Znetlady: Modern Media

Social Media Relations: Five Best Principles

This is a series of five posts to help you embark successfully on social media relations.  If you are hoping that you’ve found a quick “best practices” checklist, keep searching.  This is about creating a foundation for practicing social media relations.  Growing a new practice area requires an investment of a bit of time, but the payback is you’ll be exceptional at it.

This series is about best principles.  There are only five of them, they are actually quite simple and they will help you crystallize your social media decisions and practices.

These are article length posts.   They are full of the good (if not always sexy) stuff the professional communicator needs to start effectively practicing social media.  I hope you stick around for a read.  I welcome your comments, questions and ideas – but please speak quietly here.  We’re thinking.

Before moving on to the principles, let me first clarify the importance I assign to best principles over best practices.

Best Practices versus Best Principles

First, best practices are of limited value because they are “local.”  Meaning they only really apply to a specific organization with its own combination of organizational culture, people, needs, budget, resources, and most importantly, its individual specific goals.  Changing any one of these elements to fit your own situation removes a fundamental element that made them successful.   By way of illustrating my point: Spain’s annual Running of the Bulls event works beautifully in Pamplona, but won't transplant very well to Times Square in New York City.  Likely not a good set of best practices to build your next event around.

Best principles are universal.  These are the fundamentals from which appropriate best practices can be derived.  For example, one of the United Nations ten best principles is “business should support the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights.”  How that principle is best implemented will be quite different in each region of the world within each business.

Focusing on best principles means that as media tools change you aren’t out scrambling for new best practices.  Strategies and tactics built on social media best principles will translate when blogs morph into social nets, when social networks move from the web to the mobile phone – or into virtual worlds.  In other words, the platforms won’t matter much – the principles will hold true. 

Working inside of principles mean you create the best practices that fit your organization or situation and thus, have far better success for your efforts.

Although there is no official global body declaring social media best principles, the five I offer here are based on lots of years of experience in new media in the enterprise and have proved to be excellent guideposts in this era of shifting media practices.

Principle 1:  Go For Insight (because spaghetti is messy to clean up)

The most important thing you can do for “doing” social media is to get insight.  It will help you sell yourself - and your management - on exactly what about your communications you need to modernize.

Stop worrying about learning every new tool, site or technology.  Spend your valuable time gaining insights into those you should be using (not because it’s “cool”).   Pick one or two of those social media tools and start using them.  Doing so will lead you pretty quickly to any others that are important to your goals.

So, let’s go about getting social media relations insight with something every communications professional is intimate with – the news media. 

Even if you don’t depend directly on the news media in your practices – it simply stands to reason that whatever changes they are employing it is because their audience behaviors have changed.  Which means by extension your audiences’ behaviors are changing.   If the mass media is doing something differently, shouldn’t we look at it closely?

By following what media is doing you’ll organically be lead to where to start or expand your social media strategies.

With that, here are five key resources to use to help you go for insight.  Picking any one of them will tell you what you need to be doing.  Embracing all five?…a pathway to being an expert.

The Annual The State of the News Media Report
It is 180,000 words of pure wisdom brought to you by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.  The 2008 report is fully, freely available at a dedicated web site and conveniently broken up by media type: newspaper, local versus cable tv, online, magazines, radio, ethnic media, and network tv. An overview gives you the highpoints, and  “A Year in the News” gives you perspective on the important trends in just the last year. There are special reports on the changing newsroom, public attitudes, and the future of advertising.

The repot tells you things like:

“Aggregators like Sphere, Technorati and Newsgator help news sites keep up with the wave of online content that could be helpful links for readers.”

Here are a few other insights I randomly pulled out of the report:

"In 2007, there also are signs that Wikipedia is evolving into a new role: 'news source.'"

“A snapshot study by the Project found the top stories on popular user-driven news sites – Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us – were very different than those of the mainstream media.”

“Fully 95% of the top 100 newspapers included blogs from reporters in March 2007, up from 80% in 2006.”

“User sites like Digg have turned the tables on traditional media by allowing visitors to choose and share what they define as news.”

These few pull quotes alone point to tools that might be important to your communications.

Besides a deep look into the news environment, you can also get some snapshots of the opportunities. It tells you where news holes are.

“News consumers may have had more choices than ever for where to find news in 2007, but that does not mean they had more news to choose from. The news agenda for the year was, in fact, quite narrow, dominated by a few major general topic areas.”

Their chart accompanying this statement:

News Topics by Media Sector:

 

This is one speakes volumes: 

Public Interest versus Media Coverage.

In every case, the public interest outstrips the media coverage of the topic. 

That might be an “ah ha” moment as to the growing importance of alternative methods of getting news.

The PEJ gives you no excuse for not reading their report.  It’s well written, broken into digestible chunks.  You can print by chapter or page, it’s in Spanish, there are executive summaries or you can get a full PDF. 

Packaged insight for free, yet priceless.

Pew Center for the People and the Press
The two resources here you will likely find most relevant in your pursuit of insight is the Center’s People & The Press surveys and the Media Surveys.  These reveal the public’s attitudes toward media, what they are interested in as well as their usage of media.  You have access to the datasets, the surveys, news interest indexes and commentary.

Use it to find trends, news opportunities, those areas readers need information but are not being filled by the mainstream media and most importantly, how readers are getting information and filling news holes.

Valuable insight for the clicking.

“My Friends Could Be Dead”
With the unfolding story of the Virginia Tech shootings dramatically illustrating its thesis, iFocos identifies a dozen sweeping changes to how individuals and society as a whole experience media.

“The 800 reporters from the world’s news organizations who descended upon Blacksburg, Va., on April 16, 2007, to cover the shootings of students at Virginia Tech quickly discovered an inconvenient truth. Though remote, Blacksburg was hardly isolated. Students, educators and citizens reported the horrific events first-hand through long-established digital and social networks. The news reached the outside world well before the television crews found their way to the Blue Ridge. The story unfolded on the Internet and on cell-phones, the personal and preferred means of communication of an always-on generation. The story was in their hands.”

The report is a dramatic example of the growing citizen journalism movement and of how personal media empowers and defines communication in our connected society.

In “My Friends Could be Dead”, iFocos chronicles the Twitter microblogging of freshman Kevin Cupp on that day, which begins: 

“Trapped inside Pamplin, shooter on campus, they won’t let us leave.” 

Kevin is webmaster of the student-run news site Planet Blacksburg, and whose work was used extensively by mainstream media, as well as shared and redistributed throughout the world.

The twelve sweeping media shifts the report identifies and discusses are:
•    Media Catharsis
•    Social Networks: The New Local
•    Contribution Culture
•    Real-time Sociology
•    Derivative Myth Debunked
•    The News Spiral & The Organic Story Arc
•    The Manic Mainstream
•    Responsible Disclosure
•    A Place for News to Happen
•    SnoozePapers
•    Democratization of Media
•    Proliferation of Sources

“My Friends Could be Dead” is a project of iFocos’ Random Acts of Media initiative.  RAM is an emerging image gallery documenting media usage throughout the world.  It is digital ethnographic research collected from a network of global contributors.  RAM uses the research to report on the behaviors of a culture immersed in media.  Insights, observations and reports attached to the images often lead to more comprehensive research. 

iFocos is a media think tank and the organizer of the We Media conferences.  It is in partnership with The Associated Press and The Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California.

This report is a free PDF and is only 14 pages.

Moving and insightful.

