Why you should never give an unrehearsed demo to a journalist with a video

Scott Kirsner blogs about a disastrous live demo by an executive at Nuance Communications, one of the biggest players in speech recognition. The demo went so badly that the exec posted a follow-up on YouTube explaining what went wrong. A lot of reporters carry video cameras these days, so know what you’re doing before you agree to let them switch those devices on!

The press release evolves again

Maggie Fox’s Social Media Group, which is one of the most innovative boutique agencies specializing in new media marketing, has developed a new version of the Social Media Press Release (SMPR), which was pioneered by Shift Communications in 2006.

The SMPR differs substantially from the traditional press release, which is often long, detailed and inflexible. The new format emphasizes many points of entry, so that journalists and bloggers can pick and choose the information – and the media – that they wish to use. The latter point is important. With so many media outlets today using images, audio and video to tell a story, the traditional press release doesn’t meet their needs very well. The SMPR makes room for story-telling through whatever media the publisher wishes to use. It requires more work on the client end, but should result in much better results.

Another innovation in this new version is its use of popular back-end services like YouTube and Flickr to host content. This means that people can find the information through search engines as well as via the press release.

Maggie has made the template available for anyone to use under a Creative Commons license. She has a more detailed explanation here. Or you can just download the template in PDF format.

Daily reading 01/20/2008

ScrabbleWars: P For Piracy, Or E For Extra Exposure? – Media Post, Jan. 18, 2008

tags: facebook, social_media_useful

  • Here’s an example of a corporation fumbling a viral marketing opportunity. Instead of taking advantage of the positive publicity that a knockoff Scrabble app has generated on Facebook, the company is threatening to sue! What a perfect opportunity to tap into buzz created by somebody else! What a dumb move by Hasbo!

    Other interesting facts cited in the story:
    “As with music or video, free exposure can be invaluable in building
    fans. In 2006, shortly after CBS made clips of TV shows available on
    YouTube, the network said that ratings increased. “The Late
    Show with David Letterman” drew 200,000 new viewers, a 5% increase,
    after CBS placed clips of the show on YouTube, while “The Late Late
    Show with Craig Ferguson” increased its viewership by 100,000, or 7%.”

     – post by pgillin

Daily reading 01/17/2008

Stop The Press Releases! – Mother Jones, Jan./Feb., 2008

tags: newspaper_death_watch, social_media_useful

  • Mother Jones has another one of those opinion pieces by a journalist who is outraged – outraged, I tell you! – over the loose editing and poor fact-checking of citizen journalism. In this case, the villain is the Tallahassee Democrat, which published a popular blog by a local PR person whose topics sometimes touched upon issues that related to her clients. In one anecdote highlighted in the piece, the blogger supported a proposal to build a Wal-Mart near town while her firm was doing PR for Wal-Mart.

    Well, shame on the Tallahassee Democrat, and shame on the blogger, but please no shame on citizen journalism. The problem here is that the newspaper chose to feature prominently someone whose profession should have raised warning flags and then didn’t fact-check her work. In a true citizen journalism environment, the blogger would be subject to community fact-checking, which would have quickly identified her conflicts of interest. She also wouldn’t have enjoyed the unfair advantage of the newspaper bully pulpit. She’d have to earn respect and trust instead.

    In attempting to trash citizen journalism, this article actually does the opposite. It highlights the risks of the hybrid models now being tried by mainstream newspapers as they desperately seek a viable business model. Take the newspaper out of this story and, well, there’s no story.

     – post by pgillin

Daily reading 01/10/2008

Blogger Shel Holtz on Using Social Media as a Point of Customer Contact – Brandweek, Jan. 4, 2008

tags: social_media_useful

  • Shel Holtz argues that customer and tech support people should report into public relations because those functions have become so critical to a company’s public image. I agree. The #1 topic of blogger complaints is about customer support problems, yet businesses continue to outsource, scale back upon and marginalize this critical function. One bad customer experience can create a small tornado in the blogosphere and a pattern of bad experiences can undercut a company’s public image and valuation. So we do we under-invest in this area?
     – post by pgillin

Knol's greed appeal will make it a winner

In the two weeks since Google announced plans to unveil a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia called Knol, the blogosphere has been buzzing about its potential impact. Is this the Wikipedia-killer? A nefarious attempt to undermine media companies? A market-share play by a near-monopoly?

In my opinion, it’s none of those things. Knol is just a good idea that fills a gap in the market and that is likely to become a rich and useful alternative to Wikipedia. If Google and its contributors make money in the process, what’s wrong with that?

Knol will succeed because (for lack of a better term) it exploits the greed factor in community knowledge-sharing. Think of Wikipedia as public television or radio: it’s a public information source that is endearing, in part, because it’s so free of commercial interest. Sure, some people do use Wikipedia for business benefit, but most do so for the sake of sharing knowledge and contributing to the public good. Wikipedia’s anonymity is a virtue in that respect. There will always be value to that model and an audience for it.

