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What's the old saw? "May you live in interesting times." Amen.

It's been a great year. Social Media frenzies. YouTuba.licio.us.ness. Democrats. Dinosaurs. Blogadocious bloviations.

Here at SHIFT, lookin' at the year-end stuff, we've seen a 45 percent rise in our employee base, a significant revenue boost, and some notable client wins. It's been an honor to meet and interact with oodles of fascinating people, prospects and partners, both online and in the real world (if not in Second Life, yet).

Now --- it's break time. I'm going to go dark for a while to re-energize.

Happy Holidays to you all! Let's hope 2007 is at least as much fun as 2006.

Posted by Todd Defren at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Dan Greenfield, VP at Earthlink and blogger at Bernaisource, asked a handful of PR bloggers for their take on "The Most Important Developments of 2006." Among those participating are John Wagner, Kami Huyse, Mike Manuel the Media Guerilla, H-P's Eric Kintz and of course, Dan himself.

While I am happy to participate, TIME's announcement that Y-O-U are the most important development of the year seems to make this exercise moot! Then again, I suppose that asking a user's opinion is kind of the point.

As a first step, Dan assembled a list of notable developments from 2006. The participants in this "collaborative post" were not required to use these elements, but, let's face it, it is a handy list! So, here's my take on the Top Developments of 2006...

Social Media News Releases - Yea, I know, you'd expect this from me but if you can excuse my evangelical wonkiness for just one minute, please, consider what we are talking about:

We are going to re-format a 100-year old document for an emerging era in which consumers wield unprecedented control. By re-architecting the news release, we will place the power to disseminate data and effect reputation directly into the hands of the consumer. By providing all of the relevant, legitimate multimedia assets of the brand --- to anyone who wants them, to do with them whatever they please --- we are making a huge bet that consumers can be trusted to re-model our clients' image. (TIME would approve.)

The Social Media News Release is not the only way in which this will happen, but, due to the news release's traditional role as the Official Voice of the Corporation, it is a handy, iconic representative of the Big Changes now taking place.

Wal-Mart/Edelman Flogs - The importance of transparency and ethics made crystal-clear... in part by showing how hard it is to hide nowadays, and by demonstrating the abuse that can come as part of the disastrous revelations.

GM's Rebuttal to Thomas Friedman - It's a conversation, now. This is a big part of what the TIME editors are espousing. The media is not the be-all, end-all, anymore. If the corporation disagrees with the columnist, in the Social Media era they now have a forum to discuss it --- and (ironically) gain further credibility with consumers (who will in turn debate the issues) as a result of humanizing themselves.

In the old Command-and-Control world in which PR was bred, all of these developments would have been considered heretical.

But each is a shining example of how PR needs to think about its long-term relevance in an uncertain future.

Tags: dan+greenfield, eric+kintz, kami+huyse, john+wagner, constantin+basturea, converseon, earthlink, shift+communications, 2006, social+media, social+media+news+release, edelman, thomas+friedman, general+motors, wal-mart, flogs, blogs, PRTrends2006, web2.0trends2006

Posted by Todd Defren at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

... As I was drafting this post --- no, I am not kidding; it was near-miraculous coincidence --- I got an email from our MarketWire representative, who excitedly pointed out this latest SMNR by SAP: "SAP Developer Challenge Fosters Co-Innovation and Global Networking". Without getting into details about the relative strengths of the PRN MultiVu vs. MarketWire qualities of the two releases, this second release does win on style points. It's a far more elaborate, graphics-rich depiction of the SMNR's virtues.

The "Developer Challenge" news itself is also a pretty cool preview of how virtual worlds in Second Life can be integrated with real-world back-office systems (which will be critical if you ever want to shop at an "Amazon Store" in Second Life!):

"In the winning demo, a Second Life Resident avatar initiated a transaction by gesturing at the product she wished to buy from a Second Life storefront. The winning team members... demonstrated how updates to back-end data were reflected in real-time in the Second Life storefront."

The SAP SMNR even integrates a full-motion video of this SL transaction within the online release itself: you can choose to run the machinima demo without leaving the page, or click on over to the demo's higher-resolution version at Google Video.

Here's the bummer, though: check out how the German ERP giant posted its rich-media SMNR on its own website. All the new-media tsotchkes are missing-in-action! It looks like just another ho-hum release. A wasted opportunity to up the Company's cool-factor, eh? Hopefully the forward-thinkers who pushed for the SMNR format can work their way up through the brand guardians who must've put the kibosh on cool.

