Micro Persuasion

The Future of Advertising: Just Ask "What Would Google Do?"

Photo credit: WWGD & Jeff Jarvis at the Frankfurt Buchmesse

Jeff Jarvis' new book, What Would Google Do?, is a must-read and a real eye opener. Here is a Q&A that Jeff graciously participated in for my column in Advertising Age...

How Google is Changing Advertising Agencies

Jeff Jarvis Suggests Asking "What Would Google Do?"

In just a little over 10 years, Google has built a business that is impossible not to admire. In fact, its success begs the question -- what would Google do (WWGD)?

Media pundit and thinker Jeff Jarvis tackles this question head on with a new book by the same title. In "What Would Google Do?," Jarvis breaks down Google's practices into 12 distinct rules and then applies them to aging industries like media and advertising.

I interviewed Jeff by email on Google's model to get his thoughts.

Steve Rubel: Since you titled the book with a provocative question, I will start the same way. If Google were an ad agency, What Would Google Do? How would they run it?

Jeff Jarvis: I'd say we already know: Google is a new form of agency-as-platform.

As Publicis' Rishad Tobaccowala pointed out in my book, Google served an entirely new population of advertisers who didn't have agencies and that enabled it to set new rules. Google sells performance instead of scarcity (a lesson the rest of media must learn in this post-scarcity economy). Because it rewards relevance, it encourages better, more effective advertising.

Through search, Google enables any brand to speak with customers without advertising. Google still does business with the agencies, of course, because they hold the checkbook -- and that is delaying the tectonic change that will come to advertising as it has to music, newspapers, TV, and radio. It's coming.

Mr. Rubel: A book, however, is very un-Google, as you noted in several places throughout. It's ranking well on Amazon. How did you apply the lessons in WWGD to the way you wrote/marketed the book and what can digital marketers learn from your experience?

Mr. Jarvis: As I write this, the book is up in the 500 range (on Amazon) and, of course, I hope this Ad Age coverage gets it back up to at least 100!

I do confess that in seeking this old-media attention and in publishing an old-media book -- instead of just putting it all online, where it would be searchable, linkable, correctable -- I am a hypocrite. I did not eat my own dog food. Why? Because the book industry still works well enough to pay me an advance. Dog's gotta eat, you know.

My publisher, HarperCollins, is trying many new things. They had me produce a 23-minute, sitcom-length video version of the book. We put full text of the book online (in a widget that that Google can't search). I shared 30 days worth of excerpts on my blog. Most important, the book began on my blog a few years before it was published -- as I explored ideas there and got help, even an entire chapter, from my readers -- and the discussion continues there and in Twitter now (I love seeing readers tweet their reviews and quotes).

Where this should go: Readers should be able to buy access to an author's ideas in all media at once. I'm impressed that O'Reilly books offers a lifetime subscription to updates of its digital titles. By the way, I asked in my hardback edition whether the paperback should be ad supported; this wasn't met with a resounding yes.

Mr. Rubel: In the book you stress Google's relentless focus on the consumer. And you wonder whether focusing on the consumer over the client makes more sense. Isn't this what ad agencies already do? And if not, what needs to change?

Mr. Jarvis: In the book, I quote an Australian ad exec saying that agencies should pay attention to clients instead of consumers. Then I quote the ever-quotable Toboccawala saying that agencies should focus instead on their customers' customers. I'd vote for the latter. The real question is whether agencies -- ad or PR -- can truly act as consumers' advocates. If a company has great customer service, do customers need advocates?

Mr. Rubel: Are customer service and peer-to-peer advocacy the new advertising? And if so, how does that change the ad industry?

Mr. Jarvis: Advertising is failure.

If you have a great product or service customers sell for you and a great relationship with those customers, you don't need to advertise.

OK, that's going too far. There is still a need to advertise -- because customers don't know about your product or a change in it or because, in the case of Apple, you want to add a gloss to the product and its customers. But in the book, I suggest that marketers should imagine stopping all advertising and then ask where they would spend their first dollar.

In an age when competition and pricing are opened up online and when your product is your ad, you need to spend your first dollar on the quality of your product or service. If you're Zappos, you spend the next dollar on customer service and call that marketing. If the next dollar goes to advertising, there has to be a reason -- and if the product is good enough, that reason may fade away.

Mr. Rubel: You also talk a lot about transparency. Google, however, isn't the most transparent company. What does the ad industry need to change here?

Mr. Jarvis: Google is not perfect. It expects us all to be transparent -- so we can be found in search, so we can benefit from our Googlejuice. But Google is not sufficiently transparent about its ad splits or its Google News sources. So, as our parents would say, this may be a case of doing what Google says more than what it does.

Online, it only makes sense to be as open as possible, to have answers to every possible customer question online, to join in conversations with customers as people rather than institutions. Transparency leads to trust. Transparency is just good business.

Mr. Rubel: How does WWGD apply to b-to-b marketing?

Mr. Jarvis: Customers are customers, communities are communities. In the mass of niches, there's nothing to stop every community -- moms or plumbers or chemical engineers -- from joining together online and sharing their knowledge and interests. See the success of blogs such as TechCrunch and PaidContent with targeted B-to-B content, advertising, job boards, and events. In the highly specialized world of online media, B-to-B represents a big opportunity.

Mr. Rubel: If Google were a Super Bowl ad, what would it look like?

Mr. Jarvis: It wouldn't. Google does not treat us as a mass. And it has better ways to spend its money.

Mr. Rubel: Can advertising become a platform?

Mr. Jarvis: In a sense, Google is that. It provides the means for anyone to reach anyone, whether through ads or through their own sites and conversation. This, I believe, is Google's greatest lesson for media, advertising, marketers, as well as government: provide a platform for your customers and communities to succeed and you, too, will succeed.

Is that advertising? Well, if we redefine advertising, it might be. Most every company and brand can become platforms for their customers and except for the means to accomplish that, there's nothing new in this. A great company always helps its customers do what they want to do. That's a platform.

Mr. Rubel: What parts of the advertising assembly line (e.g. research, creative, media buying, PR, direct, digital, etc.) has the greatest risk of getting Googled or the greatest opportunity to become Googled -- and why?

Mr. Jarvis: Everything is changed by the Internet, and not just by Google, of course: We have more means to learn more about customers today than focus groups or certainly panels, ratings, and samples ever told us.

Customers make the best creative when and if they recommend and talk about products. Media buying, I believe, will morph into network creation; in a mass of niches, there's opportunity in curating those niches to create critical mass and that work is being done today not so much by agencies but by technology, media, and network companies. PR becomes everyone's business in a company, which must have direct relationships with the public, person-to-person. Direct? The Internet is direct and we're still not done with the argument over whether it is anything more.

Everything in marketing is changed.

Mr. Rubel: Finally, in the book you wrote that "The agency and the advertising need to get out of the way in the relationship between customers and companies." This seems like it's an endorsement for public relations -- if it's done in such a manner. Yet, you are sour on PR and lump its future as questionable with the legal profession. Why? And what needs to change?

Mr. Jarvis: Though they can and certainly do use the Internet to improve their businesses, PR and law can't take on all the attributes of the open age because they serve clients and thus can't be transparent or consistent. The true test of a firm's willingness to prove me wrong would be firing a client that doesn't act Googley. I don't see that happening often.

Having said that, I know what you're fishing for here: If -- in my radical oversimplification -- advertising is failure and relationships are everything, is PR in a better position strategically than advertising?

Well, maybe, but there is this: A company and its employees must cultivate direct relationships with customers and communities without middlemen. So what is the role of the PR agency? It can advise and goad a company to build those relationships. But then, like a good consultant, it needs to get out of the way, to leave. I doubt we'll see that, either. The economics of agencies are built on getting clients to spend more, of course. So the real question is whether new economic models can support both agencies and Googlethink.

APAC Rising: A Conversation with Glenn Wolsey

In Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat (now out in version 3.0) he talks extensively about "the great leveling." Specifically, he writes about how broadband-enabled populations in India, China and elsewhere will make waves here in the US. This is more than just theory. It's reality. All you need to do is look to the emerging voices from Asia Pacific (APAC) and their ability to make money from US advertisers.

Web 2.0 in APAC is rising. A lot of talented, new voices are emerging from the region - and quickly at that. Two of my favorites are Amit Agarwal, a technology analyst from India and author of Digital Inspiration, and Leo Babauta a Guam-based blogger who writes Zen Habits and also contributes to Web Worker Daily. What's notable here is that both are making money from US advertisers. Leo, who has 20,000 RSS subscribers, works with BlogAds and Amit (15,000 daily subscribers) uses Google Adsense.

No one, however, is more impressive than Glenn Wolsey - a 15 year-old from Rotorua, New Zealand who writes one of the single best blogs about the Macintosh as a productivity and photography tool. Glenn, who has 2,000 RSS subscribers, doesn't have the same reach as Leo and Amit. Yet at such a young age and barely blogging a year he is making money from US advertisers and managing it all on his own. (He is getting lots of love from PR pros too!).

I recently interviewed Glenn via email. His story is impressive not only because of how much he was able to accomplish at such a young age, but how he is making money (and working quite hard at it). His story shows how the media landscape is not only flat, but global.

---

SR: How many advertisers are you currently working with? Do you handle all the sales/placement yourself or does 9Rules handle it for you?

GW: 9rules doesn't do anything to help with the running of the blog or advertisers. It's simply a network where they list my recent content and allows me to connect with other talented bloggers. I deal with all advertising sales myself, and am currently working with around six different companies/developers on a regular basis.

SR: Where are your advertisers based - US or in NZ or elsewhere? It seems like they are from the US?

GW: Most advertisers are international, a majority coming from the United States.

SR: What - if anything - unique are you doing to maximize their return on their investment?

GW: I've always kept a simple vision when it comes to blogging for maximum output quality for myself and advertisers. Quality content people want to read. I don't try and trick people into reading anything, they read it because they enjoy it. I try to take on board a similar approach with my advertisers, only taking on "quality" advertisers my reader base will be interested in.

SR: How do you maintain a "Chinese Wall" between your editorial and the advertising?

GW: I have a pretty strict policy with sites such as ReviewMe - I don't take any money for actual blog posts, and don't plan to. When a post goes live on my blog about a product, it's because I personally wanted to write about it, not because the company is paying me for it. With the editorial and advertising barrier, if the advertiser comes out with an amazing new product, I may write about it, but it's not something I have to do.

SR: Was the decision to take advertising a difficult one? How did your readers feel about it?

GW: I pretty much started right off the bat from week one with advertisers, so it has been a non-issue. Saying this, I know I could be making a lot more return on the blog than I currently am, but I'm not comfortable turning the blog into an ad haven like the popular John Chow.

SR: Were there any considerations in that you are under 18 as it relates to taking ads? How did your parents feel?

GW: Nothing as such. I've been working in this online field for a while now and my parents have had no problem with what I'm doing. I'm very open with them in taking about my working life. It's a common thing to sit down to dinner each night and give them a brief run down of my day. They've been very supportive with what I do.

SR: How are you able to balance your time between cricket, your girlfriend, your blog, your school work and now video?

GW: It's not an easy thing to do, trust me. For instance yesterday I was out from 7am to 7pm for pre-season cricket training. However I still managed to fit in a "full" working day and get all my appropriate tasks completed. I feel it's all about discipline, and getting the most important tasks out of the way as soon as possible. I've also found in necessary to time block the times of the day I'm most efficient in.

SR: It seems like a lot of blogs from India and APAC are starting to really get legs in the US. Was this always your plan or did the blog sort of take off?