Poynter Online
The Poynter Institute is a school for journalists, future journalists and teachers of journalists.  Their website is a veritable playground of resources giving you insight into news media practices and the technologies and formats they are using.   Plenty of insight into readers is also to be found here.

Just one of those insightful resources is Eyetracking the News: A Study of Print and Online Reading.  This is fascinating stuff from the design side, but more importantly for you, it is a rigorous study of what attracts attention and what doesn’t.  And this is scientific research that helps the pros make decisions about editorial and advertising.

“Do readers follow teasers? How deeply are they reading into the text? In what order do they look at photos, headlines, graphics and info boxes? And how do each of these vary from print to online?”

Check here for more golden insight for you to use in providing both the content and the formats that editors are looking for.  The findings in this report can be applied to your web site, blog or other content formats as well. The report (book) is currently $39 (U.S., reg. $60).

An ongoing feature at Poynter is WebSpeak that helps journalists learn the lingo of online news.  It can help you too – plus get insight into interesting ways to get attention or provide content for the new media landscape.  For example, last March WebSpeak had a segment on slideshows, highlighting a program called Soundslides.  This software program has become a standard tool for journalist-produced audio slides shows that may include interviews, natural sound, narration by a reporter or photographer, and/or music. 

Poynter also sponsors NewsU, an outstanding collection of free online courses (I've taken a few, so speaking from experience).  There are more than 60 of them covering things like insights on visual journalism, multimedia storytelling and ethics.  A new course about to be launched is called Beyond the Inverted Pyramid: Creating Alternative Story Forms - Write, edit and present information that engages time-crunched readers.

That title alone should tell us a thing or two about what journalists and readers are looking for in media today.  Even just a periodic perusal of the offerings at NewsU will provide insight into the shifts in media practices.

Or, follow the NewsU blog.  A recent post is all about Twitter, that seemingly everywhere micoblogging site, and how it is supporting serious journalism. 

Insight for the taking.

Cyberjournalist
This is another rich resource that gathers in one place a variety of commentary, news, tips and tools about Internet journalism specifically.

Cyberjournalist.net has a list of about 350 blogging journalists, a blogger’s code of ethics, a primer on RSS (really simple syndication) and other resources that tell you what journalists are tapping into.  It will even link you to the Cyberjounalist group on Facebook (FB login required).

Online media insight.

Taking the time to gain a little insight will save you social media meltdown, frustration and your sanity.  These resources will give you enormous amounts of it, informing you where to start with your social media relations initiatives.  Maybe more importantly, it will give you the fodder you might need to sell social media into your organization.  Every manager wants to know how “we can do it better” and these resources are huge signposts.

If you go where the media is going, you’ll be supporting your outbound communications strategies while prioritizing the tools you need to bring into your tactics.  And, you’ll be learning about what any audience wants from their media source (that would be you).

Of course you have targeted audiences you want to reach, and there are lots of other insight resources, but this is an excellent place to start, devoid of the noise out there.

Next post covers the best principle “Edit for More, Not Less.”  And watch for the three principles to follow:  Go Where You Will Touch People, Make Everything Shareable, and Everything You Need to Know About Social Media You Learned in Kindergarten.

Note:  I apologize that the comments were unavailable for early readers of this post.  If you are returning I hope you add your thoughts.

What is a Blog? How Can I Use a Blog?

I am cross-posting this from my Modern Mediasphere blog

Blogs are the every-person’s publishing tool.  The simplest definition of a blog - or weblog - is a personal, topical web site that is frequently updated.  Corporate executives, journalists, marketers, freelancers, advertisers, politicians, and citizens of the world have taken to publishing blogs, moving them from personal journals to a modern influential media form.

Estimates of the current number of blogs might surprise you if you aren’t tuned into the blog-o-sphere. One hundred million worldwide and growing at a rate of about one new blog per second.  Creating a blog is fast, and is as easy as filling out a web form.  But what makes them so alluring – and powerful - is blogs’ social nature, their populist culture, and their immediacy.

In short, blogs are a channel that is totally remodeling the flow of information.

Blogs have a set of features that distinguish them from a traditional web page – but keep in mind these features are not about the technology.  These characteristics turn a simple web page into a social network, a lone voice into an influential one and a local conversation into a global one.

The four features, in particular, that distinguish blogs are:

Posts: A single blog entry is called a post.  Posts are often short, are conversational and time-stamped, displayed with the newest post on top. The time-stamps create a sense of proximity to the writer for the reader.

Syndication:   This is the “motion potion” of blogs.  Blogs are automatically syndicated through a feature called RSS - “Really Simple Syndication.” RSS is a tiny bit of code embedded in the blog that allows readers to subscribe to an automatic “feed” of all blog entries.  As soon as an author posts a blog entry, the post can be "pulled" by the subscriber.  Subscribers receive these posts through software integrated into their web browser or through a separate application called a “news reader.”  RSS also makes it possible for blog content to be distributed automatically onto other web sites or blogs.

Comments:  Each post invites readers to comment via a small web form immediately under the post.  Comments are published with the related blog post. Blog readers can read both the author’s posts and the comments of other readers.  The author is notified when a comment is posted to their blog.  Blog authors may comment back, or enter new posts.  Comments keep the conversation moving forward on that individual blog.

Trackbacks:  The conversation continues among blogs too.  Trackbacks interconnect blogs.  A trackback is a method for one blogger to publish a special type of post directly onto someone else’s blog. It works by entering a post on your own blog, then entering the URL of your post into the trackback feature of another blog.  Your trackback post, and the link to it, is published on that other blog.  Authors are notified when a trackback link is entered into their blog.   Trackbacks intertwine multiple blogs and conversations.

There are a few other common features that categorize and organize blog posts and link blogs or web pages together, but these are the four that have turned the flow of information from broadcast media to conversation commons.

What Does it Mean?

Blogs are at least as significant a development as the printing press was – and more so because of their interconnectedness and social network nature.  It means we – all of us – now hold the keys to the information kingdom.  We no longer rely on mass media for our news, information, or gossip.  It means anyone can publish a globally accessible channel in seconds. 

Blogs are disturbing every form of business communication. Blogs have already had a profound effect on mass media and consumer behaviors.  Traditional TV and print media outlets as well as individual journalists are creating blogs.  Consumers are blogging about everything from politics to mothering; using blogs as a complement to mass media and as a trusted source to check on mass media.  Even executives of Fortune 500 companies have started blogging to ensure their company’s story is told in the worldwide conversation and to personally engage constituents.

Blogs are a communications fact of life.  If you join in, the conversation is happening with you.  If you aren’t involved, it is happening without you and about you.   And, being in the dark is not a good competitive strategy.

What is it Good For?

Understanding the power of blogs requires that you blog.  It isn’t something to simply study.  Try Blogger, Typepad, Bloglines, Blogstream or one of the many other services, and have your blog up and running in less than 5 minutes for free or nearly free.      

In the meantime, here are just a few blogs selected from the 100 million or so.

• The writers of the hit TV show, Grey’s Anatomy, are blogging; talking directly to their fans and offering it as a gathering point for its fans.  It is a fascinating case study.

• General Motors’ Vice Chairman is blogging to engage customers, but also as a way not to leave the last word to mainstream media reports, according its author, Bob Lutz.

• PR agencies like Edelman, Ogilvy and Hill and Knowlton are blogging – mostly about the changing communications landscape.

