Mutually Inclusive PR

Do Journalists Owe Companies their Attention?

Darren Barefoot raises an interesting question. The Vancouver technology PR consultant mentions a technology conference that allowed journalists to not disclose their contact information to the companies paying to exhibit at the site.

Barefoot calls the 80% of journalists who blocked their information "sorry ass journalists," and suggests they're not doing their jobs.

Says Barefoot:

"This is reflective of a peculiar double-standard in journalism. It’s their job to cover the conference. It’s their job to receive and consider media information from companies. After all, it’s not like they’re investigative journalists uncovering corrupt politicians—95% of their news is placed by companies. If they’re too lazy to sort through their email prior to the conference, perhaps they should consider another career."

Having heard the horror stories of junior PR lackeys tasked with calling all the journalists prior to a conference and bugging them to visit a given company's booth, I'm more forgiving of the decision to use stealth mode.

But the company that allows journalists in free, but doesn't require them to identify themselves to paying distributors? Sounds like they're not providing the kind of services exhibitors are looking for.

Previous posts:

• A Blacklist for Useless Pitches
• The Morons Slap Mobile Boy Around a Bit

Tags: pitches, conferences, technology, reporters

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Environmentalism Gets Cool Again

When North America discovered recycled paper, environmentalism was the only game in town. The media was obsessed with it. Companies were terrified of being labeled a polluter. It was cool to be green.

That passion never waned in Europe and in some parts of North America, but it has been substantially sidetracked  in corporate North America.

Iceland is committed to hydrogen-powered vehicles. Britain is making progress toward meeting its Kyoto targets.

In Canada, our biggest environmental hero is a prime minister who left politics 13 years ago? (Maybe not. )

The environmental revolution lost its place on the front pages to other issues.

It's still a bad business decision to be a blatant polluter, but subtle (and not-so-subtle) polluters have had it easy. SUVs should never have been allowed to thrive as a status symbol, but North Americans want security. And those SUVs can plow through a sub-compact car without slowing down. I figure the September 11 attacks added another three or four years to the popularity of SUVs. By all rational measures SUVs should have become a symbol of decadent waste much sooner for our whole society, not just the green brigades.

Dull, boring Al Gore is raising the temperature of public debate on climate change (you remember him, the nerd who thought global warming and the knowledge economy were important). He is having a renaissance as the champion of the environment.

Gore fronts a major documentary on global warming, coming to theatres in May. Wired Magazine features him. Vanity Fair publishes a Green Issue this month. Al's back.

"Today, there are dire warnings that the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization is bearing down on us, gathering strength as it comes," he says in VF.

"We can solve this crisis," he writes. "Today, we have all the technologies we need to start the fight against global warming. We can build clean engines. We can harness the sun and wind. We can stop wasting energy."

Don't take Al's word for it. Just look at Europe to see what's possible.

Blog search on Gore and climate change, and climate change.

www.fuh2.com (more photos of H2s getting the finger)

Hummer photo by Kris Krug

Previous posts:  Bruce Sterling's Hurricane: Been There, Done That

Tags: environment, green, canada, trends, fuh2

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Lessons Learned from the Nobody Thing

Ragan Communications blogger Steve Crescenzo watched a colleague get crapped upon by what he and some others perceived to be a horde of rabid, hysterial bloggers.  He has learned several things from the episode:

• Don't insult people, if it makes you look like a pompous ass (I'm paraphrasing);
• Don't piss off insecure bloggers, or they'll attack you;
• A lot of bloggers are blindly prejudiced against the traditional media.

Which is too bad, because I hoped he and others would learn these truths instead:

• It's more gracious to apologize and move on than to bluster about why you should have used a different adjective to insult someone;
• Bloggers are a lot like ordinary people. In fact they are ordinary people (a lot like trade magazine editors and columnists);
• People generally have more in common with others than they think. When they can truly see the other person's perspective, they gain far more than they would by winning an argument.

Steve has a great sense of humour. If not for a personal attack on his reputation by Nobody Allan Jenkins, I'm sure Steve would have found something funny and enlightening about this situation to share with his readers. Instead, he launched a counterattack, slamming Allan for bringing up, out of the blue, an incident from years ago that suggested Steve once acted like a drunken boor.