GW: It was always my plan to launch the blog internationally, hence taking a dot com domain name. My blog is actually more targeted at those living in the United States rather than my home country New Zealand due to the huge target market overseas. I've even found myself veering from the New Zealand grammar rules to write for Americans.

SR: Finally, what's next for Glenn Wolsey? Do you plan to turn pro full time or head to college and continue.

GW: I don't even think this is something I can answer. There's so much I've done in my life to date, but also so much I want to do in the future. Surprising to some, I'd love to take on a career as a Wedding/Event photographer, or maybe a tad of photojournalism. The future is wide open for me, and I'll be approaching it with open arms - it's an exciting prospect.

A Conversation with Mark Cuban

Photo by Staci Kramer

Every other day, a new digital term is born. Lately, HDNet co-founder and Chairman Mark Cuban has been re-purposing the old piece of skateboard vernacular, "vert ramp," to describe Long Tail content crossing into the mainstream. I caught up with Mark to talk about Long Tail content, why online video stats are a joke and, no surprise here, high def TV. (This is also an extended version of my AdAge column.)

Q) In your post you talk about properties jumping from the Long Tail to the Vert Ramp. What about the reverse? Are there media properties in your view that will slide down into the Long Tail?

MC: I think that TV networks that can't make the transition to high def will, and there will be more examples than people expect.

I think most blogs, vlogs , podcasts, broadband TV shows that sneak out of the Long Tail, my blog included, will have a tough time staying out and earning more than minimum wage for their efforts.

I think follow up acts are 100x harder online than in traditional media.

Q) It seems like a lot of people down the Tail who aspire to jump on to the Vert Ramp are looking to advertisers as their great savior. What's it going to take for advertisers to begin to make big investments in the Tail or will they stick to the head?

MC: They will work with aggregators. Those who host the Long Tailers will get paid, those who create for the Long Tail rarely will.

The big risk to all will be the inevitable saturation of ad inventory. For the reasons you mention, everyone wants their slice of the advertising pie. Right now there is more ad money than inventory. That will change quickly over the next 12 to 24 months. The advantage may go to the diversified salesforce that can bundle multiple platforms. TV, search, net video, VOD, mobile.

There is also a risk, particularly for online video that the inventory saturation precedes verified numbers. Right now the concept of 'views' is as much a joke as people buying hits in 1998. Content providers game those numbers by the minute.

It won't be long till competition for ad dollars will require real video numbers and that could impact the strength of the net video ad market, or worse, turn it into an unverifiable throw in when bundled with other media.

Q) How is HDnet helping people down the Long Tail jump on the vert ramp? Is there enough HD content in the Tail yet to warrant such an effort?

MC: We don't care where our sources of content come from. We just want great content. We don't buy pedigree, we buy great programming. To your question HD content in the tail, its close to non existent. But the cost of HD camcorders is falling rapidly and PC video editing is already cheap. So it will happen.

Q) What about the NBA? Has the Long Tail reached the NBA in terms of where it finds talent, how it markets itself? How about the Mavs?

MC: No question. We search the globe for kids who can play in the NBA.

In terms of marketing, we deal with aggregators . That said, we will deal with influencers. The bigger value is in the movie marketing business. To drive box office or DVD sales, creating unwired networks of bloggers that can influence influencers is something we are now working on.  We aggregate different groups of long tailers depending on what the movie content is.

Q) Finally, how should advertisers be adopting to the Long Tail? What's missing from the equation right now?

MC: Advertisers have to stop falling for hype and focus on what moves the meter that drives their business. I also think that advertisers need to start thinking in terms of dayparts. How people consume ads at work is different than when they happen to be surfing or playing online after checking their email, or while watching TV after dinner.

They also have to look forward rather than backwards. I'm obviously an HD bigot because of HDnet and HDnet movies. That said, does anyone really think that highdef is not going to happen? That 30mm people will buy HDTVs in 2007 and be happy to get ads in standard definition, or will they expect HD? That all those LCDs hanging on walls will be connected to computers anytime soon or show Internet video? They won't.

I think the living room is becoming the focus of family entertainment again. People are gathering around their brand new 40" plasma or LCD to watch shows and sports and movies in HD. Its an opportunity to get an advantage most advertisers are missing.

A Chat with Firefox Community Marketer Rob Davis

By day, Rob Davis works for Minnesota public relations firm Haberman & Associates. By night, he's dreaming up ways to evangelize Internet users to download and try the Firefox Web browser. Recently, Davis and his buddies kicked off a community fundraising effort to help the Mozilla Foundation purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times. The campaign attracted more than 10,000 contributors, raising a quarter of a million dollars in just 10 days - more than five times the amount required to cover the ad space! (The remainder of the funds will be used to support the Foundation.) The fundraising effort has received significant media coverage and has been hailed as the future of marketing. In fact, some journalists are even taken a page from the Mozilla playbook and are now using the Web to solicit press-worthy Firefox user stories. As the browser zeros in on its official November 9 launch, I caught up with Davis for a Bloggerside Chat to learn more about the New York Times campaign and its goals. If you have questions that are not covered here, Rob welcomes you to email him directly.

Q: Where did the idea for the New York Times ad originate?

Davis: I had remembered reading about a fundraiser done by a political advocacy group last spring - they had wanted to take out a single, full-page ad and ended up raising over $500,000. Knowing that many technologists are as passionate about their software as others are about their politics I thought the idea would resonate. Having the contributor's names in the ad was done to make it a memorable souvenir for all of Firefox's developer volunteers worldwide.

Q: Why advertise in the Times and not the Journal, online or even on blogs?

Davis: The original idea was actually to take the ad out in the Wall Street Journal because of their strong corporate executive readership, however the cost was prohibitive. USA Today and the Washington Post were also evaluated. The Times offered this campaign the best demographics and value for the money.

A full-page newspaper advertisement is bold and exciting. When a large company wants to quickly convey a message, the full-page newspaper ad is a tactic of choice. I felt that there were sufficient Firefox advocates to act like a big company.

Q: Frequency is a big factor in many advertising campaigns. How does Mozilla feel it can be successful with just a single ad?

Davis: Great question - it's exactly why the Mozilla Foundation will likely never undertake an advertising campaign. Also, just to clarify, I do not speak for the Foundation. My role is simply as a manager for this advocacy campaign.

While some have considered this effort an advertising campaign, I consider it a fundraiser - something more akin to a charity ball. In this case it cost less than $50,000 to raise $250,000 for the Mozilla Foundation.

Q: You work for a PR firm - Minneapolis-based Haberman & Associates. Was the firm hired to work on this project? If not, how do you balance work and volunteering?

Davis: Yes, but not until September and only to cover expenses. I started volunteering with Bart, Blake and the Spread Firefox team in July after an I.E. virus (DSO exploit) caused me to reformat my hard drive. I had been working freelance with Haberman & Associates over the summer and then joined them full-time on September 1. In July and August I was probably volunteering 15 hours per week to this project. As the campaign planning heated up in September it became clear that I would need time during the day to complete all the work on schedule. I wasn't willing or able to take two months of vacation, so I recommended that the Foundation spend a small portion of the donations to cover my expenses. Haberman & Associates contributed a large chunk of my billable time to this project as well. Needless to say, the vast majority of my evening hours have also been volunteered to the project.

The short answer about how I balance work and volunteering hours is: I work hard to ensure that I don't burn out -- running is my thing.

Q: Have you been surprised by the response you have received? What's been most surprising/informative about this experience?

Davis: Absolutely, we exceeded our 10 day goal in 17 hours - that was surprising. The campaign included over 81 countries worldwide - that was surprising. The most informative outcome of this campaign however, has been the overwhelming gratitude expressed that the contributors have expressed to Mozilla's developer community. There are a lot of people out there who had a similar experience with an I.E. virus and are so pleased to have a safe  alternative.

Q: What do you feel this portends for the future of marketing? Will we see more open source marketing or PR campaigns? What kinds of products might see similar results and what kinds of products won't?

Davis: The success of this campaign has created an interesting model for similar consumer-driven advocacy campaigns. After much debate we're calling this process "community marketing" rather than open source.

Marketing people have known for years that a small percentage of their customers are strong advocates, however they have not taken sufficient steps to equip these advocates as a marketing force. Supporting or endorsing a grassroots campaign may simply expose most companies to too much liability. This kind of community marketing tactic will likely grow with small, nimble companies for the immediate future.

Q: What's next, another ad?

Davis: The ad won't actually run until late-November (11/16-12/5) so we'll get that done first and then continue working with the broader Spread Firefox community to evaluate new ideas.

Q: What lessons can you offer marketers interested in replicating this?

Davis: In software, the open source model is not one of creating something from scratch, but of taking a set of code and improving it in a way to better suit your need. In marketing, ideas should be tweaked, bent and molded in new ways and to new uses. The best thing marketers can do is get outside of their traditional networks and find new ideas.

A Conversation with Convention Blogger Matt Stoller

Matthew Stoller is one of the 30+ webloggers who are blogging this week's Democratic National Convention. He is the producer and cocreator of the Blogging of the President web project, an interactive media series on the ongoing digital transformation of politics and media.

Matt has worked in software product management, holds a BA from Harvard University.

MP: You're a blogger, but are you also in part an organizer helping the DNC manage the bloggers? What is your exact role here? Are you working for the DNC yourself, etc?

STOLLER: Funny you should ask that question. The National Journal just did a story on the DNCC supposedly 'firing' me because my name was removed from the blog. Of course, the story isn't true, but it is a reflection of the ambiguous role that I played and the conflict between organizations and the media cycle that so distorts effective descriptions of democracy.

As unpaid advisor to the DNCC, I put a lot of work into the convention to make sure the bloggers had a good time. And they are being treated wonderfully. I used the Democratic National Convention Committee blog to help coordinate this group. But I am also blogging on my own blog, BOPnews.

MP: Does the fact you are working at the DNCC mean you have more responsibility than others?

STOLLER: Great question. When the Convention came around, we had to figure out what to do, which speaks to the essential question - when I blog on my own site, am I me Matt Stoller or a representative of the Convention? And what are the consequences of this being misrepresented one way or the other?

Well, I think that it is possible for media outlets to misconstrue what I say on my blog and confuse it with the DNCC blog, especially those with partisanized agendas. In an environment with such an immature media culture, this can become controversy very quickly. How could someone want to help the Democratic National Convention and not love every single thing that's going on?!?! Zut alors!

The determination was that if I was speaking for myself publicly in an online forum, I was speaking for me and not the Convention.

People have conversations all the time about what's going on. Once conversation moves online, however, it goes 'on the record'. I happen to have some of my conversations online, but the political media hasn't caught up with the fact that most normal people act like normal people and have normal conversations. They curse. They have opinions. These are normal things. But putting this normality online challenges the structures of our cultural institutions, which tend to rely on images of perfection rather than authenticity.

MP: What, generally, has the reaction been like by the press to the presence of the bloggers? Are any of them resentful?

STOLLER: Oh, I don't know. Most of the ones I talked to are like 'oh, neat'. Some say that they love blogs and read them all the time.

MP: Do they feel competitive at all to break news?

STOLLER: Perhaps. I think the bloggers here have different agendas. Some just want to watch the Convention.

MP: Are the bloggers getting special treatment? There was a blogger breakfast this week attended by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

STOLLER: Some are journalists looking to break news. Some are consultants looking to broaden their understanding of political issues and races. We are starting to see that 'bloggers' doesn't mean anything anymore. Because blogging is just a tool. The people that used it were initially in one community. But no longer.

MP: But are bloggers getting white-glove treatment the press does not get?

STOLLER: Yes. They don't have to pay for their space in the Fleet Center.

MP: Why should they if blogging is just a tool?

STOLLER: Because this is a special moment.

MP: Do they get greater/lesser access than journalists do?