• 101 Cookbooks, by Heidi Swanson, is a chronicle of a cookbook collection. She is a photographer and cookbook author whose website is a blog – a well-read one, with nearly 700 other sites linking to hers.  She has sponsors, markets her classes and her own recipes, and offers an opt-in newsletter.

• McDonalds' Open for Discussion blog focuses on the company's social responsibility initiatives.

• Charlene Li, a Forrester Research analyst, blogs about how technology is affecting content delivery, media and advertising.

• Major broadcast and print media, like CBS, NBC, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal to name a few are using blogs as a way to provide additional content. 

• Overheard in New York.  Two New Yorkers have gathered bits of overhead conversations and published them on a blog.  They now have thousands of submissions – and have just published a print book of selected conversations.

Find more at Google Blog Search or Technorati Blog Finder.

So, what are blogs good for?  Almost any type of communication.  The trick here is that this is two-way communication, not a controlled website.  Blogs are both the talking part and the listening part.  Blogs are good for taking part in the marketplace conversation, the political conversation or your industry conversation. 

Here are a few ideas to get you going:

• Publish your newsletter online as a blog.  The syndication feature will build readership, and provide your readers a way to join in.

• Establish your expertise by publishing a blog on a topic you are passionate about.

• Publish industry thought leadership articles to a blog.  Search engines like blogs and this is a way to increase search engine visibility and distribution.  You don’t have to wait for or pitch them to the industry rags.

• Use blogs internally to keep everyone apprised of ongoing projects.

• Create an “ideas” blog on which team members can create an archive of best practices or good ideas.

• Create a citizens blog around a community issue.

• Create a non-public blog to communicate with a client or contractor on the progress of a project – it is easier to organize than email and creates a chronological, time-stamped archive.

• Create a “blog event” by inviting guest experts to post on a specific topic during a particular week or month.

• Create a photo blog on which you publish pictures of a special event, for ongoing team building, an archival history of a project, or a  “behind-the-scenes” peek.

• Use a blog as a pointer to topical resources for your clients or internal teams.

• Market yourself!

From here, it is up to you.  The conversation about how to communicate with audiences has changed.  Audiences find you.  Be where they are - the blogosphere is one of those "places."

Tagging – What Is It Good For? – Part 3; Eighteen Ways to Use Tagging in Your Communications and Marketing

So, just what is tagging good for practically?   Hopefully Part 1 and Part 2 laid the groundwork for finally answering this question, discussing how tagging is shifting online searching and is a growing and powerful way to both organize and share web documents.  Now, the next step is putting it to practical use in your communications or marketing.

My last post reviewed specifically how tags work at del.icio.us and Technorati, but those concepts are much the same for all social bookmarking sites and tag search engines.  More and more online services are incorporating tagging. Dating sites like Consumating.com uses tags on dating profiles – you tag your own & others are able to tag your profile.  Evdb.com uses tags for worldwide events and venues. InfoWorld editors tag articles.  Dinnerbuz.com shares favorite restaurants via tags.  43Things.com uses tags for goal setting.  And, Amazon is experimenting with tagging in a concordance feature that shows the 100 most frequently used words (tags) in a book – and by clicking on a tag in the “tag cloud,” Amazon will display the sentences in the book that contain that tag word. 

The point is tagging is for finding and sharing stuff.  It is redefining all types of online search.  And, since search is increasingly important to all of your communications, media relations or marketing efforts, it’s time to start learning about tags, experimenting with them, and incorporating tags into your communications strategies. 

Here’s a start with eighteen practical ways to use tagging. While they will help others find you and streamline how you find important information, you might even find tags help you organize and find your own “stuff.”

• Search on social bookmarking sites for tags related to your organization, brand or industry.  If one exists, subscribe (via RSS) to those tags.  This is an easy way to track what people find valuable in your industry, what people are saying about you – even to spot potential customers, channels or marketing opportunities.  Start at del.icio.us, Blogmarks, Shadows, IceRocket and Technorati.  Also check out Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 (in beta).

• Look closely at the  “related tags” to your most relevant tags.  It’s very likely you will find unexpected perspectives or uses of your brand or content.  Use the insight to develop both tagging and communications strategies. 

• Watch for changes in tag clouds on social bookmarking sites.  See one here.  The size of the tag suggests what’s popular.  Use it to detect trends.  If you look sideways, you might even find some interesting clues for innovations in your markets.

• Tag your existing web content at social bookmarking sites with appropriate tags.  If a tag doesn’t exist, just create one.  Don’t forget to subscribe to it, so you will know what others are tagging with the same tag.  And, do look periodically at how the related “cloud” is developing around your tags.

• If you have a blog, tag your individual blog entries, as well as your entire blog. Check if your blog software supports categories or has other tagging capabilities. IceRocket and Technorati will use your blog category feature to tag your blog entries at those search engines.

• Use a blog as a newsroom and post your press releases and news items – and tag them.  Blogs are an easy way to incorporate tags immediately, as noted above, many popular blog services have category or tagging features that are then used by social bookmarking sites to include in tag searches.

• Use tags to organize your web site’s press releases, articles or media resources.  This is an easy way to guide journalists, analysts, customers, or investors to organizational or topical content that might be overlooked at your web site.  Point them via your web site to the relevant tag link on your chosen social bookmarking site(s) and show them the same content but organized by tags; and don’t be afraid to expand on your own content by adding bookmarks to relevant content on other web sites.

• Ask journalists that cover your industry if they are using tags.   A few are using them as a way to accept pitches as an alternative to email, as are some influential bloggers.  While this practice is not yet widespread, journalists are subscribing via RSS to tags and keywords to research and find story ideas.

• If a favorite journalist is tagging their blog or has a social bookmarking tag, subscribe to it via the RSS feed for that tag.  An easy way to follow what the journalist is interested in, writing about, or following.

• Create a set of “private bookmarks” and advise journalists what your tags are and invite them to subscribe.   When you update your bookmarks or content with tags appropriate to that journalist, they will be notified via RSS.

• Use social bookmarking and tags to create an ongoing “library” for your email (or RSS) newsletter readers. You will be creating a valuable growing resource for your readers – and they can also contribute to the “mind share’ by adding relevant resources.

• Use tags to gather and organize resources for customers, distributors or partners.  These can be public or private tags, but this makes it incredibly easy to organize and share reports, articles, whitepapers, data sheets, industry research, etc. that may be stored all over the web by simply tagging appropriate web pages.  Link to the social tag from your web site, intranet, or extranet.

• Contribute links to existing tags that point to relevant content on your web site or blog.  Do not engage in “tag spam!”

• Use tags on your internal blogs and web-based resources, extending your organization’s “corporate memory.”

• Create special tags for your presentations or training sessions.   We find this especially helpful for our seminar participants.  We gather all the resources discussed. such as web sites, studies, tools, etc. into one easy place for the attendees to reference post-event.  Attendees can also add resources they know of or find later, initiating a community among your attendees. 

• Create a “news aggregation” site relevant to your customers, brand, employees or partners by combining tags and RSS.   Use RSS and tags together to gather, filter and then automatically publish news or content items to a page on your web site, blog or intranet.

• Tag staff and employee profiles on your intranet related to specialized skill-sets or knowledge or experience.  This could be an unexpected boon to training, identifying internal experts, or maximizing internal resources.

• Use tags for your personal bookmarks and research.  Because tags are so much more flexible than browser-based bookmarks, it makes it easy to find relevant resources you might otherwise “lose” in your “Favorites" lists.  You can tag them with more than one tag, allowing you to find content evoked by differing circumstances or needs.  Plus, because they are stored on the web rather than your own computer, you can get to them from anywhere – including mobile devices or someone else’s computer.

