The Marketing 2.0 Revolution: Who Is Driving?

This evening, the San Francisco American Marketing Association put on a panel featuring the just departed from Google Kevin Marks, Jeremiah Owyang, Mark Silva and Robert Scoble. I took notes on the panel and posted them to FriendFeed. These notes are embedded below. The topic was billed as how tech bloggers are pushing the new version of Marketing 2.0, and strayed away from the core topic, bouncing to PR, social media, and how marketers and advertisers can take advantage of these new tools.

In a month, I will be back up here, participating with Guy Kawasaki, Scoble and others, discussing the potential demise of Marketing and PR, hosted by Mark Evans, who just so happens to be the president-elect of the SFAMA and father to triplets.

PR Pitches Promise to Trade Diggs for Coverage

As the blog has gained in visibility, so to have the inbound pitches. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they are horrible - and some are just downright off-topic, and get deleted. But one the more recent trends I've seen is a promise by the PR rep to push the story to Digg "if the review is great". Twice this month, I have received near-identical pitches, ostensibly from two different people at two different PR agencies, ending with the following two lines, after having introduced their new iPhone apps:

"Let me know - I can send promo code right away. If the review is great we will digg it as hell."

Never mind the cookie cutter wrap-up and the substandard English, or even that the pitches have been for less than interesting iPhone applications. Call me snooty or idealistic, but I have a very real problem with the idea that if my review is deemed "great", that the PR team will try and reward me with traffic by manipulating Digg - even if I think they don't have the Digg juice to do it.


An excerpt from one such pitch in early May
I'm not going to stand on a pedestal and make a rant about paid posts, or how bloggers are allowed to curry favor or get bias, but this is a stupid practice I could really live without. Because I'm a nice guy, I won't be outing which agencies, individuals or which products are pitched this way, but I bet some of you reading this have gotten the same template garbage.

Do you really think you're earning bonus points with me because you're Web 2.0 savvy enough to know what Digg is?

If you want to entice me into writing about your product, don't do it with a promise of Diggs. Show me that you know what I usually cover, and that your offer is something my audience wants to know. And please don't send me a link from a top tech blog as evidence that your stuff is awesome, because if somebody else already debuted your story, it's already old. Digg it?

Don't Tempt the Online Mob. They Come Bearing Pitchforks.

There's no need for me to recap Twitter's two-day flub as you've already seen it 40 different places. What's most interesting to me about the entire situation is the rapidity of how the user community turned on the service and its founders in response to what was a relatively minor change that was confusingly and sloppily addressed. The response, which loudly came from all corners, mirrored that of previous blowups, which have also included Facebook and Digg as victims - the first around its terms of service and Beacon, and the second, around its blocking of illegal series of numbers that could unlock DVD region codes. Even Google Reader faced a backlash last year from users who expected a different interpretation of what friends were and who could see what.

See also:

• May 2, 2007: Unpopular Opinion: Digg Revolt Is a Bad Precedent
• December 26, 2007: Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

Every single case dealt with a Web 2.0 service driven largely by user generated or selected content, where the mob was reacting to changes handed down unilaterally from a seeming all-knowing company, without first communicating potential changes, or accurately foreseeing downstream effects. And in most of the examples (Google Reader being practically the only exception), the service had already chipped into its balance of goodwill, leading to a strained relationship with a vocal minority of users, setting the stage for the much larger backlash that was to come.

Did the services that made mistakes and got roundly slammed deserve the punishment? If you ask the users, the answer is yes. In today's world, the online communities that have been built around these popular products have a sense of entitlement, not just to specific features, but that they will be made a part of the process, spoken with and not just spoken to. And if they feel they have been wronged or lied to, all hell can rain down on the company or the individual bearing the broken message.

To me personally, the change in @replies for Twitter was frustrating and annoying, but what ticked me off was more the way in which it was delivered. As with the company's previous comments about following many users being "disingenuous", this week's move seemed like they were once again telling us of a right way and a wrong way to use their product. That their blog post was backtracked upon and respun as a product issue and then a technical issue made us feel lied to, and the team, despite having what by all means is a very successful product, disappointed us again.

Here's the thing: Before I get slammed (again) for being a FriendFeed apologist and/or Twitter hater... the truth is not so black and white. I think Twitter is great for what it is supposed to do - send short messages and help broadcast information quickly. It is now a utility, like e-mail, and we're all assumed to be there. But I, and many others, continue to get frustrated when we see the system and its people fall short of what is an amazing potential. You can have hundreds of millions of users, but the experience itself is diminishing, and the management seems disconnected, in a way that makes them look like they are in love with the latest celebrities to sign up and less enamored with us rank and file who evangelized their product the last few years, pointing out both the good and the bad as it came.

Similar too are the stories of those previously stabbed by the mob. The Digg fanatics believe strongly in their ability to push favorite items forward, and potentially upset the balance of the new world media. Facebook, once deemed a safe place for friends and family to congregate online, found itself on the wrong side of privacy choices and business. Google Reader wrongly hoped that those you e-mailed in GMail would be fine to share your RSS favorites with. In each case, the users believed in the product, wanted it to succeed, but disagreed strongly with the latest moves, and they would not give up until their voices had been heard and made impact.

Designing new products and services, and adding new features to existing ones, is very difficult to do in public, especially when you are trying to walk the fine line of placating existing users while attracting new ones. Twitter, in a flash point of popularity, is especially vulnerable due to the fact their own product, as also are Digg and Facebook, could be used by users to fight back. Did Twitter or Facebook or Digg lose users permanently due to such heated battles? Probably not for long, but the scars do linger, and the trust factor that might once have been there is gone, or at least damaged enough that the mob will keep their torches at the ready, waiting for the next time they're needed.

The world of product development, on the backs of user content, is changing the way people expect to participate. And when they aren't treated as equals, or they are talked down to, people are taking it very seriously, and there are more platforms for conversation than ever, with more people to reach than ever, so any service who is in this space who expects to make even "small settings updates" should strongly think of their potential impact and be ready in case things start to go wrong - fast.

Inbound Marketing Summit Preso: There Is No Information Overload

There Is No Information Overload: Finding a Signal In the Noise

View more presentations from louisgray.

At 4:25 today in San Francisco, I will be presenting at the Inbound Marketing Summit on tackling the perception of information overload. How can those of us in Marketing, tasked at discovering and participating in microcommunities where our prospects, partners and customers, reside, get a handle on all the data, and find the most relevant bits?

With only 20 minutes, we'll see what we can do. There's no time limit for you to flip through these slides, of course. Go to it.

Creating Social Media Outposts

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Roll-Your-Own Social Media Campaign: Outposts

I recently started a new job at a software company. One of my responsiblites is creating and launching an effective organic SEO & social media strategy for our customers. Our customer base deals primarily with the auto industry, not the keenest when it comes to marketing on the Internet, much less social web. The majority of our customers spend their advertising dollars on print, TV and radio ads. This strategy for the most part works well, as it's locally targeted to a geographical region.

My main objective with this task is primarily for search engine purposes only. Creating back links and outposts. Brand monitoring is also another objective. This is a roll-your-own strategy tailored for the three objectives I mentioned only. Educational training on social media comes later. These type of clients are salesmen who are on the sales floor all day long trying to move product, and often these clients will have an employee assigned to the Internet division, but that employee usually does not know the first thing about Internet marketing. Their sole task is updating online inventory and responding to Internet requests. These are the employees who will require ongoing training about Internet marketing and more specifically social media marketing, engagement and interaction. More on that on a future post, but lets get started.

Think of outposts as a sort of toll booth. This is the analogy I'm making here. It's pretty much the same in real life. On the Internet there are many toll booths for many destinations. You need to own and operate that toll booth, instead of your competitors.

1. Reserving and creating the brands name online, aka vanity urls.

The first step is creating accounts on the major social networking sites. All I'm concerned with at this point is Twitter , Facebook , MySpace , YouTube and blogging. Blogging for this objective will be using Blogger.com, eventually leading to in house blogs as well as hosted on the brands website using WordPress. I need to reserve the brand's name on these networks for search engine traffic, but equally important is to keep them out of the hands of name squatters and potential competitors. I'm not concerned about the smaller social networks, they can come at a later point if needed.

Why choose Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger and YouTube?

Blogger:

• The ability to create dozens of blogs utilizing targeted keywords.
• Easy to use with no learning curve.
• Vanity URLs
• Google juice
• Marketing
• Branded outpost

Self hosted WordPress blogs will eventually be the main informational hub for consumers

Twitter:

• Real time search capabilities.
• An API we can hook into to pull and post data.
• Consumer interaction, engagement & lead generation.
• Broadcasting inventory, specials, etc.
• Vanity URL & tweets are indexable by search engines, Google being the prime target.
• Branded outpost

Facebook:

• The ability to create a public branded fan page & vanity URL
• Public pages are indexed by search engines. Google being the prime target.
• Consumer interaction, engagement & lead generation.
• Rich multimedia environment.
• Branded outpost

MySpace:

• Vanity URL
• Public pages are indexed by search engines, Google being the prime target.
• Multimedia environment, primarily will be used for video/photo purposes only.
• Branded outpost

YouTube:

• Vanity URL
• Distribution hub for videos created in house.
• Ability to create a custom channel.
• Embeddable share options for videos and soc nets.
• Indexable by search engines, great for Google juice.
• Branded outpost

2. Creating consistent brandable outposts.
Now that all these accounts are created, it's time to turn them into outposts. Remember an outpost is used for driving traffic back to your central hub. The hub in this case is the brands website.

• Outposts need to be streamlined and most importantly consistent across the board.
• Corporate contact information, banners, logos and URL name should all be the same.
• Outposts always link back to the central hub.
• Always use targeted keywords in profile information.
• Goal is to achieve uniform omnipresence on all outposts.
• When information is changed on the central hub, it needs to be reflected on the outpost.
• Link back to all your outposts. Always remember main emphasis is on the central hub.
• Encourage following and fans on your outposts and always follow back.
• Keep the outpost fresh with content as often as possible, this is key for search engines.

That's part 1 of this roll-your-own strategy. Outposts are relatively easy to set up and maintain, and are key for organic search traffic. Part 2 will cover maintenance of the outposts and will also dive into brand monitoring.
Image by thetruthabout under Flickr CC

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

You Should Be Using LinkedIn for Demand Generation

LinkedIn can be much more than simply a site to host your online resume, and connect with colleagues. While the site's core mission may be to keep your job history in one place, and to leverage connections you have to find new people, the vast, fast-growing, database can be leveraged for much more. At a time when many companies are cutting back on their marketing and prospecting budgets, LinkedIn presents a significant opportunity to find new targets and stir up business.

In late 2007, I talked about how LinkedIn is an incredible resource for sharp reporters and bloggers. Earlier in the year, I'd also given the company some suggestions to improve, many of which have since been implemented. But there is no question in my mind that most LinkedIn users are not taking advantage of the features that are there now.

Finding Targets By Territory and Vertical

LinkedIn's advanced search offers the ability to search by many different attributes, from the user's location to their title, and industry, not just their current job or school history. If you are a sales account manager, inside sales rep, a researcher, or in marketing, the right set of search combinations can get you a list of people, with titles and companies, giving you a starting point to get calling and e-mailing.

For example, if you own the Los Angeles territory, and want to reach technology VPs in the entertainment industry, enter the Zip Code ("90012"), choose the title of "Vice President of Technology, and the Industry of Entertainment. (See the search here)


The results are sorted by their linkage to you, starting with those you are connected to, and then to those who are connected to your friends. The more connections you have on LinkedIn, the more likely you are to have top matches. And once you have these names and companies, with their titles, it just takes a little Sales 101 to get their phone numbers and e-mail, either through the Web, or by being nice to their office receptionists.