I'm with Steve on this one. Even Nobodies can be insensitive, and even mainstream media can feel unfairly attacked and personally offended.

An apology for the original Nobody comment by David Murray would have been nice, but I didn't expect it. I'm not holding my breath for Allan to offer an apology for slinging mud in Steve's direction, either.

Assuming no apologies are forthcoming, what else do we learn? In the comments to Steve's post, Ragan Communications' Mark Ragan misses the point about the Nobody movement. He asks for a future report on progress, metrics, and sales.

The Nobody thing wasn't about sales, or site traffic or performance objectives, so don't ask for them. Our lofty goal was to bring people together and try something different. To follow a sense of indignation to its logical conclusion, and see where that took us once we got past the initial slam at an arrogant offhand comment by a trade magazine editor.

It was a bit of agitprop street drama, acted out in the blogosphere instead of at the corporate offices of its target.  It was a social thing, where creative people who barely knew each other beforehand had some fun, made some statements about personal dignity, and showed how a group can quickly coalesce around an idea.

Our goals were achieved when we first extended a hand to others, and got a response. Everything else is gravy.

If no one writes another word about the Nobody thing, we will have exceeded our expectations.  A bunch of people who I used to think of as competitors for audience are now acquaintances, maybe even friends, thanks to an experiment in satirical blogging.

I've learned that it's better to reach out with an open hand than a closed fist.

And that is a good lesson to learn.

Update:  Comments on Steve's blog and a new post on the Nobody blog renew my faith in people. Apologies all around (well, David Murray seems uinable to actually apologize, but he makes cheery noises), and promises to get together for beers at the IABC international conference this June in Vancouver. Now if somebody could strum a guitar, we can sing a round of Kumbaya and put the nastiness behind us.

PR Briefs - News Items April 17, 2006

Toronto Star Adds Del.icio.us Bookmarking -- Colin McKay compares the approaches Canadian newspapers use for online publishing. For example, I know who the media columnist is for the Toronto Star, but not for the Globe and Mail, which I subscribe to.

In Silicon Valley, a Man without a Patent -- The New York Times' John Markoff reports on the guy who dreamed up the idea of wireless e-mail a decade before NTP (a company that doesn't contribute to society in any way) patented the idea and later went after RIM over its Blackberry technology.

Portfolio Night IV -- Ad industry creative hopefuls are putting on Portfolio Night again this year. May 4 is the day, in many locations, including several Canadian cities.

What Newsvine Is and Should Be -- An introduction to the news site Newsvine, and how its approach to groupthink works better than others.

The Numbered Days of Traditional Ad Creation -- Neville Hobson thinks professionally-made ads are on their way out, to be replaced by consumer-generated ones.

Tags: pr, public relations, advertising, ads, creative, media, canada

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PR Briefs - News Items April 15, 2006

Time Magazine Closes Canadian Bureau -- April 28 is the closing date. (link via John Gushue)

Blogs: The Birth of "Public" Relations -- Josh Hallett was one of the participants in the Florida Public Relations Association's blog week 2006.

Easter Extra: The Bible in 50 Words -- courtesy of Donna Papacosta.

You can always count on Hugh MacLeod's humour...

Best wishes for Easter, or whatever your beliefs, upbringing and values have in store for you this weekend.

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Scoble Puts the Trolls where they Belong

Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, who has long boasted about his policy of not censoring comments on his blog, has decided to moderate comments.

About time.

Setting aside the legal implications of giving a wide audience to comments that often get out of hand and sometimes are just hate screeds against various targets, the personal wear-and-tear of reading through raw bile has to wear you down.

Smart move, Mr. S.  I don't have a comments policy on my blog, but as soon as I have to deal with a fraction of the crap Scoble has been enduring for years, I'll come up with something.

Wikipedia on trolls.

Previous post:

Blog Comments Lead to Lawsuit

Tags: blogs, robertscoble, trolls, netiquette

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Blog-based Fund-raising Campaign

The huge number of sites adding fund-raising buttons for the tsumanis, earthquakes and hurricanes in the past two years confirm the power of blogs and other sites to enable fund-raising.

