If you did a tag cloud on what was being bounced around the social media echo chamber in the last 14 days, the word “influence” would probably be the largest. Yes, even larger than “Old Spice.” Whether it’s the sadly lacking Fast Company Influence Project or the various voices in the social world trying to defend or attack it, we’ve suddenly become obsessed with measuring influence, finding out who is influential and figuring out how to generate influence.

Not a bit of it matters. If you’re looking at influence, you aren’t looking deep enough. It’s like judging a car by its color and not its engine. Influence is only a coat of paint. What drives influence is trust. He who has earned the most trust wins.

Do you trust Guy Kawasaki? Perhaps. But when you find out he has a team of people tweeting on his behalf, your trust in him is likely diminished. He has influence, but not as much trust as some. Do you trust Perez Hilton? I sure hope not … or at least not for most things. But Perez Hilton has a great deal of influence.

The difference in influence and trust is the difference in quantity and quality. Perez Hilton can get you a lot of eyeballs, but are they the right eyeballs and will they do anything with your information? Louis Gray won’t get you a lot of eyeballs, in comparison, but the ones he gets are golden. He gets them because his audience trusts him.

Stop looking for the candy apple red and start looking for the V6. It will make you a smarter PR pro.

Dealing with detractors is perhaps one of the biggest pain points for companies just starting and even well entrenched in social media marketing. “What if someone says something bad about our company?” is often asked by brand managers, executives and more when opening their websites or even Facebook pages to conversations and interactions with consumers.

There are many examples of companies engaging detractors that can illustrate why you don’t have to be quite as worried about the complainers and combatants as you think. But only through experience can you develop your own tested processes of handling the various types of detractors. Having advised a number of companies on how to deal with the negative online, plus having to dig myself out of a few incidents where my sense of humor has gotten the best of my sense of decorum, here are the six steps I take in dealing with detractors:

• Acknowledge their right to complain
• Apologize for their situation, or your mistake (if warranted)
• Assert clarity in your policy or reasons (if warranted)
• Assess what will help them feel better
• Act accordingly
• Abdicate (Sometimes a turd is a turd)

Forrester originally classified the different types of detractors as legitimate complainers, competitors, engaged critics, flamers and troublemakers. I like a bit less formal designation in my list. I think you deal with offended publics, disgruntled stakeholders, competition, trolls and turds. The difference in a troll and a turd is that a turd identifies him or herself with a name and/or email address. They’re accountable, but still being a pain in the ass, mostly likely just because they like being a pain in the ass.

Identifying which you’re dealing with will make using the system easier. But then again, you have to dive in and do it to really learn what works best for you.

Is how you handle detractors off-line different that how you would handle them on-line? Do you do something differently than what I’ve suggested? Add to the knowledge by adding a comment below.

Related articles by Jason Falls with help from Zemanta

• How To Engage Detractors In Online Conversations (Older thinking from SME)
• How To Respond To Rants And Other Criticism On The Social Web (Interactive Insights Group)
• Dealing With Detractors (Brass Tack Thinking)
• Engaging Detractors (Conversation Agent)

My friend Arik Hanson started compiling a reader’s choice awards for public relations blogs last year. Arik is a smart guy and a hell of a blogger in his own right and the program was both a kind way of elevating good PR bloggers in several different categories but also a smart way to drive traffic, interest and links for his own blog, which deserves to be nominated in a few of the categories, too.

The 2010 PR Reader’s Choice Awards voting is now open on Arik’s blog. If you’re a PR person who reads some blogs, go vote. You should also go subscribe to all the ones listed for the various awards. They’re good.

This year, the people who have participated in nominating candidates have chosen Social Media Explorer as a finalist for Public Relations Reader’s Choice Blog of the Year for 2010. I’m honored to be recognized, though I’ve always shrugged off awards for blogs. Blogging is not a competition. The winners are the readers who get to learn from smart people.

But I am appreciative that a few folks threw my name into the hat. The finalists for Blog of the Year include Todd Defren’s PR Squared (which won last year, I think); Danny Brown’s blog; my buddy Mark Schaeffer’s {grow} and Gini Dietrich’s F.A.D.S. (The Fight Against Distructive Spin) blog. I read each of them regularly and am friends with three of the authors, kindred spirits with the other.