You can see more examples here: (CTOs near Sunnyvale in Computer Hardware or Internet and VPs of Sales near Seattle in Airlines and Aviation)

If you're not sure exactly how targets refer to their industry, do a search first on someone you know, or are connected to, and use them as the template. That person you thought would choose "Entertainment" just might have put themselves in "Motion Pictures and Film" instead.

Finding Contacts by Title and Company

If you already know the company you want to break into, you can do searches on the company and reduce your targets by title. For example, on LinkedIn, you can search for "artist at Pixar" and pitch them the latest animation tool, or "scientist at Sandia" to find out who is keeping watch over our atomic weapons arsenal.

Depending on the query, you can end up with many targets, or you can drill down to the perfect one you need. (Such as the Technorati CEO)

Execute a Friendly Game of Competitive Espionage

Here's one I am particularly fond of. Even in the most cutthroat of environments, you can sometimes make friends with your competitors' staff, be it through trade shows, or other venues where you both need to show up at the same place and play nice. Getting connected to them won't hurt you all that much, especially if you hide your connections from others. But it can especially benefit you if they don't hide their connections, giving you a Rolodex you can walk through, to find both potential partners, and, potentially, naming their entire prospect and customer list by name.

The very best person to link to in this case is your competition's sales territory manager. I've done it. As LinkedIn shows you their latest connections, you can get good insight into which meetings they have held this week, and traded business cards. Or, you can go to their Web site, see listed customer references, and then cross-check those company names against your new friend's LinkedIn list.

It's pure gold. And if the person is high enough up in the chart, you might just want to hit Print on every single one of their LinkedIn connections pages and hand it off to Inside Sales. In fact, connecting to the competition is the primary reason I don't share my connections list. I want access to their business cards, but I don't necessarily want them to have mine.

If you're using LinkedIn in hopes of attracting a new job, or just to keep a PDF copy of your resume handy, that's fine. But if you already have a job, and you want to make it as successful as possible, you should be using the tools right in front of you. Don't be afraid to link up to more people, as it gets you more names as the connections extend and open you new routes of communication and search detail. I've been using LinkedIn for demand generation for years, and if you're in Marketing or Sales, I recommend you do as well.

Who Does Apple Think They Are?

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)


I can't believe it's barely been a month since we were crammed in stores filled with irate last-minute shoppers. If you've forgotten, close your eyes, think back to the few days before Christmas and how brutal the holiday shopping crowd and all the stores are - even the grocery stores.

Now imagine, combining the tiring experience with raining glass. What a nightmare. I would not wish that on my biggest enemy but that is what happened to a couple from Kansas.

Last December, an Apple retail store's glass doors shattered shut from strong Midwestern winds and showered glass all over two shoppers. Luckily, the couple only sustained minor cuts with no major injuries, but the fact remains: Glass. Exploded. On them. In our country where everyone and their pets are quick to yell LAWSUIT, Apple got lucky, as the couple chose not to sue.

Instead, the couple's son wrote to Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson (VP of Apple Retail) about the incident, and the only response they got was a call from Apple Claims in Seattle, to verify that Andrew's parents decided to pass on taking the company to court.

There was nothing from Ron Johnson VP of Apple retail, or his office.
There was no press release from Katie Cotton VP of PR, or her office.
Of course, there was nothing from Steve Jobs (obviously it won't be from the man himself, since he is in no condition to do so) but not even an Out of Office reply?

Unacceptable.
Below is the letter, taken from Gizmodo:

"On Sunday December 21st, my parents were shopping in the Leawood, KS Apple Retail Store. After making their purchases they found a design flaw in the elegant stores of Apple. Glass does not hold up well in Midwest winters As they were leaving the store, a gust of wind caught the front glass door, the door slammed all the way around into the front of the building and shattered all over them. After many apologetic conversations with the employees of the store, they left and my father noticed he had sustained a cut on his hand. To make it home, they had to stop at the local grocery store to get bandages. Upon coming home, my mother discovered she had also sustained cuts.

This all seemed like a lot of trouble and trauma for just adding to the number of Apple products in our family (We have the new Macbook, Macbook Air, 2 iPhones, time capsule, Apple TV, airport extreme, countless iPods, etc.).

THE END RESULT: I emailed this information to Steve Jobs himself, as well as Ron Johnson VP of Apple Retail. My family has not heard from either of them. We did however get a call from an Apple Claims representative in Seattle to make sure my parents didn't keel over on the car ride home and probably trying to find out if we were planning any litigation. My parents took the high road on this one out of respect for the company of Apple which they know I greatly admire. I am an Apple shareholder as well as the Vice-President of the Mac Users Society at my University.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Our family LOVES Apple. We have all been to Cupertino and have seen Steve in person. It's just funny that all Apple did to rectify a retail door shattering on my parents was to make sure we weren't suing. It's ironic that people who get horrible service and whine about it walk out of stores with brand new macbook pros and whatever they cry for. Yet people like my family have taken the high road because we respect companies that give 1st class service to customers and deliver innovative products.

I've Attached a Photo of the Damage to the Store. My heart goes out to all the Apple Employees who braved the cold and stayed until the store closed."

I love Apple, I do. But Apple's course of action - or lack thereof, makes me sick to my stomach. Who does Apple think they are? Have they forgotten why a company succeeds? It is the paying customers. And from the letter, it sounds like Andrew and his parents are loyal Apple customers. To not even extend a written apology from the corporate offices is completely unacceptable - especially since Andrew and his parents handled the incident with class. The least Apple could've done was offered the nice couple a free year of MobileMe, since no one wants to pay for it anyway. Completely unacceptable.

Am I overreacting? What do you think Apple should've done? Do you have any nightmare Apple customer service experiences?

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Admiring Companies That Don't Blink

It's tempting to run with the mantra that every company must be transparent. With so many ways companies can communicate to us in real-time, we practically expect every single one to respond to our blog posts, our tweets, and our product demands. We find ourselves publicly lauding those developers who show up in our blog comments and promise change. We celebrate those companies whose founders we know on a first-name basis, and whose Twitter handle we have memorized. But there's also a part of us that finds the silence from companies in the tech space who choose not to be as transparent alluring, as it both adds to the mystery in terms of what they have planned, and gives a sense of confidence on their end that they don't have to change their product to match my every whim.

Apple is one of the best examples of a company whose vast wall of silence and secrecy spawns a vast network of rumor-seekers and speculation. Once limited to the dark recesses of the Web, guessing the Cupertino company's next move has practically become an industry tradition. You won't find an official Apple Twitter account. You won't find an official Apple blog either (though the Hot News page is pretty close). And you most definitely won't find an Apple representative in the comments of users' blogs, saying what features they will or won't add to the next release.

You could say the same, on various levels for many companies. What's going on at Google? Despite their many blogs and the ever-present Matt Cutts, it's not all that transparent. Most Google employees don't blog about their at-work exploits, and product development isn't usually that give and take. Microsoft? A different animal altogether. You could argue Microsoft never really understood the Web, and is a full generation behind the true Valley, so maybe they'll get it in the next five years, but they too represent a company that doesn't exactly kowtow to its users.

There are some smaller companies in the Valley that elicit the same kind of respect, because it looks like they are more willing to focus on improving their product than they are shouting down every naysayer, or responding to critics - as tempting as it may be, no doubt. Some of that can come from the founders' previous experiences, if they have grown up in companies where the focus was more on quarterly earnings and shipping product iterations than it was on asking their customer base for product roadmap ideas.

You can see different approaches in terms of how the strong companies respond to criticism, warranted or otherwise. The bad ones will try and shout you down, posting multiple negative comments in response, and might even post on their own blog saying how you are wrong. The good ones might instead say thanks for the advice, or quietly see your input and tuck the advice away for a rainy day.

Some people think I talk too much about Twitter and FriendFeed here, which is fine, but the reason they get so much attention is because we so clearly see their potential, and we use both services a lot. Of course, with high potential comes high expectations, and I have a tendency to want to push them both further faster, whether that makes good business sense or not. You might remember how at the beginning of this month I posted a long item practically begging FriendFeed to work harder at attracting new users. I stated my concerns that too many people were finding the system hard to use. The team could have done a few things - including saying I don't know what I'm talking about, or the reverse, saying I was right and starting to do all I said right away. Instead, Paul Buchheit explained the team's long-term view. His measured, quiet response was respectful and insightful, but didn't blink. My comments and those of others didn't phase him. He and the team quietly kept working. Twitter, in light of recent criticism as to how they've interacted with the developer community, has similar gone back to work and focused on their business. And I respect that. While I'd love to wave a magic wand to push these companies around, or see how closely their plans match my ideas, their focus is to be admired.

Companies like Apple and Google, for the most part, are "above the fray", and don't seemingly need to kowtow to their users in the way that struggling startups or smaller businesses do. So long as both companies, and Microsoft for that matter, continue to push out high-quality products, and grow their business revenues and profits, playing tit for tat on the blogs and Twitter isn't necessary. And they are a special case, in that their mere silence on a topic can stir even more discussion than a clear answer could. If some of the stronger Web 2.0 companies can cross the chasm to that level, thanks to their unceasing focus, then they have made the right choice. I may pound the table for answers, but secretly like it when they don't say a word.

BuzzGain Launches In Beta, Enabling "Do It Yourself PR", Monitoring

Just yesterday morning, we were talking about the friction that can arise between bloggers and Public Relations teams, who in theory should be working together, but often find themselves battling, largely due to a lack of understanding of one's goals, or even if they have the right targets. Today, BuzzGain, a small startup I've been helping to advise since March of 2008, is opening up in beta, with a goal of helping companies' service, communications and product teams work with bloggers and social media in a better way - through improved monitoring and outreach tools.

Most companies these days are waking up to the fact that they are going to have a hard time controlling their message and brand reputation online, with so many voices out there watching and reporting on their every move. Be they competitors, customers or partners, people are talking about you online, on blogs, on Twitter, on FriendFeed, YouTube, Flickr and other sites. BuzzGain is looking to start out by offering a set of robust social media monitoring tools, but also help companies get to the next level, and better understand who has influence, and where conversations are taking place, so they can better listen and learn from those who can offer beneficial relationships.


BuzzGain Shows Blogs Relevant to Your Company
In the ten months I have worked with Mukund Mohan and watched the site grow, it has taken tremendous evolutionary steps forward, growing its data base, and making it easier for corporate or PR teams to run campaigns that follow keywords. With time, it could be that BuzzGain would be operated by PR teams in the way Salesforce.com is run by Sales teams in a wide range of industries. And like Salesforce.com, BuzzGain launches with a real revenue strategy, pricing at $99 a month for companies below $100 million in revenue, and rising to $500 a month to those up to $1 billion in revenue, and $1,000 a month for $1 billion+ companies.


BuzzGain Can Rank Influencers By Authority, Frequency
BuzzGain doesn't operate in isolation. Its data is pulled from popular Web sources, including Technorati, which helps determine sites' influence in terms of external link activity, and Compete.com for estimated traffic. Essentially, as a PR person, if you wanted to find out who the authority was for your company or a set of keywords, you could learn through BuzzGain who mentions those topics most frequently, see how often they do, and whether they reach 500 readers or 500,000.


BuzzGain Can Show Details On Specific Sources
Given the site is in very early beta, there is some work still left to be done when it comes to optimizing the user experience and speeding up time for queries and results, and continued efforts to remove duplication of data, but BuzzGain has developed a one-stop tool for agencies and corporate marketers to get, in a single glance, a barometer for what is happening to their brand on the Web. Mukund and the team call it "Do-It-Yourself PR". The site is currently tracking 150 million different sources of influence, and helps to make some sense of the noise.

