Tech PR War Stories 18: CEO bloggers are great except when they're not

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Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was praised for entering the blogosphere two years ago but the buzz turned bad when it was revealed recently that Mackey had written anonymously about his company on Internet stock message boards. PR pros should take note, argue Paul and David. It’s great when the CEO blogs, but the very hint of deception can turn the community against you and end up doing more harm than good.

It turns out both our hosts have been spending time on Facebook lately and they really like it. Paul says Facebook is what LinkedIn should have been: a professional networking site with personality. David likes all the new applications that members can share. But they hesitate to call Facebook the winner in professional social networking. The market is too chaotic right now to predict who will come out on top. That’s no excuse not to dive into a social network and learn the style and lingo, the advise PR pros. Just do it!

In Cheers & Jeers, David roasts Sunrocket, a VOIP provider that went of business but didn’t bother to turn off its website, where you can still sign up for its non-existent service. Paul toasts Harry Potter, whose Internet success may keep the book series alive even after the author has stopped writing.

Download the podcast here. (15:06)

How to create brand advocates

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My article on brand advocacy published today on iMedia Connection. It’s all about how to use electronic tools to engage with customers and make them your best sales representatives. I’d love to get your feedback and war stories. I’m starting work on a new book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, and tales from the field are a key component. Don’t be shy to tell me your successes. Failures are welcome, too. Names will be changed to protect the guilty.

WSJ's blogging retrospective is interesting reading

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The Wall Street Journal celebrates the 10th anniversary of blogging (can you believe it?) with a series of essays from prominent media and literary figures about the role and value of blogs. They range from Tom Wolfe’s dismissal of the medium as a “universe of rumors” to Elizabeth Spiers’ thoughtful essay on the value of targeted audiences. It’s an eclectic and interesting selection of contributors representing a wide range of perspective. Recommended reading.

The Wall Street Journal reviews New Influencers

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Much to my delight, The Wall Street Journal this morning carried a 900-word review of my book, calling it “a persuasive case for companies’ reaching out to bloggers,” and recounting many of the stories and examples I used to argue for greater marketer attention to social media.

Unfortunately, you have to be a paid subscriber to read the article. We’ll see what we can do about that 🙂

Having tried (unsuccessfully) for years to get published in the Journal, this was an unexpected endorsement and a very gratifying one. It’s good to see marketers coming around the perspective that social media can be a meaningful channel for customer connection.

My interview on Blog Talk Radio

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I’ve done lots of radio interviews over the years, and they are invariably similar: the host has maybe three to five minutes to talk and asks a question every 30 seconds or so. You can’t slow down because the listener’s attention will wane and will switch to another station. It’s invigorating, but also ultimately frustrating because it’s so hard to say much that’s meaningful in that short a period of time.

That’s why my interview this week on Blog Talk Radio was such a pleasant surprise. Just minutes before going on the air, host Wayne Hurlbert informed me that the program lasted a full hour with no commercial breaks. This is like telling someone in a Porsche that they have the entire highway to themselves. It was such a pleasure to stretch out and really talk over some of the issues with Wayne, who asked excellent questions. I don’t know if anyone has the stomach to listen to me for an hour, but if you want to hear more details about what I learned about social media while writing The New Influencers, give it a listen.

Our latest podcasts focus on social media marketing

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The Tech PR War Stories podcast, episodes 15 and 16, are about the future of marketing with social media. In episode 15, we talk to Brian Solis, a PR executive who has been writing the PR 2.0 blog and who recently authored a social media manifesto that nicely pulls these technologies together.

In episode 16, our guest is Maggie Fox, founding partner of Social Media Group. The year-old firm is exclusively devoted to helping businesses use social media platforms and has had some remarkable early successes.

Both of our speakers are clued in to the potential of social media marketing, but both understand the difficulty of selling new ideas to top management. They offer advice on the benefits of embracing these new tools and how to get your clients and managers on board.

My new blog chronicles the decline of newspapers

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I’ve started a new blog, Newspaper Death Watch, to monitor and comment upon the disintegration of the American metropolitan daily newspaper industry. If you keep an eye on this blog, you know that I have strong opinions about this topic. I believe that the collapse of this American institution will be stunningly swift and broad, with perhaps no more than a dozen major metros surviving until 2030. There’s more detail in this essay.

I take no pleasure in this turn of events. On the contrary, I love newspapers. But I find this process to be a fascinating convergence of subjects that fascinate me: publishing, technology and transformational change.

If you have any suggestions for topics or news items I should be aware of, please don’t hesitate to send them along.

Facebook is rising, but social network users are fickle

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Rich Skrenta comments on the surging popularity of Facebook at the expense of LinkedIn and MySpace and asks Are network effects getting weaker? He has a great point about the fleeting success of early social networks.

A year ago, everyone was talking about MySpace. Now its star seems to be fading, perhaps as a consequence of its early success. My MySpace mailbox is full of come-ons from dating services and very little else. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends and business associates have joined Facebook in recent months and there’s a surge or activity there driven by the service’s expanding audience and new openness.

But who’s to say that will last? As Skrenta notes, the cost of switching services is pretty low and people are inclined to run toward whichever network has shiniest new toy, at least for now. If Facebook doesn’t continually out-innovate new competitors, its success could be short-lived.

Google has been remarkable in that respect, for the cost of switching search engines is zero. Yet Google got 65% of US searchs in May.

I’m currently a big fan of Facebook, but I’m not convinced it’s the winner in professional social networks. It’s way too early.

Tech PR War Stories 14: Are CMP layoffs the death knell for IT print media?

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This week in the Tech PR War Stories podcast, David and I reflect on upheaval at CMP, which laid off 20% of its workforce last week and shuttered some print publications. I suggest that this is the beginning of the end of print publishing in the IT media market and note that the economics of online publishing in that area are now weighted toward using freelance and blogger contributors instead of full-time staff.

David points out that technology companies are becoming more aggressive about launching their own online and even print publications, and that some of the senior editors who have lost their jobs in IT media will move over to work for vendors. We agree that these custom publishing operations are legitimate targets for PR people to place their clients. Now that everyone can publish easily to the Web, the definition of a “media company” is becoming fuzzier.

In Cheers & Jeers, I praise Oovoo, a new videoconferencing service that sent customized video messages to journalists and bloggers as part of its launch campaign. My jeer goes to Dell Computer, which sent a cease-and-desist notice to Consumerist.com, an action that ultimately backfired on Dell. But at least Dell was contrite in blogging about the mistake and even linking to underground photos of unannounced Dell products. My, how times have changed!

Listen to the podcast here (right click to download): 15:05