AP O-NO

For those of you who saw The Associated Press reaction to bloggers re-posting articles, it seems they are making the same mistake as the record labels. Rather than try to enforce compliance, they should encourage a dialogue and the spirit of “Fair Practice.” The AP’s long-term relevance hinges on, like many media companies, its relationship to social media. I hope they know that.

Here are some other articles for the curious

Gestures

Steve Gillmor taught me what Web 2.0 means (“users in control of media”) years ago, and remains one of the more enigmatic people I have ever collaborated with (AttentionTrust.org).  You have to read his post from Techcrunch, and determine if it is hyper intelligence or sophistic. (or a combination of both).

www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/21/surviving-the-net/

Doh! The Technorati Monster Escaped again

If you work in the social media space, the above phrase has probably caused a few gray hairs. Sure – Not a huge headache for the average blogger just logging on check his or her authority, but to those of us that count on public tools like Technorati and Google for reliable data, this “inconvenience,” along with fluctuating standards for how these metrics are computed, is choking the adoption and growth of social media marketing.

The volume of inbound blog links is the layperson’s way of determining influence of a blog. So, calculating this simple metric should be, you know, simple. Right?

Yet, the two public tools used most for blog research, Technorati and Google, keep changing the way they calculate their metrics. Technorati is constantly rejiggering its service, resulting in a frustrating user experience and often-unreliable data. And while that dreaded “Technorati monster” seems to escape more and more every week, earlier this year Google changed its algorithm to weed out paid links – A noble action to be sure, but vexing to social marketers.

Bottom line – Since the measurement of a social media marketing campaign must begin with a benchmark, changes to these basic calculations screw up the measurement. Apples and oranges. All of the sudden employees awake to tell their bosses that their blog now had 20% fewer inbound blog links despite aggressive engagement.

It leaves us with the question of whether the older data was poor, the new data is untrustworthy or whether it is too early to join in social media marketing.

Those of us who pay a lot for data sources don’t have as much of this problem, but a rising tide raises all ships.

Curtis Hougland

Transparent Relationships

We’ve talked about the importance of transparency before, right? Here’s a great example of that social media axiom in action. Though we selfless PR folk are much more concerned with seeing our clients in the media than ourselves, it’s always nice to see our efforts towards authentic sharing and genuine relationship-building appreciated publicly once in a while.

See below for an excerpt from a recently secured post on Behind the Buzz, a popular digital marketing and advertising blog written by Rachel Clarke:

The Pitch

I’ve posted about Buffalo Wild Wings before , so the email from Jeff referenced that as a way of affirming the relationship. As well as general information about the campaign, I got screenshots, an offer to talk to the agency and a link to a report about the casual gaming industry , which is nice additional background information even though it’s 2 years old, as a reason for why BWW has done something in this space. Looking at the mentions of this campaign in the press, it looks like AttentionPR does a very good job of getting their clients name out there, but it’s nice to see they’re taking that expertise and using it for blogger relations as well.”

Thanks Rachel! We feel closer already.

The Death of PR

“THE RISE AND FALL OF PUBLIC RELATIONS”  – May 16, 2008

It is official.

Public relations is a deceased discipline in 2018.

The definition of public relations on wikipedia.google.org now reads “a marketing discipline [now defunct] practiced prior to the emergence of Web 3.0 in 2013.”

As a post-mortem, [we] looked through the archive to piece together why.

By 2008 social media was impacting nearly every brand.  As a result, every discipline—including public relations– rushed to embrace the new medium.  At the time PR was in its ascendancy, or so we thought.  Social media prized authentic one-to-one conversation, and PR people are at the core conversationalists.

So, what went wrong?

First of all, the Internet went wrong.  As more media moved online, communication became more transparent. Every online action –posting, viewing, subscribing, installing, sharing and downloading –resulted in the creation of public user data.  Consequently, the ability to track, understand and use social media data became key to success in online communications. PR badly lacked these ‘quant’ skills having relied on instincts and schmoozing for 50 years.

The eco-system of social media is based on sharing, not pitching.  Simply, Person A offers relevant content to person B, who in turn finds the content compelling enough to share with friends/fans/readers/community members.  No one ever enjoyed being pitched, and now they could avoid it all together because information was more readily accessible.  The advent of anti-PR filters instituted in 2008 by mavericks such as Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and Chris Anderson of Wired were the first nail in the coffin.

Lastly, the pendulum clearly swung toward content.  Success in communications increasingly depended on the quality of the content and the integrity of the message. So it was no longer enough to just publicize content.  Communicators also had to publish and produce more content.  Sadly, PR lacked the knowledge of how to build APIs, syndicate content and create compelling online experiences.  Dealing with smaller budgets than their advertising competitors, PR was ultimately squeezed out of the process altogether.

In my next column we will discuss the death of advertising for its failure to achieve anything close to authentic communication.