Is there any other technology company (or any company for that matter) who’s routine product announcements are treated with such a sense of anticipation and wonder by the public at large?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Coming Next Tuesday: Live iPhone 3.0 Coverage (technologizer.com)
• Rumor: iPhone to Get a Premium App Store (Priya Ganapati/Gadget Lab) (techmeme.com)

Related Posts:

• Social Media Angels
• Social Media Camp Recap
• My Visit to Social Media Hour

I’ve always agreed with Brian who once said that it’s not content that’s king, it’s connection. It’s the myriad connections we make every day when we venture onto the interwebs that’s important. The actual content – the things we are saying to each other – well that’s for the marketers and the sociologists to ponder.

So, if you are a marketer you still have to worry. And you have to learn about how those connections work so you can venture out into the conversation. The problem for most folks in the world of public relations is they are blissfully ignorant when it comes to the technologies that make all of this possible.

In other words, most PR folks understand (or at least are getting to understand) the ‘why’ of social media. What they don’t understand is the ‘how.’ I would even suggest that most don’t even know that they don’t know.

I’m not arguing that PR people should be fluent in PHP and Ruby on Rails (although it can’t hurt) but I would suggest that we can all be a bit smarter. If you are suggesting a client use Facebook or Twitter, you should at least understand what it is they do and what the underlying technologies are that make all of this possible. Or at least learn enough to seem like you do.

There are lots of agencies recommending podcasts, videoblogs and Twitter accounts for their clients. And most of the people making those recommendations have no clue how to accomplish any of their recommendations from a technical standpoint.

This all comes to mind as I read this week that SHIFT is announcing a social media labs of sort.

The companies that, for years, chased after “ink” in the mainstream media are now starting to think like publishers themselves.  Creating and sharing multimedia that helps spur dialogue in blogs, forums, Twitter, etc., has become almost as important as getting that elusive WSJ clip.

SHIFT is one of a few agencies that I would venture to guess not only understands the ‘why’ but the equally important ‘how’ of social media. Like how do I do video, for example. Understanding how to implement all of these bright ideas is going important, especially with budgets slashed and clients looking to social media as the low cost alternative to traditional PR (right or wrong).

The agencies that not only ‘get it’ but ‘get how to do it’ will be the winners.

Related Posts:

• Building Better Tools
• The New News Release
• A SHIFT in New York

I was meeting with a friend of mine who runs an agency on Long Island – she was showing me the newsroom her designer had cooked up for her web page. The design was very nice and colorful; the search mechanism worked like a charge. But for all practical purposes, the site was all wrong for what she needed. For one thing, there was no way to save a search as an RSS feed. And for another, the PHP script that ran the searches returned the results into one generic URL, so there’s no way to link to the results of a search. So if my friend is pitching a restaurant client, for example, and she wants to point out to the prospect all of her restaurant experience, she has to direct them to the newsroom and tell them to pull down menu one and find results in window two, instead of giving them a unique URL where they can find all of the results.

This may seem like a minor point, or the point made by a technology geek, but it illustrates a larger problem in the PR world. As the demand for more sophisticated knowledge of social media technologies is growing, our tools are still stuck at where they were at the dawn of the 90s Internet boom. 

Cision’s interface and search mechanism is woefully inadequate for any sort of serious research for building media lists. I haven’t used Vocus but I haven’t heard much in the way of positive reviews. Most agencies have no contact management solutions in place other than individual staffers keep track of media contacts on Excel spreadsheets. And while agencies talk the SEO walk, many of them have websites built entirely in Flash. 

There are of course a lot of great solutions out there, many of them free or open source. I’ve started tinkering with BatchBlue for contact management and lists. Radian6 is a great tool for tracking social media and turning hits into actionable items, much better than the old clip books. And the research and development that has already gone into the Social Media Press Release has taught a lot of PR folks about the basics of XHTML and microformats and hopefully some of those folks are taking those smarts back to their agencies. 

Most importantly, since we’re all keeping lists of journalists, it shouldn’t be that hard for someone to take on Cision and  Vocus with an inexpensive, open source and community built media contact directory. 

All in all, we need to get smarter, not only about the effects of our tools, but about our tools themselves. Because in many cases, what we are using is not working for us. 

