PRWeek’s Lindsay Stein reports that Finn Partners has acquired Horn Group for an undisclosed sum to boost its tech practice.

After more than two decades in the business, Horn said she started thinking about selling, and Finn Partners was attractive because of its fresh thinking, independent stature, and culture. She noted that the deal will also expand its reach both in terms of geography and services. Horn’s security software clients may be interested in Finn Partners’ lobbying practice in Washington, DC, for example.

In 2014, Finn had 370 staffers worldwide and more than $52 million in global billings. Following the Horn acquisition, the agency will have about $70 million in annual fees and 500 employees.

Finn Partners boosts tech practice with Horn Group acquisition | PR Week

Foremski’s Take: Sabrina Horn is one of San Francisco’s top PR industry mavens, (even though she has been spending most of her time in New York these past few years). I’ve worked with Horn Group’s San Francisco teams on many stories over the past 15 years. 

Horn Group always had interesting clients and interesting people working there. I remember with fondness their old office space on Howard Street where I shot a video of a pilot for a show called “Fridays with Foremski.”  

And it is where I met BrightIdea, one of my favorite San Francisco startups, which started life in the basement of Horn Group’s office.  BrightIdea CEO Matt Greeley and his Head of Culture Michelle would organize fabulous monthly Friday Salons which became unmissable and where I made many good friends. 

The gender barrier in PR…

There’s still a few independent PR firms left in San Francisco and the majority are run by women (exceptions include Todd Defren’s Shift Communications - (Todd recently shifted to San Francisco from Boston). These women entrepreneurs have been very successful in the PR industry building sizable businesses of usually around 100 to 150 staff. Some have been acquired such as Outcast Communications by publicly traded Next15.  

But the world is dominated by much larger PR firms such as Edelman, privately held; and giant publicly traded conglomerates such as WPP, Omnicom and Publicis that each own dozens of big PR firms such as Weber Shandwick, etc.  And there’s very few women executives at senior levels in these larger PR organizations. 

There clearly is a barrier here that prevents successful women business leaders — such as San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s many women PR firm founders — to move up into large PR organizations despite their evident success in running their own business groups for many years through good times and bad.

Why aren’t those formidable business skills being recognized within the senior executive ranks of the PR industry’s largest firms? 

Updated: Aarti Shah at Holmes Report published a great report into this barrier to female PR execs earlier this year: Why Aren't There More Female CEOs In PR?

Among the 250 firms on the list — which spans agencies as big as $750m in fee income to those as small as $3m — 75 have at least one woman in its top post. This number, however, dwindles further when looking only at firms with revenue of more than $100m. 

 

 

Updated: December 1 — PRWeek named Weber Shandwick a Best Place To Work 2014 - Large Agency, for the second year in a row.

I've been spending a lot of time in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, working with teams on Weber Shandwick's Mediaco venture, which is helping companies become media companies.

This week Ad Age named Weber Shandwick as one of the best places to work. As an independent observer of only one large Weber Shandwick office, I can attest that everyone is hard driving but super nice with each other and with everyone else. 

I can also attest that there are no private buses whisking staff to work, there are no celebrity chefs in the office kitchens, and there's no free lunch or Blue Bottle coffee for the staff. Tech company HR managers would be aghast.

Free stuff makes you feel entitled. It takes people to make a great workplace. And it has to come from the top, kudos to Weber's management. 

People to people is the most important interface for every business. Miserable staff can't hide it even when they think they can -- people pick up on tiny clues in voice, eyes or manner.

Happy workers are key to ROI. Here is the proof if you don't believe me: watch this short video by one of my favorite CEOs, Shawn Riegsecker at Centro in Chicago.

Shawn Riegsecker, CEO and founder of Centro, explains at a 2013 TechWeek event in Chicago, why he focused his company's culture on the happiness of its employees. 

It's working: Centro has become a giant in the hot ad tech sector. With more than 500 staff and over $300m in revenues - it is Chicago's fastest growing tech company. 

His staff attrition rate is an unbelievable 4% a year. He has no HR problems.

Centro won "Best place to work" in Chicago — no company in any city has won the top accolade twice in a row — Centro has won four years in a row.

I've watched this video many times.

Please see: Centro: Chicago's Ad Tech Giant Aims To Revive Journalism -SVW

Mediaco And Scalable Technologies Of Brand Publishing -SVW

Among the social media celebs in Niche's network with the biggest reach are Nash Grier, a teenage Vine star with nearly 25 million followers across his social media accounts, and singer Kevin Jonas, who has a total reach of more than 22 million users.

Each celebrity is a big media publisher in their own right and the deals brokered through Niche aren't simple sponsor or advertising opportunities, the "celebrities" will be paid to create the social media content for Weber's clients. 

Weber Shandwick's global president of digital Chris Perry... estimates about 15% to 20% of Weber Shandwick's PR programs involve social media influencers and that's growing fast, especially for consumer brand clients.

Read more: 

Weber Shandwick Partners with Niche to Tap Social Media Celebrities - CMO Today - WSJ

Foremski's Take: [I'm working with Weber Shandwick's Mediaco on an unrelated project.]

Partnerships such as this one are a smart way to jumpstart an audience for a brand if it's part of a long term strategy to build a loyal audience, it has to be more than just a three-month campaign.

Borrowing the audience of a "social media celebrity" is fine but at the end of the day companies need to learn how to become "celebrities" in their own right, they need to learn to become media companies with direct access to their own audiences, unmediated by Google or anyone.

Weber Shandwick's Mediaco group is worth watching because it is directly focused on helping "every company become a media company."  It's a trend I first spotted nearly ten years ago and it has now reached a tipping point influencing the content marketing initiatives of companies worldwide.

Media publishing success has the additional benefit of blocking attention to competitors. It's a killer competitive strategy -- if you aren't seen online you don't exist.

Tooling up for business...

There's tremendous business opportunities for PR and marketing agencies to capitalize on this trend, and there's opportunities for many others, too. For example, software developers of media technologies.

Corporations will need to equip themselves with an arsenal of media publishing platforms, apps, tools, analytics and infrastructure, all made complex by the fragmented nature of tens of millions of media channels; and made even more complex by the extraordinary two-way nature of our modern media: we can publish content to any screen and each screen -- pocket or desktop -- can publish back, through comments, video, clicks, silent cookies, etc.

Companies need to become good at interpreting and engaging with all that media feeding back to them, as well as know how to produce great media content. And they'll have to feed (and walk) that media beast every day. It won't be easy.

They'll need a lot of help from a lot of people. And hopefully, they won't have to relearn basic rules of ethics and best practices that we've accumulated in the media industry over hundreds of years.

The media is dying ... and growing

The old media might be dying out but before it disappears, it can teach the new media how to walk. It's an important lesson. 

We face a democratic crisis in that special interest groups will gladly pay for the media they want people to read but people won't pay for the independent media they should read.

Brands becoming media publishers will be tempted to skew things their way, all the way. But they should be careful because they will be subject to the same ethical scrutiny as a Wall Street Journal or any other media company. Learning to walk straight will be key.

It might not seem surprising to my readers that I'm working on a project with Mediaco, a Weber Shandwick business that advertises, "We Help Every Company Become A Media Company." 

Helping companies be great media companies is a noble calling these days, especially with the huge loss of skilled and experienced media professionals. There's hundreds of years of best practices that still apply regardless of paper and electron.

I'm working on an interesting project with Mediaco's West Coast lead Luca Penati and an enthusiastic team of professionals across many disciplines and locations.

This is what's needed in today's digital media worlds — the complexities of managing fragmented media channels and user interfaces across many devices requires integrated tech, media, design, SEO and communications professionals on the same publishing teams.

Brand publishing on today's scales requires sophisticated tools and apps. There is an opportunity to create a new type of enterprise app, a media publishing platform for corporations that also acts a listening post.  After all, it's a two-way Internet and each screen is both publisher and published.

We live in a world surrounded by media technologies. Computer pioneer Ted Nelson, said "We live in media as fish live in water."

Silicon Valley is a Media Valley, our largest and most dynamic companies are tech-enabled media companies or sell media technologies. Google, Facebook, Twitter publish pages of content with advertising. Intel microprocessors decode and encode high definition video streams in parallel; Apple sells media players and media making devices.

From Gutenberg's movable type to Silicon Valley's dynamic reprogrammable media — it's a huge leap. We know that leaps in media technologies have dramatically changed our society so what will this do?

Media Management Tools...

Enterprises will need a lot of media technologies and this will become a new genre of enterprise apps,  more importantthan ERP and CRM.

Selling media technologies to the enterprise will be a lucrative business and it is one that makes full use of advanced cloud technologies and subscription business models. 

PR is artisanal...

A year ago I asked where are the technologies from the public relations industry? How can PR firms also become tech firms? Where are the scalable technologies of promotion? Ad agencies are great at scalable promotion and this is a vulnerability.

Brand Publishing...

Somehow I missed this last week but Weber Shandwick's Mediaco launched a publishing platform that seems headed in this very direction. It comes from its just announced media tech group focused on brand publishing led by Eric Helgesen. 

Weber Shandwick uses the term "brand publishing" rather than "brand journalism" — a practice that other firms should adopt because it is more accurate and it doesn't snag.

Mediaco Publish is customized for brand publishing. It is built on open-source technologies and industry standard Wordpress that combines custom workflow, multi-channel publishing; tracking and reporting, and all the other features corporations need to be effective digital media publishers. 

Eric Weitner, head of Technology Platforms at Mediaco, used to work at Forbes and helped design its multi-author content management system. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I'm also looking forward to the arms race as Weber Shandwick's competitors announce their media products and roadmaps. The media tech sector is getting interesting.

Richard Edelman (center) at a Churchill Club event in February 2013.

Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman, the world's largest privately held PR firm, recently wrote about his "Decade of Blogging." His first post was September 29, just 10 days after my first post, which shows how early he began. 

There weren't many bloggers at the time, it was a tiny community and that's how I got to meet Richard Edelman. We were both bloggers. And we spoke the same language.

It takes a lot of courage for the leader of a large organization to jump into blogging, especially in 2004 when it was causing tremendous consternation in PR and corporate communications communities.  It's difficult to believe today but when I left the Financial Times to become a "journalist/blogger" in mid-2004, Intel held an emergency meeting to discuss how it should respond to "bloggers." 

I spent a lot of my time in those early years, speaking to PR agencies at lunchtime meetings, speaking at conferences, speaking privately with the comms teams of major companies to try and answer their questions about this media phenomenon, and I witnessed their trepidation at being caught in the middle of a fast changing media world — without rules and without precedents. It still hasn't stopped. 

By starting to blog early Richard Edelman figured out what blogging was and what it is good for. He didn't have to ask anyone and that gave him an important advantage over his peers at competing companies. And it continues to give him an advantage. Blogging is something that you can only know by doing it. [And it's so much more than you could ever imagine — it can sometimes feel like a spiritual practice. I'll share my decade in an upcoming post.]

Richard Edelman writes, 

The most important benefit of the blog is my connection to so many different kinds of people in this industry. It has been a wonderful way to connect with clients and media partners surrounding topics about which they care deeply. In academia, I feel that I am a positive force for PR students and professors, raising issues that they can debate in the classroom. And it has been a powerful gateway to our talent, connecting me to my Edelman colleagues around the world who ask me questions about my posts when I visit their offices in my travels.

By blogging, I have been able to address a wide range of topics: from political change in the world, to the explosive impact of digital platforms and technology to some of our most brilliant client work. It has also allowed me to give the background for a change in position, such as my new interest in sponsored content done in a balanced, ethical manner versus solely for advertising purposes.

Some of the posts have been deeply personal. My tributes to my late parents Dan and Ruth were cathartic for me, my family and the Edelman employees who knew them. My turning 60 was similarly an opportunity to reflect and commit to the future.

There's more on Edelman's 6 A.M Blog — his favorite time of the day.

[Edelman was a sponsor of SVW for six months in 2006] 

Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore Media Survey, at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Jack Odwyer reports that Bulldog Reporter, a service for PR agencies, has closed after 35 years in business. That's a shame because I've taken part in many Bulldog Reporter panels over the years and its team has done a great job educating PR people about the changes in media following the explosive rise of "blogging" in the mid-2000s - a confusing time for many people in communications.

He writes that the PR trade press has been on a downward trajectory for some time even though the number of PR professionals has grown:

PR jobs have grown from 166,630 in 2004 to 202,530 in 2013, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor. Jobs in journalism dipped from 52,550 to 43,630. PR Week/U.S. went monthly in June 2010 and its sister publication in the U.K. went monthly last year.

PR Society of America is gradually converting print runs on its two publications to online-only....PR Reporter, a weekly newsletter published since 1958, was purchased by Ragan Communications in 2002 and changed to a monthly. It was folded later that year.

The Ragan Report, previously a weekly NL, went online only in 2008. Ragan now does joint projects with PR Society of America. PR Quarterly was published for 52 years until 2009.

What's going on? Last month I caught up with Sam Whitmore (above) who produces the always excellent Sam Whitmore Media Survey. He said, "PR has been changing a lot. There are all sort of agencies that specialize in different aspects of PR. Some are hired to make sure clients don't get any media coverage." 

