Reuters now has a virtual news bureau over in Second Life. Tech reporter Adam Pasick (whose byline is his SL name 'Adam Reuters') is now wiring in stories about the goings-on in Second Life. Pasick kicked off his new appointment by sending in a smashing story about how the SL's massive virtual economy there is giving some policymakers something to think about.
Media presence in Second Life is growing. In late September, CNET Networks launched a virtual doppelganger of its real-life office building on a coast overlooking the sea. Wired Magazine also built its own presence to accompany a set of stories published about Second Life.
With all this media interest in Second Life, Mr. Pasick-Reuters should be aware that with tech PR giant Text 100 on the loose in SL, and other PR agencies taking note, his virtual phone may just start ringing off its virtual hook. (He may just prefer to hide.)
So it looks like there is yet another Wal-Mart/Edelman blog controversy. The gist of the story is that a blog launched in late September that was supposedly written by a couple traveling across America in an RV and spending nights parked in Wal-Mart lots. It turned out the blog was paid for by a Wal-Mart funded group and one of the blog's authors is a Washington Post photographer. None of this information was disclosed on the blog. You can read commentary on the issue here, here, here and here.
I think we are going to see lots more misteps like this in the coming months and years. Lots of companies and organizations are starting to cautiously participate in the blogosphere without really understanding it. Many are participating using an old school PR/advertising mindset. Meaning they are trying to manipulate people instead of trying to talk to them.
Update: Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel from Wal-Mart's PR firm, Edelman Public Relations, have dived on their swords for the lack of transparency in the Wal-Mart campaign and issued mea culpas. It was the right move.
But I think it is important to point out that this program was a bad idea even if Wal-Mart was completely transparent about the payment of the bloggers. The whole RV tour idea just strikes me as old fashioned and, well, boring. I don't think the point here is to bring the same tired old ideas to a new medium.
With the rise of blogging has come blogger relations: the efforts of PR and marketing types to get bloggers, some influential with large audiences, some obscure with niche ones, and everyone else in between, to write about their companies and clients' products.
In many ways there's nothing new to this development. PR types have always worked, basically their bread and butter, to get print, radio and TV reporters to write about and promote their clients' products. Reporters from the national newspapers to the city dailies get hit with press releases, product samples, and phone calls. Getting a favorable story by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal can launch a new tech product. A bad review can do the opposite.
And the better PR pros get to know key reporters very well, and know how reporters work and are able to make the reporter's job easier. But no money changes hands. There may be lunches, speaking engagements and other honoraria, but no payments.
But now it seems that PR types and marketers are paying bloggers to write favoarble stories about client products. There's a story(not yet online) in the November issues of Smart Money called "Bloggers" by Anne Kadet highlighting this new (perhaps not, alas) and sordid trend. There's even a company called PayPerPost.com that as its name implies pays blogger for posts. Seems about as reputable as paying individuals and companies to fradulently click on search engine ads. (Yes, this is a real problem.)
Here's my favorite quote from the story: Noramn Miglietta from Turner Sports interactive says that
"paying bloggers to mention an event is no different that buying an ad." 'If it's informative and not misleading, I don't see that as a conflict.'"
Yeah, right. Ask him for a mention or buy an advertisement. Otherwise the blogger is a paid shill and is being dishonest if he doesn't disclose the 'sponsorship'. If this goes unchecked bloggers run the risk of being viewed as the social media's equivalent of junk mail and spam. Caveat Lector.
It's no secret that I think that Consumerist does a huge favor to the general public in pointing out what's fishy about the latest bridge on the market. Editor Ben Popken has now taken Consumerist readers into a conversationEdelman PR's Wal-Mart advocate Mike Krempasky attempted to have with Ben.
If Ben is being entirely truthful and transparent, then the question that was posed to Editor Ben by Krempasky will make your stomach sink. According to Consumerist, Krempasky, representing both Edelman and Wal-Mart, asked, "What can we do to get you to stop writing about our companies?"
We launched a couple of new features yesterday sort of on the sly.
(1) We put up a Wiki (what's a Wiki?) that will serve as a companion to The Bivings Report. At it's most basic level, the Wiki will provide a place where readers can collaborate and expand on some of the ideas we discuss on The Bivings Report. Down the road, we'll be attempting to conduct some collaborative research on our Wiki.
(2) We added a link on our sidebar that you can use to email us ideas for posts or products/services you think we should look at. Or if you just want to talk. Either way.