Today I came across Blogidarity, an effort to get bloggers to help raise funds for organizations that help people in developing countries. The campaign will choose different organizations to benefit from the fund-raising each month.

This month, funds will go to Clearpath International, an organization that "works in southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia and on the Thai-Burma Border) assisting present day victims of landmines and bombs."

Clearpath's use of a blog and a video posted on YouTube shows their comfort with new media to get their message out, making them an obvious choice to benefit from a blog-based fund-raising effort.

Blogidarity asks blog readers to spend $1 each month to help a non-profit organization that helps people in need. Their Zero Confusion promise: 100% of funds raised will go to the non-profit organization being partnered with that month.

Sadly, my first impulse when asked to donate to worthy causes is concern that the money won't end up helping someone, or that I'll be scammed. Maybe it's time to be a bit more giving, and a bit less suspicious. Before setting up a donation, I'll want to do a bit more checking up on the people behind Blogidarity.

Blogidarity has a donation page that links to PayPal, where you set up a $1 payment per month. The payments continue for differing charities until you cancel the payments.

Link via Steve Sherlock.

Tags: charity, clearpath, southeast asia, youtube, blogs, donations, non-profits

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If 43 Things Doesn't Float your Boat, Try 43 Thongs

Richard Eriksson has launched the latest social networking site.

The foot fetishists of the world, having tried 43 Things, 43 Places and whatever other variation on 43 the Robot Co-op came up with, can now visit 43 Thongs.

This parody site looks and feels like 43 Things, but thankfully doesn't take the joke too far. I tried 43 Things when it was starting out, but I just didn't have the stamina or the interest to live my life large for my online neighbours.

If you have always wanted to see flip-flops in action, this is the site for you.

Link via Darren Barefoot.

Tags: humour, parody, 43things, robotcoop

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12 Step Program for Old School Communicators

Robert French offers business communicators a 12 step program to get over their addiction to Old School communications techniques.

A couple of the steps:

• We admit that WOM / social media no longer allows us to have total control over the message.
• Admit to yourself, those in your organization, your stakeholders, and to any other interested human beings the exact nature of your wrongs.
• Seek, through prayer, meditation or whatever works for you, to improve your conscious contact with whatever overlying force guides your life. Human beings, customers or stakeholders - whatever you want to call them.
• Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. Try to carry this message to other communicators, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

 More advice about social media comes from B.L. Ochman, who offers her Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Not Blog.  Some of here reasons:

• You can't control every message on a blog. (But message control has always been an illusion.)
• Dozens of other blogs probably cover the same information. To be successful today, you need to define a narrow niche for your blog and become an expert in it.
• Everyone and her dog already has a blog. Even whores have blogs these days.
• You need approval from legal before you can publish anything. Don't bother blogging if every word has to be vetted by legal or PR. You need an authentic voice.
• Writing something interesting every day is hard. Most people would rather have root canal than write something coherent, pithy and provocative every day. It takes talent, skill and training to write down ideas clearly and make them interesting to read.

Link via Spamouflage.

Tags: social media, blogging, 12 steps, business, organizations, communications

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Promotion Advice - "E-mail 50 Popular Bloggers"

On Problogger, guest writer Martin Roth urges us to add to the Inbox burden of all the A-List bloggers, as he advises new bloggers to "alert other bloggers in the hope that some of them will link to you." Read further and his tips include "polite emails to 50-or-so of the most popular writers in the blogosphere, suggesting they might be interested in it."

Roth advises you not to do this "more than, say, once or twice a month."

That's just the kind of indiscriminate spam that makes those same popular bloggers retreat further and further from contact with others. Who has time, when you're deleting e-mails from a few million bloggers following advice from the likes of Roth?

Don't let me stop you from promoting your blog. But please, use some method other than just working your way through the Technorati Top 100. Roth is the author of Bird Flu Update.

Link via Steve Rubel.

Tags: pitch, pitching, blogs, promotion, spam, darrenrowse

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