I certainly know a few agencies that can't get media coverage for their clients but I hadn't realized that this is now a billable service.

PR publications such as the Holmes Report seem to be doing well, and a key aspect of its success are the awards events that Holmes organizes around the world, recognizing the work of innovative teams.

(Hat tip Alex Shapiro.)

By Andrew Barnett, partner and head of the SEO practice at digital marketing and public relations firm Elasticity.

 Organizational structures are notoriously rigid, often lacking the agility and flexibility to respond to changing market forces. Over the last decade, the unrelenting growth of digital media has upended the way organizations and brands manage reputation issues and reach audiences, unleashing a tidal wave of new roles, responsibilities and budgets.

In the world of search engine optimization (SEO) -- the art and science of getting to the top of the search results (presumably for the right reasons) and perhaps the most undervalued yet most important element of reputation -- change has been constant. But not all organizations have adapted to the changing whims of Google. And this has created a gaping void between what Google wants and how some organizations are structured.

The misconceptions about SEO go something like this: SEO is all about the left-brain. It's ruled by spreadsheets, meticulously constructed formulas to evaluate the almighty keyword, and technical changes to the code of the site -- a plugin will take care of most of that. Sure, you need backlinks, but those are just waiting behind some Google voodoo magic curtain ready to be harvested. But, that couldn't be farther from the truth.

Nevertheless, I imagine that is the reasoning why SEO at some organizations is still under the control of the code jockeys that develop and maintain their website. In an era where Google rewards sites that deliver content and a great experience to their users, the gap between what Google wants in 2014 and what IT departments can deliver is growing wider.

The Case Against IT Ownership Of SEO

I've written about the need for convergence to tackle the manifold challenges that modern optimization entails. In this framework, the new imperatives for success include:

1. Focus on Users: Build a great website, focusing on users, not search engines.

2. Avoid Manipulation: Avoid tricks intended to improve search rankings.

3. Create Great Content: Develop original content focused on your audience.

4. Profit!: Users will find your content and magically flock to your site.

Of course, unlike Field of Dreams, if you build it, visitors probably will not magically come. It requires sustained, ongoing promotion, marketing and outreach to make this work.

At a high-level, a modern approach to SEO requires a diverse set of skills (above). Across those 11 factors, public relations and marketing clearly are aligned to take ownership of SEO. 

PR Is The Future Of SEO

While development, engineering, and the strong analytical minds of the website managers will remain a vital part of SEO, in the post-Panda world, the demands from Google for organizations and brands to develop even more valuable content and leverage relationships is taking on an increasingly central role.

Thus, it's time to let go of the old ways. It's time for IT to hand over the reigns of SEO to those tasked with managing reputation and driving sales through digital marketing channels. In short, those who are better-equipped to manage these new challenges. 

- - -

Please see:

 Content Marketing: Don't Trust SEO -- Publish Content For People And Not Robots -SVW

There's a huge quality mismatch between content created for SEO purposes, and human edited content. With an explosion of content marketing -- it is vital to understand the difference.

Luca Penati (above), a former senior executive at Ogilvy has joined Weber Shandwick as General Manager of its San Francisco and Silicon Valley offices. He spent 9 years at Ogilvy, mostly as Global Managing Director of Ogilvy's technology practice. 

Most recently, Penati was Managing Director of Content and Social at Ogilvy West and headed up content marketing for key clients. At Weber he will also be the Western lead for Mediaco, Weber's content marketing business.

(Below, I'm glad to see Mediaco is using my tag line: "Every Company is a Media Company.")

Weber Shandwick announcement: 

At Weber Shandwick, Penati will oversee growth and operations for the firm's Northern California offices in addition to focusing on content creation strategy for new and existing clients. He reports to Weber Shandwick president of North America Sara Gavin and global head of Mediaco Jason Wellcome.

Weber also announced Lee Noonan as its new Global Technology Officer based in New York. 

All the evidence gathered from PRWeek's investigations over the past month points to a couple of crucial conclusions...

Danny Rogers, Editor-in-Chief of PRWeek spells out the future in his recent column: The death of PR agencies -- as we know them

Attending the recent International Festival of Creativity, I was struck once again by the fact that advertising and PR are increasingly the same thing...

There used to be a fundamental difference between the two marketing disciplines. Advertising was about paid-for promotion; TV commercials and billboards. PR was about editorial persuasion; selling stories to journalists. And while the distinction between bought media and earned media still exists, you now find their executives working across both.

... now is the opportunity for those with earned (media relations) and owned (company websites, magazines or events) media skills to completely rebrand their business. Alongside endeavours to reinvent themselves according to today's transforming media, they may finally need to cast off those two deadly letters - P and R.

Mr Rogers is right, there is a change happening in his industry. I've written many times about the changes PR agencies need to make as advertising agencies (and SEO agencies) move into their turf. Richard Edelman, head of the world's largest privately held PR agency, warned about the challenge from the ad sector more than 6 months ago. 

PR agencies need to develop technologies that help scale their work -- advertising agencies already know the power of scale. 

But PR agencies are artisanal, and focused on hand-crafted services, their understanding of technologies of promotion is a Twitter hashtag. That has to change.

PR agencies need to master the media technologies that are used to communicate and to listen. They need to teach their clients how to use them, too. (I have more ideas here for the new rules PR firm.)

PR agencies need to move forward because the world has changed while the way they work changed little. They still argue about putting links in press releases. 

- - -

Please see:

PR's Next Big Challenge: Tooling Up For The War With Ad Agencies

Google Is Forcing A Change In The PR Industry

Richard Edelman's 'Show Up Differently' - A Rally Cry In PR's War With Advertising

The wonderful Deirdre Breakenridge will kickstart the morning. I'm speaking late morning on: What Happens When Every Company is a Media Company? 

And I'll be on a panel discussion in the afternoon (post 3pm coffee break thankfully) on: "What are the technologies of PR?" chaired by the always insightful Neville Hobson.

Here's the lineup:

9:35am The Future of Communications - PR 2.0

Keynote from Deirdre Breakenridge 

Author of five Financial Times books, Deirdre Breakenridge is an internationally renowned PR and social media expert. She will set the scene for the conference by describing how we are all, as professionals, reinventing the PR industry through the use of socialised media. How should we best embrace PR2.0? What are the best strategies for companies and brands to engage directly with the public, customers or stakeholders?

10:15am Content Marketing vs The Big Idea

Panel discussion: Jon Bernstein (chair), Paul Sutton (Bottle PR), Daniel Dodd (National Trust), Emma Hart (O2), Justin Pearse (Bite).

Social media and real-time marketing have changed the nature of the way in which brands communicate with consumers. The ability of brands to publish their own content in owned media, which spreads their stories through earned media, effectively bypasses traditional media channels completely. Brands can now build their own communities of customers and advocates and talk directly to them with ongoing content marketing activities. So is there room any more for the big creative idea?

11:30am What Happens When Every Company is a Media Company?

Interview: Tom Foremski interviewed by Adam Cranfield

When Tom Foremski first introduced the concept of brands as publishers a decade ago, few understood it. But the idea of the internet's media technologies having transformed PR and marketing is now something that most in the communications industry have come to accept. More and more brands are behaving like media companies, publishing content to engender engagement and affinity. But with such a huge volume of new content available every single day creating white noise, what next for the communications industry?

12:00am Why people share stories online - Stephen Follows (Catsnake Film)

Stephen is an award-winning writer and film producer, he specialises in using emotion-based stories to change perceptions. With the help of some video examples, Stephen will demonstrate the psychology behind storytelling and show why it's such an engaging way of getting your message across online. He will offer practical tips on how to best to get the story into your brand online.

1:30pm Using YouTube to underpin your PR

Innovation Case Study: Andrew Marcus, Deputy Head of Communications, Museum of London.

The Museum of London has ambitious targets to increase footfall and raise its profile over five years. Andrew will share how the comms team at this high profile visitor attraction are using YouTube as the key channel for their consumer and corporate PR campaigns. He will demonstrate the innovative techniques used and present the lessons learned.

2:15pm Anatomy of the modern communicator

Panel Discussion: Chair: Gabrielle Laine-Peters, Stuart Bruce, Nicola Dodd (Cancer Research), Vikki Morgan (TMW), Laura Bates (Heritage Lottery Fund)

As the communications industry evolves, so do the professional skills required in order to stay relevant. The integration of marketing functions means that roles within agencies and in-house positions are changing to encompass a far wider range of disciplines, technologies and knowledge than ever before. What do we need to learn to be successful in the future?

3:15pm What are the technologies of PR?

Panel Discussion: Neville Hobson (chair), Tom Foremski, Betony Kelly (BIS), Danny Whatmough (Ketchum), Juhani Levola (Deski).

Social and digital technology is playing an increasing role in the ability of brands to reach consumers. It is both an opportunity and a threat. The proliferation of mobile devices means that reaching people when and how they choose is becoming critical, while the advent of 4G, wearable technology and 3D printing will serve only to increase the pressure on the communications industry. So what's on the horizon?

4:00pm Jon Morter - Are you sitting comfortably?

Jon Morter is the man who got Rage Against the Machine to the Christmas number one in 2009. And he runs the hugely popular 'Condescending Corporate Brand' social media profiles. He can politely be described as a 'disrupter'. What can we learn from Jon's war stories? What mistakes should we try to avoid in our social media campaigns? Prepare to cringe at Jon's 'worst practice' examples.

I'm setting off to London and Warsaw (above) and will be back in early July.

Next week on June 18 I will be speaking at FutureComms14 in London, a brand new conference organized by Mynewsdesk, a Swedish media technologies startup. 

It was nearly ten years ago that I started talking and writing about how every company is a media company. Maybe that's an obvious statement today but it certainly wasn't then and I had to do a lot of education around this subject. I did a lot of talks, at conferences, at lunchtime brown bag meetups, and at many evening events.

I did them because I believe it's an important idea and that once it is fully understood it will transform every business.  And that's exactly what is happening.

Every Company is a Media Company.     EC=MC -- the transformative business equation of our times.

What's next? It's not questions such as: How does a company become a media company? How do I produce video content? What technologies do I need? Do I need an online newsroom? They are easy to answer.

It is not enough to simply agree with the statement: Every company is a media company, and then embark on a content marketing program.

There's a crucial aspect -- of all media companies -- that's overlooked in the corporate rush to become media companies.

[And it is not "Every brand" is a media company - a brand is a product line that's owned by a corporation. A brand can be thought of as a publication of a (media) company.] 

I will reveal the next stage, next week on stage, at FutureComms14 in London and I will post about it here.

I will tease you by saying that the answer is right in front of you.

Another clue is in my recent post about "content marketing's massive blunder." 

Trusted media...

Corporations are struggling  with the expense and the skills needed to create quality content and then they are getting poor results.  It's because people don't trust content written about the company, especially when it is commissioned by the company -- no matter how good it is.

[Nielsen Study Finds Very Poor Performance For Branded Content -SVW]

A company producing content about itself is fine for the "About" and "News" section of its website but it's not: "being" a media company.

Media companies don't write about themselves. That's not what media companies do.

Red Bull media...

A year ago I was speaking at Ragan's global PR Summit conference in Amsterdam and a Red Bull executive came over and said he was there just to see me. I was very flattered and pleased and thanked him. I respect and admire Red Bull and its success as a media company. 

He said there is just one rule. "The bull never speaks."

The athletes, the teams, the sports personalities that Red Bull features in its many-media publishing empire, speak for themselves. And that speaks volumes for Red Bull.

What does it mean to be a media company? The answer is also here: What does a media company do?

I'll tell you next week at FutureComms14 in London. Check back for discount codes.

(I will also be in Warsaw for 9 days.)

- - -

Please see:

InPowered Founders Interview: Trusted Content Is 4 Times More Effective Than Native Ads -SVW 

Above, Search Engine Land shows traffic plunge for Businesswire for certain search terms.

Google's latest algorithm update, Panda 4.0 appears to be punishing sites that host and distribute press releases, by demoting them in its search rankings reports Barry Swartz at Search Engine Land:

since Panda 4.0 hit... PRWeb.com, PR Newswire, BusinessWire and PRLog all seem to have lost significant rankings in Google.

He published a series of charts that show traffic plunging down a cliff, as much as 71% in some cases. This could become a huge problem for companies trying to distribute news and other information.

It is also affecting the distribution partners of press release sites such as Bloomberg, which are paid to host the press releases.

Foremski's Take: Last year Google warned companies not to stuff too many links and keywords into press releases or it would penalize them in its search index. Press release sites had become a favorite way for companies to boost their standing in Google's index because they are distributed to many other high ranking web sites, creating hundreds of back-links. Google's algorithm considers links from top sites to be a sign of trust and gives those pages a high rank for specific search terms.

Google considers PR firms and other marketing companies, to be similar to its hated search engine optimization (SEO) firms because they all work to boost visibility for their clients through paid activities rather than through merit.

Google wants search results that reflect the natural, "organic" popularity of web pages because they contain useful information. Anything that is done to try to game the Google algorithm is considered against its rules of service and can result in a ban from the search index. This means that traditional PR and marketing practices fall into the SEO category, in Google's view of the world.

