I sent a friend of mine a link to The Bivings Report last week and then met up with him a few days later. He’s not a blogger and isn’t a slave to the Internet like a lot of us. We started talking about blogs.  “What’s a tag?”  “Why on your list of tags are some of the words bigger than others (tag clouds)?”

I think a lot of people don’t speak this shorthand that has developed among those of us that spend far too much time online. Hill & Knowlton’s blog has posted a nice cheat sheet that explains a lot of Web 2.0 concepts. Its a great overview for people confused by all the buzzwords. One suggestion to the H&K folks: explain the term meme.

At TBG, we’re doing a detailed look at how ‘wired’ — RSS, commenting, podcasting, etc. — the major newspapers, TV and radio stations are. To see how those that have taken the plunge are doing against those that remain islands unto themsleves. One interesting and pioneering example of going blogging is WKRN-TV in Nashville, TN. Not only are they blogging, but a blogger works at the station to aggregate local blogs as a community service. Not bad.

Very interesting New York Times article that provides insight into Wal-Mart’s use of blogs and bloggers to combat its negative public image. The gist of the story is that Wal-Mart’s PR firm of record, Edelman, has been sending out talking points to pro Wal-Mart bloggers via email. A few of the bloggers then posted excerpts of the emails without disclosing where they came from. Sounds like a non-story really - its not news that PR folks send bloggers information. You just have to wonder how successful Wal-Mart will be in manufacturing something (a grassroots blog movement in support of Wal-Mart) that really should happen organically and with Wal-Mart employees leading the way.

Update: Here is a link to the story that doesn’t require registration. 

Update 2: Here is a link to a PDF of correspence between an Edelman executive and a blogger he is wooing. 

Technorati Tags: Wal-mart PR Edelman Blog Communication

In an effort to boost relevance and public interest, the Chinese government is setting up blogs for members of its figurehead Parliament and companion advisory board. Seems to me that ghost written and heavily censored blogs are going to make the government look more out of touch, not less.

Technorati Tags: China Politics Blogs Government Asia

Courtesy of http://www.gapingvoid.com/

Last summer, prominent blogger Jeff Jarvis used his site to complain about his buggy Dell computer and Dell’s subsequent unwillingness to live up to the terms of their warranty.  Jarvis’ posts led others to come forward with their own problems with Dell, and ultimately a sort of grassroots movement against Dell formed.  The situation hurt Dell’s brand.  (Read a great case study on the situation).

Well, the author of the popular Gaping Void blog, Hugh MacLeod, recently bought a new Tablet PC and was having serious problems getting the Wifi to work. He got frustrated and began to point the finger at Microsoft.  A Microsoft employee in Texas quickly got in touch with MacLeod and helped him fix the problem.  MacLeod is now a happy camper.  Crisis averted.

This is the way the world works now.  Companies that don’t recognize that are at a huge disadvantage.

Technorati Tags: Gaping Void Microsoft Tablet PCS Dell

In Gary’s post about “The Wisdom of Crowds” he referenced Newsvine, a social news site that was in private Beta mode at the time. Well, it went live Thursday and it looks very promising.

The site’s news is fueled by wire feeds such as AP, but also allows users to “seed” the site by posting links to stories from other sources (online newspaper sites, blogs, etc.). Newsvine users can vote on which articles should be given the most prominence and comment on what they read. Most importantly, Newsvine allows users to set up their own mini-Newsvine site - bivings.newsvine.com - where they can post their own articles and opinion pieces. Citizen as journalist.

The one thing that would make this great idea even better is a feature that shows which blogs are discussing Newsvine articles, similar to the feature recently rolled out by the Washington Post. But that’s being picky - Newsvine has fantastic potential and it will be fascinating to watch how it develops.

Prediction: I think its inevitable that a lot of sites like Newsvine will pop up that serve different types of people. Inevitably, Newsvine will take on a personality that will attract some and turn off others. Competing sites will pop up to fill the void. As an example, if Newsvine takes on a liberal bent, a conservative competitor will pop up.
Technorati Tags: Newsvine Media Web 2.0 News Journalism

I’ve been around PR a bit. Saw how to use focus groups and surveys to come up with messages, and ways to frame/talk about them.  Learned how direct mail could drive results depending on presentation, and how advertising, especially political, could set an agenda.  I marvelled at the intuition of the best PR pros.  And they used to lament that there was no real science behind all of this, but there is.  It’s relatively new, it’s called behavioral economics, a hybrid of psychology and economics.  Here’s a story about it in The Harvard Magazine, called “The Marketplace of Perceptions,” by Craig Lambert.

Money quotes:

Good — “. . . that the ways in which alternatives are framed—not simply their relative value—heavily influence the decisions people make.”

Better — “The difference in impact between two broad policies may not be as great as differences in how each policy is framed—its deadlines, implementation, and the design of its physical appearance.”