Both ot these features appear in the Collaborate area of our sidebar.
Way back when, I wrote a post about the undoing of James Frey and his memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."
We all know the memoir was a lie, a total fabrication. I wondered at the time what might happen, whether the publisher would fess up and give readers a refund. Well they are going to it seems, but of course, only after being sued. In fact, it's basically a total recall — for a defective and falsely advertised product.
You can find more details of the refund at this blog here .
We have some really exciting news: we have reached an agreement with Moreover Technologies to begin to use their online news content in ImpactWatch, our flagship media monitoring service. For those not in the know, ImpactWatch is a web-based media management platform used by a large number of public relations and corporate communications professionals. We are proud to announce that Moreover now joins other high-volume media content providers such as Factiva and VMS in helping to provide our ImpactWatch clients with a truly global combination of news sources, tools and information that give our clients a simple way to visually track, gather and analyze global news content.
After an exhaustive study of all the major online content aggregators out there, we settled on Moreover as we felt they provided the highest quality and most versatile service available to provide our clients with the kind of flexible, quality media monitoring solution they require.
Moreover has in fact been around for about as long as ImpactWatch, which is another reason we felt compelled to team up with them – it was important to us to choose a product that we felt had really proven itself in the marketplace. In the realm of media monitoring and reputation management, new products seem to come out every week – with the release of the fifth complete work-over of the ImpactWatch software just around the corner the software has gotten to the point where it is really user-friendly, scalable and extremely stable.
Anyone interested can see it themselves by entering their name and email on the the ImpactWatch demo form to sign up for a demo.
In the comments to our post on blogging at the world's largest PR firms, Frank Shaw from WagEd jokingly wondered which blog went up first. Erin did some quick research and figured it out. Below is a list of PR firm blogs along with the date of the first post. Frank wins.
> There is an interesting piece on BusinessWeek.com (via Slashdot ) that talks about the Dell Battery Recall program and how the blogosphere “kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.”
As mentioned in the BusinessWeek.com article, the blogosphere’s ability to continue to provide examples and data raised the profile of this issue into something that Dell needed to accept and address openly. Kudos to them for dealing with it as they have - maybe they should take a page out of Apple’s playbook (and Rita’s post ) in regards to positioning and ease of use.
Last night in a fit of insomnia I was scanning Slashdot for the latest and greatest - and I stumbled on a link to this article from the Washington Post. Michael De Kort, a (now ex-) Lockheed Martin engineer working on a project for the U.S. Coast Guard identified “several critical safety and security problems” within the project and tried to bring attention to them by going through the traditional processes for dealing with such issues. According to the article, he went through proper channels to voice his complaint - including “Lockheed Martin ethics investigations, engineering management reviews, quality reviews, propram management reviews” and also working through “the chain to Lockheed Martin corporate legal, to the CEO Bob Stevens, and to the Board of Directors”. He also contacted the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Homeland Security which is currently conducting a review and reached out to Representative Peter King (R- NY), Chairman of the Homeland Security Oversight Committee. I highlight the steps he took because it seems that he did what any good employee would do in this situation; use appropriate channels to voice concerns about a project.
What he did next is interesting to me - especially in light of the BusinessWeek article I mentioned at the top of this post. He made a video of his complaint and posted it on YouTube. The original video is below
If you cannot watch the video or would rather read a transcript of his video, Slashdot user Pushnell
has helpfully created one.
At 1:09pm this afternoon, his YouTube video has received approximately 41579 views. At 5:15 pm his video had received 47186 views. As of last night the Washington Post was reporting over 8,000 views. As of this afternoon there are over 25 stories about him and his story, and they are on Time.com / CNet.com / CBS news and a host of others. Direct link to my Google News search is here.
It seems that his story has legs and e has created a profile on Slashdot to respond to comments about his video.
I wonder what appreciable results his posting on YouTube will bring about. Will it raise the profile of this issue to the point that both Lockheed Martin and the Coast Guard need to publicly address this issue? Will the blogosphere embrace this despite having one central source for this story (his YouTube video) as opposed to the many others found on the Dell Laptop Battery incident (YouTube videos, blog postings from many different users, etc)?