There are countless ways to use tagging.  The important thing is just to start using them - your own ideas will soon surface.  I invite you to share your own ideas for using tags here via comments.  I’ll be adding more ideas in other posts - check for them in Categories here; look for the tagging tag!

Tagging: What is it Good For - Part 2

Second in a series of three posts for communications pros that will hopefully explain tagging, using tags in practical applications for marketing communications and their implications in moving to “modern media” communications.

In part one, I described tagging as assigning single words to describe or categorize any web content.  And while somewhat similar to bookmarking a web page on your computer, it is far more powerful.  It is not a systematic or hierarchical categorizing method (like folders) – it is simply using one or more words that make sense to you to categorize content.  And, instead of the entry (URL) being saved on your own machine, it is saved on “social bookmarking” sites or shared photo sites – publicly available sites that anyone can use to tag web content.  That also means anyone can search for content by tags assigned by everyone else – so resources become shared by way of this communal tagging.

Two key sites in which social bookmark tagging comes to life are del.icio.us and Technorati.  Understanding the basics of these two sites means you can start leveraging the new generation of tools for content organization, distribution and search.

Del.icio.us is the site that popularized social bookmarking.  Its looks are barebones, but its straightforward functionality epitomizes the basics of all social bookmarking sites.  Del.icio.us is actually a “bookmark manager.”  It allows you to add sites to your personal collection of links, to assign tags to each one to categorize them in your own personal way, and then to share all those links with others – through tags.

Del.icio.us gives you multiple “views” of tagged bookmarks. Every user has a unique “home page” (del.icio.us/username). This page includes all your own bookmarks, along with a sidebar showing all your tags.  Each of your tags has a “home page” (del.icio.us/username/tag) with links to sites you’ve assigned that tag to, also with a list of related tags.  And, every tag itself has a shared home page, (del.icio.us/tag/communications), on which you will see everyone’s bookmarks (including yours) that have that tag assigned to it, along with a list of related tags linked to each of those individual tag pages.

Certainly being able to access your bookmarks from anywhere is a big advantage.  Being able to tap into resources other people find useful expands everyone’s horizons.  But add RSS to the mix and now you’ve got powerful amplification.  Here’s why:

First, you can subscribe to any tag or any user’s public tags using Really Simple Syndication.  That means when anyone adds a bookmark in del.icio.us with that tag, you are notified via your RSS newsreader.  If you want to follow what a particular del.icio.us user is adding to their tags, you can use RSS to subscribe to their del.icio.us home page or individual tag page.  So, what you can do, so other’s can do with your bookmarks, pages and tags. 

Plus, the new generation of search engines, like Technorati use RSS, tags and sites like del.icio.us to return relevant results to searches.

Technorati follows some 15 million blogs via RSS feeds, but it also incorporates links from tags on del.icio.us and Furl, as well as images tagged on the photo-sharing sites Flickr and Buzznet.  Technorati keyword searches return individual blog entries that contain the desired keyword(s) – but if that keyword happens to be a del.icio.us or Furl tag, Technorati also returns a display of links associated with that tag/keyword along with links to any related tag words. 

Technorati and similar search sites rely on RSS to “find” content. It returns content from what Technorati calls the “world live web” -  often indexing newly updated content within ten minutes.  While blogs are in large part what Technorati indexes because RSS is a part of most blogs, by incorporating RSS into even “regular” web pages, you can turn any web page into a “live” page by tagging it on del.icio.us and encouraging Technorati to index it every time the page is updated.  More on this later.

And, like del.icio.us, Technorati offers RSS subscription to keywords, but also to URLs.  By creating a Technorati “watchlist” and subscribing to it, you will receive updated links every hour via your RSS newsreader, keeping you up-to-date on new blog entries, tag entries and links to a specific URL.

While there are many ways to incorporate these two types of tools into your communications, an obvious application is to start tagging your content pages and blog entries, subscribing to tags related to your areas of interest, and, of course, subscribing to your own blog or website URL through del.icio.us and Technorati to track whose referencing you.

Next, putting it all together with practical uses for tagging in your communications.

Tagging: What is it Good For?

I’ve run into a lot of very smart professional communicators who just don’t yet get tagging.  So, this is a first in a series of three posts that will hopefully explain tagging, using them in practical applications for marketing communications and its implications in moving to “modern media” communications.

Are you tagged?  If you aren’t sure go to Flickr and type your company name or product category (such as “cameraphone”) into the search box – or just click on one of the words you see in various sizes of blue.  Chances are Flickr will display several to hundreds of photos as a result of your search. I’m guessing you’ve been tagged.

Tagging is assigning “keywords” to content, such as the photos on Flickr, bookmarks on del.icio.us, or blog posts for Technorati.  Maybe you’re somewhat familiar with tags as in “meta tag” keywords embedded in web page code to help some search engines categorize your site. But, we’re not talking here about your father’s tags.  No, these tags are thoroughly modern tags, created by everyone, for everyone turning photos, web pages or blog posts into shared mindspace (hang with me, this isn’t going to get metaphysical).

Tagging may seem chaotic on the surface, however tagging is an incredibly powerful media tool.  It is as much a media channel as it a social experience of the content that exists within the medium. 

Now, don’t be put off if tagging hasn’t seemed terribly intuitive to you.  It is actually quite simple. And you already do it for yourself when you bookmark a page in your web browser.

To help get your mind around how it works in the larger world, Gastrocast is a great example of putting tags (and modern media) into action.   ChefNeal has a great blog as well as a delightful podcast show, Gastrocast. To say it is about cooking seems anemic, as it is full of rich sounds, texture and culinary illumination. 

To help us listeners be better cooks, ChefNeal uses Flickr (a photo-sharing web site) to post photos of recipe stages, ingredient photos as well as images of tools or techniques to accompany his podcasts.  He tags each set of photos that correspond to each of his Gastrocast podcasts with his chosen keywords. For example, for his Gastrocast #14, ChefNeal assigned the tags ‘grilling,” “gastrocast,” “podchef” and “summer cooking” to his Flickr photos for that show. For purposes of his podcast, he links listeners via his blog to the specific photo set for that show, as well as the podcast audio file.  So, the full Gastrocast podcast experience becomes a “when I want it” audio broadcast and a shared (public) Flickr photo set/slideshow. 

ChefNeal isn’t the only person who uses the “grilling,” or “podchef” tag on Flickr, however.  By searching on the tags “grilling” or “podchef” you can also see everyone’s photos who have assigned those tags to their own photos, as well as any ChefNeal may have assigned to photos from other Gastrocast shows.

Tagging, at its core, is a super-simple keyword filing system.

Where it gets messy is that there is nothing that says what tags (keywords) are “available.”  There are no pre-assigned categories or hierarchies like you find in Yahoo, for example.  You assign the tags (keywords) simply by what makes sense to you – and so does everyone else. Just like you do when (if) you categorize your very own bookmarks in folders in your web browser. What’s different here is you can access documents based both on how you (with your personal tags) “filed” it, as well as how everyone else tagged (“filed”/described/categorized) that same document. 

Better yet, because others may have tagged very different documents with the same or similar tags as yours, tagging leads you to documents or resources you may have never been aware of. In essence, by tagging everyone is contributing to a shared set of resources filed under that tag.