Bingo — “Economists and others who engage in policy debates like to wrangle about big issues on the macroscopic level. The nitty-gritty details of execution—what do the forms look like? what is in the brochures? how is it communicated?—are left to the support staff. ‘But that work is central,’ Mullainathan explains. ‘There should be as much intellectual energy devoted to these design choices as to the choice of a policy in the first place. Behavioral economics can help us design these choices in sensible ways.’

I cherry picked some quotes, the article is a great read overall.  So PR and communications follks, you’ve been vindicated.  What you do does really matter and Harvard can prove it.

Here’s a funny call to arms, by Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher, to kill the press release as we know it. However, press releases wont be extinct any time soon, especially with all the websites and RSS feeds willing to post and send them verbatim. So expect to see even more bad releases. But there’s good news: Tom’s got some great suggestions, and there’s a maybe the first diggings of graveyard for the worst releases at this site.

Update: We have added a page to our Wiki that serves as a running list of PR firms that blog.  If you aren't listed, please feel free to edit the Wiki and add yourself.  Original post follows.

In a story I posted a few days ago, I found that 4 of the 18 largest PR firms had official corporate blogs (Burson Marstellar, Edelman, Hill & Knowlton and The MWW Group). Constantin Basturea wrote in with some corrections/additions to my list. Here goes:

• The Horn Group has a blog that I flat out missed. My bad. That's 5 of 18.
• Manning Selvage and Lee doesn't have a blog, but Hass MS&L does. I'll leave it to you whether that should count.
• Ketchum's Personalized Media practice has a blog that they update fairly regularly. However, Ketchum doesn't even link to this blog from the Personalized Media practice area section of their coporate site, and its the last entry on the second page of Google, well behind the faux Ketchum Ideas blog. I'll let you decide whether to count it.

Here are some other non-official PR blogs Constantin pointed out:

• Tony Obregon from Cohn & Wolfe is blogging.
• There are at least two senior execs from Ogilvy who are blogging: John Bell and Rohit Bhargava.
• Robert J. Ricci from Weber Shandwick’s Web Relations Group is blogging and the Weber Shandwick technology PR team in New York is blogging.
• A group of people working at Porter Novelli Washington is blogging.
• John Brodeur (Chairman of Brodeur Worldwide) has a blog.

Constantin also recommends this as a good listing of PR blogs. Please feel free to post any additional blogs I may have missed.

Blog buzz makes the front page of The Washington Post. (registration required.) Article talks about ConAgra Foods and H-P monitoring blogs for emerging trends in comsumer attitudes. Piece features the blog monitoring company Nielsen BuzzMetrics, formed last week by the merger of Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics.

There’s been a lot of internal talk here at The Bivings Group regarding the use of Ajax and the idea of Web 2.0, the second generation of web applications.

I came across a great article and subsequent conversation on the use of new web technologies and web interface design in general. It talks about how there is still a lot of improvement to be made in terms of web application interface design (as opposed to website interface design) and how new technology has rarely contributed to that. Here is an excerpt that talks about how the real reason Google Maps has the success it has is not because of its use of Ajax, but because of the developers’ focus on application usability:

“Google Maps took off like a rocket, because their competitors, despite having five, six (or more) years lead on them, had wretched interfaces. [...] Google cleans up because they find a market where the current market leaders have a great idea, maybe even great technology, but provide a lousy user experience.”

Basically Google is one of the few companies that develop web applications that have learned how to selectively harness old and new web technology to its full potential.

As a science, web application usability is still very much in its infancy. Successful web application developers should be focusing their time and energy on application design much more than on applying new web application technologies. The net end result is a much better and well thought out product.

Technorati Tags: Technology Development Web 2.0 Usability Web

I was vaguely interested in how much online buzz was being generated about Microsoft’s Origami Project, so I spent a few minutes on IceRocket.com using their blog trends tool. Here’s what the trend line for mentions of the word “origami” looks like over the last month:

The chart tells me what I already knew - that bloggers are talking about the Origami Project. Tools like Icerocket’s blog trends graph interest me, but ultimately the insights these tools provide are superficial and anecdotal.

Say I was charged with tracking blog coverage for a company like DuPont (which is not a client of ours). I might see a spike in mentions on blogs when DuPont releases an earnings report. But I might also see a spike when DuPont’s Nascar team runs well. Or when someone with the last name “DuPont” posts some gossip about Lindsay Lohan. Or when someone uses the word DuPont as an example in a post about blog tracking.

Tracking the volume of conversation alone isn’t sufficient. You’ve got to understand the context of the conversation. You’ve got to block out the background noise and find the two nuggets that might be posted on a given day that truly impact your company/organization.

Clarification: Mark Cuban, the owner of Icerocket, wrote in to point out that I could exclude Nascar results by typing in the phrase “dupont -nascar”.

Technorati Tags: Ice Rocket Search Blogs Tracking

Check out this ad for the new AT&T. It got placed above a story entitled “Telecoms let NSA spy on calls,” that reports on the agency using AT&T and other telcoms to help with domestic eavesdropping!