PR firms have a tough road ahead when it comes to using digital to promote their clients. 

- - -

Please see: Did Google just kill PR agencies? | ZDNet

The first Hubbies awards (winners above) were presented in San Francisco earlier this week recognizing breakthrough digital creative work. It is organized by a new publication The Hub, a sister publication to PR Week.

Steve Barrett, (below, right) Editor-in-Chief of PR Week was on hand as part of a day-long conference discussing key trends in digital PR. He also interviewed Brian Solis from Altimeter Group. The Hub is based in San Francisco and edited by Omar Akhtar (below, left)

Here were the winners: (A full description of each campaign.)

Best Brand App of the Year

Winner: Burson-Marsteller and Proof Integrated Communications and AIG

Campaign Name: AIG CyberEdge iPad Application

Best Digital Agency

Winner: Huge

Campaign Name: Huge in 2013: Defining the Future Agency Model

Best Digital Brand Team

Winner: The Coca-Cola Co.

Campaign Name: Coca-Cola Journey

Best Integrated Campaign

Winner: Weber Shandwick and Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP)

Campaign Name: Milk Tackles Breakfast at Super Bowl XLVII

Best Real-Time Marketing Campaign

Winner: MSLGroup, Procter & Gamble/Scope

Campaign Name: For Breath That Sizzles! Scope Bacon

Best Social Media Presence

Winner: Human Rights Campaign

Campaign Name: Turning the Internet Red

Best Use of Brand Content

Winner: MSLGroup and P&G/Bounty

Campaign Name: Ken Delmar - Paper Towel Picasso

Best Use of Gamification

Winner: The Coca-Cola Company and Bunchball

Campaign Name: My Coke Rewards

Best Use of Video

Winner: PMK-BNC and Audi of America

Campaign Name: Audi of America: The Challenge

Courageous Client Award

Winner: Chapman Cubine Adams & Hussey and City of Hope

Campaign Name: "I am a Cancer Survivor"

Influencer of the Year 2014 -

Winner: The Coca-Cola Company

Campaign Name: Coca-Cola Journey

 The complete list of Hubbies 2014 (brand) awards winners

- - -

It was a good turnout and I met new people and saw many old friends.  It was great to see Steve Barrett, Rachel Polish, Tony Hynes, Nick New, Sarah Austin, Brian Solis, Heather Meeker, David Berlind, Jason Schlossberg, and Steve Kerns.

Here's a few photos from the evening:

  - - -

About The Hub | Technology & digital blog

ABOUT THE HUB
The Hub is a sister brand to PRWeek, focusing on marketing, data, innovation, content, social and digital media, creativity, and the VC and startup worlds.

The Hub is underpinned by technology, but it is not about technology -- it is about storytelling and the way communications and marketing is converging on the same space. It covers technology from the point of view of how brands and companies are telling their stories, rather than being product-focused

Influencer of the Year 2014 - Brand

Winner: The Coca-Cola Company 

Campaign Name: Coca-Cola Journey

With so few media professionals around to help tell a company's stories it makes sense for companies to try to tell their own stories and get them out online and into the many communities that matter to them. That was the prime reason Intel launched Intel Free Press, to make sure that key stories about Intel would be told and published in a professional manner. 

But it's tough producing high quality media content and expensive. And then companies have the problem of distribution -- they forget about the "marketing" part of content marketing.

Just because you created some media content doesn't mean that people will see it. It flashes into existence and then disappears in a blink of an eye into a dark archive. Then you have to do it again, and again, you have to produce fresh content constantly.

Although companies understand the part about becoming a media company they missed something very important: media companies don't create media about themselves. 

This is why companies have problems with the content they produce, people are immediately skeptical about any media that is about the company that produces it -- no matter how high the quality.

Take a look at the Nielsen study released this week, commissioned by InPowered. It found that branded content ranked extremely low among consumers but content written by journalists -- independent of any brand -- ranked very highly.

Independently produced media is trusted but content produced by brands is not. This is a massive problem at the heart of all content marketing. 

Every company is a media company but media companies don't write about themselves. So how do brands solve this conundrum?

There is an excellent solution and I will tell you about it soon.

Richard Edelman (right) with Steve Barrett, Editor-in-Chief of PR Week, at a Churchill Club event in 2013.

Can PR companies “Show Up Differently” as Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman, the world’s largest privately held PR firm, wrote in his New Year’s rally cry for his troops? 

Edelman understands that PR agencies will need to show up differently if they are to win against the advertising agencies. 

My post this week about the lack of automation technologies in PR is directly related to this coming confrontation. There’s a great business opportunity for PR agencies to compete for  lucrative advertising budgets — if they can prove  performance with solid metrics and at scale.

The pitch is easy: “Spending money on PR is more effective than on advertising, especially with the billions of dollars lost to ad fraud. We help you build lasting relationships instead of fleeting ad impressions.” 

Some advertising agencies are already vying for some PR accounts but the advertising industry as a whole is going through a lot of consolidation and is very distracted. PR agencies can use this to their advantage.

But can PR agencies show up differently? I’m not convinced they can change fast enough.

I’ve interviewed executives at many thousands of companies in my career and I’ve seen that all businesses are set in their ways to a remarkable degree. In every successful business, no matter the size, the culture and its operational processes are set in concrete. 

The new rules PR agency…

Change is hard and slow, it’s far quicker to start a new organization, or what I call a new rules enterprise; it’s new and no one needs to be persuaded of the right strategy and execution.  

Some of the features you would expect of a new rules PR firm are obvious:  it is tech savvy, tech-first, and run by top PR and media specialists. Its developers would be best described as media engineers — part software engineer/and part media/PR professional.

The technologies of PR…

The use of technology by the PR industry is just beginning and will be essential to its future and its ability to challenge the ad agencies.

PR firms are hampered by a culture that only knows how to grow by adding more people — that’s not a scalable business model and it won’t be a viable model for long. PR needs to develop tools that help leverage the work of its people. And it needs to understand all the media technologies out there and how best to deploy them.

Teaching companies how to be media companies will be a core competency of any successful PR firm. 

By providing the technologies and the services that enable companies to be media companies, PR agencies will be perfectly placed to reach for the advertising budgets. It’s a position of strength and the best strategy for competing against the ad agencies. 

The PR industry has a head start but it’s a short one. Let’s see what it can do.

- - -

Please see:

Can PR Be Automated? The Technologies Of Promotion Are On Their Way... -SVW

Show Up Differently - Edelman

These are the new dotcoms of the new rules economy... -SVW

The media industry has been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world and forced to adopt new media technologies and drastically overhaul its operations.

The successful new media model is a combination of three components: professional media, user generated media, and smart machine media (e.g., automated news aggregation).

Buzzfeed is an example of this trinity: it has top journalists producing original content; it makes great use of social media; and it has a tech platform that leverages the algorithms of distributors such as Facebook and Twitter.

Forbes is another example of a large media company with professional journalists, user generated articles, and a good technology platform.

Public relations has been pulled into the modern world  (complaining about the extra work of social) but not much has really changed. It’s still very much a hand-crafted, artisanal business, its use of technology is a Twitter hashtag and a dashboard of likes and shares.

But without a significant tech component PR is at a big disadvantage because it can’t scale, it can’t grow without growing more people. Which is also why valuations of PR firms are low compared to their revenues. 

And it makes PR firms vulnerable to competitors outside of their field that can figure out and automate technologies of promotion.

Fizzle…  

The three components in the media operations stack are like the three components of gunpowder: charcoal, saltpeter, and sulphur. It’s important to get them in the right mix. If you get the proportions right the result is explosive, if you get it wrong it fizzles and smells bad.

The PR operations stack is mostly fizzle. 

PR needs to figure out how to automate some of its capabilities and keep up with the changing trends affecting their clients. The major trend is in helping companies become media companies simply because there are fewer reporters around to help tell the stories of clients.

I’ve worked with Intel on its Intel Free Press and other media projects, for example. And PR firms need to do the same, help every company to be a media company and how best to use the media technologies available.

Impress Labs, is a good example, it publishes newsletters about solar and clean energy and is aggregating other publications into a Solar channel.

I see lots of PR firms helping clients spruce up their web sites and offer design services.

But the publishing, etc, is not enough. There needs to be a large technology component inside the future successful PR firm. It needs technologies of promotion that can scale the work of its practitioners in the service of its clients.

This has to happen quickly because PR is being challenged from sectors that already understand technologies of promotion. 

The PR industry is heading for a serious showdown with ad agencies gunning for PR budgets. Ad agencies have algorithmic buying and selling of ads, there is already a large automated component to their business.

Where is the equivalent component for PR? 

PR has competition from other sectors such as SEO, marketing agencies, and even more troubling in the long term, Google itself.

Art for art’s sake…

PR is certainly more art than it is science but that doesn’t mean there is no opportunity to automate some of the work.

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, recently predicted that within 20 years most jobs will be automated. Why are PR jobs so special that some of the work won’t be automated? 

Metrics tied to ROI are imperfect today but that won’t last forever. The rise of more accurate metrics that can be tied to long-term results will force PR firms to change.

That front page story in the New York Times is great but it doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t move the needle for clients — and that needle is the metric of revenues. 

PR firms will need to do more for less, but they can’t keep doing more without adding more people. Which is another reason why PR will need technologies that leverage its work. 

PR firms need more investment in the technology component of their operations. Not only to automate parts of their business but also to sell to their clients and create a new revenue stream.

What will these technologies look like? What technologies will you be able to buy from PR firms?

I know what some of those technologies will look like and what they will be able to do.

Scalable technologies of promotion are on their way —  just make sure you aren’t in the way. 

The recent SF Creators Salon focused on the topic of trust and content marketing and as usual, it was a lively evening hosted at InPowered’s community space in San Francisco.

I Interviewed the two  founders, the brothers Peyman Nilforoush and Pirouz Nilforoush (above), who are very much on top of this topic of trust and content marketing through the services of InPowered. The company helps client identify trusted media written about them and their products, and then it amplifies its distribution.

Stories written about a product from a trusted, independent source such as a magazine or newspaper, are by far the most effective means of influencing buyers.

InPowered’s research shows four times the effectiveness of trusted content over company produced content. It’s a huge difference that I can never tire of emphasizing this fact because it strikes at the heart of the current crisis in the media industry. The continuing loss of trusted, independent media brands is bad for society and its very bad for commerce.

Bill Ziff made billions of dollars building trusted publications….

Prior to the main interview with the brothers, I interviewed Fred Davis, (above) a former senior executive at Ziff Davis when it was run by the legendary William Ziff. Fred worked very closely with Ziff as he built the largest privately held publishing group. His success, Fred said, was his absolute insistence on editorial quality untainted by any commercial influence. Readers trusted Ziff’s magazines and he made sure nothing eroded that trust.

Ziff’s success has some important lessons for content marketers today. For example, Fred says that Ziff always insisted that content had to be completely led by the editorial team and there could be no fraternization with marketing and advertising sides of the business. Yet in today’s world, content marketing is nearly always led by the sales and advertising departments, which probably explains the poor quality of much of it.

The metrics of trust…

Also, Ziff spent millions of dollars on research showing the effectiveness of his magazine’s high quality, independent editorial in driving sales for advertisers. His near fanatical insistence on producing editorial of the highest quality, free of any commercial taint, resulted in terrific returns for advertisers.

Ziff made a tremendous amount of money. And advertisers made money because they had a highly effective, independent trusted media platform to reach customers.

 The disruption of the media industry’s economics means that there are fewer, independent trusted sources of news and information.  Many publications have closed or have been forced to accept promotional programs that call into question their independence — such as with native advertising.

With fewer journalists to talk to, companies are forced to try to tell their own stories. (I’ve advised Intel on the development of Intel Free Press — a good example of content marketing by a large brand.)

Every company now has to be a media company — whether they like it or not — and most would rather not. 

At the salon I said that, unfortunately, we will have to tear down the old order and we will have to relearn many of the basic truths about media publishing  — the immense value of trusted and independent media publications.

But the destructive nature of the disruption will create a nasty period of confusion and opportunities for special interest groups with nefarious agenda.

We will eventually figure out the economics of the new media and we will again, have trusted, independent media companies with sustainable business models; so that every company no longer has to be a media company. 

Native advertising is bad for advertisers…

It is a huge mistake for trusted publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the few remaining trusted media brands, to accept native advertising. Native advertising is specifically designed to look and feel similar to independently produced stories.

Anything that causes readers to question their trust in a publication, as native advertising does — is absolute madness. 

The lessons of Bill Ziff, and InPowered’s discovery that trusted content is four times more effective than paid content — is proof that native advertising is absolutely wrong for both the publisher and advertisers. Anything that erodes trust in the publication also erodes trust in the advertiser. It’s a loss for both parties.

[Please see: Native Ads Are The Worst Idea In The World - NYTimes Is Clueless]

Advice from SF Creators members…

The first interview of the evening was with Carla Schlemminger (above), a long time member of the salon. It’s part of a regular series of interviews focusing on salon members (coming up Jane Evans Ryan and Heidi Groshelle).

