Micro Persuasion

An All Too Convenient Truth: Many Marketers Pollute the Web

Photo credit: Copenhagen Industry Pollution #1 by Miguel A. Lopes "Migufu"

Earth Day is around the corner and a lot of marketers are thinking about the sustainability of our planet. Some are recognizing that doing good also helps business. Edelman's Good Purpose study found that 73% of consumers are prepared to pay more for environmentally friendly products.

However, it's not just the environment that is endangered by toxins. The atmosphere we breathe online is too is being threatened by pollution - from marketers. The all too convenient truth is that it's very easy for advertisers to pollute the web with their garbage. Most often, that's not their intent. But it's the end result and it's reaching an epidemic proportion. Now business needs to take the same approach online as it has done offline through corporate social responsibility (Jason Calacanis echoed a similar theme recently.)

First let's look at the the obvious ways marketers poison the web. These all intend to game the system ...

• Spam: 94% of all email is spam (Postini)
• Splogs: 53% of all blog pings is spam, including 64% of those in English (UMBC)
• Click Fraud: Increased last year by 15% (Click Forensis)

Still, there's more. In subtle ways marketers are contaminating the Internet without even knowing it by spewing millions of meaningless messages across thousands of sites. This may be contributing to the slow down. They're not adding value to your experience or working to help you meet your goals in a very meaningful way.

Consider these popular techniques ...

• Banner Ads: A lot of money is going here but click-through rates remain abysmal and their overall branding value is being questioned. Many of them just litter the web and get in the way of what you want to do. Eye-tracking studies in the past have revealed "banner blindness."
• Social Network Advertising: eMarketer predicts advertising on social networks will reach $2.2 billion this year. However, traditional display approaches to date have not performed. As Ian Schaffer from from Deep Focus noted, marketers need to dig in and figure out how to make the experience better. This means what does work is creating authentic content, widgets/applications and more that people pull because they add value to the community. (Note: MySpace, a major social network, is an Edelman client.)
• Social Media Optimization: This needs to be watched like a hawk. As I have said before, if you participate and add value you are rewarded with Google Juice - and so much more. If you just set up sites and spam social nets to get links, then I am sorry, you're bad.

Despite all the money that's flowing online, most marketers completely miss the boat on what the web really can do for them. As I have talked about before, the Internet isn't just a communications medium. It works best when it's used as a platform for open collaboration. This means taking a PR-centric approach.

This means companies and consumers need to partner toward shared outcomes. This can be as simple as "we want to be entertained" to "we want to find the best world-changing idea." The latter is what American Express will unleash again later this year with its Members Project.

The web is facing it's own global warming crisis as marketers continue to pollute it. Consumers are voting with their clicks and eyeballs by engaging with authentic content that adds value, while ignoring the rest. That's good news that shows maybe we'll solve this crisis, even as business continues to tackle the larger issues that impact our planet.

Later:: Bryan Person asks if clueless PR pitches are part of the problem. Heck ya.

Historically, Most Online Communities Haven't Stuck

The following is cross-posted on a new blog I am contributing to called Authenticities. It's the official blog of my employer, Edelman Digital, which we officially unveiled yesterday.

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We're barely into the second decade of the the Net's development. Unlike the first ten years when corporations built the web, over the next decade the Internet will largely be created by the people for the people via online communities.

This means that the phrase "public relations" is (finally) taking on a literal meaning. It is our industry's charter to help clients navigate online communities and build authentic, meaningful relationships with their stakeholders. However, the challenge is if you blink, the entire vista will change.

Most marketers prefer to gravitate to the big hubs. These include Edelman clients like MSN Spaces and MySpace, as well as Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn and a host of others that have lots of eyeballs. Any of these sites can serve as strong venues for marketing programs.

What we take for granted, however, is that they will be around in the long term. On the Internet, churn is constant.

Historically, online communities have perpetually come and go. The Internet Archive amber is littered with fossilized communities that once dominated, much the way the T-Rex roamed during the Mesozoic era. These include former stalwarts such as Angelfire, The Well, TheGlobe.com, GeoCities, Tripod and Friendster.

Only a handful of community sites over the last dozen years have had staying power. If you study them you'll find moats to protect them from competitors and fickle users. These barriers to entry include peer-to-peer commerce (in the case of Edelman client eBay), robust user reviews (Amazon.com) and deep entrenchment in vertical markets (BlackPlanet.com).

The online universe is about to grow even more complex, making it harder for some sites to maintain their dominance. Over the next several years social networking and community will become less about specific venues and more of a river that runs through the entire web. As Cisco's Dan Scheinman says, community will define not only how content is created, but also how it is consumed.

This means that although it will get harder for marketers to achieve scale, community engagement will become a much more efficient and effective way to engage an audience. This requires a shift in thinking though as community becomes like running water. The takeaway here is never bet against change - it's constant on the web.

Comparing SMM SEO and PR Tactics is Pure Poppycock

Last week I wrote about how some in the search engine optimization profession (not all) are openly espousing how to basically turn social media sites into heat seeking missiles for Google Juice - and not much else. Apparently there is a whole cottage industry called "Social Media Marketing" (SMM) that analyzes how to use social media for SEO purposes. That should give anyone pause.

