A conversation with Peter Shankman

We are pleased to bring you the latest episode in our Beyond the Hype podcast series. For this podcast, I sat down with Peter Shankman with HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to discuss the best ways to approach reporters and bloggers from a public relations standpoint. Peter is very vocal about PR professionals' use of social media tools to connect with journalists. His view -- and one that we share as an agency -- is to listen to the conversation...

Thank you, sysadmins!

I was on a call the other day with the director of IT at a large process automation tools and support company when the subject of today's System Administration Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day, came up. He said he was planning on making note of his own sysadmin in his personal blog and he told me the following story. Last year at the company's summer outing at the beach, he and his sysadmin were enjoying themselves and enjoying...

Socially Entertaining Media

One of my favorite moments last week was XM Sirius radio talk show host Gayle King's admission that she needed help from her listeners, as she didn't understand Gov. Sarah Palin's farewell speech. She was trying to figure out the major points in the rambling speech. Her confusion was genuine and amusing at the same time. It definitely took a village to explain the speech, which is the sign of bad communications in general. We coach speakers all the time...

CEO Twitter Rules to Live By

I've seen a number of references and "retweets" to an UberCEO.com post about the very small number of Fortune 100 CEOs who use Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook or other social media tools to communicate with the outside world. The headline of the post labeled these socially media uninitiated CEOs "slackers." I think it's a bit harsh, considering the newness of many of these media and the job of a F100 CEO these days. This isn't even considering the battle most large...

Facebook not a "Good Thing" for Martha Stewart

The Twitter vs. Facebook battle appears to have a new convert -- Martha Stewart. Martha stated in Tina Brown's The Daily Beast that she loves Twitter "so much more than Facebook" apparently because of the "dippy" stuff like befriending you have to do. So is this yet another data point in the "Facebook is over" meme we've been hearing? It would appear so based on some of the coverage I saw. It didn't help that Bill Gates also announced his...

A good day for Twitter, IMHO

I saw a couple of tweets yesterday afternoon of people speculating that Twitter was purging spam accounts, then noticed the "Twitter Correcting" and "Spammers Perish" trending topics this morning. This is a great thing for Twitter, in my opinion. Since we advocate to our clients that they leverage Twitter as a channel to reach their buying communities and key influencers directly, which in some cases has generated sales leads, I've been increasingly disturbed by the steady increase in spam and...

Social Media and Business Performance

We've touched on the big topic of social media and return on investment a lot here in recent weeks. It seems the velocity and veracity of research of the issue has increased to a great degree. As a prime example, there was an interesting study released Monday in which Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell, was involved. It explored the correlation between how much the leading brands are engaged with customers through social media and their financial performance. It showed in...

And that's the way it is

Although we hadn't really seen or heard much about him for many years, it was still sad to hear of the death of iconic anchorman and journalist Walter Cronkite. Reading the memorium in the Wall Street Journal written by blogger Susan Toepfer, I was shocked to realize it was 28 years ago that I watched his last broadcast with a group of Computerworld journalist colleagues. It was in a bar (of course; we were journalists) and I still remember our...

More data on the shift in marketing

Josh Bernoff of Forrester blogged about some new data released by Forrester this week that provides more hard data about the shift in marketing taking place right now. The data comes from its new forecast of spending in interactive marketing. Here is a strong point Josh makes before summarizing the data: In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than...

Journalistic Ethics vs. the Economy

I've been watching with fascination the uproar surrounding Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth's attempt to raise money for her struggling newspaper by hosting a salon series at her home that featured the newspaper's journalists - including its host, editor Marcus Brauchli and government officials. The price of admission for this series was a steep $25,000 per salon or $250,000 for the series and the target audience was lobbyists and corporate executives. Most interestingly, the coverage of the mistake by the...