Air Force Blog Assessment

The image above is of the Air Force Blog Assessment chart, put together by the United States Air Force - not an organisation you would expect to have a great blog engagement policy.

Better, in fact, than many organisations that claim to be experts in this area, as a recent article in Web Ink Now shows:

"In an environment where many corporations are scared witless about social media, here a huge global organization firmly committed to social media communications to spread messages, stories, knowledge and ideals. Capt. Faggard says that the focus is on: "Direct Action within Social Media (blogging, counter-blogging, posting products to YouTube, etc.); Monitoring and Analysis of the Social Media landscape (relating to Air Force and Airmen); and policy and education (educating all Public Affairs practitioners and the bigger Air Force on Social Media)."

The Air Force also has a number of presences on the web, including the official blog, Air Force Live, a YouTube channel, a Twitter profile, and a number of other "new media", including widgets and podcasts.

Take a look at the Air Force's social media policy and see if you can use it to enhance your own thinking around social media with, ahem, military precision.

The End of Embargoes?

Michael Arrington wrote a piece on TechCrunch today that proclaims the "Death of the Embargo":

"All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories... One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. The benefits are clear - sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first."

But the digital world means that embargoes have long been dead in this PR specialism.

Bloggers don't work 9 til 5 - well, not on their blogs anyway. Most of them will have day jobs with all of the responsibility that entails and so will only get the chance to blog in their spare time. This means that they just don't have time to sit and wait on an embargo.

If they do get paid to write for a blog or online news site, they are getting paid to get the news first. In the world where a hit on Digg can increase traffic by ridiculous amounts, or - as Arrington points out - being the first to break a story to gets you on the front page of TechMeme and another substantial increase in traffic, it is against the journalist's best interests to wait on an embargo, especially if they know that another publication is getting the same story with the same embargo.

As anyone who has seen Will Ferrell's Talledega Nights will know, "If you're not first, you're last".

This isn't a solution, but if a PR agency wanted to get their clients on a wide range of blogs and online news sites, they wouldn't bother with an embargo - ever. Instead, they should spend time on actually making their announcements newsworthy and targeted at the right publications, time that would have otherwise been spent explaining to journalists and bloggers what the embargo was. This means that the journalist will want to break the story before anyone else and therefore you'll get a range of publications who are actually interested the news writing a piece on it.

But Arrington does give an exception for when embargoes will be honoured:

"We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively, so we know there won’t be any mistakes. There are also a handful of people who we trust enough to continue to work with them on general embargoes."

So the solution is to build up a trusted relationship with the journalists and bloggers that you are conducting outreach to and give them a strong story so that they can guarantee that the news will be of interest to their readers. Isn't this the case with traditional journalism? When did the rules change for digital PR?

Newsworthy announcements given to journalists that you have built trusted relationships with. Just because embargoes may now be extinct, it doesn't mean that the basic rules of PR are.

There's more excellent discussion on this subject in the comments of the original post and over at Mahalo. Drew Benvie also covers the post here (complete with reference to grey hairs!) and Brian Solis gives an insider's perspective here.

Update: Jonathan Hopkins pointed out this delightful little site this morning, The Embargo Killer.

What inspires you to blog?

I've been tagged in a meme by Tom Malcolm, who was in turn tagged by Stephen Waddington to continue a meme that he was tagged on to by Ged Carroll on what inspires him to keep up his blog posts.

(See all that tagging by the people on the meme who already have a working relationship with each other? That's today's top tip on "How to start a meme").

So, what inspires me to keep up with my blog posts?

• Twitter - Probably first and foremost, this is where most of my inspiration for things to write about comes from, either through conversation, observation or procrastination (e.g. clicking on a URL when you have nothing better to do).
  
• News - Looking for stuff to blog about always makes me keep up with the latest news and issues in the big wide world.
  
• Writing - I think learning how to jot down thoughts in a clear and cohesive manner is an essential skills in the workplace in general. Plus I enjoy writing.
  
• Ideas - Whether it's an idea I've been thinking about and wanted to test to my blog readers, or an idea that I came across somewhere else but wanted to share, the blog is the place for it to go.
  
• People - At the end of the day, this is what it all comes back to. My inspiration to keep up with my blog posts comes from the people, whether to share something with them, hear what they have to say about something, or help me to connect with them.