You can sign up for the private beta on their Web site, or let me know if you're interested. I just might have some invites and have hopes that these humble beginnings will be the start of something very interesting in the world of PR and brand monitoring.

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DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to BuzzGain.

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Bloggers and PR Are Not Enemies, But Quality Efforts Are Needed

When it comes to the issue of how bloggers should work with companies' public relations teams, I sit in an interesting intersection. From 9 to 5, I help administer my company's public relations strategy, working on customer announcements, product releases and relations with media, analysts and customers. It's only part of my role, but a significant one - to help raise the company's visibility and awareness in key target publications and communities. But outside of work hours, when it comes to the blog, I often find myself solicited by companies' PR teams who are hoping their announcements will hit a sweet spot for the site and its readers. And the two roles can be very conflicting. At the office, my goal can be for many people to write about one thing. At home, often, if I think others have already covered the story, I'll skip it. But that doesn't make PR the enemy - even as I get press release submissions that I never would have requested, see people set unrealistic embargoes that are clearly broken by someone else, or watch double standards be applied.

Yesterday, Jeremy Toeman of Stage Two Consulting, and a strong blogger in his own right at LiveDigitally, asked if bloggers were simply underutilizing PR people. He, very accurately in my opinion, highlighted how many bloggers are choosing speed over correctness, not checking with PR teams to get background data, or even turning down the opportunity to speak with company representatives to gain quotes and other facts behind the standard release.

Simply stated, a good number of bloggers, many without traditional journalism training, are not taking extra effort needed to make their stories more robust, with company input. Some of that is due to a lack of experience. Some of that is due to a lack of time. Other factors may include a lack of interest, and especially, reward. What many have found, including me, is that the traditional ways bloggers measure themselves, with page views, external links and the number of comments, "likes", Diggs or what have you, are usually not impacted in a positive way through the additional work.

In my comments to Jeremy, I said I do reach out to developers behind a service, especially on longer-lead items, where the company has made a personal effort to reach out to me, instead of just seeing my name on an e-mail list. If, instead, I can tell it's practically a form e-mail, the additional effort to get background data, quotes and an interview is essentially lost, as my story will be just one of many that hit the Web at the same time - so it'd be just as useful to simply get a login to the site and start making screenshots. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb concurred, saying there is "little incentive in terms of pageviews" to do the additional research. Robert Scoble, who does some of the most-direct reporting with videos of entrepreneurs in his work for FastCompany, said there is "not much homework being done, just a lot of repurposing press releases," adding it's not just bloggers who err this way, but many in traditional media as well.

Putting my work/PR hat on, I can see the trends as well. Just a few years ago, the best way to distribute a message was to set up a series of conference calls and analyst visits weeks ahead of a launch, and provide customer references. Now, given the dramatic reduction in media outlets, and rise in people vying for attention, it could be just as effective to send an early version of the press release out and pick a date for folks to write about it. Some will want the executive interviews and customer quotes, but not all. There are just too many stories to be written and not any more hours in the day, and as with bloggers, the media wants to be first. Provide a date, and some will post at midnight Pacific. Others will post at midnight Eastern time, meaning their story lands up to six hours before the official press release and Web site updates.

So yes, things are changing - and with change comes strife.

Not every public relations firm is an expert in dealing with bloggers. Some are waking up to the blogging phenomenon and, guessing at the influencers, are simply adding blogger e-mail addresses to their distribution lists, without taking the time needed to se what it is each blogger covers, learning their focus areas, or personalizing an angle. Others are aggressively hustling the top two to five names and ignoring the second layer - which creates stress for those pursued, and resentment for those who are ignored.

But the issue is a two-way street. Bloggers often want the respect given to traditional media, and want to be counted as journalists, but it is a select few who are leveraging the resources available - taking time to ask questions of the company and getting quotes from executives. Is it because executives aren't trusted? Is it because bloggers don't want to look biased in favor of the company, but instead, neutral? It can't possibly be because they didn't think to ask, or are lazy, or just wanted to get a post out the door before moving on to the next one, right?

On LouisGray.com, there are definitely times when we get the chance to speak to the developers of a service to gain quotes and their take on the news. You saw that with the launches of Plinky and PeopleBrowsr, Scrapplet, Gnip, Glue and many others. You've also seen launches of new products where we've been trading e-mails with the companies for weeks or months, like with Feedly, Toluu and Socialmedian. But we don't do this every time. Sometimes, it's because we never got the chance. Other times, it's because all we got was a press release and a launch date, and not being overly impressed with the product, it didn't seem worth the effort.

For me, much of the traditional public relations activity, owned by a PR firm, is being done by the founders of the companies I talk to themselves. Instead of asking a PR person for help, I'm going straight to Jason Goldberg or Bret Taylor, Caleb Elston or Alex Iskold. The traditional PR function of shaping a message, choosing targets and scheduling interviews is often done solo - but the rules still apply. Bloggers want to get a unique story, and companies want to reach as many people as possible - so yes, there is a conflict.

The solution is for bloggers to understand the goals of the PR firm and company, and for PR firms and companies to understand the goals of the blogger. It would behoove PR firms to learn how to reach out to bloggers as individuals and tailor a message, even if it is a simple feature enhancement or milestone. It would behoove bloggers to go beyond the headlines and try to really understand a product - to kick the tires, providing feedback, positive and negative. Bloggers don't like feeling like a number, and PR people don't like being ignored if they have made an executive available.

As bloggers, taking the time to speak with an executive and getting a customer example or a use case can be not only a good way to get a unique story, but also to get a personal relationship that goes well beyond a press release. Truth is - the more you know about a product, the more likely you are to end up using it yourself anyway.

As PR reps, understand many bloggers have day jobs, and they don't always have the flexibility to answer you in your 9 to 5 window, so you will need to be open for calls at 10 p.m. as much as 10 a.m. Trade e-mails with me at 1 a.m., and you've practically got a partner for life. And do your homework. It's just as important for you to know what it is that I write about as it is for us to know what it is that you do and where you used to work. The blogging community can be your best mouthpiece for getting the message out quickly, and your worst enemy, should you end up ticking them off.

There has got to be a move to quality on the blogging side. I would much rather have longer-length posts from me and the team than quick hits that get out 15 minutes before the next guy. And companies should reward bloggers who take the extra effort by highlighting the reports on their site as they do traditional media reports. But there has also got to be a move toward quality from PR firms, who in stressful times these days, are scrambling to make headway in a very tough environment. PR companies and bloggers could work together as partners to deliver their readers stories that are relevant, sourced, and robust.

Or... we could continue to ignore each other and point fingers, and from that, nobody will grow.

What Social Media Is and What Social Media Is Not

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


This post touches upon what I feel social media is and isn’t. It does not matter what your purpose is for using social media. The key elements are and always will be the same. Your desired outcome is dictated by the basic fundamentals of the core of what social media is. This post touches upon the most important ones. I could have went on and on with this list, but I don't think that was needed to drive home what I'm trying to get across. Please feel free to add to it by leaving your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

What social media is:

1) Conversation: Social media is all about word of mouth. The message you are trying to convey might vary for personal or professional gain. This is the social in social media. Without this, it's just plain old media. Traditional marketing methods are one-way, one-sided. Social media and social marketing is all about two-way communication, never forget this. Marketing in the social web means you must participate, lead and when necessary react to conversation.

2) Commenting: This goes hand in hand with community and conversation. You should actively comment on conversations. If you have an opinion let it be known, otherwise you are a shadow lurking in the background. Comment only when you have something constructive, or positive to add to the conversation. Commenting just for the sake of commenting adds no real value, all it does is add clutter to the conversation. Commenting also reflects on you as the individual or brand, so always beware of that fact. Choose your words wisely, think before you act or react.

3) Community: This is formed from conversation. This is where people are talking. The communities may vary across all the social networks. Go where your existing and potential customers are talking and engage them. It could be on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and so forth. If your goals are strictly for launching a new product, you should be creating a community around it and for it.

4) Collaboration: Work with anyone, anywhere to achieve a common goal. This should be key to any company, especially when launching a new product. Your customers could be anyone. Who better to solicit feedback and ideas about your product than the ones who are already using it? Going beyond that, the social web allows us to collaborate basically with anyone that's connected to the web. Collaboration fosters creativity and innovation. It would be foolish not to use it. Forget the costly and expensive R&D teams. Collaborate with your employees. Like your customers, they are the ones who know and work with your product day in and day out.

5) Contribution: First and foremost this means being helpful. What you put into social media, is what you will ultimately get out of it. It's really that simple. You need to contribute before you can ask for something in return. On Twitter, re-tweet valuable information from your followers and abroad. Contribute to the conversations going on around you. Every avenue of social media allows you to contribute and participate in someway shape or form. I don't think I need to expand on this any further.

6) Sharing: This aspect is especially true if you are using social media for personal branding. Share your knowledge with others through blogging. Knowledge is power, and by sharing it you, are arming people with power. Share and promote quality content whenever and wherever you find it. The knowledge you share either through blogging or Google Reader is the foundation for what social media is based upon, conversation. Always remember, sharing and self promotion is always a two-way street.

What social media isn’t:

1) Social Media isn’t easy. Anyone can set up a blog, Twitter and Facebook account. That's the easy part. You could teach a child to do that. It's how we use these tools that is the challenge. Social media takes time and plenty of it. It takes commitment and also an understanding of how things works. This is not something you can just jump into and reap the benefits. Like anything else you must crawl before you can walk.

2) Social Media isn’t the end all solution for every business. There are some industries that are very niche or for instance locally based, that social media is just not a viable solution for. Tom's pizza shop down the block could care less about social media. He might have a need for a website, maybe listings in the local Yahoo or Google search, but that's about it.

3) Social media isn’t about list building and Friending hundreds to thousands of people. Social media is about connections, meaningful ones at that.

4) Social media isn’t a "set it and forget it" type of medium. Read #1

5) Social media isn’t a replacment for SEO. It's simply an effective tool that compliments it, but should not relied upon as a total replacement.

6) Social media isn't about ROI (to some extent). If your goal is strictly to make money, you are not going to last to long. Social media is about VOI (Value of investment). Social media is about the conversation. You cant put a price tag on conversation. Instead, you should be measuring the success of the conversations. Currency in social media is valued in the content that is created along with relationships. Both of these elements are needed, not one or the other. The VOI is measuring value of the conversations. How many comments were left? Were they positive? How much buzz is happening on Twitter? How many back-links were generated in the search engines? What bloggers/blogs are talking about us? Did we build brand awareness, create and build customer loyalty? VOI is always measured for the long term and never short term.

I want to close this with a fantastic video by Perry Belcher called the 7 secrets of social media. I have embedded it below. Please take the time and watch the full video. It outlines a lot of what I have talked about in this post today, along with a few other key elements that defines how to successfully get involved with social media.



Image by Jason Vance under Creative Commons License.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

The Best Solution to Embargo Angst? Write Something Else.

As blogging approaches the traditional role of journalism, traditional elements of journalism, including public relations firms, embargoes, briefings, and bias are going to surface, as they have with traditional marketing, media and business for centuries. Today's flare-up, kicked off by one of the best discussion starters on the Web, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, isn't the first time embargoes have been slammed, and it certainly won't be the last time. Back in August, I discussed why I believed the embargo process was both broken, but necessary, and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb followed on with a great take of his own.

I think the bigger issue is not that embargoes are being broken - which they are by blogs both big and small - but instead, that there are a large number of sites who act like they are the only game in town, and that they must cover every single story.

To those guys, please stop. Seriously.

