Grounded In Reality

Andrew Foote, Andrew Silver and I are at BlogHer 08 Conference this weekend in San Francisco. It has been aware that posting to Twitter in 140-character format has been much more popular than full blog writing. Well, get back to your blogging roots ladies because Twitter’s Fail Whale is in FULL FORCE. I am not sure if Twitter planned this or they are just simply unaware of the popularity the application has among the women influencers online, but this is the most inopportune time for a shut-down.

If you look at the top Twitter search trends for the past 3 days, just under the new Batman movie is #BlogHer08. Moms are on Twitter, and I am honestly waiting for the day that mommybloggers go on strike against Twitter…and I have a feeling its coming soon.

‘The Andrews’ and I will be back a little later with conference updates, but for now, I can say that these women are amazing and the learning curve is steep. Be ready to step up.

This has been an interesting year for blogging. Going from guerilla to grounded and back… Early in 2007, I heard form some colleagues that their client was ready to cut all ties with Gizmodo after they posted a video poking fun at a speaker during a press conference… come on guys, he is a human being, he wasn’t the best speaker (at the time) and you made him look like a robot? Seriously, have a heart… The good news is they actually pulled the video and only weeks later, hired an onslaught of magazine and newspaper freelancers hungry for work as the print press starts to dry up.

One of the hires most notable to me was former Time Magazine tech reporter Wilson Rothman. From this publicist’s humble perspective, Rothman covers great tech stories (with real news value), he honors embargoes, he is fair and honest and has integrity as a journalist. Huge sigh of relief and Gizmodo returns to good graces with most technology manufacturers. In fact, only a few months later, they were offered an exclusive on the Pioneer KURO HDTV announcement, easily one of the biggest consumer electronics launches of 2007 (Yes, Pioneer is my client BUT, in my defense, the KURO won ALMOST as many tech awards in 2007 as the iPhone).

The blogging community has long been at odds with “credible journalists” and we at GCI have been supportive of the blogging world, counseling our clients to give influential bloggers (FYI, they are just reporters with faster publishing) the same pre-briefings we would offer a few select reporters at New York Times, WSJ, BusinessWeek or Financial Times around a big announcement.

CES 2008 was no exception… influential bloggers had unprecedented access, they brought live blogging to a new art form and they played the mother of all pranks… and that was just Gizmodo.

This publicists humble opinion on the prank of all pranks? I am mixed on this one. On one hand, I want to say, “grow up guys” and stop turning off all of the television around CES with the remote that you blasted in a review three or four years ago. On the other, “no harm, no foul.” It is funny, clever and you wouldn’t have one of the most influential blogs in the world if you didn’t turn a few heads now and then. Still, Gizmodo may just be the “bad kid” in class? All I know is that Engadget has yet to pull a prank like this and they are still hanging on to #1…

Bottom line, I can’t help feeling sick to my stomach for the people behind the scenes at Motorola who worked tirelessly to bring something newsworthy to CES, to put on a good show and get credit for the CNET People’s Voice Award winner, the Moto Rokr E8. I also disagree with Brian Lam’s recent article chastising tech reporters taking freebies and becoming the pawns of major corporations. I believe journalists (and bloggers alike) today are NOT the pawns of corporate America. In fact, for the first time in 50 years, journalism has significantly changed (thanks to blogging and community forums) and it is creating an open dialogue with corporate America that never existed before. Bravo blogga mania – if you must, go on and turn off as many TVs as you like, just don’t be surprised if you find yourself nursing a puncture wound courtesy of the business end of a publicists’ high heel…

Over the past week, Dell has been the topic of many conversations in the blogosphere, spurred by a Forrester Groundswell Award and BusinessWeek article discussing the company’s transformation from digital bystander to leader.  In reading these posts, I am incredibly proud of the GCI team that helped make this happen. (NOTE: Dell is a GCI client)

Below are a few highlights from the blogosphere:

• BusinessWeek: Dell Learns to Listen: Jeff Jarvis takes a guest columnist role to discuss his two-year relationship with Dell and an overview of Dell’s social media initiatives. The online version is complete with a 25-minute video of an interview with Michael Dell (also available on Jeff’s blog: BuzzMachine).   He also posted the un-edited version, which notes a very measurable impact of Dell’s programs:

“Thanks to this new relationship, the company learns about issues online before they do in the press or sometimes in-house. They are stanching the flow of bad buzz. By their measure, negative word of mouth in blogs has dropped from 49 to 22 percent. And my Dell Hell posts, which used to come up third on a Google search for the company, are now relegated to second-page search-engine Siberia. ‘That change in perception just doesn’t happen with a press release,’ Menchaca says.”