STOLLER: I bet that bloggers could get better access if they wanted it.

MP: Some say the bloggers are the news at this convention. Are the bloggers stealing the spotlight? How does the DNC and the Kerry campaign feel about this?

STOLLER: You'd have to ask them. But my interactions with them have been quite positive. I think, and I think they think, that blogging and participation will be very good for the Democratic Party, and great for democracy. Anything that distributes power downward, as Joe Trippi or Seth Godin might say, is good for populism.

MP: Jay Rosen told the New York Times this week: "Whomever they decide to let through the gate is now the press. What the credential means to me is that someone just expanded the idea of the press a little bit." Is blogging journalism? Are these bloggers closer to journalists than folks like me? What’s the relationship between blogging and journalism?

STOLLER: Well the whole edifice of journalism is built on the idea that ethics in speech are important. But why must this be? Well, because if there are a limited number of printing presses, the people in charge of them have special responsibilities and special power.

Now, anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and some degree of literacy can have their own printing press. The challenge is to figure out a set of institutional arrangements that maximizes the credibility of the content that is displayed to the largest number of people. And I'm not convinced that our current system of commercially organized media does this. In fact, I think it doesn't. Individual blogs don't do this either, but the blogosphere as a whole presents good quality content very efficiently.

We are used to a system where if you work in commercial media, the content you create will be edited and honed, but it will be consumed The blogosphere doesn't work that way. Neither do people. We don't remember most of the conversations we have - we only remember a few key moments in them. 99% of the content is ignored, but the 1% that isn't becomes very meaningful. And the bad 99% is critical to the creation of the good 1%.

So even though the blogosphere creates a lot of innuendo - in fact most of it is terrible - the content that the blogosphere presents to most people who participate in it is great. Why? Because the blogosphere is one institutional arrangement that has figured out how to allow people to mostly ignore crap, and pay attention to stuff they are interested in.

MP: But does this mean that gatekeepers - by limiting access to a select few of these individuals - risk setting this system backward?

STOLLER: Gatekeeping, which is intrinsic to the system of media and PR that we have right now, creates corruption. And that's what our public discourse is right now - corrupt. And so the question of 'is blogging journalism' is really an attempt to redefine the notion of journalism when its institutional arrangements don't make sense any more.

How do you find a business model for Seymour Hersh, in other words? But this crisis is everywhere. A lot of corporations are trying to figure out how to sell what they want to sell, rather than restructuring their businesses to encourage risk-taking. The whole 99% of crap produces the 1% of greatness.

Anyway, no, I don't think that credentialing a few bloggers will set this back at all.

MP: What impact do you think this seminal event will have on politics, journalism and (most importantly) PR?

STOLLER: Well, it legitimizes blogging as a medium that the press is now allowed to pay attention to. So that's a shift in media culture. Over the long-term, this will alter the media ecosystem to allow for more boutique journalists - and 'beats' will become 'communities'.

Politically, we are in the midst of an enormously significant change, perhaps as large a political realignment as the American Revolution. The anger we see between the parties and within the parties, and within organizations generally, is over how much information to share and how much power to distribute downwards - classic populism rocket fuel.

In terms of PR, the industry will become a lot happier. Authenticity is a great thing, and authenticity sells. The need to portray perfection when all is not perfect is inherently anxiety producing. PR will become about managing conversations among stakeholders in a product or service line. It will grow to encompasses CRM and some elements of product design and marketing.

It's fairly obvious once you drink the kool aid. The thing is, people don't want to believe that cynicism doesn't work. They are used to assuming that manipulating fear and imagery can get you everything you want.

If I sell you a bad product, and I know you can't talk about it, I'm not going to care what you think. So my PR strategy will be about convincing other people that they need this product. Obviously, this is an oversimplification.

But without strong word of mouth, the tool set available shrinks to information delivery and emotional manipulation. It's hard to convince people that just by making a good product and being honest with your customers, you can do well. They just don't believe that 'word gets around'. And so they are skeptical about substance, because without word of mouth or community, style is all that matters.

A Conversation with Dan Gillmor

I just posted a must-read email interview I conducted with Dan Gillmor for Global PR Blog Week 1.0. The interview focuses on how weblogs and participatory journalism are changing how PR people manage crises. Here's one of the more poignant excerpts...

RUBEL: Weblogs and personal/amateur journalism mean greater transparency. Does this mean PR pros will lose complete control of their company's reputation? What opportunity is there here for PR pros to shape reputations?

GILLMOR: Not at all. The PR mission evolves. But it's important for people to understand that a) they never had complete control in the first place; and b) "control" is a mistaken notion. Think in terms of managing, not controlling, what clients say and what is said about them.

The risks are growing on one level. Bloggers and other grassroots media -including the increasingly ubiquitous digital camera - are uncovering information many companies might prefer to keep secret and then spreading what they learn to anyone else who cares. Customers help each other "hack" products today in ways companies might not like. And some of the information that gets spread is false.

The opportunities are also growing. Using the same tools, companies can communicate better with their various constituencies: customers, suppliers, employees, community. With a more human than PR-laden voice, they can explain what is happening and why. They can have a conversation with these constituencies, via comments, bulletin boards, etc. They can enjoy the value that comes from listening to people's ideas.

PR folks also can use RSS to distribute routine news, instead of clogging up the e-mail inboxes of journalists who are already overwhelmed. And they can be careful to pitch the right people at any given organization, rather than blasting messages widely.

An Interview with Jay Rosen

This morning I posted an in-depth interview on PR in the age of participatory journalism with Jay Rosen, chair of the New York University Department of Journalism and author of the Pressthink weblog. The interview is part of Global PR Blog Week1.0 . Here's the interview's key excerpt...

Does disintermediation threaten PR? How should the profession react to the changes in how consumers get news?

ROSEN: I think public relations should first understand that to the extent that its art is a form of "spin"--whether it's reasonable spin, accepted spin, good spin, bad spin, terrible spin--it is selling a service for which there is less and less value, and less mind is paid to it. Spin was possible in the era of few-to-many media, and a small number of gatekeepers who could be spun.

There are fewer who listen (or have to listen) and more who hear only dull propaganda, witless repetition, one of the many forms of mindlessness to which citizens are subjected. Spin is also comedy to Americans, and John Stewart speaks with authority on it. PR does not because it believes, on the whole, in some right to spin-- all exceptions cheerfully granted. Plus, there what Doc Searls says to all the "pound the message home" pros, in any field: there is no demand for messages. Factor that in if you want a bright future in any media field.

Today many knowledge monopolies are breaking up, and this corresponds with what the British media scholar Anthony Smith once identified as a shift "in the locus of sovereignty over text," a shift toward the public. We could say "toward consumers," but what Smith meant is that more power has fallen into the hands of the people who were mere receivers before. They are more sovereign-- as consumers, yes. But also as producers of their own media. Pickers and choosers.

My advice to PR people is to help citizens become more so-- more sovereign over information goods. Spin is not a good. Neither is a brick wall, or a blatantly one-sided story that cleverly coheres because it leaves out every single inconvenient fact. Public relations, if it wants to do good, should stand for real transparency in organizations, and genuine interactivity with publics. Want an issue in corporate PR? Freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, freedom of interaction for company bloggers: how do we make it a practical reality?

Feedster to Launch First Real Revenue Mechanism, New UI Next Week, CEO Tells Micro Persuasion

Next week Feedster, a popular blog and RSS feeds search engine/aggregator, will unveil a new UI and its first real revenue model, CEO Scott Rafer told Micro Persuasion. The site will also enable consumers to subscribe to RSS feeds via email and bloggers to "claim" their URLs, much like they do on Technorati. More details follow in this exclusive bloggerside chat with Rafer.

MP: What are the key new features you are adding for users who read feeds on Feedster and MyFeedster? What advantages do these offer over other aggregators like Bloglines and software like FeedDemon? When are these launching?

RAFER: Feedster has been spreading quickly beyond our original hard-core blogger crowd into a broader audience. This release aims to strike that tricky balance between early adopter and mass audience. Long-time Feedster users need the flexibility and RSS tools that Scott Johnson and Francois have been providing for a year, and the newer users need a cleaner interface with fewer odd little orange and blue icons with intimidating XML pages behind them. We've gone to a search returns UI that looks more like what the larger search engines use with a few enhancements. The most obvious is the per-feed icon. Our index is now a healthy mix of blogs and traditional journalism. We're doing what we can to make it very quick and obvious which is which for the users who care and to give bloggers an ability to visually brand their postings on our return pages. The example we've been showing people is posted here.

I'm going to hold my comments on MyFeedster for the moment. The updated version of MyFeedster will go live a few weeks later than the main search engine update, which is scheduled for next week (not Monday).

MP: Feedster has always had great RSS/email alerting capabilities. But now it looks like you're adding to them by giving users the ability to subscribe to entire feeds by email. What can you share?

RAFER: Thank you. Feedster is the first site where many users who are new to RSS, online news syndication, and blogging see the incredible depth of information being created. We think that its critical that they have a quick, consistent way of receiving content updates in whatever form they prefer from whatever feed, group of feeds (i.e. reading list), or Feedster Search Feed they prefer. Of course, we restrict ourselves to sending out the excerpt and permalink as defined by the publisher of the original feed.

MP: It appears you are adding new features for bloggers - such as link tracking, claimed feeds, table of contents, blog searching backlogs and more. What can you tell us about these and when will they be live?

RAFER: "Claim your feed" is new and is the way that feed publishers can control the metadata we store on their feed including the icon I mention above. It works in a way similar to "Blog for Kerry or Bush or ABB or ..." that we put together on politics.feedster.com last winter. Most of the other features aren't new, just refined and presented in a clearer way. They are all tied into MyFeedster accounts from now on and are on the schedule to be released/updated with MyFeedster in a few weeks.

MP: What can you tell us about the Feedster API?

RAFER: All I'm qualified to say on the Feedster API is that we need to formalize it so that developers have a clearer and more predictable way to pull information from our engine. Scott Johnson will go into it further when we've got something concrete to show. It's on the schedule for September 1, 2004, release and will be call-compliant with the API of a "much larger player."

MP: Feedster's performance has been sluggish lately. You told me you just completed a significant hardware upgrade. What exactly have you done to improve performance and when/how will this be clear to users?

RAFER: "Completed" sounds like heaven, but I'm not sure any of us Feedsterites have behaved well enough to be let in to that particular venue. We are at the tail-end of moving from one colo to another and putting in a new server architecture that scales to millions of users a month. Once we're done, the user experience will be dramatically improved. By the time we release the new search UI next week, the speed will be noticeably better. There are software improvements and hardware additions planned for each month to keep getting better.

MP: How does Feedster make money and how do these new services help you drive revenue?

RAFER: Feedster's first real revenue mechanism launches with the new UI next week. We're a search engine and will be posting paid-search ads from one of the big networks. They will be clearly marked as "Sponsored Links." We're avoiding Paid Inclusion as you would expect. Paid-search ads will be our main revenue for the near future. Revenue streams #2 and #3 will show up in August and September. In none of the three cases are Feedster users being asked to pay a subscription for services. We can't guarantee that we'll never introduce subscription premiums but we're working hard to keep our services free to individual users. We hope that our audience will support Feedster by reading and responding to interesting ads and offers.

MP: Newsgator just received a round of financing. How might this bode for Feedster?

RAFER: We certainly plan to raise venture capital ourselves and grow Feedster as quickly as user demand grows. To date, we have angel funding from a half-dozen very experienced startup execs which we are using to make infrastructure improvements. There are about 5 RSS-related deals VC-funded at this point, so we are one of the few high-profile startups in this area that has not yet solicited significant funding.