Given my accusations, immediately and understandably many commenters jumped on the public relations industry for also trying to use social media to pull the wool over people's eyes. That's complete poppycock. There is no comparison. The reason is that over the last several years the PR industry has largely learned its lessons - often the hard way.

Call me an optimist, but in 2008 most in the PR business take a clean approach to social media. A key reason is that when our clients engage, their participation needs to be transparent for it to be credible. If they fail at following the common law of the community, which has happened in the past, you'll be the first to know about it. You can't always say the same so-called SMM SEO types. Their work is sometimes far harder to sleuth.

I want to discuss this a bit more by addressing some of the comments about PR that came back in response to my post...

Danny Sullivan: "the next time you're dealing with some client asking for visibility, just tell them that hey, if they have a great brand, good PR will be a byproduct."

Positive PR is definitely an outcome of good products, but not always. Public relations professionals play a key role in helping brands identify their core genius and to tell that story. The ultimate arbiter here is the public - either directly or through the media.

We always need to convince people of a product or service's worth, no matter how good it is. If we're encouraging brands to participate in social networks, blogs and social bookmark sharing sites then the bar is even higher. They must add their value before anyone will care.

Social Media Marketing through SEO, on the other hand, often aims to game the system for Google's sake. It can be difficult for someone to discern the role it played in generating Google Juice.

Aaron Wall: "Since when is a PR guy concerned about how wrong it is to game media? I mean...I spoke at a PR agency once, and their walls were plastered with framed media articles that favored their clients. How is that any different then a blogger linking to my content because they like it?"

Public relations professionals - the ones who do their job well at least - never game the media. In fact, every journalist would take issue with that statement. In the social web, the bar is even higher. If good content attracts legit blog links, then that's a completely valid approach.

Chris Kieff: I think the PR industry is just as dirty as the SEO industry. For every 8 of us good ones in both PR and SEO there are 2 lousy ones who give us all a bad name.

Every profession has people who are white hats and black hats. However, my contention is that it's very hard to uncover the nefarious SEO types while it's pretty easy to do so in PR. Fear of humiliation is acting as a deterrent in PR.

Andy Beal: "What about the multitude of PR firms that flood social media with company profiles of their clients–all with the sole intent of building their brand recognition. They want to 'appear' as if they’re engaging their customers, but really they’re just jumping in so they can figure out how to push their brand on users."

I believe these people will all be exposed if they are not adding value - period. We (the community and the industry) need to police these egregious programs, no matter where they come from. And that's happening.

Book Excerpt: Online Marketing Heroes

On March 10 WIley & Sons is going to publish a new book by Michael Miller called Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus. The book features interviews with a host of digital marketing experts, including yours truly.

Wiley has graciously approved the posting of the chapter that features an interview with me. It covers my background, thoughts on blogging, PR, digital marketing and my work at Edelman. You can download it here as a PDF.

Sound bites...

* Technology works best when it takes on a do-it-yourself character—and when it becomes free

• Google’s free search has replaced the PR professional’s traditional paid research tools.

• Generation Y is abandoning earlier technology, such as email, in favor of text messaging, instant messaging, and social network communication

• To take advantage of social networking, figure out where you andyour community overlap and how they want to communicate

• Going forward, the concept of community is the common element running through all online media and technologies

An Experiment in Lifesourcing

What if you could tap into your social net (or even strangers) and ditch time intensive information tasks that you have to do in favor of the higher value stuff that you're best at? After an experiment in "lifesourcing" some work to India, I believe such a scenario might become common in the business world or even more widely - one day. Here's my story and where I think this could lead.

I first heard about lifesourcing - e.g. personal outsourcing - last summer when I read Tim Ferriss' runaway bestseller, The Four Hour Workweek. His mantra is to free yourself up to do the stuff you and only you are best at. Seth Godin covers a similar theme in The Dip.

Though it's very early, my gut says that it's conceivable that as people cope with the Attention Crash, they will zero in on their core competencies and seek to offload the rest in order to become more productive and remain competitive in the workplace. There are several forces at work here: the massive and independent-thinking Gen Y workforce, big time disruptions in IT, the growing ubiquity of social networking and peer-to-peer platforms and the rise of a giant talent pool in Chindia.

Back when I read Tim's book, I didn't see an immediate fit for lifesourcing in my day-to-day as an executive at Edelman. In fact, given that so much of what I deal with is confidential client information, it's darn near impossible.

Still, I remained extremely intrigued to run a pilot. It seems to bridge to a growing "digital nomadism" movement. For more, check out what my former colleague Mike Elgan and folks like Lea Woodward and Skellie are writing about.

My blog seemed like a natural place to dabble in lifesourcing since since pretty much everything I do here eventually enters the public domain. So, on Tim's recommendation, I posted a job on Elance. I searched for someone who could take my raw reader survey data and convert it into percentages and nice charts. This was a rather trivial assignment. However, for an Excel-challenged dude like me it was a major timesaver.