Carla is a San Francisco native and has worked in PR and marketing for many years, and has helped more than three dozen startups and larger companies, with product launches, strategic positioning, and media strategies. She shared some of the common mistakes she’s seen and gave a great presentation on how to avoid them. 

A key point was that companies wait too long before hiring PR and marketing specialists and there isn’t much time to do the things they want to achieve. They have a launch coming up in two weeks but the product isn’t ready and they have no social media footprint, and they want their CEO to be seen as a thought leader.

Carla polled many of her colleagues for her presentation and it was packed with practical advice. Here’s a recap of her five main points:

- Trust your agent not to drink the corporate Kool-Aid.
- Treat Marketing with the same import as you do Finance and Legal.
- Consider your agent an extension of your team and not your “vendor.”
- Align expectations with resources.
- Retrench quarterly similar to what a pro athlete would do.

- - -

My thanks to Robb Henshaw from InPowered for helping to make the event possible and the generous hospitality of the company. It was great to see Matt Greeley, CEO of BrightIdea; Dave Richardson, head of Impress Labs SF; and Tom Zimberoff, one of the world’s best photographers and now at the helm of a potentially revolutionary photo startup; plus many new people and new conversations. I can’t wait to do it all again.

David Matahai, Director of Marketing Communications at Hyundai.

Holmes Report conferences are rapidly becoming my favorite conferences and last week’s Innovation Summit in San Francisco was excellent — and not just because I won a top 25 Innovator award for my “Every company is a media company” thought leadership.

The quality of the attendees was excellent with top PR executives from some of the largest agencies and there were many interesting panels. And I had lots of great conversations in the hallways, which is always the mark of a good conference.

I was very pleased with the response to the panel I was on, with lots of people telling me it was one of the best. As an outsider, and as a journalist, it’s easier for me to cut through to the chase because I don’t have a vested interest in protecting any specific type of PR program, or ride along with whatever the current bandwagon is promoting. 

Just over a year ago I was in Miami at a Holmes Report conference speaking on a panel about Brand Journalism and it was great. It quickly turned into a big discussion about corporate media and we made so much noise people from other conference sessions were coming over to join us.

This year, my panel was called Smash the Agrarian Clock and Other Innovation Mandates  and was excellently moderated by PR industry legend Marian Salzman, CEO of Havas. David Matahia, head of marketing communications at Hyundai was interesting (above), he was saying that there’s big pressure on companies to have a newsroom, to produce content 24/7.

I said that every company is a media company but you don’t have to be every kind of media company — you don’t need to be CNN.

This was the first In2 Innovation Summit, the brainchild of Aarti Shah, senior editor at Holmes Report. I’m looking forward to the next one. Here’s a short photo essay:

Lou Hoffman from the Hoffman Agency (right) presented an excellent case study of the work his agency has done with Kelly Kline (left) and the city of Fremont. This San Francisco Bay Area city no longer has a local newspaper and so has taken on a lot of media publishing roles and has gained significant attention from local residents and beyond. 

The Fremont site: Start, expand, grow, relocate business in Silicon Valley - Fremont, California

Aarti Shah presents Susan Etlinger from Altimeter Group with an Innovator Award.

Sam Whitmore from Media Survey wins an Innovator award.

Marian Salzman, CEO of Havas wins an Innovator Award. 

Ken Shuman, VP of Communications at Trulia wins an Innovator Award.

Trulia wins best in-house PR team.

Mark Stouse, VP of Global Connect at BMC wins an Innovator Award.

Julie Crabill, Inner Circle Labs, left, with Paul Holmes, wins a Sabre Award.

Richard Edelman (right) with Steve Barrett, Editor-in-Chief of PR Week, at a Churchill Club event in 2013.

The advertising industry is going through big changes and that means opportunities for PR firms to compete for large marketing budgets normally allocated for advertising.

PR agencies have a window of opportunity while the advertising industry is distracted in a wave of consolidation, such as the huge Omnicom and Publicis merger; and the agencies are distracted with responding to disruptive trends, such as algorithmic ad buying.

This is a very good time for the PR industry to move against the ad agencies. But with what? How?

Richard Edelman (a 2006 SVW sponsor) leads the world’s largest privately held public relations company. He writes that PR firms will need to, “Show up differently.”  He calls it, “The rallying cry for ourselves, our clients and our industry.”

Here is an extract from his “6 A.M.” blog post: Show Up Differently. 

We believe that the combination of public relations, digital and research will allow us to build a new kind of marketing communications firm that can help clients both promote and protect their brands. … [And] to challenge the status quo, which has placed advertising agencies as the first among equals.

Foremski’s Take: The headline “Show up differently,” says it all because the only way PR firms will make headway against the ad agencies is by being creative and innovative. But I’m not confident they can do it.

PR firms have done little to challenge the status quo over the past decade. I’m continually astounded as to why they are so risk averse and haven’t tried to implement business strategies and new services that seem obvious to me. The same goes for the media industry where there is an even greater lack of different ideas.

Yet we are living in extraordinary times. Our society has at its disposal incredibly powerful media technologies. The Internet is a publishing technology — but now it works in both-directions. 

Our computing screens are no longer one-sided, they work on both sides of the glass: displaying and creating — our computing devices have become both the paper and the printing press. 

We’ve built a new type of Gutenberg press, a vast virtual printing machine made from Silicon Valley’s media technologies.  We’ve moved from moveable type, to reconfigurable type. We can create  reconfigurable media of all types, on-the-fly.  We have the means to develop new types of media, in new formats, in new expressions. And we’ve barely begun.

I see lots of opportunities for disrupting PR firms, and the advertising agencies.  A new kind of marketing communications company will arise, as Edelman predicts, but I doubt it will come from within. It has to be what I call a “New Rules Enterprise."

I have 10 rules defining a New Rules Enterprise and the first and most important rule is that it is new. Because new thinking is so difficult, and so time-consuming to push through in established organizations. Innovation develops far more rapidly within new ventures.

I agree with Edelman that, “Show Up Differently” is vital to the future of the PR industry. The danger is that the advertising agencies will figure out how to do things differently, faster. 

How the PR industry meets this challenge will be an interesting story to watch in 2014.

- - -

Please see:

Edelman Global Survey Finds Lack Of Trust Has Become Contagious -SVW

Analysis: The Empire Strikes Back – Giant $35bn Omnicom, Publicis Merger Aims Squarely At Google, Facebook... -SVW

I hate blowing my own horn but I’d like to thank The Holmes Report for recognizing my work and naming me one of the top 25 innovators of 2013. 

Aarti Shah wrote:

For having the foresight to see that every company is a media company even before the content craze took hold. For being the PR industry’s Silicon Valley ally, sounding the alarm for industry disruption and plainly pointing to pockets of new opportunities. And for being among the first brave journalists to take the leap from the analog to the digital realm even when the model was still half-baked, at best.

It hasn’t been easy work so it’s very gratifying to be noticed by an organization such as The Holmes Report. It has a great team that keeps a close eye on what’s happening in PR and media. I spoke at one of its conferences in October 2012 as a guest of Lewis PR and it was one of my best experiences of the year. 

New Gmail Filters Out The Competition: Other Marketers -SVW

Now it has taken further steps to hobble the marketing efforts of newsletter publishers by cacheing images found in emails.

Again, Google says it's for the user's benefit because it can protect them from images that, "compromise the security of your computer or mobile device." It also speeds up the display of the image since it doesn't have to be fetched from servers outside of Google.

However, those images are a vital component of tracking and metric systems used by the newsletter publishers to see who opened the email, and glean additional information.

Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica: 

Marketers get a rough idea of your location via your IP address. They can see the HTTP referrer, meaning the URL of the page that requested the image. With the referral data, marketers can see not only what client you are using (desktop app, Web, mobile, etc.) but also what folder you were viewing the e-mail in.

Google claims viewing images on external severs is a potential security risk. Taking that logic further, the browsing of web pages that aren't on Google sites compromises your computer in the same way. Before long it'll be Google's web -- anywhere else will be considered very risky.

"Welcome to the G-Web! All your marketing budgets are belong to us!"

- - -

Official Gmail Blog: Images Now Showing

New Gmail Filters Out The Competition: Other Marketers -SVW

For much of this year Facebook has been gradually cutting back on distribution of a brand's messages to Facebook users that "like" the brand. Now, it's offering a way for brands to regain that distribution by paying for it, reports Cotton Delo at Ad Age:

[Facebook] states plainly: "We expect organic distribution of an individual page's posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site."

Foremski's Take: All that work to get people to "like" a brands' Facebook page has been neatly integrated into Facebook's business model.

Social media was never free but in the early years it seemed that way when companies could get huge distribution of their messaging for seemingly little work. Then as the number of media channels fragmented, it became less free because of the extra management required but the distribution was free. Now the distribution is being locked away and will cost money.

All in all, overall marketing costs are going to go up, way up, as other media channels start to monetize their traffic. Google, for example, is killing search engine optimization services because it wants to sell distribution instead of giving it away through SEO influenced organic search.

Google filters from the inbox of Gmail users all promotional email newsletters and puts them into a separate folder. Google sees them as competitors for the same budgets so why make it easy for them? 

How soon before Forbes and LinkedIn start charging their users to distribute their articles? Publishing without distribution is useless.  There's a huge market in vanity publishing among professionals in every industry sector.

It was the users that built the community and now those users have to pay to interact with their communities. Facebook and LinkedIn are the gatekeepers to information flow and there's a toll to pay if you want to reach every member of your community.

There's not going to be much free traffic ahead which means the quality of the content is now secondary to the money.

When distribution is free, content is distributed widely and filtered on its merits. But what happens when traffic is bought by money and not by virtue? The web will become a very dull and mediocre experience.

Which is a good thing because we won't be missing much. We seem to be transitioning into an everyday reality where our technology is disappearing into the woodwork, into the framework, creating a blended reality where there is no web, and none of its glittering distractions. I can't wait!

It means the world wide web is a temporary Internet phenomena. There's no need for web sites and web experiences when we're mobile with our digital technology, and surrounded by our technologies. They overlay and underlay reality. There's no place for a HTML page in that future, which is already here in places. The end of the web is near. Which is why Facebook is concentrating on the underlying technologies of connections between people - so that when the web goes away it does't matter because its community technologies stay relevant and have a good chance of becoming a de facto standard, built into the woodwork of tomorrow, as dependable and ubiquitous as a chair.

Thanks Bill Sledzik! It’s interesting to see that others sometimes agree with me :)

From Ragan: Coca-Cola digital chief: ‘Kill the press release’

However, recent changes at Google's Gmail has marketers very worried.

The free email service has begun  filtering some emails into a separate "Promotions" folder, which shifts them from the prime position they had in the users' Inbox folder. Marketers are worried that conversion rates will be hurt by the change as Google rolls out the changes to its 425 million users. They could be right. 

Drew Fitzgerald at the Wall Street Journal reports:

MailChimp last month found the percentage of emails that were opened by its 3 million customers fell by about 1 percentage point for Gmail, to between 12% and 13%. Analysis from HubSpot showed the percentage of Gmail users who opened clients' emails slid slightly over the summer.

Foremski's Take: This is very much in line with Google's latest strategies to isolate companies with marketing services promoting online businesses because it sees them as competition to its own services.  

Why should companies pay other firms for promoting content and online businesses on Gmail when that's what Google offers through its AdWords service?

The Google changes in Gmail mirror recent changes in its webmaster rules on links and keywords in press releases. Again, because press releases are often issued to promote online businesses and that's what Google offers, too.

Its search algorithm provides a lot of online businesses with free traffic but that is done on the basis that those sites truly provide a valuable service. Google hates anything that tries to dupe its search algorithm into providing an online business with a higher rank by gaming its algorithm through SEO. 

The same is true for Gmail. The appearance of the "Promotions" folder is part of this strategy to sideline competitors. Anything that requires an extra click to get to — reduces traffic significantly.

It's tough being an online marketer and it's going to become a lot tougher now that Google is stepping up its competitive strategies. After all, Gmail's audience belongs to Google and the free ride that marketers, and PR firms have had so far, will become increasingly difficult to exploit.

[Did Google just kill PR agencies?]

Sam Cooke: "It's been a long, a long time coming. But I know a change is going to come, oh yes it will."

I've long warned that PR companies would be subject to similar forces of disruption that have been destroying the media sector for the past decade. As with the media companies, their helter skelter basket to hell was waiting for them.

But my friends in PR weren't entirely convinced because there was no clear cut challenge to their business. While they watched the boa constrictor technologies of the Internet squeezing the profitability out of the media sector, the new media revolution had increased their business opportunities.

They were so busy that they hadn't noticed Google's war on SEO, or that it was heading their way.

Now, they have to deal with the might of Google. And Google hates any other business that promotes other businesses because Google wants that money.

PR is a form of SEO; whether the PR industry understands this or not, it doesn't matter because Google certainly does.

In olden days...

It never used to be a problem when Google just looked at links, and who had them and who didn't. That's how it judged the importance of a site, it is described in Larry Page's PageRank patent. With the Panda algorithm update the focus was on "quality." 

In Google-speak "quality" is a proxy for purity. Paid-for links and other SEO messes with the purity of its index, the crown jewels of Google.