The other categories, which include some awesome blogs, too, include best Up-And-Coming Blog, Most Educational Blog and Most Thought-Provoking. You can vote for the various categories on the PR Reader’s Choice Awards post on Arik’s blog.

Please vote for the most deserving candidate. Not me.

It’s amazing what good public relations can do. And by “good” I mean fair and honest. Fortunately, the power-to-the-people shift brought about by corporate scandals, economic uncertainty and social media is forcing more and more public relations firms, professionals and departments to be that or be embarrassed … or finished. Unfortunately, the education most public relations professionals received, coupled with the company-first doctrine of the business world means most public relations, by nature, isn’t good. It’s spin.

The bothersome notion in all this is that many well-intended people, companies, organizations and political movements have not just fallen victim to good spin, but have exacerbated the problem by repeating it. When my friend and noble public relations professional Geoff Livingston recently told us (or more likely repeated an assertion that) fried chicken causes breast cancer, I shook my head at another unfortunate and unsuspecting victim of good spin doctoring.

For the record, obesity is frequently a predictive factor in breast cancer, not eating fried chicken. If someone eats too much fried chicken, they may very well become obese, but the person’s inability to eat in moderation is to blame, not the chicken. Geoff’s assertion is akin to saying Apple, Microsoft, Cisco and Dell cause Internet porn. And we all know Internet porn was invented by Tipper Gore. (Sorry. Too easy.)

Another example of a noble cause skewed by spin has duped a fair number of intelligent, well-intended people in my home community of Louisville. The Ohio River Bridges Project, a Federal transportation Mega-Project that would add two Ohio River spans and reconfigure the junction of I-71, I-64 and I-65 near downtown to address immediate and long-term traffic issues for our region, has been attacked for several years now by environmental and community activist groups. While the organizations who have criticized the project are well-intended and represent ideals that I would even endorse, they’ve duped a fair number of people in to believing an untruth.

Groups like 8664 and River Fields want you to think the States of Kentucky and Indiana and the Federal Highway Administration overlooked the environment and want to cover Louisville’s Waterfront Park with more highway concrete. The plans call for more lanes, but more efficient total concrete coverage; a higher traverse across the portion of the park currently under overpasses and less support columns (making that part of the park more open, bright and safe); and — oh, by the way — a potential expansion of the park by 50 acres at the project’s completion when that amount of land is turned over to the development organization that manages the park.

It’s frustrating to have conversations with people who think they’re in the know about the project only to discover their “know” comes from the spin (from perfectly good people, by the way) and not from investigating facts.

I’ve also recently been enlightened to my own misinformation from spin thanks to a client’s insistence on making me smarter. (Thank you, EMA!)

Think for a second about companies that make paper. Now think about your perception of them or perhaps what you’ve heard in the media about paper companies. Would it surprise you to know that no North American paper manufacturer uses trees taken from unethically deforested rain forests? Would it shock you to know that the North American paper and forest product industry plants four times as many trees as it harvests? (Think about it. If they didn’t, they’d eventually go out of business.) Most of the recycling trend was started by the paper industry and they continually increase the percentage of manufactured product that comes from recycled paper, not the other way around.

The paper and paper-based communications industry is probably more “green” and environmentally conscious than any other industry on earth, including the environmental lobby who wants to paint them as the bad guy. Yet all we hear these days is about how we need to move toward paperless communications and “save the earth, don’t print this email.”

If the paper industry dies, kids … it won’t help the environment.

Find more interesting factoids (with third-party attribution) here.

For the record, I admire Geoff Livingston for millions of reasons, the least of which certainly isn’t his passion for cause marketing. I don’t have issues with people protesting KFC for making fatty foods or even those who accuse them of pink-washing with their recent Komen donation drive (though I fully support anyone wanting to raise or donate money to fight cancer, regardless of how selfish their motivations are). I don’t have issues with people who have found fault with Komen’s methods, either.

I admire the ideals behind 8664 and love the fact River Fields serves as an environmental checks and balances organization for projects, public and private. In fact, I want to protect and preserve the environment, both in my community and our world in general, as much as anyone. I proudly recycle, even though I’ve heard rumors many local efforts are B.S. and your waste goes to landfills, not processing centers. I err on the side of conserving paper and gas. To my knowledge, I’ve never killed a three-toed sloth or clubbed a seal, either.

