Micro Persuasion

Lance Armstrong is Podcasting

Starting July 2, one of my heroes, Lance Armstrong goes for a record-breaking 7th consecutive Tour de France victory. Throughout the Tour, SIRIUS will have exclusive behind-the-scenes reports from Lance himself via a special podcast. Here's the feed. (via CNET)

CNET Introduces Tags

CNET News.com editors are now tagging each published story with one or more topics, all of which are now displayable in a tag cloud.

Search Expert Missing

SEO and WebmasterWorld moderator Ian Turner was last seen in New Orleans at the WebmasterWorld Conference. Yahoo and others are using their blogs to help spread the word to try and locate him. Nick at Threadwatch has additional information.

Jarvis Puts Dell in Hell

Jason Calacanis chronicles Jeff Jarvis' recent horrible experiences with Dell customer support. Dell meanwhile has not rushed to help Jarvis. If I worked in Round Rock I would have my best tech on a plane to Jeff's house New Jersey tomorrow. This is inexcusable behavior given that Jeff Jarvis is an A-lister.

UPDATE 7/1: Some readers in comments are taking issue that I suggest Jarvis get special treatment since he is an "A-lister." I want to clarify this post by adding that I feel all issues raised on blogs are important to address - especially if they share a commonality. In Jeff's case, however, there's no doubt he has a bigger megaphone, which ups the need to act with urgency.

Corporate Blogs Aint Just Hype

Backbone Media, Inc. a Boston based Internet marketing consultancy, has published a 68-page report on what makes a successful corporate blog. The report, which includes a survey of hundreds of companies, sought to understand what results business bloggers have received from their blogs. According to this report, the survey discovered that for the majority of the survey sample, corporate blogs are living up to all the hype. John Cass, Backbone Media's director of Internet marketing strategies, commented:

"Every company is at a different stage in their blogging efforts, some are dipping their toe into blogging and getting good results, in terms of higher search engine rankings and thought leadership, while others have changed their whole product development process to make their company as open and transparent to customers as possible. The benefits of blogging are many, but it seems that to build and achieve the best results using blogs, a company must cross a cultural chasm that turns customers into brand evangelists."

The "brass ring" of blogging is in using them to mobilize your customer evangelists to spread your word for you. I will have more to say about this tomorrow when we launch the first of our two Vespa blogs. Keep an eye on Blogspotting or my blog tomorrow a.m. for details.

RSS Really Simplifies Surfing

Andy Ihnatko: "Thank God for RSS."

To Podcast or Not to Podcast, That is the Question

Howard N. Karesh, Vice President, Ketchum Midwest Corporate Practice, has written a blog post outlining four reasons to have a corporate podcast and three not to.

He says podcast...

*  If your information has a long shelf-life
*  If you don’t necessarily need your audience to access your news instantly
*  If you want your listeners to have control over when they receive your information
*  If you want to transmit information easily worldwide without the technical requirements of a live Web cast or broadcast licenses

And don't bother podcasting if...

* If your information is time-sensitive
* If you’re a publicly traded company looking to rely on podcasting to meet the SEC’s RegFD requirements
* If you need a large, live audience to receive your information at the same time, in real-time

What's disappointing about this piece is that Howard is writing about podcasts purely from the perspective that they could be a pseudo substitute for press releases or webcasts. He does not touch on how democratized the medium is and how its driving "consumer consumption" content created in a human voice. This, over time, could erode people eagerly drinking the waters that spew out from the PR jugs.

Walking the Talk

Last week I took some heat on stage at Gnomedex, which continued afterward in the blogosphere. My perspective, nearly a week later, is that in the 30 minutes WeatherBug CTO Chris Sloop and I had to present on "Tomorrow's Public Relations," we did convey our experience in how we utilize blogging to address hardcore PR issues. Nevertheless, I value all of the blog feedback that perhaps we went too far in turning the last part of the session into a mini press conference. I believe in walking my talk - the theme of which was "listening to learn" - and I promise you that I will learn from this feedback. That's what I love about blogging. I learn so much from my fellow bloggers - especially when skies turn stormy and rain on my parade. For more, read Chris' perspectives about Gnomedex in his blog post and check out Dan Farber's complete account of the story.

Gnomedex Podcast Interview

During Gnomedex I had the delight in sitting down for a podcast interview with John Furrier from Podtech.net. We covered RSS, blogs, and podcasting and the latest projects at CooperKatz' Micro Persuasion practice. You can find the audio download here. A full transcript is posted on John's blog site. However, don't stop there. Be sure to check out John's other interviews as well from Gnomedex and Supernova.

Yahoo News Carrying Huffington's Blog

Yahoo! News yesterday began carrying select blog postings from Arianna Huffington's all star blog, MediaPost reports.

