Micro Persuasion

FeedBurner Suffers Outage, Leaving Customer Evangelists in the Dark

UPDATE (7/6/04): FeedBurner has posted an update on their recent outage.

FeedBurner, which powers RSS feeds for dozens of sites, has been down for several hours now and there's no communication whatsoever from the company as I write this post. I have dozens of subscribers to my RSS feed who all moved over to the FeedBurner feed because I asked them to and now they're in the dark. I elected to evangelize this company's services so I am ultimately responsible, still I find their lack of communication incredulous. This is an excellent lesson in how not to treat your prized customers. Nick Bradbury demonstrates the other side of extreme. He heard from his FeedDemon customers about their Internet Explorer concerns so he addressed them swiftly and effectively.

Costa Completes Blog-Free Diet

Costa Tsiokos has completed his week of blog-free media dieting and, as promised, I gave him a blog news quiz.

Netflix PR Wakes Up to Blogs

After several unsuccessful attempts, Hacking Netflix was contacted today by Netflix PR. He reports they are working on a strategy to reach out to the online community. Do I smell RSS feeds coming??

PRWeek Studies Gmail PR

PR Week's Matthew Creamer this week studies how Google used word-of-mouth marketing to gain street cred for Gmail and take the attention away from the privacy debate.

Alex Halavais: It's the Porn, Stupid

Blogologist Alex Halavais: Steve Rubel suggests that the reason that RSS and newsreaders haven’t caught on is a lack of “mass adoption by b-to-b and b-to-c e-commerce sites.” He turns to the history of Amazon and ebay and the explosion of the web to suggest a historical analogy. But he has fallen into the trap that many commentators on communication technologies do: ignoring the primary factor moving many such technologies from the innovators to the early adopters. Porn.

Yahoo!'s RSS TOS

Yahoo! has a pretty aggressive terms of service for referencing their RSS feeds. In a nutshell, they want their props ....

What are the terms of use?

The feeds are provided free of charge for use by individuals and non-profit organizations for personal, non-commercial uses. We ask that you provide attribution to Yahoo! News in connection with your use of the feeds.

If you provide this attribution in text, please use: "Yahoo! News." If you provide this attribution with a graphic, please use the Yahoo! News logo that we have included in the feed itself.

We reserve all rights in and to the Yahoo! News logo, and your right to use the Yahoo! News logo is limited to providing attribution in connection with these RSS feeds.

We are also including the provider of each individual news story in the feed alongside each headline. Please do not alter this for display. We want our news partners to be attributed for their work.

Yahoo! News also reserves the right to require you to cease distributing these feeds at any time for any reason.

Got that all!

Search Engine PR

Search Engine Watch: Blending the traditional tools of public relations with innovative search marketing techniques opens a new avenue of promotion for savvy content providers and site owners.

Key quote:

According to Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder of SEO-PR, search engines have become an indispensable utility for journalists. "They've been assigned a story they are going to do some relevant searches," he said. "Do they find you or don't they? Where are they going to go look?"

PR people need to always keep search engines in mind. Blogs can play a role here as well.

Commerce to Drive Mass Adoption of RSS

I had an interesting discussion with two of my co-workers yesterday. We all use FeedDemon and are getting addicted to our many RSS news feeds. We find RSS particularly valuable for monitoring client, industry news and what the media is covering in general. One of my colleagues asked me a couple of really good questions: "Why doesn't everyone use this stuff? Why is it that when we talk about RSS we get blank stares?"

The truth is, for all the hype about RSS, it's still trapped in geekland. It's moving mainstream, but it is taking time. So, what will it take for RSS to reach a tipping point? The answer is not mass adoption by news outlets, but mass adoption by b-to-b and b-to-c e-commerce sites. Take a look back in history for perspective.

Remember the early days of the Web circa 1994 when major news organizations raced to launch Web sites? The tech publishers, such as CMP and Ziff Davis, were early adopters. They were quickly followed by mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC. Media coverage about the Web mushroomed and the Internet audience began to grow. However, the Internet at this stage still lacked the killer app that captured the attention of millions of moms and dads. This all changed with Amazon.com and eBay. Once people saw they could buy stuff online quickly and easily, Internet adoption began to accelerate.