But what happened to us as a society that we’re so apt and willing to believe a one-sided story? When did self-directed decision-making leave our conscious?

Did “good” PR kill good PR? Is our ADD society producing droves of drones who’d rather accept the common thread rather than raise a hand and ask questions? Will the consumer-based marketplace reverse the trend or will the socially-adept extremes dictate popular belief?

Our politics (at least in the U.S.) have already become so polarizing the vast majority of us are disenfranchised. Will our conversations soon follow?

When it comes to public relations, this is what keeps me up at night. What about you?

Disclosure: I previously worked as a public affairs account manager for the Ohio River Bridges Project while on staff at Doe-Anderson. While this certainly reveals a bias on the issue, to the best of my knowledge, all of my assertions relative to the facts of the project can be found in publicly available documents related to the project, many of which are found at http://kyinbridges.com. I currently have no vested interest or involvement in the project or its support/protest groups other than I live in Louisville and support improving inter- and intra-state travel, traffic, safety, quality of life and environmental concerns in this region.

As we saw with our look at the top WordPress, Blogger and Typepad blogs recently, my friends at Postrank have been busy crunching some numbers. Their engagement comparison tool allows you to compare and contrast three separate websites based on their engagement scores. The analysis includes sub-dividing engagement by domain, which allowed us to break down the top blogs in the WordPress, Blogger and Typepad platforms.

When they gave me access to their rankings of those three, I also had the good fortune of getting the rankings for Tumblr.com blogs as well. Looking at each platform’s top blogs is interesting. You can start to see trends in what types of bloggers use which platforms. While it’s certainly generalizing, the anecdotal look certainly is intriguing.

Here’s a listing of the top 10 Tumblr.com blogs based on cumulative Postrank engagement scores (look here to learn what that encompasses) for the last three months. See what you think about what the types of blogs here say about the Tumblr.com platform and share them in the comments.. To access more of the lists, you or your developer can apply for and access that data through Postrank’s API.

Enjoy!

Top 25 Tumblr.com Blogs

My friends at Postrank unveiled yet another cool public tool this week. Postrank Labs now allows you to compare and contrast three separate websites based on their engagement scores. Consider it kind of a Compete.com view of a given blog or website’s engagement rather than traffic.

Something I noticed about Labs was that it also delineated out five subdomains within each website and scored their respective engagement score. This was the first I’d ever seen someone have the ability to determine differences between subdomains. Certainly, the information is there and accessible somehow (otherwise Postrank wouldn’t have it), but I’d not seen it yet.

I’m sure some techy is going to make fun of me for not tapping into publicly available API data and cross-grid hexing some morpheous node to flip on the sphincter, but I don’t know how to do that, so put a sock in it and get back to your World of Warcraft, dork.

The division and comparison of subdomains is interesting, even exciting, because it gives public relations professionals, marketers and anyone else trying to determine which blogs are more important, impactful or influential the ability to do so within WordPress.com, Blogspot.com (Blogger.com) and Typepad.com blogs. If a blog is run from one of those services and is “hosted” or contained within the WordPress.com servers, for example, it appears as blogname.wordpress.com. When you typically run traffic or engagement reports on the domain, you get results for everything on WordPress.com which is essentially useless.

Being the general pain in the ass I can be, I asked Carol Leaman, Postrank’s lovely (and patient) CEO, if I might get my hands on the sub-domain data for the three services mentioned. She gave me that and then some. (So much so that I can’t possibly cover it in this post. Hint.)

Without further ado, here’s a listing of the top 10 blogs, based on cumulative Postrank engagement scores (look here to learn what that encompasses) for the last three months, of each of the three major blogging subdomains. To access more of the lists, you or your developer (provided they aren’t tied up with Lord of the Rings … heh) can apply for and access that data through Postrank’s API.

I found the lists interesting and have some thoughts that might bubble up, but I’m more interested in hearing your reactions. What do you think of the top blogs in each platform. Any surprises? Any anomalies? The comments are yours.

NOTE: Some of the blogs contain content that might be offensive or unsuitable for your tastes. Click through at your own risk.

