Could this be the first written Rick Roll?

When iChat is down, good employees improvise…

Notepad iChat Transcript:

Lance: Man, not having Internet blows
Lance: Oh, s***, but check this out…
Lance: http://youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiV

Me: That one’s cool, but it’s nothing compared to this one.
Me: http://youtube.com/watch?v=rtFotf7NEWg

I don’t want to sound like a fanboy of Peter Shankman’s Help A Reporter Out (HARO) since I already posted about it recently, but I wanted to point out this video produced by one of the many fans of Shankman’s new query service.

High quality blip.tv verison also available.

In truth, I am sort of a fanboy for the service. I have found some real value from it since joining HARO when it was only a Facebook group, but I am using this video to illustrate a point.

When you have users like Bridgette here creating pretty high-quality content like this video for your brand, you don’t have to wallpaper the Internet with advertising for your brand or worry over every piece of negative press (although responsible advertising and protecting your brand are good moves). Your community can do some of that for you. When you win over a community — and by win, I mean doing the hard work to BUILD a community around your brand/product — your community becomes your biggest advertisement.

Where are your fanboys and fangirls?

I mean REALLY understand it? Even on paper?

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

How about now?

I bet you want ice cream now, too.

Video from leelefever (Common Craft) and found via Todd And

I stand in the world without a FriendFeed. It may be a slightly darker, colder less RSS-blissful place, but I am okay with that for the moment.

If you’ve been trapped under some Web 1.0 rock, FriendFeed is an aggregate service that allows you to link all your social media profiles, blogs and services into one site and feed — Lifehacker can walk you through getting one and Tamar Weinberg analyzed it for us. With your account and page on FriendFeed created, you can connect with friends and contacts to follow the feed from their page and give them your own online activity feed.

In the end, through all your connections on FriendFeed, you create one massive RSS feed of doom that tracks all the actions of your friends online. Why would I resist such a thing of wonder?

To tell you the truth, I have been tempted to jump into FriendFeed for quit awhile ever since Robert Scoble began championing it even while it began to fracture commenting on blogs, but I have several reasons to wait on this one.

Online Account Zen – I’m a Minimalist

Call me a commitment-phobe, but I simply don’t want another account online. I have a profile on almost every major social media service, and yes, the idea of having it all linked together appeals to me.

Unfortunately, I don’t want to sign up for a service JUST to aggregate all my other services. I am an account minimalist and have recently been taking stock and collecting all my various accounts online. The count is already very high. With privacy concerns on every site where I sign up and port my online existence, I don’t want to put myself out there unless it’s really necessary.

Coming Soon…from someone else

The aggregation FriendFeed provides is something I see happening in the social media networks where I already participate, so why move and invest in a new social network?

Unlike some media powerhouses and major blogging moguls, it takes me some time to promote an online service to my many Web 1.0, non-blogging friends, create email invites, offer explanations and grow my network. It’s not worth it for me to go through all that trouble if FriendFeed will soon be competing with the services I already use.

I’d rather wait for Facebook or Google to integrate all my other social media feeds so that I have a one-stop shop for all interaction. It looks like my wait-and-see approach might pay off too since Facebook is already implementing FriendFeed-like features.

Bringin’ da Noise

As Scoble himself and others have pointed out, early adopters tend to thrive with a lot of noise. While I would love to be able to digest everything going on, and I enjoy the noise on Twitter, I am not sure that more noise in my life would add value.

I am limited to what I can easily track daily in my RSS feed reader. Blog posts, Facebook, Pownce and Twitter overflow my inbox and RSS feeds each morning.

Another online service that repeats some of the same messages would be overkill. I need no more sources to sift through every morning — at least not until I do another feed reader audit.

Fragmenting Comments

As a blogger, I have really enjoyed the feedback from hosting conversations about my ideas in the comments. Okay, Okay, I’ll admit it. I like the ego boost of getting comments as well.