Now, with the Penguin algorithm updates, it is looking at more than 200 signals, many of them in social media platforms. There's a lot more ways to muddy the quality of its index.

The quality of natural signals...

Google, above all, wants high quality signals that are naturally produced by the viral nature of the Internet.

Google understands this natural behavior of the Internet very well because it's how it grew to be the best search engine -- because it was the best search. It didn't do any marketing because that would mean it didn't have the best search engine.

Whenever I used to meet with the founders and other Google executives, they were very proud that they didn't need any marketing. They didn't even have a marketing chief, and they didn't pay anyone to promote Google as the best search engine. Even today, Google still has no marketing chief in its senior ranks.

Google understood that the Internet can act as a meritocracy, that the cream will always rise to the top -- except when people muddy the waters with paid-for promotional activities.

Google tries to find those signals of natural quality that represent a true virality, a truth that indicates the natural importance of a business, a product, a person, or an idea -- separate from any promotional signals of quality.

Let the search engines optimize themselves...

I've always advised: "Don't worry about links and SEO beyond the basics. Concentrate on pleasing your customers, let the search engines optimize themselves. If you try to buy links, etc, sooner or later Google will see that and those practices will come back to bite you."

And sure enough, the bite finally arrived, and businesses are scrambling to have millions of back links erased, sending legal letters to some sites. And tearing their hair out trying to regain their lost positions in Google's index. 

[Please see: The Fast Unravelling Web: How Google Is Killing The Hyperlink]

Optimize for your customers and let the search engines optimize themselves. That's all that Google wants, so that it has clean signals, so that it can refine its search algorithm to find the best results for each search.

This is why Google hates paid promotion of any type. It is an artificial boost to popularity and it deliberately harms its index -- the holy core of Google. Once discovered, retribution is swift and vicious -- lost Google traffic has maimed many businesses. 

Beyond the press release...

Some commentators to my posts have said that PR agencies do more than create and distribute press releases. It's true. But now that Google is looking for signals in many places, any form of paid promotion, guest posts, paid-for columns, paid-for Facebook friends, paid-for Twitter followers, etc, all have the potential to muddy the purity of its index, and Google hates that. That's what scammers do. 

In Google's world, there is no need to trick its index with PR and false signals of popularity. If you truly do have a better product, service, or mousetrap, Google will make sure that the world beats a path to your door. 

How do PR agencies fit into that world? How do they reinvent themselves?

]]> Fri, 09 Aug 2013 02:39:12 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/pr-in-the-age-of-google---unnatural-promotion-of-content-is-penalized/ https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/pr-in-the-age-of-google---unnatural-promotion-of-content-is-penalized/239493Google has updated its webmaster rules on the use of links and keywords in press releases and it doesn't look good for PR agencies and their current suite of services. The details on the changes are here: Link schemes - Webmaster Tools Help

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

If you repeat the use of a word in a press release, Google will think you are trying to stuff it with keywords and try to trick its index. Repeated words are a big red flag (I've put them in italics to explain what Google means by "optimized anchor text.")

Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites. For example: "There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress."

Most press releases are posted on numerous sites to get attention and to promote the client. This is now against the rules. Google doesn't want to see any unnatural boost to the popularity of a piece of content. 

You must, "Create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community."

Here's a question I found on Internet marketing forum WebmasterWorld (Penguin is Google's latest search algorithm):

Are press releases considered spam now? I want to know as I have one planned for a UK news event about to break but I don't want to risk my already penguin hit site. If they are considered dangerous now. Any thoughts please? 

Foremski's Take: I've been trying to get PR firms to put links into press releases for many years because it makes my job as a journalist easier. I can quickly find background materials such as photos, information on founders, and prior news releases.

My 2006 post: Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die! -SVW is used by universities and colleges in teaching PR. I argued for links and for a modular approach to the information so that I can more easily decide what to put into my story.

Under the new webmaster rules, Google could penalize a PR firm's client web site because it could view the links in a press release as an attempt to unnaturally promote the site! Only "natural" growth in the popularity of a web page is allowed. 

All forms of promotional content are suspect...

It's not just press releases. PR agencies increasingly create a lot of content for their clients ranging from guest posts, guest columns, to feature length articles. These are published in many different places, they contain links, and are designed to promote the client company. 

Any actions designed to improve a company's PageRank is automatically flagged by Google and can result in a penalty.

Lots of links, lots of repeated key words, and multiple postings of a press release to different sites, are all red flags to Google under the new rules. Such actions are viewed by Google as blatant attempts to trick its algorithm into ranking a site higher than its allotted position. 

Yet these have all become standard practices at PR agencies. Did Google just kill the PR business?

The fact of the matter is that Google and PR agencies earn their money in the same way: promoting businesses. Google does it by selling ads on its AdWords or AdSense networks, and in return it directs lots of traffic to the site. 

They don't see themselves in this way, but PR agencies are essentially engaged in a form of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google is at war with SEO companies and is trying to wipe them out.

Except for the most basic aspects, it sees all SEO as blatant attempts to game its algorithm. Only scammers would want to do that, is its thinking, therefore those businesses that paid for SEO services must be penalized as scammers.

Plus: Google wants the money businesses pay for promotional services because organic or not, it's all Google's traffic. 

If a business is caught violating Google's webmaster rules it can be a very serious matter. It can result in a penalty that sinks its rank deep within the Google index. Most people don't click past the first page of search results. If a business can't be found easily through Google, it can kill it stone dead.

A huge archive of transgressions...

Google can change its webmaster rules at any time. There is never any mention by Google of grandfathering-in of prior practices.

All the previous promotional PR practices on behalf of clients will be judged by the new rules. The damage is done and it will be near impossible to undo.

PR agencies face three big problems:

- Their current and former clients could become very upset with them because of perfectly acceptable prior PR practices designed to promote their business -- instead of the viral, organic growth based on happy customers, which is what Google now wants to see. 

- PR agencies could be held liable for the damage they caused to the online reputation of client businesses through the execution of normal practices. It could lead to legal action and compensation claims on millions of dollars in lost sales. 

- PR agencies have to wake up to the fact that Google is now their competitor. How do they promote a client when Google punishes any form of paid online promotion? Good luck with that one.

- - -

Please see: Google is forcing a reinvention of PR | ZDNet

SEOBook: Google: Press Release Links

Improving Web Site Quality Could Sink Your Google Rank -SVW

Any SEO -- White Hat Or Black -- Could Flag You As A Spammer - SVW

Is Search Broken? Does Google Trick SEOs With Random SERP Ranking Changes?

Link schemes - Webmaster Tools Help

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

If you repeat the use of a word in your press release, Google will think you are trying to stuff it with keywords and try to trick its ranking of your site:

Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites. For example:
"There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress."

Any attempt to promote your press release, with multiple postings to different sites, and other measures, other than its natural gain in popularity will raise a red flag at Google:

You must, "create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. "

 More on this topic here at SEOBook: Google: Press Release Links

From left: Peter Burrows, Eric Brown, Mary Dent, Richard Edelman, Jeffrey Pfeffer.

Richard Edelman, the head of the world's largest privately held PR firm, said that the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global survey of 31,000 people, revealed a lack of trust for business and government that was "contagious" and spreading to other sectors.

He was speaking earlier this week at the Computer History Museum on a panel organized by the Churchill Club, and moderated by Peter Burrows, senior reporter at Bloomberg.

He said that it's the first time that such lack of trust has become viral and it stems from the financial sector.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, co-panelist and professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, said, "We are all being tarred with the same brush."

Mr. Edelman said that the survey showed that government ranks lower in trust than business and that this is an opportunity for companies to act quickly and distance themselves from the poor standing of government.

Every company is a media company...

Mr. Edelman also spoke about other trends, such as how "every company is a media company" mentioning Silicon Valley Watcher, and how business is stepping into the empty space becoming vacant because of a shrinking media industry.

Professor Pfeffer told the largely PR executive audience, that there was only one way that businesses can deal with the issue of trust and improve their low standing, "CEOs should tell the truth."

Does the stock market reward 'trust'?

Peter Burrows asked about how "trust" is reflected in the stock market. He pointed out that banks and financial services companies have had a very good year and are doing very well.

Mr. Edelman said that CEOs often look at "trust" as if they are putting coins in a piggy bank, but it's not an equal relationship because a fall in a company's trust can be geometric and not linear. He said CEOs should give up the idea of control of a message, it's less risky, "Let the community decide."

Professor Pfeffer recommended "getting ahead of the story" and "don't let the story dribble out in bits."

Ignore the media...

Eric Channing Brown, GM at Skype, and a co-panelist spoke about his prior PR work at Yahoo! and elsewhere. He said that keeping CEOs out of the media spotlight, away from answering questions about an issue, improved their standing. Ignoring the media led to far more positive results than engaging with the media.

CEOs are role models...

Mary Dent, General Counsel at Silicon Valley Bank, and a co-panelist, said that CEOs have to be role models and that they need to do the right things.

Transparency failure in local government...

David Vossbrink, Director of Communications at City of San Jose, said that greater transparency and openness had not helped raise trust in the government of the city of San Jose. "The more we do the less we are trusted."

- - -

Above, Steve Barrett, Editor-in-Chief of PR Week and Richard Edelman.

Foremski's Take:

It was a pleasure to talk with Richard Edelman, (a sponsor of SVW for six months in 2006.) It was also fabulous that he mentioned on the podium, "Every company is a media company" and that he and "Tom Foremski have been talking about this for many years."

I also liked his advice to CEOs about giving up control. I've often spoken on this topic, saying that companies are constantly trying to have control over how they are perceived but that it's is not possible in today's fractured media world.

However, there is another "C-word" that they should adopt: Consistency. Companies have to be consistent in how they portray themselves: how they talk, what they say, and be. They have to do it once, twice, a thousand times. Consistency will get them to those places where control cannot.

The very low trust levels of business and government was an interesting point and it is a worry, especially during these tough economic times with high levels of unemployment.

Low trust clearly requires good public relations to help fix perceptions and the Edelman Annual Trust Barometer shows the proof and the scale of the problem.

But the Trust Barometer can be very volatile. Over the past few years I've seen large swings in the levels of trust for media, bloggers, peers, experts, CEOs, and industry sectors. What was true last year often isn't true the next.

That might be because of the fickle public's short memories, or it could be because of excellent PR.

- - -

 The first exhibit you see at the Computer History Museum... :)

Additional information:

Edelman PR sponsored a debate on "Trust" Monday evening at the Computer History Museum. Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR discussed some of the findings of the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer global survey. Here are some extracts. A full report is coming...

Moderated by Peter Burrows (far left) senior writer at Bloomberg; next is Eric Channing Brown, GM of Integrated Communications at Skype; Mary Dent, General Counsel at Silicon Valley Bank; Richard Edelman, CEO Edelman Public Relations; Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

The widespread belief is that the media has "reach." Trust me, they don't. Not anymore. It's become almost pathetic.

It hit me the other day when I snagged a profile for a client on a well-known website...

Dear God, I realized, my client has more readers than they do. The website needed us to attract an audience for them. They wanted the subject of the piece to send his readers over to them rather than the other way around.

It seems a bit strange that people in New York, the media capital of the world, have only just discovered "Pageview Journalism."

Popularity has been driving online journalism for sometime, I started writing about it more than 2 1/2 years ago in May 2010, noting that reporters are increasingly rewarded based on the traffic they bring, either through direct cash compensation, or by a boost up the editorial ladder, which is essentially the same thing.

Things were similar in the days of paper: writing scoops, provocative subjects, popular columns, etc. But reporters could get away with also writing stories about less well known subjects, ones that might not gain much attention, but the stories were important in highlighting emerging trends and personalities, because it was the overall number of readers that was counted.

In the move from paper to electron, the number of readers of a single article can be counted, and is counted. This means journalists are encouraged to focus on articles with subjects that will bring larger numbers of readers.

Why should a journalist focus on a small company, or unknown individual when the likely small size of the audience will bring the wrong type of attention from their boss?

The focus on Pageview Journalism is a product of the hard economic realities of the media industry. But its rise represents a capitulation of editorial direction and voice to the fickle whims of pop culture.

The result is what we have today: a bland me-too media landscape which publishes huge numbers of the same stories.

But this is not just about journalists feeling the pressure of popularity. What about PR companies? Why should I take a briefing from your client if I can't get the traffic?

Can PR companies drive traffic to a story that I write?

If they can they are golden. Reporters will take their calls over any others.

- - -

Please see:

MediaWatch: Journalists Won't Report News Unless It Can Drive Page Views - SVW

The Future Of Tech Journalism In A Post-Technology World - SVW

PRWeb distributed the press release and said it slipped through its internal tests for "integrity."

Danny Sullivan explains how PRWeb has become a popular distribution network for a lot of content, some of it shady, and how it ends up on well respected newspaper sites.

How PRWeb Helps Distribute Crap Into Google & News Sites

In the past, you'd get a press release out and hope newspapers might pick up the story, often using the release as a basis for writing their own stories -- ones that might be fact-checked, or sourced with others, or get turned into something other than a promotional item.

Instead, with PRWeb and other services, you can get whatever you want published and distributed verbatim into a wide range of news sources.