Even though the job was small, I was stunned when dozens of bids flowed in within the first few hours. The bidders seemed extremely aggressive and hungry for the job. After 24 hours of fervent bidding, I selected Sri from India based on his feedback rating, correspondence, experience and price. I also selected him because I was eager test a project with someone based in India.

After some back and forth and a bit of clarification in what I was looking for, Sri got to work. The amazing thing is that almost all of his emails came during my workday, not his. Sri turned around the job quickly and professionally and it cost me all of $50 - the Elance minimum. (I will share the charts in a subsequent post.)

Granted, this was a very simple assignment that probably anyone (but me) can do in an hour or two. Still, I was impressed. And it gets me thinking about where this might go when you combine lifesourcing and social networking - especially if the costs come down.

Social networking and online real-time communication/collaboration tools are a way of life for many Gen Yers. They already use these systems to get stuff done both inside and outside the enterprise.

Over the next five years I believe that lifesourcing will become a core part of every social network, be it b2b or b2c. Like IM or corporate blogging, social lifesourcing will start as a bottom-up movement as workers tap into the Net to get work done in the most efficient way possible, no matter where these resources may be. A groundswell may build as word spreads and workers try hard to compete with those who are farming out work elsewhere.

Still, there are big pitfalls. It's a guarantee that companies will try to put the kibosh on such activities as their information seeps beyond their virtual walls. This is already happening on social networks. Many employees have water cooler groups on Facebook. Others are dabbling in using LinkedIn to get questions answered.

It's conceivable that these interactions will migrate from simple collaboration to peer-to-peer transactions over the next few years. The implications here - if this happens en masse - are huge. People will focus on their core competencies. This in theory will make everyone more productive and prosperous. However, it remains to be seen if this will become a mass trend given all the inherent risk.

SEO Shenanigans Pose a Clear and Present Danger to Social Media

As someone who reads a lot of blogs about search and social media (a term I am still not nuts about but has stuck), I have recently witnessed a disturbing trend. Some respected experts are advocating launching social media marketing programs solely for the purpose of influencing search engines, rather than with the intent of fostering collaboration and genuine communication.

This represents a clear and present danger to the fabric of the community. If you care about the social web, then you should be alarmed.

Search engine optimization (SEO) professionals of late seem poised to take over blogs, digg, StumbleUpon and other sites with a range of tactics, some legit, others more questionable with the intent of building Google Juice and nothing more. Read these blogs and you'll see it's often all they're talking about. I am not the only one out there who feels this way.

Consider some of the following blog posts that I found in my Google Reader database...

Boost Organic Results. Link Build with Social Media (Search Engine Watch)

The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing (Search Engine Land)

Building a Company With Social Media (Search Engine Land)

Realizing SEO benefits through blogging (HitTail)

How to Use Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis and Other Social Media Tools to Find New Clients, Make Money and Create the Lifestyle of Your Dreams (Conference)

To be clear, I do not object to the way that blogs, digg links and Wikipedia rank highly in search results. What does get me hot and bothered is when consultants and bloggers propose launching such an initiatives solely for influencing search. SEO, like word of mouth, should be a byproduct outcome, not a primary objective. Any brand that plays in this space should be aiming to create value. Do that and the other stuff will follow.

But the SEO shenanigans for the sake of SEO has to stop. If you're going to play in our sandbox, follow the community's (unwritten) rules.

Charting 2007's Three Big Web 2.0 Trends

"The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time." - Abraham Lincoln

Thinking about the future is fun. It's what I am paid to do. However, I never contemplate the days ahead without the context of the past. After all, the future is always grounded in history. That's why I have become a heavy user of Google Trends.

The tool is closest thing we have to a global rear-view mirror. Blog search and conversation charts only go so far. They capture what a small subset of the most vocal, tech-savvy users are saying. Search engines, on the other hand, show us what's on everyone's mind - including the giant underwater iceberg of silent users.

Like 2006, this was a big year for Web 2.0. Here are Google Trends charts I pulled looking at three broad 2007 Web 2.0 trends, along with my comments. I chose to focus here on broad trends, as opposed to the gyrations of individual sites, which always change with fickle users. (Micro blogging is an exception because the term is rarely used so I looked at Twitter instead.)

All of the data is global in scope and only as current as mid-December. Of course, all of this is just directional. Ideally, it would be great to cross-reference all of this with other sources, like Compete.com. Still, they do provide perspective.

Trend I: Social Networking

* Data: Searches for social networking and news volume both doubled in 2007. However, more recently, the volume has started to show some signs of weakness. Meanwhile, geographically, interest in social networking from India and Singapore is skyrocketing. Search volume for individual sites, like Facebook, appear to track the broader meme.

* Insight: Social networking is evolving from a group of sites into several competing platforms that power thousands of sites. Eventually, we won't think of social networks as sites but as a feature. This data might just be the first sign of such a progression.

