media relations – Page 23

The Thanksgiving holiday and an over-indulgence of turkey, football and college basketball has thrown off my circadian rhythms. So I’m a day late with this week’s Friday Five. Technically, I should’ve taken the week off, but this particular topic is timely, as it relates to the Advanced PR Institute I’ll be helping out with on Dec. 3-4. (“Developing a Technology-Savvy Communications Approach” is the theme for this institute, and if you would like to attend, there’s still time to register if you hurry.) Anyway, my co-faculty and I discussed some pre-reading for the conference participants to help bring them up to speed on the impact of new technology on PR, and we came up with this list of materials:

1. Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing, by Lois Kelly. (Executive summary available online. So is my review of the book.)

2. The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The whole book is now available online.

3. Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. (I also reviewed this book.)

4. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott. The introduction and chapter 1 are available online (PDF).

5. Now it’s your turn. What other book about technology, social networking, the web 2.0 world, etc., would be on your list of recommended reading for higher ed PR folks? Leave your recommendations in the comments below and I’ll be sure to share these recommendations with the folks in Austin on Dec. 3-4.

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Now playing: The National – Apartment Story
via FoxyTunes

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