Finally, what does this mean for other whistleblowers in the future? Has he set a precedent for them? Instead of a whistleblower pitching his or her story to the traditional media, will YouTube and the blogosphere be the go to outlets? Mr. De Kort lends a human face to the problem that might otherwise be buried in a lawsuit somewhere and thanks to wonders of the archiveal nature of the Internet (and the series of tubes that make it up) his story will always be found in video or text format regardless of the merit of his story. Currently, he is unemployed, and according to the Washington Post, Lockheed Martin
said that “the video did not influence the decision to lay off De Kort and that he had had been notified earlier this year that he would be out of a job.” Who knows what the details are surrounding his dismissal, but I wonder if his actions can also get him a new job.
Finally, a hypothetical scenario to ponder that could affect us directly in our day-to-day lives. Are we far off from the days when some anonymous ‘hacker’ will decide to not only highlight the security flaw in an operating system but also provide a screencast showing your average user how to exploit this flaw?
I’m watching this story with interest - leave me your thoughts in the comments below.
(24) Search Term Volume. Track how many people are searching for keywords that impact your company and watch how it changes over time. This can be done using tools like Google Trends or through Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing accounts.
(25) Search Term Rank. See how high your company appears for key search phrases. Obviously related to #24.
(26) Relevant Wikipedia Entries. See how relevant Wikipedia entries are evolving over time. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for entries so that the changes come to you. If you decide to edit or complain, be transparent about it.
(27) Third Party Influencers. For some, it is important to know everything certain individuals/institutions say about your industry as a whole. For publicly traded companies, that might be financial analysts covering your industry. For technology companies, this might be Walt Mossberg or Michael Arrington. For others, this might include thinks tanks or trade associations. Figure out who they are and read what they are saying.
(28) Key Stakeholders. Employees were mentioned in the original list. For some companies it might also be useful to track coverage of partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders.
(29) Press Release and/or Blog Post Pickups. Many large companies seemingly produce a press release a day. The effectiveness of these releases at actually generating press should be tracked so you can see if they are worth the time/effort. Same applies for blog posts, if your company has a blog.
Note that I don't think every company should track every item I've listed above (or every item on the full list). Some of the items I've added are only really relevant for specific industries. But I think the cumulative list that has been developed could serve as a great starter kit for those implementing a monitoring program.
Around six months ago I wrote two posts (1, 2) about whether the world's largest PR firms had official, company sanctioned blogs. I decided to loop back on this research to see if any companies had started blogging in the interim. This time I also looked at the Technorati rank of each the blogs. For the uninitiated, Technorati calculates the popularity of a blog by analyzing the number of incoming links a blog attracts. Although not perfect, this is a pretty good way to access the popularity of a blog. Lower ranks are better.
In doing the research this time I was looking specifically for blogs that were linked to from the main website of the PR firm. I know that individuals within all these companies are blogging. The point was to find blogs that are supported and sanctioned by the PR firms.
Enough throat clearing, here is a chart showing the results, sorted by Technorati rank. If the company has a blog that I could find I have linked to it.
*Edelman links to a variety of blogs from their site. The rank listed here is for Richard Edelman's blog, which is listed first and the most represenative. Obviously I know Micropersuasion is a Top 100 blog.
Gary's article on how communicators can adapt traditional PR strategies to the online environment has been published in Communique , a magazine devoted to healthcare marketing. You can find the article here.
Ajit and Erin’s recent posts about creative uses of text messaging got me thinking about Mozes, a cool texting product I played around with a few months back. In brief, Mozes allows you to create a free account and then register the keywords of your choice. People who send a text message to 66937 (MOZES) with your keyword as the message will get back a custom message of your choosing. In addition, you can use Mozes to encourage users to subscribe to your keyword and you can then send out broadcast messages to all your subscribers whenever you want.
So, I set up an account and registered the keyword “ajitmusic” as an experiment. Ajit is a friend and colleague here at Bivings and, more importantly, a talented musician who plays gigs around DC. Check out his website. Plug. Plug. Plug. Text the message “ajitmusic” to 66937 and you’ll get back a custom message and also an invitation to subscribe to broadcast messages from Ajit (or me I guess - :)). Give it a whirl. (more…)
The Bivings Report (TBR) is a source of news, insight, research and analysis on the web-based communications industry. TBR content is posted, created and managed by internet strategists, media/communications analysts, web developers, designers and programmers, all of whom are employees of The Bivings Group.
It's no secret that I think that 
We have some really exciting news: we have reached an agreement with 
