Bloggasm

Occasionally, after emailing a blogger with a suggestion or story idea, I receive a polite reply inviting me to take my message to the blogger’s comment section. Though there is definitely inherent worth within this subsection of a website, there’s no question that in terms of readership it is of lesser visibility. Mike Masnick at TechDirt lambastes the PR minions who seek out coverage within his blog posts, telling them to mix with the other commoners in his blog comments section if they want to deliver a message.

My reading habits are no indication for the blog reading public at large, but based on observation there is a small percentage of the overall readership that dives into the comments; just as a pub has its mixture of regulars and random visitors, so do most blogs. If your message or comment manages to squirm its way through the moderators and CAPTCHA traps, it will essentially remain below the “fold,” where only the most avid and loyal readers dwell. Given that many blog posts are read through an RSS feed, which renders the comments invisible, it’s unsurprising that PR flacks, wanting to claim large audience reach and influence, don’t want to resort to this method. I don’t completely blame them for not wanting to mingle with the commoners, not while the vast majority of the public are merely window shoppers, not willing to venture in and browse around.

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Jonathan Berr doesn’t know why Keith Olbermann singled him out when responding to recent online criticisms. In a statement to TVNewser, the MSNBC anchor said that Berr, “whoever he is, does not like my prioritizing caring for my mother and dealing with her death, and then doing as many shows as I could, ahead of vetting the comments of our analysts and my management team, frankly, I feel sorry for him.”

Of course the Daily Finance reporter is one of just hundreds of bloggers and online journalists that have gone after Olbermann recently after it was revealed that one of his guests hosts, Richard Wolffe, had corporate PR ties that weren’t disclosed during his broadcasts.

This isn’t the first time Olbermann has taken to the web to respond to online critics. He is a frequent Daily Kos contributor and has gone on there before to answer attacks from Salon’s Glenn Greenwald. Coincidentally, Greenwald was one of the many to lead the crusade with the Wolffe controversy.

In a piece titled, “Keith Olbermann screwed up badly,” Berr had echoed many of the points brought up by Greenwald and others, noting that Wolffe had been hired by a company called Public Strategies, which flouted his MSNBC influence. It was argued by many that the company is selling Wolffe’s access as a MSNBC journalist to its corporate clients.

I asked Berr in a phone interview if he thought it was a positive sign that Olbermann took his online critics seriously enough to respond. He said that he was encouraged by the engagement but wasn’t impressed with Olbermann’s response to the criticisms.

“It shows that he’s at least willing to engage with his audience for this issue, and I give him credit for that,” he said. “I don’t give him credit for not giving a coherent answer. All the answers he’s been giving don’t make much sense, and until he starts making some more sense, then people will continue to question whether he’s trying to hide something. The fact of the matter is that what Richard Wolffe was doing was hardly a secret. He was hired by the company, and it sent out a press release touting it … so this notion that he was doing something particularly secretive is hard to understand. I don’t get what Olbermann thought Richard Wolffe was doing, because in the press release it was pretty clear what he was doing. He was a PR consultant.”

Berr said he would have no problem with Wolffe hosting Olbermann’s show, as long as the proper disclosure is given.

“Wolffe was writing for the Daily Beast for awhile, and his affiliation with his company was disclosed on the Daily Beast, so why didn’t anyone at MSNBC notice that? I’m perplexed, I don’t understand how something so basic as knowing where someone works would slip through the cracks.”

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After the Washington Post’s Ian Shapira wrote a piece claiming that Gawker — by repackaging his story — had somehow unfairly cashed in on his reporting, it was revealed that Gawker regularly receives emails from Washington Post publicity people supplying links to the newspaper’s articles, presumably in the hope that Gawker would write about them.

Over the years I’ve driven millions of page views to news and media content — articles, videos, images — by engaging in direct social media outreach. Too many outlets believe that they should simply be able to publish their content on the web, and somehow, some way, users will find it and spread it. Though it’s not unheard of for articles to spread organically, it makes much more sense to hire someone who is adept at finding communities that would be receptive to a particular story and “seeding” it within the community.

What does this mean? It means having someone who knows power users on Digg and Reddit. It means blogger and social media outreach — using search tools to root around within the blogosphere and Twitterverse and pitch these people directly on writing about your story. Someone needs to get his hands dirty and not only pitch the large aggregators like Huffington Post and Gawker, but also interact with the long tail of the blogosphere — the blogs and Twitter users that may have a few thousand daily readers.

