Despite all the hype, hoopla and debate around social media as a marketing and public relations tool, there is one even more fundamental aspect of the Web that is far more pervasive: the search.

It seems weird to say “the search” without putting ”Google” in there, but there are other services available to dig up information, Wikipedia being the most obvious. It used to be that information was power, now it’s an avalanche that overwhelms us. Intelligence is what’s important: the ability to filter through the overload to determine what is useful and chart trends or patterns that have meaning and relevance.

When all that information is so readily available and convenient, it’s easy to take it at face value without looking deeper and doing some good old-fashioned digging to verify facts and the credibility of the source. For a journalist on deadline eager to wrap up a story, it can be a trap. Take the example cited by Drew Benvie at Drew B’s take on tech PR, in which a fictional athlete was presented in an article as an actual person, thanks to a bogus profile on Wikipedia.

That’s not to suggest that Wikipedia is not a valid research tool, but it is vulnerable to abuse and demonstrates the importance of verifying facts and cross-referencing any online source of information.

For organizations sensitive to how their brand or image is being presented to the world, it is definitely important to keep an eye on such online information portals to ensure the accuracy of whatever information is being presented about them.

And while there are valid questions about the veracity of online information, what about the value of obtaining media coverage online instead of in print?

As a newspaper editor with only so many inches of space in the print product but much more on the website, I would often hear the complaint that running a story only online was somehow inferior to running it in print.

Sure, there is tactile satisfaction to be had in handling ink-stained paper, but it should be amply evident by now that content online lives far longer and reaches a far larger audience than the processed corpses of trees. In the newspaper business, I would get feedback on stories from readers on other continents after the content appeared online. The print product, on the other hand, was distributed in only one city. You do the math.

Kevin Dugan at the Bad Pitch Blog shares my sentiment and offers a video clip to help make the point.

Technorati Tags: social media, Google, Wikipedia, media coverage, online media, print media

How we communicate is just as important as what we communicate. And by “how” I don’t mean what tool should be drawn from the social media toolbox. I mean the language we use that either demonstrates frankness, sincerity and honesty, or obvious self-interest that will only push away your listeners. Timing is also key. It’s much easier to engage in dialogue with someone if they don’t feel your agenda is pressuring the conversation. If you only speak with someone when you expect or need something from them, you’ve conveyed the impression that this is nothing more than transactional relationship. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Hardly the foundation for a long and fruitful association.

Today’s picks from the Blogosphere all touch on these points.

The first comes from Collective Conversation, where Kellie Major cites the example of a CEO who, in an address to his staff about cuts, demonstrates clearly and sincerely how he shares his employees’ pain.

In contrast, Joseph Thornley at Pro PR presents a somewhat different attempt at communication from the C-suite. In this case, it is RBC head honcho Gordon Nixon trying to reassure the bank’s customers that all is still right with the world and with the Canadian banking industry. Or is it really just a piece of self-promotional fluff that should have been distributed as a press release? You decide.

Lastly, we have words from the horse’s mouth about how to, and how not to, begin a dialogue with a journalist at Bulldog Reporter from Michael Singer, West Coast news editor for InformationWeek.com. And, no surprise here, he says waiting until you have a news release to peddle is not the best approach. He goes on to offer a number of other tips to keep in mind when chasing media on behalf of a client and how to make appropriate use of such avenues as Twitter.

Technorati Tags: social media, media relations, pitching, communications, RBC,  Gordon Nixon 

Pondering the place of social media in the marketing and PR toolkit has been a familiar theme on this blog as the industry as a whole attempts to understand how best to approach and manage audience engagement with such a dynamic, informal and immediate variety of channels as those that fit under the general heading of Web 2.0. (Or maybe we’ve already moved on into Web 3.0. Who can keep track?)

Should you blog? Should you tweet? Should a company hang out its dirty laundry for all to see? To whom can companies turn for advice and how can they validate the credentials and experience of those who claim to be the gurus with the answers?

It’s a pickle, for certain, and one that will only weigh more and more on the minds of companies through 2009 as they struggle to build awareness of their brand and their value proposition as recessionary pressures nibble away at the bottom line.

I’ve come across an interesting array of perspectives and opinions on these matters over the past couple of days.

Beth Harte explores the question, Is social media the same as marketing? and reaffirms the most basic precept: Social media is best considered and approached as one part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Her post also raises the quite valid concern about carpetbaggers who claim to be experts in the area.