In the tech blogging sphere, there is a serious echo chamber. While I look forward to banging through my Google Reader feeds every day, I can pretty much bank on seeing the same story, spun a different way, a good dozen or two dozen times by every single tech blog - even if it's clear that they are just reporting that someone else reported the news. If you see a story has been covered already and you have nothing to add - leave it alone.

Given the ease of news distribution, let's now write with the assumption that everybody reading your site is reading a few others as well. If you see a story broken by TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb or Mashable or VentureBeat or CenterNetworks, there's no need to pile on and become story number 18 on the topic. Let it go and write about something else - unless you have unique insight, unique quotes or access.

In my day job, I work with press releases and embargoes and reporters on a frequent basis. There is a need to be sure announcements go out when the products and partners are ready, or the customer is ready to take press calls. But Arrington is no doubt right that, as king of the hill, which TechCrunch is, some companies and PR teams are making coverage on the site practically mandatory, and near harassment of him and his team is no doubt occurring.

When trying to get coverage elsewhere, memorably one time in 2006 in Computerworld, I know I aggressively called the feature reporter every few hours until they finally picked up. After berating them for covering a competitor, and not our story, I got hung up on (no doubt deservedly so). I can only imagine being a TechCrunch reporter getting hit over and over by desperate firms, begging for coverage and honoring of their embargo.

A suggestion to those PR teams, please stop. Seriously.

Take your story somewhere else, to one of the many other tech blogs who write well, and will give your company or service its due. There are many new writers who have posts to file, and they want your story - and they will honor your requested embargo.

On this site, when I was running the whole thing myself, and now, with the great team of writers we have here, no embargo has ever been broken. On one occasion, I prematurely posted the Seesmic/Disqus integration news, having forgotten the day it was due, but I promptly deleted and reposted the next day. But one of the major reasons I haven't broken an embargo is because I strive, and ask my cohorts the same, to write things that are new. Cover new stories and new angles and be unique. If it has been covered somewhere else, let it go. We're not TechCrunch, and we're not trying to be.

TechCrunch doesn't have time for stories like Gawkk.com, which we covered last night. They probably aren't interested in stories like the one today on Resume Donkey, or Monday's announcement of Twit Or Fit. TechCrunch also doesn't have the leisure anymore of introducing great new blogs, as we do every month, or highlighting how to better use FriendFeed and Twitter, as we can. That's because they have taken on a new role, as a very real media company, and with their focus on Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and other big companies, there's room down at the bottom for us small fry to find the stories that are in the cracks.

It takes a different mentality to find new companies and new angles that nobody else has written before, that doesn't require a PR firm's input or embargo. And it takes strength from the PR firms to turn away from their top target and take the story somewhere else. While I don't think today's missive from Arrington will do just that, it might make some think different about the way they blog and distribute stories.

Social Media Marketing - Who, What, When, Where, Why and How?

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


If you are an individual or small business who is looking to get started with social media marketing, you have your work cut out for you. You must first examine the landscape to see if marketing, using social media is even a viable solution. If your current or potential customers are engaging online, odds are you need to be as well. Before you get started, have you asked the right questions? Done all your homework? Using the five W's, and the occasional H, I decided to put that into the context of social media marketing.

1) Who:

The keyword here is demographics. Who exactly are you trying to market to, single women, generation X'ers, parents etc? What are their household incomes, and can they afford your product? By knowing as much as you can about your customer's profile, you can target your marketing efforts more efficiently, and minimize wasted costs. This is more true with a niche product than anything else.

Advertising budgets are tightening today more then ever. You need to spend that money more wisely and effectively. Consider buying advertising on blogs, as opposed to a traditional and rather costly PPC campaign. First and foremost, search engine traffic is still king, but you can not rely on it solely as your pot of gold. Staying consistent with your marketing efforts in social media by default increases your visibility in search. Play your cards right and you can eventually start to lower the cost ofPPC spending, and in time totally eliminate it.

Don't get me wrong, social media is not the viable and end-all solution for every business. Search engine traffic, whether it's organic or paid always needs to be a top area of focus and never overlooked. The fact of the matter is, when people are looking for something, they resort to search engines first. How will you fare in the search results? Social media is an excellent link building tool, learn some of the SEO basics and be consistent, and you will achieve better search results.

The other part of the who, is who are the influencers? In social media we refer to influencers such as Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan,and Louis Gray. Build relationships and target the specific thought-leaders that are related to your industry. Influencers in their own respect have broad reach and influence over potential buyers. Influential marketing is a gateway, seed it small, and it will grow fast. Remember the name of the game with this is time, forming relationships meaningful at that, takes plenty of it. In addition to influencers, target and focus efforts on the "New Influencers ". These are power social media consumers. These are the prominent bloggers, people who upload the most videos to YouTube, the power diggers and stumblers. They are the most vocal and active on their social networks and so forth. They have to some extent a loyal and large following, and with that comes a certain degree of power and influence. YOU might even be a new influencer, and you don't even know it.

2) What:

What are the tools, mechanisms and channels that you will use? A grassroots marketing campaign will require pulling out all the stops. Starting a blog is mandatory, choosing the platform is next, WordPress or Blogger, self hosted or service hosted? What social networking sites/communities should my business be participating on, Facebook, MySpace, or both? Which is better targeted for my product? Do we need to set up a Twitter account? What will the Twitter account be used for,conversing or broadcasting? Explore and try new channels, podcasting, and creating original video are some examples. Something I touched upon in the beginning was search engine traffic. What is more effective cost wise, time invested in pay per click campaigns, or time invested with human social media efforts, or both? What channels, if any should we spend marketing dollars on, banner/text links on blogs, ads on Youtube, on Facebook, branded audio spots on podcasts ? I'm sure I'm leaving plenty out, but you see where I'm headed on this one. Find use and learn the essential tools that you will require for publishing, promoting and listening.

Consider what amount of time you are willing to commit to your marketing efforts. What are your objectives, a hard sell, creating brand awareness, buzz, or recognition? What markets am I going after? Should I focus on international, domestic or both?

3) When:

The time is now. A majority of smaller and medium sized businesses are not engaging in social media. Are you one of them? Don't hesitate any longer. Your competitors are using it and there is no reason why you shouldn't be too. The traditional and costly marketing methods such as print are becoming less and less effective. Consumers have adapted with the times, so don't get left behind. You can achieve better results with a social media advertising campaign for a fraction of the costs, compared to old school traditional ways of marketing.

4) Where:

Where is the conversation taking place? Where should you respond and engage on, Twitter, your blog, Facebook? Where should you create outposts? Go where the existing and potential user-base is and establish a presence, it's that simple. Never spread yourself too thin, but don't go overboard either, otherwise you end up creating more work than really needs to be done.

5) Why:

The question should read more like why not? Your customers are using it. With the current economic crisis, a recession, and no sign of things getting better, marketing budgets are being slashed. What are your alternatives? I have already talked about some of the positives, such as it's cheaper and more effective than the old school traditional ways of marketing. Social media, because of it's medium, brings globalization to your company's front door. It's easy and anyone can do it, just as long as they are willing to invest their time into it by learning, and participating. Your competitors, especially the ones in the know, are already are using social media. Have you noticed? Social media is about conversation. You want people talking about your product, spreading the word, and creating brand awareness in the process.

6) How:

Social media is not a rush job. It's not about creating a website, Twitter or Facebook account and calling it a day. Don't be fooled or mislead by the hype, the tools are only the facilitators of the message. Yes they are important, but without a basic understanding of how to use them, they are in effect rendered useless and become nothing more than a one way megaphone, with no one listening at the other end.

I will end with a little more food for thought:

• How are we going to participate?
• How are we going to create openness?
• How are we going to create, find and react to the conversation?
• How do we find and create community around our product?

If I gave you the answers to all of these questions, I would have nothing else to write about:)

Image by Leo Reynolds under Creative Commons license.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

We've Only Just Begun to Syndicate Our Content

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

It wasn't too long ago that blogging and pull technology, including RSS, first became popular. If you published new Web site content, and wanted the world to know about it in real time, your delivery and distribution options were very limited.

Publishing content updates was pretty much the same as it is today. You would upload your new pages to the server and hope to see some decent search engine traffic. But you relied more on bookmark traffic, and other means of marketing, such as e-mail, to get people to your site. Important as it is to get new traffic, retention is equally as vital. Quality content, useful products, affordable prices and great customer service, are all factors in keeping people coming back to your site.

The early days of the wild, wild, Web.

In the early days, before Google, search engines took days, and often weeks, to crawl and index new content. There were a lot of hoops to jump through to get listed, and you could be waiting weeks to months for a manual review of your site for inclusion. If you didn't have the patience to wait that long, you always had the option of paying a nice fee for an express review, to get your site approved. But the days when Altavista, Lycos,Yahoo, and a few others reigned supreme were also the days the spammers dominated search results.

Therefore, if you were lucky enough to get indexed in a timely fashion, chances are some spam-related bottom feeder had already beaten you out, leaving your pages buried back in the search results. Because spam was so bad and such a problem, a lot of Webmasters adopted the " If you can't beat them join them " mentality. As a result, the search engines almost became rendered useless for a period of time, because they were filled with nothing but spam, mainly in part due to black hat SEO tactics.

E-mail was the name of the game, and it actually worked.

Newsletters are something I, and many other Webmasters, heavily used to inform our user base of new Web site updates/product offerings and so forth. This was as real time as it got back then. Composing daily and weekly e-mails got to be quite a chore, but proved to be very effective. This of course did not last long.Spammers eventually discovered, and killed e-mail marketing for the rest of us. How many of you have received or reported spam e-mail, or even what you perceived to smell like spam to Spamhaus or Spamcop? Even with these most opt-in compliant e-mail lists, you still have frequent headaches with people reporting your legitimate e-mail as spam. The spam reports are also e-mailed to your Web host, and usually to their abuse dept, which causes more unneeded headaches. For non commercial uses such as notifying small or close groups of people, e-mail is still effective and has its place. And nowadays, marketers who use commerce e-mailing must ensure their lists are opt-in/out, and that their compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. It also takes a significant amount of more e-mail addresses to click and convert. Besides, people are a lot more reluctant to submit their e-mail addresses today than they once were. Even if they do, the chances of them actually seeing the message diminishes greatly thanks to spam filtering, and disposable e-mail addresses.

We have come a long way in a short period of time.

Today we publish and consume more content faster than ever before. WordPress has become the new FrontPage. Web sites are now blogs. e-mail and newsletters have been replaced by RSS. Micro-blogging applications such as Twitter have filled the void in between. Today when new content is created and published, it's usually done on a blog, and syndicated automatically thanks to RSS and the blogging application used. Today when you publish a blog post, it's distributed and found instantly in RSS readers within minutes of being written. Google and other search engines love blogs, because they are constantly publishing new content. Blogs that update frequently often will have more influence and higher rankings in search. Blogs and traditional Web sites get indexed in search engines, but that's where the similarities end, in terms of real time publishing and real time distribution. Blogs are indexed within minutes, but Web sites often take longer, with a lower probability for achieving higher in the search results.

So just what happens after you click the publish button on a blog post?

When you click publish, your blogging software automatically sends a ping alert to special servers maintained by Google Blog Search, Yahoo, VeriSign and others. The ping lets them know that you have recently published new content. Ping servers then alert aggregators, search engines and others to send out bots to crawl the blog for updates. The ping also alerts data miners and text miners that you have updated. Data miners are in the business of metrics, and this data is often sold to and used by corporations. Text miners are the true bottom scrapers, also commonly referred to as "splogs". Splog is short for "spam blog" and is used to describe an auto updating blog, setup to scrape feeds at regular intervals and post them. They exist for the sole purpose of either displaying ads, such as Google’s Adsense or for the purpose of creating search engine traffic, which in turn is used to promote other splogs. Splogs are automatically generated, and there is not much you can do about them nowadays other than report them to the search engines. The next step in the process, which is set in motion seconds after you press publish, is sending the new blog post to aggregators such as feed readers like Google Reader, and sites that pull RSS feeds, such as alltop.com etc. The human redistribution process (sharing, bookmarking, etc) then takes over and the cycle is started all over again. Compared to the old days, all this happens within minutes.