Note: In another of our periodic visits to various public relations firms and agencies, I asked Don Bartholomew, vice president, digital research at Fleishman Hillard, to share some of his thoughts, and his firm’s approach to measuring social media and public relations. Fleishman has a different way of looking at metrics for communications and makes a pretty interesting argument for their points. This post is a look behind the Fleishman curtain and how they are approaching measuring and metrics in the digital age. By the way, Don also authors MetricsMan, a popular PR/social media measurement blog.

New Models, New Metrics

Communication models are a linear representation of how a communication process works and are important in providing a framework for evaluation and measurement.   The Outputs – Outtakes – Outcomes communication model often used in public relations today has two primary deficiencies in the era of digitization and social networks – clarity and relevance.

Clarity
The model is difficult for many to understand and apply. Public relations practitioners regularly get Outputs confused with Outtakes or Outcomes. Outtakes are not often used in the U.S. – they seem much more prevalent in Europe. The overall taxonomy can be confusing and is defined in different ways by different practitioners or organizations. Further compounding the confusion is the fact audiences we present our results to rarely understand the terms and have trouble relating to them. In short, the terms are too much ‘inside baseball’.

Relevance
The model was developed when communication was media-centric. Digitization, consumer-generated content and social networks have shifted communication from a media-centric world to a content-centric world. How receivers of communication engage and are influenced by content has fundamentally changed.

What is needed is a metrics taxonomy that is easier to explain, understand and apply. Ideally one that is applicable for traditional and social media. Here is the model we apply at Fleishman Hillard.

With the new model comes new metrics primarily driven by social media/networks. Exposure includes traditional metrics like Impressions and Message Delivery, and digital metrics like Search Rank, Twitter Reach and Average Daily Visitors. Engagement includes traditional metrics like Readership, but adds new metrics like Subscriptions, Repeat Visitors and Follower Mention %. Influence in the model refers to influence of the target audience, not who has influence in social networks. Influence metrics range from increases in Brand Consideration to changes in attitudes and opinions to changes in online click behavior. Action metrics can range from event attendance to voting for/against legislation to buying a product.

New Data, New Places

Public relations research and measurement has historically been driven by content analysis. As content increasingly became available in digital form, the techniques of research and measurement didn’t change so much as the way content was aggregated and delivered for analysis. Then web-based platforms became available from a variety of vendors to digitize and automate content analysis while the metrics being measured – article counts, impressions, message uptake and sentiment for example – basically remained constant with previous, more manual, methods. Today, the digitization of research and measurement has broadened from this predominately singular focus to include data and interactions from three distinct regions or zones of research and measurement as shown in the figure below.

As company websites, e-Commerce sites and other forms of ‘owned’ media proliferated, web analytics software provided an explosion of data and new metrics like unique visitors, page views, click through rates, duration, referring sites and conversions become widely used and reported. We became over-served with data and underserved with insight.

The exponential rise in popularity of social networks in the last five years raised the bar again and presented new challenges in digital research and measurement. Now we were faced with measuring conversations and not just clicks. Measuring engagement became more important than measuring eyeballs. The frontier in social media measurement is evolving toward measuring both the conversations and behavior patterns occurring within social networks, and understanding and connecting the underlying influences and motivations for the online behavior.

The third area of interest is in all the real-world, offline interactions and transactions. Scan and other digital sales data is important to understanding, tracking and connecting online and offline behavior and actions.   Connecting mobile transactions, online and offline behavior and WOM is a significant challenge.

Although we have attempted to define three distinct ‘zones’ of digital research and measurement necessary to address the full spectrum of social media and marketing impact, a robust measurement strategy should take a holistic, integrated approach using methodologies, tools, data and metrics from all three zones. The goal is to be able to track the behavior, interactions and transactions of individuals across all three zones, across multiple platforms and physical locations, understanding how online behavior impacts offline behavior and vice-versa.

New Scope, New Integration

Today at Fleishman Hillard, we recognize the very definition of public relations is rapidly evolving to encompass a much broader and more integrated view of communications and how we connect, engage and build relationships with consumers and other stakeholders on behalf of our clients. Digitization in all its forms has driven and accelerated this important change. While public relations has traditionally been oriented toward ‘earned media’ – gaining placements of client stories in print and broadcast media based on the strength of the story and quality of the pitch – today’s content-driven world demands much more. The scope now must include all the consumer touch points available in our increasingly digital world. We capture this new scope and integration in a model we refer to as PESO – Paid/Earned/Shared/Owned. Our PESO model predates the similar Forrester model (Paid/Earned/Owned) and is different in an important way. We created two categories, Earned and Shared, where the other model has one – Earned. We believe this better comprehends strategies like blogger outreach and other proactive efforts undertaken by practitioners as ’Earned’,  distinct from efforts that may be passive or reactive. Here is how we define the elements of our model:

Paid – refers to all forms of paid content that exists on third-party channels or venues. This includes banner or display advertisements, pay-per-click programs, sponsorships and advertorials.