MP: Anything else you would like to share with my readers (press, PR types and bloggers)?

RAFER: Feedster is on the AlwaysOn Top 100 list that was announced this week. The list showcases the top innovative private companies that demonstrate market traction and the ability to disrupt existing markets.

My Breakfast with Nick Denton

The school year might be over for most, but Blog Marketing 101 was in session for me today and my professor was none other than Nick Denton of Gawker Media.

Nick recently invited me to breakfast, so this morning we met and engaged in a wide ranging discussion about our respective companies and whether custom-published blogs are advertising, PR or a new animal altogether.

I have been extremely impressed by the tremendous quality and continuous buzz surrounding Gawker Media's blogs, which include Defamer, Gizmodo, Wonkette and Gawker. So during the brief hour I spent with Nick today I tried to quiz him extensively so that I could learn as much as possible about how to market and promote a weblog.

Here are three key lessons I learned from Nick today. Hopefully you will find them just as valuable as I did:

1) It's All in the Name
Clever names are what gives each of Gawker's blogs their brand essence. Nick told me that he and his team of writers and designers spend an extraordinary amount of time coming up with blog names. Once they come up with one, Nick and his team then create content and design for the site that will build the brand personality. In my opinion, very few blogs do this as well as Gawker does.

2) Blog PR = Blog Traffic
You might think that every time Gawker launches a blog they would issue a big hoo-ha press release on PR Newswire. Nope. All Denton does to get the buzz rolling is send an email heads up to a few select blogs that he feels are in line with the site's audience demo. Once his blogs develop a following, the buzz cascades (thanks to good snarky writing) into traditional media coverage. He really spends zero time on proactively courting the press.

3) Men Matter
Finally, Denton says he intentionally focuses on launching blogs that will attract the coveted 18-34 year-old male demo. He believes (as do I) that men of this age stopped watching television long ago and they now pretty much live online. Denton tries to target this demo with every launch. What gets him excited is launching blogs and watching them grow into household brands surpass a million page views per month. His next projects will focus on video games and travel.

Thanks, Nick, for your time today. I certainly learned a lot and will be reading all your feeds closely.

Robert Scoble and Buzz Bruggeman on Corporate Blogging and Customer Evangelism

Last week I invited two of the smartest people I know - Robert Scoble of Microsoft and Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords - to meet with CooperKatz agency staff, clients and select members of the press. During the two-hour seminar, called "Meet the Bloggers," the technology evangelists shared their insights on how Weblogs, RSS and wikis are reshaping marketing and PR.

I kicked off the session by talking about how a new media ecosystem is emerging. You can view my PowerPoint here (5MB file). In short, I said marketers and PR pros need to "grok" these changes by:

1) Learning how news spreads online
2) Using the tools for monitoring blogs (such as FeedDemon and Feedster)
3) Identifying the most influential and vocal bloggers among our target audiences
4) Studying the different techniques for reaching these influencers
5) Becoming part of the conversation by launching company blogs championed by real people

Next up, Buzz discussed in detail how he effective he is in promoting his product, a utility that automates the Windows operating system, all within a $100/month budget.

Buzz said he focuses on harnessing every productivity tool available to him to court bloggers to try ActiveWords, blog about it and hopefully influence others. Using Feedster, for example, he closely monitors RSS feeds for phrases like "user interface," "Buzz Bruggeman," "innovative," "ActiveWords" and more. "I know 10 minutes after you've written something about that topic. And I'm on it quickly and thoughtfully," said Bruggeman. (For more on Buzz's amazing salesmanship skills, check out this recent post on Scoble's blog.)

The ActiveWords EVP and co-founder also talked about how blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget are disintermediating larger, established news outlets. "I used to read Wired magazine because they wrote about neat stuff…tools that work. All of a sudden now - literally in real time - we have Gizmodo, a blog on gadgets. I don't know what the Popular Science and Popular Mechanics guys are going to do," he said. "The people you’re going to want to pitch your products to are the people who are going to be hanging out at this watering hole. This is where all of the camels are putting their noses in the water."

Finally, the lawyer turned entrepreneur urged PR people to engage webloggers, because they're not going away. "These changes force you to play your 'A game.' If you're not, somebody else will," he said. "Your job, as I see it, is to suggest to (clients) that if they are going to be market leaders in their space they need to be engaged (in the blogosphere). If they choose to ignore this phenomenon and these customers, conversations and ideas, they'll go the way the buggy whip."

Next up, longtime blogger Robert Scoble reminisced about how marketing has changed since the 1980s when he ran a camera store. Back then 80% of Scoble's sales came directly from word of mouth, he said. However, at that time he unable to actually participate in any of these water cooler conversations.

"Today I can be there while those word of mouth conversations are going on. And the conversations are far vastly more efficient. They take place now in matters of minutes, when it use to take years to react," the Scobleizer said.

Scoble also spoke in detail about how Microsoft uses Channel9, the brainchild of Jeff Sandquist, to engage customers. He demoed the site for the group and showed how virtually every thread, profile and section on the site, including customer profiles, have their own RSS feeds. Scoble said that he hopes more companies will start similar "relationship portals" and engage in a permanent dialog with their customer evangelists. (He also recommended visiting the superb Church of the Customer blog, which covers this topic in detail.)

"We get to see what the customers want to show us," the Geek Blogger said. "(Gawker Media's new) Nike weblog missed this. They did a pretty good job of doing a one-way flow of information and having a good design and good writers. But there's no customer involvement at all. It really is stale when you compare it to a site like Channel9 where there's customer involvement in the ability to have their own presence and identity."

He also offered some terrific advice to CEOs who want to blog. He said they need to have voice, be frequent and be engaged. He even offered some words of wisdom for his boss, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who currently does not blog.

"Bill Gates' challenge is to write in a human way given his schedule that doesn't look like a press release," Scoble said. "Linking out to other bloggers is one way. Show that you're part of the community. Be a human voice. (HDnet CEO) Mark Cuban does this often. If you read Mark Cuban's blog you're going to see a human voice come through that that's not designed in a group session."

Scoble also said that although blogging is a big commitment for busy executives, it's well worth the effort.

"Whenever I ask execs why they don't have a blog they always say to me, 'well, I don't have enough time.' But they'll talk to a user group with a 100 people! I have 4,000 people reading me a day. You can't take an hour out of your day to write a blog? I'll even give you a guest blog on my blog. You can have an audience of 4,000 people with doing one hour's worth of work. Is that worth it? It's not just thousands of people. It's journalists, analysts, CEOs."

Finally, Scoble outlined the five key reasons why blogging is important:

1) They’re easy to publish
2) They're discoverable.
3) They're social
4) Every post has perma-linking
5) RSS syndication

Robert, Buzz, thanks so much for sharing your wisdom with us! We're forever in your debt.

UPDATE: Robert notes that Channel9 was the brainchild of Lenn Pryor. Jeff Sandquist came up with the idea to put customers out front. Apologies to all.

Buzz Bruggeman: The Master of Blog Buzz

Buzz Bruggeman is a founder and EVP of ActiveWords Inc., which publishes a powerful software program by the same name that easily automates thousands of everyday computing tasks. He is responsible for all marketing, evangelizing, and business development for ActiveWords. Bruggeman was previously a demonstrator at DEMO, and has spoken and demonstrated his company’s products at many industry events and conferences. He also is scheduled to participate in Chris Shipley's upcoming BlogOn 2004 conference in July.

As Robert Scoble recently noted here, Buzz relies on blogs heavily to market ActiveWords to users around the world. An active blogger himself, Buzz is also a pioneer in the new world of participatory journalism. Dan Gillmor recounts how Buzz shaped his coverage of Qwest in this must-read passage and in his amazing new book, We The Media.

I conducted an email interview with Buzz to get his read on the potential impact of blogs and participatory on both marketing and PR.

MP: How have weblogs helped you generate mass media coverage for ActiveWords and vice versa?

BRUGGEMAN: Early on, I recognized that we didn't have the budget to advertise via traditional media and at the same time, I began to realize that other than for "branding" type coverage, traditional media in our space was not really effective. I spent a lot of time talking to our users, asking them where they got information related to trying/buying decisions, and the bottom line always came back to "word of mouth."

I had been a fan of Dave Winer for a long time. I had used "More" on the Macintosh a lot, and when I found out that Dave was involved in "Userland" I set out to figure out what their products were all about. It was through Userland that I met Robert Scoble. I watched how Robert and Dave were getting the word out about Userland via blogging. Their users were coming to them via word of mouth. I had this eureka moment when I realized that smart tech journalists were experimenting with blogs, and were reading them. I figured if I could understand the interplay, then I had a chance of pitching ActiveWords to both smart writers/smart bloggers/influencers.

MP: How do you typically interact with other bloggers?

BRUGGEMAN: Before the advent of news aggregators, I used ActiveWords to read maybe 40 blogs a day. I would name them with ActiveWords so that I could instantly go to a blogger site, i.e. "wldan" took me to Dan Gillmor, "wldave" to Dave Winer, etc. So in an hour I could read 30-40 blogs.

With the advent of RSS, I began to watch who was blogging a lot, what they were writing about, and who they were writing about. When I saw someone whose ideas resonated with me, and who I thought might like ActiveWords I reached out to them. I tried to give them examples as to how ActiveWords might make their lives easier and more productive. Since it was early in the process, some of the great bloggers didn't have a lot of readers. So getting to know them was easier. I also, tried to make sure that if I saw something that someone might find interesting I made sure to get the link to them. I never sought any credit, just hoped that they might benefit from my reading/thinking, etc.

I think that a critical part of this process is accelerating information and sharing it. Everyone has a perspective, most are very unique, and I love the richness that comes from, and excuse the baseball metaphor, of throwing someone a fat pitch, and letting them hit it out of the park.

MP: What tips can you share with PR pros who might just be getting their feet wet on the blogosphere?

BRUGGEMAN: You have to start somewhere. I am a big fan of NewsGator. Until I got a new computer I was reading about 200 blogs a day inside NewsGator inside Outlook. As Robert Scoble is quick to point out, you don't really read 200 blogs, you just read the new postings.

I used to read a number of newspapers daily, i.e. the N.Y. Times, WSJ, the Orlando Sentinel, and parts of The Mercury News/Seattle Times/Minneapolis Tribune, and my home town paper, the Daily Journal in International Falls, MN. ActiveWords allows me to instantly navigate to the sections of those papers that I read a lot.

But now with RSS/NewsGator, and I seem to living in Outlook, I can read lots of very smart people, whose ideas I really enjoy and leverage off of. Frankly my newspaper/traditional media reading is way off.

Also, you need to blog. I am a big fan of TypePad. I firmly believe that the more you write, the better you write. I have three blogs. One that is visible and two that are not. I use the other two sort of as staging areas where I can park ideas, let them bake a little before I spring them on an unsuspecting public. I blog about what I call the ActiveWords Odyssey, and some other personal "rants", but I try to separate my personal ideas from ActiveWords. I have learned that there is a skepticism from users about people like me if they only see one dimension. They want to see that there is some substance to you, and to your ideas.

MP: ActiveWords is a technology product, which makes it a natural for blog PR. Are blogs just as important in other industries or does is the medium still nascent?

BRUGGEMAN: I think they are. But we are really still very early in the process. You hear this cliché about technology that says something like "We always over-estimate the short term impact of a technology, and underestimate the long term impact". I think blogs are a perfect example of this.

Doc Searls, who I think is a genius, wrote in the Cluetrain Manifesto, "Markets are conversations"...I have lifted a portion of that idea and I would submit to you that "Products are conversations". If he's right, which I am sure of, and if I am right, which I am hoping I am, then the notion that you can have a conversation about your product, whatever it is, with your users then blogs are a brilliant amplification that idea.

