Tag Archive for 'blogging'

No, I Am Not Turning This Site Green

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.

Link

Now go do something important, for a change.

/rant over

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My Visit to Social Media Hour

This afternoon I joined my fellow Ad Hocnium Catalyst Cathy Brooks, Jackie Peters of Heavybag Media and Nicole Jordan of the Rubicon Project for a wide ranging discussion of PR and social media.

You can subscribe to the Social Media Hour here.

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Public Relations For Start Ups

A few random thoughts on last night’s PR for Start Ups event:

There is still a huge gap / void / disconnect between agencies and start-ups. This was most clearly illustrated by Sabrina Horn’s comment on seeking clients who have passed Round A and are bearing down on Round B, and Charlie O’Donnell’s reaction, best summed up as “WTF?!?” Most start ups aren’t getting to Round A these days. Some of this is due to the economy. Also, it’s just much cheaper to do business now than it was in the 90s when you needed VC money to even get your idea off of the envelope. So given that, who’s going to take a risk on the next AOL or Netscape or Twitter? Not any agency that sets a $15K limit in retainers.

Honestly, I can empathize with Sabrina. It’s brutally hard to even hold a conversation with someone if they have a great idea but no money now and no money for at least the first few months. Which is why most start-ups should take the best bit of advice offered by the panel which is to bring someone in-house who is clued to marketing and willing to work like a dog for the glory and infamy.

And frankly a lot of start ups do think it’s all about press and getting into TechCrunch and don’t understand (or don’t care about) the finer points of positioning and messaging.

On another note, I honestly had to bite my tongue to keep from shouting this thought out, but finally Peter Himler talked about knowing who your audience is and where they go for information. Too many people have great ideas for new products or services but no clue who they are trying to reach. This is one of my biggest jobs, to ask the obvious question of clients. Who is going to buy this and why do they need it?

To be blunt, the PR agency model of sucking down 10-15K a month in retainer is going to have to change or the industry will see even greater disintermediation than it has already. Most folks at start ups are pretty hip to using Twitter or whatever these days and can get themselves noticed a lot faster than in the past. And most reporters covering this space are already hunting for the next big thing on Twitter and the usual spots.

So what’s an agency to offer? Sure all that experience and perspective is a good thing (in fact a necessary thing), but not at those prices.

If we can get around all that, there seems to be a bright future developing. With media savvy CEOs of nimble start ups and smart PR people who can help them navigate the seas of a changing media.

Overall, it was a very good event with a very smart panel. In addition to Sabrina and Peter, Adam Isserlis of Rubenstein and Jonathan Kolbe of Weber Shandwick, as well as Chantelle Karl from Yelp! held up the PR side of the equation and did us all proud. Gillian Reagan of the Observer, MK Flynn of The Deal and Rose Gordon of PR Week rounded out the panel, representing the media. Also in the audience were Lee Odden, Allen Stern of Centernetworks and Jason Chupick of PR Newser.

And finally a big KUDOS to Kristin Maverick for throwing this all together.

Bonus Link: a recap of the evening from The Deal’s Flynn.

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Metro-North In The House

Marble Hill station in Manhattan on the Hudson...
Image via Wikipedia

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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The New News Release

Here’s a great example of a social media press release from SHIFT Communications announcing their relationship with Powered Inc.

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.

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