Foremski's Take:

Many newspapers have sections where they republish press releases, hoping to make a little money on the pageviews that this might draw. They don't check the facts in the release because they never have, even when writing news stories based on that information.

Newsrooms everywhere assume that the facts within a news release are trustworthy because the company issuing the release has passed it through many internal checks by its communications and legal teams.

Journalists also assume that the distribution service, PRWeb, Businesswire, etc, has verified the source of the press release, though not the facts in the release.

The "scoop" culture in rewriting press releases

This system works nearly 100% of the time. However, once a fake release has made it into this trusted network it can then gain wide distribution very quickly on highly ranked news sites, primarily because of a key vulnerability in many of today's newsrooms.

Lots of online news sites, such as TheNextWeb, Techcrunch, etc, demand as many as 6 news stories per day from each staff writer. They are under intense pressure to publish news stories within minutes of an announcement, which means they are rewriting press releases with no time to make calls.

Gone are the days of newspaper deadlines, when reporters had several hours to work on a news story before each edition hit the streets.

In this new newsroom culture, the first site to publish the rewrite of the press release is considered having a "scoop" even though the lead might be measured in seconds

[A scoop used to mean being the exclusive source of an important news story. It represented a lot of hard work by reporters cultivating networks of important contacts. Rewriting press releases all day long does little to help young news writers become effective reporters, who are skilled in interviewing senior executives, in nurturing contacts, and skilled in the many ways of uncovering great stories and real scoops.]

The perils of broad distribution...

This incident highlights another valuable aspect of issuing a press release: it can help to maintain a high Google rank by increasing the number of links back to a company.

As Danny Sullivan explains:

Buying a press release through PRWeb is an easy and legit way to effectively buy links, a way that Google doesn't penalize you for.

That won't stay true for long if PRWeb continues to distribute fake releases, or spammy, low quality content. And if that content is republished by large numbers of what Google considers to be low ranked sites, that will be a very large problem too.

There are a lot of web sites republishing press releases because the content is free and easy to find.

There's a very clear danger here: Google's algorithm updates are increasingly focused on rooting out sites trying to scam Google into awarding a higher rank. Lots of links can harm websites because it is a red flag for Google. It could decide to penalize a site for trying to SEO it's way into a higher rank by buying lots of links on lots of low quality websites.

Take a look at: The Fast Unravelling Web: Here's Why Google Is Killing The Hyperlink - SVW

This is why many companies are trying to get web sites to delete links back to them because they are concerned that it is hurting their Google rank.

This "negative SEO" trend, where fewer links from top sites are better than lots of links from many sites, is resulting in a mass erasure of hyperlinks and threatens to unravel much of the commercial Internet. I

PRWeb is popular because it can offer wide distribution for its clients' content which can lead to lots of backlinks from many sites. But if Google decides it doesn't trust those sites, or the distribution platform, it could boomerang onto PRWeb customers with a wallop, because of all the backlinks from low-ranked sites. 

And if Google decides that some content is low quality, then every website republishing that content, is risking its visibility within its search rank.

PRWeb is just an example of the challenges faced by all other press release and content distribution services. 

So what's the best way for companies to distribute their press releases? It has to be through trusted distribution networks that keep low-quality, spammy content out. Because Google will judge your business and your content on the company it keeps.

In February 2006 I wrote: A job advertisement from the future . . .

Wanted: Head of Corporate Communications for a fast growing Silicon Valley startup. Competitive salary and stock options. Candidates must have a Google Page Rank of at least 5. And/or an Alexa rank of at least 750,000 or better...

At the time there was no Klout score but there were other metrics. And it makes complete sense. Software engineers originally got into blogging because it raised their visibility in their communities and that led to work. The same is true for other professions.

In reference to Salesforce.com, Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group, wrote on Facebook that he is "all for it" because it helps employers hire better people.

On Techcrunch, Drew Olanoff wrote that Salesforce's focus on Klout scores was "stupid."

Numbers are numbers, people are people. People make companies win.

Numbers always win, there's always a metric and even if it isn't the perfect metric, there is always a metric of one kind or another being used to judge people's performance. Klout is part of today's metrics, like it or not, (and many don't).

I constantly see PR and marketing folk advising clients on social media strategies yet I rarely see them posting anything online, not even retweets, the easiest form of engagement. Surely, there's a serious disconnect here.

There's many that don't "like" social media or they "don't believe in it" as if it is Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

Social media is what it is, it can be a pain to maintain your presence but that's the rules of the game these days. Those rules will change and they do change which is why if you are in communications -- both journalism and PR/marketing -- you better know when the rules change.

You have to be in it to get it.

The CEO is Giovanni Rodriguez, who just left Deloitte and used to be a partner at Eastwick, and Chief Strategy Officer Toby Chaudhuri, a top public affairs consultant in Washington, DC.

The two met while working for a White House Hispanic initiative and they realized that large enterprises had a lot to learn from combining Silicon Valley's tech and social media skills, with Washington's expertise in creating communities and maintaining conversations.

Here are some key points, and my analysis follows:

- SocialxDesign is an independent consulting firm focused on social business or social enterprise.

- A key goal is to combine Silicon Valley social media and tech expertise with Washington, D.C, abilities to build communities and conversations.

- Bridging online with offline is one of the core principles of the firm.

- Educating enterprises not to see "social" as a technology but as "a broad set of competencies -- including offline engagement with people who may be or not be visible on the technology side of the social graph," said Mr Rodriguez.

Some excerpts from the announcement:

SocialxDesign will enable organizations to grow, reduce costs and increase their market value by engaging and empowering people in their ecosystems -- customers, employees, industry partners -- to take an active part in remaking the enterprise.

...

Initially the firm will provide three core services for organizations looking to increase their impact in consumer marketing, enterprise marketing and collaboration, business and marketing development for technology startups, online/offline events and public sector innovation:

Discovery: A qualitative and quantitative audit of key stakeholders throughout an organization's ecosystem in order to identify opportunities and desired outcomes.

Design: The development of an engagement plan -- including strategic positioning -- designed to achieve the behavioral outcomes.

Delivery: Management and execution of the plan along several dimensions: technology implementation, marketing implementation and measurement and education and training.

Focus on "The New CMO"

Barbara Bates, CEO of Eastwick who will also serve as Chairman of SocialxDesign, said: "An organization today must not only know how to position itself in competitive markets but understand how to activate and motivate people in active, connected ecosystems. And in the meantime, the best CMOs - and their counterparts in the public sector -- are beginning to understand that social is not a channel. Social creates new and sustainable value by empowering the people who matter most to your organization, whomever they are, wherever they are."

The team also includes Margarita Quihuis, Mark Nelson and Nic Milagro Chapa, "behavior design" consultants who have distinguished themselves working on research initiatives at Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab.

"We have a strong East meets West - Silicon Valley meets DC - mentality," said Giovanni Rodriguez. "But it's also about North and South - the powers of the 20th century mixing with the emerging cultures and political powers of the 21st century. The world is being remade, and organizations hoping to innovate and compete need to think through their entire engagement strategy. Some of it is online, some of it is offline. But all of it will take serious thought, creativity, and deliberation, which is why we say social by 'design.'"

In the face of austerity and caution, Toby Chaudhuri said SocialxDesign's approach accelerates and increases impact, decreases costs, and disrupts business as usual in capitals everywhere.

"Every generation gets a chance to transform the world, but the new cultural and technological landscape unleashes new possibilities," said Chaudhuri. "Inspiring social movements have always originated at the ground-level. With social design, governments and organizations can empower the people they serve to take part in the work needed to shape this young century -- at a scale that can overwhelm powerful special interests and rich lobbies."

"With SocialxDesign, Eastwick is bringing the best lessons of social enterprise to the organizations hungriest to apply them," said Sam Whitmore, tech media analyst and founder of Sam Whitmore's Media Survey. "Social engagement is no longer new but huge potential remains untapped. SocialxDesign's innovative approach -- which combines science and psychology -- may change that."

- - -

Foremski's Take: I've known Giovanni Rodriguez for many years, and I recently had a chance to catch up with him and his partner Toby Chaudhuri, and with Barbara Bates, their chief funder.

SocialxDesign is a smart move that reflects some of the changes in the PR industry, which has been changing rapidly because of social media and the disruption of the media industry.

PR firms are far different today from the PR firms of ten years ago, or five, and even three years ago. Increasingly, they have to provide business consulting advice to their clients, but they also have to execute on very time-intensive social media work, in addition to their regular services. Revenues from monthly retainers haven't increased by much, while the amount, and the quality of PR work that has to be done, has increased tremendously.

By creating a separate consulting group, Eastwick can separate out its many services and reap the reward of higher income from higher value add services, instead of throwing them into the same package of PR services, for the same fee.

Social media is important but it's one part of an overall media strategy. As Giovanni and his colleagues concentrate on best practices social media strategies , there's also a need to help companies become media companies, to become publishers. That's the area I've focused on, helping companies understand best practices in journalism and publishing. It helps support Silicon Valley Watcher.

I wish Giovanni the best of luck in this new venture and I also recognize areas of synergy with my work, and the potential for partnering on future projects.

I can see this becoming a trend among PR firms, the creation of independent strategic business consultancies, because many firms are already doing a lot of that work.

Will that challenge the consulting giants Deloitte, McKinsey, and others? Yes, certainly on the edges, but how disruptive it'll be is something still to be discovered.

Deloitte has been trying to beef up its social media expertise, I have several friends that are fairly recent hires. But to really develop social media expertise at Deloitte, the core partners have to have direct experience, you have to be in it to get it. Deloitte's John Hagel is one of the few that stands out.

How companies deal with the complexities of social media across their organization, and how they deal with the challenges of being a media company, will pretty much determine every aspect of their future prosperity.

In terms of strategic business consulting, I can't think of any other area that has the potential to transform a business faster -- yet the traditional business consultancies are nowhere to be seen. This is a big opportunity for firms like SocialxDesign and the timing is perfect.

(Offline Tales - a new (ir)regular Friday column.)

Wednesday I was in North Beach heading for the Bubble Lounge and Media Bistro sponsored by the Horn Group.

It was great to catch up briefly with Sabrina Horn, founder of the Horn Group, who tells me that business is booming and the firm is engaged in a broad range of digital communications services and applications.

I had an interesting chat with Tim O'Keeffe, (below) who heads Horn Group's San Francisco operations.

And it was great to see Smita Topolski, who joined Horn Group as Vice President in December 2011.

Then off to find a cab ... heading to the Mission.

I ran into a fast moving Brian Zisk in the Mission. Brian's excellent "Future of Money" conference is this Monday. It's well worth attending.

Scott Beale, founder of culture and events blog Laughing Squid was in town from New York. Scott used to live in San Francisco but moved to New York a couple of years ago, "for a change." I know lots of people who have done the same, a trend that seems to have accelerated lately.

There were lots of media at Scott's drinks thing, and it was great to be able to relax and chat without it being a "media event" with PR and tech companies about.

I congratulated Eric Eldon, the new Techcrunch editor. He's putting together a great team, here he is with a recent addition: Frederic Lardinois.

It's always a treat to see Violet Blue, my colleague from ZDNet.

Also good to see Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme, Alexia Tsotsis, Eddie Codel, Kevin Mathieu, and assorted starters...

(BTW, I'm testing out the term "starters" to describe people in startups... more on this in a separate post.)

Why are we reading about products as a news story and not in an ad?

When I look at the tech press it is heavily focused on product reporting; about gadgets, features in apps or online services, and details about underlying technologies in software, hardware, and Internet.

Product launches, especially by industry heavyweights such as Apple, are examined in great detail, before the launch, in live reports from the launch, and for weeks afterwards.

The product is weighed, it's specifications checked against the specifications insiders thought it would have; it's measured and compared endlessly with other products. It's taken apart and each component catalogued, and journalists report estimates of how much money it cost to make.

Even a product's color is questioned in news stories, as in the white iPhone that some said was more beige than white.

Similar attention is devoted to the reporting about software apps, web services, and Internet technologies.

Vast amounts of product journalism are being produced. Many mainstream newspapers and magazines are beefing up their product news. And multitudes of reporters race to be the first to write up the product specs of a new device.

When did this start?

When did journalists decide that it would be a great job, reporting about products?

When did readers start to think it was cool to read endless news stories about products?

There was a time when we didn't. Reading about products was usually done by reading their advertising - reading news about products was rare. Why did it change?

Tech journalism became product journalism for one simple reason: it was created.

Tech companies spend 40% and more, of their annual revenues on marketing. Their cost of sales is very high and it amounts to billions of dollars in marketing. But the problem with advertising, as we can see thanks to the Internet, is it doesn't work that well.

Over the past two decades tech companies have been steadily shifting their substantial marketing monies into public relations, with the express goal to have news stories published about them and their products.

The reason is simple:

Advertising is only one-third as effective as a news story about a company or product.

PR is much more effective than advertising, you get far more marketing bang.

You sell far more through news stories and that's what public relations firms do, they get your story into the media - and these days - into social media too. They help companies sell.

PR spending continues to increase, every PR company I know is booming, hiring like mad. And it's because the PR firms do their job well, and the tech industry gets what it pays for: lots of news stories about their products.

