I’m a PR guy by trade and, in light of recent developments in the PR-bashing arena, am suggesting a list of blacklisted bloggers. These folks are performing the largely unfair, wholly unprofessional, shortsighted and, frankly, ignorant practice of outing public relations professionals who don’t pitch them well. Here’s my suggested starter list. You’ll notice it’s a list comprised of people who consider themselves bloggers, but are also considered journalists or blog for websites large enough to make an argument for said title.

• Gina Trapani, Lifehacker
• Chris Anderson, Wired
• Matt Haughey, MetaFilter (honorary member)

I’m not saying public relations professionals don’t need a wake up call on the stayed and stale practices of copy-paste pitching. I’m not saying there aren’t unethical hacks out there who should shape up or ship out.

I am saying that a journalist (or a blogger for that matter) who publicly humiliates someone just trying to do their job – even poorly – or goes a step further by declaring that person’s employer on a permanent banned list is performing the adult (though not mature) equivalent of Chris Hargensen ordering up buckets of pigs blood to be dumped on Carrie White at prom.

Geoff Livingston is a friend and fellow public relations pro who seems to agree with me.

My biggest beef is this: Public relations professionals most often serve a valuable purpose for media members, including bloggers. They provide access and useful information about their clients or companies. Without them most stories that entertain and enrich the public through traditional media and many on blogs would go untold. The others would have half-assed information.

For Gina, Chris and Matt (almost) to say, “One person … Jane Smith, the 23-year-old newbie who doesn’t know any better but I’m publicly and forever humilitating because I’m an almighty and powerful journalist/blogger person, bwahahahahahah! … from a firm sent me a pitch that didn’t catch my attention, therefore your company is forever considered a spammer and won’t make the consideration set,” is unfair to the individual, the company, its clients, its future clients and, most importantly, their own audiences.

My suggestion is that by declaring these media members or bloggers unfit for pitching, they are the ones who will ultimately pay the price as they cut their audiences off from the world of valuable information public relations professionals provide them.

What if a company Lifehacker routinely covered or highlighted in their posts were represented by a firm on her banned list? Oh, wait. Ogilvy, one of the most respected PR firms in the world, is on there. LG Electronics is their client. Guess Gina won’t be using info from LG anymore.

What if Steve Jobs hired Ogilvy one day? Would Gina backtrack and accept emails from them? If she’s not a moron, yes. Hope she knows how to re-white list people and if she does, that she’ll publicly admit reinstating PR firms into good graces.

For the record, I know firms like Ogilvy, Shift Communications and Future-Works, all on the banned list, are very committed to best practices in blogger outreach. But because of the short-sighted cruelty of the triumvirate above, if they hold true to their word, are forever banned from doing their jobs, and without the opportunity to make amends or draw retribution. Even if PR firms followed my unrealistic notion of blacklisting journalists, their clients would suffer, so it’s not an option.

I’ve had the good fortune to sit on both sides of the aisle in the media/blogger vs. PR pitch person relationship. I’ve even been a real, full-fledged journalist, not just a blogger, and at a large media operation. In the noisy world that is PR pitches, it’s easy to get frustrated, especially with the bad ones. But starting a public embarassment wiki is below the belt and unneccessary. It’s the kind of thing that feasibly could negatively effect people’s careers or a company’s ability to earn business.

And, as it turns out, Gina Trapani’s personal email address is listed in Cision’s media database, meaning she and/or Lifehacker have volunteered to put her on outreach lists. It doesn’t excuse bad pitching, but she kinda asked for it and now wants to humiliate those she gave permission to. Sad. (NOTE: Graph added after initial publishing.)

Does PR have a long way to go? Yes. Do many public relations professionals need to learn that reaching out in the digital world demands relevance, personalization and relationship-building? Yes. (I would argue reaching out in the traditional world demands that, too, by the way.)

But is it cool for journalists or bloggers to publicly humiliate those with pitches that are bad, hastily done or perhaps even just ones the journalists don’t like? Hell no.

On Media Pitching

The immediate predecessor to this blog was one called The Straight Pitch. The original premise was for journalists and bloggers everywhere to fill out a simple form explaining how they liked to be pitched. Several outstanding media members participated. I gave up on the premise after recording over 2,000 custom asks of media members and bloggers to tell the world how they like to be pitched and notching a success rate of less than one percent. While I didn’t approach Chris, Gina or Matt in that array of 2,000 approaches, journalists aren’t really interested in helping with the problem. The recent attacks on PR firms and folks by the three amigos above is further evidence of that.

I’ve also written some pointers on how to appropriately approach bloggers, including a case study for everyone to comment on, here.

IMAGE: Gina Trapani by Will Pate on Flickr.