With FriendFeed, my posts collect their own comments in various places that never ping back to my blog. These comments are never shared with regular readers. Even though there are now ways of pulling comments out of FriendFeed, it doesn’t catch all of the discussion, which is scattered throughout FriendFeed as Scoble explained (number 9), never to be reunited.

Spreading the discussion across different networks and feeds shatters the commenting system of blogs in my opinion. I love sharing my digital content, but I do enjoy that it all comes home — comments, trackbacks, social media shares and emails — to my main domain.

If FriendFeed would unite all the conversations happening on one item within their own network and then, minding privacy restrictions, port that conversation back to the original blog, I could be happy with the way the service shares blog posts.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

While I like the idea of aggregating all my social interaction, I have different networks and relationships within the various social networks. For example, I use Facebook for a great deal of personal interaction with people that I have met and known off-line. My network there is a little more personal. On the other hand, my Twitter followers and follows are mostly people I have never seen in real life. Twitter is like my great big cocktail party.

Combining these networks into one feed and joining with friends from both networks would be similar to hosting a party with your great grandparents and your drinking buddies in attendance. Now, I don’t have anything to hide in that situation, but you get the idea.

I maintain a pretty unified social presence across all services, but for those who do not, connections originally from one social media service might be bored or offended by your social actions and blogging within another service. As Tamar pointed out, the watch of others could make you censor what you do online.

In the end, I’ll probably cave…

FriendFeed certainly has a great deal of benefits and a lot going for it. If they have the motivation beyond dominating lifestreaming aggregation, they could scare or possibly overtake Google in the search market with their wealth of social, human-generated data. If they can accomplish that, the company should be around for a long time or until “the next Google” — has “the next Google” become a scary bedtime story that we tell to children yet?

In the interest of keeping it simple, I will try to hold my ground and wait for this whole aggregation business to mature. While I love to root for the new guys, I am hoping that Facebook or Google can implement the same kind of aggregate service so that I can simplify my daily online routine…but I might eventually cave for you, FriendFeed.

UPDATE — May 22, 2008: This post has been shared in FriendFeed. Scoble thinks I’ll cave with the conversation going on there. We’ll see how long I last outside of the FriendFeed.

UPDATE: I caved.

Last month, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net asked his Twitter followers — that includes me – why they loved Twitter. He took those responses and turned them into a video slideshow on YouTube enhanced with a rocking instrumental track.

Check me out around 4:03 AND AGAIN at 4:17. Yeah, that’s right — twice. Don’t worry. I’ll sign autographs at the end of this post. I just couldn’t capture my thoughts in 140 characters.

While most people highlighted Twitter’s ability to create a virtual water cooler or bring a bit of social to the desktop of those who work solo at home, my response was simply this:

I love twitter b/c it keeps me up to date on the latest happenings and makes it easy to share interesting finds.

Before going a little deeper to say…

Most people I talk to are outside of the contacts I have in real life, so I get exposed to things I may not have seen otherwise.

To expand on what I twittered — see, I told you I couldn’t keep it to 140 characters — Twitter has thus far been my forum for geeking out and releasing my blogosphere-hugging link monkey. It satisfies my fear of missing something by allowing me to listen in and respond to the conversations of hundreds of individuals that I admire/watch/read but never meet for coffee.

The real value in Twitter for me is being able to listen in on the thoughts of like-minded Internet junkies. It’s like being a talking fly on the wall in a Web 2.0 startup or a major blog. I find things on Twitter that I wouldn’t catch anywhere else, and I follow others who have interesting things to say even if I can’t keep their blog in my RSS reader due to the overload.

Twitter is also my release for early-adopter-itis. Despite what the walking-two-miles-in-the-snow, non-Internet types might believe, friends from my own generation have not completely jumped aboard the twit-train or the Internet. While Facebook has gone mainstream, I am, for the most part, alone among my off-line friends in my Twitter usage and social network-aholism. I often explain Internet memes to friends and co-workers, but in Twitter, I get to join a cloud of people that know what’s up online. Is Twitter the Cheers bar of the Internet future?

