For those who have been trained to send empty press releases, as well as sit and stay whenever the client gives the command, this is a very hard lesson. For an in-house social media champion, who is probably not an executive in the company, it can go against the grain.

As clients and bosses start adapting to the idea of social media, blog relations, online buzz campaigns and online PR in general, the most important thing we can learn as communications professionals is the importance of saying no.

It’s hard to say no to a client, and even harder to say no to a boss, but as communications pros, it’s our job to be educated about the wild west that is the online mediascape, and help our clients and employers not end up shot in front of the Facebook Saloon.

When a client wants you to send mass-emailed press releases to bloggers, you have a responsiblity to say no. When a boss wants you to “seed” something anonymously on forums, it’s your job to say no. When someone in a position of power wants you to do something that will ultimately be destructive to the company or brand they want you to promote, it is your job to know enough to know when to say no, and to do so without fear.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey would have been lucky to have someone to tell him no when he anonymously posted trash talk about his competition and praise for his own company for eight years on Yahoo! Finance. He was found out, and the same fate would have befallen anyone else who attempted that as well.

There’s enough bad PR out there. By understanding online culture and knowing when lines are being crossed, it’s a lot easier to ensure that you don’t add to what’s already out there.

I figured it was time for a bit of a change, so I’m going with a new theme.  If I keep it, there are a few changes I’m going to want to make to it, so let me know what you think of the new look.

It’s a weird, upside-down world when big brands start parodying a video shot by some dudes in their back yard.

Nonetheless… this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all day.

[via Out of Site]

Sometimes the best potential bloggers are the hardest to convince because the smartest people are often the busiest and the ROI of blogging is not always evident. There’s a lot of talk about the ROI of blogging in the marketing industry, at conferences and within the blogosphere itself. The reality is, these discussions usually either completely miss the point, or are vague to the point of being useless.

Discussions of how bloggers can make money miss the point because most bloggers will never make a dime from their site, regardless of how many adword, affilliate or banner links they have on their blog. Monetizing a blog is possible, but it’s not the point… much like monetizing your commute to work is possible, but certainly not the point of driving a car.

Likewise, the “fuzzy things happen as a result of blogging, sometimes” discussion, while it does speak to the point of blogging, doesn’t much hold water when you’re trying to convince a CMO to adopt a corporate blog.

For a corporation entering the ‘sphere, blogging is not really about dollars at all – it’s about intellectual respect.

We recently launched a new website at my day job, that included a blog. We’ve always had a blog, but in all honesty, it was not what I would call a good blog. When we relaunched, we included more people, started giving our opinions of what’s going on in our industry, and started posting more regularly. It was a big push to make it happen, but it got done, and now, while still not a canon for corporate blogs, it’s on its way to being a good blog.

What changed? Not much. We got a few more hits, a few more comments… nothing that can really be recorded in a graph or a chart.

Last week, our EVP of Strategy, who is a regular contributor to the blog, met with a potential client – a senior VP at a Fortune 500 company. The first thing he said was that he completely agreed with our EVP’s posts on measuring audience.

We sat down to the table with his complete intellectual respect before we had even said a word.

The power of the blog was confirmed for me, and it served to convince the rest of the team, who like me, probably felt in their gut that it was a good idea, but really couldn’t “prove it.”

It’s not going to happen with every client, but it’s an excellent example of the fact that as we enter the knowledge economy, blogs will go a long way as intellectual currency.

Lately, I’ve been feeling bloated and slow – out of sorts.  The problem: I’ve been over-consuming.  With a constant information buffet available to me, and the desire to explore new tastes and trends, I’ve overwhelmed myself with information, and if I’m ever going to be myself again, I need to go on an information diet.

First, the problem.  I need to keep tabs on a lot of industries, reporters, trends and so on in order to do my job effectively.  RSS makes this much easier, but in some ways it is merely enabling my information gluttony.  For a while, I stopped bookmarking, and started adding feeds whenever I found an interesting site.  The problem was, I never got rid of it, and ended up with hundreds of feeds that were of little use to me.  I would binge and purge these feeds, but no matter how well I organize, there is still a lot of fat that needs to be cut.

Second, I belong to a lot of sites.  Most I don’t use very often, but many I do.  Facebook is a particularly notorious source of unnecessary information calories.  I’m also on LinkedIn, I have a MySpace page, and far too many accounts with far too many “beta services.”   I love online applications, but the problem is that they each only do 1% of what I want them to do, so I have to sign up for at least a hundred to do everything, not counting the services that duplicate one another.

Third, my email snacking habit has accentuated my office-onset ADD, and has left me with the attention span of a magpie.

My Information Diet Plan

1. Set Objectives.   I obviously just can’t “quit” information, but I can set clear objectives as to what I want to get out of my information intake.  If a feed doesn’t advance one of these objectives, I probably don’t need it.
2. Smaller Portions.  I’ve already gone through my RSS feeds and culled the extraneous crap.  Tomorrow, I’ll do the same with mailing lists.
3. Schedule Meals.  I tend to go randomly through my feeds searching for the good stuff because there is so much crap along with it.  Once my feed reader is down to a manageable size, I can schedule information meals, where I can go through my email and RSS all at once, and do with each whatever needs to be done.  Less time wasted.
4. End destructive relationships.  I’m going to say goodbye to some services.  I’m not sure which will go and which will stay, but this time next week, I plan to use far fewer social media sites than I currently do.
5. Set Routines.  The other side of this is the production of information, which I want to do far more of.  My summer resolution this year is to write for 1 hour per night.  I know I won’t hit it every night, but I think it’s a good goal.  It may be on this blog, on my corporate blog or on one of the many plays I’m writing, but I hate feeling rusty when I sit down to the keyboard, so this is a good step in the right direction.
6. Eat at the table.  Okay, this one’s stretching to fit the metaphor, but bear with me.  I have personal feeds and email and business feeds and email.  Right now, they’re mixed, so I’m doing business at home and personal at work.  That in and of itself isn’t a big deal – the problem is that each draws attention away from what I should be doing.  By separating the two, I may still do work at home and personal at work, but at least they won’t be on the same plate.