In Flickr the documents are photos; in del.icio.us the documents are bookmarked web pages and in Technorati the tags are tied to blog posts.

So what? big deal; a simplified, shared document description methodology….  That is what it appears to be on the surface, but here’s where you have to make the leap out of “old media” thinking into modern media thinking. 

What results from tagging is a shared categorization system that reflects how individuals describe documents, rather than a highly structured location system, like the Dewey decimal system, for example.  It defies “standardization,” doing something that a standardized filing system (or search engine) can’t.  It creates an evocative “view” of a document; one based on how it fits into people’s own lives, work or consciousness.

Tagging moves us away from a single “expert” determination of the context or categories a document “fits” into.  It totally removes control over the context of documents or even physical objects (e.g., Flickr photos). While you may think of your press release in the context of  “Corporate/News Room/New Product Press Release,” someone else may think of that document as “New Gadget I Gotta Have” or “Who Are They Kidding?”

The point is, documents you create do not exist in your context but in the context of every viewer and all the viewers.  A document is the sum of its tags.

Think again about that last sentence.

Next we’ll look at how to use tagging in del.icio.us and Technorati and how it fits with your communications efforts.

Modern Media Tools for Modern Media Relations - Podcasting Part 3 of 3

This is a summary of our recent presentation at PRSA Media Relations Workshop, Orange County, CA.  I will be posting the summary here in three parts.

Here’s a podcast by one of your PR colleagues - the Hobson & Holtz Report.

Think of podcasting as TIVO for radio, except anyone can create audio programs and they are sent directly to the information consumer for listenting at their convenience.  A podcast is a recorded audio program in MP3 format (the popular audio format for the iPod and other portable audio players) but with a twist.  The audio is delivered via RSS and is included as an “enclosure” to an RSS feed.

In other words, you can subscribe via RSS to audio content and receive it as a download to your computer or to a portable audio player automatically -- as soon as it is published (see our earlier RSS discussion).

The number of podcast programs is rising rapidly. Podcast Alley, an online directory, currently lists 3500 distinct programs, and Feedburner reports it is tracking 6,000 podcasts.  Considering the first podcast was in July of 2004, the term “rising rapidly” may be a gross understatement.

Who’s Podcasting?
Infinity Broadcasting announced in April it was flipping its AM station, KYCY, San Francisco, to KYOU radio – an all podcast radio station.  Sirius Radio has hired Adam Curry, one of the inventors of podcasting, to host a daily four-hour show about podcasting, and broadcasting podcasts. 

Rapidly on their heels, other mainstream media is quickly adopting podcasting.  BBC Radio and Minnesota Public Radio, NPR, CBC, and ABC News have all started to make some of their programming available in podcast form.  Broadcasters in Australia, Spain, Sweden, and Belgium are podcasting.  Rush Limbaugh, President George Bush, Senator John Edwards and California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger are also using podcasting to stay in touch with constituents.

Sample a bit of ABC’s AferNote podcast here.

Corporations are also podcasting.  General Motors and Disney have recently launched podcasts.  Disneyland launched its podcast as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. 

Take a listen to Disneyland's podcast.

Podcasting is here to stay and emerging and large players alike are embracing the medium. There are many popular podcasts on every topic – from cooking to medicine.  What’s most exciting is that mainstream media is embracing podcasting as a way of reinventing itself.  We, as communicators, need to do the same.

All Media Is Multimedia
Our mantra that “all media is multimedia” couldn’t have a more concrete illustration than podcasting.  We’ve discussed in the past that communications professionals must think of every medium in multimedia formats:  print media includes streaming audio or video on their web sites;  broadcast media publish print on the web; radio broadcasts over the Internet and puts up print and images on their web sites.

But podcasting seems to bring the “multimedia-fication of media” concept home like never before.  Newspapers like the Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle and the Philadelphia Daily News are not just repurposing content for their podcasts, but are creating all new content and shows for the podcast format.   

For you, this is a way to extend the reach of your PR and media relations efforts.  These are new and expanded outlets to provide content for, and a brand new way to get your news out.

Podcasts are viral - a news hit on one podcast can easily be used on other podcasts – and podcasts are easily shared/sent to others.  Content used in a podcast can show up as a print story – online or offline. And, don’t underestimate the influence of the first and very well-respected podcasters – those “citizen journalists” who started the podcast phenomenon in the first place.

The What I Want, When I Want It, How I Want it Attitude
Podcasting, like all modern media, answers the “what I want, when I want it” demand for media.  It is “content-to-go” and allows for that all-important time-shifting.

But, there are lots of other PR reasons to consider podcasting:

• Podcasting is an inexpensive and immediate broadcast channel you can easily syndicate via RSS.
• The podcast is pushed directly to subscribers as soon as it is published, keeping your constituents engaged with both your content and your brand.
• You speak directly to and engage customers, investors, partners, media, etc.
• Podcasting is a better opportunity to reach constituents during the right “frame of mind” moment since they listen at their own “right time.”
• You can create original content around your product, issue or theme. For example, General Motors podcasts about car trends and The Kitchen Garden Company produces Gastrocast about food and cooking.
• Podcasting is an easy way to provide your news in a rich media format.
• It is a medium used by influential bloggers as well as mainstream media.
• It is an opportunity to evolve the modern “Radio News Release. ”
• Podcasts are an additional outlet for coverage, as podcast shows need original content and it is ideally suited because podcasting is a medium for talk and news, rather than music.
• The movement of news to and from the various forms of media is becoming increasingly fluid, so an item on a podcast may also makes its way to a blog, newspaper, or to mainstream radio or television.
• Podcasting is a growing tool for internal corporate communication and IR. Earningscast, for example, has started publishing select quarterly company investor conference calls in podcast form.
• Podcasts are popular!

Podcasting is a medium in search of new content. Since YOU are now the media, go out there and provide it!

Getting Started
The first step to being successful in using podcasts in your media relations efforts is to subscribe to podcasts to become familiar with them and to listen.  You’ll notice a wide range of production quality and formats, but don't let that influence their importance. 

Identify influential podcasters and follow them, subscribe to the RSS feeds – and remember, you don’t need an iPod or other MP3 player – you can listen on your computer.

Start here to find podcasts:
Podcast Alley
Podcast.net
iPodderX
iPodder.org
Podcast Directory

• Once you’ve identified relevant podcasts you would like to approach, first get involved with it through the comments feature that many podcasters enable via their blog.
• If you have a blog, trackback or link to that podcaster’s content, and comment on the value of its content.
• Podcast yourself – and interview, review, recommend or point to the influential podcasts you’d like to get on.  If you aren’t ready to start podcasting with all new content, try making your newsletter into a short podcast.
• Contact mainstream media journalists and include them via an interview on your podcast.
• Provide the podcaster with some information they might find helpful and relevant to the topic of their blog via a private email message.
• Give and you will receive.

What You Need to Podcast
Podcast yourself! The easiest way to podcast is to use the telephone.  Services like Audioblog.com will create a podcast for you by calling it in by phone.  These services result in very acceptable audio quality.

We recommend you opt for the very best audio quality possible in your circumstance, especially considering most people will be listening to this “on the go” – in the car or subway, outside, while eating lunch, etc.  Keep your listener’s possible environment in mind. 

There are various levels of equipment and software you can use, but a good quality podcast does not need to be expensive to produce.  You can use services like Audioblog, or your own computer sound card, and microphone, along with software to save the audio in MP3 format.  You can opt for prosumer level microphones and mixers, or, on the high end, use a professional sound studio.  In all cases, you will need to upload your MP3 file to a web server and provide it as an RSS feed enclosure.