You'd think the tech media sites would prefer advertising money for product launches rather than reporting them for free. After all, there are far more interesting stories to write.

I'll share some ideas over the next few weeks. The future of tech journalism is certainly not in product journalism.

It announces the first product, and the first customer wins for Nicira Networks - one of the startups in the firm's portfolio.

It would be great to see other news releases written in a similar fashion.

- It starts off with a quote from Prince.

I've seen the future and it will be
I've seen the future and it works
--Prince, The Future

- It soon begins to tell a personal story.

When I was a young man in 1990, I designed and deployed Silicon Graphics' first wide area network using technology from a little known networking startup called Cisco Systems.

- In crystal clear language he describes the technology environment today and the problems with it, in this case, networks.

...the brittle nature of today's networking platform severely hamstrings cloud computing. Amazon's AWS, the largest cloud offering in the world, runs an embarrassingly feature poor network in order to maintain enough flexibility to support its service.

Networking functionality that has been around for over twenty years such as multicasting, traffic isolation, and security isolation are absent from Amazon's offering.

When people ask me why more enterprises haven't moved to the cloud, I point out that doing so would require reversing out the last 15 years of networking features from their applications.

- Enter the hero protagonist.

Martin Casado began his career auditing networks at a government intelligence agency. While trying to secure our nation against terrorist attacks, he became increasingly frustrated that current networking technology prevented him from solving mission critical problems.

He needed a better platform that was so radically different that he knew that he'd have to build it himself.

- The hero embarks on a quest and finds followers.

... he journeyed to Stanford University where he connected with like-minded people in Stanford Professor Nick McKeown and UC Berkeley Professor Scott Shenker. McKeown and Shenker were equally frustrated with the current state of the networking art, but for a different reason.

They taught network innovation, but it was almost impossible to innovate on the network. You see, real network innovation requires being able to work with real networks - i.e. real production traffic.

Sadly, today's networks are so fragile that no right-minded network administrator would ever allow experimental traffic and programs on her production networks.

In fact, even the network administrators at Stanford said "no" to experimental traffic.

- Despite obstacles the trio persevered and today marks the triumph of their journey.

Building this new platform was a humongous effort...Today Nicira Networks publicly unveiled its widely anticipated first product, the Network Virtualization Platform along with 5 major customers - AT&T, eBay, NTT, Rackspace and Fidelity Investments, who are currently deploying NVP.

I am thrilled to be a part of it and welcome all of you to the future of networking.

It's not the official "press release" but it does read well as one. And it's far more interesting than the actual release here.

A journalist could create a far more interesting story from that blog post than the PR company's release, which contains passages such as this:

"NVP is a scalable software system implemented at the network edge and managed by distributed clustered controller architecture. The system forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane."

Interestingly, Mr Horowitz's post about Nicira and The Future of Networking has no links in it at all. Which makes it even more similar to a news release because most of them also share a link-less preference, with page after page with no links in the text at all.

Why are PR people so stingy with the use of links in news releases and press kits?

I can understand the reason if newswire services charge extra to distribute documents with links, but that's not true for publicity materials posted on a company web site.

PR people know about the "link economy" because they are always pleased to see my links to their blog posts or Tweets; and I see a lot of PR people linking to stuff on Twitter and Facebook all day long, yet those lessons don't make it into their daily work.

There's just one link in this Nicira press release. And I'm not singling it out as an egregious example but merely as a typical one.

I'm often asked for suggestions on how to make press releases more effective and I smile and answer, "Put some links in it." People usually laugh but I'm smiling less and less these days. In this pervasive online world where we spend so much of our work time there should be no reason why news releases, these 100% digital electronic documents, have page after page with absolutely no links in them at all. Even when those documents come from companies that claim to be in the vanguard of Internet and networking technologies.

Why aren't clients of PR firms bothered by the absence of the hyperlink - this most basic and most fundamental element of an Internet document - from the publicity materials prepared for them?

Surely, clients are losing out massively because of this lack of links in their public content?

Everyone knows that the foundation of Google's search algorithm is PageRank, which pays close attention to links between trusted sites. If it's done right, it results in a big boost in organic traffic - the right kind of traffic because it is people that are interested in that company's products.

Companies shouldn't go crazy and add tons of links because Google will think they are a spammer, but a few per page is reasonable, acceptable, and expected by Google's spiderbots. After all, without links to other pages there wouldn't be a Google, or a World Wide Web.

So why are company PR materials so link averse when their creators are so links-ago-go when it comes to promoting their own matters?

I've been told that the problem is that PR firms aren't paid to do search engine optimization (SEO), and so they don't. Fair enough, but they could at least prepare SEO-friendly documents with links in them. They can leave the mechanics of SEO, the tracking and the counting, to others.

Embedding a few hyperlinks is trivial. And the bit of extra time it takes to find and test the links is a bonus when you have clients that pay by the hour. It should be a win-win for the PR firms and their clients you'd think. And reporters would save a few clicks too, making it a triple-win.

Put some links in it, it's 2012, already.

- - -

Here's an infographic from Aaron Wall from SEOBook that shows the current best practices for links in content. It's shocking how much valuable advice he gives away:

If you want to know the top influencers in a specific niche market, these services will provide you with a simple number for each person, which you can use to rank the influencers.

Their goal is to provide information to publicists and marketers to help them target the right people in their markets.

But it seems to me that there's a big problem with this approach. If you, as a publicist or marketer, need to consult these services, this probably shows that you are clueless about who is important in the very markets that you are selling into.

Surely, you already know a lot about your markets. Why would you not know who is important?

Surely, you are in them, an active participant in the communities that represent your markets.

Surely, people know you, and you know them... you know who's who.

Rule 1: You have to be in your communities to know them.

Rule 2: Repeat rule 1.

Rule 3: There is only rule 1.

Klout et al, have no clue, beyond counting Tweets, reTweets, and applying an algorithm to people's online activities, about the context and the meaning of what they collect. They will provide you with a single number that refers to a person's influence within a specific sector.

But that number tells you nothing about the context of that assessment: it tells you nothing about what the hot topics are; what the major issues are in those sectors; and nothing about the culture and how to behave in those communities.

Klout, PeerIndex, Empire Avenue, and the others, provide shortcuts without insights.

[There's many cases where these services have ranked bots higher than real people.]

Use them sparingly and carefully; and get involved in your online communities. You will learn so much more about what's what, and who's who.

Finding influencers is more than just comparing their Klout score.

Miguel Helft and Claire Cain Miller reported in the New York Times that the campaign conducted by PR firm Burson-Marsteller included:

two high-profile former journalists, Jim Goldman of CNBC and John Mercurio, a former political reporter...

Was it some form of naivete by these former journalists? Would PR professionals have advised against the smear strategy?

I don't think it is fair to put the blame at the feet of the former journalists because PR campaigns are planned by groups that include PR professionals. Everyone knew exactly what they were trying to achieve.

Yet links are a key Internet currency. Why don't they understand this?!

And I'm fed up of adding links to my posts about their clients and other relevant material because they are absent from the background materials.

I've come to the conclusion that since PR people aren't putting links into their communications then I shouldn't need to put those links into my posts. Clearly, if it were important to them, then the links would be there in the source material.

I used to be puzzled about this behavior but now I think I know why: The reason for the lack of the hyperlink -- the most fundamental element in a digital document -- is that PR people don't get any credit for it.

PR people are paid for story placement -- which is just one side of the story. The SEO benefits from a well-linked story are worth much more.

A link from high-ranked news site will provide far more than a momentary boost in traffic to a company's web site. It provides a high degree of trust that Google uses to determine rankings in key search results.

This is much much more valuable than the actual news or feature story itself because it affects Google's ranking of the company web site for a very long time.

But if the links are missing then the search engine optimization (SEO) benefits from the story will be missing too.

The future will be different. Savvy companies will make sure that their PR and SEO strategies are complimentary and they will ask PR firms to take on a larger SEO role.

However, this will be tricky for many PR firms because they don't understand basic SEO techniques -- as can be seen by the lack of links in their materials.

- Horn Group's New York based business is expanding and is now equal with its San Francisco/Silicon Valley based clients. But the monthly retainers are smaller because the New York clients are smaller. A big boost came from Fred WIlson, a leading VC recommending Horn Group.

- Horn Group is interested in moving beyond social media. It doesn't have a social media practice because it expects all of its staff to be well versed in social media.

- What's beyond social media? Mobile corporate comms is an interesting subject. For example, what would a mobile press release look like? Horn Group plans to host a panel discussing this topic in the new year.

- Horn Group is adding a wide variety of services including advertising. The goal is that PR will be one of many important services. One of these days a client will sign of for those services and not PR. PR companies in the future won't look like traditional PR companies.

- Horn Group has had an interactive media group for several years and is expanding that side of the business. It helps clients with their web sites and other digital media needs.

- Horn Group has built several iPhone apps for clients and more are on the way.

- Horn Group has managed to build a diverse client base.

- One of Horn Group's clients is preparing for an IPO (the name of company is confidential at this point but my guess that it is Splunk, an excellent company). This is a good sign and it is the first Horn Group client IPO in more than 7 years.

- Horn Group is hiring. It's tough finding good people but the company has been getting some quality people.

This morning I spoke with Bill Calder and Ken Kaplan about the project (http://freepress.intel.com). Here are some notes from our conversation:

- With all the changes happening in media, journalists are having to cover a lot of beats and they don't have the time to do in-depth reporting on Intel, or much in-depth reporting at all. It is frustrating because there are some great stories within Intel that aren't being told.

- We know we have the expertise in-house to report on these stories so we thought why not do it ourselves? We have people on Intel's communications team that are former journalists so we put together a team, that includes us and one or two others, to try and tell these stories.

- Our communications team, for good or bad, is very focused on product launches. But there are so many other stories to tell. Intel is a very large company with many interesting projects, and people.

-It is very much a dream position for us, we've been talking within Intel about doing something like this and its great to be able to have the resources to launch this venture.

- Anyone is free to use the stories from Intel Free Press. Our goal is to have some of the largest news sites running these stories, in whole, or in part.

- Our biggest challenge is credibility. People tend to distrust corporate blogs, so we have to show that our stories are fair, and high quality, so that people trust us.

- Our goal isn't to compete with other news sites, we aren't going to do a deep dive into the technology or benchmarking our chips. It's about telling stories that haven't been told yet. For example, a story on our VP of Investor Relations (Caught in the Crossfire: Intel's Investor Relations Chief - SVW)

- We will also write about our partners, showing some of the interesting things they are doing. There will be a wide variety of stories every week.

- We also have a team of about 15 people that produce "Circuits." This is written for Intel employees and only available internally. There is a lot of great content there that we will publish on Free Press.

- Intel Free Press will be our main job. We may expand the team by bringing in outside contributors, other journalists. We want to create a media brand that is clearly distinguished from the rest.

- We decided not to use bylines so that we can use one voice and give it more of a news agency feel. And that should make it easier for other publishers if they want to reuse all, or part of our stories. They don't even have to attribute it to Intel.

- Success will be measured by the take up in search results and also the stories being re-used by major media outlets. And that should also lead to bloggers linking to the stories.

- Our legal department has been pretty good about it.

- We've set up Free Press as being separate from the Intel newsroom although there is a link from the newsroom.

- You can follow Intel Free Press on Twitter: @IntelFreePress.

Foremski's Take:

It's great to see a large company taking this step and willing to experiment with new approaches to communications. I recently spoke with Cisco, and it too is following a very similar strategy, wanting to produce a news magazine with stories sourced from within Cisco but not focused directly on Cisco.

(Cisco Plans Relaunch Of News@Cisco)

It's good that Intel has established a separate brand for this venture because that will help it track its progress and also help establish credibility outside of the main newsroom. Credibility will be established over time and by consistent, high quality content.

Some news organizations might see Intel Free Press as a competitor. It is possible that they might not cover a story, say the one on Intel's VP of Investor Relations, because Intel has already written that story. I was on a Bulldog Reporter panel last year with Kara Swisher, the former Wall Street Journal columnist and now at All Things D, and she was berating companies for posting a news announcement on their own website, saying that she wanted the scoop. Intel Free Press won't be writing those types of stories so Kara should be OK with that.

I'm looking forward to tracking this venture and seeing how it is received by other news organizations.

- - -

Intel Free Press.

Please see:
Every Company Is A Media Company

Shannon Latta EVP at Horn Group writes:

Today we announced our very own iPhone app, live in the iTunes App Store. We think we're the first agency like ours to design a mobile app like this -- that combines agency news and industry insights, sharing and commenting functionality, and a handy directory of our entire staff -- for clients, prospects and employees. Have you seen anything similar from anyone else? I know Lewis PR has a news aggregator for the iPhone but it's nothing like what we've built.

Here's our launch package:

• 
  Press release
• 
  Video demo of the application
• 
  The app itself

We're seeing a lot of interest from marketers who want a mobile presence for their brand. We think it's becoming as important as having a website and agencies have to evolve to meet this need. Our iPhone app, built entirely in-house by Horn Group ID, shows off some of our new mobile capabilities. We can quickly and affordably build applications like our own for clients -- ideal for sales, marketing and employee communications.