Trend II: Micro Blogging

* Data: Micro blogging doesn't register on Google Trends, so I chose to compare Twitter and blogging (as opposed to "blogs" which is a much broader term). What's fascinating here is that searches for Twitter surpassed for "blogging" in April and never looked back. Meanwhile, news volume for the two are neck and neck. Twitter is particularly strong in Japan. That said, interest in micro blogging has dropped off dramatically this (nearly 50% off their peak in the spring).

* Insight: Blogging is work and the payoff (emotional or monetary) can be hard to come by, particularly for those of us who want to see a rapid return on our investment in time. Meanwhile, personal publishing is evolving because of the increasing sophistication of mobile devices and the Attention Crash. Micro blogging fosters connection with less work all while working well with mobile devices. Blogging remains important, however, as the traditional press rapidly embraced blogging, it has encouraged individual publishers to find new ways to spread their influence.

Trend III:: Web Applications

* Data: Google searches for web apps doubled in the second half of the year. That said they are dwarfed by stalwarts like Microsoft Office or Apple's iWork suite. Interest in Google Docs has flattened since they rolled out their presentation application. The US leads the way in web based applications.

* Insight: The search data seems to reflect what others have said - that web applications are not on most people's radar. This data is consistent with what Microsoft and Apple have said - people like their desktop apps. Web applications are in their infancy. It should be interesting to see if they will remain a niche category in the years ahead. The lack of the ubiquitous connectivity could be a major stumbling block.

The Moneyball Marketing Era

The conventional wisdom on Madison Avenue is that reach rules. In other words, in the digital realm you can't go wrong making a buy or launching a campaign on a site or social network that has scale. However, that's all going to change as money flows online, competition rises and marketers find they need to pay more to drive sales.

To cope, advertisers should adopt new digital media planning model. This one ignores common metrics like unique visitors, pageviews or even time spent in favor of more esoteric statistics like cost per action. We're entering the Moneyball Marketing Era - an age where some big online properties will suffer a slow death by a thousand cuts from tiny niche sites that deliver greater ROI.

Moneyball Marketing liberally borrows the concepts outlined in Michael Lewis' 2003 bestselling baseball book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. In the book, Lewis chronicles how the Oakland A's and its general manager Billy Beane were able to build a successful team in a rather unconventional way, all with a significantly smaller budget than rivals like the Yankees have.

Beane and his team eschewed conventional wisdom that dominated baseball for decades. Rather than selecting and evaluating players based on common statistics like home runs and runs batted in, the A's switched to a model that favors on-base percentage (how often a batter makes it to first) and slugging percentage (a way to measure a hitter's power). The end result is an elegant, efficient model that enabled the A's to get better players for less money. The methodologies described in Moneyball have since been adopted by dozens of contending teams and in some industries as well.

Here are three ways you can apply Moneyball Marketer in your organization today:

1) Become a Super Cruncher - Look beyond the common methods for evaluating media and identify more meaningful, perhaps esoteric statistics. For example, make a buy based on a site's ability to drive consumers to complete high value tasks.

2) Skip Reach, Go Niche - As hard as it is, try forgoing some of the larger sites in favor of emerging niche ones that deliver a higher percentage of your target. Work with them to create measurable, outside-the-box programs. For example, consider Takkle - an emerging social network focusing on high school sports.

3) Think Relationships, Not Impressions - The most successful companies in business today recognize that relationships rule. Consider launching programs that allow you to hone your relationships with narrow segments of your audience. Go beyond impressions.

Saturday Morning Streams

Jason Calacanis and Fred Wilson have started a new form of blogging that's more Twitter style. It consists of brief commentaries on a myriad of subjects. Here's my shot at it as I sit in a Starbucks with my iPhone waiting for my car to be serviced. Let me know if you like this approach. I will add links later on. 

My move to Wordpress is not progressing as quickly as I would like. The WP team is making a Herculean effort to maintain my permalinks. They are terrific to work with and I really appreciate their efforts. If I can't take my permalinks with me I will stick with Typepad.

The iPhone version of Typepad meanwhile is quite good. I hope WP gets a similar interface.

The age of Web 2.0 innocence is well behind us. Some say it ended when Flickr sold. I see the sale of YouTube as the marker. I miss the innocent days when money wasn't the big motivation. The mania feels very much like 1999 without inflated IPOs.

As more brands begin launching their own content sites they may find themselves competing with the media. The media companies should get in front of this by enabling brands to create content. Yahoo's brand universes follow this model. BTW we haven't heard much about these sites. I like the concept. 

The whole Joe Torre episode depresses me. The man gave the last 12 years to the Yanks and was very successful. He deserves better.

The iPhone sorely needs cut and paste. Cmon 1.1.2.

Very few community sites have had staying power over the years. Two that come to mind are iVillage and eBay. Many others have wilted.

There was just as much news from companies that did not participate in the Web 2.0 conference than those that did.

I hope Twitter doesn't sell anytime soon. Can they hold out? My gut says no.

Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft's eventual entry into the web based office wars could really replace most wikis. The versioning is quite good in these apps.

I am using Gmail for a big research project and it worked quite nicely as a database. I think a lot of people are overlooking how useful and versatile web mail is.