If you want to read what other people have said inspires them to keep on blogging, then here's a selection of responses to the meme (See? More tagging!):

• Ged Carroll - Looking for inspiration
• Tom Malcolm - Shoestring inspiration
• Drew Benvie - Inpiration to blog
• JonnyRosemont - Looking for inspiration
• Matthew Watson - What inspires your blog posts?

To continue the meme, I'm going to tag Dommy W, Philly S, Timmy B, Jazzy C and by special request, Jeddy H (yet more tagging!).

What inspires you to blog? Let me know in the comments below or even carry on the meme yourself - just don't forget to tag me!

How to write a "great blogger pitch"

My colleague Drew Benvie was sent an "interesting" pitch from a PR firm, which you can read about more on his blog here.

The pitch has received a lot of criticism, not from Drew (as he left the post fairly neutral) but from the comments below the post. These include: "it just seems like a load of waffle"; "what strikes me is that there is no sense of personality in the pitch"; "the overuse of the word aggressive is, well, aggressive"; and - my favourite from Luis Levy - "it's almost as if Word wrote that pitch by itself based on crappy Microsoft algorithms."

Perhaps a bit harsh, but these criticisms could have been easily avoided.

One of the things that I have found most appealing about people involved in social media is the ethos of sharing. Sharing is a good thing, especially when trying to pitch a blogger, as there are plenty of examples and tips on how to pitch a blogger. Now, I'm not going to dive into a long, long list of all sorts of tips on how best to pitch to a blogger. Instead, I'm going to show what the PR professional from 5WPR might have done better, even as some first steps.

In the interests of research, I simply googled the term "great blogger pitch" and came up with the following results:

How to Pitch to Bloggers - 21 Tips
www.problogger.net/archives/2007/10/30/how-to-pitch-to-bloggers-21-tips/

The Jeff Pulver Blog: PR 203: How to Pitch a Blogger
pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/008349.html

Will Video for Food » Best Blogger Pitch Letter Ever
willvideoforfood.com/2008/06/06/best-blogger-pitch-letter-ever/

How to Pitch a Blogger » BloggerDesign.com
www.toprankblog.com/2006/10/blogger-relations-101/

Attention marketers: do you know how to pitch a blogger or podcaster?
www.krishnade.com/blog/2007/how-to-pitch-a-blogger-or-podcaster/

How not to pitch a blogger: Church of the Customer Blog
www.churchofthecustomer.com/blog/2007/04/8_bad_pr_pitche.html

Micro Persuasion: How Not to Pitch a Blogger
www.micropersuasion.com/2005/02/how_not_to_pitc.html


I hope I'm not being too unfair here, but surely it wouldn't have been too much effort to find out what other people have said on the subject? After all, every one of the bloggers on this list would have had to have started somewhere. If it took those bloggers a while to get the pitch just right, then they've done the hard work for you by repeating the exercise until they have found a way that gives them a good chance of being well received when/if they pitch to a blogger.

This situation can be repeated over and over - if you're not sure on how to go about something in the social media sphere, google it and there is sure to be a helpful article from Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Seth Godin or other brilliant social media strategists to at least help get you started on whatever you're thinking of doing.

While I don't think that there's such a thing as the perfect blog pitch - after all, I believe that every pitch should be tailored for every situation - if all I have to do to pick those social media guru's brains is to google a certain phrase, then I count myself lucky that they have been willing to share their expertise with the rest of us. When we believe our expertise to be of use to someone else, we should be sharing that knowledge too.

So how do you write a great blogger pitch?

Google it. The answer's out there somewhere.

Shenanigans in Chamonix

So I was on holiday a few weeks ago. Well, I call it a holiday but I was actually doing some charity work for Camp Quality UK, running an activity holiday for young people with cancer in Chamonix, France.

It was an amazing week, but definitely one of those 'holidays' where you need a holiday to recover from the previous one (especially if you're responsible for a large group of people on a holiday in a foreign country).

One of the things I've tried to encourage the charity to do is to make more use of Social Media and Web 2.0 and it just so happened that the fact that one of the young people was anaspiring film maker really helped! So Murray (or Mr. Spielberg as we affectionately took to calling him) has produced this rather stunning documentary. At 14 years old he's certainly in the running for the youngest ever film director to win an Oscar!

