Jan 20th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 11 Comments
Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist with Podtech, has gotten a debate going on the idea of the “social media press release” or SMPR (you know when something becomes an acronym that all hope is lost), which is an idea that some PR types have been tossing around for awhile. I think the idea, which my PR friend Ed Lee has written about before is essentially to update the traditional press release with social-media links and content.
Edelman has tried to push this particular train forward by putting out something it calls Storycrafter, software that is supposed to help companies put together social-media releases. But not everyone is sold on the idea — and frankly, neither am I. Stowe Boyd makes some excellent points in his post here, about how the SMPR is still more about talking at people instead of engaging with them in some way, and to pimp out the press release with tags and Digg links doesn’t really solve that problem.
Jeremiah has some similar questions, saying: “Why are we formalizing the word of mouth network into these clean nice buckets? Isn’t the point of conversations to have them flow nice and easily? Is this a way for Marketers to infiltrate “Social Media” communities with a few clicks and graphics? Where’s the relationship building? Where’s the humanity?” Steve Rubel responds that the SMPR is a sort of intermediate step, to get clients to dip their toes into social media.
I know when Ed asked me what I thought of the SMPR that High Road put together for Weblo, I said I thought it was a good step, and I still think that. A baby step, perhaps, but still a step. Not everyone is going to jump feet-first (or head-first) into blogging. But I would also agree with Stowe and Jeremiah — and Brian Oberkich here and Jeremy Toeman and Dominic Jones — that it does not go nearly far enough. And it looks like my friend Tony Hung agrees with me.
More on the subject from Brian Solis, Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 (complete with Breakfast Club reference) and from Chris Heuer at SocialMediaRelease.org, who says Stowe took things that were said at the Third Thursday get-together out of context and is deliberately trying to stir up controversy — which, knowing Stowe a little, I find hard to believe.
Update:
Shel Holtz, who was part of the Third Tuesday panel, has a long and thoughtful post, and Stowe has responded to Chris and others as well. In the end, I would agree with my friend Mark Evans that there is a place for press releases — social or not, as well as for blogs and pretty much every other kind of social media. A place for everything, and everything in its place. And Dominic Jones has a persuasive argument for why any kind of press release, social or not, isn’t anywhere near as good as a blog.
Jan 13th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 4 Comments
Sometimes in order to find out what works, it’s useful to look at what doesn’t work. So where might we look to find examples of what not to do when it comes to newspaper blogs? Andrew Grant-Adamson suggests that looking at the Independent in Britain would be a pretty good start — and I would have to agree. In his latest post, Andrew notes that the Indy blogs (which are hosted at Typepad) have gone for 21 days without an entry.
That was only true until a short time ago, however: now there is another blog entry, this one about some reviews of comedy events done by what appears to be the comedy blogger, who also has his own blog (which doesn’t seem to get posts any more frequently than the Independent one). The post before that one was December 16, then before that December 13 and December 10, and before that November 21. Not exactly a deluge.
In a previous post, Andrew notes that “the best thing that can be said about The Independent’s entry into newspaper blogging is that they are wasting very little time on it.” Touche. Martin Stabe has also written about the somewhat, er… lame-rific blogging done by the Indy, saying that “the Independent’s experiment with blogging has only been around for just over a month now, but I think it’s time move it to the central place of (dis)honour in the “blogwagon” hall of shame.”
Someone at the Independent must realize how pathetic their blogs look, because both Martin and Andrew mention a technology blog called the Sony Technology Blog, sponsored (surprise!) by Sony, which is nowhere to be found now. All that appears at the Indyblogs site are three categories: “environment” — which has two posts; “comedy” — which has four posts; and “photography” — which has three posts. Some of the posts have comments, but none of them (as far as I could tell) are from the authors of the posts.
All of which leads Andrew to his five tests for blogging:
1. Does it do anything which cannot better be done in another section of the site?
2. Does it develop the paper’s interaction with the readers?
3. Does it gain a valuable audience? (A particular niche, readers who are new to the paper etc.)
4. Can you give the blogger sufficient time to blog successfully?
5. Have you chosen a writer or writers who have the aptitude to blog successfully?
Good questions to ask. I would wager that the number of those questions the Independent asked is approaching zero. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis takes a swing at Shane Richmond — who does a great blog at the Guardian Telegraph — for telling bloggers not to discuss newspaper business or “tricks of the trade” in their blogs.
Jan 7th, 2007 | Social Media | No Comments
From Karoli at Odd Time Signatures comes the story (via The Zero Boss, and prior to that Chris Winfield of the website 10e20) of one Chandler Kent, a 19-year-old college student who wandered into the sights of the Digg bury brigade. In this case, it was Chandler’s comment that got buried, and may have become the most buried comment ever. But there’s a twist.
As Chandler describes it in a long and hilarious post here, he posted a quick comment on a Digg link, saying he liked the site that was linked to, and (big mistake) attached his blog’s URL. This set off alarm bells as a “spam” comment — like the ones I get all the time that say “I am liking your content very much!” with a link to some porn or poker site — and so it got buried repeatedly.
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Chandler also got some fairly abusive comments, which is typical of the mentality that one finds at Digg, and why many people have given up on reading the comments at all. His phone number was also posted by some unscrupulous Digger, and people even abused him via instant messenger.
More evidence of what is wrong with Digg, as Zero Boss notes. But there’s a happy ending, in a sense: Chandler’s post about what happened has gotten Dugg about 4,000 times, and he has used the criticisms about the crappy design of his website to start a contest to redesign it. Nice work, Chandler.
Jan 5th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
I missed the big rush of posts that hit Techmeme about the launch of Daylife yesterday, but from what I can gather just about everyone — including Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, a prominent investor in the project — is underwhelmed by it, if that’s a word (gratuitous Sloan reference). I wonder if the next shareholders’ meeting is going to be a little frosty 
Paul Montgomery of Tinfinger says that he thinks Mike’s response could have something to do with his well-publicized dislike of the New York Times, which is a lead investor in the site, and Paul also notes — as do other blogs that have looked at Daylife — that mainstream-media content is featured awfully prominently on the site. In which case, why not use Topix or Newsvine or even Google News?
Some of the only kind words have come from Steve Rubel, who says in a response to a comment on his post that we should “put on our anti-geek glasses” and see it from the point of view of someone who doesn’t read Techmeme or visit dozens of blogs a day. Which is a fair point, but again I have to ask why we wouldn’t point someone like that to Topix or Newsvine or Google News.
I think a big part of the problem is that Daylife has been in stealth or development mode for a year or more, and it has some pretty high-profile people involved, including Jeff Jarvis — who seems to be taking all the criticism pretty well so far — as well as Craig Newmark, Dave Winer and the NYT. So I think the expectation was that when it launched it would be significantly different than Newsvine and Topix and so on. And it’s not.
Does that mean it won’t ever be any good? Hardly. From what Jeff says, more improvements are planned (including RSS, which does seem like a pretty major hole), so I’m willing to wait and see how the site develops. I hope it finds a way to add more interaction — comments, blogs and so on — in an interesting way. We could use some more experimentation in that department, and Jeff has the chops to be able to deliver it.
More commentary comes from David Weinberger at Hyperorg, Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, Rex Hammock, Liz Gannes at Gigaom and Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests. And for a totally unvarnished and skeptical take, as usual, watch a video review from the inimitable Loren Feldman of 1938media.
