Gnomedex: Tomorrow’s PR – where does blogging fit?

Posted in Blogging, Events, Gadgets & Gizmos, Marketing

Panelists: Steve Rubel (micropersuasion), Chris Sloop (WeatherBug)

It’s all about listening.

Rubel is a PR guy, but loves blogging as a PR tool. Works for CooperKatz and includes blogging in their programs.

Sloop has a product, WeatherBug, and provides other services. Plus, he talks directly as a techie on their blog.

It’s no longer media <—> audience.

It’s now a 360degree view of blogs <—> media <—> audience

The people are the media.

If you are socialized to soften the blows (yes, that’s PR), then candor flies out the window. Blogs are PR with candor.

WeatherBug is a desktop service that works with 8000 weather stations to provide weather data. They are blogging to remove a bad perception of them as adware (they even get flagged on old versions from Norton). Rubel is helping them do this. Is it working? As authorities blogging, they are getting back that authenticity and that fandom they lost. Plus, they are using the blog to ask for feedback and are recycling that back to the product. They even have an API that lets weather networks use the data from their aggregated stations.

New PR is listening. Listen, learn, then talk.

Ha. Darren Barefoot makes a valid point. The PR talk did get embedded with a product pitch. Steve responds by saying that he needs to show how he is using blogs and PR – to show the action.

Why not scrap the name if it has bad PR? Because it will create bad PR. He never was nor is adware. If he changed his name, he’d get flack for doing so. I agree. I think going against bad PR is good. Controversy is a path to learning.

Is tomorrow’s PR just blogging? Not necessarily. It’s the feedback cycle. Blogging is a component of PR. Some old PR practices will decline, such as press releases. RSS/blogging will be the new press release, but one that will be in a human voice in a specific audience. Most customers and people out there don’t read press releases. They are meant for a different audience – that of investors or more.

Let’s open the floor for discussion:

Anyway, I would invite everyone here to open the discussion on PR and blogging. It’s a great topic, and one I am all for debating. After all, I have a marketing background and am also a blogger. How does that work? What role does blogging take in my marketing consultancy? What role should it take? How does blogging fit with marketing and/or PR? Would love some feedback.

Technorati Tags: PR, public relations, blogging, gnomedex

Posted by arieanna on June 25, 2005
No Comments »

Gnomedex: Tomorrow’s Media

Posted in Blogging, Events, Opinion

Panel: JD Lasica (ourmedia), Terry Heaton (Donata Communications), Cory Bergman (lost remote)

This panel extends the topic of citizen media to the personal media revolution.

ourmedia

We started out with a great Bush remixer and a few videos that are on ourmedia. Very cool. I totally want to read Darknet (aka Hollywood vs. the Longtail) too.

“This is a personal media revolution” – JD; blogging, videoblogging, podcasting and much more. Taking back the media.

Fair use – there are things we ARE allowed to do that we cannot forget. We should do them. Take that movie snippet.

RSS is driving the personal media revolution.

Digital stories are just starting. Anyone can tell their story in any mix of media. It’s the real world. Not bootlegged stuff. But stuff people create and want to share in a global conversation.

lost remote

TV execs look at this blog for all of what’s up and coming in TV. It’s a new media aggregator to push the front of what TV has to deliver in order to keep people happy and to make money – TV will have decreased revenue far before digital hits its high. For Cory, ratings may be going up but revenue is going down.

What should happen:

1. acquire digital companies

2. leverage TV to launch digital products

3. invent new business models

4. cut costs

This blog is leading thought on new media and where it fits with so-called traditional media.

They are now going to have the Seattle newsroom blogging at King 5, where Cory works, as an established thing under the King 5 brand. To embrace blogging, not to shun it. I think it’s great that they are putting forth such a large blog model and see it as a great merge of media.

Donata Communications

Consults with TV on the Internet and the personal media revolution for image, content and revenue. The web is bottom up. For many in TV, this means doing things counter-intuitively.