The documentary runs to about 35 minutes in 4 parts and features yours truly as an MTV Cribs style presenter. Enjoy watching it and joining in the fun. If you fancy donating to the charity so that I can go on more holidays we can take more young people with cancer away on these amazing holidays, then you can do so here.

I'm thinking of writing a post on my experiences with the Camp Quality UK and how they are using Web 2.0 and Social Media to aid them in their cause, which I'll post week or so - any thoughts/links to help me out? Leave them in the comments section below!

Chamonix 2008 - Part 1/4




Chamonix 2008 - Part 2/4




Chamonix 2008 - Part 3/4




Chamonix 2008 - Part 4/4

Should PR people blog/tweet about their client work?

Not wanting to start of this post sounding like an episode of Sex and the City, but what are the rules surrounding PR practitioners talking about their client work in the online space? Does it annoy the people not in PR have to put up with our occasional promotional tweets in between personal messages? Should we be posting/tweeting about or client work at all?

Etiquette would have it that most people would be perfectly happy to put up with a few plugs from a PR person, as long as there was a disclaimer stating that it was client work. I've done it a few times on Twitter (with a disclaimer), but I've seen a few people being pulled up for tweeting about client work but not disclaiming the fact.

There's also the issue of people who put up a link on their blog or a Tiny URL on their Twitter feed, but not informing people where the link leads to. Often it is to personal blog post or a clients site. Is this practice frowned upon?

What about people who blog/tweet on behalf of a client? And what if they then retweet a client's messages sans disclaimer? This confuses the issue even more.

I believe that in PR, transparency and authenticity counts for a lot. I'm perfectly happy for people to write about their client work and even plug it, as long as the wool isn't being pulled over our eyes and there's a clear disclaimer that lets everyone know that what has been written should be read from a certain perspective. Sometimes it can be really useful for people to write about their client work as it may be of genuine interest to people who read about it.

Our personal and business lives are so intertwined in the online community that it is often impossible to separate the two in some cases. Even then, it is only good practice to let people know what's going on behind the scenes.

What do you think? Do you let people know when you write about client work? Do you get annoyed when people write about their clients without telling you that they're being paid by them?

(P.S. Apologies, but upon rereading this post, it really does seem like something out of Sex and the City, especially if you read it in Sarah Jessica Parker's whiney New York accent)

Senior PR executive admits to blog misconduct

Hotwire recently blogged about a recent change to UK media law that makes a certain practice of ‘fake blogging’ against the law. What used to be just a faux pas is now more than just that. In plain English, the law means that organisations should not pretend to be consumers.

To prove just how relevant this issue is, an article appeared on the front page of the US edition of PR Week, describing an incident where New-York based agency 5W Public Relations acknowledged that a senior executive was involved in misconduct by impersonating a client when leaving a comment on a blog.

The incident arose when 5W Senior Vice President, Juda Engelmayer, left comments under a client’s name on the Failed Messiah blog. The comments were then traced back to the IP address of Engelmayer, showing how people who undertake this now illegal practice are leaving themselves open to be caught.

The CEO of 5W, Ronn Torossian, said that they had instituted internal measures to ensure this cannot happen again: “A senior staff member failed to be transparent in dealing with client matters,” Torossian said. “He has taken full responsibility.”

For further reading on this, check the BBC’s take on the law and read the PR Week article.

Cross-posted to the Hotwire Interactive blog.

Journos to sub own copy

London's freesheet City AM, a newspaper of 100,000 aimed at workers in financial services, is to dispense with the services of its entire sub-editing team.

A spokesman for City AM said "In assessing the editorial capacity and based on similar experiences in Europe, City AM is undertaking a reorganisation that will see it move away from a combined editorial and subeditorial model to focus on frontline journalism."

Replace 'frontline' with 'cost-cutting' and I think you get a better picture of the publication's position.

This is another sign of bloggers and journalists becoming increasingly similar in the way they work. Indeed, Roy Greenslade of The Guardian, commented "In future, writers will sub their own copy. This is how it will be on every paper one day - before there are no papers." But will this lead to a decrease in quality from traditional publications?

Most journalists, if not all, would have gone through some sort of formal training with a required minimum of language skills and so do a good job of effectively subbing themselves before they hand their work into the subs desk. Most bloggers sub their own copy and in most cases do a good job of it. In both cases, most people take pride in their work and writing, and so will want to make sure that their writing is error free before formally publishing it.

