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October 27, 2005

Citizen journalists: Who needs money?

I found an interesting piece on DetroitNews.com. It invites readers to submit essays.

Share your First Person experience
Do you have an experience to share with our readers? Maybe a life-changing experience that made you look at things differently? Or a humorous experience that simply put a smile on your face? Or even an ordinary encounter that had an extraordinary impact on your life?
We’d like you to share your stories with our readers through a new feature, called First Person, that will begin later this month.
It’s an opportunity to help others through the telling of your story. Or simply to entertain them.
To submit a First Person essay, call National Editor Nan Seelman at 313-223-4614, or e-mail her at nseelman@detnews.com.

Back in the day, that used to be called freelancing, and writers were paid for it. Now the newspaper is targeting aspiring writers by asking for free "user created content." This First Person feature is aside from The Detroit News's seven "blog" sections. (The blogs don't have the usual blog mechanics: comments on each post, trackbacks, RSS.)

Providing free content, whether writing or photos, is an interesting conundrum for unpublished writers. I'm sure many people would love having their work published just for the sake of seeing it published and citing it in a resume.

Robert Scoble, the Microsoft blogger, points to a debate between SixApart's Anil Dash and Flickr's Caterina Fake. Dash suggests that Flickr users whose photos are ranked as interesting should receive some sort of compensation for being in the category and drawing viewers to the site. Fake says being interesting is payment enough.

Posted by at 09:47 AM
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October 25, 2005

Better read than dread: why your company needs a blog policy

Wired has a story about companies that are filtering the word "blog." Some are worried that employees will leak sensitive information.

From the article: "In a survey of over 300 large businesses conducted in conjunction with Forrester, Proofpoint found 57.2 percent of respondents were concerned with employees exposing sensitive material in blogs."

And not all blogs are blocked – only those that use the word "blog." Instead of blocking sites (and thus possibly making them more desirable), shouldn't the company be upfront with its employees and create and distribute a blogging policy?

Posted by at 10:07 AM
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October 19, 2005

How do you pitch a blogger? Very carefully

The BlogOn Social Media Summit had a fascinating session yesterday on the question of how to make public relations pitches to bloggers. Representing the pitchers was Jeremy Pepper; representing the pitchees was Andrew Carton of the Treonauts blog. Moderating was Cathy Brooks of the PR agency of Porter Novelli.

Hanging over the session was an angry post on the whole topic the day before by Jeff Jarvis. He was on a panel and noted that other illustrious speakers were planned, but then wrote:

I also see panels such as this: "Pitching to Social Media ... How do you pitch to bloggers when most spurn overt attempts to influence them? It’s a whole new PR ballgame and you need a new playbook to get in the game."

Makes my skin crawl. Businesses think they can exploit blogs. But I want to tell blogs to exploit businesses instead: Get what you want out of them. Get advertising money out of them, if you want. Or attention. Or peace and quiet. If a PR company calls you, tell them to have their ad buyers call instead. This is why I generallly won’t do panels at events for PR people. No offense. But there’s nothing in it for us. They want free publicity from us. They want to piggyback on our trust. Well, then, buy an ad.

Tuesday, Jeremy began by saying he "100% supports pitching bloggers," but noted he’s been on the receiving end of clumsy pitches himself. Although his blog is about public relations, he’s been pitched to blog about music sites, for example. He attributed such clunky attempts to junior PR staff working without oversight.

Andrew doesn't mind being pitched but when he asked a flack why public relations people were approaching him, rather than marketing reps, he was told that because he wasn’t being paid to write about Treos, he fell under the purview of public relations.

That line of demarcation is vanishing. A blogger in the audience said a flack had pitched her a story and simultaneously asked about buying an ad. The blogger needed the ad revenue but didn’t want it to influence her decision whether to write about the product. Her solution is to keep the traditional news publishing model in mind, with its church and state separation of editorial and advertising functions. It’s harder to do of course, when the editor is also the ad salesman.

Andrew, who makes a respectable sum of money from his blog, believes blog readers implicitly understand that bloggers make money from advertising and respect that.

Aside from the ethics, practical tips emerged for pitching bloggers:

• Read the blog before pitching it!
  
• Make the pitch short and low-key
  
• Provide a link & contact information for an expert
  

P.S. Here’s a New York miracle: I got out of the cab at the Copacabana Tuesday, schlepping luggage, laptop, swag bag and purse. I went to the coat check to drop them off. I had left the laptop in the cab! I ran back outside. The doorman spotted the cab, which had turned around! The cabbie stopped! The laptop was rescued! New York is full of nice people.

