Jim Courtney over at the Skype Journal has an interesting series of articles underway about Skype and how, in his opinion, they mishandled the PR for the Skype 3.0 beta release this week.

In Skype PR WakeUP Call 1: The Issue, he provides an interesting comparison of how the news of the Skype 3.0 beta leaked out into the blogosphere, and how completely inconsistent the coverage was with regard to what exactly was important in the release.

In Skype PR WakeUP Call 2: The Solution, he outlines his view of how such a product release should be handled and refers to how Andy works with his clients.

He says he'll release part 3 today "to review the Skype 3.0 beta release activity with respect to the proposed solution.". Look for it over to be posted on the main Skype Journal site sometime today.

Well worth a read.

P.S. Hat tip to Alec Saunders to pointing over to Jim's series.

Tags: pr, skype

For better or worse, Technorati rankings are one of the very few tools we have to assess the relative "authority" of a blog. This becomes incredibly important when one is trying to understand the urgency (or not) in responding to something posted on a blog critical of you, your company, client, product, etc. Is this person a lone blogger whose entry might be found via Google or tag searches, but otherwise isn't heavily read? Or is this blog an extremely widely-read and heavily-linked-to blog? The difference can really drive how urgently - or not - a response may need to be created. A negative mention of a product on some individual's personal blog might not merit the same level of response as, say, a negative posting on Engadget. The level of "authority" is certainly something to consider and whenever I speak about social media to companies or conferences, I always mention Technorati rankings as one of the few tools we have out there to help with this. (Another being BlogPulse Profiles, but that one does not yet seem as comprehensive, although it has some interesting components.)

However, even though I'm a big fan of what all the folks at Technorati are doing, I'm having a real hard time lately being able to take the rankings seriously, especially given that the stats for my own blog are rather wrong. As you will note in the graphic, it shows "Updated" for my blog as 209 days ago. Huh?[1]

( Read more... )

Tags: blogging, pr, technorati

Shouldn't every morning begin with a podcast recording session at 5:30am? :-) That's how today started for me, anyway, with a recording for today's FIR episode. Shel's on the road in Atlanta and Neville is unable to participate in the show today. I'd been corresponding with Shel about sending him my usual weekly report and offered to talk directly instead... so we did... at 5:30am. Hey, I'm in a hotel room and it's the normal time my daughter would wake me up, anyway!

As usual, it was a fun conversation.... we primarily talked about the "Environics Communication" lack of response to blog monitoring issue. This is where there was a Toronto Star article about a PR firm, Environics Communications, who is launching a blog monitoring service. However, as pointed out by Maggie Fox, the firm doesn't seem to be monitoring their own name! Or at least, they never responded to Maggie's post a week earlier questioning the numbers in an Environics poll.

Now, nothing says that you have to respond to every blog entry out there about you... but if you are selling a "blog monitoring service" and yet there is a post out there on a known blog (i.e. people do link to her) that is critical of your own firm - and you (still, as of the time I wrote this) haven't responded back to it in some manner.... well, if I were the potential client it would certainly make me question the ability of your services. It leads to the perception that you aren't finding mentions of your own name.

Clients will Google for the name of your company. Savvy clients will punch your name into Technorati. The conversations will be found - and for whatever reason you will be absent. Good case study, in my opinion.

FYI, I first heard of this on an "Inside PR" podcast, and Terry Fallis and David Jones point out on Maggie's comment that Environics' staffers have replied on David Jones' blog.

Despite their replies, I would argue that the perception issue is still there by their silence.

Anyway, it was a fun recording with Shel... you can hear it on today's FIR.

Tags: fir, pr

Neville Hobson pointed to an interesting piece on the "Bernaisesource" blog (by Dan Greenfield, VP Corporate Communications for Earthlink) entitled "Open Post to All Marketers – Why Blogging Matters". Nicely done piece, with some very interesting contributors:

• David Armano - Creative VP - Digitas – Logic + Emotion 
  
• Peter Blackshaw - CMO - Nielsen Buzz Metrics – Consumer Generated Media
  
• David Churbuck - VP Global Web Marketing - Lenovo – Churbuck 
  
• Dan Greenfield - VP Corporate Communications - EarthLink – Bernaisesource
  
• Eric Kintz – VP Global Marketing Strategy - Hewlett-Packard – Marketing Excellence
  
• Will Waugh – Senior Director, Communications - ANA – Marketing Maestros

Nice to see senior maketing executives from large IT companies like HP and Lenovo joining in the conversation. Worth a read.