This is where bloggers have the upper hand. There is no formal publishing schedule. If they publish something which has an error in it, they can always update the content as soon as the error is spotted. And as they are subbing their own copy all the time at the moment, they will be more use to the future changes that journalism brings.

Greenslade hits the point on the head when he says "this is how it will be on every paper one day - before there are no papers." Perhaps that time isn't too far around the corner.

Update:

Dave Lee rather cheekily points out a piece of sub-editing irony:

"Ironically, in an article about freesheet City AM ditching its sub-editors, Media Guardian’s Leigh Holmwood faces a subbing error of his own:

London business freesheet City AM is to axe eight jobs, including its entire subediting, team as part of a streamlining of its operation.*"

Twitter Launches Twitter Status Blog

Sitting on the first page of Twitter this morning was a short message that has (thankfully) replaced the doom and gloom messages about the pagination and IM features being unavailable:

"Check out the Twitter Status blog for ongoing updates about the service."

It's good to see that Twitter is trying to communicate it's problems more. For example, the first post explains that the API request limit has been lowered to 30 requests an hour and that pagination has been partially restored:

Pagination partially restored

Most users will be able to paginate through older updates, but you may run into some situations where the Older links are not available. We’re continuing to work on restoring pagination for everyone.

IM is still offline but we are currently testing some fixes that enable the restoration of that service.

IM and Pagination are disabled, API limited

Due to excessive database load, we have disabled pagination on the web and IM updates. Also, we’ve lowered the API request limit to 30 requests per hour. We are working to restore.

While I'm sure everyone would rather Twitter not have to have a status blog and keep Twitter running 24/7, when it does go down we at least now know the problem.

This is one blog that I hope doesn't update very much as Twitter runs better in the future.

"Aren't blogs just bloggers commenting on each others blogs?"

Whilst at the Shine Unconference last weekend, a few bloggers (and a few non-bloggers) got together to discuss why we blogged (or didn't in the case of some). Dave Dawes of Entreprenurses had his magic podcast recording kit on him and recorded the session.

The result is an impromptu podcast featuring a host of social entrepreneurial bloggers, including:

• Dave Dawes - entreprenurses.blogspot.com
  
• Nic Temple - sse.org.uk/blog
  
• Greg Villalobos - blogcreator.co.uk
  
• Rob Greenland - thesocialbusiness.co.uk
  
• Rachel Slade - unltdworld.com
  
• Darragh Doyle - darraghdoyle.com
  
• Me - puddingrelations.blogspot.com
  
• Maureen Bowes - weinspireothers.com & peopleintelligence.com
  
• Nicola Jones - unltdworld.com

The podcast covered a lot of ground in a relatively short time - these were the issues discussed:

• Meeting and networking with people via their blog
  
• Making time for creating and following blogs
  
• How blogs can raise the profile of your social enterprise
  
• The role of blog comments and blog readership (where the title of this post came from)
  
• Corporate vs personal/informal blogging styles
  
• How to start blogging (Typepad, Wordpress, etc)
  
• The pros and cons of Twitter (the scary world of microblogging)
  
• Is mobile blogging the next evolution?
  
• Finding out that lots more people read your blog than you thought
  
• Dealing with information overload and using blogreaders and RSS feeds
  
• Using blogs to share ideas, develop ideas and create collaborations
  
• How UnLtdworld works
  
• Why some people like blogs, other like podcatss, others like forums, others like twitter - the role of people's personality preference and learning style

The podcast can be downloaded here (35 Mb). The music is "Fire Dance" by djbouly and is brought to you under a creative commons licence.

Many thanks to Dave for producing the podcast for us all to enjoy!

Comments = Cash for Burma

Made a promise to make more comments on other people's blogs?

Always looking for ways to help people in need?

Well now you can kill two birds with one stone.

The Digital Influence Group is donating $10 for every comment made on this post as part of their work on the Burma: It Can’t Wait project.

If you want to find out more about the issue, Guardian journalist Helen Pidd reported from neighbouring Thailand after spending a week in Burma, seeing first-hand the extent of the damage caused by Cyclone Nargis and recording her views in a video that you can view here.

Go comment here and do your good deed for the day.

The Secret Life of a Blog Post

Love this.