In Closing

Publishers today do not have to worry or spend as much time with the distribution of their content as they did way back when. Time is now spent focusing on producing quality content. Gone are the days of the wild wild Web. We are now using smarter, and more effective tools and publishing methods to get the word out faster than ever before. What's next on the horizon for content syndication?

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Brand Reputation Management Is Not a Monday-Friday Gig

The concept of a workweek starting at 8 a.m. on Monday and concluding at 5 p.m. the following Friday is cute, but not all that realistic in most cases. Whether you're in sales or engineering, marketing or technical support, there seem to always be tasks that need your attention outside of the listed business week in the company handbook. With the rise of the Web and realtime response and discussion across social networks, managing a brand's reputation is absolutely a 24 by 7 operation. Sometimes, as a groundswell takes on your company, or your products, waiting until Monday to react is simply not an option, for the damage will already have been done.

Today's victim is the pain reliever Motrin, who posted a condescending ad that had many parents seeing red. The ad, posted on their main Web site, essentially stated that carrying one's baby in a sling or backpack would cause undue pain, requiring their product. While delivering a need and solution makes sense, they unnecessarily mocked babywearing as being in fashion, and making you appear like a real mom. The condescending ad ignored the reality of needing to go "hands-free" simply to function, fashion be darned. As a father of twins, I may not be a mom, but I often carry one of the kids around in a sling or a baby carrier, whether to do dishes, or just to type without having to go one-handed. And Motrin's ad was misguided. After my wife viewed it, she said she was surprised the ad got through a series of reviews and passed.

(See the video archived on YouTube)

While not incensed as many mothers said they were, and in a household that didn't have Motrin in the medicine cabinet anyway, we discovered the ad through the power of Twitter, which was ablaze with mommybloggers slamming the campaign. (See: #motrinmoms)

On a weekend not dominated by major news, Motrin's brand got stomped on, and waiting around until Monday to pick up the pieces would be too late. After almost a day of getting dissed, the Web site finally went down tonight, either through exceeded demand, or by way of the company's intervention.

When I talk to brand managers about social media, I recommend three clear steps:

1. Understand
2. Observe
3. Act

They need to understand that your brand is at the mercy of its constituents. And you need to be using monitoring tools to rapidly discover and act upon how it is being used or mentioned - no matter what day it is.

Some basics to get started:

• Twitter Search - to see realtime mentions of your brand or keywords.
• TweetBeep - sending alerts of keywords or your brand to e-mail.
• BackType Alerts - to see whenever your brand is mentioned in comments around the Web.
• Google News search - alerts to e-mail for your brand.
• Google Blog search - alerts to e-mail for your brand in blogs.

These alerts will be automatically sent to you around the clock, even if the doors to your office are closed and the lights are off. Be aware of these services, monitor what is being said, and after all this, act. Don't just react, but do so thoughtfully.

And if you were curious to see just how I look wearing a baby carrier, check out the photo on FriendFeed.

See also:
Marketing Mystic: In Motrin moms debacle, the winner is Twitter
The Standard: Motrin learns there's a downside to viral advertising

Recording: Emerging Media Event Panel

As mentioned previously, I had the opportunity on Tuesday morning to participate in a panel on emerging media with Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski, put on by PR Newswire in Santa Clara, conveniently between my home and work. The discussion ranged from how to approach new media targets as old media struggles, to how to leverage tags on social sites like Delicious and Flickr, and some basics on how to track client mentions and their brands on newer services, like FriendFeed. Chris helpfully recorded the conversation, and posted it to his blog on Wednesday.

I have embedded the recording here:


To instead download the 30 megabyte file in MP3 format, do so here. The conversation lasted about an hour, and you should be able to distinguish between the three voices, including mine, on the panel. If you have reaction or questions, feel free to relay them in the comments.

It's Not About the Technology, Stupid

This morning, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel with the well-traveled and well-respected Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher. The three of us, speaking to a group primarily comprised of PR and Marketing professionals looking to get a grasp on new media and emerging social tools, discussed how to better track your brand online, how to interact with prospects, and how the move toward the semantic Web, including tagging and group-derived suggestions, would pose both new opportunities and challenges.

While the conversation got technical at times, I felt the places where I connected best with the audience was when I talked to them in terms of e-mail, iTunes and spoke their language in terms of understanding how they had to answer to multiple clients, who each wanted to broadest visibility, in a time when media outlets are disappearing.

A few hours later, this afternoon, I was back on the phone talking social media to a group of PR people looking to, again, figure out just what the heck Twitter and FriendFeed are and why they would have any value to their own outreach campaigns. And I could tell, based on their responses, that to take on these new tools sounded daunting.

Frankly, we, as consumers and developers, for the most part, are not doing a very good job of explaining these tools and making them simple enough to comprehend to the average layperson, let alone adopt. In describing these services, we need to do a lot less about talking about 140 character limits, feeds and aggregation, and instead talk more about connections, sharing and community.

What we need to do is help translate these honestly geeky tools into something that makes sense to the mainstream. Instead of talking about how many people you're following, APIs and how you use TweetDeck to follow specific terms in Twitter, start by explaining that the service is essentially text messaging that gets recorded and can be sent to many people at once. As for FriendFeed, I always explain it by breaking up the service into its two pieces. The Feed captures all your activity online. The Friend lets you see what your friends are doing, find new ones and interact with each other's content. Don't talk about 40+ supported services and how you can redirect to Twitter or Facebook. Start with the basics.

At Blog World Expo this September, Chris Brogan famously teased Jesse Stay with a comment I posted to Twitter:

"Look, tech dork, software doesn't solve problems, humans solve problems."

But the mistake is an easy one, especially for people who don't have a background in PR, communications or marketing, because the technology itself can seem so exciting, and to be honest, it can at times be fun to sound more knowledgeable and "elite" above those who don't have the same understanding.

At times, I find myself clenching my teeth and wincing when I hear an engineer or elite technologist try to explain how something works. What users don't want to hear is the process of how things work, but instead what the results are, and how they can benefit. So let's be real clear - these new tools, no matter how many lines of code you have developed, have in most cases been made to offer a solution, so make the story about the user, not about you.

Help use their language and their own frames of reference to make the services less intimidating and overwhelming. Don't throw them into the deep end without a life jacket, but walk them down the steps holding their hand until they get used to the water.

Specialized Perceived Value Trumps Real World Value

If you've attended college, or at least know somebody who has, you know that students are willing to pay hundreds of dollars a term for some of the most mind-numbing texts alive. Students will wait in line for hours, or go store to store to acquire these textbooks, which might only be available in one location, knowing that to not pay these exorbitant prices and, therefore, miss out on the texts, could lead to lower marks, and potentially, decreased success in school and just maybe post-school, could be disastrous.

But these same books, worth hundreds of dollars to an individual, are worth absolutely nothing to me. You couldn't get me to take those blasted tomes for free - because to me, they have no value. They would clutter up my house, and I'd probably never open them up. (Of course, I didn't open most of them in college, and that's a different story.)

Outside of the world of publicly traded companies and market caps, the value of a service is very much like these same textbooks. What might have ultimate value to one person may have no value to another.

Just imagine dropping off iPhones in the Amazonian jungle or Sub-Saharan Africa, where 3G is a lot less important than three meals a day. Think about the plans of the last few decades of delivering one computer per classroom, when class capacities were ballooning to nearly forty students. After a while, it's clear, there's a gap between one person's perceived value, and that item's actual value. The same, is of course true with online services.

Ever try to explain social media or social networking services to people who don't rapidly take to putting their lives online? It's a tough road, especially if they don't have friends who use those services, and see keeping their online life updated as a significant time sink. But to someone who is fully engaged and has thousands of followers or friends at some of the popular services, even minutes of downtime are alarming.

Students who buy these overpriced, one time use only textbooks, and actually read them, are doing so with the expectation that their future lives will be bettered through investment today.

Similarly, I believe that taking the time to blog, or read RSS feeds, and engage with peers on Twitter or FriendFeed or SocialMedian can improve my experience today and tomorrow. Through these services, I've learned new things, I've shared ideas, and helped others. I've found new friends and peers.

It's not always clear how investment of time and energy in social media will benefit you in the long run. As Robert Seidman mentioned in a post here over the weekend, activity on social media landed friend Hutch Carpenter a new job. And since engaging on this blog, I've started receiving a good number of opportunities to meet interesting people, to speak at or attend conferences, and to help contribute to some cutting-edge services.

This weekend, I walked my mother through some of the services I use, and while there was some interest, most of the response was "why would I do that?" or "how would I find other friends who use these things?" Not every service is built for every individual. It's likely the Facebook application developers who are finding themselves snapped up for nine-figure sums would never have gained traction with a significant portion of the market, who saw their products had no value. It's likely many of the services I use every day won't be seen as having value to others. But the important thing is that to some portion of the population, they are crucial. The game is finding out which part of the population it is, and working to make that target larger.

Does Negativity Deliver Credibility? If So, That's Nuts.

Over the last 18 months or so, I've gained something of a reputation for being an early adopter more likely to heap praise on early versions of software with clear bugs than to drag services through the mud, calling out their every hole and flaw. I've stated that I do champion the little guy, and when I've found a service I like, there's no question you'll know, because I'll be consistent in my comments on it, highlighting new tweaks and trying to help you understand why I like what I do, and, in the converse, why I might not like other options.

But does my tendency to be positive and shun negativity make me less believable? Should I maintain a ratio of cranky posts to positive ones for variety's sake or to prove I'm not a paid shill on the take? As far as I'm concerned, no. In most cases, rather than drag down services, or dance on the graves of failed startups, I see sites' potential, and recognize the very real people behind services who are working hard to make their products as good as they can.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb jokingly commented on FriendFeed today: "You should write a really harsh review of something tho, just to maintain credibility!"

It's clear my quasi-utopian view isn't held in many corners of the blogosphere. Some revel in negative reviews or tearing people down. Others feel they have a calling to be "balanced", evening out an otherwise positive post by highlighting a service's deficiencies, or if the service happens to be amazing, to pick three random competitors for whom this new arrival will certainly mean curtains. But to be honest, even if I have more readers now than I did three, six or twelve months ago, this is still my personal blog, and should reflect how I feel. When I write up a service, I aim to deliver an accurate portrayal of the news, sites or individuals covered, but I would much rather highlight those companies and services I like than waste my time showing you the services that I didn't like. In essence, my silence in itself can be considered a negative review - and if you think about those topics I do write about, maybe there's a good reason I haven't covered every single service out there under the sun...

This isn't to say I haven't had a few negative posts here and there. I've at times been frustrated with TechCrunch (TechCrunch's Celebrating Failure Doesn't Help Anyone), ValleyWag (Valleywag Thinks My Old Posts are Breaking News) and even TechMeme (Blogrunner Likes Me, TechMeme Hates Me). I wasn't exactly overwhelming in my praise for NotchUp (NotchUp Sells You Out, but Nobody's Buying) and you likely remember my first comments on Fav.or.it. (Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close.)

But these negative posts are are a rarity.

In fact, Mark Hopkins of Mashable said to one FriendFeed user in search for good PR that it's fairly obvious when I've found a favorite: "Talk to Louis Gray. Forget product evangelist. When he likes something, he's a one man crusade."

