14 Sep 2006
Today in Scatterbox, Steven Silvers spelled out two crucial rules for using conversational media: "More and more, corporations find themselves in the headlines because they ignore two realities of the information age: A company's attempt to covertly influence opinion is only as effective as the reaction people have when they find out who's behind it and why. Yes, they will find out." He's right. Transparency has become the currency of online reputation. Simple oversights can make your company look clueless, and attempts to conceal, misdirect, or misinform often generate outright scorn — causing lasting damage to your reputation and your business. Here are my tips for transparency in conversational media. These apply to PR/marketing pros as well as news organizations, bloggers, citizen journalists, and, well, anyone…
...Continue Reading
14 Sep 2006
On Sept. 11, PR pro Simon Collister shared his recent experience with a client whose web designers decided to build their own blogging tool. However, a quick conversation revealed that this tool lacked key functionality. He wrote: "…It turns out the designers [had] just built their own blogging platform which they would happily set up for the client. "…I asked some basic questions such as, does the platform have RSS feeds and does it support trackback links? At this point the main designer looked blank, turned to his colleague and said: 'Do you know what he's talking about?' "Luckily he did. But neither of them seemed to understand the importance of [these features]." With such a broad variety of blogging tools available these days for free or for license, and given the speed at which blogging evolves, it amazes me that any organization would consider building their own blogging tool. Especially when the…
...Continue Reading
10 Sep 2006
So tonight for the first time I finally tried out a Firefox browser plugin that's been around for a while: Google's Blogger Web Comments for Firefox. It sounded so cool. This plugin was supposed to give me a little icon in the lower right corner of Firefox indicating, for whatever page I happened to be on, whether any blogs had linked to that page. Click on that, and a list of blog links pops up. (Yes, despite its name, this plugin has nothing to do with actual blog comments, but rather cross-links — another disappointment, but I'll let that go for the moment.) The trouble is, this plugin is too slow to keep up with the blogosphere. It appears to be able to give you cross-link info for pages that have been posted for a while, but not brand new content. And when it comes to tracking blog buzz, you need…
...Continue Reading
07 Sep 2006
My friend and colleague Dave Taylor, who writes several popular weblogs on technology and business, today posted an intriguing article to his free Blogsmart News e-mail newsletter: "Linking as a Way to Drive Links." You have to subscribe to that e-mail list in order to see this article (it's in the archives), but here's the gist of it. On Sept. 6, Dave posted a blog entry about Hewlett Packard: Dunn follows in Fiorina's footsteps as HP implodes yet again. This business story includes links to related postings by three other bloggers: Valleywag, Paul Kedrosky, and Robert Scoble. He found these related postings with a simple Techmeme search — but for non-tech topics, more general feed aggregation services like Technorati would work just as well. The Payoff: Dave wrote, "While I was sleeping, top blogger Robert Scoble was reading through my article and then updating his own blog entry to include a link back to mine: 'UPDATE 2: Dave Taylor, who worked at HP with…
...Continue Reading
BrettGreene:
jo_rogel:
JamesOClark:
mountainkat:
JasonCormier: