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

Posted on August 1, 2007 by rgeller

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.

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Enterprise 2.0 and ROI

Posted on July 31, 2007 by rgeller

The Presto Vivace blog called out the 7/27 Information Week article Business Value Of Web 2.0 Tools Hard To Measure yesterday.   The post and article cited a Forrester Group survey of enterprise IT managers that showed lack of hard ROI for Web 2.0 technologies.

I expand a bit here on my comment on the Presto Vivace blog.

I am not surprised by the study. First off, Web 2.0 itself is an
amorphous concept – many could and do debate what it is and which
technologies it encompasses. Second, it is just technology while it is
the application of technology that is important and can lead to
quantifiable benefits. I bet if they were to look into specific areas
where Web 2.o technologies are well-integrated into applications that
support lines of business, they would see a return. Finally, it is true
that many of the benefits that Web 2.0 delivers – improved
collaboration, organization and discoverability of info – are soft and
hard to measure.

This reminded me of my days selling Lotus Notes groupware solutions in the 90’s, and sales force automation systems before that.  Although most of the benefits were considered to be soft, many studies documented improvements and ROI over the long term for organizations that did better jobs of implementing these systems, and managing knowledge and info.

When it comes to blogging, it would seem on the face that it is a big time sink and thus a productivity drain, at least for the short term.  Looking outside the sphere of IT and technology projects, there are some hard returns that come with communicating more effectively and openly as some forward looking executives and organizations are starting to do using blogging and related technologies.  See my post From Madmen to PR’s Holy Grail, and of course Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s popular book Naked Conversations.

(I am of course not saying that blogging in and of itself is a panacea or recipe for effective PR, just that it is increasingly a tool that can be part of the communications mix).

Also, I touched upon some related areas in my January post Google and Web 2.0 Productivity Dividends.

Posted in Web 2.0 | Comments Off on Enterprise 2.0 and ROI

PR, Politics of RSS, Unintended Consequences

Posted on July 26, 2007 by rgeller

Continuing on yesterday’s topic of RSS, I am now starting to understand the importance of RSS standards and appreciating the related politics.  There appears to be lots of teeth gnashing and back and forth about these topics.

Here is where it gets interesting from a PR standpoint.  It shows why us PR folk should stay attuned to some of these issues which at first might appear to be just tech talk and religion.

Scripting News blogged today about Sun’s move to release financial results first via RSS:

Mike
Dillion is Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary
for Sun Microsystems. On his blog he says "We’re trying something
different…"

He says: "On Monday, we will release our financial information first to the
public via our website, RSS feeds and 8-K filing. Then, about 10 minutes later,
we will release the information to the traditional private agencies and their
paid subscribers.

This alone was not that surprising – I had blogged about Sun’s intention to do this after the NY Times reported this back in November 2006 (What Next, a MySpace Profile?).  Here’s an excerpt from the NY Times What’s Online column:

Jonathan Schwartz, the chief executive of  Sun Microsystems,
has called for the S.E.C. to accept the use of the Web to disclose
significant financial information to shareholders under Regulation FD
(for “fair disclosure”). Complaining that his lawyers kept warning him
off discussing various company-related issues on his blog, he decried
Regulation FD’s insistence that companies use “anachronistic” methods
like conference calls and news releases to disclose financial
information (blogs.sun.com/jonathan).

Then, I caught Sam Ruby’s post from yesterday, First Impressions, on the Intertwingly blog (this goes to the "unintended consequences" part of my post title).  Here’s an excerpt:

"Jonathan
Schwartz: to get the latest updates directly from Sun, be sure to
subscribe to our RSS
feeds.

You know, people use the term RSS like Kleenex. 
As long as Sun isn’t using RSS 2.0 to disclose
financial results, it will probably be OK.  Let’s take a look at the first feed.

Oops.

Oh, well, it probably is still OK.  If RSS 2.0 is used correctly, and Sun is
a technology company after all, it will probably be OK.  Probably.  Let’s take a
closer
look at that first feed.

This feed does not validate.  Eek!

… OK, so in English, what’s the problem here?  Well items are intended to be
identified by globally
unique identifiers…  It is not good if you are trying to convince the
SEC that syndication is a reliable mechanism for distributing financial
results."

Oh well, as they say, "no good deed goes unpunished."  Releasing financial information via blogs and RSS might seem like another chink in the armor of the venerable and dated press release and associated news release wire services.  Yet standards and details are important and there’s still lots of work to do to perfect PR 3.0.

Posted in PR Tech | Comments Off on PR, Politics of RSS, Unintended Consequences

RSS Blues

Posted on July 25, 2007 by rgeller

My News Radar is picking up lots of chatter about RSS over the past few days.  Lots of this relates to RSS standards, the politics of RSS and the recent acquisition of FeedBurner by Google.

(It figures, just
as I get off the dime and decide to do a better job of monitoring my
blog’s metrics, including tracking feed stats via FeedBurner, Google
goes ahead and acquires the company.)