RSS today feels like the Web 1994. The geeks have long caught on. The big tech sites all have RSS feeds and increasingly, so do mainstream news outlets like Time magazine and others. Media coverage of RSS is also rising, yet overall awareness is still low. So, here's the trend to watch: commerce sites will increasingly find creative ways to use RSS feeds to alert customers and drive sales. Amazon and eBay are already on board. Brokerage sites like Schwab, bill payment/bank Web sites, retailers, major manufacturers, real estate brokers and others will all soon follow. Hopefully newspapers will recognize the opportunity here too by making their classified ads available via RSS. You can bet that MSN, Google and Yahoo are already thinking about building RSS feeds into their shopping sites.

In short, mass adoption of RSS will begin once consumers realize they can use the technology to easily find items they want to buy and sell. News via RSS, in and of itself, won't do the trick, but it certainly does help.

Need an Expert on Sarbanes and CEO Blogging

Twice today I was asked whether Sarbanes Oxley should prevent public company CEOs from blogging. Alan Meckler touched on this topic in an earlier post, but I feel it warrants further discussion. If you are a public company CEO who blogs or an attorney with expertise in this area, I would be interested in interviewing you on my blog. Please send me an email to get in touch.

Unisys Exec Ambivelant on Employee Blogs

Finally, in wrapping up my coverage of today's BusinessWire event on integrated marketing, I asked Richard Badler (SVP, Corp. Communications for Unisys) the following question:

"You said that Unisys uses every marketing/communication tool in its quiver. Do you allow your employees to blog? Microsoft has 700 employee bloggers. What's your take on this new and exciting communications channel?"

His answer:
"That's an interesting idea. We haven't condemned or condoned the idea of employee weblogs. On the other hand, we have a lot of people who are probably doing that in their personal lives."

Sounds like they're looking at blogging, but haven't quite committed yet.

BizWire Breakfast Blog Part III: Les Blatt (BizWire)

Les Blatt, BusinessWire's Manager of Multimedia, spoke next. Highlights:

* Blatt talked about disintermediation. He said "we're saying goodbye to the gatekeepers."
* Consumer/investors are turning to alternative news sites like Google News, which does not have editors
* You still need to reach journalists, but also need to reach consumers/investors directly
* 150 million people are online today; it's a huge opportunity
* Elusive 18-34 year olds are online, 99% of senior executives use the Internet at work
* "We are all suffering from information overload. BusinessWire puts out 1,000 releases. How are you going to get someone to pay attention to your story?"
* PR pros need a great story to tell and they need to tell it with multimedia (photos, audio/video)
* He then went into a sales pitch on BizWire's multimedia tools
* Again, no mention of Weblogs or RSS and how they reach journalists and consumers directly. Geez. It sure looks like it will be up to me to raise these questions (sigh).

BizWire Breakfast Blog Part II: Richard Badler (Unisys)

Shortly after Al Ries, Richard Badler, SVP, Corporate Communications for Unisys, spoke. (Michael Marino, Chief Strategy Officer for Manning Selvage and Lee, also spoke but his talk gave me nothing exciting worth blogging about - sorry Michael.)

Highlights from Richard Badler's talk, called Everything is Tied Together:
* It's no longer nice to tie all your communications vehicles together, it's necessary for building brand awareness
* His group's mission statement: create and implement cutting-edge communications that drive the business forward.
* Everything is important in integrated marketing, but media relations is the most important part of the mix
* He cited a case where a Barrons piece helped Unisys' stock rise 6.73% in one day
* He talked about a tiered model that Unisys implements globally: Tier I is focused on building reputation management, Tier II is market penetration, Tier III is prospect -focused to help win deals
* Badler said "Use every new technology that connects you and your people to your audiences."
* He did not mention corporate or employee blogs, but I plan to ask him about this topic

BizWire Breakfast Blog Part I: Al Ries

Julia Hood opened the event by saying that a recent PR Week survey said more than 70% of PR pros are spending their time on integrated marketing. A show of hands revealed that most of the attendees are in PR. She then turned the stage over to marketing master, Al Ries.