Gawker, Page Six Content Hijacked

Adrants reports that an anonymous blogger has launched two Blogspot-hosted Blogger blogs. One steals Gawker's entire editorial content word for word. The other steals the Post's Page Six content. The only thing these two blogs leave behind are the ads.

Yahoo Unveils Tagged Social Search

Hey Yahoo! I guess I should have patented this tagged search idea way back when I had it, because you went out and built it. Good for you! According to the YSearchBlog, using My Web 2.0...

Anyone can save, tag, and share knowledge with their community. Any page on the web with your comments and insights. Your community can do the same. The result – a new search experience that combines web search with what your trusted community has tagged and shared. Users can build their community by inviting their contacts via email or by importing existing social relationships from Yahoo! Address Book, Messenger, or their 360° community. My Web 2.0 then leverages the Yahoo! 360° personal network platform to enable people to manage their search community.

Go check it out here. It's in limited beta right now. I have access to the beta and plan to play with it in the coming days. It looks very promising.

NewsGator Outlook 2.5 Hits Tomorrow

Greg Reinacker from NewsGator writes in that tomorrow his company will launch version 2.5 of its Outlook RSS client. The enhancements include advanced read/unread/deleted synchronization of individual RSS items between Outlook and NewsGator Online via a new 3rd-generation synchronization API. Details will be posted tonight or tomorrow on Greg's blog.

Hey Greg, what about support for Attention.XML? That coming too? We need to make Steve Gillmor happy. He may not look happy most of the time, but he can be happy when people support Attention. I saw it. Here's proof!

What Would Moses Say?

What would Moses say if he saw this? Yikes. I am getting a ton of traffic to this post  thanks to the Supremes. This is innocent. Now imagine I had an agenda. Will the search engines one day exorcise blogs?

Dow Jones to Host Blog Virtual Seminar

On July 12 I will be participating in a virtual seminar Dow Jones is hosting on blogs. It will address "how you can use blogs to boost sales and marketing, while also ensuring you protect your company from risks associated with this unregulated medium." Guests include experts from the legal community.

Two Debuts from Google

John Battelle's got the details on Google Earth and Google Personal Search.

iTunes Upgrade with Podcasting Support Ships

Frank Barnako reports that the new version of iTunes, 4.9, is available for both the Macintosh and Windows. And it includes this bit: "Select subscription options and download your favorite podcasts automatically."

Feds May Crack Down on Political Bloggers

This is a story to watch. Bloggers who built their Internet followings with anti-establishment prose are now lobbying to protect their livelihoods from federal regulations, AP reports. The article adds that some are even working with lawyers, public-relations consultants and a political action committee to do it.

Chad's Having Active Desktop Flashbacks

Chad Dickerson at InfoWorld compares how his servers handled the deluge of requests from the launch of Active Desktop in IE4 to how they might react to default RSS feeds in Longhorn. However, this time he says it's a very different scenario, particularly when you consider how Microsoft is blogging for feedback...

That was eight years ago, of course, so I'm glad to see that Longhorn Team RSS has a blog with open comments. Even if there were problems like we experienced back then, I think it would be impossible for Microsoft to hide from them anyway (not in a Scoble world anyway).

Blogs and Press Releases Revisited

Last week I blogged that over the next several years companies will decrease their use of press releases in favor of increasing their reliance on corporate blogs and RSS. I repeated this conviction over the weekend at Gnomedex, even attaching a time frame of five years to this transformation. This sparked an outcry from many other PR bloggers and even from Rich Levin, a journalist who I once worked with and continue to respect immensely. Consider what Rich told Shel Israel...

Steve Rubel recently wrote "Blogs are the New Press Releases." Like Robert, Steve and I go back a few years (we worked together at CMP). Steve, I love ya', and I read your blog and you have a lot of great ideas, but on this point, you're wrong. Blogs are just another delivery medium, not "the" medium, and certainly not the content. Like Robert, Steve has the religion, and he's not seeing things on balance.

PR practitioners need to be masters of multicasting; that is, capable of spinning a story simultaneously as a news release, a query, a blog post, a blog comment, a byline, a phone call, a flyer, a TV or radio interview, a wire feed, a billboard, a text message, an e-mail, a T-shirt, a pen with a slogan, etc.

Rich, I am all about multicasting. I don't think that press releases are going the way of hula hoop. In fact, I said so quite clearly in my post...

"Do I think press releases are dead? No. I think companies will rely on them for years - especially for big news like mergers."

So, I stand my original conviction that - over a period of five years - the volume of press releases on the major wire services will decline because more companies will choose to instead blog or RSS some of their news.  In the future you will see PR professionals saying let's "blog it" or "RSS it" rather than let's "press release it." But press releases are not going to die. I said it before and I repeat it again now in case anyone missed it in what I admit was a bit of hyperbole.