• Direct2Dell - Dell’s Blog: Lionel Manchaca did an interview with Jeff near the end of the day and posted the vlog that resulted on Direct2Dell.

• Forrester’s Groundswell blog also mentions Dell’s transformation when referencing the Forrester Groundswell Awards that were given out last week.

Company transformation. Dell.
We created this new category to capture the powerful changes happening across all functions at Dell. The Dell Customer Advocate program, which pursues fast resolution of support problems, decreased the negative share of online comments about Dell by 25%. Direct2Dell, Dell’s frank and informative blog, generates 3.5 million page views per month. Ideastorm, Dell’s innovation community, tallied 500,000 votes for over 7,000 ideas and generated a new product, Dell PC’s with Linux pre-installed. And Employee Storm, an internal idea community, has generated 2,700 ideas and seen visits from 22% of Dell’s employees.

• From Geoff Livingston at The Buzz Bin:

Relationships and RELATIONS are about being human — not God. Together as humans we experience life and grow together. Mistakes happen, and good PR can overcome this. Consider Dell’s incredible lesson in admitting wrongs, listening and changing. This week’s BusinessWeek story is a celebration of relations.

• Our own Paul Walker mentioned that he is “really proud of the people and programs mentioned in the article. Thanks, Dell, for letting us be a part of it.” 

On behalf of GCI, I want to give the entire team a big pat on the back! The consistent creativity and innovation in new media waters is something to be extremely proud of.

Sweet Moses! You cannot imagine the joy I felt today when I was catching up on Perez Hilton and came across a post about Ab-fabulous himself, Mr. Ryan Reynolds…and the Huffington Post.  Of course, of course – I will repeat that. Ryan Reynolds, an actor best known as Van Wilder and formerly engaged to the rock-your-face-off Alanis Morrisette, BLOGGED for the HUFFINGTON POST. Check it out here.

I braced myself to bare utter embarrassment for the public ridicule Mr. Reynolds would surely face…until I kept reading. Not only can one of my favorite Canadians throw down some serious and tight sarcasm – the dude can write!  Assuming he didn’t have some chimp scribe for him, the post shows he harbors a serious level of personal concern for society’s focus.

In fact, Mr. Reynolds downright rocked my world with his blog.  Here’s why: Not only can he spell and put together coherent sentences (let’s face it, half of Hollywood is lacking a GED, so my expectations can’t really be that absurd), but Reynolds is getting gritty and having fun doing it.

This makes me wonder – could this lead to a new phase of celebrity sponsorship – having a notable celebrity spokesperson quite literally blog on a formidable forum like the Huffington Post whilst extolling the virtues of your clients’ product, service or social movement or representing it in personality?  All grit and humor aside, transparency in the case of a celebrity spokesperson blogger would be absolutely paramount.  Not that Mr. Abs, I mean, Reynolds, was pushing a product, per se, but he does successfully divert readers’ attention to something more substantial and impactful than competitive eating.

So as you’re watching the news this summer, and come across fluff pieces about competitive eating contests at your small-town fair, heed the words of Mr. Reynolds: Remember the starving children in Darfur.  (perhaps a new twist on the popular jab of guilt uttered by mothers nationwide)

In closing, I humbly ask you to count your blessings as you enjoy a full dinner this evening.   And if you’re charged with pitching a competitive eating contest this summer, please, please, for the love of everything holy – just don’t.

Hot dog, anyone?

The hardest thing in life is to make time for the things you want to do.

I have two daughters, and I do everything in my power to be home with them for dinner as many nights a week as humanly possible. But sometimes, I have to travel for work and can’t be home. Sometimes, my wife and I have a charity or something we are involved in and can’t be home.

Such is life in the big city, but I do the best I can.

Blogging is like dinner with my girls - you need to commit to it and stick with it as much as you can on a daily basis.

“There are going to be days where you don’t have time to blog.”  I dont think that’s a fair excuse.  The way the blogosphere is set-up, you can blog from your PDA or mobile phone. So as you sit on the plane waiting to take off or on the train on the way home, you can find two minutes to jot down a few notes to keep your page up-to-date.

Now, while you might be able to get away with the lack of blogging on a personal site, if you have a corporate or company blog, you most certainly cannot slack off.

Perfect example of what can happen when you do slack off is Jeffery Chodorow’s blog. Chodorow is a restauranteur who was getting a bad rap in his mind from the New York food critics and took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to speak his peace and announce his blog, chod-o-blog.

When it came out on February 21st, his blog was off and running. He had 157 comments on his first post. That’s a pretty good start by any standards. One week later he updated with a new post:

I apologize for the delay in posting my new blog entry. This has been an overwhelming week given the reaction to the NY Times ad and dealing with all of the subsequent press inquiries.I will be updating the blog shortly.