If you listened to this week's Elite Tech News podcast, you could probably tell that my positive viewpoints on the Web were frequently outnumbered by those who didn't favor companies, services, or individuals, who feared their content would be stolen, and that tech leaders and bloggers were too money-driven or ego-driven to be trusted. But I would rather accurately portray my intrigue and excitement around new services, even if they're not perfect. I don't think it does me a lot of good to sit down with a service I don't like or can't recommend and put 500 words into it.

You could probably also tell this from the interview Mark Evans posted this morning, Who’s Louis Gray?, which helps explain my background, and shows why I've ended up covering what I do. The tech world is moving faster than just about any market out there which I can think of. There are some amazing folks out there working ridiculous hours trying to make the next big thing. Only a few will make it. But if we tear them down too early, they might never actually reach their full potential, and I don't think it's really worth it, simply to engage in a race for page views.

Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag

Now 23 weeks into our twin pregnancy, it's clear our son and daughter are already doomed. Although they don't even have names picked out, they are already unknowingly marching down the path to geekdom. Still a good few months before they debut, the pair are destined to be branded like the common race car, made corporate shills, through the donning of apparel featuring the logo of some of my favorite technology companies - and they could wear those of your favorites, if you feel generous.


Our Kids Want to Wear Logos. Here's a Starting Pack.
So far, we've managed to procure a pair of onesies featuring the Google, Apple and FriendFeed logos, as well as FriendFeed bibs and Google beanies, and we aren't done by any means. For while seemingly every mother wants her kids adorned in bunny rabbits, flowers and puppies, we'll have nothing to do with it. Similarly, we will push off any Disney and cartoon characters as long as we are able.

So here's the deal. I hereby promise that if you want to see one or both of our children sporting your company logo, whether it be on a onesie, a baby blanket, branded bottles, or any other baby gear, we agree to be sellouts, so long as you are in the technology space. We will not turn down any offers from hardware vendors, software vendors or Web sites. Want our children to mock me with their Windows Vista or MySpace t-shirts? Fine. We promise to dress them up and add their photos to our Flickr account for the world to see.

But rather than have our kids mocked for their poor judgment from the get-go, we already have some favorites in mind. I would love to go weeks without seeing the same logo twice. I want baby clothes from Digg, TechMeme, TiVo, Technorati, Ballhype, Facebook, ReadBurner, and Yahoo!. I'd love to see my kids bearing logos from TechCrunch, Twitter, Mashable, GigaOM and LinkedIn.

If you've got a favorite brand you want promoted, we're here for you. Send me an e-mail or call (my cell phone is on the right of the blog), and I'm more than happy to send contact information which puts my kids in the role of corporate babble-person.

LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel

How Select Tech Titans Stack Up (Click for larger image)

Last night, LinkedIn rolled out a major upgrade to the professionally-oriented social network and career/recruiting database, adding new company profiles, giving corporations the same kind of dedicated page to their background as their individual employees have had for roughly five years. (Here's mine.) While corporate profiles have been around forever, LinkedIn adds "special sauce" through its large user database, determining where employees come from and leave to, what other companies they are connected to, and who may recently have changed positions or joined the company. Good stuff.

The new company profiles on LinkedIn are a gold mine for reporters who want to get data beyond what the PR guys may want to dish out. (See: LinkedIn Is a Paradise for Smart Reporters)

Want the average age of an employee? A good estimate is on LinkedIn. Want to know if there is a high level of turnover, and people don't stay long? LinkedIn has that too. It also can provide hints as to whether a company is so strong that folks aren't leaving at all, or if they are leaving in exodus. And if you peer closely enough, you can see the Silicon Valley carousel, as employees move from company to company in search for the next big thing.

You can see employees move from PayPal to Google, Yahoo! or LinkedIn. You can see Friendster employees went to Yahoo! and Zazzle, or from Napster to Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google. And if you think Google is getting all the good employees out there, there's no question they get their share, but so far, it looks like Facebook is getting a lot of new hires, and nobody's leaving - a boomtime for the social networking giant.

Interestingly, due to Apple's tenure, and the company's rising from the ashes with the return of Steve Jobs, you can see employees that once left the company have returned, having never lost the Mac religion. You can also see longer median tenures at the more established companies, like Microsoft and Intel, who also feature an older employee base.

Gender-wise, men dominate LinkedIn data for the tech industry, with between 60% and 70% of all employees at the companies I selected. Could that be the case, or is there an overweighting of men who use LinkedIn, compared to the true employee base? Maybe it's both?

LinkedIn opening up this data will keep company marketeers and PR on the alert to see how their data is being portrayed, just as they should be watching their coverage on Wikipedia, for in this case, it's their employees' collective data that is pushing the details, without a filter, and just maybe, the truth will reveal more than they had ever imagined. I know I'll be spending a lot more time poking around LinkedIn now myself.

Forget the A-List? Not Quite Yet.

Well known A-list blogger and technology evangelist Guy Kawasaki says the time has come where prominent bloggers with brand names aren't any more likely to determine a product's success or failure. As he says it, referencing a recent article in Fast Company, "Lousy reviews by them cannot tank your product. Great reviews cannot make it successful."

But to summarily dismiss the most well-known bloggers as ineffective means to get word out around a new product or Web service is flawed. In my belief, there is no binary "right or wrong" answer here. You shouldn't make outreach to the A-list bloggers OR hope to reach users who can virally make your product a success. A good campaign should be more broad, and include elements of both reaching out to the most widely read, and to early adopters.

We can see Web services every day try to get launched through TechCrunch, GigaOM and Mashable, in hopes that the massive traffic spike will carry them through their next venture capital round and long-term success. People often refer to the ensuing deluge of visitors as "The TechCrunch Effect", as they once did about the "Slashdot Effect". And while we know that eventually traffic goes back down, being profiled by such well-read sites leads to smaller bloggers following on with their own take, trying out the product and writing reviews. In effect, rather than starting at the bottom to get a few links and working their way up, going after the big dogs means getting coverage both at the top and the bottom.

As I told Emanuel Rosen, author of "Anatomy of Buzz", following my first comments on his book, there are new ways to gain buzz and interest across the Web these days, from limited invites and private betas to working Twitter and the B-List. There's no question that each of these elements can deliver users. But to ignore a significant portion of a potential campaign on its face and declare it one to "Forget" is silly.

Some of us may wish the A-List concept were dead and gone, but it's not yet, and it won't be for some time, and if one name were to go down, there's no doubt another would rise to take its place. In every marketplace there are leaders who wield an inordinate share of power. Simply wishing them away won't make it so.

Praying at the Tech Geek Altar

So far, I haven't yet tried to convert louisgray.com to any kind of real brand, despite my previous comments that your blog is your brand.

Many of the sites I frequent on a daily basis have done a good job to separate the brand of their blog from the individual behind it. MG Siegler converts to ParisLemon. Jason Kaneshiro turns into Webomatica. And Steven Hodson wears a cape reading WinExtra. But I haven't done it. I've had the domain name forever, and keep plodding ahead.

This gap in my self-branding has opened up the opportunity for others to try and define who I am and what the blog stands for. I saw a few great attempts in the last few days, from some influential blogs.

Mashable was very kind to me Monday night, in their ReadBurner coverage, when Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins said the site "is currently seeded with the linkblogs of several thought leaders in the tech blogging community, such as Louis Gray..."

OK ... Thought leader. I like that.

Then, today, VentureBeat had an outstanding write-up covering FriendFeed, and its growing momentum. The author gave a lot of credit for FriendFeed's rise to its initial users, saying: "It’s used by early Googlers and their many friends. The company was founded (and funded) by former Gmail team members Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh together with Google Maps engineers Bret Taylor and Jim Norris. It’s also getting championed by early-adopter bloggers like Louis Gray."

OK... Early-adopter blogger. That's good too.

And later this evening, Chris Brogan, writing on the challenges of Social Media, reported he often hits a firewall at work, restricting his access to some sites, including mine.

He says, "I’m blocked 3-7 times a day, and almost always with an incorrect blocking message by the firewall company. For example, Louis Gray was blocked as religion. Only if tech geeks are now a religion, and then, I’m praying."

Line up at the altar, Chris. We're right behind you.

So, way back in February of 2007, I was called a friendly neighborhood geek. It looks like the geek label hasn't changed, but now, we're also being acknowledged as an early adopter with a unique approach to the tech blogosphere.

While I haven't worked on enhancing my personal brand, others are setting it for me. Right now, that's okay, and I just might start borrowing their words. Your friendly neighborhood early-adopter tech geek blogger, signing off.

Are You An ACTIVE Hub?

With about 14 hours of airplane time over the last week, I had plenty of opportunity to catch up on books I've been neglecting. One of those I took in was Emanuel Rosen's "The Anatomy of Buzz", which aimed to capture the concept of word-of-mouth marketing, analyzing how some products take off (see: the iPhone and Nintendo Wii), while others stagnate despite tremendous advertising (see: Microsoft Vista).

One of the most important elements of getting a product launch or news popularized, according to Rosen, is to influence "hubs", defined as people who act as references to friends and others, and who, if influenced, can help to spread the word to many people, helping your cause.

Rosen defines these people with the acronym of being "ACTIVE", namely:

* Ahead in Adoption
* Connected
* Travelers
* Information-hungry
* Vocal
* Exposed to Media

This, to me, defines a great number in the tech blogosphere, who are obviously unafraid to share their opinions, reach many people, and suck down as much information as they can, whether from the mainstream media, or hundreds of RSS feeds from fellow bloggers. There's also no question these ACTIVE folks are connected to others and ahead in adoption. It's the tech bloggers who first adopt (and later dismiss) new Web 2.0 technologies, who are the first to download (and later uninstall) beta products, and they are all too eager to announce having gotten their hands on something new.

While this is true, The Anatomy of Buzz amazingly already seems seriously outdated since its writing in 2000. The book tries to talk about how the Internet impacts buzz by mentioning newsgroups, shared opinions sites like Epinions.com and comments on Amazon.com (including his book), but has zero discussion of those hubs that influence buying decisions now - blogs and social networks being the obvious omissions. It's also amusing to see the word Google is nowhere in the book. As a result, I found myself a little less than impressed with some portions of the book, which as a whole does a good job explaining how the Palm Pilot took off, how Nintendo drummed up excitement around the launch of Super Mario Brothers 3, and how Cold Mountain became a best-seller.

Part of being a blogger is knowing that by being ahead in adoption, information hungry and vocal, that through your connections, you can act as an ACTIVE hub. Though authored in 2000, Rosen describes this phenomenon in an offline way but rings true in today's even more fully connected world. If you don't mind the occasional rolling of the eyes over Web 1.0, it's definitely worth a reminder that it often doesn't matter just how many advertising dollars you throw at a product if the end users don't extend your message to their friends and others.

Early Reaction to PlugandPlay Expo

The biggest problem to trying to navigate a few dozen startups in a few hours' time is that there's only one thing guaranteed - I won't get to them all, especially when I'm trying to vie for attention in competition with early-stage investors who could mean the difference between their seeing another six months, or looking for work. I did manage to talk to 10-12 of the companies at reasonable length, and found some services I'll definitely use, while others just simply weren't built for me as a consumer.

The conference, organized by the PlugandPlayTechCenter (yes, all one word) in Sunnyvale, aimed to put entrepreneurs in the same room as VCs and have them make their case in rapid fire. A representative from the three dozen companies was given all of two minutes to deliver their elevator pitch, and based on a vote, four were selected to move to the next round, where they got all of ten minutes to elaborate on their offering, and business model. (Most, of course, were ad-based. Others looked to take a portion of revenue generated from their own users' sales.)