This feels a bit off-topic, but the reality is every PR person is in the same position as me, keeping up with a constant stream of information, and managing it as best they can.  Some are likely far more productive as a result of consuming far less information and only on their terms, but I would argue that those people, while productive, are probably professionally undernourished – at least in the areas that are still quickly evolving, like social media and digital PR.

I’ll keep you posted with the results of my information diet as the weeks go on, but even at this point, it’s nice knowing that not reading RSS feeds for a day won’t result in 800 unread posts.

Ah… I feel lighter already.

Sending a press release to a reporter is a far different activity than blasting a million messages about generic viagra, right?  Of course it is, but as media relations starts to veer out of the professional into the amateur realm and our public relations plans branch out to include civilians who are less inured to the constant barrage of press releases, it has become apparent that we need to take another hard look at how we communicate.

When a blogger ends up in a Cision or Vocus database, they will inevitably start receiving press releases from PR people.  Likewise if they attend a conference as “press,” they will end up on the conference media list.  I think this is something that would be completely expected (if irritating) to a veteran reporter, but I think it’s easy to miss the fact that many of these bloggers might be utterly confused when they start receiving press releases and pitches, seemingly out of the blue.

I was reading a Photoshop tutorial on mezzoblue (which is a great site, by the way) and I came across an entry called “PR.”  What it said was this:

Somehow, and I’m just guessing here, but somehow my email address ended up on a centralized mailing list for public relations firms representing the tech industry. All of a sudden I’m getting in the neighbourhood of 2 or 3 press releases directly emailed per day, all from different people at various PR agencies. This started around a week ago.

The comments that followed were mainly from other bloggers who were likewise confused as to why they were getting these, positing that these firms by lists of blogs culled from the web and one of them calling this practice “the new style of spam.”

Obviously, they don’t have all the facts about how the industry works, nor should they be expected to.  All they know is that they’re getting unsolicited commercial email, and they don’t want it.

It would be easy to blame the bad PR people here, but I think that’s too easy.  Certainly, the ones sending mass emails to bloggers they’ve never spoken to before is a good sign that they don’t understand social media, and probably aren’t that great with regular media either.  The problem stems from the idea that a) the press release is the only way to communicate with that media, and that b) we should treat blogs like the media.

Press releases have their place.  I send press releases for things like personnel and account annoucements.  The things that trade magazines want to cover, but that will only ever get a couple of lines in a “by the way” sort of section.  They’re also good for financial announcements and things of that sort.  Notice that none of these things are the sorts of things that would show up on a blog.  An online news site, perhaps, but not a blog.

In order to communicate with a non-commercial blog, you have to understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.  Do they ever cover commercial products?  Do they post reviews?  Do they talk about the kind of thing that you’re promoting?  If they still seem like a good fit, a blogger has to be courted in a meaningful way.  Through a program like the Nikon D80 blogger outreach or something that fits in with what they are covering.

The main thing we have to remember is that bloggers are not a part of the media industry, and as a result, they are not expecting many of the day-to-day things that reporters wouldn’t bat an eye at.

That said, pitching media with a blanket release is just as silly as pitching bloggers… it’s just less confusing for them.  In all cases, your value as a PR person is about the number of relationships you have created… not about how many press releases you send.

After a week of being too busy to write, think or appreciate, this is one of the saddest articles I’ve ever read. 

Pearls Before Breakfast – Washington Post

Update: Brendan Hodgson writes about the article far more thoughtfully than I have. 

GDC has been interesting. I was hoping that I would have more public relations insights to share, but the only thing that has stuck out at me is that if you’re going to pay a whole lot of money to get a booth at a conference, you should probably staff it with people who aren’t socially retarded. I stood at the Sony online booth for about 2 minutes, looking at their brochures while the pimple-faced attendants talked to one another and completely ignored me until I left.

Instead, my post today will be about hobos.

San Francisco is a bastion of hobos, owing largely to the nice weather and liberal guilt. So far, I’ve seen a chinese Charlie Chaplin, a couple of people who screamed at me, and a guy wearing a top hat. I don’t know if he was homeless, but I am of the opinion that if you’re not an English nobleman and you’re wearing a top hat, you’re automatically a hobo. It’s the way of the universe.

However, the prize for best hobo I’ve see so far goes to the guy outside the conference centre who said to a group of passing GDCers:

“So, if I panhandle in binary, will you guys give me money? 1000110001011…”

An honourable mention goes to the Jamaican dude with the sign that said “United Negro Pizza Fund.”

The lesson here is clear. If you’re going to be a hobo, you might as well have a sense of humour about it.

As I mentioned, I’ll be at the Game Developers’ Conference for most of this week. I’m currently on a flight to San Francisco, though I’m flying Air Canada, so naturally, we’re an hour late.

I’m not a nervous flyer, though I admit that especially during takeoff, I get that tinge of “what if I die” that makes flying so nerve-wracking. I take solace, however, in the fact that the forces of nature are on my side for this trip. Judging by the sheer number of Super Mario t-shirts around me, many of these people are going to be attending GDC as well, and this many dead virgins would far too much symbolism for the universe to bear.

I’ll try to post intermittently during the week if I see anything interesting that is at least tangentially related to PR.

Air Canada flight attendants are bitchy as hell.