Public Relations, Social Media and Ephemera Since 2005
Nor will I change my Twitter icon green.
If turning the site green would help, then perhaps, but it’d merely feed that narcissistic desire some people have to “do” something. Hackers creating proxies for Iranians to bypass their nation’s internet censors? THAT’S doing something tangible and of great value.
Now go do something important, for a change.
/rant over
Thank you and a tip of the hat to Gary Goldhammer for stating so eloquently what I’ve been trying to say for a while.
Bloggers are people.
People are media.
People are social.
Furthering my self-improvement by learning PHP experiment, I’ve tinkered a bit more with SimplePie. It took me about an hour to whip together Metro-North Bloggers, a collection of feeds from bloggers in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Duchess and Fairfield Counties – AKA, the northern New York suburbs.
In digging around for feeds, I’ve found there are a whole lot more bloggers in the area than I initially suspected. Hopefully some of my newly found blogging friends will add their feeds.
Next steps are offering the ability to subscribe to individual feeds, or the the whole shebang. I’d also like to color the headlines in the color of each Metro-North line, i.e., blue for someone who lives on the Harlem line, red for the New Haven line, etc.
A more ambitious goal is a means of auto-submission of feeds so I don’t have to manually add each new feed to the script that generates the page.
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We’re back once again in the midst of the pay for blog post debate. This time, bloggers who attended CES on Panasonic’s dime are defending themselves against charges of blogola.
Chris Brogan has this to say:
The work I did with Panasonic was a blogger relations campaign. I wasn’t paid to write anything about the products. I wasn’t paid for my time. Instead, I was given some gear and some opportunities and told I could write about what I wanted to write about. It was expected that I write about CES and that if it made sense that I write about Panasonic, and I did, but beyond that, there was no quid pro quo…
From what Chris is describing, the Panasonic deal sounds a lot like the deal Nikon struck with bloggers (including yours truly) last year.
ADWEEK’s Brian Morrissey describes the Panasonic program as
one of several undertaken by brands carving out a new take on the old notion of advertorial. Rather than relying on magazines, they are contracting with influential bloggers who bring with them their own powerful distribution networks. Rather than a long-form narrative, content is fit for the Web via blog posts, Twitter updates and YouTube videos. And the key differentiator: instead of dictating the content to lead to a sale, brands typically keep their distance to maintain credibility.
I suppose there is a huge difference between pay-for-post and what Panasonic is doing. And for the most part, it makes sense to me that companies would want to put their products in the hands of their most enthusiastic and well-connected fans – who for the most part in the consumer electronics world are bloggers. No surprise there.
What does bother me is the legions of bloggers. clogging up Twitter and Friendfeed with breathless nonsense about this year’s iPhone Killer / next year’s landfill stuffing. Honestly folks, don’t we have anything better to talk about?
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Stowe Boyd wades into the stormy seas between bloggers and PR flacks and as usual, he gets it right:
The root cause here is the delusion on the part of the clients that this sort of PR carpet bombing works, that mass media messages embedded in a press release or press release-ish email work, and that we, the bloggers, actually react positively to this junk.
Stowe argues that bloggers need to stand up and say “no mas” and then be explicit to PR folks in how they want to be pitched. He’s got a point, but I would flip it around and put the onus on us, the PR folks in the trenches.
We need to get ourselves smarter. And we need to get our fellows smarter. And we need to keep getting even smarter. We have to understand that public relations is about relations and if you wouldn’t ‘relate’ to your friends or loved ones that way, why on Earth would you ‘relate’ like that to some blogger or journalist who could make or break your client.
Update: in the comments, Bob LeDrew points out, quite correctly:
We also need to get our CLIENTS smarter. Or maybe, if there’s no other choice, to get smarter clients.
Well, yeah. But in any case, we need to develop backbones and tell our clients the way things should be done. We aren’t paid just to say ‘yes.’
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