I haven’t gotten the return value of a Scoble just yet due to the “friend divide” that Scoble defined. My growing army of followers don’t yield the huge number of responses that a ProBlogger can amount, but regardless, I have found value in Twitter because the people I follow keep me in the loop and make me, as Scoble said, “smarter, richer, cooler, and funnier” — and better looking.

Pitching bloggers, just like traditional media outlets, takes research and significant effort. To be effective, you really have to know your audience and what will interest them.

Off-topic pitches are a bad first impression, and they can stick with you if you are unlucky enough.

With the growing number of social media communication tools and the rampant abuse of journalists’ email addresses, more and more journalists opt to require that public relations practitioners reach out to them through their social network of choice. Bloggers and the stars of online media are leading this movement.

Brian Solis highlighted several preferred contact methods of the big names of the blogosphere today.

Some like Facebook while others are incredibly turned off when you bring business to their wall.

Several ask that all pitches be twittered to them and add a little bonus pressure to PR reps to cram their message into just 140 characters — if the message is really that good, you should not need all 140.

ReadWriteWeb‘s Marshall Kirkpatrick prompted Brian Solis’ post after he shared that his favorite method of receiving pitches was through RSS feeds. Bloggers have started to post this sort of information online to help us all out.

Brian highlighted Kirkpatrick’s opinion on getting something outside of the (in)box:

He summarizes what you should do this way, “PR people, please send us the RSS feeds of your clients’ blogs and news release. The full fire-hose of company news and updates for us to pick out what’s interesting, someplace outside of our email inboxes, free of dreadful press release rhetoric (skip to the second paragraph where details usually are, then skip past any executive quotes and hope there are readable details somewhere) – that sounds like a dream come true. I know that’s where I get most of the stories I write about, not from email pitches. Send both, but company feeds are likely to be looked at more closely.”

RSS feed pitching encourages the growing trend of corporate blogging, and in the process of demanding just a feed, Kirkpatrick is also taking away the control, the choice, that PR reps have in what they choose to send out about their clients. Is that such a bad thing? Giving the journalists more info about you on a regular basis and letting them highlight what they will?

Kirkpatrick’s post points out one particular tech-savvy PR practitioner who used Yahoo Pipes to create one massive feed of all his clients. Very clever. I’m jealous.

Read Brian’s complete post for several detailed looks at what prominent bloggers and journalists desire from their PR friends.

As each journalist better defines their pitch acceptance process, it’s on all public relations professionals to do the research.

Almost every blogger that has made up their mind has a contact page or post detailing how they like for PR people to reach them, and off-line journalists are speaking out to inform PR people what they like to see as well.

Find it and follow it or reach out to journalists and ask them what they like before you shoot off an email.

As Brian put it: “Yes, it’s time consuming. But this is about relationships and not about broadcasting spam.” Well said, Brian. Well said.

photo credit: Stabilo Boss

There’s a reason that I want to integrate a role as a community manager into my normal public relations duties. As more and more marketers profess the equal ground that social networks create between marketers and consumers, marketers have to redefine themselves.

Jeremiah Owyang answered his own question on how marketers could stay relevant in a recent post.

Question: Many consumers loathe marketers, now consumers can bypass marketers with social media tools, the power has shifted to the participants, how do marketers stay relevant?

Answer: Marketers must participate, or let consumers participate on their behalf, it’s a new world.

The best way to participate is to become what is today defined as a community manager.

Just like Larry Hryb became the face of Microsoft’s Xbox as Major Nelson and Frank O’Connor became a “Content Monkey” for Bungie, community managers have taken on the role of passing information to the community and letting the community do what they will.

This model works best with brands where a large fan base already exists on the Web. It’s not as strict and defined a communication format as traditional public relations, but it is one that more consumers and fans appreciate.