Tags: marketing, pr, social media, socialmedia

Remarkably, things worked out (including hotel internet connectivity!) that I was able to briefly attend the Crayon launch party inside SecondLife. I hadn't really been to many large events with SL, so it was interesting to see... especially with the streaming audio. Congrats again to Joseph, Shel, Neville and C.C. for the launch of this new company.

For those unable to attend, I did take these snapshots of the launch event and other aspects of the new "Crayonville Island". Enjoy.

Tags: crayon, marketing, pr, secondlife

The links in my last post provided a nice reminder of the oft-discussed topic of the continued value of good headlines and synposes in your RSS feeds.

Take a look at Hackermedia.org. Specifically at the titles of the various podcast episodes contained in the boxes on both sides of the screen. Which ones are interesting to you? Which ones would make you want to listen to that episode?

The nice thing about aggregating all these feeds and displaying them like this is that it makes it easy to do this comparison. For instance, on the right side, look at the box at the top titled "Off The Hook" (which I assume must have podfaded). The episode titles include the date of the show. Useful to understand the chronology, but not the content. Similarly, "The Linux Link Tech Show" episode titles all have the utililtarian text "The Linux Link Tech Show Episode #". Again, useful to know the progression... but not useful to know the content.

In contrast, keep going down the right side to "Phone Losers of America" which does provide descriptive titles. Now, I've never listened to the show and know nothing about it, but "PLA Radio - Episode 7 - Screwing with Other Podcasts" does admittedly make me want to click on it to listen. If you keep going down the right side, you'll see Steve Gibson's SecurityNow! where he includes the main theme of his show - and also nicely includes his sponsor's name. And then, of course, you get to Mr. Verbosity himself... yes, indeed, my feed for Blue Box includes a longer definition of what's in the show.

That was, of course, a conscious choice on my part... I wanted to include enough in there to entice people to listen. And the fact that I am seeing referrers coming in from this site indicates to me that the descriptive titles are working.

Note also in the "Latest Additions" part of the page the nice "Synopsis" underneath the listing of our recent show. I can't take any credit in that... I started out copying what Shel and Neville did over at For Immediate Release, primarily because I saw how it worked for them in sites like Podcast Alley which also display only short summaries for podcast episodes. Compare what is displayed for our Blue Box episode to what is displayed for some of the others, which I can only assume had very minimal show notes.

Again, all good things to think about when you are writing up your show notes and having those go out in your RSS feed. (Given that for most blogging platforms the title of your post becomes the title of the item in your RSS feed.)

Tags: blogging, podcasting, pr, rss

The word is now out... the name of the social media company that Joseph Jaffe, Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, C.C. Chapman and others are now launching is... "Crayon". Rather than write more about it here yet, I'll direct you to their blogs:

• Shel Holtz: Introducing crayon
• Neville Hobson: It's time to unveil crayon
• C.C.Chapman: I Always Did Like to Color
• Joseph Jaffe: A baby crayon is born

Congrats to them all for taking this leap of faith and joining forces to push on into the world of helping companies engage in social media. It will be very fun to watch the company evolve.

Bummer that the website launch party will be on Thursday... I'm going to be speaking at a conference down in Massachusetts and then driving back up that day. Would be fun to see what exactly they are all doing.

Tags: crayon, fir, newmedia, pr, socialmedia

My report into For Immediate Release this week in FIR episode 182 includes a section of Martin McKeay's podcast interview about the Tor project that I mentioned previously. I asked Martin, obviously, and he was kind enough to grant permission for the usage. He turns out to be an FIR listener as well.