The most important thing you can do, however, is to create great content. To start podcasting, start here:
Audioblog.com
iPodder.org

The Future of News
We’ve been beating on the theme in this presentation of “what I want, when I want it, how I want it” for modern media and modern media relations.   This means we need to think not only about new delivery channels like blogs, podcasts and RSS, but it also means we need to think about providing content in formats to accommodate the new channels.

Mobile media is the quintessential “liquid media” channel, both for creating and delivering communication at the right frame of mind moment.  Mobile phones are today’s all-in-one communication appliance.

Last month, the MediaCenter released its Media and Technology and Society multi-disciplinary research study on the landscape of media. They confirmed everything we’ve said here - it is about any time, any place and any device - it’s about storytelling and sharing -  and it’s social.

THE FUTURE OF NEWS IS ... Bigger,
glocal
Accessible any time, any place, any device
Transparent Participatory, a conversation not a lecture
Edited for more, not less
Reliant on social entrepreneurship
Authentic. 
Trust is the new trust
--The Media Center

Our challenge as communciators is to provide and participate in news in this environment.  We must develop communications programs that delivers “what I want, when I want it, how I want it.”

Provide your content in multiple ways, suitable for all modern mediums and in suitable formats: blogs, podcasts, RSS, mobile, SMS, wireless; audio, video, on-the-go and time-shifted.

When providing reports to your clients, be sure you include your news delivery to all the modern media paths your news is taking today:  blogs, citizen journals, podcasts, RSS, mobile accesses and downloads, SMS, and social and collaborative networks.

Be modern. Modern media is everywhere, and showing up in new ways everyday.  You are using modern media in your daily lives. Use it to deliver your news in modern ways.

It’s mobile, immediate, visual, interactive, participatory and trusted. Make way for a generation of storytellers who totally get it.
---The Media Center

Modern Tools for Modern Media Relations - Really Simple Syndication Part 2 (of 3)

This is a summary of our recent presentation at PRSA Media Relations Workshop, Orange County, CA.  I will be posting the summary here in three parts.

Have you seen these little orange buttons during your web travels? 

They are your media relations power tools!

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the pivotal technology in today’s media environment and it is being adopted at lightening speed by both the creators and the consumers of news. Do not give in to any temptation to dismiss or underestimate the importance of what we are telling you here today about RSS. It is a vital tool for your media relations efforts.

Really simply, RSS sets up a method for your web content to be instantly syndicated – by individuals, editors, journalists, or by news sites or web sites.

Technically, RSS is a small bit of code in a blog or web page which instantly turns that content into a syndicated “feed.”  People subscribe to feeds, and that content is received via software on their computers called a “news aggregator” or “news reader.” Most blog services automatically generate RSS feeds so that a reader/subscriber to that blog is immediately notified when a writer has posted.  RSS ties the writer and reader together in time, giving a sense of immediacy, and to some extent a sense of shared experience between the reader and the writer.  But, its power goes way beyond that.

So, RSS sounds simple (and it is), but HOW you use it is what makes it so powerful.

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"The day will come when the online location of a company's RSS feed will be just as much of a PR pro's email signature file as his or her email address, home page and phone number."
---Phil Gnomes, pr guru

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With the mindshift away from mainstream media to the concept of everybody as creators of content (see Part 1), communications channels are broadening.  One reason is….

Email is dead.
Nearly half of the 31 billion email messages sent every day is junk email, drowning the average email user with approximately 2200 spam messages per year.

Only about 50 percent of journalists are even opening e-mail. 

With filtering, blockers and trust lists, you cannot count on your email being received much less read.

But RSS is an entirely “opt in” communications channel. You simply provide the location of your RSS feed - with that little orange button - and the minute you update content, every subscriber gets it delivered to their newsreader.  RSS acts as a homing device for your news.

Email is still a method to communicate with a “trust network” of people known and welcomed.  And, we still recommend providing email options, but RSS simply cannot be topped as a distribution channel.

RSS Makes Everyone Happy
Journalists are rapidly adopting RSS, and increasingly want companies they regularly cover to publish RSS feeds.  It gets around invasive and non-relevant pitches, and allows far more timely access to news.  Some journalists are asking not be pitched any other way.

RSS makes it far easier to get your news into the hands of those who care – and to get it in front of more people.  A nice side benefit is that traditional search engines, like Google, Yahoo and many others, index content from RSS feeds faster, and often more favorably.

Journalists are not only monitoring specific feeds, but they are also using RSS to monitor topics.  So, this means that even if a particular journalist is not monitoring your feed directly, if they are monitoring the topic in general, your news may make its way into their news reader anyway, if you’ve constructed your headline and copy well.  A great way to get additional visibility by doing nothing!

Desktops Are the New Front Porch
BusinessWeek magazine calls RSS the "online paperboy" because it delivers news from blogs and web sites directly to “the desktop” via RSS news readers.

As I mentioned earlier, a “news reader” is software that pulls in content from RSS feeds.  News readers are available for download (many excellent ones are free) and the newer versions of most browsers have, or will have, RSS readers built in.  They look and act very similarly to your email software.  Readers generally have three columns:  one that lists all the feeds you are subscribed to; a second that shows the headlines associated with that feed; and a third column displays the full content of the feed.  Some feeds provide a short summary and a link to the full text others provide the full text within the feed. 

Here are some RSS news readers:
Sage (For Windows, Firefox)
NewzCrawler (Windows)
NetNewsWire (Mac)
Pan (Linux, Unix)

So, start syndicating your content! 
RSS not only notifies readers immediately, but it is a media relations person’s dream because it makes re-broadcasting content automatic.

RSS is being used by “news magnet” or “master news sites” sites like:
Memestreams – a collaborative web site to find and share interesting web content.

NewsKnowledge - gathers and redistributes news to corporate, content publishers, and other aggregators.  It also offers a media monitoring service that is based on search terms and then aggregating the feed results for you.

Findory and Topix.net are news aggregation sites, which become more personalized as you use them.  And, you will find one of those little orange xml buttons on your news page – you can subscribe here to a single personalized feed, letting Findory or Topix gather RSS feeds for you.

And, of course major online news and mainstream media outlets are also using RSS to capture news across the Internet. 

Creating an RSS Feed
It is easy, even if you are a non-techie.  First, most blog services have RSS built in and which broadcast automatically each time you post.

But, for a small fee you can use a web-based RSS publishing service like Nooked, PressFeed or Simplefeed to send out news via RSS. No technical know-how is required. These RSS services work similarly to web-based e-mail. First you log in with a user name and password, you write your copy into a form and press "post entry" to distribute the news.  It is as easy as sending an email.

We recommend making your newsroom a blog, to take advantage of built-in RSS.

Use Nooked, Pressfeed, and Simplefeed to get started adding RSS feeds to your news distribution. You can use RSS for lot of things other than press releases, such as alerts, crisis communications, announcements, events.  Well, just about anything.

By the way, if necessary you can also password-protected RSS feeds.

In the Know – Now
The new generation of search tools such as Technorati, PubSub and Feedster, depend on RSS. If you’re not providing an RSS feed for them to index, the users of these tools aren’t finding your news. 

These tools specifically index content made available via RSS, but “mainstream” search tools, like Google are also now using RSS to find and index content.