We are living in "Internet Time" Look at sites like "Technorati" and "Feedster", they are incredibly powerful in terms of allowing you to connect the dots in this space. Maybe I am missing something, but I am unaware of anything similar in terms of traditional media.

MP: On numerous occasions, Dan Gillmor has written about how your citizen reporting helped shaped his coverage of a particular speech. What is the future of participatory journalism?

BRUGGEMAN: I think it is explosive. I was lucky enough to be paying attention when Dan Gillmor and Doc Searls were blogging a speech by Joe Nacchio at PC Forum. That story is a big part of the introduction of Dan's new book, i.e. We The Media. I have read Dan's book, it is sensational, I plan to buy a copy, and ask him to autograph it for me. I am a huge believer in the collaborative process, and I see participatory journalism as part of that process. I think Dan has written that his readers are smarter that he is. I am sure they aren't smarter, maybe as smart, and if they bring to the party insight and perspective that makes for a richer experience then we all benefit.

MP: Finally, what's the single best way PR pros can benefit from your product?

BRUGGEMAN: I would love to have them try it. Tell us how we can make ActiveWords better. We live in an 80/20 world. If ActiveWords can make their computing lives better then we have succeeded. If ActiveWords gives smart people back perhaps as much as an hour of productive time a day, then it is a win/win deal. To date, we have attracted a fiercely loyal group of users. They seem to be smart people, who are self organized and who want to get more stuff done. A lot of them also don't want to be tech support for their friends and hence have stopped talking about products that really work for them. Our challenge is to convince your readers to try ActiveWords, tell us how to make it better, and then tell their 10k closest friends about us.

My take is the PR pros are about ideas, they are about accelerating information, ActiveWords can change their computing lives forever.

Alan Meckler: Few Blogs Will Generate Money

Alan Meckler is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Jupitermedia. The publicly traded firm is a global provider of original information, images, research and events for information technology, business and creative professionals. It operates major tech sites, including ClickZ and internet.com, as well as JupiterResearch and a burgeoning conference and events business.

Alan is the few publicly traded company CEOs (at least that I am aware of) who blogs. And what a Weblog it is. Alan pulls no punches. He comments on competitors, vendors, and of course, his own business.

Back in 1993, while he was at the helm of Mecklermedia, Alan created the Internet World trade show, which was later sold to Penton Media and now is no more. But Alan’s back in the Internet trade show game with the Internet Planet Conference and Expo, which takes place next week in New York and again in November in San Jose. One of the highlights is a session on "Building Your Business with Weblogs and RSS," featuring Robert Scoble, Buzz Bruggeman, and others.

I caught up with Alan via email for a brief interview on his blogging and the upcoming Internet Planet event. (Note - CooperKatz & Company, my employer, at one time did some project work for Jupitermedia. We no longer are engaged by Meckler’s company.)

MP: You are the first and one of the only public company CEOs who blogs. Why do you feel CEOs should blog? Which CEOs do you wish would start blogging?

MECKLER: I do not necessarily feel that CEOs should blog. I have chosen to do so in order to get out the message about doings at Jupitermedia. Also I feel I have an interesting perspective on media so I enjoy providing observations.

MP: How does Sarbanes-Oxley impact what you write?

MECKLER: It has no effect. Sarbanes-Oxley is more geared to financial reporting than anything else. It certainly effects our costs of doing business.

MP: The launch of Internet Planet is a harbinger of the renewed excitement in Internet innovation. Do you feel that we are entering an Internet renaissance? What most excites you?

MECKLER: The internet never "left." The press made it seem that way by blasting those associated with the so-called internet bubble. The internet has turned many industries on their respective heads and this trend is accelerating. Internet Planet is devoted to the topic of "growing business online." I think this is the key to the internet industry going forward.

MP: What's your view of the blog vertical business model that Nick Denton's Gawker Media and Jason Calacanis' Weblogs, Inc. have developed? In some ways they're emulating what you created with Internet.com way back when. Business 2.0 reports Denton pulls in $250k per year. Not too shabby for blogs.

MECKLER: Very few blogs will be able to generate money. Within the Gawker and Weblogs Inc. empires one will find a handful of blogs that can generate income. Therefore I am not a big fan of the concept as a way to make big income. Blogs associated with network sites like our Jupiterweb, on the other hand, can in fact tangentially generate revenue because the readership is likely to want to find out more about a writer and this in turn can lead to lead generation. We see this with our Jupiter Research division. Several analysts write blogs which are free. Readers of these blogs might be impressed with the opinions expressed by one or more of our analysts -- and this can lead to sales leads.

MP: Finally, what lessons can you share with CEOs who want to start blogging?

MECKLER: Writing even once per week can be a chore. I have to really think about the fact that I should be posting. Therefore, if one sees posting as a burden, stay away from starting a blog.

Tom Mangan Talks About News Instablogs, His Blog "Retirement" and PR

As noted earlier, Prints the Chaff blogger Tom Mangan of the San Jose Mercury News has announced he is retiring from frequent blogging.

"I haven't given up on blogging altogether... just a certain variant of it which obliges a take-over-one's-life timesink. My homepage at tommangan.net will still have occasional postings," Tom explained to me today in an email.

"I thought I wanted to be the Romenesko of newspaper editors but my heart wasn't in it for the long haul. But it was fun till it wasn't, which is always the best time to bail. Plus there are tons of editors blogs out there now so I don't feel like there's this big unmet need."

I conducted an email interview with Tom earlier this month and was waiting for the right moment to post it. In homage to Tom, I can't think of a better time than today to do so. Tom, we will miss your regular rants. Every time I fix a spelling error or cut a comma I will always think of your postings and how they made me laugh and think. Keep in touch.

MP: Are bloggers journalists, editors or....?

MANGAN: Bloggers are just people using the Web to spread their voice to an audience. Some do journalism, but some do poetry and pictures of their housecats.  Lots of lines of work have had volunteer and professional components -- firefighters come to mind.   Desktop publishing made it possible for anybody to become a journalist, but you had to figure out a lot of cranky, difficult software, so few people exploited the opportunity. Blogging software has made it possible to be a volunteer journalist with far fewer technological hurdles.

You can't say bloggers aren't journalists or editors or anything else. There are too many kinds of blogs to say what they are definitively. The key distinction  is that so long as they are volunteers with no financial stake in their blogs, they can quit at any time -- and many of them do.  But then again, volunteer firefighters often stay with it for decades and pass it along to their kids, so there's more than money at work here.

MP: How are blogging and participatory journalism changing professional journalism?

MANGAN: Not much is happening beyond a few working reporters checking blogs and discussion areas.   It won't be "participatory journalism" until audience give-and-take becomes integral to news coverage, and the audience voice becomes part of the story.  We're seeing enough bits and pieces of this to recognize fascinating possibilities, but not enough to say it's "changing professional journalism."

Participatory journalism  exists in a few specialized areas -- it's rampant in some segments of media and technology, but there are vast swaths of regions, topics and careers that are essentially unblogged. When blogging crosses those frontiers, we'll have a far better idea of how "participatory journalism" will shape up.

MP: What should PR people keep in mind vis-a-vis these changes?

MANGAN: Blogs offer a new way to find targeted audiences; name your audience and start looking for blogs. If you can't find one,  it's a good excuse to start one.  The great thing about blogs is that the well-done ones manage to attract a devoted, insightful audience to their topic. Thing is: it has to be updated at least daily; it has to have distinctive voice, and it must have a no-bullshit attitude. So, if you're gonna start one you have to be committed to keeping it up. It's not a trivial commitment; it could last years. So think about that, too, before diving in.   I know a lot of PR folks are wondering if they can pitch stories to existing bloggers -- that's sorta the old-fashioned way to do it, and most blogs have such small audiences that it might not be worth the effort.    I wonder if you wouldn't be better off just starting a blog on the topic you're covering -- that way you can frame the story you want to tell, and let the audience fill in the gaps.

A good blogger can become the online voice of a product, service or personality. To date this is mostly untried, but when branding and advertising budgets run into the millions, how expensive is it to have somebody blogging full-time on some company's behalf?  You'd have to be savvy to the Web audience, treat them as equals, be a bit sassy and so forth, but it seems to me it could be done.  The trick is matching talent with client.

MP: In Dan Gillmor's new book it mentions your urging newspapers to start instablogs. Why hasn't the Merc done this yet for a big local biz story like Google's IPO? How far away from seeing this used as a regular practice? Does the Merc have an instablog ready for the next earthquake?

MANGAN: Remember, all my blogging is volunteer; I have nothing to do with the Merc's online operations, which are mostly handled via Knight Ridder Digital. So I can't speak to their ideas about blogging.   My guess is that Knight Ridder Digital is reluctant to dive headlong into blogging until the novelty wears off and the profit  potential becomes more obvious.  But I will say that blogs are so easy to set up that it would not be a large task to set one up the next time a quake hits.

MP: Robert Scoble recently urged journalists and bloggers to help each other. He wrote: "For instance, what will happen during the next major earthquake in San Jose? Will the few hundred journalists who work for the San Jose Mercury News be able to keep up with such a huge story? No. Webloggers, because of our numbers, will be able to cover such an event in a way that traditional journalists would never be able to." How do you see bloggers and journalists working together?

MANGAN: Well, we have a generator so our lights will stay on. It'll be hard for all those bloggers to post when the power grid's down and the batteries on their laptops go dead.  Access to professional resources will always divide the pros from the volunteers.  But there will be volunteer bloggers for the same reasons there are volunteer firemen.  In the firefighting trade the volunteers are a given, but in the news trade they are newcomers on the scene. Over time they'll figure out the best ways to work together and stay out of each other's way.

When big news breaks, blogs will spring up spontaneously.  The best thing bloggers can do for reporters and photojournalists is to recognize they are people with jobs, deadlines, press runs and editors -- if want to be helpful, fine, but avoid situations where you'll be tripping over each other (a good guideline might be: if you see a reporter, go somewhere else to get the unreported story).

The best thing journalists can do is validate bloggers' efforts by reading, linking and recommending blogs to their readers.   Bloggers don't need this validation, but those who get it will be more apt to stick with it than those who are ignored.

MP: What is the best copyediting advice you can offer to bloggers?

MANGAN: Check your spelling, check your names, check your grammar, check your facts. And write well.

Good writing will draw an audience, but mistake-ridden copy will run them off.

Esther Schindler on the Care and Feeding of Bloggers

Esther Schindler has been writing about software development tools and trends since the mid-90s, and about the effect of technology on our lives for far longer. These days, she is a content editor at InformIT.com and site editor for Ziff Davis' DevSource.

To PR old-timers, however, Schindler is best known as the author of the Internet Press Guild's Care and Feeding of the Press, a popular guide for working with the technology press. I caught up with Esther via email for a Bloggerside Chat to help us understand how to care and feed bloggers and what role they play in the media ecosystem.

MP: PR is changing as some citizens become "journalists" and bloggers. Do you plan to refresh the Care and Feeding of the Press?

SCHINDLER: I always plan on refreshing Care and Feeding. But since it's a labor of love (and a *big* labor, at that), it's the sort of project that I can only do when I have free time. I'm in the happy position of being too busy to find the time for it... even though I do see that it needs a new coat of paint. (And not just in regard to blogging. I wrote that document when I was primarily a product reviewer and tech-feature writer, so it doesn't address a lot of News issues that deserve to be covered.)

MP: What's the journalists view of blogging/personal journalism? They appear to welcome it rather than fear it.

SCHINDLER: Fear isn't an issue, at least not among the journalists I know. (They're tech press, though; for all I know it's different among the general media.) Some of those journalists are bloggers themselves, after all. (I don't have one of my own, but I do contribute irregularly to vowe.net.)