Most of the top podcasts on iTunes are dominated by the big media companies. They really did a great job embracing the technology.

Behavioral targeting is the big rage right now in online marketing. The challenge is that consumers are becoming more aware of the privacy implications.

Maybe I should try this blogging format more often! It fits my mobile lifestyle.

Replystreams: The Next Step for Lifestreams

Since my post about lifestreams last week I have been digging it a bit more and found there's an active community of people out there who are aggregating their bits into a single site. Rex is the latest to join the club. He also explains where this idea originated. So what's next for lifestreams? How about aggregating all of one's replies into a single site - yes, a replystream.

In about as long as it takes you to read this post, I was able to build a test replystream site again using Tumblr (you can also do this with Jaiku and many more sites). You can find my replystream at http://replies.steverubel.com. The page currently aggregates all @steverubel tweets from Twitter via Terraminds and in-bound links to this site from Technorati. Rather than syndicating the full text of a blog post, I am just rolling these up into a river of items that all link you back to the original content creator.

Here's a free idea for a smart developer/entrepreneur. We need a tool that will roll up one's lifestream and then thread the entire replystream underneath on a per-post basis. Then you can institute a smart contextual ad system that pays both the content provider and the replier. Oh and widgetize the entire product so it can go anywhere.

As content gets sliced and diced into thinner pieces that can fit anywhere, the greatest value will be created through smart aggregation. Take Dave Winer's NYTimesriver.com for example. That's what I learned during my few days playing with Tumblr. With everything living in RSS, aggregation can be pretty disruptive if you think about it. Just the ethical implications alone - yikes.

Identity Through Online Lifestreams

Over the last few months I have really changed how and where I create content. For a long time all of the action was here, on my blog. Today I am posting to Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter and Facebook. I also have tons of other less active accounts too - digg, Blogger, MySpace, YouTube, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, Jaiku, Pownce and on and on.

Where I will publish in a year's time is anyone's guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.

The problem here is that this has created dozens of online identities for me, a single individual. People who want to follow me need to pick their poison - this blog, Twitter, etc. I use each medium differently but what I hate about it is that I need to think about the information I want to publish and the venue that's best for both me and my audience.

I finally have honed in on what I think is a viable solution. Enter Tumblr. This simple, free service allows anyone to create a tumblelog - which is basically a bare bones blog. Gina Trapani recently explained how to set one up.

Tumblr is unique in that it can ingest any RSS feeds that you throw at it and aggregate all by date - what Dave Winer so eloquently calls a river of news. And since RSS is the common denominator that unites most communities, the end result is an online Lifestream - a place for all of your stuff. (Josh Bancroft was the first to come up with the idea.)

I have set up a tumblelog at my personal domain at www.steverubel.com. It rolls up my blog, del.icio.us links, Flickr, Facebook notes and Twitter tweets all in one place. You can subscribe to the feed here. Also, there's a mobile version. Next step: turning my lifestream into a Steve Rubel widget.

I really like that there is a single place attached to my name that rolls up all of the content that I am publishing online. I also like that in just a couple of clicks I can set up a river of news that I can share at the domain of my choosing. This can become a very powerful concept. For example, I could use either my existing tumblelog or a new one at a sub domain to roll up all of your content - such as @steverubel tweets on Twitter or in-bound inks to my various blogs.

Aggregated Lifestreams could be the next big thing on the web, particularly as community expands. I am also thinking about how this might be coupled with services like social networks, Twittergram, Spock and OpenID. What do you think of this idea?

When Less is More and More is Less

If you've been reading my blog for more than a year, I want to thank you. You may have noticed that it has gone through a significant change.

For nearly three years I blogged nearly every single day here and only here - often several times in a 24-hour period. Back in 2004 I discovered blogging was my calling; something I love to do. I really enjoy putting out valuable information and getting responses back - even when it's negative. Feedback helps me learn, which is primarily why I blog.

However, over the past several months things have changed.

For starters, the format I had relied upon - lots of short, newsy/resource-filled posts buttressed by longer essays once a week or so - doesn't work anymore here. There are many sites that fill this void better than I possibly can given my full-time gig. So, I adopted a new format in the spring that consists entirely of thoughtful essays plus link-posts. The substantive posts, while longer, were more meaty and opinionated, but far more infrequent.

Second, the world now tuns faster. The blogosphere has transformed from the NFL to a quicker style of play that more closely resembles Arena League Football. Thanks to micro-blogging and social networks Web 2.0 is now more about rapid exchanges and it's very mobile too. I am not the only one who notices how the sphere is changing. Jeremiah says MicroMedia is taking hold.

This is all transforming how I express myself online. I learn new things faster and easier than I did before through real-time microblogged conversations. Today on Twitter, for example, we discovered that Google is indexing some Twitter streams and blogs in under 30 minutes. Twitter was our science lab. We couldn't have interacted as quickly here. Nevertheless, I understand that only some of you follow me on Twitter and other sites so I don't plan to give up this site anytime soon.

