November 2007 – Page 10

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired and author of The Long Tail (and the blog of the same title), has issued a strong rebuke for PR types who send indiscriminate email in hopes of gaining some media attention.

They’ve gotten Anderson’s attention. Now he’s blocking them.

“I get more than 300 emails a day,” he writes in a recent blog post, “and my problem isn’t spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it’s PR people.”

Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers (that’s editor@wired.com).

So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that’s why my email address is public).

Everything else gets banned on first abuse.

Anderson’s post underscores the importance of knowing which story ideas to pitch to which journalists, the importance for PR folks to research the interests of the journalists they’re trying to reach, and the importance of knowing the rules for submitting ideas to certain media outlets. (Obviously, if you think you’ve got a story that Wired would pick up, the editor-in-chief is not the person to email.) PR blogger Jeremy Pepper saw Anderson’s post as a teachable moment and created a nice slide show to help his fellow flacks better understand the nature of social media.

But there’s a sideshow to this cautionary tale that has my mind spinning. In his post, Anderson also listed the email addresses of all the PR folks who are now blocked. That list resulted in some bizarre unintended consequences, as described in his Nov. 1 post. Some PR companies used the opportunity to email clients of people on the list to try to get them to switch firms. It’s turned into an all-out catfight between a couple of PR shops.

Whew! Makes me glad that I’ve got a gig in higher ed.

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Now playing: Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings – Something’s Changed
via FoxyTunes

Mike Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University and one of the most thought-provoking faculty members to have discovered YouTube, has once again hit a nerve with a video message gone viral. Last winter it was The Machine Is Us/ing Us, a presentation of how the Internet and hypermedia is changing the way we communicate, collaborate and work (discovered via a February 2007 entry on Karine Joly’s blog). This time around, Wesch addresses the state of higher education in the United States — or at Kansas State, anyway — with A Vision of Students Today. Clocking in at under five minutes, the video, in Wesch’s words, “summariz[es] some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

Reaction on the web has been widespread — more than 4,300 comments on the YouTube site alone. At Wired Science, Aaron Rowe calls Wesch’s assessment (actually a collaboration with 200 K State students) “spot on” and adds:

For young men and women that are accustomed to the instant gratification of the web, even the simple act of flipping through the the glossary of a textbook may be unthinkable. Venerable professors may view this as impatience and laziness, but that would be a superficial assessment. My generation has become acclimated to the efficiency and immediate feedback of the internet. Once you have shown a farmer a tractor, they will never want to plow a field by hand again.

Watch the video, and ponder what it means for our business. You can also join the discussion.

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Now playing: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – Fortune Teller
via FoxyTunes