Nobody has the sense that blogging is going to put us out of business. What we have discussed, on and off, is the credibility of Joe Random Blogger. The consensus is that blogging is not journalism; it's something different. Lots of bloggers write about the world as they see it -- which can sometimes be more accurate than a jaded journalist, but just as easily can be a naive view from a "reporter" who has his own agenda, a lack of context, or incorrect assumptions. Not to mention fact checking and bad grammar.

But overall, I think most journalists who're aware of blogging think it's a good thing -- the way that pro photographers have no objection to amateurs clicking photos with snapshot cameras. Some of those amateurs are, after all, good enough to be professional.

In searching through my notes, I found this useful quote:

PUNDIT, BLOG THYSELF "Without editors to correct syntax, tidy up the story structure or check facts, it is generally impossible to rely on anything one finds in a blog without verifying it somewhere else -- often the much-maligned mainstream media." --British television commentator Bill Thompson, decrying bloggers' factual inaccuracies in a piece where he misspells the name of the company he's writing about and ignores the fact that many people are, in fact, editing blogs for pay today, BBC News, 21 February 2003

My own (personal) view of blogging is that it's a good thing -- rather like people who kept journals, a hundred years ago, giving the individual and those who read the blog a map of their perceptions over time. It's going to be interesting to see how they evolve.

For instance, I know people employed by big companies who don't want their coworkers to know about their blog. Not because they write "I hate my boss" but because they don't care to share their politics (or other very personal opinions) with the folks they work with. Eventually, there's bound to be a flap over what someone posts on a blog, even "anonymously."

Another effect is the impact that bloggers have on search engine results. If a thousand bloggers point to an article posted on my site, then suddenly it's going to have thousands more hits and it'll come up faster on Google. That makes me, as a journalist, much more anxious for my articles to get noticed by the blogging community. I want my sites to be discovered. (And I'm sure that, if my article's about a vendor, the vendor's PR person will be even more anxious for that article to be popular.) What'll I do to encourage it? ...So far, not much. But that situation may change.

MP: What do's and don'ts from your document apply to pitching bloggers? What else should PR people keep in mind?

SCHINDLER: I suppose it depends on the nature of the blog, the nature of the pitch, and the agenda of the blogger. Frankly, it hadn't occurred to me that PR people might pitch bloggers, though I suppose it makes sense that they'd consider doing so.

If the blog is about products or services (such as a "here's news that can help librarians," which I think lii.org runs or used to run), then I would expect the rules to be the same as in Care & Feeding. Only with a bit more gentleness, because a lot of bloggers don't know what to expect from a PR person; maybe it'd help to put extra effort into being clear what you're asking for or offering. Some may be naive (a fact I'm a little nervous to point out to ruthless PR people) and thus be a bit too responsive to shady PR offers ("we'll fly you to Bermuda for a personal demo...") -- which goes back to that issue of credibility.

And I suppose that you should think more about the nature of that offer; I can't imagine that an individual blogger would care about "an interview with a company executive" because -- if nothing else -- these folks don't know how to do an interview. As with any other publication you pitch, you need to spend some time looking at the stuff they do: is it "vendor announces something that sounds cool, here's a photo"? "here's my personal opinion after trying it"? I certainly wouldn't
assume they're open to loaners (or even know that loaned hardware is expected to be returned).

Plus, I think that any PR contact might piss off some bloggers. If they're doing this because they love ANYthing to do with movies (or astronomy, or mobile computing gizmos), and are flattered for the attention, the contact will work to your favor. But if they'd blogging because they want to be "independent, dammit!" they may be offended that someone is trying to suck up to them.

But you can't make assumptions, because a site like egullet.com (which may or may not be a blog, depending on your definition) has so many top food industry people contributing to it that it's considered a legitimate news source and ought to be approached with exactly the same professionalism applied to the top print pubs.

I suppose the summary of all that is: don't make assumptions.

MP: Is it taboo to call a blogger?

SCHINDLER: I think it'd be a little weird. Certainly unexpected. I suppose it depends on the circumstances, but I would find it surprising in a negative sense -- the way I'd be both freaked and impressed if a PR person called me at home on a Saturday. Anybody who's good at blogging (enough so to attract the attention of a PR person) is inherently going to be an "online" person rather than a phone person, so I doubt it's as effective as an e-mail message.

MP: You write about reviewers in Care and Feeding. Is there a chance that well-read bloggers like Scoble will become the next Walter Mossberg? He doesn't seem to think so (neither do I).

SCHINDLER: There's always someone new working her way up the ranks, and often they're taking advantage of a new and untapped technology. (You could certainly find similarities in the rise of FM radio, for instance.)

It's entirely possible that the Next Walter Mossberg is blogging today. On the other hand, few bloggers are making a living at it (at least that I'm aware of -- I don't pretend to cover this area) and the Next Walter Mossberg is likely to be snapped up by a (probably online) computer news/etc. site with a Next Walter Mossberg salary.

I think you want me to say that bloggers are the next big thing, that'll change the whole notion of media. I think they have an effect -- and if it means that PR people recognize that it's no longer a matter of "call the usual suspects at the big publications and ignore the little guys" that's one of the better effects! But blogging won't replace traditional journalism.

Calacanis: Celeb Blogs to Top Most Others Within Two Years

Jason McCabe Calacanis is a veteran of the online and media worlds. In the late 1990’s he created the Silicon Alley Reporter, which quickly grew into a must-read. When the Internet industry consolidated he changed the online publication’s name to Venture Reporter and eventually sold it to Wicks Business Information, and began his next adventure – the Weblogs, Inc. Network, co-founded last fall with longtime friend Brian Alvey.

Weblogs, Inc. (WIN) is rolling out dozens of trade blogs across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product. The company’s properties include the popular Engadget, The RSS Weblog, Marc Cuban’s Blog Maverick, The Nanopublishing Weblog and high-profile conference Weblogs.

Micro Persuasion caught up with Calacanis recently via email for a quick interview to understand more about his company’s business model and what impact for-profit blogs might have on the PR community.

MP: Jason, on your site it says that Weblogs, Inc. is dedicated to creating trade blogs across niche industries and that these will eventually form a new layer on top of traditional business-to-business media. That sure sounds like Jupitermedia and Alan Meckler, a onetime client of mine and a friend of yours! Why does the business-to-business media world need such a layer and how does WIN fill that void?

CALACANIS: Alan is a friend, yes.

Alan, however is doing traditional journalism--we are doing blogs which are *not* journalism.

Also, Alan is doing tech only... we are doing all trade.

So, we're not more like Internet.com/Jupiter Media than we are like Ziff Davis or CNET--in other words not at all!

MP: Why do you feel traditional journalism- a field you were part of for many years - is broken?

CALACANIS: I think it is broken for two main reasons:

1. Consolidation.
2. Lack of transparency.

These two factors are causing the public to mistrust traditional journalist and media outlets so much that users are looking for source material and alternate voices.

In some ways the readers are becoming their own journalist.

MP: Is it difficult for your bloggers to get press credentials for the big events they blog?

Not at all.

We get asked to come.

Also, I know most of the folks running these shows so I make calls on behalf of them to the top people at these shows and discuss the value of us covering the event.

MP: WIN is the company behind Mark Cuban's popular Weblog. What is the future of celebrity blogging?

CALACANIS: The future of blogs is that celebrity/established bloggers will be 90-95% of the top 100 blogs in two years. Anyone who is on the list of top bloggers today should be prepared to get knocked down to the 200-500 slots when established players join the party.

That being said, being neck and neck with very established players is a very big deal.

MP: How will Weblogs Inc. and, all blogs for that matter, make money?

CALACANIS: Same way all publications and media outlets do...

1) Advertising
2) Subscriptions
3) Cross media products/licensing (i.e. A Boingboing.net print magazine, an Engadget.com TV show, a Buzzmachine Radio Show,. etc).

MP: OK, let's say traditional journalism is indeed broken. Does that mean traditional PR is broken too? Does the PR community yet grasp the impact of participatory journalism and blogs?

CALACANIS: I think PR people get blogs... PR people are like pornographers, they grok the technology early on because they can profit from it. Now, I'm not saying PR people are pornographers. :-)

MP: You have said that 80% of the people you meet do not know what blogs are. What will it take for blogs to go more mainstream? If no one knows about them now, why are they important?

CALACANIS: I would up that number to 95%. It is shocking.

My goal is to make Weblogs a mainstream.... I think Blogmaverick.com has educated more people as to what a blog is than anything that has happened to date. Blogmaverick.com is talked about on ESPN TV!

MP: What suggestions can you offer PR pros interested in either getting positive "coverage" from a Weblog or are interested in launching their own blogs?

CALACANIS: Nothing, except be supportive when bloggers have questions and maybe participate in the comments section of blogs.

Blogs in some ways are a problem for the PR industry because they are so transparent. PR people traffic in image, not reality. Blogs are reality, so PR people are going to need to "keep it real," as opposed to playing stupid games like giving exclusives, etc.

MP: What do the more popular bloggers feel about PR people?

CALACANIS: They hate them.... just like traditional journalists.

MP: What is your vision of the future of Weblogs and participatory journalism and the relationship between nanopublishing and the mainstream press?

CALACANIS: The mainstream press is going to take up blogging in many cases, and in others they will be referencing blogs on a regular basis. We've seen this story already... Matt Drudge was the one of the early bloggers (he hates to be called a blogger, but he's a blogger--get over it Matt).

A Bloggerside Chat with Feedster’s Devine Feedmaster, Betsy Devine

Feedster is one of the most powerful online tools available to PR pros interested in Micro Persuasion (integrating Weblogs into traditional campaigns). The search engine indexes over a million blog posts on an hourly basis. It is a powerful tool that can be used to monitor online discussions about clients, competitors and more.

Micro Persuasion recently conducted an email interview with Feedster’s Feedmaster, Betsy Devine. In the interview Ms. Devine discuses how PR pros can make best use of Feedster and how she goes about selecting the coveted “Feedster Feed of the Day.” You can read more about Feedster over at the Story of Feedster blog.

MP: How many blogs and/or feeds does Feedster now crawl? How does it differ from Google or Blogdex?

DEVINE: We have almost 600,000 feeds in our database - 582,236 as I write this - probably more when you read it. The great majority of those feeds come from people's personal Weblogs. Newsfeeds have just been taking off this past year, and corporate blogging is also on a steep uptrend.

Feedster is an RSS search tool, much more like Google than it is like Blogdex. Feedster is like Blogdex because we both look at blog data and metadata. Blogdex looks at what people are talking about by tracking the URLs they link to. Feedster looks at what people are talking about by tracking the words and phrases they use. People use Feedster to find blogs and newsfeeds that talk about stuff they care about.

Our most obvious use is a free "clipping service." You can run a fast Feedster search on your name or your product--find out what people are saying today, or what they were saying more than a year ago. You can subscribe to your favorite searches as RSS feeds or get them delivered by email if you prefer.

People use us to capture the sense of blogbuzz. You can use metadata to do some intriguing stuff--for example, in December, 2003, we were tracking what people said about "Saddam Hussein" in English, in French, in German, in Spanish, etc.

So I guess I could sum up the difference between Feedster and Blogdex this way--if you want to know what's hot, check the links at Blogdex. If you want to know what people say about stuff that matters to *you*, use Feedster search.

MP: Every day you select one blog and/or site to feature as the Feed of the Day (FOTD). What makes a good FOTD?