RSS search engines update their indexes far more frequently than Google or Yahoo.  They update every 15 minutes to an hour, while a typical cycle for Google’s database update is as much as once a month.

We’ve noticed that Google indexes blogs faster than regular web pages, largely due to blogs incorporating RSS.

Subscribe to RSS Feeds
Monitor your own news, your client’s online reputation, industry news items, competitors – and don’t forget - journalists by subscribing to RSS feeds.

A few places (there are more than 50) to find RSS feeds are:
PubSub
Feedster
Technorati
Daypop

Subscribe to Searches
So, if you aren’t yet convinced of the power of RSS, try this.  Use RSS to subscribe to search terms.  News and content that contain those terms are aggregated for you on your desktop via your news reader, saving you time and keeping you instantly in the know as soon as something is posted.  Use RSS search engines to create a “subscription term” and simply paste into your news reader the unique URL the search engine provides you for the results and – voila – the flow to your desktop of keyword matches begins. 

Use these tools to see what people are saying about you or your clients.  For example, I’ve used Technorati and PubSub and have subscribed to my name, as well as terms like “modern media” and “mobile media.”  When new content is indexed by these two tools, I get it instantly in my newsreader.

By the way, these are not necessarily a substitute for using traditional search engines like Google.  RSS search tools are indexing content being fed by RSS and provide you the newest information as it is posted, while Google contains an enormous pool of non-RSS content.  Each has its strengths, but watch Google as it is incorporating RSS into several new services.

Here are a few RSS search engines you can use to subscribe to searches:
PubSub
Technorati
Feedster

RSS can expand your media relations efforts by magnitudes.  It can make your life easier, and by monitoring searches, provide you with better reporting.

But Wait! There’s More!
RSS can also have “enclosures.”  Enclosures are various types of documents.  So, that means documents can be distributed via RSS.  It is analogous to an attachment in an email.

In fact, an RSS enclosure that is absolutely exploding in popularity is an audio files – and that makes it a podcast.  Which we’ll talk about next (in Part 3).

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"I reiterate my plea that PR folks focus hard -on the behalf of their clients - on putting anything that would go out to a mailing list of larger than 2 people onto an RSS feed..."
-- Dan Gillmor, journalist, author and blogger

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Modern Tools for Modern Media Relations: An Introduction (Part 1 of 3)

This is a summary of our recent presentation at a PRSA Media Relations Workshop in Orange County, CA. I will be posting the summary here in three parts.

Think for just a moment about how you communicate – and how your expectations about communications have changed in the last ten years. Email? Web? Mobile phone? Tivo? iPod? Internet Radio? Think of how these are, and continue to, shift the way we work, recreate, and interact with each other.

We live in an “always-on” world, one that is increasingly dependent on networks. A good number of us – upwards to 800 million of us –view connectivity as essential as breathing. With connectivity there is a mindshift occurring away from mainstream media to the concept of “everybody” as creators of information – and we’re doing it on-the-go and in real-time, sharing, exchanging and co-creating. Our information channels are broadening from mainstream media to each other.

Perhaps to prove these points, Yahoo did an “Internet Deprivation” study last fall. The most interesting finding of all was that it was nearly impossible to find anyone willing to give up Internet connectivity for two weeks in order to participate. In the end, however, Yahoo found participants reporting feelings of depression and isolation, a sense of loss, and of being “out of the loop” without access to the Internet. The study concludes that our everyday activities are far more steeped in connectivity than we (or Yahoo) may suspect.

So, if we are all living modern lives, and we’ve adapted to communicating in modern ways, why are we going about media relations as if it hasn’t evolved in the last ten years? It stands to reason that our media relations activities need to get in sync with modern life.

The “who” the “what” and the “how” of media relations is evolving and broadening. And it starts with blogs.

Weblogs

The simplest explanation for a weblog (blog) is a personal, topical web page that is frequently updated. Personal websites are not new, but what makes blogs so powerful – and alluring – are their social nature; their organic and populist culture; and their immediacy. They have become so popular so quickly because very inexpensive or even free services make it possible for anyone to publish on the web without having to learn any technical skills or programming. Because of their comments and trackback features, blogs are interwoven among each other.

Blogs are the great equalizer, making everyone a publisher. They make us all “media.” Blogs have taken media from the cathedrals of “big media” to a communal activity. Blogs are turning media relations on its head.

Who’s Blogging?

Your colleagues, for starters. There are about 100 blogs (and growing quickly) published by PR pros. Edelman was the first of the major PR agencies, who also, by the way, was the first agency to have a web site back in the early 1990s. Richard Edelman uses the blog to discuss current PR affairs and practices. Other smaller agencies and PR consultants have been blogging since 2003, and use blogs to gain visibility or publish opinions and news affecting practitioners. They publicly discuss PR issues and educate clients via their blogs. A few agencies are starting “blogging practices” as a new service, helping clients to effectively implement blogs into their communications programs. An important point is that PR professionals are using blogs both as a way of doing business and as a type of business.

The Media. Journalists are blogging, as are more and more mainstream media publications. Blogging expands the parameters of reporting, giving journalists unlimited space to explore topics or ideas. It also allows journalists to express ideas or opinions they may not be able to in print because of space constraints or editorial structures. But, most importantly, it allows them to create a more personal relationship with “the audience.” By having a blog, journalists are inviting you into their personal space, which makes it easier to create relationships, if used properly and respected. Cyberjournalist.net maintains an international list of journalist bloggers. There are currently 340 on the list, and growing.

Corporate Executives. General Motors’ top management is blogging. Ford, Cisco, Sun, and Boeing are among corporations whose executives are blogging. They cite the primary reasons as having the ability to present their stories directly (without the media as gatekeepers), and to connect more personally with customers.

Why Are We Blogging?

Most importantly, we’re blogging because it creates a relationship between the writer and the reader. It not only invites a relationship, but, unlike websites, blogs depend on relationship to thrive.

Blogs have removed the traditional media as the gatekeepers of news and information. Blogs challenge traditional journalism because of their speed, penetration and the powerful credibility built by blogs’ social network – the network of readers organically create credibility via readership and readers have a quick ability to call out and correct any inaccuracies.

Citizen Journalism

Blogs have spawned a whole new form of media – citizen journalism. Citizen reporters help create thousands of “listening posts” around the world – and they spread news via online newspaper blogs almost instantly. They cover stories mainstream media may not, and are “on the ground” to report local news or details beyond the reach of mainstream media. Dan Gillmor, a former San Jose Mercury News columnist and author of We The Media calls these people “the former audience.”

A few examples of citizen newspapers are:
OnMyNews (South Korea)
New West (Rocky Mountains)
H2O Town (Watertown, MA)
Northwest Voice (Bakersfield, CA).

Information is now decentralized. It doesn’t come from the “center,” as in the era of traditional media, but “from the edges” - and all around - in a global distributed model. Therefore, we can’t do media relations from the center anymore either, We have to do it by encompassing the edges. Blogs and the other technologies we’re talking about here make this possible and powerful.

So with 5 million active blogs how do you begin to incorporate them into your media relations?

Identify
The first step is to identify credible blogs that complement, cover or report your areas of interest, including journalists’ blogs, individual blogs, group blogs and mainstream media blogs. Tools to assist you in finding these are:
Cyberjournalist.net
Technorati
BlogSearchEngine
BlogMatcher
BlogDigger
Blogdex

…to name a few. Once you locate credible and relevant blogs, browse through each author’s “blog roll” – a list of blogs the author reads or recommends. It is located in the left or right navigation column of most blogs. These will likely lead you to additional relevant blogs.