Tags: social+media, social+media+news+release, sap, marketwire, prnewswire, hrelease

Posted by Todd Defren at 11:11 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A new game of memetag. "Five Things You Don't Know About Me," per Susan Getgood. Here goes...

Short.

Balding.

Big-Nosed.

Gap-Toothed.

Egomaniac.

(Okay, maybe you already knew about the egomaniac part?) Of course, there are tons of other things ya don't know about me, but then again, why would ya want to? Now, as for tagging --- donning blindfold, spinning in-place --- Steve, Mike, Rohit, Scott, John --- you game?

Tags: meme, memetag, steve+rubel, mike+manuel, rohit+bhargava, scott+baradell, john+wagner, susan+getgood, todd+defren

Posted by Todd Defren at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

NeatReceipts is a SHIFT client whose "Scanalizer" product is a gem for anyone on your shopping list who, like me, is often embarrassed by remarks about their "Costanza Wallet" (a reference to the Seinfeld sidekick's messy, over-stuffed billfold).

Don't worry, I am not about to start using this blog to flog client products, but I did want to point out a great example of how "the power is in the consumers' hands," via this remarkably clever, mildly profane user review.

Welcome to the future. (Gulp!)

Posted by Todd Defren at 03:20 PM | Permalink

The most intriguing and thought-provoking bit of "snarkasm" came from the inimitable Brian Oberkirch. Brian is one of the most knowledgeable Social Media guys out there, and a damn good writer, to boot. So when a brainiac like Brian chooses to dismiss a substantial development like the SMNR (twice, even), it's worth the time to carefully consider his objections.

"Truly solving problems of attention & connection are what PR shops will have to learn to do. Not faux microchunking of content. As it stands today, the SMNR is a bunch of tarted up message points with del.icio.us and Digg links added in for extra innovative flava ... I suggest we focus our collective efforts on hRelease, build WordPress and MovableType plugins for hRelease [etc., etc.] ... To really play in this world, we have to unbundle the information, and not just make it look unbundled."

If you net this out, Brian's beef seems to be: "The SMNR will not be truly effective or innovative until we get serious about metadata," i.e., each "microchunk" ought to have a life of its own; ought to be discoverable and malleable. Brian's concerned about TECHNOLOGY.

Next-up: Dee Rambeau of "Adventures in Communications." Dee asks some pertinent questions:

"Who is calling for these changes [to the traditional press release]? Are agency practitioners calling for this change? Are corporate PR types calling for this change? Are working journalists calling for this change? Are consumers calling for this change? Are the wire services calling for this change? Are the regulatory agencies calling for this change?"

Dee has a clever way of suggesting that the answer to each of these questions is "NFW." Dee is concerned about WHY.

First, to Brian: Brian, I totally agree with you. When compared to WHAT'S POSSIBLE, the SHIFT template is merely a tarted-up version of a traditional release. The value of our SMNR template, ultimately, was to kick-start the conversation about WHY and HOW these changes ought to be considered. When the Powers-That-Be (hRelease, SocialMediaClub, PRX Builder, the newswires, et al.) deploy the tech you discuss in your post, I'll be the first to applaud (and adopt, and adapt). Meanwhile, unfortunately, I have no programming skills to help coax the tech & tools along to the next, better phase. Having admitted to being a technical dumb-ass, though, let me say this:

Yes, it's easy to look askance at "buttonware" like del.icio.us, Digg, etc., but, as Phil Gomes recently said, "The current SMNR discussion is 80% about attention and 20% about conversation. Reverse it, or you'll have bigger problems than a metadata standards quibble." Adding those "pieces of flair" to the corporate news release is Step #1 to making "news" part of a dialogue with the broader community, versus the age-old, top-down communication from the brand to the mainstream media.

In other words, I am more excited and intrigued by WHY we should evolutionize the news release, than I am by the HOW. That's for the techies to figure out.

So, as Dee Rambeau asks, WHY should we continue to strive toward a re-engineer the press release?

Granted that corporations will continue to do their "edgework" --- using their own websites, blogs, etc., to disperse news and information, but, the "official press release" is not going away anytime soon. If anything, the press release's relevance --- as a substantiated corporate source amid a swirl of dubious chatter --- grows by the day. Thus we should make sure that the press release is fit for duty in the New World Order.

I turn to our original inspiration, Tom Foremski, who recently posted about why he is so jazzed about this movement:

"[T]he Social Media News Release comes with so much more than the old press release...For example: its trackability across media and blogs and Internet locations is easy and extremely valuable... [The SMNR also] will continue to exist forever, cemented into the permalink archives of the Internet. It becomes a free floating publication in its own right, with its own Google pagerank, and a Technorati following ... It could also be set up to collect comments for weeks or years; it's a live document. The collection of such information in such a manner is something that we never had a chance to consider before now..."