So, net net, what does this mean? Well, by posting less on Micro Persuasion I actually am able to give you more. I am freed of the need to write here daily. This means when I do post on this site it is more substantive and meaningful and it incorporates my learnings from the conversations I have had elsewhere.

Further, micro blogging - especially because it is mobile - makes it easy for me to converse with a good number of you in real-time. This fits perfectly into a busy schedule where many days I use my iPhone more than I do a computer. It also flows with our growing need as a society for all that is brief.

So right now what I have is short game and long one. It's working but some of you may not notice because you only choose to read this feed and ignore me on other sites. Where this goes in the long term is unclear, but right now the short and long are working together in harmony - at least that's how I see it.

What's your view on the new format and the mix? Are you feeling the same or do you crave the old style?

Wither Blogging? Not Yet, But Perhaps Soon

Earlier this week we chatted - here and on Twitter - about Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS). Our appetite for new technologies and channels is certainly insatiable, but it points to a larger trend. Perhaps we're in search of a new format (or formats) to replace the almighty blog.

What, wither blogging? Not quite. I believe blogs remain extremely powerful and I plan to be a multi-format contributor. Still, a perfect storm is brewing that could one day mark the decline of the long form blog as we know and love it today.  BL Ochman and Michael Tangeman are two that are pondering the same trend.

Let's take a closer look at what's happening. There are three big forces at bay here.

First, there's the Attention Crash. The demands on our time, be they work, family, shiny objects or all of the above loom large. This is changing our media habits. We crave what's pithy and fun. That's one reason why YouTube and widgets got hot.

Second, there's the proliferation of mobile Internet usage. I don't have the statistics handy but my gut is that the upper strata of Forrester's participation ladder includes many smart-phone owners.

As a reporter from MSNBC found, you can increasingly do a lot with these devices by themselves. On my next short trip I plan to leave my laptop at home in favor of my iPhone, especially if I can plan it all so that I am around wifi.

What this all means is that mobile platforms and devices encourages people to publish more often, but in a far shorter format.

Last but not least we have social networking. These sites and services make it easier for us to tune into "signals" - e.g. people and topics we care about - and tune out noise.

So what does this mean all for blogging? I imagine over time some erosion. We will unsubscribe from low quality blogs written by strangers that we truly don't have time for, in favor of tuning into friends and their mobile streams. Perhaps it's already happening.

Crowdsourcing a New System for Measuring Influence (Beta)

When I started blogging a few years ago I quickly got to know Steve Gillmor. I love Steve. He consistently says things are dead - Office, TV and links, just to name a few. Sometimes Steve is right, other times he is way off. But he missed a big one.

The practice of measuring online influence by links is truly dead. Link authority, as it was called, was good while it lasted. When blogs were where all the action was, this system was king - even though many of us hated it. Good for Technorati for building its own brand around it. Nowadays, however, link authority is a meaningless metric. Jeff Jarvis touched upon the broader measurement issue last week.

The main reason link authority is dead is that there are so many places where people can publish and connect with peers. Often, many of us are active in more than one at a time. You might not think some of these networks are influential, but in fact they are.

Take Twitter, a small example. Lots of people who are on Twitter don't write blogs and vice versa. Still, it's influential. Thousands of people track their friends and the site is incredibly well optimized for search. The TV nets are checking it out too.

Last night on Twitter my friend Robert Scoble and I got into an intense discussion regarding Facebook. Arguably, some 6,000 people (Robert's 4,400+ followers and my 1,500) witnessed it. That's small compared to the reach of our blogs.

However, one of those folks was Dwight Silverman, a veteran tech reporter from the Houston Chronicle  He took it all in. (Dwight had to put up with my PR pitches from 1996-2004. Pity him.) Had Dwight written about this, then conceivably hundreds of thousands more would have been influenced. And link authority or impressions doesn't measure any of it.

With this in mind, lots of smart people in our firm have been thinking about online influence and how to measure it. This is a critical issue not just for PR pros, marketers/advertisers, but everyone who wants to monetize content. We're experimenting with a new weighted blended approach and would like your feedback. (When I learned that I ranked highly in their calculations I told David Brain, our Europe CEO, that he fixed this to psych me into relaxing so I Twitter less. My rankings would fall and his would rise!)

The model we have developed is far from perfect, but it's a start. The key is to develop a system that can grow as the channels change. We want a system that we all like - or at least a majority. Feel free to leave comments here or on David's site. Our intent is to create this in partnership with you out in the open. It's in beta but now we need your help. Together we can find something that's workable.

Community Glues Offline and Online, Real and Virtual

Community is the glue that unities us all, as humans. It has for thousands of years. We identify ourselves with the physical communities in which we live - local, national and global. Our family is a community. Our circle of friends and fellow alumni are communities. The workplace is a community. Even Starbucks - the third place - is a community for thousands of web workers and new moms.

More recently, thanks to Web 2.0, search and mobile devices, community is becoming an equally huge part of our online lives. Technology has given rise to thousands of micro global villages where people find each other, talk and collaborate around shared interests and/or goals.

This isn't a new idea, of course. I remember spending hours on GEnie's RoundTables as a teenager in the mid-1980s. When the web blossomed in the late 1990s, many of us hung out on community sites like GeoCities and the late great Six Degrees.