Since that note, he posted twice on March 1 and once on March 13, with only 17 comments total in those posts.

Chodorow spent a lot of money on the ad in the New York Times, then he was off to a rousing start blogging and had viewers. But because he hasn’t really posted in a timely basis, it’s going to be very hard for him to recapture that mass audience and buzz that he had.

In many situations, blogs are a one-man show, and it’s more difficult than having a group blog like we do with our Digital Media team here in this space. Problem is the masses don’t care. You can’t do blogging half way, it just won’t work. If you want to reach an audience and keep them, you have to commit to giving them a few minutes of your time on a regular basis. In my mind, that means a minimum of three times a week. It doesn’t have to be a novel, but more novel ideas and thoughts.

In the end, I take the time to have dinner with my family, and it’s something my children will do with their children someday. If you think about it, don’t we and our clients want our consumers and customers to pass our messages and thoughts to their kids and sell their products or brands? 

In this day and age, you do this at the ‘digital dinner table.’  It’s worth a few minutes a couple of times a week…

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UPDATE:  USA Today posted a blog entry saying ‘When bloggers are silenced, the world must speak for them.’  The article focuses on Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman’s jailing for blogging about attacks he witnessed by Muslims on Coptic Christian establishments and the extremist views taught at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

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Everyone is reading blogs these days. In one way, shape or form, we all read blogs of all different shapes and sizes.

From American Idol to ESPN, there are millions of blogs with many different levels of authority. But why?

The blogosphere is getting interesting in the area of covering world events. Newspapers, television stations, and radio stations all have blogs of what’s going on in the world as it happens.

In the New York Times yesterday, a great article ran on Matthew Lee, a blogger that covers the United Nations and has credentials to go to everything and anything about the United Nations.

It begs the question, why does Lee get credentials and since he does, who else should have them? It’s a very fine line that is going to be defined as time goes on.

From my past life at USA Today, I covered sporting events, and there’s not enough room half the time to accommodate the working media. When USA Today went online - we could’t get credentials to most of the major sporting events - now there’s not a major event that isn’t covered by the online news sites.

How and where can you even begin to draw the line if you start letting bloggers get credentials? And who decides which bloggers are credible and which aren’t?

The line is fuzzy for now, but over time, it will hopefully get defined.

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4/12 UPDATE:

MSNBC pulls the Imus in the Morning show, and it replaces with news. Imus pushes forward with Radioathon; what happens with CBS to be determinedafter his 2-week suspension, which starts next week.

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For those of you who follow the news on a regular basis, the names of Don Imus and Katie Couric need not be explained. They are two of the biggest names in radio and television and this week they are linked together for things gone awry.

Imus got himself in trouble when the now-suspended radio show host called the Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy-headed hos” on his April 4 show. He’s lost sponsors and has been on every news show from coast-to-coast and on the web. He’s number two (Imus) and number five (Don Imus) on Technorati top searches and there are 20,913 results on blogs with any authority.  April 8-10, his name was getting mentioned in 500+ blogs a day, and as of April 11, he’s over 4,000 mentions. Mind you some folks are mentioning that it’s all getting blown out of proportion, but most are calling for his head.  

While Imus is dealing with his fun, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric is putting out her own fire for a producer who plagiarised from a Wall Street Journal column on the fading allure of library books.

 Newsweek has a great piece on the story where they say:

The problems began when an April 4 installment of  “Katie Couric’s Notebook”—a daily essay by the anchor that appears in video and audio form on CBS News’ Web site, among other places—was uncomfortably close to musings by Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow on the fading allure of library books.

Newsweek’s story goes on to say that the story came to light “when a Wall Street Journal reader who’d read, heard or saw “Katie Couric’s Notebook” alerted the newspaper, according to an insider at the Wall Street Journal.  Zaslow, the author, said two CBS officials phoned him to express regrets.”

What’s incredible is how the web plays a role in both of these cases.

Imus has been spouting off about all kinds of issues for years. He’s crossed the line many a time, but the world we live in isn’t the same as when I was growing up outside of New York City and he was just on WNBC-AM (you younger folks, you know what AM radio is, right?). 

Couric’s issue is deeper in the sense that plagiarism is deemed “journalistic suicide” and the producer in charge of the ‘Notebook’ has been fired. But once again, it’s an issue that can explode because of the mob on the web. 

 The sad part about Couric’s problems are that, I think, CBS News and Couric have done a wonderful job embracing new media into their broadcast and into their site. If you haven’t checked out their site, I recommend you do at: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/eveningnews/main3420.shtml 

It will be interesting to see when Imus comes back in two weeks if he has any sponsors left and if he will still have a job. The Couric issue will be gone in two weeks. It will be talked about, but they have fired the producer and now onto bigger and better things. The one interesting factor in my mind about CBS News is that they brought in Rick Kaplan to be the Executive Producer.