The story of WKRN-TV. The problem is audience – ratings are going down. People are going online. Rather than build resources for an online audience, they should use the local blogosphere to enhance audience interest. They have a site, other blogs, started meet-ups to enhance the local level in blogging, made a local aggregator, and have a whole strategy to support their blogging. Eventually, their bloggers will be on air journalists too.

Technorati Tags: media, gnomedex, blogging, journalism, ourmedia, personal media, citizen journalism

Posted by arieanna on June 25, 2005
2 Comments »

Gnomedex: Tomorrow’s RSS

Posted in Blogging, Events, Gadgets & Gizmos

Mark Fletcher (Bloglines), Scott Rafer (Feedster), Bob Wyman (PubSub) sat together on a panel on the future of RSS.

RSS will not be just for text anymore. We’ll see more structured publishing. – Bob Wyman

The future of RSS is Atom.

Old formats will pretty much live forever, so the tools will need to continue to support them.

Just call RSS as it is. Stop tacking on versions. It’s more confusing than useful.

Just give one feed. Gives clarity to readers. And there is more to gain from clarity than giving lots of feeds, even if they have different features. Clarity wins over small features. But this does cause some argument with the crowd, who do want these features and want some posts to live longer. IF, and only IF, you have feeds with different content – maybe a category feed – that is ok.

We need to have advertising in the feeds to get paid for what we do. The services are good and valuable enough so let’s get paid for it. Let’s just find a way that makes it seamless and have the experience agreeable for all. Wohoo! So, here’s an ad for you:

What grows out of RSS will be what we see growing on the Internet in the next 10 years.

Audience comment – would like the technical community and the publishers to set the standards for where/how ads are displayed – not the advertisers. Bob says to leave it to the user community. They have not figured it out yet, so user input is very welcome. We need the ads to write the cheques, so let’s get it done the way we want it. If Google can seamlessly get paid by ads, let’s do it for ourselves too.

Would like to see more embedded comments and comment extensions in the feeds. I agree. Wordpress does it, but others must be configured.

Overall, would liked to have seen more of a directed panel up front. Too quick right into Q/A. These guys have an amazing perspective to teach us things we perhaps may not know to ask or not ask based on the detours we take during Q&A. Lots on advertising in RSS. I am pro advertising, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t really agree with what was being said totally (mostly with Dave Winer), but that is also a different issue. I would LOVE a panel on RSS advertising in general, But I did want a future RSS centred talk. Oh well.

Technorati Tags: rss, web2.0, aggregator, syndication, atom, gnomedex

Posted by arieanna on June 25, 2005
2 Comments »

Gnomedex: Tomorrow’s Syndication

Posted in Blogging, Events

Steve Gillmor, Dave Sifry, Scott Gatz came on stage just now to talk on “tomorrow’s syndication.”

RSS is today.

Audio, videos, photos – think beyond the post. And how to you make the stream make sense. Thumbnails? Slideshows? What needs to be in the aggregator technology? And who says that it needs to be restricted to the aggregator alone? It need not be limited to one application.

Give it to me when I want, where I want, and how I want it – Scott Gatz, Yahoo

This decade is the rise of user-generated content – Dave Sifry, Technorati

The web is a stream of state changes. It’s not documents or pages – it’s people talking. (Thank you! You all know where I stand on the language of blogging). – Dave Sifry

How do you express it all? What do things look like? Calendar events can easily be translated to HTML or whatever. Let’s see how people want to do things. And how to make them simple. I like the idea of having a calendar as web based.

Start the standard based on what’s out there already. People worked hard to make stuff that is out and used right now. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Just extend it. Polish the wheel.

A little mini poll here shows that people really really want to be able to synch up over aggregator devices (mobile, web based) and to have a synched online/offline system.

Metadata needs to be captured, but seamless. We need to control what info we want to get.

I missed some of this little panel (though definitely much better panel style than most) so apologizes for not having the full discussion going here.

Technorati Tags: syndication, rss, gnomedex, blogging

Posted by arieanna on June 24, 2005
No Comments »

Crews Safety Sun Glasses
Buy or Sell Concert Tickets at StubHub!