Ries reiterated many of the themes in his book The Rise of PR and the Fall of Advertising and was rich with case studies. He said:
* Advertising/PR are tools. Advertising is a hammer, PR is a nail
* Most of recent brand major successes are PR successes
* Advertising has every advantage except one - credibility
* PR has the third-party effect
* PR-oriented marketing integration establishes credibility
* Advertisers want to make the ads famous, not the brand
* Creativity is a marketing paradox. PR should focus on the new and different. Advertising should focus on the old and familiar
* Advertisers don't advertise, they instead use PR to promote their awards
* Big brands are built not by advertising or PR but by being first in a category
* Finally, Ries said his key message of the day to PR pros is to do something that burns an idea in the mind of a consumer rather than simply communicate it. "The emphasis on PR should be not on press releases and press conferences but on doing something to create news," Ries said. "PR should be thinking about doing big things, not small things."
* Integrated marketing: PR first to establish credibility (set the nail), advertising reinforces the credibility as the hammer

Mobius Dances the Press Release-Blog Tango

Earlier this month I wrote about how news-makers might use press releases and blog posts in tandem. Press releases basically break the "hard" news while blog posts, written by an executive in a human voice, can delve further into the "why's" and "how's" behind the news - e.g. the softer side of the story.

Mobius Venture Capital Managing Director Brad Feld today demonstrated just how well this can tango can work. In case you missed it, Mobius last week announced it invested in NewsGator. As you can see, the press release does its job. It hits all of the 5w's. But, Feld's blog post on the investment gives more rich detail into why his firm invested in NewsGator and RSS.

This is an excellent case study in how to marry press releases and blogs together into a powerful PR approach.

Blogging the BizWire Breakfast on Tuesday

On Tuesday morning a colleague and I will be attending a BusinessWire breakfast on integrated marketing that will be moderated by Julia Hood, editor of PRWeek. Assuming the pre-arranged connectivity pans out, I plan to blog the event live. Details are posted here. It will also be streamed live online.

The breakfast features:

• Al Ries, world-renowned marketing strategist and best-selling author of "The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR."


• Richard Badler, senior vice president, corporate communications for Unisys.


• Michael Marino, chief strategy officer for Manning, Selvage and Lee.


• Les Blatt, Business Wire's manager of multimedia.

If you're going to the event and you read my blog, please find me and say hi. I'll be the guy with the Dell laptop who looks like Tom Cruise the person in the photo at right.

New Blogs of Note

Here's a list of some new blogs I am reading that I plan to add to my blogroll...

• Fredrik Wackå, a swede, has started an English-language Weblog to offer European communications professionals a starting point on the basics for business communications. He already has some great posts up there. Welcome Fredirk!


• Trevor Cook opens the curtain on the spakin' new Global PR Blog Week Weblog.


• Jeremy C. Wright has started a 'pre-project' (online brainstorming site) for a potential magazine on blogging which he is calling The Bloggist.
  
• Matthew Podboy, the founder of Voce Communications, Inc., has started a blog focused on tech PR

CMP to Lift Ban on In-bound CNET Links

Mike Azzara, CMP's VP/Group Director of Internet Business, and I chatted via phone briefly today to set the record straight on the company's alleged blocking of inbound links from CNET, Google News and other Web sites.

Azzara, a former colleague who now oversees editorial and sales for the 10 year-old online technology news network, said CMP will soon begin lifting its ban on CNET's in-bound links. "We've made the decision, but just need to tell the staff," Azzara said.

The former editor of Open Systems Today claimed that CNET was deep linking to CMP PDF white papers and attempting to capture reader registration data in the process. As a result CMP sent the competitor a cease and desist letter and CNET has since lifted the user registration requirement.

Azzara said that his company continues to block links from two other competitors - TechTarget and Linux Today (part of the Jupitermedia network) - because they republish CMP content in a manner that oversteps the boundaries of "fair use."

He also confirmed earlier reports that CMP never intended to block links from Google News. He attributed last week's brief episode to a software hiccup that occurred as the company was moving some of its sites to a new publishing platform.

Finally, Azzara said that CMP's online business is on track to double its revenues from 2002 and that later this year it will unveil a brand new publishing platform that he calls "simple, yet ingenious."

eMarketer Launches RSS Feed

This continues to be a big day for RSS. I just learned that eMarketer now has an RSS feed. You can get the feed here (RSS).

Mac OS X Will Have "RSS Inside"

Wow. Apple just announced the new version of the Mac OS will have "RSS Inside." Users will be able to scan all the latest news, information and articles from thousands of favorite major news organizations, community web sites and personal weblogs in one simple-to-read, searchable article list using Safari RSS. Microsoft, how soon will we see RSS in IE done even better?

AP to Launch Blogs, E&P Reports

Editor & Publisher reports The Associated Press will launch its first weblog at the political conventions in Boston and New York, utilizing Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Walter R. Mears.