Flack's Revenge

A Modest RSS Proposal

Well, I am back after a relaxing week in the Outer Banks, a beautiful spit of land just off the coast of North Carolina.  It had great beaches, crashing waves and seemed to be one of the few places in the U.S. that did not take a weather pounding last week.

Anyway, I further pondered the question from my last post: why the slim adoption of RSS among tech journalists?

Could it be at least partly because PR professionals have not jumped on the RSS bandwagon, and are not using RSS to disseminate PR materials to any great degree?

Sounds ridiculous, yet one of the findings of the survey was that an incredible 67% of the surveyed journalists ranked "PR contacts" as a top 3 method for researching articles - behind Google / Yahoo! (76%) and company websites (69%), yet ahead of "other articles" (52%).

First, it is great to know that they are actually listening.  Second, this led me to wonder whether our choices in how we communicate influence how others "listen."

Food for thought.   Sounds like we may need another survey of the PR side.

If you want to read more about my thoughts on RSS and PR, please see my post RSS: Read "Stop Stalling"

Is RSS Usage Overstated?

A bit ironic isn't it?  We did not find as much uptake for RSS among tech journalists that we surveyed as we had expected (see yesterday's post Social Media Impact on Tech Journalism, and the survey summary on the Fusion PR Forum).

In brief, RSS was ranked by the journalists we surveyed as among the least popular ways to receive news and info.  You would think RSS would be wildly popular in information-driven professions like tech journalism (unfortunately, I get the sense that my fellow PR professionals have not jumped on the RSS bandwagon in droves yet either).

Yet Computerworld reported yesterday the results of a Forrester survey: RSS Tops List of Web 2.0 Tools.  True, their survey was of IT managers, not end users of technology.  Still, you would think the results would not be at such odds.

Social Media Impact on Tech Journalism

Some have said that social media like blogs, Wikis and RSS pose a threat to traditional journalists and publications, especially in the tech sector. 

For example, an article in Forbes (see "Tech Boom, Media Bust") reported that tech media is reeling because of blogs.  SlashDot’s ensuing post was the focus of much heated debate, both online and off.

At Fusion PR, we wanted to go beyond the simple storyline and heated debate and find out specifically how social media is changing traditional tech journalism, amidst some very obvious trends – the growth of blogging, the shrinking or print media, and surge in online advertising and traffic. 

So we launched a survey of tech journalists last month.   Our goal in conducting this anonymous survey was to find out directly from actual journalists how their jobs have changed since the advent and rapid ascent of new and social media.

We wanted to determine to what extent traditional media are taking advantage of social media tools. Has this changed how they research, write and deliver their stories, and follow the technologies they cover?

The hope was to get a better understanding of the profession, leading to better ways of communicating with our journalist contacts.

You can find out more about the results by visiting the Fusion blog today.

 

Friendships and Technology, for Better and Often Worse

In my post Antisocial Networking I mentioned that I was getting a ton of invitations to social networking sites and joked that "before long we will all be one big writhing mass of social networkers, spending countless hours doing whatever people do on these sites" due to peer pressure.

My post implied in a light hearted way that technology was changing the definition of "friend."  Since then, some have come out and said in a more serious way that technology really is changing the nature of friendships.

In MediaPost Online Spin, Max Kalehoff had an interesting take on the subject in his article Please, No More Friends.  He wrote: "We’re experiencing friends overload, and it’s a tragedy of the commons. The practice of friending has morphed way beyond the term’s original intention and utility. And that is why I declare friends — at least in the social-networking context — passé...

Let me be clear: Social networks are very much alive and well, but our traditional, generalized notion of friend is dead. When online friendships begin to scale artificially — such as randomly or via the all-too-easy click of a button — they run the risk of overwhelming us, causing the aggregate value of deeper social-network friendships to erode."

A little depressing (and overblown, in my opinion) but perhaps he is onto something.

Social networking friendship creep (a trend, not a person you want to avoid) is a more visible example of technology's potential for altering how we relate to each other, and who we call friends.

The NY Times described how cell phone "friend and family" calling plans are doing much the same, in Saturday's article What's Good for Business Can be Hard on Friends:

"A month ago, Brandy McDowell sat down with her longtime friend, Kezia Chandler, and told her she had switched cellphone carriers. Their relationship has not been the same since. Now, they barely speak...

Maybe they should blame the cellphone carriers. The carriers, after all, set up plans that encourage subscribers to talk mainly to people in the same network. The companies say they are simply trying to recruit and retain customers.

But what was set up as a purely business strategy is having an unintentional social effect. It is dividing the people who share informal bonds and bringing together those who have formal networks of cellphone 'friends.'"

I am in PR. Why should I Blog?

So if you are in PR, why do you need to blog?

I'll spare you all my rantings about new times calling for new communications measures (if you are new to this blog, here are a few representative links A Publication of One and The Web 2.0 Press Release: An Oxymoron?; also, you can see the PR Tech category of this blog).

If you are in tech PR, you might also want to refer to the following Forbes article Tech Boom, Media Bust and ensuing SlashDot post Blogs are Eating Tech Media Alive and commentary.  Without getting into too much detail - the article warrants a dedicated post - suffice it to say that blogging, or at least factoring blogs into the communications mix could be a matter of survival and not just a good idea.

No, the reasons are more basic.  I contend that whether your focus is traditional PR aimed at MSM or the new PR  you should develop effective blogging skills.

This is why:

Being a good blogger means writing in a way that attracts attention and engages people. It means communicating well.

This skill is of course vital for any kind of media relations.

It means tracking the hot issues

No one wants to read a blog that hashes over last week's news.  Staying-up-to-date is also key in PR, especially in fast moving sectors like tech and B2B.

It means knowing what you are talking about

No one wants to read a blog that is misinformed or full of hot air.

It means coming up with interesting concepts

Sure, many blogs comment on existing news and content, however if you can't add an interesting perspective and/or occasionally come up with original ideas, you will probably not draw much of a following.

In short, blogging well means communicating well, being up-to-date, interesting and relevant.

Does developing good blogging skills mean that you need to be an A lister in the first year?  Not at all, God knows I am not.  See this inspirational post from Ben's Brain - You Don't Need to be an A List Blogger to be an A List Blogger. But aspiring to be a good blogger forces you to hone the above skills.

If you are in PR and don't think these skills are important, you might as well look for another gig or be content to be just another hack in the business.

Blogging's a Big Time Sink. So Why Blog?

Yesterday's post reminded me about what a time sink blogging can be.

When you are blogging, and trying to do a good job of it, conventional assumptions about effective time management go out the window.

Good time managers minimize activities that steal time from tackling important long term goals and high priority short term activities.   Another rule of thumb is to not start your day off with time sinks because they inevitably take over the day.

Wading through email is an example of this type of time sink and so is blogging.  One of the rules of effective blogging is to first be a good "listener" (see yesterday's MarketingProfs post by T.J. McCue Blogging Baby Steps).   This takes time.

Maybe others have a better way, what I do is monitor hundreds if not thousands of RSS feeds for specific keywords (not as laborious as it sounds since I use FeedDemon to help sift through the feeds), regularly visit my favorite blogs, and also scan email newsletters and other sources of info, adding a serendipitous information discovery element to feed my blogging muse.

After the listening part is done you need to come up with an original concept or commentary and then write the thing.

I hope my boss is not reading this (actually, I have begged him to read my blog) but the above falls into the category of Great Big Honking Time Sink.

So if blogging renders Time Management an oxymoron, why even bother?

If you are in PR, you need to blog.  I will explain why I think this is so in tomorrow's post.