Today this is all much easier and natural because of broadband. It has changed the way we view the web and the time we spend online. It's important to note the role that community has always played in driving the Internet revolution and how that will continue.

The aforementioned communities were the prehistoric predecessors to the water coolers where we spend time today. This includes the blogosphere (a giant, distributed community), social networks like Facebook and MySpace and virtual worlds like There.com and Second Life.

Community, however, is no longer limited to just the specialist sites. It's becoming completely ubiquitous online, just as it is off.

You can find it everywhere, really, if you look. USAToday.com, MLB.com, Edelman.com and even Apple.com all are, at least in part, communities. In the near future, every corporate-owned site will either have community features, showcase content from communities in a picture-in-picture approach, or simply point people to where they can find them.

This is just the beginning, however. The most exciting moments will come when online communities are increasingly used to foster offline connections. That's the big idea behind Meetup.com, for example, and why it's thriving. It's also why eBay Live and Gnomedex (and soon Techcrunch 20) are very successful events.

During the Paley Center summit I attended earlier this month in Silicon Valley, Vint Cerf talked about this at length. He was referring specifically to the power of video inside virtual worlds. He echoed many of the themes he covered in this recent piece in Forbes. Video is a hybrid between offline and on.

The lesson here for media, entrepreneurs, marketers and PR pros is that even though we are spending tons of time online, it does not replace what happens offline. In fact, it amplifies it. Last night during an event I participated in at Wharton School of Business, Ed Keller discussed his research into this phenomenon. More here (PDF)

The secret to success is gluing together online with offline and real and virutal. Use the web to make the physical connections we have stronger. That's one big reason why the words public relations are really finally beginning to have a literal meaning.

The Future of PR is Participation, Not Pitching

The PR business has long put a premium on strong media pitching skills, especially at the junior and mid levels. All you need to do is scan the help wanted ads and you will see what I mean. However, pitching is on its way to becoming a lost art because the landscape is changing rapidly.

Communities like Facebook, the blogosphere and digg are becoming even more influential than certain traditional media outlets.Their relevance to PR pros is rising and the industry is responding by wisely trying to beef up its new media acumen.

Unfortunately, the biz is not evolving quickly enough. Many in PR seem to be treating Web 2.0 as simply an extension of the traditional media - another venue for buzz. They are pumping thousands of email pitches into the community every day. I know because I receive hundreds of these emails every day, as do many other bloggers I have spoken to over the last several weeks. Some are good, most are not. And many are getting fed up.

Journalists are accustomed to the PR mating dance. They know that as soon as they get a desk, a phone and an email address they're going to get bombed with inquires from PR pros. Some of these will be helpful, others won't be. Journalists know that PR inbound is an occupational hazard that comes with the territory.

Online social networks and communities are completely different. Bloggers, social networkers, diggers, social bookmakers and Wikipedians don't want to be pitched. They're collaborating on these sites for a reason - to share, be entertained, to become informed, to connect, etc. They place value on people who contribute regularly and selflessly.

Further, the lines between old and new media are blurring. Community is becoming a river that flows through virtually every web site, The media is adding social networking features while also embedding itself into big horizontal hubs like Facebook or Twitter. They have embraced changed faster than we have.

To thrive in this new distributed environment, the PR community must step out in front of the curtain, become a bit more technically adept and participate transparently as individuals in online communities. We will have to openly collaborate and add value to the network and help the companies we represent do exactly the same.

My fear? If we continue down our current path PR will lose any credibility we have left with the public and the industry could one day cease to exist. However, if Darwinism creates change then I am all for it.

Content That Finds You (Part I)

For pretty much as long as the Internet has been part of our lives, pundits have been talking about smart technology that's able to surface content that interest you. This was one of the ideas behind General Magic in the 1990s. (Historians, please correct me if this is wrong.)

That early vision is now closer to a reality. It was one of the big themes to emerge from last week's International Council conference, hosted by the Paley Center for Media.

This is the first of two posts on the subject. The first covers the four underlying pillars of content that finds you. The second will cover the impact of this major change in how we interact with media and the impact on marketing. In addition, Part II will address how content that finds you might even mitigate The Attention Crash by helping us focus more, perhaps to a fault of exclusion.

As I mentioned, several underlying forces are coming together in a powerful way that will very soon help everyone find content that they care about more easily.

The first underlying technology is search. Specifically, I am referring to what John Battelle describes in his great book, The Search, as databases of intention. Search tools are gathering so much data that they are able to show you related content, such as advertising, just at the moment you need it.

The second building block is personalization. Today consumers are balancing the benefit they get from personalizing services against the downside risks of privacy. This will become less prevalent as the Net Generation ages. They live their whole life online already. I personalized my Google News page for example, and now it recommends news stories that are relevant to my interests.

The third is Web 2.0 people-powered services, such as del.icio.us, Flickr, digg and others. For example, Flickr Interestingness consistently surfaces incredible photos based on the activities that the community generates through comments, clicks and favorites. Similarly, Techmeme taps the global brain that is the blogopshere to show us what's hot in the tech news sphere today.