The one advantage that a major media outlet has is the fact that it can actually hire someone to do this for them, but many of them don’t. Yes, many news outlets do hire social media “experts” that tell them how they should best use tools like Twitter and Facebook, but very few of these experts are actually wading into the blogosphere to secure links directly.

As of this writing, the Gawker post that repackaged the Washington Post story has received 15,000 views. How many views would the WashPo story have gotten on its own if they had someone actively pushing the piece within the blogosphere and social news sites?

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Frequently now I receive apologetic emails from PR reps, little personal notes sheepishly asking me if they can send me a press release. They recognize the disdain that many bloggers have toward the medium, and so they figure that if they ask nicely first, addressing me by name, then I will temporarily put down my guard and let them shovel processed, watered-down text into my inbox.

I’ve been put in situations before when working on clients where someone placed a press release in front of me to accompany my pitches. I’ve never included them. As I wrote in a recent PBS piece about how PR people should approach bloggers, the blogosphere is very unresponsive to this approach and it isn’t atypical for the press releases to go to the spam folder.

Today, TechCrunch — known for its rants against the PR industry — takes a dig at the press release, naming the 10 words that should never be included in them.

I’d like to tackle a different problem in this post, one that reporters from around the world and whatever field they cover will no doubt recognize. The issue I have with press releases, and the reason I think they are a thing from a distant past in its current form, is that they basically all look alike. Sure, the companies that are talked about can be different, and the type of news coming from them can be different, but the copy, form and style are often so much alike that for large parts of the announcements you could just as easily swap the names of the companies and keep the rest of the words. Oftentimes, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

To “spruce up” the press release, some PR people have introduced something called a “virtual press release,” which is a multi-media package. But it’s still a press release, still anchored down by the impersonal bland language that has plagued the industry for years.

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For my latest PBS piece, I interviewed several PR professionals to better understand their methods of locating social media users to push content out to. In other words, if you have a client in a certain industry, how do you decide who would be the best users to seed a story to so it will spread?

Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley

Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.

While public relations is just one arrow in the marketing quiver for most companies, it plays an especially crucial role in a region where dozens of start-ups are born each month. Without money for advertising, these unknown companies have to promote themselves to potential users, investors, employees and partners.

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When I lived in Richmond, Virginia and, right out of college, paid my dues as a staff reporter for a small string of weekly newspapers all jointly owned by the same media company, I received a phone call one day from an acquaintance of mine who worked at a Richmond PR firm called Madison and Main. I knew the person because I had written a piece about one of his clients, and as in most cases, the rep felt obligated to hold my hand through the entire interview process, an annoying tendency within the PR industry when it comes to working with journalists. At some point during our conversations I mentioned to him that I enjoyed blogging, and it was this topic to which I owed the pleasure of his call.

Madison Main Rep: How do you write a blog?

Me: What?

Madison Main Rep: Hold on, I’m going to email you a link.

I clicked on the link and it brought me to a post from a local political blog that was bashing one of the PR rep’s clients.

Madison Main Rep: So how do I write a blog on here?

It finally dawned on me what the guy was asking. He thought that the blogging medium worked so that anyone could post a blog post on any blog, and he was asking how he could post something countering what had been said about his political client. I explained to him that this was impossible because he didn’t have administrative access. He thanked me and hung up.

Later that week I was sitting with the guy with a group of other people at a bar and I brought up the blog incident. He said he took care of it, and the version of taking care of it that he described to me was that he basically astroturfed the comments section of the blog, not disclosing that he was working for a client.

The reason I’m retelling this story is because I have an exciting opportunity for you. I at some point got placed on Madison Main’s email list and occasionally get spammed by their promotions, and today I found out that you too can learn to write a blog for $249!

I usually don’t call out PR companies directly for their bullshit, but when I read this email and thought back to that ridiculous incident about two years ago, I couldn’t help myself. Every day I get incredibly badly targeted and poorly written pitches from “social media” arms of PR agencies, and from working in the industry for a little while I know exactly the obscene amount of money their poor, naive clients are getting charged for what amounts to little more than spam.

My suggestion is choose a new media consultant/PR firm like you choose a doctor or a mechanic. Obviously you don’t know the technical jargon, so you don’t know if they’re bullshitting you, but ask your friends and colleagues or other consultants in the field. We know plenty of reputable experts.