To sum up an earlier post, the SMNR --- done right (and that has arguably not happened yet), can:

• Democratize "Access" - ALL of the content (multimedia assets) becomes available to ANYONE who is interested, not just journalists but bloggers and consumers as well.
• Build "Community" - We need to make it easy for anyone who views the Social Media News Release to comment on its content; re-mix its multimedia elements for use in blogs, on YouTube, and in the online versions of traditional print publications, etc. We also need to track this response and show a willingness to respond --- openly, quickly and, as appropriate.
• Ensure "Accuracy" - Corporations who are willing to "let go" of their brands also see the benefit of providing "official" versions of their logos, graphics, and other multimedia, for use and re-use by traditional and new-era pundits.
• Embrace "Context" - Why not make the media's (or blogger's) job easier by proactively providing links to industry-related research and yes, even to "competitive" articles (via del.icio.us, for example, where you can also append your own notes about each article)?
• Be "Findable" - Borrowing from Bhargava's ideas for Social Media Optimization and with a hat-tip to the wire services' increasing understanding of the importance of "search optimized" news, all I need to add here is the reminder that even the NY TIMES has considered how to run headlines that would make their content more readily "found" by the search engines. If the Gray Lady worries about Google, so should we all.

Ye Olde-Style Press Release is not well-suited to these objectives. Do we NEED all this stuff today? No. Do we NEED all this frou-frou "conversation" to occur around each and every release? No. But, is the world changing? Are more consumers powered-up to make their voices heard on the Web? Yes! Should we as marketers find ways to encourage, embrace and account for this revolutionary up-ending of traditional media relationships? Hell, yea.

SHIFT's template (and the hard work that goes on now at SocialMediaClub, Edelman, the wire services, etc.) are merely babysteps in the right direction.

Tags: social+media+news+release, brian+oberkirch, shift+communications, edelman, phil+gomes, dee+rambeau, rohit+bhargava, tom+foremski, hrelease, social+media+club, chris+heuer, prx+builder

Posted by Todd Defren at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I am increasingly fascinated by the concept of "edge-in" marketing --- catering to the fringe vs. the mainstream.

In this era of globalization, when every mall contains the same mass-produced merchandise, each person struggles to customize their look to be a little-bit-different from the masses. The people who live "on the fringe" are typically the most successful in this quest for customization (Malcolm Gladwell's "Mavens" from The Tipping Point). They may be a little odd, maybe a little intense, but they are alpha-influencers within their peer groups, the drivers of the bandwagon. These "fringe-alphas" are the people most likely to bend the corporate brand to their will, and in the process reinvent it to appeal to new audiences. Their intensity gives them the fuel and desire to do so; their originality appeals to "everyone else." "Everyone else" emulates & passes-along the re-crafted branding.

Check out the new Burger King X-Box games: just $3.99 with your meal and you can play them with scores of other strangers on XBox Live. BK is marketing to a narrow audience niche (XBox owners, aged 8 to 18 or so). This is not only a lucrative audience in its own right, of course, but its also worth considering the "bystander byproduct" --- neighborhood kids and parents will crowd around the tv screen, watching the game's owner take part in a grandiose marketing campaign. If these cheap games are even remotely good, BK's cool quotient goes up a notch with the game owners, and with everyone within the owners' social networks.

Think about the Stormhoek approach. It's so simple yet so brilliant. Offer one free bottle of South African wine to up to 100 bloggers. Don't require them to blog about the wine; just cross your fingers that they will. Risky. What if they hated it? But there is no real risk if you produce a good product. The only true risk was the cost of producing and shipping 100 bottles of wine; a pittance when you consider the results:

• "Shipments of Stormhoek to wine shops doubled ... to 100,000 cases in 2005.
• Flickr alone has more than 600 photos of Stormhoek bottles.
• Technorati reports over 2,100 blog posts mentioning Stormhoek.
• Stormhoek now has the reputation of being the 'wine of blogging' and, more specifically, of the Silicon Valley hi-tech crowd. Following prominent mentions in TechCrunch and ValleyWag, (Silicon Valley residents) expect to see Stormhoek at geek dinners, conferences with bloggers in attendance (etc.)"

(Data taken from Stormhoek's award-winning entry to the Society for New Communications Research's 2006 awards, which I helped judge. Just a few weeks later there are over 2,500 blog posts --- up from 2,100 --- containing the word "Stormhoek.")