DEVINE: I look for the "Wow!" sites--something timely or new or unusual and of high quality. I want Feedster users to keep on clicking that FOTD link every day, with a feeling of anticipation. I rarely pick a blog that's already famous--something like Scobleizer--because people don't need me to point them to Scobleizer. On the other hand, when Robert Scoble came out with Channel 9--it made Feed of the Day because it was excellent but not yet a brand name.

I have a long list of cool sites I want to pick someday, but I still check out a wide range of bloggers and search feeds every morning in case there's some great new thing that isn't on the list. Then, if I didn't discover some feed just has to be chosen *today*, I start hunting around in my list.

I test feeds with a "Yes" question and a "No" question. Does this feed have a good recent top post? (The answer has to be yes.) Is this feed very similar to some recent pick? (The answer has to be no.) When a good feed passes that test, it's Feed of the Day.

MP: What is the mix between homegrown feeds you select and "corporate"-sponsored feeds? Are you increasingly seeing more of the latter?

DEVINE: Most feeds are the homegrown love children of one person. (Ow, mixed metaphors.) Newsfeeds and blogs by paid writers are newer and rarer. How much rarer? It's rising fast, but I'd guess maybe 1% of the total. Here's a feedsterized justification of that guess: When Google filed its IPO, just about every pundit or bizblog talked about it--of course, a lot of homegrown bloggers did as well. On May 1 and 2 Feedster indexed about 270,000 posts. Of these, only 3,500 mentioned Google.

So, even though I pick more homegrown bloggers than corporate feeds, the disproportion out there is even bigger.

MP: Are you seeing an influx in pitches from PR pros? If so, what kind of advice can you offer to PR people who yearn to have their site earn an FOTD distinction?

DEVINE: Yes--I'm seeing more pitches from all kinds of people--and that's great. The more suggestions I get to go look at new sites, the more interesting feeds I have to choose from.

The basic test for a possible FOTD winner: a site we'd like to show somebody else, right now. Just about any other rule I can think of has been broken by some former Feed of the Day.

One unbreakable rule: the site can't be feed of the day if it has no (RSS) feed. I once got a pitch for a non-blog website promoting a small-town store. The site was cute, but even if it had been ten times as cute as it was, it had no feed.

So, if you know a site that ought to be Feed of the Day, just send me the URL--plus maybe a few sentences on what makes it special.

MP: How might PR pros use Feedster as search tool?

DEVINE: I've been very impressed by the ways webbiz people use Feedster searches for their own PR. Amy Wohl preps for speeches by subscribing to Feedster searches on her topic.

Ross Karchner tracks his product's name in Feedster because he can respond quickly "to feedback, complaints, and criticism earned me a lot of early good will and word of mouth."

Stuart Henshall uses Feedster search to get back up to speed on his hot topics after a vacation--it's also a good way to get in the swing with new interests.

PR pros could use Feedster to measure their success. For example, if 10 blogs mentioned "gazingas" on May 1 but 10,000 blogs mentioned "gazingas" on June 1, that's useful to know if you do PR for gazingas. Rick Heller did some excellent measurement work using Feedster search in the early primary season.

MP: How might Feedster work in conjunction with Google?

DEVINE: Definitely, use Google as well as Feedster. Google's data tends to be older than Feedster's--they crawl most blogposts within a month after they publish--but Google searches the static web in addition to what Feedster covers. I subscribe to both Google Alerts and Google News Alerts. If something gets out there in Google, it's really public--so I want to know about it when it happens.

A Q&A with Rex Hammock on Bush, Blogs and PR

Rex Hammock is president of Hammock Publishing, Inc., a Nashville, Tenn.-based custom publisher of magazines, newsletters and digital media for corporate and association clients nationwide. A former advertising and public relations executive, Hammock spent three years in Washington, D.C. as a press secretary for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Today he is probably best known as the author of the popular rexblog, which focuses on magazines, the magazine industry and custom publishing.

In February, Hammock was invited to participate in a private meeting with President George W. Bush that included other small business owners. The meeting was off limits to the press, but Rex provided a first-hand account on his Weblog, which generated quite a stir in the media.

In an email interview for Micro Persuasion, Hammock discusses the Bush meeting, his thoughts on Bush and Kerry’s campaign Weblogs, the interplay between magazines and the Web, the impact of participatory journalism on public relations and more.

MP: Recently you participated in a meeting with President Bush on small business that was off limits to the press and then blogged it. Do you feel that you were selected because you are a prominent blogger read by media pros? Is it possible that the President had a message he wanted to get across in a relatively controlled environment?

HAMMOCK: The White House knew I was a small business owner and that, since I was suggested to them by NFIB, the 600,000-member small business association, they merely knew that I would be a good representative of a small business point-of-view on the specific issue the President was focused on that afternoon: the effort to make permanent a provision of his tax plan that relates to capital investments made by small businesses. Beyond that, no one at the White House knew I was a blogger. One person may have known my company works with NFIB in publishing its magazine, but even they did not think of me as a journalist or even as a publisher on that occasion.

MP: Your blog post following the Bush meeting sounds like participatory journalism. Why did you choose to blog it? Were you discouraged or even encouraged by the White House to blog it?

HAMMOCK: I view blogging as simply the current version of an ageless tradition of story-telling. When I've tried to describe this phenomenon in "media terms" for the past several years, I've used the phrase "conversational media." I am an avid reader of early American history, which, by the way, comes in handy if one of the magazines you publish is about early American history, so I appreciate the rich texture and vivid color that can be added to a historian's work if he or she has access to a wide variety of personal accounts of an event.

Again, the White House neither encouraged or discouraged me, but (and I haven't mentioned this before because I just recalled it) one of the staffers asked me if I would be willing to talk with a reporter who wanted to ask me a few questions. I said, "sure," but then in a few moments, the staffer came back and said the reporter didn't need to see me. While I didn't ask permission to record on my blog all that I would have been willing to tell that reporter, I "assumed" their eagerness to let me talk with a reporter was an implied permission to share what went on in the meeting. I'll admit also, that I feared that if I asked permission to blog the meeting, the request would have gotten hung up in red-tape. Better in this case, I felt, to get my hand slapped later than to ask permission. Now that I think about it, maybe I WAS thinking of myself as a citizen journalist.

MP: Do you think the President of the United States gets blogging and participatory journalism? Did you mention to him that you are a revered blogger with five readers?

HAMMOCK: With him, I inflated my readership to ten. No, blogging never came up and I feel rather confident in guessing the President doesn't "get" blogging. At the same time, I'm nearly positive he "gets" participatory journalism as it is displayed in the phenomenon of talk radio or letters to the editor or town-hall meetings.

MP: What do you think of the Bush campaign blog? Think he reads it?

HAMMOCK: I hope he's too busy being leader of the free world to read it. When my blog post about the meeting was reported the next morning on the front of Washingtonpost.com (they must read Jeff Jarvis' Weblog), there was a while there when I thought I might be in hot-water with the White House or my friends at NFIB who suggested my name. It was a relief when I saw the campaign's Weblog pointing to my blog with some positive remarks.

I think both campaigns do a good job of using the conventions of blogging: lots of links, reverse chronology ascending (or would that be descending, I never have figured out what those mean in the context of a web page list) posts, RSS feeds. Frankly, PR folks in corporate America could view either one of the campaign's websites as best-practice models of how to pull together almost every web-based tool and trick imaginable under a fairly cohesive, easily-navigated umbrella. Both blogs allow the engaged supporter (or opponent) to see the campaigns real-time reaction to unfolding events.

That said, I think the Bush campaign Weblog is not in the same league with the Kerry blog. First off, I'm not a big fan of anonymous Weblogs and the Bush campaign Weblog is. Kerry's campaign blog is run by Dick Bell who I assume is a real person as he attended the first Bloggercon. Also, the Kerry blog allows comments and the Bush blog does not. I don't necessarily think comments would add much in terms of quality insight to the Bush blog, but it would display a confidence that is missing by not allowing them

MP: Why stick with print media (e.g. custom publishing) rather than go to all blogs all the time, like Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton have done?

HAMMOCK: Funny you should ask. I poured heart and soul and capital (mine and others) into developing a conversational media platform for a website called smallbusiness.com. The content was all user-generated. Frankly, it is a precursor to blogging and in many respects a great alternative to a blog for someone who merely wants a means to share their insight or knowledge about a narrow topic.

But that whole dot.com crash thing happened and while the website and URL remain, our business failed. In the coming months, I believe you will see it slowly reemerge with blog-like features as a core component. I'm not ready for any official announcements, however.

MP: In a public relations sense, is there anyone who shouldn't have a blog? How do you feel about corporate blogging - official and unofficial?

HAMMOCK: Probably there are more companies and other entities that should not have a blog than should. A bad blog is frankly worse that no blog. I think, however, that the conventions of Weblogs that I mentioned earlier will be incorporated into the corporate communications areas of a company's website.

For CEOs who are extroverted, opinionated and passionate (and can write with a voice) I would argue that spending a big chunk of time blogging, even if behind a firewall to an internal audience only, would be time well spent...better surely than sitting through endless meetings.

MP: What is the impact of participatory journalism on custom publishing, the magazine industry overall and PR?

HAMMOCK: I think magazine publishers (including those of us who focus on the custom niche) will be slow to embrace a culture of conversation and participation with readers. It's ironic, however, as there are some tremendous examples of magazine-organized special events and conventions that are organized and branded by magazines. However, it won't be long before the media companies that today own the world's major media platforms will find a way to monetize whatever attracts and retains the attention of individuals.

PR, however, stands to see a bigger impact from a world in which everyone has, at least in theory, a platform to communicate his or her point of view. Where once, an entity was dependent upon the news media or paid advertising to present its side of an issue, today, everyone can refer the world (or the few individuals interested in the issue) to the web.

Again, the place to watch the future unfold in this coming phenomenon is on the presidential campaign websites where each candidate has a team in place to instantly "de-bunk" any negative news from any source. As newspapers offer blog-like comments at the bottom of their stories, having a PR approach that encourages the real-voice involvement in the conversation will radically change the way PR is practiced from when I used to be a member of PRSA a couple decades ago and put APR behind my name.

MP: Why should the next Bloggercon be held in Nashville?

HAMMOCK: That wasn't my idea. It was a suggestion of a blogger from New York, Robert Cox, who discovered while planning a family reunion that Nashville was an easy place to reach from lots of different places around the country. My blogging about Nashville and Bloggercon was merely a welcoming endorsement of his suggestion. Sort of like when we say down south, ya'll come.

MP: Finally, Rex I am only in my thirties, but I'm already going blind from reading the rexblog. Can you up the picas a bit?

HAMMOCK: Wow. I was trying to find a way to make it smaller. Isn't there some command on your browser that makes the type bigger? Perhaps because I wear thick reading glasses, I've been lulled into thinking it was big. I'll have my development team look into that.

Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta on How Blogs Amplify Traditional PR

Shortly after this blog launched I received an intriguing email from Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta about how his company fused blog PR and traditional media relations to help build brand awareness. Rich agreed to take this to the next step with an email interview, resulting in the second in my ongoing series of Micro Persuasion’s “Bloggerside Chats” with CEOs, bloggers, PR professionals and journalists.

Prior to joining Topix, Rich held a variety of senior roles at Netscape/America Online, including including Director of Engineering for Netscape Search, AOL Music, and AOL Shopping. He joined Netscape/AOL upon its purchase of NewHoo/The Open Directory Project, where he was Co-founder & CEO. By the way, Topix has a great page to keep up with PR industry news.

[Note: Topix.net is not a client of CooperKatz & Company, where I am employed.] If there’s someone else you think that my readers (journalists, marketing and PR pros) would benefit in hearing from, please drop me an email.