The fourth and final building block, perhaps the most critical, is RSS. Feeds by their nature bring us content that we care about to our desktops. However, today consumers need to preselect the content. We need to tell Google Reader or Newsgator that we want the Sports section New York Times. However, soon that will change and the readers will get smarter. Check out Newsgator Buzz for a glimpse of the future.

So how will this change how we consume media and the PR/marketing business? Stay tuned for part II.

Silicon Valley's Valley

Last week, I had the privilege of representing Edelman at a fascinating three-day, off-the record meeting attended by about 75-100 marketing, media, entertainment and tech company CEOs. The event was organized by The World Economic Forum and the Paley Center, in conjunction with Google, Yahoo and Sun - who hosted us on their campuses one day each.

The meeting marked one of the final public appearances for Terry Semel as Yahoo's CEO. He resigned today, just days after I met him. Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke on the record, as did Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Chad Hurley from YouTube and incoming Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang participated too. A straw-man agenda is posted here.

While unfortunately I can't blog about the specifics of what was said during the closed-door event, I can certainly provide broader perspectives now that I am back. This is exactly what I plan to do over the next several days. (It was difficult to blog thoughtfully during the event since it was literally going morning, noon and night.)

I was one of only a handful of marketing executives in the room and the most junior overall. The execs flew in from around the world. At times I was a bit star-struck by who I got to know. I will join this select club - one day (at least that's the current plan!).

What became clear almost from the get-go, however, is that there is a big disconnect - a valley if you will. On the one side of the valley is, um, the Valley (go with me) - e.g. the tech industry. On the other side lies the media-industrial complex. This is the giant yarn-ball that includes marketers/agencies, media and entertainment companies.

How do I know? I work in the marketing industry but know many leaders in the tech and media business since I blog about the convergence of these industries.

Silicon Valley (e.g. the tech/Internet businesses that dot its landscape) created many of the popular Web 2.0 communities we live in. They revolutionized our lives. The Internet today is the life bloodstream for some one billion Internet users worldwide. There's no putting the genie back. Our lives are changed forever as the Flat Earth communes online.

However, for it to continue to thrive economically, Silicon Valley must break bread with the media-industrial complex. The challenge is there is a vast chasm in the culture and ethos between the two sides. Scoble alludes to this in discussing Yahoo's challenge in finding the right CEO who can address all of these very different constituents.

Tech and Internet companies develop their products in the open. As I mentioned last week, beta (e.g. unfinished products) is viewed as a good thing. A beta brings valuable feedback that makes version 1.0 even stronger. Further, many Valley companies happily share and open kimono to all - competitors too. Take Yahoo's Hack Day for example, which is now underway in London.

This is very different in the media-industrial complex, where secrecy rules. He/she who dies with the most information is king/queen. This is why leaks are constant, more so than in tech. Washington DC operates in a similar way, though it's even more complicated there.

However, technology is changing all of us. We are all becoming more and more Valley every day, whether we like or not. We live online in the Valley's creations. Business recognizes that to thrive, it must embrace technology because that's what we do as consumers.

Very slowly, media, marketing and entertainment companies are changing their cultures to become more like their counterparts in Silicon Valley. Take business casual attire, for example. It started in the tech industry and now most of us have it at least part time.

The changes go deeper, however. Media companies like the BBC, WeatherBug, The Economist, The New York Times and Reuters have lab sites (these liks go to the lab pages). These are sandboxes where consumers can play with and give feedback on betas.

Marketers are joining the club too. American Express just launched a beta program where you can test new concepts. Everyone is beginning to recognize that the principles of Wikinomics that were pioneered in the Valley - openness, peering, sharing and acting globally - are good business overall. It's like the end of communism in the 1980s. The changes were gradual at first, then dramatic.

Last week's event certainly was a step in the right direction to closing Silicon Valley's Valley. Progress was made. But we still have more to go. However, it's clear that the Valley and the media-industrial complex are committed to closing the gulf and that is very exciting.

Celebrities Dominate, But Not on Digg

It never ceases to amaze me just how much we love celebrities. Even the wide river of non-gossip bloggers. However, on digg they like tech a whole lot more.

PC Magazine ran an interesting chart in their latest issue that measures this. They tracked the buzz around the death of Anna Nicole Smith and compared it to the launch of the iPhone. Anna trumped Apple in Google searches, blog posts and news stories by a wide margin. But the iPhone walloped Anna on digg.

There's a bit more here.

Report: Yahoo Censoring Flickr Photos

Thomas Hawk, a photographer who blesses my desktop everyday with gorgeous shots, is reporting that Yahoo is censoring certain photographs on Flickr. The images in question express outrage over the alleged unauthorized sale of the photographs shot by a talented artist in Iceland. Flickr claims that the photographs "harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others."

Such measures may - for other reasons - become more common. Dave Winer notes that Congress is proposing rather draconian measures to thwart copyright infringement. If even a watered down the bill passes it could pose a challenge for lots of Web 2.0 sites.