NextGen PRose

Blogs, Search Engines: Just Say No to Comment Spam

Chalk this move up by the blog and search worlds as a stellar example of co-opetition.  Google, Microsoft's MSN division, Yahoo, and Six Apart announced late today their support for a "nofollow" tag that can be used to stop blog comment spam from influencing search engine rankings.

This won't be the end-all for comment spam, but it sure takes away some of the incentive.  And it's a good lesson of what's possible when we collaborate with one another.

Tekrati Debuts Analyst Blog Directory

Tekrati introduced today a new directory of analyst bloggers at the New Communications Forum 2005: Blog University. The directory identifies 65 analyst blogs and will be updated on an ongoing basis. Upon quick review of the list, I discovered the following interesting items to note:

• There are 34 analyst firms—both large and independent—with blogs.

• Gartner is associated with eight blogs—four group blogs and four others for EXP members only (although a click through each group blog link will show they’re all inactive).

• Contrast this with Jupiter Research’s 18 bloggers, all who actively post.

For those of you not familiar with Tekrati, I would highly recommend their free (that’s right, I said free) news service, The Industry Analyst Reporter, as a valuable resource for any tech communicator. The site consolidates and presents at a single location news and reports from over 325 technology analyst research firms worldwide. It also offers a comprehensive directory of analyst firms, a calendar of analyst events, and tips on how to work with analysts.

Knowing how hard it is to keep up with the analyst community, especially without paid access, this should be a weekly, or even a daily, must-visit. And even better…they’ll bring the news and research to you through 11 different RSS feeds.

Update: Read this Part 1 Special Report from Tekrati, "The State of Analyst Weblogs." Part 2 is expected next week with analysts talking about their blogs.

Blogging VS. Mainstream Journalists

One of my favorite online magazines, Slate, is running an interesting article entitled ‘Blog Overkill,’ which makes some great points about the state of blogging and the danger of “fetishizing a new technology,” as the author, Jack Shafer, puts it.  (Yes, the irony of blogging about an article on blog overkill did occur to me, but there are some interesting points.)

Shafer, while attending Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government conference on “Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility” noticed a growing sentiment of some bloggers who view themselves the “destroyers of the mainstream media.” If this were true (which I don’t think it is), wouldn’t it be extremely alarming?  The Society of Professional Journalists, in their mission statement, identifies a free press “the cornerstone of our nation and our liberty.”  While I think bloggers can definitely play a part in this, they admittedly don’t give the (mostly) accurate and comprehensive information provided by the mainstream press.   

Apple's Marketing VP Loves His Podcasts

Phil Schiller, Apple's VP of Marketing, apparently is wild about the new podcasting craze.  This straight from the Wizards of Technology's podcast of their encounter with Schiller at this month's Macworld Expo in San Francisco.  How's this for enthusiasm regarding the new medium:

It’s a fun way to get more programming on your iPod. I love it.

Playlist's Michael Gowan picked up on Schiller's comment and offers a great tutorial on how to join the podcast listener buzz.

Blog as Crisis Communications Tool

At the Blog Business Summit today, A-listers Robert Scoble, Buzz Bruggeman and Anil Dash, discussed the issue of crisis communications, and how blogging can help.  The panel focused on the humanization factor of blogs and the importance of getting to know and understand your audience and how they perceive things.  Emphasis was placed on how blogs can help to develop strong customer relationships, understand who the influencers are, and know the gatekeepers so a crisis response can be mobilized and disseminated.

Brian Chin from the Seattle P.I. recaps the discussion in his Buzzworthy blog and outlines a few crisis communications blogging ideas:

• A blog can project a human face or voice for an organization and help defuse negative feelings.
• A blog provides a forum for soliciting specific feedback from customers about their concerns.
• A blog makes it possible to respond quickly when a situation arises. Scoble suggested that simply posting a brief acknowledgment of a problem, to let people know that the company is aware of it, can buy time to mobilize a response.

Steve Rubel offers some additional steps:

• Continually listen and analyze
• Develop a list of vulnerabilities
• Build a lockbox blog
• Build a network of blog allies
• Ride the long tail

Ketchum: How We're Preventing Another Williams Debacle

Ketchum has announced its plans to avoid future controversy such as it experienced during the past week with the Armstrong Williams debacle. Critics have come down hard on Ketchum, the DoE and Williams when the USA Today unveiled that Williams was being paid by the White House through an arrangement by Ketchum to advocate the No Child Left Behind Act.

Among the new guidelines to prevent future mishaps of this magnitude, Ketchum stated "We are putting in place a new policy for the signing and authorization of contracts with spokespeople." Perhaps this is a necessary step for Ketchum as a result of the media frenzy, but one that will weigh on the agency work flow.

I think it is worth taking a look at the perspective offered by Julia Hood about the whole situation. Hood wrote this editorial partly in response to Ketchum CEO Ray Kotcher's Op-Ed piece for PR Week in which he gives his defense and perspetive.

Responding to Blog Attacks

Stephen Baker, one of BusinessWeek's bloggers on the new Tech Beat, has just posted about a topic that will see waves of coverage during the coming year as bloggers grill big corporations over the proverbial coals. That topic: what should PR be doing to counter the negative comments on the blogosphere?

What types of attacks will we see? Rest assured that corporations will see everything from product insults to attacks on executive management regarding non-work related items to venting about the technical support. We're seeing these things already, aren't we? In all, this year we are sure to see more negativity regarding the companies we work for by bloggers than we may have seen in several of the previous years combined. As Big Blog Company pointed out recently, the adoption of a technology that gives free Web publishing to the general public will bring out the cynic in people. They have a forum by which they can rant and rave about anything and find an audience that agrees.