I showed up to the conference around 4, as soon as I was able, and tried to catch up for lost time - visiting many displays and talking to CEOs, CTOs, co-founders and the occasional VP of Marketing. And while some were very pleased with the close quarters and rigid schedule, I did hear complaints. As one exhibitor put it, "If you're the 28th presenter out of 37 companies, the audience is pretty glazed over. You don't even know who the investors are!" You can be sure that he hadn't been selected as one of the final four, and was all too eager to pick apart the process.

Two highlights for me were speaking with Spokeo's Mital Poddar, the company's VP of Marketing, and Jeffrey Tannenbaum, CEO of PhotoCrank. Mital, only a month or so into her new role at Spokeo, did a great job demoing the social network data aggregator, and were we in another situation, I'd have tried to recruit her away from her current job. Needless to say, I'll have a follow-on note around Spokeo shortly. Jeffrey also was all too happy to demo his photo and image annotation tool (now live on this site), and thought of some unique applications for it - which I'll discuss in a bit.

I also enjoyed talking with Leonard Backus, CEO for Datamash, Tomás Zeman of Wirenode, Steve Gibson of CCube.com and Ernstjan Albers of Headr.com, to name a few.

Depending on who I talked to, you could see differing levels of strain or excitement on the exhibitors' faces. Some were hard core geeks who didn't like public speaking and couldn't wait for me to stop asking questions. Others, after finding out I had no money to give them for an "A" round of funding, were all too happy to cut their pitch short. But the good majority seemed to enjoy demoing their service and walking me through, screen by screen, how they planned to change the world. Maybe some will. Many won't. But it was a unique Silicon Valley experience. More soon.

Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies

Most companies would prefer that if you have questions or comments regarding their service, you would send them a nice e-mail to their support staff, or post it to a company-sanctioned, moderated forum. But as we all know, sending e-mail to busy support people can be a guessing game as to how long you'll wait to get a response, if you hit the right person, or if they will answer your question at all. I've found the absolute fastest, sure-fire way to talk directly with people at Web-aware services is through the blog.

Blogs are the future of company to customer communications. Those companies that allow the highest transparency to customers to management or rank and file employees will win the much sought after "hearts and minds of the people." It's already worked on me a number of times in the last few months, with small companies like Technorati and LinkedIn to larger companies like Google and Yahoo! subsidiary MyBlogLog, as you might have seen over the last few days.

Google Reader Example:

In March of 2007, I listed ten improvements I hoped to see from my RSS go-to destination, Google Reader.

A little more than a day later, Google responded, with Mihai Parparita, an Engineer working on Google Reader, writing in the coments, "Funnily enough, the Reader team just had a big all-day brainstorming session about where to go next, and ideas similar to many of your suggestions were discussed."

I've since been told that the post is occasionally referenced within Google and helps add signal to the noise of user feature demands. Though I was initially nervous they would take my suggestions the wrong way, I am glad they recognized I was and remain quite positive on the service.

LinkedIn Example:

Later that month, I offered similar suggestions for LinkedIn, the leading business-focused social network. Steve Ganz, of LinkedIn, later wrote to let me know that some of the suggestions had just been implemented, and more were to come! As he kindly wrote, "These are all great ideas. Thanks so much for the great feedback, Louis! Stay tuned."

Technorati Examples:

Despite Technorati's occasional issues and recent management changes, I enjoy the service. But the downtime can make users weary. In June, I noted another outage, and not too much longer after my post, Ian Kallen wrote to say "We're bringing our systems back online now".

In April, I was eagerly awaiting the new issue of Technorati's popular state of the Web and openly speculated it was imminent. Then-CEO David Sifry took time from his busy schedule to say "LOL, keep your eyes on the blog.", and later returned, after 2:30 a.m. to say "The new State of the Live Web is now up!", which was very cool.

And that leaves one more, for now:

MyBlogLog Example:

On Monday, I discussed what the future of MyBlogLog would be after their acquisition by Yahoo!. While I wasn't overly glowing in my comments, two MyBlogLog employees offered their comments, with Ian Kennedy first saying "We're alive and well thanks and have been busy...", and later, Robyn Tippins coming back, offering thanks for the comments, and unexpectedly, a free Pro account! Of course, I recognize I'm being wooed, but I can take it. Now I'll have an even better chance to look into MyBlogLog's services and can speak more directly to what they're doing well and how they could continue to improve.

Not every company comes by when I make comments. Apple doesn't, and likely won't. Microsoft hasn't yet, and neither has TiVo. That could be due to internal policies on communication, PR, customer service and blogging, or they aren't as in tune to the Web's power to connect customers with companies. I appreciate the extra effort taken from Google Reader, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, and Technorati to talk to me directly and openly as individuals, and outside of the corporate firewall. I look forward to more, and encourage the rest of you bloggers to be comfortable in analyzing what you use every day and thinking aloud about how you could make change and make a difference.

New Reality: Your Blog Is Your Brand

While many are debating whether bloggers should be considered on par with journalists, if microblogging through Twitter and others should replace standard blogs, or even if Facebook or LinkedIn are the new business cards in a technology oriented age, it seems to me the clearest, newest definition of a blog is that it is your personal brand. Whether you have tens of visitors or tens of thousands, whether you have dozens of comments or none at all, the content on your blog, in total, represents you, and if done well, can define you, to those who know you well, or those who do not.

By blogging about your interests, by sharing news, links and photos, you are helping explain to the world who you are, what you like and don't like, what you represent, and what you do. If you choose to break news or comment on the day's news, you are doing so through a personal filter which covers everything. If you choose to talk about sports and technology, your choices as to what you want to discuss help define your brand. And, more importantly, the quality of your posts, the frequency of your posts, the length of your posts, all those elements help to illustrate your writing abilities, your attention to detail, your ability to stick to a project, and comprehension or adoption of new technology.

A personal blog will always be much better as a brand than your Facebook profile or LinkedIn profile.

A Facebook profile, even with the newest enhancements to the service, shows photos, groups and networks you consider yourself part of, the friends you have, updates you provide, applications you have installed, and a short message board, or "wall". But the Facebook profile does not allow for much personalization of look, feel or content. The Facebook profile doesn't allow for post after post of prose. The Facebook profile allows you to show how you're connected to a friend, but doesn't give you a platform to talk about the relationship. The Facebook profile is not your brand, but instead the Facebook brand with a small helping of your content.

Your LinkedIn profile is an excellent business card and resume, with job history, relationships, and recommendations. But it is not your brand. Instead, it is one, strong, contributing element to your brand.

As important as it is for me to look to LinkedIn and Facebook to know about a new hire candidate, or to research acquaintances, a blog will go far beyond in explaining to me how this person wants to be portrayed. I now expect job candidates to have blogs, and make that part of the interview process, whether it's related to their position or not. Even if the big shots like Steve Rubel of MicroPersuasion and Robert Scoble are successful in moving microupdates away from their blog and to other services, their blog will be the best measure of their personal brand to me, and should not be abandoned, because no other single service can best be owned by and represent the individual.

Thank You For Smoking: Addicting

Now that we've broken through the "Great Netflix Backlog of 2007", Kristine and I are trying to enjoy her summer off from teaching by catching up on some long-awaited DVDs, some which were shows well recommended by others, and some we instead opted to skip when they were in the theater.

Last week, we enjoyed the topical comedy "Thank You For Smoking", which followed a big tobacco lobbyist and his crusade to creatively promote cigarette consumption, while at the same time, maintaining his sanity and being a good role model as a father. At a time when so many communities are becoming smoke free, and headlines of death and disease are common, the lead actor, a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, had quite a tightrope walk to do, to espouse both the purported positives and minimize the evils of cigarettes.

The movie is amusingly done, such that you find yourself rooting in favor of the tobacco lobbyist, and against the political and cultural machines that swing in action to destroy his work. Unfortunately for him, he becomes too tightly entwined with an investigative reporter, who mixes business with pleasure, and costs him his job. But unmatched in his ability to spin out of the situation, he survives.

Surprisingly, the film isn't preachy. It doesn't try to convince the audience that smoking is evil, or in reverse, that the lead actor's spin is on target. Simply by placing us in the mind of one of America's most likely hated people, we find his daily challenge intriguing. He didn't convince me to start smoking, but I'm definitely glad I saw the film.

New TAB Post: Five Steps to Being an Apple Fanboy

It wasn't all that long ago when the rest of the world wouldn't obsess about the latest Apple products. There was a smaller subset of us who watched the Steve Jobs keynotes, bought and sold Apple stock below $15 a share, and knew that despite our low market share, we had made the right choice. Boy, have things changed. With the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iMac, Apple is back in a huge way.

For those new to the platform who want to be good Mac advocates, I noted five lesser-known tips on The Apple Blog, namely:

1. Never Admit Fault With Apple Around Non-Mac People
2. Make Your Apple Usage Visible
3. Present the Apple Logo in a Good Light
4. Don’t Sound Too Eager
5. Do Your Homework. People Will Expect an Expert

That's the background behind my most recent contribution to The Apple Blog, titled Five Lesser-Known Tips on Being an Apple Fanboy. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided a link. Enjoy.

The Biggest Blogs Aren't Really Blogs Any More

Though my stance is likely a controversial one, I don't believe that the most successful blogs out there are really blogs in the true sense of the word as they were originally intended. Instead, the uber-blogs, like TechCrunch, GigaOM, Engadget, Mashable, Read/WriteWeb and others, have morphed into a new phase of their lives, mimicking old world media.

While millions of people continue to create popular and less popular Web logs chronicling their thoughts, lives and activities, TechCrunch and the rest have instead turned into product announcement and release launching pads, typically lacking a personal touch or insight. They have evolved from their own mouthpieces to instead, mouthpieces for others.

Gone is the personal touch and feeling that is so embedded in the blogosphere, replaced by an air of elitism and selective news aggregation mixed with startups gleeful over a successful data point of public relations.

It's been proven that popular blogs can retain the very personal one-to-one conversational style. Great examples of this include Robert Scoble's Scobleizer, Dave Winer's Scripting.com, Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion and Jason Calacanis. But especially over the last 12 months, you can see a divergence, as the blog powerhouses are much less about the comments and conversation, and more about them acting like media. Meanwhile, old media, primarily those covering technology, are adding interactive tools made famous through blogging, like comments, and the ubiquitous "Digg This" icons on every story. The convergence of old media and new media is happening before our eyes.

This change isn't necessarily all bad, but I strongly believe the time to refer to these new media sites as "blogs" is gone. TechCrunch, in my opinion, is no more of a blog than is Computerworld, InfoWorld or eWeek, these days. Even InfoWorld has gone solely online, ditching their print magazine equivalent. The site's historical roots are truely embedded in the blog world, but you could say the site has grown up - now with a full network of sites, and even a trade show for startups looking to use the platform as their springboard to fame.

Will all blogs that find success move away from their humble origins? Likely not. But even as we enjoy the scoops, product introductions, reviews and obituaries from TechCrunch, GigaOM and others, we should make a conscious attempt to recognize in this new world of media and the "24 second news cycle", that the landscape is rapidly changing and definitions need constant tweaking.

Technorati's Transparency Should Be Lauded

First the good news: Technorati is back up.

Then the great news: Technorati isn't afraid to tell its users exactly what happened. After the site saw some serious downtime today, the company explained there was a network equipment failure that hit the company's services in a big way. They believe they've come a long way in offering great services and response times, and will be finding out how to avoid the issue in the future.

Best yet, they reached out to those of us affected. I had called Dave Sifry this afternoon to see what had gone wrong, and if possible, what could be done to help. Unlike just about any other CEO I can think of, he answered the phone in the middle of the crisis.

And the company, as it should, hit the blogosphere to respond. Ian Kallen, in the company's core services engineering group, wrote me during the situation, saying "We're bringing our systems back online now."