I also love how loosey-goosey Mentos and Coca-Cola have been about the Mentos videos. The brand is in the users' hands, and these major-league brands have embraced the concept. They have opened their arms to the lunatic fringe, and profited. (The Coke/Mentos Experiment went from "the edge" to the "Ellen DeGeneres Show." Perfect example.)

These are leadership case studies of PR in the Social Media age.

Compare these examples to Campari's new campaign, which embraces the whole grab-bag of top Social Media services (YouTube, Flikr, MySpace, del.icio.us). It's a game attempt, but unlike the campaigns cited above, it fails the sniff test. In fact, the Powers-That-Be at Flikr have already terminated the Campari account.

As I noted at Kari Huyse's blog, the Campari campaign is notable for its comprehensive use of Social Media tool sets, but, the visionary marketing campaigns that we'll all some day talk about --- the future paragons of this dawning age --- will not be about the tools of community, they will be astounding for their ability to build or leverage communities.

Starting from the edge.

Tags: marketing, pr+2.0, public+relations, kami+huyse, campari, coca+cola, mentos, burger+king, stormhoek, david+parmet, gaping+void, sncr, malcolm+gladwell

Posted by Todd Defren at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

From Phil Gomes' blog, some interesting details emerge about StoryCrafter. The 2 most enlightening, and intriguing tidbits:

"The tool is hosted. Companies can choose to install it in their firewall or (far more likely) unlock a tertiary domain (e.g., socialnews.company.com) and park it separately."

"It's not a 'site,' nor a service for people to just sort of log into and push 'publish.' It's a client offering."

So it is strictly for Edelman clients. I am all for defending a proprietary advantage in a capitalist society, but I also hope that it won't be too long before (as Phil suggests), "[Edelman will] probably set up some semi-public sandbox for it, so long as the management of it remains reasonable."

I contacted Chris Heuer of Social Media Club --- originally he was pretty gung-ho about the Edelman offering --- and he admitted via e-mail to feeling a twinge of disappointment about the Clients-Only aspect. But like me (and most all of us), Chris is a capitalist at heart (albeit an incredibly generous one), so he was also empathetic.

But I am curious about what Edelman's clients-only approach means to the wider blogosphere, and Edelman's role in it? It kind of reminds me of the Technorati deal, in that the Agency's first-principles seem to be "protect what is proprietary" vs. "spread goodwill and it will come back to benefit you." That's certainly their prerogative (and as Phil bemusedly notes in his blog, I am certainly not averse to scrapping for credit myself!), but, given recent damage wrought to Edelman's reputation by the Agency's own Social Media missteps, releasing StoryCrafter to the masses might have made a nice peace offering. But, maybe that's just me.

Anyway, forget all that --- I am actually more intrigued by Edelman's idea to make news-related data more "bloggy" via the "socialnews.company.com" domain. My guess is that this means that news will be published in a blog-like format, that encourages the participation of any/all stakeholders, at the client's corporate site. That's certainly achievable based on both the SHIFT template and the SMC's emerging spec, but as Phil notes, our template (and SMC's) is intended to be distributed, i.e., via newswires, rather than to spur conversation-for-conversation's-sake as a first-priority. Kudos to Phil & the rest of the Edelman gang for making that concept central to their scheme.

Tags: social+media+news+release, edelman, phil+gomes, storycrafter, hrelease, social+media, social+media+club, chris+heuer

Posted by Todd Defren at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

First off, and notably, Edelman seemed to use the SHIFT template for their announcement --- which is pretty cool. They also used my favorite Technorati tag (social media news release) to point to the industry-wide discussion. Thanks, gang!

But I am not clear on what is being announced, exactly. The release calls the new service, "StoryCrafter -- a Web-based software tool for helping companies produce and deploy social media news releases." But there are no links to a StoryCrafter site? A Google search doesn't yield any results. It can't be a service just for Edelman clients, based on Rick Murray's quote: "StoryCrafter lets people create social media news releases quickly, easily, and affordably."

The screen capture looks interesting --- but functionally it appears to be derivative of similar to the PRX Builder service announced in September...? Either way I'd like to take it for a test-drive.

For all I know, the Edelman software may be superior, but my first question is going to be about distribution. Will Edelman facilitate links to major newswires, as PRX Builder did with PRNewswire? If they have no plans along those lines, it's not a deal-breaker but it would seem to be a major benefit for companies looking for a seamless solution for Social Media News Release creation & distribution.

That's all I know for now. I hope to see folks like Shel Holtz, Chris Heuer, Brian Solis and Shannon Whitley (among scores of other qualified commentators!) weigh in. I'll track reaction as best I can at SHIFT's PR 2.0 del.icio.us site.