Will such negativism injure the companies we work for? Not necessarily. Blogs bring together people that share common goals, beliefs and values. The content of a person's site establishes their credibility and if they rant on about a frustration they have with a corporation, they'll draw those people who share that feeling to their site and find other people losing interest. As PR practitioners we are responsible for sustaining a positive and mutually beneficial relationship with various publics.

What should PR do to counter this?
First, embrace the blogosphere
Second, expect varied criticism
Third, counsel when appropriate with corporate management regarding incidents
Fourth, take action and approach individual bloggers if it makes sense to reason together

One worthy side note to the final recommendation, taking aggressive punitive action might make the blog in question more visible, and hence work against the company’s interest suing.

During the coming years, corporations will see a lot of negative things written about them by bloggers. Hopefully a good economic model will take hold and that companies will weather the storms. One thing is certain as we have already seen, bloggers will continue to write things about companies that have not been written by mainstream journalists. 

It is a topic that you'll see NextGen PRose blog more about during the coming months.

What Will Media Look Like in the Future?

This might make you go hmmm.  Google and Amazon merge.  Bloggers force the New York Times to fold.  News essentially writes itself.

Advancing Media Transparency

ZDNet's David Berlind poses an ever present question in journalism today:  What role can and should technology play in contributing to transparency--full disclosure--in the media?  Berlind is actually experimenting with new mediums like podcasting to demonstrate how journalists can build new "channels of transparency."

By providing the uncensored, unedited raw data used to assemble a news story, opinion piece, or blog entry, the problems of misquoting, quote truncation, placing quotes out of order to arrive at an unintended meaning, quoting out of context, or manipulating interviews in the interests of a particular agenda could go away.

How?  Well check out his efforts in this opinion piece, Why Blogging Matters to Your Business and Your IT.  He actually relies on quotes from UserLand Software's CEO Scott Young from a recorded interview and then podcasts the uncensored and unedited recording.  He even includes in-line time-codes in the text allowing readers to fast forward to the exact location of the quote in the audio file.

This is a great experiment in transparency initiated by a journalist who understands the potential for new technologies to enhance the media consumption experience.  I'm eager to see what else unfolds over there at ZDNet, and beyond, spurred on by Berlind.  His final thought is golden:

I hope other journalists [this applies to much more than just journalists] take what I've done into consideration and expand on the idea.  In the name of integrity, we won't know the answers until we start trying some solutions.

Forrester Magazine: Don't Show Me The Money

San Jose Mercury News broke the news on Friday that Forrester is launching a print magazine next month.  Matt Marshall points out how Forrester is joining the company of four other new pubs (actually two new, one revival and one re-vamp)--Tech Confidential from the folks at TheDeal, Tonhy Perkins' AlwaysOn "blogozine," the next generation Red Herring, and MIT Technology Review.  He poses a good question in light of grassroots journalism and Internet publishing advances: Can these new tech mags survive?

Forrester Magazine's goal isn't to make money. Rather, it's to build the brand of Forrester, which provides research on business and technology issues. It won't carry advertising and will start with three issues per year....The company's research found that the more senior the executive, the less time they spent reading online, Kardon says. Thus the decision to go print-only. It will be more of a business magazine than a technology magazine....Forrester Magazine will be sent only to executives of companies that pay around $30,000 a year for Forrester Research.

Some branding move.  Sounds pretty exclusive to me.:)  Forrester analyst and blogger, Charlene Li, provides further insight defending the multi-channel branding approach.

Bloggers Divided Over RSS and Copyright Control

Here's an interesting development in the blog world.  First, Martin Schwimmer, an attorney and publisher of The Trademark Blog, asked Bloglines to remove his RSS feed from their site. 

It was brought to my attention that a website named Bloglines was reproducing the Trademark Blog, surrounding it with its own frame, stripping the page of my contact info.  It identifies itself as a news aggregator.  It is not authorized to reproduce my content nor to change the appearance of my pages, which it does.

Then Scoble responds.

What is different about Bloglines than, say, NewsGator? Is Martin saying I can't look at his writings in ANY news aggregator, or is he discriminating only against online news aggregators? I say: if you don't want your writings to be republished in a news aggregator, don't publish an RSS feed.

Then the blogosphere responds--including A-listers like Dave Winer--and a division forms over the issue of RSS and copyright control. 

Then Schwimmer clarifies his actions and Scoble captures blogger reaction (moreso in his favor).  Finally, Scoble justifies his stance.

The dynamics of this exchange are intriguing--a seemingly nobody blogger vs. an Alpha.  I would imagine that an analysis of the blogosphere response to this exchange would portray the majority on the side of Scoble, even though Schwimmer has every right (and a good argument) to ask for the removal of his feed from Bloglines.  Why is this?  And why haven't some, who would normally be vocal on a topic like this, spoken their mind.  Would it have been different if the tables were turned?  Hmmm.  Bummer though for Schwimmer's 190 subscribers--they'll have to be doing some old school Web surfing.

UK Grassroots Journalism

Grassroots journalism via blogging has not had its uptake in the U.K. like it has here in the U.S. The U.K.-based Dot Journalism authored an article comparing the adoption rate in the two countries. It provided a few interesting answers to the possible reason why. Among them:

"The popularity and awareness of blogging in the US can partly be explained by cultural differences. The American tradition of talk radio encourages people to speak their mind, and blogs give an ideal platform for people who want to rant."

 

The article quotes Big Blog Company's Jackie Danicki regarding the U.S.-uptake:

"You'd be hard-pressed to find an American journalist who isn't reading blogs on a regular basis, regardless of whether or not they keep one."

Based on the research that Big Blog Company has done, doesn't this tell us yet again that PR agency practitioners need to be telling their clients to take the phenomenon more seriously? The gatekeepers are reading blogs and looking to them as sources.