Earned – includes traditional media outreach as well as blogger relations/outreach where we attempt to influence and encourage third-party content providers to write about our clients and their products and services.

Shared – refers to social networks and technologies controlled by consumers along with online and offline WOM

Owned – includes all websites and web properties controlled by a company or brand including company or product websites, micro-sites, blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter channels.

The enhanced scope and integration represented by the PESO model drives a corresponding broadening and need for integration in digital research and measurement. One can easily find themselves attempting to measure a highly integrated program that includes the awareness created with paid media, the relevance and information delivered via owned, the credibility delivered by earned media and measuring the conversations and interactions occurring in shared media. Just from a metrics perspective, the PESO model requires a significant broadening in thinking as shown in the matrix below.

Digitization has changed what we need to research and measure, where we find data and how we perform analysis. The future will bring more data, better tools and improved methodologies. Sifting insights from the mounds of data will remain a major challenge. The intersection of marketing, privacy concerns and research must be navigated. The constant in all the change brought by digitization is who – human analysts and research. Discovery and insight, like it was 15 years ago, remains fundamentally a human process. It remains the analog constant in a world of digitization.

I don’t write about cars. I don’t really even write about gadgets. But I’m writing about the Chevy Volt electric car today. Why? Because the folks at Chevy are using influencer targeting as a method to get the word out about their car. No, I’m not succumbing to the power of a good pitch. The car is cool and there’s a fun video below featuring Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki that will show you some of that. I want to share the influencer outreach approach they’re using as an example of good PR and interaction with the social media space.

Cristi Landy, Volt’s product manager, told me technology bloggers and influencers were logical outreach targets for them because of the innovative technology in the Volt. The car not only features a mostly electric engine that can go up to 40 miles without using gas, complete with the pick-up, torque and handling you’re used to from a gas-powered vehicle, but is tech and gadget heavy. The car will have a smart phone app that enables you to lock, unlock, heat, cool, check charge status and more from wherever you are. For folks like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki and Leo Laporte, who all write about technology and have large audiences, the outreach targeting was spot on.

What Chevy did for these influencers is invite them to test drive the car and experience the power first hand. The only thing they had to agree to was be interviewed for Chevy’s content after. There was no commitment to produce content about the car in the arrangement. Just test it, tell us what you think and you’re done. Chevy would produce all the content they wanted. Anything that Scoble, Kawasaki, Laporte or even I produced was gravy.

SME-TV: Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki & Jason Falls test drive the Chevy Volt from Jason Falls on Vimeo.

What Chevy did was give influencers in a relevant target an exclusive opportunity. The Volt isn’t on the market yet and not everyone can test drive one. They allowed us to take all the pictures, video and ask all the questions we wanted. There were no complex legal issues, trademark talks or even proprietary information non-disclosures. Just drive it, tell us what you think and thanks for coming. The individuals they chose are naturally going to produce content, even if it’s just a Tweet about the car. Certainly Chevy would love it if all the people they targeted blogged about their experience, but they’ll take what they get and be happy with it.

Perhaps more importantly, the audiences that are inspired and excited about new technologies will get a glimpse from their favorite source for tech-related information.

The point here is to keep in mind that your brand or client may find unusually productive niches of authorship in peripheral verticals to your core. Chevy didn’t target auto bloggers with this effort. (I’m sure they did separately, but they got involved in South by Southwest for non-auto bloggers.) If you’re a spirits brand, the spirit and cocktail bloggers are your core but radiating from those on your list should be the food, night life and lifestyle bloggers.

It’s not hard to think a little outside the box from your core media list but you’d be surprised how few do it. Just a reminder that even a social media and PR blogger might find something interesting in your electric car.