Tags: social+media+news+release, edelman, storycrafter, robert+french, tom+foremski, chris+heuer, phil+gomes, prx+builder, prx, social+media, social+media+club, hrelease

Posted by Todd Defren at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

In Part 1 of this blogseries I noted that "it's simply in the marketer's nature to use & abuse new media channels on behalf of their clients." That's true, unfortunately, and the examples are legion.

But it's also true that it is in our nature to be highly respectful of our audiences. We study them. We learn their likes & dislikes. We build cordial relationships. We try to be helpful. We take the time to forge a bond.

This will be Marketing's salvation. (Specifically, these "respectful" attributes are more common among PR pros. So, it follows that this "natural" instinct will be the salvation of the PR industry in the Social Media age.)

I think that many of the mistakes and abuses that we've seen thus far have been the result of a lack of research. Social Media is new, exciting, and potentially lucrative, so --- so, it's land-grab time, people, and at such times the would-be zillionaires and wanna-be gurus get greedy, sloppy and short-sighted.

First come the organic successes (think Rocketboom) --- entrepreneurs who strike gold doing what they love.

Then the schemers buy the dreamers (Yahoo buys Flikr, del.icio.us; Google gobbles up YouTube).

Then everyone becomes a dreamer, and will stop at nothing to gain the attention of the schemers. At this point, both the schemers and the dreamers abandon authenticity. It becomes about $$$. That's when the mistakes start to happen.

This is PR's Big Moment. For the first time in memory, it's the PR pro who can rein things in a li'l bit. Why? Because we are hired for our expertise in relationship-building. "Catering to Community" is what we do.

When the client wants to do something that abuses the goodwill of the consumer; something inauthentic; something wrong-headed, it's going to be up to the PR pro to say, "No. That's not going to work. If it ain't real it ain't right. This campaign disrespects the community, and if we move forward, our reputation will suffer even more than yours."

For years, the PR pro's job has been about reaching out. In so doing, they have learned when to pull back. Do we know how to "spin" a message? Yes. Do we know when it's time to abandon "spin?" Yes. We know that sometimes the best "spin" is "no spin." Ultimately, PR pros are expert at understanding and catering to stakeholders. It's a hard-won skill. It will serve our clients well in the Social Media age.

It's in our nature.

Posted by Todd Defren at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

From Wikipedia: "The Scorpion and the Frog is a fable attributed to Aesop. The story is about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid to be stung, but the scorpion reassures him that they would both die if that happened. The frog then agrees, but in mid-river the scorpion stings him nevertheless, telling him that it is simply his nature to do so."

Social Media has changed the practice of Marketing faster than the industry's ability to respond intelligently. Many marketers are not yet ready to engage Social Media principles; many barely understand what a blog is, let alone how bloggers might impact their brand. Meanwhile, though, those marketers who presumably "get it" actually seem to "get it wrong" more often than not, and they paid a price in terms of revenue or respectability. Witness:

• The Edelman/Wal-Mart blogger relations flap.
• The Edelman/Wal-Mart flogs.
• LonelyGirl15's flunking the authenticity test.
• Exxon-Mobil's (alleged) fake viral video, attacking Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth."
• The Wikipedia ban.
• The SecondLifers' growing revulsion for marketers.
• Time-Warner's blatant abuse of YouTube for the "Superman Returns" DVD launch.
• UPDATE: the usurpation of Digg and other socially-driven news aggregators.

Paul Holmes wrote about these mishaps and abuses recently (he graciously asked for my input), as did Steven Silvers, Strumpette, Jeff Jarvis and (ironically) Richard Edelman. Many within the industry acknowledge the problem: just as the scorpion in Aesop's fable could not help itself from stinging the helpful frog in mid-stream, it's simply in the marketer's nature to use & abuse new media channels on behalf of their clients. But whereas abuses like these might be glossed over by the mainstream media, in the Social Media era each breach is viewed --- rightly so --- as an egregious affront by the community members affected. And that's the worst, most dangerous part of all.

My guess is that there are plenty of smart PR pros who are willing to wade into Social Media's waters, without any plan to abuse the system --- but, the negative hype about past exploits has swamped the newbies' enthusiasm to take the plunge. I don't blame them. Until we get some better case studies --- examples of great work, in which both the frog and the scorpion made it across the stream unscathed --- I fear that marketers will merely sputter along.

Fear could cause marketers to miss this unique opportunity. The marketer's basic nature could cause them to foul it up.

Posted by Todd Defren at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)