Oh well, we’ll see how that goes.  I am not sure if the pessimism exhibited in many of the posts in my freshly updated news radar (see left column) is warranted.

On the other hand, is there another game in town besides FeedBurner?  It seems like a shrewd acquisition on Google’s part.  Hope they don’t tinker with it too much (read: muck it up).

 

Posted in PR Tech | Comments Off on RSS Blues

From Madmen to PR’s Holy Grail

Posted on July 23, 2007 by rgeller

All the hoopla about Madmen, AMC’s new show that covers the men of advertising circa the late 50’s, reminded me that there is no recognized culture of PR akin to the culture of advertising.

Dating back to the days of the Mary Tyler Moore show – her husband on show, Rob Petrie, was an ad man – the public has held a fascination with the people who create advertising, despite the ambivalent feelings people generally have about ads.

Ad men were romanticized back then.  Although the image has been updated, and is certainly less male dominated, it is still seen to be a glamorous field.

And the image people have of the PR field is…. ???

Then, I reminded myself that PR as a profession is on the upswing (please see my March post on the Fusion Forum: PR Props).

I was also pleased to see good PR for PR in the Business Week article: The Corporate Image: What Price Reputation?.  It posited the startling thesis that a company’s reputation can affect its stock price.  Not a revelation in and of itself, but upon reading further it really did get interesting.  It reported on the growing trend of turning reputation management into a science, and cited research isolating and identifying the specific premium (or drag) that a company’s reputation can add to (or subtract from) its stock price.

The article cited work that research firms like Delahaye (you will recall I interviewed author and Delahaye – now Cision – Sr. VP Mark Weiner on Fusion Forum) are doing to research image and steer clients to the most effective messages.

Here’s an interesting quote from the article:

"There are plenty of
data measuring the visibility and credibility of a company," says Low.
"But there have been no data showing how communications adds value to a
company." Says corporate communications professor Paul A. Argenti of
Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, also a CCW partner: "If we can get
this right, we have found the holy grail of communications."

The reporter concludes:

While these
experiments are intriguing, the real test of faith in the new science
of spin will come when somebody risks serious money on it. Suppose a
hedge fund really does unravel the secret that can boost a company’s
value simply by turning around its reputation—and uses that information
to buy and reshape that company’s image?

Heady stuff indeed!  OK, so there’ not cult of PR.  But I am resting easier knowing there may be a hedge fund pot at the end of the rainbow.

 

Posted in PR | 2 Comments

Avoiding Tech PR Writing Pitfalls

Posted on July 19, 2007 by rgeller

I just thought I would call attention to my post on the Fusion Forum blog today which asks and answers the question: Does tech jargon have its place in PR writing?

It cites a study referenced on Cincom Expert Access about the frequency of tired tech terms that add no meaning to press releases.   Some of the winners, or rather losers, were:

"next generation," with 9,895 uses. There were over 5,000 uses of  "flexible,"
"robust,” "world class," "scalable," and "easy to use." Other notably
overused phrases with between 2,000 and 5,000 uses included "cutting
edge," "mission critical," "market leading," "industry standard,"
"turnkey," and "groundbreaking." Oh and don’t forget "interoperable,"
"best of breed," and "user friendly," each with over 1,000 uses in news
releases.

I expand on his analysis and offer tips on how to write about technology, and the proper use and place for jargon.  You can read more about this here.

Posted in Tech PR | 1 Comment

Memes Gone Wild: What’s YOUR Media Appetite?

Posted on July 17, 2007 by rgeller

From a PR person’s standpoint, it just doesn’t get any
better.

I have long held a fascination
with memetics, the science that purports to study how ideas and culture propagate.  According to the Wikipedia definition: "In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the ethologist Richard Dawkins coined the … term "meme" to describe a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture." 

After all, if one can truly understand how memes work, isn’t that one
step closer to understanding how buzz happens, and to making buzz happen? 

Since digging into this and reading books by Seth Godin
(Unleashing the Ideavirus), Richard Brodie (Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme) and Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine), all great reads, I have since come to believe that memetics is more of a
pseudoscience than a real science.  There’s lots of reasons for this, some of which were explained in my post: Welcome to the New, User Generated Non stop Media Whipsaw.

At any rate, while perusing my daily does of RSS feeds I
happened on this “meme” that was started by Jeremiah Owyang, in his post My Media consumption Diet:  "I’m hoping to start this meme, that others will join in and share their
media consumption diet, in hopes, that we’ll start to learn how they
get information or be entertained. I’ve sort of mixed up mediums, and
media types, but after some thought, that’s the best way to organize it."

He goes on to list his media preferences in the following categories: Web, Music, TV, Communication, Movies, Magazines, Books, Newspapers and tagged others to
do the same. 

From a myopic PR perspective it does not get any better – to start a trend that might wind up with everyone wearing their media consumption habits on their blog sleeves. 

It is Pay it Forward meets chain letters meets self absorbed blogging culture.  From another perspective, it shows
some of the benefits and implications of user generated content. 

I checked on Technorati and over 1000 people have
responded. You can sort by authority to see what the
high authority influentials are reading, and how they like to get information.

