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Track 100 Twitter followers at a glance.
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He left out spying but the rest is good!
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This is major league cool.
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I will be there.
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Interesting new blog.
« December 2007 | Main | February 2008 »
January 2008
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
What Greg Brady Taught Me About Digital Connections
The following is also my column in this week's Advertising Age.
The e-mail pitch seemed almost too wacky to be true. Barry Williams (aka the actor who played Greg Brady on "The Brady Bunch") started blogging two weeks ago at thegregbradyproject.com, and his hired PR help wanted to set up a meet and greet.
Growing up in the '70s, I logged many after-school hours watching "Brady Bunch" reruns on TV -- an experience today's digital kids probably miss. This fanboy couldn't pass up the meeting.
In the process, I learned a lot about how brands can use the digital space to become more genuine. After all, Greg Brady is a mighty brand. Everyone knows who Greg is, and Williams has leveraged his fame into all kinds of ventures, including Broadway and satellite radio.
Going in, I was a bit cynical. I half expected to meet a celebrity chasing the latest web trend just to be seen as hip. Boy, was I wrong. What I found instead was someone who is serious about blogging for the long haul.
Williams does not have an agenda for the site. He simply wants to create a digital presence where he can share, learn and build connections -- and not just with his fans. The blog is about "being in the game with people who share common interests," he explained. "I want to listen, to engage and develop it."
Our meeting reflected this approach. Williams was more interested in learning about Twitter than he was about promoting the site.
His digital presence exudes the same sense of openness. The Greg Brady Project courts guest bloggers and carries little in the way of promotion other than links to Smiles Change Lives, a charity Williams supports. It's trustworthy because it's all about building connections.
The takeaway for brands is that it's OK to create a site that doesn't have agenda, messaging or shock and awe. A digital presence can be a port for conversations, connections and collaboration. The key is to keep it fresh and inhabited by real humans who want to share and learn.
So next time you're planning a digital strategy, channel Greg for inspiration.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Open Collaboration and the Future of Public Relations
Jonny Bentwood, my colleague in the UK, has published a very thorough and provocative white paper on how to potentially define and measure "influence." The white paper was the byproduct of a meeting we held in New York with some of the industry's deepest thinkers. You can download it as a PDF, or simply peruse each section in HTML.
As Jonny says, this is not a fait accompli but a work in progress. You responded in kind. In the week since its release, many of you added valuable thoughts that will shape ours going forward. It's my hope that we can synthesize this discussion into applicable ideas we can incorporate in Edelman programs.
The release of this white paper, in a simplistic sense, illustrates what the web does best. It allows millions of connected citizens to come together as a global brain to solve problems, shape new ideas and above all spur collaborative action. The book Wikinomics, which I highly recommend, offers a lot of great examples and case studies. Doc Searls tackles a similar theme.
New communication technologies and channels grab all the headlines. However, what's far more important and meaningful (and a lot less ballyhooed) is how the web is allowing companies and stakeholders to produce outcomes that are to everyone's benefit. Dell's evolution over the past year is one great example.
That said, public relations is generally perceived as a communications discipline. We still put out lots of press releases and generate media coverage. But that's rapidly changing as the web allows us to increasingly facilitate open collaboration between a company and its customers. Richard Edelman, our CEO, has been at the forefront of this discussion. He advocates that companies take on big issues. And that's exactly what our agency is doing through initiatives like Good Purpose.
So does that mean media relations goes away in favor of new, more open approaches? Hardly. As Jonny and I wrote in the white paper's conclusion, public relations is flexible enough to cover it all. Arguably, PR programs can span two different continua. They can included tactics that are closed or open while being intended to spur communication or collaboration. The result is four quadrants, which mix together the old and the new....
1) Controlled Communication: One-way tactics such as TV advertising, online advertising and media relations that are great for branding and visibility, but are seldom collaborative. What's old still works.
2) Open Communication: Online initiatives, such as viral videos, that are designed to generate discussion, but not necessarily produce a shared outcome. Most corporate blogs are often up in this quadrant. The more collaborative blogs move "right"
3) Controlled Collaboration: Programs that facilitate participation but are more controlled, for example numerous efforts to solicit consumer generated ads
4) Open Collaboration: Win-win initiatives that open a dialogue toward reaching a broader goal. The American Express Member's Project is a great example.
What are your thoughts on this model? I'd be interested in your ideas on how this might be implemented in programs and measured - as well as any case studies on the right side quadrants. It's not perfect and it's theory. Help us move it into action.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging
Tech bloggers (and I put myself squarely in this group), I am sorry to report that many of us have become lazy - really lazy. So, with this in mind I offer a challenge: in 2008 let's strap back on our thinking caps and get our blog mojo back. Let's kill the Lazysphere once and for all.
The Lazysphere - a working definition - is a group of bloggers who I won't name by name, but you can spot them a mile away. Rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, they simply glom on to the latest news with another "me too" blog post. Their goal is largely to land on Techmeme and sometimes digg - perhaps Google in an archival/Long Tail perspective. These sites - and Twitter too - have perpetuated a lot of lackadaisical writing. The Attention Crash is another factor at work here. People don't have as much time to think.
If you want to see the Lazysphere in the wild, I encourage you to take a look a two resources. The first is this terrific video that Amit Argawal put together. It distills 50 hours in the life of Techmeme down to 50 seconds. It shows how often bloggers will gather like a pack of wolves around news that will be largely forgotten in a month. The other is digg swarm.
Somewhere circa 2006 the tech blogger mindset shifted - at least among the majority. People who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to simply regurgitating the same old news over and over again, often with very little value add. It's almost like we stopped the real work of reading, thinking and writing in favor of going all herd, all the time.
My blogging New Year's resolution is to quit The Lazysphere. I can't go cold turkey reading it, but I aim to avoid using my blog to perpetuate it. To inspire me (and perhaps you) I have started a category of feeds in my Google Reader that include a group of people I feel really think - and do so often. You can browse or subscribe to the feed stream here. A list follows below. I plan to add or subtract to these over time.
Who's with me? Can we kill the Lazysphere this year? That's a challenge that I feel is vital to the future of blogging.
Friday, January 04, 2008
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An AdAge Power 150 Blog 
Steve Rubel works at Edelman. Everything posted on this blog is his personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of his employer or its clients.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