The snippet I included was a very interesting piece where Tor Project executive director Shava Nerad talks about how she worked within the blogosphere to counter would could have been a deadly PR nightmare linking the Tor project and her own name to child pornography. The entire interview is well worth a listen, but the part I included in my FIR report is definitely of most interest to folks interested in PR and social media.

Tags: fir, martin mckeay, pr, security, social media, socialmedia, tor

The big news that was teased at last week is now out... Joseph Jaffe, Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson and C.C. Chapman are all joining forces to work together in forming a new company focused on social media.  You can listen to the Skype conversation the four had at any of their podcasts:

• Across the Sound #59 (Joseph)
• For Immediate Release #181 (Shel and Neville)
• Managing the Gray - The Big Announcement (C.C.)

All four are great people really leading in this space within PR and marketing... I'm excited for all of them - and also for the rest of us as this should only help them continue to push the social media conversation that much further!

Congrats, guys!

Tags: fir, josephjaffee, nevillehobson, pr, shelhotz, socialmedia

Shel Holtz writes about a new site called SlideShare which various folks are calling "the YouTube of PowerPoint". (See Ross Mayfield and Niall Cook). While you can't get into the site right now without an invitation, you can read a good bit about it on the slideshare blog. Michael Arrington also has a longer article over at TechCrunch.

Now, some might say, does the world really need a YouTube-like site for sharing PowerPoint presentations?

My own answer would surprisingly be "yes". Not because I think it would ever have the YouTube-ish affect of having people go there to see the most-viewed presentations (although it does look like people are using it for some artistic purposes), but more for the archiving and finding all those presentations that we all make on a regular basis.

For example, take my frequent focus of VoIP security. Wouldn't it be nice if you could easily find presentations made by companies on VoIP security? What if VOIPSA could have a link that you could follow that would bring you to all presentations tagged with "voip security" or some other appropriate tag? Or even better, what if we could embed an RSS feed into the main page that would list recent presentations with that tag? What if I could use it to see what presentations people are making about competitors? What if I could use it to help people learn about our products/services/etc? Or to promote my own presentations?

Now, of course, the porn spammers and SEO spammers would probably destroy any idyllic system like this. As blog comment spam has shown us, the spammers will figure out any way they can to game the system. Give them a new system and they'll figure out a way to abuse it. So I could unfortunately see any system winding up being invaded by... um... "inappropriate" presentations.

But assuming that appropriate protections could be put in place, why not? Yes, you lose out on the audio (right now) of a presentation, but there's often a great amount of material in presentations. As a frequent speaker, I'm also always interested in new ways that people may have of presenting material, so I actually like to look at other presos not even as much for content as for style. You can always learn from seeing how other people put together information to tell stories. (Sometimes, indeed, you learn what NOT to do.)

It's also interesting to look at the idea of embedding a presentation in a blog entry. Right now over on Blue Box, I've often included podcasts of presentations that include links to accompanying presentations - why not include a little embedded flash player so that people could just follow along right there? (Although in looking at the code included in this post, I'm betting I can't embed the player here on LiveJournal, but I could over at Blue Box or one of my other blogs.)

We'll see where the site/service evolves, but it seems like an interesting idea to try out... at least for those of us who live in the land of PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Keynote, etc.

Tags: powerpoint, pr, slideshare

For most of the past 1.5 years, it's been a pleasure for me to be connected to Shel Holtz through the For Immediate Release podcast that he and Neville Hobson produce. In that time, first as a commenter and then as a regular weekly FIR correspondent, I've quite enjoyed working with Shel, have learned a great amount, and have enjoyed the friendship that has developed over time as we've met for various meals when his insane travel schedule happened to intersect with my not-quite-so-insane-but-still-busy travel schedule. Anyway, for those of you who may listen to FIR but have never met him, Ragan Communications put together this nice little promotional video of Shel... so here he is, in video (this is also a test of seeing how well this click.tv applet copies over from one blog to another):

UPDATE: Okay, so LiveJournal seems not to allow the posting of that embedded flash object... you'll just have to go to Shel's entry to watch the video.

Tags: fir, pr, shelholtz

Over on the Naked Conversations blog, Shel Israel has a nice interview with Shel Holtz. (Shel is one of the two co-hosts of FIR.)

