Drew B's take on tech PR

Zuckerberg was on a roll: The currency of Facebook as a PR tool

Anyone in digital PR not aware of Hugh MacLeod's work could do far worse than to take a few minutes to subscribe to a few of his feeds. Here's his blog and here's his Twitter. I think Hugh's one of those guys who, when he speaks at an event or wherever, he gets the wow factor. He does some cool work with brands on using the social web as a marketing tool (like Microsoft and Stormhoek Wine) and he talks and writes about this stuff on the circuit too. I had the pleasure, courtesy of David Brain, of sharing a fry-up with him recently and he's a switched on chappy.

Reason for me posting about Hugh is that, following people like Simon Willison, Jason Calacanis and Ben Hammersley (can't find the link to his FB post but I remember it, promise) Hugh's one of a growing number of 'influencers' that is publicly deserting Facebook. No apps for his brands, and too much spam.

[Hugh's latest anti-Facebook cartoon]

Is this the tip of the curve? Facebook for me still rocks for friend-finding. But I have to say my photos have gone back to Flickr and ffffound, and status updates to Twitter. I post mostly on blogs, not walls, and use upcoming for event tracking. I'm wondering if social networks that will work best might be better off specialising in doing a small number of things well, instead of polluting peoples' personal web space with things they will look elsewhere to do properly. For the mainstream Facebook does a job. But a new breed of cool web stuff is changing how digital natives network and share. Not in my humple opinion but in theirs.

Wrong elephant. Different room.

Last night I spoke at NMK's Clients in the Wild event. It was broadly about how PRs can, could and should use social media. Nice event Ian, and a cracking quality crowd. The audience was a who's who of the UK PR blogosphere. I was up alongside Midnight's MD Sarah Ogden and social media agency Nixon McInnes' MD, Will McInnes,  who is on most of the social networks himself. He's done some very cool stuff online. And the moderator was Roger Warner of Squiz and Velocity Partners.

Attendees who've blogged about it already have said how they thought it was a good event, and I'd agree.  Lots of useful banter about metrics, measurement, control and all that. Ian Delaney, having organised the whole thing, has done a super report. Other write-ups have gone up online from Edelman's Simon Collister who was in the audience and chipped in a fair few times on some social media theory, as did his colleague Tim Callington (cool to meet Tim again - I have read his blog for a long time and only realised when we met again yesterday that we'd met before at a Microsoft gig). Alan Patrick asked a few questions on Facebook. Ben Maynard at Harvard made a good point on client counsel. Stephen Waddington at Rainier asked about revenues and profits of social media campaigns, but his colleague Tim Hoang did the blogging. Ged Carroll at Waggener Edstrom has done a great write-up, but sadly I missed catching up with him at the event. Other attendees like Giles Shorthouse at Webitpr and Lloyd Gofton have also blogged about what they thought. And someone from Cake had a fair bit to say too. 

But the after-event buzz in the room and over email today was on how everyone avoided talking about elephant in the room. That elephant being the notion that ad/design/digital agencies are encroaching on PR turf and could potentially steal all our work, flattening our revenues and growth in tech PR. That this is a fundamental shift in what we're doing in our jobs. And that PRs are getting worried.

I'm seeing an entirely different room, and we're the elephants.

We have a massive opportunity to develop the right skills in cutting edge areas such as web 2.0, social media, word of mouth, call it what you will. People that do will be allowed to do develop very cool and applicable work, they'll be fun to work around and very useful to have on campaigns. I know guys like Simon, Stephen, Mikey and James must see what I mean. Now and over the past year or two, not just recent months. Being the elephant in this other room, I'm seeing there are marketing as well as PR plans, budgets and concepts on the table. So the grey are emerges between PR and digital media production. Some of us PRs upskill and learn how its done. But we're working too with people who can't and will never need to write a feature for a magazine or know which journalist to call at a newspaper for placing a story. But they can create digital content, build apps and make virals that are core to new campaigns from the beginning. The kind of stuff that as a whole package I really enjoy and am motivated by.

Some more essential reading - BBC Internet Blog and Brendan May's CSR blog

Catching up with feeds and here's a blog that's just caught my eye (thanks James Warren). May Day May Day May Day is a CSR blog from Brendan May, a colleague of James' at Weber Shandwick.

Also The BBC Internet Blog. All stuff internetty from 'senior staff from BBC Future Media teams' where they 'will talk about issues raised by you about the technology behind bbc.co.uk, our mobile services and the BBC's presence on the internet.' Subscribed!

New book - blogging heroes

Something I just picked up over at Steve Rubel's blog... a new book out soon on Amazon called blogging heroes.

Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the Top Bloggers chronicles this through in-depth interviews. Lifehacker's Gina Trapani, TUAW's Scott McNulty and Dowload Squad's Grant Robertson are among those featured in the book.

Amazon has it here, and also lists all the bloggers profiled in the book.

Speaking at Clients in the Wild

I'm going to be speaking at the NMK event on Tuesday on innovation in PR and client blogging. It's called Clients in the Wild. It costs a little to get in, but it's an intimite affair. only about 20 spaces left I'm told. If you're going do come over and say hi!

Bloglines relaunches in beta

My RSS reader of choice, Bloglines, has a new beta version out. I just saw it through an incoming link, so not something formal I believe. You can check it out on http://beta.bloglines.com with the same login details that you usually use. Quite swish, a bit more in the direction of Google Reader.

blogger pitch... in the post

I'm wondering who else from the media blogosphere got a similar package to me this week (in addition to Ian and Neville)? On Monday I got a very cryptic and little bit scary package - a photocopy of some kind of message but with details censored and with too little info left on it to decipher what it meant. And a pay as you go sim card. Here are some pics of what I got.

What happened next involved some cryptic emails and wap texts. Very cool and slick. Anyone else get sent this too?

How to pitch a story to a blogger

I've just read a article that lists 21 things you need to do in order to properly pitch a story to blogs. Some good advice there. It's only a list of tips, not a maual on how to do social media PR or anything. But worth a read:

"Obviously incorporating all 21 points into your next pitch of a blogger might be a little too much to ask - but as both a blogger and someone has done my fair share of pitching I would recommend at least attempting to incorporate some of the above."

Thanks to Jonny Rosemont for the link.

Hitwise sees the beginning of the end for email

A lot of the people I know who don't have office jobs say they never get real email any more - only  newsletters and pings from the social networks they use. This new graph from Hitwise tells a similar story and perhaps the beginning of the end for email as the main way people message eachother on PCs. That social networks are being used more than email.

The Hitwise stats can sometimes be misleading. For example, one visit to a webmail site like Gmail.com you could send and receive 20 mails. And one visit to Bebo and you might just look at pics. But the message is clear and the impact on marketing and PR continues to gain strength - emails get ignored a lot of the time as people move to different places. 

More on fake names

Fair play to Shel who commented this morning on my Facebook names post. Didn't see he'd reported it too on his FIR podcast.

But what a load of guff eh! Lots of online types like bloggers and chat room users have a nom de plume and have to do all sorts of rubbish to get on Facebook with their online name. Tech PR blogger The Worlds Leading having to give himself Theo for example. When Facebook changed from authorised university email addresses to wide open free for all it should have re-thought its names policy maybe. Maybe it did but to me it looks like it still isn't working.