Knol is a commercial play. According to sketchy details provided so far by Google, users will be able to attach bylines and profiles to their contributions and submit to community ratings. Articles will move up the popularity stack based upon a Digg-like process in which visitors identify the most useful content. Contributors could also see some financial reward if their work is heavily trafficked.

The fact that Knol promotes the identity of its contributors will give it significant commercial appeal, particularly for experts who don’t have the benefit of a big forum for their knowledge. I’ve written the past about an experiment called Wikibon that is a precursor to Knol. The creator of Wikibon, David Vellante, spent many years in market research and understands both the power and limitations of that model.

Market research firms charge high fees because they have a reputation for quality. The analysts who work there command big salaries and enjoy considerable influence in their markets. It’s the think-tank model and it’s tried and true.

The problem with think tanks is that they shut out the vast majority of potential experts. In most business-to-business markets, there is a huge body of knowledge locked up in the minds of practitioners, consultants and small businesspeople who don’t have the wherewithal to become part of the giant research firms. Their expertise is available only to the small number of people they can reach through whatever means they have available.

Wikibon is a long-tail experiment that tries to tap into that knowledge and create a quality information resource at a cost that’s potentially much lower than that of the think tanks. The idea is to remove all of the organizational overhead and just let people showcase their own expertise. If they do it right, they can grow their professional profile and improve their chance of landing good jobs or consulting assignments.

The same factors will apply to Knol, and that’s why it will be so successful. Few Web properties have Google’s capacity to showcase individual experts. There are many blogger networks out there, but Knol should quickly become the biggest blogger network of them all.

For individuals with the time, skill and savvy to promote themselves through a vehicle like this, the payoff could be significant. That’s why I say that Knol appeals to the greed factor. People will continue to contribute to Wikipedia because it reaches a vast audience. They will contribute to Knol because it promotes their personal interests. There will be a place for both models on the Web. There’s no reason that either has to be successful at the expense of the other.

Daily reading 12/27/2007

Internet Marketing Best Blog Posts of 2007 – techipedia, Dec. 26, 2007

  • Here’s a fantastic list of links to blogger advice on nearly every imaginable aspect of business social media marketing. Many of these articles are specific to individual services like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. The list is a bit overwhelming in its scope, but you can find just about anything you need there, from effective blogging practices to advice on how to use Facebook in marketing campaigns.
     – post by pgillin

Four social media books worth reading

I’m actually not much of a book reader, but I’ve been delving into a number of social media books this year as preparation to write another book of my own. Here are some of my favorite new titles. Although this is by no means an exhaustive list, you can’t go wrong with any of them:

Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger — This is the best book I read about social media this year. While the book isn’t technically about marketing, the principles it contains are important to anyone who is trying to understand the changes wrought by community publishing. Ultimately, the book is about social tagging, but it’s really about how we organize information and how out tools and tactics are changing in the age of the Internet. Weinberger takes us back thousands of years to illustrate how we arrived the expertise-driven model embodied in the Dewey Decimal System. He then demonstrates how communities can develop far richer and more useful organization schemes than those ever envisioned by experts. Written in an engaging and often entertaining style, this book will open your eyes to the new dynamics of self-organization and stimulate you to envision its potential.

The New Rules Of Marketing And PR by David Meerman Scott — Scott’s book, which has topped the Amazon charts much of this year, is as drop-dead practical as Weinberger’s is theoretical. Some of his advice is why-didn’t-I-think-of-that simple, such as to write marketing communications using terms that readers use in search engines. Scott takes a holistic approach to advising his readers on how to make a web presence work for them. This isn’t just about social media but about online marketing in general. There are plenty of examples of successful companies that have leveraged new media channels to great effect, and Scott’s pedagogical approach is emphatic without ever being condescending. If you want a how-to manual for the new world of PR, get this book.

Marketing to the Social Web by Larry Weber — A lot of new-media marketing books cross the line from advocacy into arrogance. Their tone seems to imply that readers are stupid if they don’t embrace the concepts espoused by the author. There’s no question that Larry Weber has an agenda; he was one of the first PR visionaries to forecast the decline of mainstream media and to urge marketers to change their thinking about their work. However, this book takes a storyteller’s approach to advocacy, preferring to persuade its readers rather than to talk down to them. It’s also rich with case studies and third-party commentary, making it unusual in the universe of books written by marketers for marketers.

Join the Conversation by Joseph Jaffe — While I found this book to be unnecessarily long and Jaffe’s writing style, with its frequent parenthetical digressions, to be difficult to follow, there is no question that the author is an authoritative source on social media. Jaffe’s passion is apparent, and his style is personal and persuasive. It’s like listening to a someone talk to you over beers at the pub. The book even includes one chapter that was created from a sequence of posts and comments on a wiki. I’m not sure it worked for me, but I applaud the author’s innovation for trying it.

On my list for early in the new year: We are Smarter than Me by Libert & Spector, and Measuring Public Relationships by Katie Paine.