Tags: fir, pr, shelholtz

Just checking various VoIP blogs before heading down to VON early tomorrow morning and I find that both Andy and Jeff have written about the same issue I just covered.

• Jeff Pulver: Watch “PR Professionals Gone Wild” @ Fall 2006 VON!
• Andy Abramson responds: Jeff On PR And My View

Andy sums it up well:

That said, sending mass mailings to every reporter on the VON list is so off target and ill conceived it's just plain dumb for PR person to do. Yet it is being done every day, so it's no wonder so many members of the press have asked my friend Susan Donahue who leads the VON PR effort to keep them off the list.

Exactly.

Tags: pr

No, they aren't.  I certainly realize that.  In fact, there are some darn good ones out there. But, man, they sure seem like an exception. 

As I outlined previously, I am amazed by the complete cluelessness of so many in the PR industry.  Forgetting about all the ones I deleted before I started keeping track, I've now received 99101 pitches for various products and services leading up to Fall VON 2006 that starts tonight.[1]  Of those, they break out as follows:

9597 were generic form letter pitches that had nothing whatsoever to do with VoIP security

2 were generic form letter pitches about VoIP security (for whom I would be a natural target)

1 was a generic pitch on an inappropriate topic but that did realize that we were a podcast (and very nicely offered their executives for pre-VON podcasts)

1 was a pitch on an inappropriate topic but did actually realize that we were a security podcast

Oh, and 10 PR reps followed up with a phone call (all of which generally went like I previously described)

Let's think about that for minute... out of 99101 pitches, only one was customized - to a degree.  And while I give the account rep some credit for doing that, here's the customization:

Saw your security podcasts and thought you might want to chat with (name deleted) while he's at Fall VON

The rep got so close.... figuring out that we do security podcasts, but then not taking it the next level and personalizing the pitch.  What was the hook?  What was the security angle?  Why would I want to talk to this particular person?  Especially when the company's products have nothing whatsoever to do with VoIP security?  Maybe there is something I'm missing... explain it to me and get me interested.  Make me want to chat with that person.

Now in fairness to the PR profession and VON vendors, there are some 300+ vendors going to VON. Some percentage of those are startups without a real clue about publicity and so they probably did little or no advance press work. Some vendors may not have strong PR groups that reach out in advance, or in some cases may not have all that much to announce. And I have to believe that some of those vendors and their PR staff have an actual clue and did their research and figured out that it was inappropriate to pitch us.  I have to believe that.

But for the rest... I'm sorry, but there really isn't excuse that I can see for NOT knowing who you are pitching.  Sending out mass emails to untargeted lists doesn't make you a PR professional - it makes you a spammer.  Being on the VON press list in advance was pretty much a complete and total waste of my time... all it did was fill my inbox and make me dread checking it.  Next VON conference, I will either register very late, ask to be off the press list, or use a bogus or throwaway address.

I now understand why so many people in the media are so negative about people in PR.  Being someone who has worked with PR - and enjoys doing so - seeing this level of clueless activity is a rather large embarrassment....  please, agencies, get a clue!

P.S. One PR person in the VoIP space who I should note definitely does have a clue is Andy Abramson of Comunicano. Anyone who reads VoIP Watch will know that several of Andy's clients will be here at VON. However, given that none of them have anything to do with VoIP security, I received no pitches from him and given that I've worked with him in the past, I'll have to make the assumption that his team did their research and realized I wasn't an appropriate target... if only everyone did this!

[1] For those just joining the story, I produce and co-host the weekly "Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast" targeted at the very narrow niche of VoIP security. I am attending VON and, as he has in past shows, Jeff Pulver has generously given press credentials to bloggers and podcasters. In comparison to past VON shows, I signed up early and wound up on the advance press list, which has unfortunately primarily wound up as a source of spam.

Tags: pr

My fellow FIR correspondent Lee Hopkins has now started video blogging on his main blog.  In today's episode, he's added in some transitions and keeps improving the quality of his shows.  Darn good stuff, Lee!  Keep it coming.

Tags: blogging, fir, pr, vidcasting