Robert Geller writes about how pervasive social media tools such as Twitter have become, emphasizing his point with the example of how it is being used by the Israeli government as a communications tactic in its latest flare up with Hamas and the Palestinians.

But a social media tool’s popularity can pose problems, even security risks, for those who use it. As we have seen this week, Twitter’s success has attracted the attention of those with malicious intent. Terry Sweeney writes about how “the public nature of Twitter — like Facebook or web mail or P2P file-sharing sites — means it offers a rich petri dish for online mischief,” which has left the service scrambling to save face. And while this may not be sufficient reason to abandon the service, Terry suggests it warrants a hard look at what benefit can be derived from Twitter before jumping on board.

All that matters in the end is understanding your business, the audience you are trying to reach and using only those tools or tactics that make sense as an effective means to achieve your business development and customer service objectives. What’s hot is irrelevant.

Technorati Tags: media relations, social media, business development, Twitter, marketing

Seeing the forest for the trees
Francis is fond of describing our roles here at inmedia as “advocates in the court of public opinion.” That’s a much more appropriate and accurate label than “spin doctors.”

But the role of advocate is more than simply conveying our clients’ stories to the outlets that matter. We must also be willing to impress upon clients the agendas, or the simple realities, of the markets we are trying to reach on their behalf. What elements of their story must we have to effectively attract and retain the attention of the media we are targeting? What works? What doesn’t? How is the way the client wants to approach things more of a hindrance than a help to our efforts? To adequately serve our clients, we must deliver frank and honest counsel that sometimes includes feedback from the marketplace that may be painful to hear.

Over at the PR Conversations blog, Kristen E. Sukulac offers an interesting perspective on this by citing a classic exercise in inattentional blindness and change blindness.

PR helps raise venture capital
Bottom line here: good PR pays. Don’t take my word for it. This post at PR Squared may be a couple of weeks old, but the findings of the study it cites are timeless. A survey of 300 U.S. startups that received funding in the past three years found a clear correlation between employing a PR program and greater success in securing new financing.

Time well wasted?
And over at really practical marketing, Mark Nagurski gives a no nonsense primer and how to create, and derive value from, an effective online presence and the pitfalls that come of looking at it in terms of traditional advertising. In his view, less can be a whole lot more.

Technorati Tags: public relations, media relations, social media, venture capital, financing

BBC technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, posts an interesting piece on the dot.life blog about the slating of the new BlackBerry Storm by English comedian, Stephen Fry. No, this wasn’t part of a stand-up routine, but rather a series of messages on Twitter, where Fry apparently has a following of thousands.

I note Fry’s comment at the end of the post, essentially stating that he thought one of the results of the Net and social networking has been to make everyone more equal in their influence. But has this truly been the case?

Certainly in Fry’s case it is partially true, but while his newfound influence in the field of gadgets and consumer technology can be attributed in part to the social networking revolution, it is also true that he is a man who had a considerable public profile before the Internet was even considered a medium of any significance.

The web and its associated technologies have certainly given a voice to millions, but in terms of real influence, the masses still invariably turn to those who have commanded attention beyond the four walls of the internet.  Of course there are some exceptions to the rule, but the notion that we all have equal influence is generally only as true online as it is in the world at large.

Technorati Tags: social media, Internet, BBC, Stephen Fry, BlackBerry Storm

“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.

(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)

I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.

I chalked this one up to what I assumed was just an unfortunate experience on the part of one technology marketing executive until I relayed the story to a colleague last week, a CEO at another technology company here in Ottawa and an insightful marketer in his own right. I was again utterly gobsmacked when he said he didn’t view writing as a core requirement in the PR function, that the ability to pitch the story was far more important.

“And what do you do,” I asked him, “When the pitch is initially well received and the next words out of the reporter or editor’s mouth are, ‘Sounds good, send me something about it.’?”

Here’s the thing. To work at inmedia and, I believe, to be an effective media relations practitioner anywhere, you must be able to write at an expert level and you must be able to effectively pitch what you’ve written. There is no hierarchy between these two fundamental skills. Lack one, and you’re out of the game.

And here’s why.

To believe, as these two otherwise successful technology marketers clearly do, that writing is either not terribly important or that your PR function, whether internal or an agency, can be permitted to be lousy writers, is to completely beggar the entire communications process.

In the first instance, despite all the wonderful new communications tools at our disposal, most journalists still want to see something in cold, hard black and white, even if it is delivered electronically. And even if they don’t ask for it, it’s just gotta be in your best interests to give them well-written material so they have the complete story, with all the relevant facts and accurate spellings of company, product and people’s names to which they can refer. This is just so basic I’m staggered it needs stating.