Community managers produce original content and writing for the community rather than issuing press releases directly to the press. They overcome a greater challenge in establishing a relationship of trust with the consumers since they are affiliated directly with the company they represent, but those marketers that pass on a consistently honest message to the consumer reap the reward of developing a brand community out of their marketing efforts.

By bypassing the media, niche brands can also see rewards. Even though they may be too small for industry journalists to take note, they can develop a cult following through their own blogging and community development.

This passive marketing of the future puts the community managers on equal ground with consumers and allows them to interact and participate in a meaningful way. It will be the most effective marketing communication method in the future, so it would benefit every PR practitioner to integrate community management into normal PR functions in order to stay relevant.

TalentZoo.com featured a great set of 18 PR Tips for Startups from Brian Solis in a recent email. His tips feature a few pet peeves of mine about some people’s concept of public relations. Often, folks can doubt the power of PR.

2. Don’t undervalue PR.

PR, when done right, is extremely valuable to company branding, which has immeasurable benefits in the long haul. Customers have choices and if you’re not consistently vying for their attention, it’s pretty easy to fall off their radar screen when they evaluate options. Too many companies nickel and dime PR to the point of absurdity. Don’t get me wrong. Expensive PR doesn’t equal success. But short changing PR is usually a first step in the wrong direction.

As a general rule, PR should always be consistent because it does take time and maintained effort to establish relationships with the journalists that cover your business and find coverage opportunities. Solis does a great job expanding upon these two principles through all 18 tips–even enforcing how important it is for executives to meet regularly with their PR department and involve them early in decisions that can affect their messaging.

Marketing-savvy corporate executives are working with PR, Advertising, and Marcom teams to explore options and strategies on how to participate in relevant online conversations. This represents a shift in outbound marketing as it creates a direct channel between companies and customers, and ultimately people.

He even recommends my dream job within a company:

Hire a community manager. In the new world of social media, new PR can be complemented through the efforts of someone who can actively represent the company in all things social so that they can provide proactive information and support to people looking for guidance in the communities they frequent. Don’t market to them, have conversations.

Now, who’s interested?

Not to offend anyone who was caught in the crossfire of Wired’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson’s backlash recently, but one of the most important rules of media relations is knowing your target journalist and tailoring your message to their outlet/beat.

Anderson recently posted the email addresses of anyone who had emailed him as editor-in-chief rather than trying to find the correct beat writer or editor at Wired to contact. Many of the offenders had, unfortunately, purchased his email address from a list service of people to contact for their industry or freelance service–which is unfortunate considering his email is publicly available. It is horrible that list services charge just to compile a list for you.

It’s part of a growing problem in the industry that journalists are getting more and more mail since they don’t have what Godin describes as the “friction” of adding a stamp. An email is free to send and requires no commitment other than one click of the Send button, so spammers and ill-advised public relations professionals can send hundreds of emails and find themselves on the naughty list of many an editor.

The moral of the story: Don’t be lazy!

While Chris Anderson certainly went a little extreme by posting the email addresses and may have puzzled many PR professionals while being championed by journalists, the easiest way to avoid getting on anyone’s bad side is to do your homework and develop your own mailing lists from scratch.

Having a personal relationship is the best way to have any sort of profitable connection with a journalist. Even if your first email message is just an introduction about your company/business and a request to keep them in the loop, that is a better email to send their way than including them in a blanket pitch that may or may not be directed to the right person. Irresponsibility damages the relationship journalists have with public relations professionals–and hurts public relations as an industry.

If you can avoid it, try not to send out anything besides a press release update to a mass mailing list. Personal emails make a much better impression and can be tailored for each individual outlet and journalist based on your relationship. The most successful PR professionals are able to use their relationships and connection with journalists to keep them informed–no spin required.

Keep that in mind when you are starting up a new business or developing a new media list for a client. Doing your homework pays off far greater than trying to contact as many journalists as possible with little personal touch.