Technorati tags:

PR
public relations
BlogOn2005

Posted by Laurie Mayers at 10:49 AM
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October 18, 2005

Blogging On

I’m here at the Copacabana Nightclub in New York for the BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit, where music and passion are always in fashion. It’s definitely an interesting venue. The stage has a black backdrop and strong stage lighting for the live webcasts, while we in the audience get softer lights comes from the red Japanese lanterns. Lunch was in the Carmen Miranda room. As befits a social media conference, several cool tools are available for participants – the webcasts, podcasts, an event blog, and a social networking site.

Some of the highlights from Monday afternoon’s sessions:
· Lisa Poulson of Burson-Marsteller interviewed Gil Schwartz, executive vice president of communications at CBS Television, on “Communicating with your customers in times of crisis.” While the basic lessons of crisis communications still remain (acknowledge the problem, fix the problem, aggressively get the message out), the speed of bad news has increased since the days of the Tylenol crisis. The news cycle, between online editions of mainstream media and blogs, is dramatically shorter now, Schwartz noted, “so now the anxiety is just 24/7.”
“The difference is the time frame and the potential for any story -- no matter how bogus or transitory -- to flip out of control,” Schwartz said. He bemoaned the lack of fact-checking on some blogs, as well as in some mainstream media. On a day when the top news stories on BlogPulse were all of The New York Times reporting on its own problematic reporter, Judith Miller, Schwartz said, “I guess my plea would be to hold yourselves to the same high standards as The New York Times,” to much laughter.

· Steve Rubel moderated a discussion with bloggers Shel Israel, Deborah Schultz of Six Apart and Vicki Warker, who is Sprint’s business blogger, based on the Cluetrain theme “Markets are conversations.” They explored questions arising from corporate blogging, such as how much time to spend on customer service complaints and whether tightly controlled messages are best in some circumstances, such as a new product launch.

BlogOn2005

Posted by Laurie Mayers at 12:25 PM
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October 06, 2005

Survey: Bloggers Warming to Business

Technorati and Edelman have posted the results of their blogging survey, with 821 bloggers weighing in with their answers. And although it looks like public relations agencies still have work to do on gaining the trust of bloggers (4.6 on a 1-10 scale), most are willing to accept contact from an agency or company, and just over 70 percent would like to accept products from a company in order to blog about it.

A few key responses:

• Just under half of bloggers have never been contacted by a company or an agency.
• Only 8 percent said a blog was untrustworthy if it was endorsed and produced by a company.
• Almost 63 percent said they trust other bloggers the most when looking for product information.

Posted by at 10:00 AM
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October 05, 2005

Blog notes: Word of mouth attacked, Scoble on disclosure, Bad blog

By David Binkowski

A few remarkable notes over the past few days around the blogosphere:

- AdAge, in a last-ditch effort to secure already bloated 2006 advertising budgets, has published the following article about word of mouth marketing "Stealth Marketers Flirt With Law...Disclosing Commercial Ties Crucial." The first rule of advertising: write a sensationalized headline. The first rule as a WOMMA member: The WOMMA Ethics Code. What is that? We call it “The Honesty ROI”, based on three simple concepts:

1. Honesty of Relationship: You say who you're working for;
2. Honesty of Opinion: You say what you really believe; and
3. Honesty of Identity: You don't lie about who you are.

Furthermore, it’s pretty clear that, going back to Jonathan Carson’s post on PR’s role in the blogosphere, that PR gets blogging and word of mouth. We get it. Advertising agencies often don’t (see "Bad fake blog, bad!" below).

- Scoble continues the debate over product disclosure. Let’s take a step back from bloggers being pitched and look at what this really is: the attempt to share information. In your daily life, information is freely passed around by the nanosecond via email, IM, cell phones, blogs, you name it, without being sourced. Word of mouth marketing is simply the tool that enables people who are already talking about a product, service, etc. to continue that discussion. So I’ll counter with this: Good word of mouth marketing enables people who are already talking about a product/et al. As evidenced by several artificial/flopped campaigns, you can't create it.

If we provide a product to a blogger for free and they hate it, then they’re being honest. If they like it, then they’re selling out. Realistically, we’re not giving away Porsches. Let’s put this into context: Can a free product whose value is less than $25 really influence a blogger? I highly doubt it.

- Bad fake blog, bad! Using a fake character to shill your product is pretty much never good. Having that character drop in with a few words for a blogger who just posted a highly personal piece on his long-strained relationship with his father, now that's really not good. Duh.

Posted by staff at 09:03 AM
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