• PR Roundtable Discussion: Outing Bad PR [via Zemanta]
• The Growing Backlash Against PR Spam, And The Rationale For MicroPR [via Zemanta]
• Making Mistakes and Amends in Blogger and Media Relations [via Zemanta]

Every time someone brings up the term “social advertising” the anal retentive word smith in me starts picking it apart. Social advertising doesn’t accurately describe banners or images that appear based on what the site knows about you. An ad for Seth Godin’s latest book showing up on my Amazon.com login screen because the site knows I dig marketing stuff is contextual or what I would term false-intuitive advertising. (False because no matter how much database you have on my brain, you don’t have my brain which at that moment might be on a Terry Pratchett kick.)

And, no matter what Mark Zuckerberg says, what Facebook tries with friend-spy isn’t social advertising. At its worst, it’s privacy invasion. At best, it’s tattle-telling.

Further, an advertisement that is so compelling, so unique and so engaging you would tell your friend about it over lunch (”Dude! Did you see the new GoPhone Meat Loaf ad with his teenage son lip syncing and head bopping? Glad I wasn’t eating when I did. It’s like an invitation to vomit.”) isn’t social advertisement, either. It’s word of mouth marketing.

Oh, it’s online? Then it’s word of mouse marketing.

But still, people are trying. MediaForge has a fairly neat development they claim puts conversation in conversational media. It’s a display ad (a banner or box advertisement) that on roll-over becomes an interactive widget. The example shown here is one for Skullcandy headphones and related accessories. It’s pretty cool and fairly useful. You can even clickety-click and the widget is on your desktop so you can track deals, always have the search function handy, etc. Other uses include tabs for the widget that contain video players, interactive games and so on. In addition to pulling the widget onto your desktop, you can also place it on the profile pages of your social networks.

Pardon the interruption for a moment, but would someone please tell me why advertisers think anyone is going to muddy up their Facebook or MySpace profile with a flippin’ advertisement for them? Are you giving me money for me hocking your wares? No. So stop acting like this is a selling point. If I’m a brand enthusaist of yours, I’ll put your logo, or product shot, tastefully done, on my page, but that’s it. Give me a badge to wear that makes me proud, not a flashing neon light that says, “I’m a big dope who LOVES this crap so much I’m gonna try and hock it to my friends.”

Sorry. Get carried away sometimes. (And yes, I know I just embedded one in my blog, thus defeating my argument. No one said I was always smart. But I’m the only one with the password!)

MediaForge claims this nifty little gadget adds a social dimension to banner ads. It doesn’t. But it could.

First, let’s define social. According to Dictionary.com, the top definition is, “pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations.” The other definitions all say essentially the same thing.

Where is the friendly companionship or relations in MediaForge’s nifty widget ad banner clickety thing? I can send it to my friends? Then I’m social, not the ad. That’s word-of-mouth (or mouse). So what would make this little number truly social? If the pop-up either is or contains a tab for a live chat with a customer service rep or even other consumers logged into that companies chat rooms, then the ad is social.

But there’s still the interruption mechanism that drives it. I don’t have to roll over the ad. I don’t have to even notice it. In fact, because I’m a savvy web user, I probably wouldn’t if I happened on a page containing one. So there are social elements happening within this little micro site the ad brought me to, but the ad still has to get me there and isn’t social.

Can an advertisement be, at it’s base level, truly social? Maybe one day.

Imagine logging on to your favorite blog. Its server knows your IP address and reads your cookie. Based on public data it has gathered, it displays a banner advertisement that is a chat window with a picture of a laptop computer, let’s say it’s a Mac. The prompt, both text and voice then says and types, “Hello Jason. Welcome back to ReadWriteWeb. We noticed from your Twitter feed you’re shopping for a new laptop. We know you’re a PC guy, but we think you would love the experience of owning a Mac. Can we answer any questions for you?”

And, being an ad for Mac, the damn thing would spit out a plane ticket to Guyana and serve you the Kool Aid right there in the comfort of your own home.

(I’m kidding. I love Macs. I just like to kid. Please stop trying to burn down my house. I have the license plate numbers of all the Volkswagens in town.)

Until the technology and/or the staffing is available for highly interactive, highly personal experiences within an advertisement, they won’t be social. But just in case I’m wrong, please pass this blog post on to your friends.

Thanks to Lee Odden of Online Marketing Blog for the inspiration for this post.

If there’s one social media tool, or more appropriately, one technological advancement which enhances social media I am beholden to above all others, it’s RSS. Really Simple Syndication redefined web surfing for me. I’m convinced it can do the same for the rest of the world, whenever they come around to it. I’m even happy to spread the joy.