 

 

 

.

Posted in Web 2.0 | 4 Comments

Read My Blog or I’ll Shoot This Dog

Posted on July 13, 2007 by rgeller

7
I just recently passed the six month mark of Flack’s Revenge, and thought I’d take a little time to reflect on the experiences.  It made me think of this famous National Lampoon magazine cover, back from when I was just a kid.  Being a naive kid, I half wondered "geez, will they really shoot the poor dog?"  I bought the issue (actually, I was hooked  and bought most of their issues).

I am wondering if I’ll need to issue a similar threat to get some real traffic going.  On the one hand, blogging (in general) seems like  a desperate bid for attention and self promotion.  On the other, it has been fun, I have  learned by delving into some interesting topics, and have truly appreciated the links, interaction and comments.

I still think it is imperative if you are in marketing, PR or really and type of business communications to blog.  I have a new respect for those who crank out great posts frequently and consistently, and for those who have been able to break through and build significant audiences.

I have been told that I am a good writer, clearly it takes more than just writing skills to build blogging momentum.  Mostly, it has been admittedly difficult to come up with a healthy pipeline of topics and find the time to develop and blog about these.

I guess it depends on the type of blog, but for those who are trying to build audience, interaction and a vibrant community, I have been thinking recently that the skills needed are more akin to those of a radio talk show DJ show. 

The good ones can fill up hours of air time, be provocative with their own thoughts and ideas yet also riff off of hot topics and caller interaction – in short they are interesting, topical, information-driven and consistently keep audiences entertained and engaged.  They keep the conversations and pace of info interesting and moving along.

Looking ahead, I am resolving to post more frequently and be more attuned to (and comment on) others’ blogs.

Thanks for reading, I hope to continue to make it worth your time, and without threatening to shoot any dogs.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Social Networking and PR

Posted on July 11, 2007 by rgeller

I thought I would follow-up Monday’s post by tuning my news radar (courtesy MySyndicaat) to the search term  "PR and social networking," to explore and share what others have been writing on the topic (in for a dime, in for a dollar I guess).

I found some very helpful posts.  I list a few of them below, please see the links in the news radar section to the left for more info:

Brian Solis of the PR 2.0 blog links to and answers Scoble’s question: "Is Facebook the new press release?" ("no").  The post offers a pretty good Facebook primer, and discusses implications for marketing and PR (example: "I wholeheartedly believe that leaving a traditional pitch on the wall of Facebook for all too see is fundamentally a bad idea.")

Blonde 2.0 offers some good advice about building brands with social tools.

The MSNBC "Public Relations 2.0" story (when will the "pet term+2.0" trend just die already?) defines  social media (I learned that social networking is a category under the more general "social media" umbrella) and describes PR applications, although it did not have much to say under "Social Networking Sites."

The PodTech site has a great podcast titled: How Social Media is Transforming PR,  featuring an interview with Brian Solis on the topic (Brian seems to be all over this subject and has some great things to say).  The accompanying blog post links to a manifesto on Brian’s PR 2.0 blog ("manifesto" is actually in the title, it is great when rhetoric comes with such user friendly labels, lest we confuse the info with something less weighty): The Future of Communications – A Manifesto for Integrating Social Media into Marketing.

Seriously, it is a great read and I found it to be very informative.  He advocates that marketers must "engage or die" (this sounds like what my wife said to me before we got married).

He further says "What we’re talking about here is how
companies will best manage an integrated communications strategy in the
not too distant future. It is about putting the “public” back in Public
Relations and realizing that focusing on important markets and
influencers will have a far greater impact than trying to reach the
masses with any one message or tool."

It is a pretty wide ranging post covering everything from Twitter, to blogs, to Facebook and more.

Between the podcast and his post, Brian comes at the topic both from a high level, and for those like myself who have had their fill of philosophy, also offers some very specific and actionable advice.

 

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Antisocial networking revisited

Posted on July 9, 2007 by rgeller

Won’t you please join my (insert social networking site) network?

I am convinced that, before long we will all be one big writhing mass of social networkers, spending countless hours doing whatever people do on these sites.

The allure is jut too great, the peer pressure too strong.  Come join my network.  Together we can find better jobs, make business connections or get sales leads.  We can figure out how to leverage each other without the awkwardness of making small talk with strangers at in-person networking events, or figuring out what to do with the toothpick when you’re done with the hors d’oeuvre .

I started with casual IM and text messaging, progressed to heavy RSS
usage and then blogging, the gateway drug to social networking.  Peer pressure is pushing me over the edge, offering the lure that is simply too tough to resist, and proving to me the power of these sites.

Well, I know I haven’t suddenly gotten more popular, so perhaps it’s the phase of the moon but I have gotten a ton of these invitations recently and I reckon it is time to reconsider my decidedly anti-social networking stance. 

Stay tuned, I’ll share my experiences, especially as they relate to Web 2.0 and PR tech, perhaps causing you to reconsider your invitation!

Posted in Web 2.0 | Comments Off on Antisocial networking revisited