From Wikipedia entry for Kaplan:

Kaplan was at the helm of ABC’s Prime Time Live in 1991, when they aired an expose against the Food Lion supermarket chain using undercover producers who falsified their resumes and staged events. Food Lion was awarded $5.5 million by a jury in 1997. The award was later reduced by a judge to $316,000. The verdict was then overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, VA. According to the court, even though ABC was wrong to do what they had done, they felt that Food Lion was unable to show that they had been directly injured by ABC’s actions.

Just something to keep in your mind as CBS News tries to move out of the number three spot. They wish people were watching their televisions instead of watching the people and things that they do wrong.

“It’s always easy to comment from the cheap seats.”

Many people in professional and collegiate sports have said those words at least once or twice in their athletic lives. Many times it’s said in anger or frustration after a tough loss or game.

Well, we received this document from a former reporter, who sent it to someone we work with in the world of public relations. It is as honest a view into a reporter’s soul as you will ever get.

When I was working at USA Today and CNN, I would say that many of us shared this view of the world of public relations.

The one thing I would add is a comment that works in your everyday life - “It’s the relationship, period.”

I have many friends in newsrooms across the country, but I won’t call them just to call about a press release. You have to have respect for what they do and not just call them with a bad pitch for something that doesn’t fit their needs.

Now, what I will do, is call a friend and ask them their opinions and ask who they suggest I talk to in their newsrooms about a pitch. Yet, if it’s not a good pitch, I am not going to waste anyone’s time.  Do that a few times and see how quickly you get voicemail on a regular basis.

Common sense isn’t common, anymore. Use your common sense before picking up the phone to call your reporter friend. This way, you will still be friends for many, many years to come.

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Update: Michael Arrington reports that Technorati has launched a CEO search.  Dave Sifry notes that he will remain with the company in a product role.

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Though many of my clients are surprised to learn that blog search engines exist, they warm up quickly to the concept, particularly when I encourage them to think of it as Google for blogs instead of the Web in general.

My colleagues tend to cut to the chase and inquire about which one to use–the context being “just tell me which one is the best available.” My response: A combination of Technorati and Google Blog Search ought to suffice for most clients.

As a heavy user of both engines, I have qualitative experience to account for Google Blog Search’s increased accuracy and timeliness of results. Plus, the fact that most of my clients are more comfortable and familiar with the Google user interface means that I need to pre-empt and manage their expectations of results from a Google Blog Search.

However, Google’s advancements beg the question of why and how Technorati, the ‘granddaddy of blog search,’ would give up its mantle to Google. Because corporations are hungry for data about the online chatter pertinent to their brands, one would think that it is in Technorati’s advantage to monetize their data. Two speculations for Technorati taking their eyes off the ball:

1. Online ad sales, Google’s forte, is a natural extension to monetizing this live data stream but it is not in Technorati’s DNA to execute.
2. Though still championing cool new technologies such as microformats, the reality of running a sustainable business is hitting home, thus inevitably causing a pause in the business and a slow down in commitment and dedication to improving the tool.

David Sifry’s State of the Live Web, April 2007, report was well received but came with speculations about a pending sale, fueled by this statement:

“Sifry says Technorati is now very much a media company, and that the growth in social media and use of the blog search engine’s tagged media pages has contributed to this growth.”

That said, I have nothing but respect and admiration for Tantek, CTO, Technorati, and his team for the free tool and for the good work of enabling my clients to search and make sense of the “live web.” 

Hello and welcome to the digital world of the voice of the web.

Back when I was just a young lad in school, I always carried around two books with me. One was (and still is) the AP Stylebook. It is the Bible of any writer. My old boss and dear friend, Steve Klein, used to make me keep one in every room in my house, including the bathroom.

The other book is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. It was given to me by another old boss, Tom Eherenfeld. The subtitle is “An informal guide to writing nonfiction.” This book is important because he brings a very simple mantra of keeping it simple.

And there’s the rub about writing for the web – it’s the KISS method – keep it simple, stupid.

No one is going on-line to read War and Peace. If you have something to say, say it. Don’t clutter up your site or blog with a lot of words that you don’t need to tell your story. Say what you have to say and get out of it. Just like I am doing here…

Another thing to keep in mind is that writers in the digital world have two paragraphs to capture your reader. If you don’t give the reader what they are looking for in a short amount of time, you will lose them. People don’t have all day to read – so get them in, give them what they want and get them out of it as quickly as you can.

That’s not to say if you have a book or a white paper that people want to read, they won’t take the time to read it. Most of the time, they would print it out to take with them, or they will bookmark it and read it when they do have the time.