Q) Rich, what is the long term plan for Topix.net? And what did you learn from your days with NewHoo/Netscape about running an Internet business in what I am calling the Internet renaissance?

SKRENTA: There's way too much information on the net for humans to make sense of, so automation is needed. In the search engines this takes the form of clever algorithms to help users locate relevant websites quickly.

Topix is applying search engine and AI algorithms to the discovery and delivery of news. Since news is an editorial product, there's even more opportunity to create differentiated products than with a web index or catalog.

Running an Internet business provides the opportunity to track business metrics in real time at a very detailed level. There's a lot in common between ecommerce and direct marketing. You have to know the right questions to ask, do proper A/B studies to determine what works and what doesn't, and let the market tell you where to take your product rather than relying on personal guesses.

Q) Your site provides local news for every ZIP code in the country, more than 30,000 cities and towns in all. And your system is completely automated. Some newspapers, like in Spokane, are enlisting bloggers to help them cover local news. What role do bloggers and personal journalists play on your site? Do you have plans to "slurp" their RSS feeds?

SKRENTA: Blogs take several forms. Some are heavy on quoting and linking; for those, we'd rather index the original sources directly than through a blog. Others write high-quality article-length original material; those are the kinds of sources we'd like to add to our system.

Currently weblogs make up just 1% of the sources we are crawling. But I'm very excited about participatory journalism. If blogging helps folks get out and write about their community, that's great content being generated at the hyperlocal level.

Q) What are your most trafficked topics/zip codes?

SKRENTA: About 50% of our traffic is on the local pages vs. the subject pages. The traffic is spread pretty evenly across the site though. Traffic on local pages pretty much corresponds to population density.

Q) In your email to me you said that the blogosphere is making Internet PR easier and more cost effective now than it was five years ago and that you started Topix'net's campaign with single IM to an influential blogger. Who did you start with and why? Why a blogger and not say, John Markoff of The New York Times?

SKRENTA: We started with Mike Masnick of TechDirt. I've been reading TechDirt daily for years and thought Topix.net was on-topic for his site and that he'd be interested in hearing about it. This was a pre-launch, so we were purposely testing the waters with savvy net-heads before approaching the mainstream press. We wanted to get feedback from a more forgiving crowd to help us refine our message before going to the next step.

Mike wrote up a nice entry about us, and it spawned a halo of attention and linking. It was a perfect soft-launch for us.

Q) After your launch it sounds like you moved into a more traditional media relations campaign. You have had extensive coverage in eWeek and The Seattle Times and elsewhere. Did you simply work with bloggers just for the launch or did you continue the dialog? Did big media pick up on what the bloggers wrote? Do you use bloggers to seed stories into the general press?

SKRENTA: We've definitely continued the dialogue. What we found was that after our mainstream PR launch the blogs provided a second boost of traffic. The Mercury News, Seattle Times, etc. coverage was great. But each time an article came out in the mainstream press, the blogs would augment the effect by focusing even more attention on the stories we were getting. It amplified the value of the traditional PR effort that we did.

We can also more finely tailor announcements to bloggers that cover a specific area of interest. With a publication like a metro newspaper, you need a big story to get their attention. Everything we do isn't necessarily worthy of that kind of coverage, but there are often interest groups that do like to hear about smaller developments.

An example is our expansion from 3,000 to 6,000 sources. This had a lot of interest for the research librarian community, and we got coverage on Gary Price's ResourceShelf.com and in Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz.com. When we announced our integration of the commercial KeepMedia story archives, on the other hand, we were covered by Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org.

To do this right you need to know who's writing about what, and why. It's very focused PR instead of a shotgun approach.

Q) What is your vision of the future of participatory media/blogging?

SKRENTA: The blogosphere is a great platform for netizens to conduct public dialogue. We haven't decided how we're going to best include all this material in Topix.net, so we're proceeding conservatively, adding sources that meet our editorial review standards for article-length posts.

Q) What's the best piece of advice you can offer other CEOs and marketing/PR execs interested in working with personal journalists? What tips can you share?

SKRENTA: It's essential to understand what individual bloggers write about and what angle of your pitch might be most interesting to them.

Also, it's helpful to have your own blog, so you can participate in the conversation. The blogosphere doesn't like megaphone-PR pointed at them; they'd rather have a conversation with you. This can be a great source of feedback from your most influential users.

Q) Is there anything else you feel my readers (PR pros and journalists) should know about what I call "micro persuasion" (e.g. using blogs and participatory journalism to convey key messages)?

SKRENTA: The net isn't a one-way broadcast medium. That's not only because it can talk back -- it's also because there are so many narrow interest groups that a single message isn't appropriate to send out to every participant on the net.

Companies have an opportunity to involve net users in the development of their messaging and their products. Companies often conduct small focus groups to find out what users think about their stuff; but with bloggers, you have a large, ongoing, literate group willing to give you high-quality feedback in real time about what you're doing. Keep them informed, and listen to what they have to say.

Q&A with Robert Scoble on Blogging, Media and PR

Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist, Platform Evangelism at Microsoft, pens Scobleizer, one of the Web’s most influential blogs. He has thousands of readers and is frequently quoted in the tech and business press. (Recommended reading: recent articles on Scoble in the New York Post and Seattle P-I).

Scoble has been blogging for three years and before that helped plan conferences at Fawcette Technical Publications, and was director of marketing for UserLand Software, a developer of Weblog and content management software. Previously he was a sales support manager at NEC.

Scoble has been involved in online communities for more than a decade. He says he has been fiddling around with personal computers since the late 1970s, when his dad bought home an Apple II. He grew up about a mile from Apple Computer's headquarters in Silicon Valley.

Recently I conducted an email interview with Robert on his experiences working with PR pros. This is the first in series of "Bloggerside Chats" I plan to run on this blog. If there's someone you feel my readers would enjoy hearing from, please send a note my way. The full Q&A follows.

Robert, in the past year or two your Scobleizer has grown quite a bit. Are you now pitched by PR people and, if so, what about? Are you ever interrupted by phone pitches during business hours?

SCOBLE: Occasionally, yes. Mostly they're not Microsoft-based PR folks and they just want to make me aware of their products. Sometimes folks inside Microsoft will see that I wrote about their teams and will give me more information. The Windows Media team, for instance, brought over a case of devices and let me play with them so that I'd be better informed about what they are doing.

How well do you feel the PR community understands blogging/news aggregating?

SCOBLE: Some people really understand it very well. Renee Blodgett, for instance, runs PR for NewsGator, which is a RSS News Aggregator that plugs into Outlook.

Others are outwardly afraid of it. At the Demo Conference a PR professional told me that bloggers freak her out. Why? Because PR professionals are paid to control a company's message. If you have all of your employees blogging there's a fear that there will be a lack of control.

Do you think PR pros approach bloggers like yourself the same way they might approach a journalist? How should PR pros approach bloggers and what should they expect from their efforts to influence them?

SCOBLE: Some are now, but mostly they don't even know that we exist, and if they do know, they assume that because we have small audiences that we aren't powerful. For instance, I have only 4000 readers. Not powerful, right? Especially in a world of Dan Gillmors and Walt Mossbergs. But, the weblog world is distributed and efficient at passing information around.

What do I mean? Well, two weeks ago we launched Channel9 and already we've had several hundred thousand visits.

Buzz Bruggeman, who is CEO for ActiveWords, told me that he was written up in USA Today. Got a really great review. The kind that PR professionals kill for. And he got 40 downloads of his product. But when I linked to him he got several hundred downloads. Lesson? Don't underestimate the weblog world.

What journalistic ethics do you feel bloggers should abide by, if any, since they're not actually journalists?

SCOBLE: You only get one chance at keeping your site credible. If you lie to your readers it'll be quickly figured out.

The rest of it? Be smart. Read my Corporate Weblogger Manifesto. That covers the basics.

What is the future of micromedia? Do you feel that blogs and participatory journalism will one day replace mainstream media in the future?

SCOBLE: No, but it will change. Why? What happens during the next big earthquake, for instance, in California? Will the hundred or so journalists that work for the San Jose Mercury News be able to cover the story very well? No. There are thousands of people who live in San Jose who are bloggers. The trick for the mainstream media is to figure out how to work with bloggers. Already some of them are doing just that. Many journalists are reading blogs to gather news. Many others are keeping blogs themselves and building ties to the community.

But, will I replace Walt Mossberg? Heck no. I am not able to cover the industry objectively the way he does. I also don't have a content distribution channel (which is exactly what the Wall Street Journal is) that'd get my content to millions of people. I don't harbor thoughts of putting Walt or other journalists out of work.

What is your interaction like with Microsoft's corporate communications department and/or their PR firms? Do they ever critique your posts or even pitch you? What about competitors?

SCOBLE: They are friendly to me and trying to figure out the new world. They don't need to pitch me. I work hard to understand what Microsoft is doing and it's part in the world. Usually the people who pitch me are other employees who are simply excited by what they are working on. The SPOT watch team, for instance, contacted me one day and said "come over and check out what we're doing." Lots of other teams have done the same thing, particularly now that Channel9 has had some success.

Recently you wrote a post about persuasion. How do you feel about PR pros launching corporate blogs to persuade public opinion? What tips can you offer PR pros considering launching blogs for internal/external clients?

SCOBLE: Be careful about doing it. Read that post carefully. You'll see that there's two philosophies on how to persuade. One works online with people who can research what you're saying and can talk to each other.

One doesn't. Why is that? Read that rant and find out why. If you blog make sure you do it to become an authority on the topic you're writing about. If you see it as another way to post press releases you'll do yourself and your company a lot of harm.

What is the impact RSS on PR and on blogging?

SCOBLE: In any population of, say, 1000 people, there are 15 who are just ultra knowledgeable, passionate, and are seen as authorities that the rest of the population looks up to. For instance, how big is the US? How many Walt Mossbergs are there?

These people are connectors. Influentials. The press. The analysts. Now, how can they get information most efficiently? Email? Nope. Ever look at a journalist's in box? Ask Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, for instance, to show you his inbox (he even pleas with PR professionals to only send him relevant emails, read this).

The Web? Nope. Think about it. You're a journalist or an influential. You need to watch 100 companies (and some companies, like Microsoft, are really more like 100 companies in of themselves -- there are entire Web sites, for instance, like WatchingMicrosoftLikeaHawk.com or ActiveWin or Microsoft Monitor that keep tabs on Microsoft). Can you do that efficiently with a Web browser No. Why not?

Well, most companies don't publish new info every day. With RSS I only need to read a site when they actually publish something. The SPOT watch team, for instance, has only had a few times that they need to communicate with the world. Why should I visit every day with a Web browser? Why should someone like Walt Mossberg?

Why did you choose to launch an aggregation blog?

SCOBLE: Because I was watching 1430 RSS feeds (I couldn't have done that if I only had a Web browser) and I was finding fascinating things that I wanted to make sure the world saw. Most people can't keep up with 1400 news sources (in my RSS aren't just blogs, but news sources like the BBC, the New York Times, CNET, etc) but most people can watch a single blog that serves as an aggregation point.
That's why I did it, and it was very popular. I've temporarily stopped doing it because of copyright concerns, but it'll be back soon in a new form.

Finally, how does your blog synergize with Microsoft's marketing efforts to energize the developer community behind .NET and Longhorn?

SCOBLE: Oh, I don't really see myself as synergizing with Microsoft's marketing efforts, but generally I try to make my readers aware of important things that are happening. I also point at things our competitors are doing that are cool, and point at things that I think my readers should know. I meet a lot of really interesting people in the industry and get to see a lot of technology in its early stages, so I try to share my insights with my readers. That's why a blog is different from marketing. It can help marketing, sure, but if you really want an audience you better serve your readers first and any corporate concerns second.