importance of engagement comes in.

If I can make my marketing message part of the signal rather than the noise, then my message is being consumed, not just seen. The customer’s attention is turned on because they have self-identified to receive this commercial message. Most of the time, that commercial message comes packaged as entertainment or information, and allows the consumer to become more than just a passive receptor of the message, and to actually interact with that message or brand.

Engagement is the state of being turned on to and focused on a message or brand such that it penetrates the consumers personal and technological filters and has a lasting effect on recall.

How you do that is a whole other ball of wax. I work for a company that focuses on branded entertainment, and I believe very strongly that this concept and philosophy of advertising (when done well) is the best way to have the members of your tribe self-select and pull the message to them rather than foisting it upon them.

As the ANA blog points out, Steve does seem to understand the essence of engagement underneath all of the glibness. He ends the article by saying:

If you want to see engagement, find the right communities, build programs that empower people to connect, then get out of the way.

I think this is a form of engagement, but I don’t think it is the only one – that’s what Mentos did with the YouTube contest. If I’m playing an entertaining advergame or interacting with something truly entertaining that is a part of your brand or product (the Satan’s VCR section of the Pick of Destiny website comes to mind) then my attention is turned on, focused and receptive.

Without engagement, there is only noise. Sometimes it gets through with enough repetition, but most of the time, it gets filtered out before it even reaches the intended recipient.

On Monday, I had the pleasure of hearing Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, speak at a PR Blogger meetup in Ottawa, thanks to Joe Thornley of Thornley Fallis who arranged it. 

I talked to a lot of bloggers (as much as I could, as my voice was giving out all day) that I have been reading for quite some time, including Brendan Hodgson, Bob LeDrew (who is apparently good friends with a good friend of mine), Colin McKay, and Aimee, Brett and Steve from Shift-Ctrl, the 76Design blog.

I go to a lot of events where I don’t know anyone, but I’ve always found that events with bloggers who I’ve “met” through comments or just reading are always much easier.  As Aimee notes on her blog, in situations like these, the ice is already broken, and the conversation flows much more easily than it would if we had met at a networking event.

It’s not a relationship that bloggers have with one another, per se. In fact, I equate it more with a religious connection than a social one.  We are a group of like-minded individuals, who are accepting of each other by virtue of a membership to a group, which we earned through a ritual of writing and reflecting and of sharing our insights with other bloggers.  Our beliefs, independent as they may be, are largely influenced by a book that is at the core of the culture.  When we come together as a group, there is an automatic acceptance, because we know that bloggers are there not to self-promote, but to share.  Those that were there to promote, were kept outside the group because they were there for themselves, not for the greater good.

Okay… maybe I’m stretching a bit, but I think that thinking of bloggers as members of a religion is a good analogy when you’re first starting out.  When you decide you want to pitch bloggers by mass emails, first imagine yourself walking into a church during a sermon and giving them the same pitch.  Chances are, you’ll get about the same reception if you’re not a part of the community, or at least, the conversation.

It’s not hard, but there’s one surefire way to make yourself or your business look like a complete international asshole – start suing the little guy for using a word that’s already in the dictionary just because you decide you want to use it.

Apparently, Apple, for whom I have extremely ambivalent respect, has taken to issuing cease-and-desist orders to companies who have the audacity to use the word “PodCast,” because it thinks it owns the letters patent to it.

So far, Apple has sent numerous such letters to small entrepreneurs who used the word “pod” in any sense, regardless of whether it had anything to do with MP3s, PodCasting or apples.

iPod has brought Apple from an obscure overpriced graphic designer platform to a household name synonymous with quality, great design and hipness.  The company has fuelled a revolution in how people buy and consume music, and in part, how the average person can broadcast themselves to the world with little more than a webcam. 

Apple isn’t happy with being a pop culture phenomenon.  Their strategy, apparently, is to kill the golden goose and “own” the word “PodCast” so nobody else can use it.  The trouble is, it’s already in the vernacular.  Hell, it’s already in the dictionary as Steve Rubel (ROO-bell) points out. 

Litigation-happy executives are the biggest danger to marketing – especially when it comes to “protecting” irrelevant things like this simply because you can. 

The world is getting smaller with every new blog that launches, and acting like a dick is a sure-fire way to get called out for being a dick.  If Apple doesn’t abandon these strong-arm tactics and consider themselves lucky that they have enough apostles to start a religion, they’re going to lose that veneer they’ve been able to create for themselves as being a creative, fun company, and end up appearing like a monolithic big-business bureaucracy. 

[Wired via Micropersuasion]

I’ll be in New York for the next few days for The Next Big Idea conference. If any bloggers want to get together for a drink, send me an email to my first name at ryananderson.ca.

Following my post on How to Pitch Bloggers, I want to post a link to Darren Barefoot’s (another fellow Canuck) post which details exactly how NOT to pitch bloggers. 

Lessons here:

• Don’t begin with "Dear Webmaster"
• Don’t talk to bloggers like they’re idiots
• Don’t pitch to blogs that obviously are not related to your content
• Referring to people by their general title rather than their name is a big time-saver

All of these seem pretty obvious, but I’m sure that most of the blog pitches that will occur over the next year or so will be low-level workers instructed that they need "online buzz" by some VP who doesn’t really know what that means.

In an interview between Dan Greenfield of Bernaisesource, and Brad Berens who is the executive editor of iMediaConnection, Berens touches on an excellent point about where the job of PR is going.

The job of the PR person just got a LOT harder.  There is so much more to keep track of now.  Technology can help — free Google alerts, Technorati, etc. — but it’s a tooth-and-nail fight to keep from being merely reactive.

Very true.  The sad thing is that I don’t see a lot of PR pros outside the blogosphere understanding this.  Many are still happy to continue on the status quo and relegate blogs to "just another website."

I think the most important takeaway of the interview for PR people is our changing role within an organization:

The best thing that people in your role can do is to manage UP, to educate CEOs, CMOs and COOs about how much chatter is going on.  The PR folks need to integrate closely with marketing, as closely as they currently do with legal.  That’s on the internal side.

Sure, as a PR person, YOU understand social media, blogs, the changing blah blah blah of PR, but if your CEO is still stuck in the old way of thinking, you’re much more likely to deal with crises – and with much higher stakes.

Maybe it’s because I started my career as a marketing guy, but I’ve always been of the mind that marketing and PR have to be on the same team – especially now that the line between the two is getting so blurry.  We still each have our own tasks, but the overlap is getting bigger and bigger. 

As much as it is our job to educate the public about the issues we are working with, it is our job to educate executives within the company about how PR looks now, and how it’s changing their jobs.