The word prose is an interesting one. It used to be synonymous with dull or unimaginative, but now it is associated with well written and thought provoking text or language. It is derived from the Latin prosa meaning straightforward.
With that in mind, welcome to NextGen PRose (Reloaded because we're ready to expand our voice beyond previous internal attempts). We are the next generation of PR; its next generation of pros. We may not be tenured in the profession, but what we lack in years under the belt, we strive to make up in intelligence, passion, vision and a willingness to pick up the torch and further the cause.
No, PR is not dead; PR is alive and vibrant. The talent is getting better. The press aren’t complaining as much and the finger isn’t being pointed as often at those labeled as "junior." Not to be too Covey-esque, but PR is experiencing its own paradigm shift. Traditional or old school PR and its staples—media and analyst relations, press kits and press tours, tradeshows and speaking engagements—while still successful, are having to evolve and embrace innovation. Traditional PR has long been criticized for being behind the innovation curve, but the next generation of PR will require pioneers and not followers.
The bubble burst of 2000 was actually a catalyst to PR’s paradigm shift. While it’s unfortunate that thousands of jobs were lost, particularly in the PR industry, many a journalist would argue that the wheat was being separated from the tares. At the same time, firms and corporations would probably argue that they’ve fielded a more qualified crop of hirees than ever before. This new school of PR is breeding employees who are more technically adept; they’re risk-takers and not afraid of innovation; they’re solution- and ownership-minded; they believe in the good of the profession and are intent on blazing new ground and making a difference.
It is on the crest of this new wave that we add our voice, connecting collective intelligence at the transformational intersection of business technology, media, and PR. Welcome us, embrace us, and join us…or better yet, let us join you in advancing and furthering the cause of something we all believe in.
Jeremy Wright’s blog had an odd but revealing post yesterday evening. Curious, I checked out the link and learned about The Podcast Network. Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic of the Down Under G’Day World Podcast
are putting the network together which, according to their site, will
be a collection of podcasts that will have interest to listeners at
both a personal level and a business level.
My favorite part:
“You will initially be able
to subscribe to as many individual shows as you like and in the near
future you will be able to create your own personalised single feed
containing all the shows you are interested in.”
MSN’s Yusuf Mehdi told
Reuters that its search engine would be upgraded to provide users with
more than just links to their inquiries. In an effort to provide more
thorough results to search queries, it will make available information
from Microsoft’s electronic encyclopedia Encarta.
One of the most interesting points from this announcement came in the second paragraph from the bottom of the article:
“One new capability that Microsoft will be
introducing with Monday's launch is the ability to create RSS, or
Really Simple Syndication, feeds that allows users to track search
results through an incoming data feed on their personal computers.”
It will be interesting to see
how extensive the inflow of information will be to an RSS reader on a
given topic. How will MSN’s search syndication benefit PR? The ability
to aggregate information on a particular company (a client) will allow
us to track the changes in what MSN’s searches are bringing up about
them.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
This
might make you go hmmm. Google and Amazon merge. Bloggers
force the New York Times to fold. News essentially writes itself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So TIME didn't bite on the pitch, but ABC News' World News Tonight recognized the difference bloggers made in 2004, calling them:
People of the Year.
The Corporate Engagement gang point to a great article today on copyright infringement
by Kathy Biehl over at LLRX.com. Biehl, an attorney who advises
on copyright protection and use, does a great job addressing the many
copyright myths that exist in today's online world.
One of the myths she brings up is the widely used, yet
misunderstood, concept of "public domain." While I would suggest
that every practicioner read the entire article, this section on public
domain is a must-read.
And here's the million dollar question. Is it okay to use
material if it doesn't have a copyright notice? According to
Biehl, the answer is no. No notice is required for works published
since 1978 - meaning that you must request permission to use anything
that is less than 25 years old, regardless of whether or not it has a
copyright notice.
Consider yourselves warned.
Dan Kennedy discusses podcasting in the Boston Phoenix. He asks: "Will it save us from corporate radio? Or further isolate us inside our own miniature media worlds?"
Whether viewed as a savior or isolator, I think we're only just beginning to envision its implications in the PR realm. The possibilities seem limitless right now. What has impressed me and Dan points this out is that the concept of podcasting has only really been around in strength since August.
I like Glenn Reynolds' quote in the article:
In a sense, the meta-story is that something this cool can happen that fast. It’s a sign of the overall health of innovation.
Fortune Magazine's January 10 issue discusses the 10 Tech Trends to Watch in 2005. Number one on this list is "There's No Escaping the Blog."
David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth analyze the good and bad with
blogging and conclude that the blogging force is a powerful tool that
will play a big part in 2005. Yet another year-end story that discusses
the impact of this tool.
In their analysis they point out that blogs can be a corporation's
worst PR nightmare. What they fail to point out is the potential it
holds as a PR tool. Blogs will grow in 2005 to be a tremendous media
relations tool for corporations who effectively use them.
While discussing his
favorite topics of 2004 on ClickZ, Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein offers a few words of wisdom that could go a long way in 2005:
The ability to tap into
consumer conversations is fantastic and powerful. Companies are falling
all over themselves trying to figure out how to use the blog phenomenon
to their advantage. All too often, they conclude they should use blogs
to talk. Please. Brands do enough talking as it is. Use the blog space
to
listen.
Rather than just italicize "listen," I think he should have italicized the whole sentence.
USE THE BLOG SPACE TO LISTEN!
This is sound advice. The power of blogging resides not in what
we have to say, but in how people respond to what we have to say.