Drew B's take on tech PR

links for 2006-07-15

• Emerging Media Lab
  A site on which new marketing solutions can be tested
• popurls.com | popular urls to the latest web buzz
  All the social media aggregators - text, video and audio - in one place
• Social media stunt: $100 Buys You Lots of del.icio.us Links
  On July 14th Jakob Lodwick is going to award one del.icio.us user $100 for bookmarking this page. So far 1300+ people have bookmarked it
• Journalists complaining about bloggers – who are you to talk?
  Whilst serious journos are worrying about the factual laissez-faire approach of some bloggers, us readers are increasingly skimming our chosen media sources (including blogs) and using our highly-attuned ‘trust antennae’ to judge each source

PR Week's Whelan's take on the bloggers vs Prescott

PR Week's columnist Charlie Whelan says in the this weekks magazine that Prescott is truly reeling from the blogosphere:

John Prescott usually blames 'the hostile media' for negative stories about him, but now he has found a new enemy and is blaming the bloggers. More...

The five social media technologies you couldn’t do without

So, the bloggers, web designers and programmers had a meeting in LEWIS London today to discuss some of the applications of social media technologies in a PR context. I make a point of trying to understand how all these technologies work, so I can coach clients, and of course so I can use the best technology too.

In the session, and as Jon rightly put it on his blog earlier, we decided we all have our favourites. In terms of publishing, I have run a few blogs on the big three platforms, so my favourite platforms won't be in my top five (that would use up an all too important top-five slot!). But here's what is:

• Bloglines for reading my feeds, and I use BerryBloglines to read feeds on the move
• Google Blog Search for my tracking - I use the RSS feeds that Google crunches out to track all my clients' names, their spokespeople's names, their products' names... you get the picture
• Del.icio.us for creating posts on my Social Media Report site and for managing social media intel.
• FeedYes.com for creating RSS feeds on sites that don't do it automatically - I use this for massive RSS news tracking across the media that haven't caught up
• Popurls to track memes and early-warning signals on news. The rumours on Popurls is often tomorrow's news agenda, and it keeps PRs a step ahead

And I wanted to mention so many more - but thank god for Popurls, as it covers so much.

I'm hoping that Simon, Ian, Simon, Danny and Bobbie - you can tell us what you think and carry on the meme.

Technorati Tags: five things, blogging, social media, meme

Add to: | Technorati |  Digg |  del.icio.us |  Yahoo |  BlinkList |  Spurl |  reddit |   Furl |

Blogs really become a powerful medium

Readers of the discussion taking place about Colin Farrington on Tony Bradley's blog should be interested in this analysis of the power of blogs.

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise posted some great analysis graphs showing the impact blogger Iain Dale is having during the 'bloggers vs Prescott' affair. Really worth taking a look if you are someone who still thinks: "can blogs really become a powerful medium?"

Offering an internship

This morning's Guardian has a great photo story about Scouts and their new PR badge. I've posted the story up on the LEWIS blog, and we're offering some Scouts an internship so we can find out more, and offer some experience. Anyone know any PR Scouts?

New PR blogs

Some new PR related blogs I've subscribed to:

• Twopointouch (ie Web 2.0uch I think?) which is a work-in-progress book on Web 2.0 by Ian Delaney
• Engage in PR, by Kyle Flaherty of Boston, US
• The New Marketing - marketing agency Write Image has started blogging
• Crispy News' "New PR" - the Digg-esque site that lets readers rank blog stories collaboratively
• Into PR - Owen Lystrup’s foray into a PR

Speedo launches podcast

Speedo, a client of podcaster Neville Hobson, has launched its new page of podcasts, called Speedo Makes Waves. Well done Neville on landing and delivering this big brand podcast. Keep us updated with the traction it gets. We all love a good case study.

Help needed on Wikipedia page for Social Media

I've just seen that there isn't a page on Wikipedia for Social Media - so I started one. So, in the interest of balance and UGC democracy, please log on and edit it. It would be good to get some detail up there from the blogosphere.

How to pitch to a blogger

The value of getting your story covered by blogs and social media is now a given. The best way to get your get your story covered by a blogger is a different story. Blogs aren't like the press, and we're having to learn different tactics to those leant in our formative years in PR.

There's any number of tactics you can use to identify who to pitch to, how you offer your story, which way you communicate with the blogger and how you network. But here are three tips to get you going with pitching to  bloggers:

1. Link love: email the blogger a personal note with plenty of links. Using links will make your pitch more concise, and will use the phycological trick known as association to get the blogger to see you think like they do and increase the likelihood that the blogger will read the email and act on it (bloggers use lots of links too, you see)
2. Exclusives: I would say, the master statistician that I am, that 99.9 per cent of bloggers are not journalists. Yet because of the long tail, they have a disproportionate amount of media power. So send them exclusives. Give them embargoes, new photos, pre-briefings and launch-do's. When you email them, offer some juicy gossip. The works, as they say, works. Just beware the bloggers' code of conduct isn't quite as well-defined as traditional media
3. Informality: with bloggers being such an informal bunch themselves, they'll prefer this from the pitch you offer them too. You'll maybe only be given the option to contact a blogger by email or web-form. If youre lucky you'll have a phone number. In any case, the corporate style will sit ill at ease with your average blogger so speak to them at their level

 

The 'I hate Ronaldo' campaign

- Update 7/7/06 - The video sharing site YouTube has played a large role in viral PR campaigns over recent months. Often a TV ad, popular clip or spoof movie will spread quickly with the help of YouTube. The most recent example of such a campaign is for a website called www.ihateronaldo.com which is portraying the winking Portuguese footballer as a public hate figure.

Since I first wrote this post it has received far too much traffic and the comments section became an outlet for foul-mouthed Ronaldo fans to tell me and my readers what they think about us, our girlfriends, our football team, our mothers... you get the picture It's really of not what this blog's about, so I've taken the comments off and closed the comments box now. Sorry but I'm forsaking freedom of speech on this blog for decorum.

If you have any feelings about the below video and how much of a cheat Ronaldo may or may not be, or whether England deserved to lose anyway, please write about it on your own blog :-)