Related Posts:

• AdHocnium Social Media Hour Show
• My Visit to Social Media Hour
• Always Learning

More agencies need to see these examples, how easy they are to put together and how powerful the interactive and social features can be for their clients.

Related Posts:

• My Visit to Social Media Hour
• Public Relations For Start Ups
• AdHocnium Social Media Hour Show

No more. Now you can go on the Web and right from your local dealer’s web site you can see what they have on the lot and how much it will cost you to drive off in your very own new gas-guzzler. You can even find out how much that dream car cost the dealer. And if you can find a better deal, your local guy might even match it.

The point is that the power relationship between car dealers and car buyers has reversed. Only a decade ago, the dealers held all the cards – they knew the price and you didn’t. Now we have access to all the information we need to make an informed decision.

Now the problem with this analogy is I never thought of it from the perspective of the car dealers. And until recently I never realized that I am a car dealer – of sorts. We PR folks have acted like car dealers for years, often treating our clients like clueless newbs who think we have some secret power to create media opportunites for them. LIke the mythical roledex that can get us the front page of Businessweek with only one phone call.

The problem is our clients are just as smart as we are and many of them are way ahead of us in using Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools. So they have access to the same journalists on Twitter that we do. They can subscribe to the same media email lists we do. And they know (hopefully) almost as much as we do.

So what can we offer them when they can subscribe to the Help A Reporter Out list just as easily as we can?

Related Posts:

• A SHIFT in New York
• Social Media Angels
• Go Back To School

In the mid-1990s I worked on the press staff of the New York City Council and pitching was as simple as wandering upstairs to Room 5 – the press room – and seeing who was up against a deadline with no story.

Then along came email and nothing was ever the same. The less said about that the better.

As new tools come along, new avenues to journalists are open to us. Of course, just like email, these new avenues are prone to abuse. But for those PR folks who are paying attention, there are new opportunities for clients opening up all the time.

For example, if you’ve been reading Stowe Boyd, you’d know exactly how he likes to be approached.

Bonus point: this is exactly why it’s important for PR people to be up to date on the latest social media tools. If journalists are telling you how they’d prefer to be pitched, it’s your obligation to learn.

Related Posts:

• My Visit to Social Media Hour
• Public Relations For Start Ups
• We Have Met The Enemy

This internet video thing.. it just might catch on.

News via NewTeeVee 

Random Posts

• The Evolution of the Pitch
• It’s Here
• Life is good

Having spent the better part of my adult life inside of PR agencies, I know something about agency politics, that is why I have no faith in the ability of any agency – big or small – to pull in an outside ‘expert’ and start up a separate ’social media’ practice. For reasons to numerous to go into here, It Just Won’t Work.

I also know something about the first option – the faking it bit. I was the ‘tech expert’ for the latter half of the 90s, covering up the fact that the rest of the agency was still sending email attachments. I strongly suspect that hasn’t changed.

So we come to the last option – develop the skills set in-house.

For example – at CJP, down the road from me in Stratford, CT, I found this. For an agency to put something like this on You Tube, something must be afoot. Drop me a line guys, I’m interested in seeing what you are up to.

And at Marina Maher, Annie Heckenberger is cooking something up.

I don’t know if we’ve reached the proverbial tipping point yet, that might be years away. But we’re getting there. Without reference or help from ‘A list’ PR bloggers or the PRSA, we’re getting there.

Related Posts:

• Why PR?
• PR vs The Bloggers part XXVII
• Press kits

So, what’s the next step?

Chris Heuer has stepped forward and is asking for those of us who care about this issue to join in the effort to redefine the press release for the social media era.

I have a lot of ideas on how we can move this discussion forward but am still really in a “discuss and decide” mode on most issues – the most important of which are how do we get broader community involvement and how do we avoid the political wrangling that has killed so many other well-intentioned standards efforts in the past.

Chris has started a Google Group to get the discussion going. I’m signed up.

Related Posts:

• A step in the right direction
• Why PR?
• PR vs The Bloggers part XXVII

Get thee here, and have fun.

Every day in every way, the tools are getting better and better.

Random Posts

• The new rules
• It’s a crisis alright
• The press release goes social