Using RSS and an RSS reader, however, can become overwhelming. There are lots of websites, blogs, news feeds and the like I want to monitor. My role as a social media strategist for brands through my agency demands I stay on top of the advertising and marketing world, as well as the categories in which my brands compete. My role as a blogger is part journalist, so I feel like I should be up to speed on lots of different topics. And then there’s the content I monitor because I just want to. Last week, after nearly six months of hoarding feeds, I looked up and had 379 subscriptions. It’s not Scoble-esque, but way too much.

I’ve offered up thoughts before on how to manage your feed reading time but what do you do when you’ve over-indulged on subscriptions? Here’s how I cut 379 subscriptions down to under 200, only 85 of them personal and blog-related, and have made my RSS experience more efficient.

1. Reassess Every Feed – While looking at some of my Google Reader Trends helped me delete several stale and seldom read feeds, I really did this in an unconventional, but thorough way. I made a migration of all my non-client or work-related feeds to a different feed reader. I was using Google Reader as my primary consumption point, and still recommend it to clients and newcomers to the RSS experience. But I moved anything personal or blog-life related to Netvibes. In doing so, I opened up each feed in Google Reader and asked the following questions:
   1. Glancing at the headlines, are these posts I’m really interested in or find useful?
   2. Are these topics covered on other blogs by more experienced or credible authors?
   3. In the time I’ve subscribed, have I been drawn to stop and read something or click through and comment?

   If my answers were yes, no, yes, I copied and pasted the feed to Netvibes. The only exceptions were 2-3 close friends I don’t want to get caught not having read. I was very careful and conservative in the approach. When in doubt, the feed got cut. If that blog becomes more relevant, I’ll find it again.

2. Use Different Readers For Personal vs. Professional Reading – This approach is smart for a couple of reasons. First, you can separately manage two categories of feeds much easier than one big one. Second, you can avoid the temptation and trap of personal feed reading at work, making you more productive and efficient where it counts.When I migrated to Netvibes, I only did so for feeds I consider personal or Social Media Explorer-related. While certainly this blog is a compliment and related to my work, I do much of my blogging from home and would continue reading the feeds whether I continue to have a job or not. My Google Reader still has about 100 feeds or so I keep track of for clients or so I can stay abreast of what is happening in their industry.
3. Where Possible, Combine And Filter Feeds Using Yahoo Pipes and AideRSS – I’m presently in the process of doing this with those 100 or so work feeds, so I’ll have to report back on nuts and bolts of it all. However, I’ve done sufficient research and discussed at length with RSS Zen Master Marshall Kirkpatrick, so I’m confident in the process.When you have multiple feeds from one category (Like alcohol, wine and spirits blogs I subscribe to for Beam Global Spirits and Wine.) but you really only want to find the relevant, popular and widely-read posts, AideRSS allows you to process feeds through its PostRank filtering. Then you can subscribe to the most popular posts, rather than all of them. By first driving all those alcohol, wine and spirits blogs through Yahoo Pipes, I can mash any number of feeds into one, filter that one through AideRSS and get the most popular blog posts from 30 blogs in one feed, leaving the lesser-read posts behind.This philosophy also makes it easier to keep up with those annoying, 20-30 post per day blogs. Running sites like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and others (no offense guys, you just crank out a lot of stuff to keep up with) through filtration, you weed out the good from the eh. And we could all use a little less eh, right? (And yes, Gabe, I subscribe to Techmeme, which filters a lot of that stuff out for me. Just don’t want to miss too much.)

So what functionality will I miss in Google Reader? Shared items are offered in a feed of their own which can be used on your blog as relevant additonal content. My “What I’m Reading” section (scroll down, far right sidebar) is my Google Reader shared items. I’ve not found a way to subscsribe to my public activity feed in Netvibes (suggestion for the NV team!) but del.icio.us tags are more powerful and can be used similarly, eliminating the need for shared items beyond bringing the attentions of your Google Reader friends to certain posts.

I also normally used Google Reader’s search functionality to proffer my list of “Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting” I normally tag on to each post. I figure if similar posts relevant to what I’m writing aren’t found in my subscriptions, why recommend them. Well, I can search all posts in Netvibes as well, but two newer features I’ve begun using more on my blog are the Sphere related content plugin you see at the end of the post and Zemanta’s contextual analysis and recommendation tool. As Zemanta gets better, it will go out and find those related posts with a higher degree of frequency than the two-month-old tool currently offers.

Beyond that, the only adjustment will be the aesthetics. While Netvibes is prettier to look at, I enjoy the flexibility of Google Reader in showing all feeds together, by folder or by feed.

The key to the success of this is to only add subscripitons that will meet the questions posed in step No. 2 above perfectly. If I fail there, I guess I’ll have to migrate somewhere else. (Bloglines people can refrain from bugging me about it. You’re next.)