Second, how in the heck does a PR practitioner demonstrate her or his understanding of the story without writing about it? Yes, a properly written document proves the communicator can — gasp! — communicate. That is, the words run together in some sort of comprehensible order, everything is spelled correctly and the commas and periods are in the right places. But it still won’t be any good unless the person writing it actually has a thorough grasp of the subject matter.

Effective writing is not a case of cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other documents to make a different document and it needs to be more than a merely technically accurate use of words, grammar and punctuation. Effective writing is the process of distilling what has been learned — from other documents, certainly, but also, and critically, from interviews with a range of subject-matter experts — into a new piece of work. It not only communicates the story to all who read it, it also demonstrates understanding.

Bottom line: If your agency can’t write about it well, they almost certainly can’t pitch it well. And even worse, they probably don’t even understand it well.

So, did we get the business? Well, that’s another story that I cover here: The Ottawa inferiority complex theorem strikes again.

Technorati Tags: writing, pitching, media relations, business development

All right, just to make sure everyone is caught up and on the same page now, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not have a heart attack over the weekend.

But all it took was a bogus posting to CNN’s online citizen journalism portal to demonstrate once again just how viral the web can be and and sucker punch Apple’s stock price. This has sparked plenty of commentary and navel gazing today about the risks of allowing average citizens to break so-called “news” without their scoop first being subjected to scrutiny and third-party verification. Check out Scott Karp’s take on how this was a failure of open systems and Matthew Ingram on how this was not a failure of citizen journalism.

This incident does reinforce the importance of trusted and reliable sources to bring us news and information that has in some way been confirmed and verified. The fact that CNN’s citizen journalism site, iReport, allows such misinformation to be uploaded and broadcast to the world, should serve as a wake-up call that content that’s been judged in some way is more important now than ever.

Sure, the nature of the web allowed this false report to be corrected as quickly as it was initially broadcast. But that’s irrelevant. For a period of time, those who were paying attention believed the CEO of a major publicly traded company was in a potentially life-threatening condition, with the hit to Apple’s stock price only the most obvious example of the chaos that can quickly ensure from such misinformation. As Karp says, such uncensored citizen journalism is an open invitation to those with malicious intentions to manipulate the public for their own ends. And the intent doesn’t have to be malicious for damage to be done. Someone with the most honourable of intentions can do similar harm simply by being wrong.

Of course, there should be a distinction made between eye-witness news – such as providing an account as a bystander or participant, or capturing on video a disaster or other dramatic event –and broadcasting unconfirmed rumours or outright lies. Even in this always-on world, we still need gatekeepers of some sort to make that judgment call.

Technorati Tags: citizen journalism, media, Steve Jobs, Apple, news reporting

I’ve commented before on the impending death of print and how this funeral dirge has evolved to include all traditional media since the rise of social media in all its various incarnations. Many enthusiastic proponents would have us believe that social media will soon emerge triumphant as the medium of choice for people to keep abreast of the latest news and information.

Who needs such staid institutions as daily newspapers and national television networks when citizen journalism can deliver in real-time a street-level perspective of what’s going on in the world through such avenues as Twitter, YouTube and the blogosphere?

Well, perhaps we’re turning in that direction, but there’s a long way to go yet, at least according to a report carried this week on Bulldog Reporter. According to a survey of more than 1,000 adults across the U.S., television, newspapers and radio (in that order) are still considered the most reliable sources of information ahead of online sources.

Now, we are left to assume that “online sources” refers to sources on the web other than the websites of those same television networks, newspapers and radio stations.

I contend that there will always be a distinction between in-depth coverage and analysis of the day’s news and events and the quick blurb or sound bite, from whatever source, that can be easily digested while on the go. They compliment each other, rather than cannibalize. And when it comes to seeing social media displace traditional media, I wholeheartedly agree with the viewpoint that there will always be a need for trusted sources of information with a track record of accuracy and impartiality.

As we increasingly turn to online sources of news and information that we can readily access while mobile, non-traditional sources of information will compete for our attention with the traditional. And print, radio and television will increasingly have to offer competitive online services to grab and hold readers. But it’s the commercial printing industry, in the business of killing trees, that will feel the most profound pain from this shift in our habits as consumers of news and information.

Technorati Tags: media, social media, journalism, Bulldog Reporter, radio, television, print

I originally wrote this post for DangleTech, Canada’s largest community-sponsored website dedicated to the issues surrounding Canada’s technology sector, where I contribute a weekly blog called “In the media: It’s where you need to be.” But my editor here at inmedialog, who’s been itching all week to see a post on this subject, decided we should also post it here.

One of the most frequent and, to tell the truth, most boring and least helpful, themes in the blogosphere is the all-too-common declaration by one blogger or another that PR is dead. With all the authority of his well-read blog, Robert Scoble started the ball rolling again this week with a post Monday that celebrated the fact that he actually heard about a new company – more of a raw beta concept, really – from some source other than a PR or corporate flack.

Leaving aside for the moment the question why this should be so noteworthy – Hey, Robert: It’s a rare day I don’t learn something new or hear about a new company, product or service with no involvement whatsoever from a PR or corporate flack. I call it waking up, opening my eyes and walking down the street! – he went on to extrapolate from this that PR is dead.

I’m not going to weigh in with comments on all the arguments raised both pro and con the silly idea. If you really have nothing better to do, if Canada’s not doing well enough at the Olympics to draw you in to all the TV coverage and you have time to kill, then you can see a good round-up here.

Notwithstanding the tediousness of this apparent fixation on the part of a lot of the blogosphere to bury PR and speak its eulogy, two useful points emerge.

The first is that when it comes to understanding public relations, the full scope of activities that fall under its rubric and the even fuller scope of marketing activities of which PR is merely a subset, Robert Scoble is strictly a blind man touching an elephant. Like many of his blog brethren, all Scoble ever sees (touches) is the story pitch. And since they are on the receiving end of a staggering number of poorly written and badly targeted pitches, it’s no wonder these guys see no value in what most PR people are doing with them.

In fact, the pitch is the very end of a lengthy and intensive process that, if done properly, creates tremendous value, both for the idea being pitched and for the person to whom it is being pitched. It’s merely one arrow in a PR quiver that, in turn, is merely one weapon in a marketing armoury.

The second useful point is that in many ways, Scoble and his colleagues are right. PR is dead. At least, PR – as it has been practiced by too many for far too long – is dead. That old way saw (mal)practitioners source huge lists of so-called contacts from commercial media directories, mail-merge them with their news release or story pitch, and then blast it out to hundreds, if not thousands. It didn’t work in the old days any better than it does now. All that has changed is that the targets of those useless pitches are naming and shaming those who do it. (I did weigh in on the death of the media directory.)

Far from the blogosphere sounding the death knell for PR, it has focused attention on the most egregious practices of the industry. While I still find most of the arguments tendentious and silly, at least they’re serving this one useful public service.

Technorati Tags: Death of PR, public relations, marketing communications, Scoble

There’s been no shortage of commentary about the threat and opportunity posed to traditional media, and the PR profession for that matter, by social media (reference too, my post of yesterday). But, while these new tools of mass communication and interaction are truly disruptive, have we developed the maturity to use them wisely?

Chris Brogan today offered some key etiquette points to keep in mind with social media, whether it be basic e-mail use or the more advanced features of Facebook. It’s by no means an exhaustive list.

There mere fact that Chris finds it necessary to start off his list with the email etiquette, of all things, demonstrates the utter thoughtlessness many of us demonstrate with the casual click of that Send button. Email is the original social media tool (no doubt, others will disagree about that). It’s been widely available to the masses for more than a decade, and yet we still have to be reminded about how to use it judiciously?

It’s the utter convenience of these things that I believe is the problem. These tools are so ubiquitous and available it’s easy to focus on employing them as the ready means to a goal without giving sufficient thought to the impact on those with whom we’re trying to communicate, or those around us we shouldn’t disturb.

Mobile phones are the ultimate example of this. Movie theatres still find it necessary to preface the feature presentation with that annoying “Please, don’t add your own soundtrack” PSA to ensure ringtones have been muted. And that’s a casual social setting. I’d estimate that 90 per cent of the time when I am attending some kind of business function that includes a presentation, at least one person in that audience will receive a call with their ringtone at full volume to interrupt the speaker. Rather than mute the volume, quite often they’ll leap up and sprint from the room with the phone still ringing.

The important thing to remember in this age of instant communication — all communication doesn’t have to happen instantly, people don’t have to respond to you within minutes and the world really doesn’t need to know what you had for breakfast or share in that snazzy new Facebook app you’ve found.

Technorati Tags: social media, etiquette, email, Facebook