I applaud Horn Group for taking this step and I look forward to hearing how it is used and if apps are a good vehicle for PR.

I'm a big fan of Pearltrees because it is a fascinating media technology. It allows anyone to curate their own section of the web by using a visual metaphor that looks very much like mind maps: users create a Pearltree and attach pearls to it; each pearl represents a web page or site, a video, image, or even a Tweet.

With so much content on the Internet it is becoming very important to identify trusted sources of information and to have people curate sections of the Internet. Google tries to do it by looking at trusted sites and who links to who but it is constantly fighting spammers trying to game the sysem -- the Pearltrees approach is spam-proof.

Pearltrees are also very social, they are extremely easy to create and share. They can be Tweeted, emailed, or embedded in any web page or web document, creating a live window (see below).

One of my goals is to build a Pearltree about Silicon Valley so that people can quickly find the best information about this region. As part of that project I have put together a Pearltree that acts as a directory of Silicon Valley PR firms.

People looking for a PR firm can browse my Pearltree and hopefully find a compatible business partner. In the short space of time since I created the Silicon Valley PR firms Pearltree it has had nearly 2300 views.

But I'd like to improve it. I'd like each PR firm that does business in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area to create a Pearltree about their business and send it to me.

If you are in PR here are some reasons why you should make a Pearltree about your company:

- It puts you, rather than me, in control of the information about your firm.

- You are the one that receives notifications on who has shared it or picked it for their collection of Pearltrees.

- You can see and respond to comments on your Pearltree.

- You can be creative about how you build your Pearltree.

- By creating your own Pearltree it shows you as the author rather than me.

- You can use your Pearltree for communications with clients. Again, being in control of the information in your Pearltree is key.

- This is the important part: each Pearltree is dynamic. Any changes are updated in real-time everywhere that Pearltree is used. You won't have to wait for me, or rely on me, to update a Pearltree about your company.

Here are two examples:

I created a Pearltree for the Horn Group:

Horn Group
It shows clients, newsroom, blog, contact info etc.

Because each Pearltree is controlled by the author, each firm can be creative about how it organizes their Pearltree. For example, in this Pearltree about The Hoffman Agency, there are links to client web sites that Hoffman might like to highlight, rather than just a simple client list.

The Hoffman Agency (Demo)
So please send me your Pearltree. It's the simplest way to get into my Silicon Valley PR directory. And also, send me the categories that you would like to be included in. Email foremski at Gmail or send it to me through Pearltrees.

And if you are an independent PR professional/consultant, send me your Pearltree too.

You can show who you work with, your past and current clients, and whatever else you'd like to include, such as your LinkedIn profile, portfolio, etc.

- - -

It's a very flexible technology and I can think of a variety of ways of using it.

For example, using Pearltrees as a media kit. Here is a Pearltree about an Intel press event, containing links to media assets such as video, and also the resulting press coverage.

Example Press Kit
And Pearltrees has lots of great new features coming very soon, including a private version that controls who can view it; and a community version that enables teams to collaborate on a Pearltree.

It's also great as an organizational/research tool. I've used it for a book project, and I'm exploring other uses, including an online store.

I use it for business and for recreation, such as this Pearltree about the upcoming Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park so I can get to know some of the acts before the event.

 PEARLTREES.embed.initTree('pt-pearl-1_1081162-751',1,9745,1,1081162,1); 
The beauty of a flexible media technology such as Pearltrees is that you can be the first person to use it for a particular task. It's like making the first footprints in fresh snow :)

So please send me your Pearltrees so I can include them in my PR firms Pearltree directory. And send me examples of any new uses you come up with.

Just click here to start: http://www.pearltrees.com/

When most people use Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, they use it for its social qualities. Yet when corporations, and many professionals use social media, they are using it for commercial purposes, they are using it for sales.

This is an important distinction because it affects how businesses should use social media.

I was moderating a panel earlier today on how businesses can use PR to leverage social media, and Louis Gray said something that was very wise. He said that people create their Facebook pages in a specific way because that's the way they like it, they are comfortable there. If you come along and engage with them you need to approach them as if you were a guest in their home.

That means businesses have to be cautious about how they sell on social media sites.

All that relationship building and engagement is not because a business wants to get to know Jane or John better, as a friend or relative would, it wants to sell more of its product or service. That's a far different agenda from most people's engagement in social media.

Like at parties, people will avoid that person that is selling something. Friends that invite their friends to tupperware parties, or similar, are tolerated for a while, but not for long. Similarly, companies that use social media as sales media must understand there is a time and place for it, or they risk alienating people.

Sir Martin Sorrell, the head of WPP, the world's largest marketing and communications group, has similar concerns about the commercial use of social media. The Financial Times recently reported:

Sir Martin warned on Tuesday that social media sites are ”less commercial phenomena, they are more personal phenomena,” more similar to ”writing letters to our mothers” than watching television.

”Invading these [social] media with commercial messages might not be the right thing.”

So let's be honest about corporate use of social media -- it's really all sales media -- let's not dress it up as anything else.

- - -
Please see: Every Company is a Media Company - EC=MC - the transformative equation for business.

Few press releases have more than one link, or have links pointing to useful information such as:

- a link to photographs
- embeddable videos
- background information
- customer quotes
- analyst quotes
- related news stories
- related news releases

Such links make my job easier -- instead of Googling around for that information I can find it more quickly. I might also copy those links into my article as a service to my readers looking for additional information.

Yet despite having many people agree with me, the PR industry still has trouble understanding these very simple things. Some have told me that people don't know how to create links. (I will be hosting a $1,000-a-head workshop on this very topic, send me an email if you'd like to sign up foremski at gmail.com.)

Another way to produce an interactive press release is to use Pearltrees. I've been working with Pearltrees the past few months and developing some new use cases.

Pearltrees is a visual way of creating a collection of web sites. Let me show you an example below. It represents Intel's recent launch of a new Atom processor family. To the main news release, I've attached pearls that represent web pages where you can download photos, video, find background information, etc.

(This is a live window in that you can move around within it and browse the content of each pearl. You can also grab it and add it to your Pearltree collection.)

After the event you can use Pearltrees to look at the media coverage, here is an example.

The wonderful thing about Pearltrees is that others can grab your specific Pearltree and attach it to their own Pearltree collection. This also means that if I make any change in my Pearltree, the changes are reflected in every version of my Pearltree that others have chosen.

Corporate communications departments could quickly share resources and reuse Pearltrees in a modular way. For example, if there are any changes in a "background" Pearltree, those changes are replicated across every version, in everyone's Pearltree collection. This is especially valuable when dealing with changes in legal wording, or legal approval for company information -- once approved, a Pearl or a Pearltree, can be reused time and again, and future changes are automatically propagated across all Pearltrees.

Try it out, I'd love to hear your feedback.

Giovanni Rodriguez said he would still retain some part-time connection with Reimagine Group, which is led by Peter Hirshberg.

The Conversation Group web site, however is still up with it's latest news from July 2009.

I'm flattered. And I'm also glad that my rant led to the "Social Media Release" (formerly known as the New Media Release). I did a lot of work on this issue with lots of others, Chris Heuer, Shel Holtz, Todd Defren, Brian Solis, and Shannon Whitley. We did a lot of podcasts and posts on this issue.

Yet I get emails with pitches from PR people that don't even have any links! I have to search for the company web sites they are pitching, and for any other references they put into the pitch.

Same with press releases, there are very few links in press releases.

Also, PR people will ask if their clients can contribute a guest post. I love to get good guest posts. Yet often there are no links in the copy! Am I supposed to do the work and put the links in myself?

Why are people unable to understand the value of putting links into PR copy? Do they know how to create a link and embed it in their copy?

Forget the 'social media release' and the work we did on trying to create a microformats for news releases -- at the end of the day all I want is some links in the copy!

Give me a link to:

- some analyst quotes
- customer quotes
- photos
- videos
- background info
- company blogs
- related stories.

Help me do my job so I don't have to search around for this stuff. I might very well throw those links into my story as a way for readers to find more info, especially if I'm on deadline. You miss a great chance to direct my readership to your choice of links!

Why is this so difficult to understand?

I could go to my mailbox right now and pull out hundreds of examples of PR people pitching me stuff, and sending me news releases, with no links at all, or there is just one miserly link.

What's up with that?! These are "new/social media PR experts" or at least that's what their web sites claim.

They chatter and Tweet all day long about 'social media' yet can't master the simple task of putting links into their communications!

- - -

Here is a PearlTree showing the Twitter responses to this post:  ptInitTree('pt-pearl-1_751150-129',1,9745,1,751150,1); 

Please see: 10 Basic Digital Publishing Skills Journalists/Anyone Should Know...

Social Media Is Not About Conversations... It's About Something Much More Amazing - SVW

[I've known Mr Garrett for more than five years and while we haven't always seen eye-to-eye, we have always enjoyed a healthy exchange of views.]

Clearly, Twitter is a great job, and also it's a great move because Twitter offers a fantastic potential in terms of stock options that 463 Communications could never hope to match.

[One of the frustrating aspects of working in PR, people tell me, is working with startups, helping to get them publicity, helping to build their brands, and then they get sold, or they IPO, and everyone's stock options have made them rich except the PR people.]

I have no idea what Mr Garrett's reasons for joining Twitter were, but I do know that he understands traditional media, and the new media, very well indeed. He was one of the first PR bloggers, and he has an innate understanding of social media and its trends. I've always said "you have to be in it to know it" and Mr Garrett has been involved in social media for years.

What interests me about this appointment is that 463 Communications is no ordinary PR firm, it specializes in tech policy. It works with large companies that are interested in lobbying around tech issues, and they want to influence tech policy.

For example, TechNet, the industry association, is a 463 client. I recently interviewed the head of Technet Rey Ramsey. [New Head Of TechNet Looks For Common Ground - SVW]

- Why is Twitter interested in tech policy?

- Does Twitter think that it might come under some type of government regulation?

- Is there a tech policy/government aspect to Twitter that would warrant it hiring a specialist in this area?

It's not a normal appointment. After all, Mr Garrett readily admits that he is "eager to dust off my front-line media relations chops after spending most of the last nine years focused on the shadowy, back-room strategy thing."

He also points out that "via 463, I have been consulting for Twitter the last few months."

So what kind of "shadowy, back-room strategy" stuff was Mr Garrett consulting with Twitter about?

It's an interesting appointment.

- - -

BTW, here is a photo of Sean Garrett demonstrating his hands on approach to dealing with the media, or rather, dealing with me :)

Follow Sean Garrett on Twitter.

Sean Garrett's esoteric and excellent musical tastes are here.

"In a play, if more than one person speaks at once ...it's just noise. No one can understand a word. But with opera, with music.... With music you can have individuals all talking at the same time. And it's not noise. lt's a perfect harmony!"

That's what struck me as a fundamental limitation of using online real-time feedback for live events.

In this brave new world of 'conversational' media - real-time creates a real limitation. And no amount of technology can solve this basic issue: you can't have a conversation if everyone is speaking at once.

You can have online conversations if they are within a time-line, such as comments on a blog post. But it doesn't work in real-time. Think of the noise of a crowd -- it's an aggregation of hundreds of conversations.

This might all seem a bit obvious but it's worth pointing out because there is a lot of chatter about the 'real-time' web these days and what it means, and what it can enable.

Thursday evening I was on an interesting panel about "Realtime Feedback Loops."

My fellow panelists were:

• Ravit Lichtenberg, CEO Ustrategy
• Sylvia L. Marino, Executive Director - Community Operations & Social Media,Edmunds.com
• Liza Sperling, Real-Time Sentiment & Trends Analyst, Scout Labs
• Van Riper, Founder & Leader, Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group
• Bill Johnston, Director, Online Community Research Network, ForumOne
• David Libby, SVP, MS&L Worldwide
• Evan Solomon, VP of Marketing, JustinTV
• Marc Smolowitz, Executive Producer - Media & Technology Consultant
  

Trust, we are taught, is hard won. It takes a long time to establish trust yet it can be destroyed in minutes.

But is that really true?

I've been looking at the Edelman Trust Barometer reports and it shows that trust in businesses, in media both social and traditional, in NGOs, in governments, jumps up and down by large margins from year to year.

I've been particularly interested in trust in social and traditional media. In the latest report, trust in peers, which represents social media, plunged by 20 points from 47 percent of those surveyed in the prior year, to 27 percent. Trust in other forms of media also fell by large margins.

[Wow! Edelman Survey Finds Trust In Peers Plunges!!! Bad News For Social Media Mavens]

Yet in 2008 I reported that the Edelman survey showed: Mainstream Media Trust Soars

"American's trust in mainstream media jumps an astonishing 36 per cent to 45 per cent from 33 percent in the prior year. "

It looks like 'trust' is a very volatile commodity. It's not a slow build. It can be quickly reestablished.

- How will this affect businesses and their competitive strategies?

- Is it worth taking risks with 'trust' because any wrong turns can be relatively quickly repaired?

This could lead to anti-social business practices, as companies pursue questionable strategies for short-term profits because new 'trust' can be quickly built back up.

It would be good to see future Edelman Trust Barometers cast some light on the reasons why trust is such a surprisingly volatile quality.