I have a bone to pick with my social media and marketing brethren. Stop making fun of people because they’re on MySpace. It’s unbecoming and shows that you’re so overwhelmed with your own smarts that you’re stupid. It’s the same smugness some Mac users generate despite the fact their beloved, intuitive machines account for a whopping three percent of the personal computer market. If they’re so great, why don’t more people get it?

According to Compete.com’s numbers from February, MySpace accounts for 66 million monthly visitors and almost one billion visits. Facebook isn’t too shabby, either, but at 28 million monthly visitors, it’s less than half the exposure opportunity MySpace is. According to USA Today, there are over 110 million registered users on MySpace, making it the equivalent to the 11^th largest country in the world (bigger than Mexico, slightly smaller than Japan).

The problem is that those of us inside the bubble and hip to hardware, software and online trends grew tired of MySpace. When Facebook opened its doors to the general public, then started experimenting with social advertising models, we all got hot and bothered by the chic, clean, open API network. We left MySpace, or conveniently forgot to check in for messages there more than once a month, and declared it dead.

But it’s only dead to us. The rest of the world still digs the ‘Space. And those 66 million monthly visitors aren’t high school girls, either. According to Quantcast’s estimates, 62 percent of MySpace users are above the age of 24, they have a higher than Internet average concentration of both Hispanics and African Americans and 49 percent of users live in households making $60,000 and up.

Frankly, I made a mistake last year when I began to migrate most of my attention from MySpace and a healthy network of friends and contacts I’d made there to the chosen networks of the Internet marketing elite. The mistake wasn’t in building contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. It was abandoning MySpace because those inside the bubble think it to be pedestrian. It might be, but there’s a hell of a lot of pedestrians there, if you haven’t noticed.

Marketing through social media is most effective when brands and companies put themselves on a personal plane with consumers. But you still have to reach those consumers. Turning our backs on MySpace, even belittling those who play there, is like calling Budweiser stupid for advertising during the Super Bowl.

Ignore MySpace because of its gaudiness and free expression and, “that is soooo 2006,” if you like, but ignore it at your own peril. That’s where the majority of the world is and will be for the foreseeable future. MySpace is gobbling up content deals with mobile networks, continually expanding their offerings to engage their users and, like them or not, they’ve got Newcorp’s pocketbook. They do music and video better than other major social networks, connect people with bands, comedians and filmmakers in a way that should make brands jealous and have a thriving subculture of niche blogs within their system few of us pay attention to. Shame on us.

Ironically, the advertising agencies and interactive firms we take such pleasure in mocking because they don’t get social media are the very ones benefiting from our short-sightedness. They’re so dumb, they only know to go where the most people are. In the end, crappy MySpace campaigns or not, they don’t look so dumb after all.

Wise up, kids. Just because you don’t personally like to play there doesn’t mean it’s a barren wasteland of marketing abyss. The rest of the world isn’t like us. And that, my friends, is often the only thing that keeps us from being successful.

Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:

1. MySpace’s Growth Curve: Over?
2. Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
3. Diagnosis: Facebook Syndrome
4. Social Network Wars Are Over; Now The Fun Begins
5. A Successful MySpace Social Media Campaign

Technorati Tags: MySpace, Facebook, social networking, marketing, strategy

Another large file hosting and transfer service popped up recently. My friend Jay has started FileDropper.com which offers free file hosting and/or transfer up to five gigabytes (5GB). By signing up for a small subscription fee, you can jack that up to 50 gigs ($5 per month) or a ridiculous 250 gigs ($10 month). Certainly, the average web user wouldn’t have a whole lot of use for the bigger-is-better service unless they’re swapping entire DVDs, but this service could be particularly useful for engineers, architects, game developers and artists who work in large files.

Jay, who is a digital colleague – someone I’ve met online doing this social media and networking thing, and I chat via IM most often. He said he developed the site because RapidShare and MegaUpload host files but either drill ads at you or generally have a bad user experience. He saw a need for large file hosting and transfer and built the service so folks could get away from the interruption and still host large files.

It’s a perfect example of someone seeing a need in the online space and filling it. He’s using the economy of free, giving away up to 5GB uploads, to entice those who might be interested in larger files to pay a small fee. Good for him. And for us.

I tried it out and noticed better upload/download times (potentially effected by your connection speed, sure) that I normally get. from SendSpace. That site is strong, but limits you to 300MB on the free end. Guess now I can send my Fridays With Falls videos to Todd Earwood in high definition .AVI files. Heh.

Check out FileDropper.com and let us know what you think in the comments. Jay has already taken the advice from reviews at LifeHacker and others to improve the service. He wants to make it better, so will be checking the comments for your feedback.