In what was no doubt a very frustrating time for Technorati, they didn't hide from the situation, but addressed it and will hopefully learn from it, helping bring enterprise class service to an already excellent product.

A Silicon Valley Adventure: Trip to TiVo

I love living and working in the Silicon Valley. Though at times the hours and intensity can be challenging, I do enjoy being around aggressive people with innovative goals, and seeing the sources of development face to face. Today, I got to "look behind the curtain" at one of these companies - TiVo.

Yesterday evening, our TiVo remote stopped working. We've had it for four years, so that was no major surprise. It wasn't the end of the world, but it was certainly annoying, as we had no access to saved programs, and had to manually change the channel by going to the cable box.

This morning, I went to Fry's Electronics to get a replacement remote. No deal. They only wanted to give me one if I bought a new unit (for up to $800).

So at lunch, a colleague and I went to Best Buy. Same issue. They offered that I could possibly use a universal remote, but the universal remotes don't have a TiVo button, and it's questionable if they would work.

I looked online, and while I could get a remote cheap, I wouldn't get it right away unless I paid upward of $35 to ship a $10-$20 product via next day UPS.

I pass the TiVo's corporate headquarters every morning on my way to work, so I had other ideas. I went to the TiVo Web site, called their main number, and hit zero to talk with the operator. I told her of my plight, and after checking with her colleague, she asked me to drive over by 5 p.m., and I could have one of her three they had for customer demonstrations.

I hopped in the car, and less than ten minutes later, I was at TiVo's worldwide headquarters, surrounded by TiVo images, from the clocks to the floormats, to a six-foot TiVo mascot plush toy. I was also in possession of a brand new TiVo remote for free, thanks to the receptionist's generosity. I offered to pay, but she declined. After all, that wasn't the point. It was outstanding customer service, something she knew she could do given our offices were only a few blocks apart.

I was already a TiVo fan for life, but this service went above and beyond, delivering a story only possible here in the Silicon Valley.

Sun vs. Microsoft, Round #293

The Sun vs. Microsoft wars in the 1990s were a delight to watch. While Scott McNealy has yielded his throne to the ponytailed uber-blogger Jonathan Schwartz, the company's distaste for all things Redmond has not changed much with time. As Microsoft sees its monopoly crumbling around it, due to poorly developed software, distaste for security and a poor user experience, it has taken to grandstanding and puffery against all things which threaten its Windows kingdom.

On Monday, a Fortune article revealed that Microsoft stated free software, including the popular Linux operating system, violates up to 235 of its patents, and it wants to get paid. In fact, Microsoft was to bold as to say the reason people are flocking to free software is due to the quality of the Microsoft software they allegedly copied. If successful, the free software would cease to be free, eliminating a very powerful differentiator from it and the software Borg.

The lines have been drawn, and once again, you see Microsoft on the site of litigation and sabre-rattling, and Sun on the other, arguing for openness and anything that doesn't smack of Windows. That's why Schwartz jumped in with a lengthy, intelligent post titled "Free Advice for the Litigious...", where he recounts how Sun adapted to a world of open source software when their Solaris operating system was under attack. Amusingly, Schwartz manages to teach Microsoft a lesson without mentioning the words "Microsoft" or "Windows" even once.

But he offers this warning: "You would be wise to listen to the customers you're threatening to sue - they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn't be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark."

Customers are always happy to pay for premium quality. Witness the iPod, the Nintendo Wii, LCD televisions and the like. If customers are trying to get around using Microsoft products, it's because they are unhappy with their quality and feel they aren't getting their money's worth. While it'd be foolhardy to claim Sun is without blemish, Schwartz is of course right. Microsoft can only lose by taking the free world to court.

LinkedIn Adds "Profile PDF Export", New Service Enhancements

I've been fairly vocal on LinkedIn's opportunity to expand its services, having first written about how LinkedIn can be made "even better", and second, writing a 10-point list that specifically outlined service enhancements to expand their user experience. As most great Web-focused companies do, they are listening.

Today, I received a comment from Steve Ganz, head Web developer at LinkedIn, who said some of the features I requested were available, and others were Imminent.

He commented, "These are all great ideas. Thanks so much for the great feedback, Louis! Stay tuned."

The first addition?

5. Allow Me to Export my LinkedIn Profile as PDF or Word

He writes:

Check! You will now find a link to download your LinkedIn Profile as a PDF right above your name on the profile page.

And it works too! You can download my LinkedIn profile here, complete with resume and recommendations, as I had outlined. My standard profile is here.

Also coming soon, an official LinkedIn blog. Looking forward to it.

Tidbits from the Link Blog: March 14, 2007

We're only two days away from a four-day mini-vacation to see the A's do battle in the Cactus League for Spring Training, but until then, we are certainly chained to the desk. That leaves opportunity to highlight the day's prominent stories.

It's no surprise that yet another company is out to get the iPod and steal some of Apple's thunder, and even less of a surprise that Blackberrys can cause accidents just as mobile phones do, or that big companies are moving to advertise on the Web. Given that all those aren't the biggest of surprises, it's a real surprise there's some strong writing on those topics today.

Don Dodge: Why Search Engines Rank Blogs Higher than Web Sites
Internet Outsider: Advertisers Fleeing TV, Radio for Internet, etc.
Slashdot: Legislators Ponder BlackBerry Pileups
TechCrunch: Reckoning Day For Venture Capitalists?
VentureBeat: Slacker, the Real iPod Killer?

To see what I'm finding interesting, bookmark or subscribe to my link blog.

A More Healthy Way to Stay Addicted?

An interesting New York Times article from this morning focuses on how soft drink leaders Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola are adapting their major diet soda brands to promote, of all things, health. Both companies have planned to adapt their flagship diet cola lines with a full set of vitamins, to break away from the "liquid candy" image, which many have used to link soda drinking to obesity.

The piece says specifically that Coca Cola will debut a brand extension called Diet Coke Plus, "which will contain niacin, vitamins B6 and B12, magnesium and zinc."

I made the switch from Pepsi Cola to Coke in my teens, and switched again from Coke to Diet Coke when in college. Now I probably down a six pack, conservatively, every single day. Unless the taste is completely indistinguishable from what I already drink, I don't have a huge incentive to switch again, and am quite dubious that the new Diet Coke Plus is going to strengthen my bones, fill me with physical energy and make me more attractive to the opposite sex. Instead, it's a lot like those old saturday morning commercials during cartoons where you would see Lucky Charms or Cookie Crisp, alongside toast, orange juice and a piece of fruit, saying it was "all part of a nutritious breakfast" and contained "9 vitamins and minerals", none of which broke the 20% RDA barrier.

What marketers sometimes fail to remember is that not all of their customers are stupid. We don't drink Diet Coke because it's healthy. We drink it because it has caffiene, tastes good, and stops from being thirsty. Maybe in that order. Sure, I can't even drink regular soda now without feelings of nausea, but I didn't switch to lose weight and reduce dental costs. And I won't switch to start looking like Popeye off a sprinkling of vitamins. Beyond this, brand extensions sometimes are not the answer. Read any book from Al Ries and Jack Trout, and they can teach you how to avoid the pitfalls of brand extensions. You simply can't take something unhealthy and relabel it as healthy. Nobody will believe you and it won't sell.

LinkedIn Provides Another Silly Web 2.0 "Error" Page

At the end of the workweek, I was planning a simple Address Book export to LinkedIn, to capture all the new contacts I acquired, but stumbled into a roadblock, as LinkedIn appears to have some planned downtime.

True to the site's Web 2.0 form, it provides a playful "We're Down!" message. This follows in line to the silliness provided by YouTube, Technorati, MySpace and others when they've suffered downtime.


The screen shot around 5:15 this afternoon...

I can only hope LinkedIn is in the process of introducing some of the new features I had proposed last month (See: How to Make LinkedIn Even Better). My site logs showed employees at LinkedIn read the story.

Previous stories on Web 2.0 Errors:

August 4, 2006: Web 2.0 Companies Play With Error Messages
January 24, 2007: Silly YouTube - Where's the Redundancy?
January 31, 2007: Scoble's Right: Technorati Isn't Scaling to Beat Google

The Big Debate: Online vs. Offline, and Web Influence

In 1998-1999, when I worked for Internet Valley, a small Silicon Valley startup focused on Web search engine optimization, Web influence and technology trends, we believed that you had to "Get Web or Get Out", meaning that the traditional big companies who had dominated the offline world would need to adapt to the Web or risk being left behind altogether. In the year or so I was at the company, we developed new benchmarks to track a Web site's influence, and even tried our hand at predicting the market capitalization of Web companies looking to go public.

Nearly a decade later, it is clear that the Web and the world of e-commerce have had a dramatic effect on the competitive technology and media landscape. It's no mystery that all companies, big and small, have a Web strategy. Some are executing well, while others are seeing their business models completely eroded by faster, nimbler, newer challengers.

Foremost on the road to extinction, barring revolution, are off-line media companies, from newspaper giants like the New York Times to print magazines - especially in the technology field. While technology publications used to number in the hundreds of pages per issue, even the leaders are seeing editions with only a few dozen pages, and maybe a dozen ad pages, including house ads promoting upcoming issues or conferences. Smart advertisers are learning that the best way to accurately track their ad spend and subsequent return on investment is through Web advertising, either through keyword sponsorships, ad banners, or customized landing pages and dedicated sites.

Additionally, the lead that traditional media once had in disseminating the news is long gone. Rather than wait for the New York Times morning edition or the 11 o'clock nightly news to get the day's information, 99% of news can be found from one's favorite news portal online, RSS feeds, or local sites. We stopped getting the San Francisco Chronicle in 1997, and despite my role in our company's media coverage and tracking, I'm slowly letting my free print subscriptions expire at all the tech magazines that have filled my work mailbox for years.

Newspaper circulations are down around the country. Reporters are losing their jobs. But some companies are making change and seeing real results.

As Colin Crawford of IDG writes:

"The brutal reality that we’re facing today is the costly process of dismantling and replacing legacy operations and cultures and business models with ones with new and yet to be fully proven business models. However, we face greater risks if we don’t transform our organization and take some chances."

At IDG, Crawford says that total increase in ad spend online is finally exceeding the decline in the print advertising for the IDG family, meaning the total revenue decline has ceased, that online advertising is carrying a higher burden for sales, and that the success of print is becoming less critical. Meanwhile, the New York Times has seen profit decline each of the last four years, and the near-eventuality is that the Old Gray Lady where "All the News is Fit to Print" may not be in print at all for much longer. The paper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, now says he doesn't care whether the Times will be in print in five years or not.

We aren't ignoring what's happening. We understand that the newspaper is not the focal point of city life as it was 10 years ago. "Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information," he says. "But the paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world."

I've written here before about how the advent of the Web significantly impacted my career path, away from being a reporter, and more toward the world of technology and the Internet. I still work with reporters and media every day, but in a new way, in a new medium. To have expected to stay the course, to hope that things would never change, would have been foolish.

Blogs and RSS feeds and instant access to news are changing the way we take in journalism, to the point that even the 24-hour news networks seem like dinosaurs in a fast-moving world, only becoming important in times of crisis or national elections. To stay on top of the news and to maintain true Web influence doesn't take the brand name of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal as it once did. Instead, consumers and news junkies are turning to their peers, through peer media, to get the scoop quick. For the Times and IDG and others to survive, hard decisions are going to need to be made. Luckily, some are doing just that.

Windows Vista: Lipstick on a Pig

Noted Web pioneer Dave Winer chimes in on the hype around Microsoft's latest release to the Operating System formerly known as Longhorn...

"$500 million of marketing can't hide the fact that these days it's hard to find anyone who cares about Windows."
Via Scripting.com (Jan. 31, 2007)