Read
To be successful at approaching bloggers, you must first read blogs! You will gain insight into the specific blogger’s personality, interests, relevance and readership. But more importantly you will acquire an understanding of the culture of blogs. Even traditional journalists react differently in the blogosphere. In addition, take the time to read the blogger’s profile, usually indicated in an “about me” type link. Just like you would read a journalist’s column, read the blogs you intend to get involved with – before you approach them.

Participate
Once you begin reading specific blogs, comment on posts of interest to you. Do not make these comments self-serving or client-serving! Comment as if you were speaking to the person – blogs are conversations. Follow the comments and trackback postings – get to know the people who are involved with these blogs.

Comments are not only read by the author but by other readers of the blog. Normally your comments are linked back to your blog (or web site), so people can find out who you are. This also creates visibility for you. Authors are notified when a comment is posted, and they generally watch them closely.

Not only will you learn, but you will find people who share your or your client’s interests – that is the point of blogs…sharing news, views, information, and opinions.

Incorporating blogs into your communications practice takes time. Trying to shorten the path to good “blog relations” and risking making a blunder will come back to bite you. Invest the time.

Write
Although this is not an absolute requirement of modern media relations, we highly recommend you write a blog. Of course you don’t have to have been a reporter to be a good media relations person – but putting yourself in the other guy’s shoes can’t hurt. Your blog doesn’t have to be related to your work – make it something personal or something educational for others. Make it non-public if you must, although you will be missing out on the fun and much of the lure of blogging. The point is, you will far quicker understand the culture of blogs if you dive in and try it. You will be better respected among, and more credible to, other bloggers – whether they be citizen journalists or professional journalists. And, you are less likely to make an error with a blogger that may become more public than you would wish.

Use an online service to begin blogging – they are free to very inexpensive. Here are just a few:
Typepad
MSN Spaces
Salon.com
MyBlogSite

Pitch
You don’t “pitch” blogs. It’s about engaging in conversation with the author, and offering relevant items of interest to them – at the appropriate time.

If you go to someone’s house for the first time, you don’t walk over to the refrigerator, open it, start looking around and then tell your host he/she needs more diet soda. So, the same goes for bloggers. Say hello, take time to get to know them and what they write about, comment and engage, and then ask if you can borrow the lawnmower. By that time, it comes naturally.

Remember, there is nothing secret and nothing sacred in the blogosphere. Authors are generally nice people and are open to you. But, you need to be a good guest. You are in their personal space!

About now, you are probably thinking “I’ve got to pitch my story NOW – I don’t have time for this.” So, don’t pitch this story to bloggers now – go your usual route this time. The point is, start now to understand and engage bloggers – that way you – and they – will be ready when your next NOW arrives.

Track
Of course, once you get your news out there, you want to track it through the blogosphere. Tracking will let you know who and how your news spreads. Tracking is also a way to find influential bloggers.

A few tracking tools are:
BlogPulse
Technorati
Feedster
Pubsub

Blog Your Newsroom
Turn your (or your client’s) online press center into a blog. It is an easy way to get started in the blogosphere. Plus, with the speed at which blogs are indexed by Google, Yahoo, and blog search engines, your news will be more visible, faster.

The reason blogs are indexed faster and news spreads so quickly is because of RSS – Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a medium all its own and is a “power tool” distribution and tracking channel for your news.

More about RSS next.

Modern Media Primer: What is a Blog?

The simplest explanation of a weblog (blog) is a personal, topical webpage that is frequently updated. Personal websites are not new, but what make blogs so powerful are their social nature, their organic, populist culture, and their immediacy. They have become so popular so quickly because very inexpensive, or even free online publishing services make it possible for anyone to publish on the web without having to learn any programming. At the time of this writing, approximately 5 million active blogs are being tracked by blog search engines.

Features of a Blog:
A set of common format features characterize blogs, setting them apart from a typical web page, although the author controls which of these features to make available on their own blog.

Posts: A single blog entry is called a post. Posts are usually short, conversational and are time stamped, displayed with the newest post on top. Blogs are normally organized around a particular topic, so grouped together posts become a reverse-chronology of thoughts, opinions, news, or shared experiences. Time-stamps impart both a sense of immediacy and reader-author connectedness. It also indicates the “freshness” of the content. Blogging etiquette strongly encourages hyperlinking within posts to companies, bloggers, information or articles referred to in the post.

Syndication/RSS: RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” This is often referred to as the “killer app” for blogs, as it allows readers to subscribe to an automatic “feed” of a blog, so that the entire post (or just its headline) is “pushed” to the subscriber as soon as a post is published to that blog. Subscribers receive post content through software integrated into their standard web browser or through a separate application called a “news reader” or “news aggregator.” Each RSS feed contains a link to the blog post on the subscribed blog. This same technology enables blog content to be distributed or aggregated onto web sites, much like a traditional syndicated news story is distributed to subscriber publications.

Comments: Each post invites readers to comment via a small web form immediately under the post. Comments are published immediately and automatically directly under the post, usually with the commentator’s name linked back to his or her own blog. Subsequent readers can read both the author’s posts and the opinions of any reader, as well as follow the link to the commentator’s blog. The author is notified when a comment is posted. The author may post a response comment as well, or post an additional blog entry – and thus the conversation becomes interconnected.

Trackbacks: Trackbacks extend the interconnectedness of blogs exponentially. Authors who allow trackbacks provide a method for another blogger to publish a post directly onto that author’s blog. A trackback is a link to the original author’s post, entered into the second author’s own blog post. When the second author publishes his or her post it is also published in the original author’s blog, directly beneath the referenced post. The original author is notified when a trackback is published. Trackbacks are interlinked to and from each blog, intertwining multiple blogs and conversations.

Permalinks: Each post, upon being published, is automatically given a “permalink” which is a permanent URL for that individual post. These are helpful because most bloggers keep 1 – 10 of their most recent posts on their blog “home page” and older blog entries are “archived” off the home page. Permalinks ensure the integrity of hyperlinks, as anyone can create a link to an individual post in any web page, blog or email, and it always remains accurate and unbroken. Permalinks also help get your posts noticed by search engines, since each post has a unique web address.

BlogRoll: Many blogs contain a list of other blogs the author reads and recommends, with links to each. Some bloggers also list books, publications, music or services they recommend.

Calendar: The calendar allows readers to browse through older posts by day, month or year.

Categories: By assigning a topic category to each post, readers can browse through posts by topic, rather than date.

Personal Information: Most bloggers have a link to their email address so that readers can contact them directly or privately. Many also publish a short profile or biography.

Why are Blogs Important?

Blogs are influential publications because of their sense of immediacy, their reader-author connectedness and their fast-growing readership.

Blogs are innately democratic, giving everyone a voice and an audience due to the ease of publishing ideas and opinions.

Blogs have removed the gatekeepers of traditional media. They challenge traditional journalism because of their speed, penetration and the powerful credibility built by blogs’ social network.

Blog readers have created influential voices through the populist and self-regulating nature of blogs. These influencers augment and challenge the power of traditional main stream media (MMS).

They are interlinked, turning the web into millions of global conversations.

Blogs spread information and ideas at unprecedented speed, literally in real-time.

Blogs have the capacity to humanize companies and create a sense of connection and approachability with customers, shareholders, employees, and media.

Blogs are a method of monitoring word of mouth references to your organization, products or services.