Dislcosure: Chevy’s arrangements at South by Southwest included transporting me to and from the mall where the road course was set up. They also extended an unrelated dinner invitation (which I accepted) to join several other bloggers and notables from the social media space including David Meerman Scott, Peter Shankman, Valeria Maltoni, C.C. Chapman, Liz Strauss and more. Chevy bought. Otherwise, I received no payment or promise for writing this. In fact, because I don’t focus on tech specifically, the Chevy folks didn’t really expect me to write about it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cadillac Converj Is GM’s Other Electric Car Competitor To The Chevy Volt (crenk.com)
• First real Chevy Volt battery rolls off assembly line (dvice.com)
• Is The Chevy Volt Right For You? (treehugger.com)
• Behind the wheel of the Chevy Volt (news.cnet.com)

I was dumbfounded when I read a recent New York Times article about mommy bloggers that indicated a conference session topic at an event called Bloggy Bootcamp was how to let public relations firms know you don’t work for free. A few months ago, I reached out to a prominent mommy blogger on Twitter to let her know that I had a client whose products she might be interested in – not a pitch, just a light toss that indicated I may pitch her down the road. She responded by saying, “I’ll be happy to work with your client. My fee is $125 per hour.” I was stunned.

It seems that some bloggers (not just the mommy kind) have a vast misunderstanding of what public relations professionals are supposed to do or be used for. It also seems that some think receiving a pitch for a product somehow entitles them to call themselves consultants and charge hourly rates to someone else for writing content for their own website. Far be it from me to criticize a blogger’s ability to make money, but these attitudes deeply concern me. While the media landscape is evolving to account for new media roles, blogger ignorance to how traditional communications and marketing works may forever ruin the notion of an unbiased media.

Here are some thoughts that all bloggers and public relations professionals should consider to help us all get along and prosper:

Soliciting Money For Your Blog Is Advertising Sales

Whether you are selling banner advertising, known in the advertising world as “online media,” or advertorial content (yes, blog posts) for a product or service in exchange for a fee or sponsorship, you are selling an advertisement. When you publish that advertisement, the Federal Trade Commission requires you to disclose what you received in exchange for that post or content element. The advertisement, whether it’s a banner ad or advertorial content, is referred to as paid media. You, the blogger/media outlet are being paid to display or post the advertising message.

Should you want to ask someone at a brand or company to consider paying you money for advertorial coverage, banner advertisements and similar online media, you typically would call upon that company’s media buyer or media planner, the marketing director or other individual who handles buying online media, not a public relations representative.

Public Relations Is Not Paid Media

The term “paid media” refers to any element of a brand’s communications that is purchased from a publishing company (i.e. advertising). Editorial coverage (not advertorial, which is paid media) is earned media that a brand receives from publishing companies because the information was compelling enough for its audience to cover the information. While some earned media occurs naturally in the course of a journalist or bogger talking about the industry, public relations professionals are agents of a brand who attempt to proactively inspire or entice earned media coverage by pitching story ideas and funneling brand information to media outlets.

PR Should Not Pay For Coverage

While there are always exceptions, public relations professionals do not have an ad budget. They do not purchase advertising for companies, and shouldn’t. PR pros either successfully pitch relevant stories to writers who are covering the topic, or they don’t. Bloggers should know enough about public relations to know they either have relevant information to help you write better, more well-rounded stories or they don’t.

Bloggers Have No Obligation To PR

Like their traditional media brethren, bloggers are not obligated to respond to public relations professionals. Bloggers do not have to cover a brand, respond to the pitch, read the press release or consider covering the item the PR professional is offering. If a blogger chooses to respond to a pitch, there are really only two appropriate responses:

• Yes, I’m interested.
• No, I’m not.

A Bloggers’ Obligation Is To His Or Her Audience

While a blogger doesn’t have to communicate with public relations professionals at all, there’s a pretty good chance they write about the industry or even the company that the PR pro represents from time to time. At some point, the blogger may need information about the company or a product they can’t find online, a logo or company image to use with a piece they’ve written, a quote or reaction from the company to some piece of news or a clarification or explanation of something the company does. Public relations professionals are the appropriate contacts for inquiries. Not communicating with the PR folks at all could limit your ability to serve your audience with accurate information. Furthermore, sometimes the pitch or the press release is about some news or a new product that the blogger’s audience should know about. By ignoring pitches, or demanding paid media treatment of said information, a blogger is doing a disservice to his or her audience as that limits or adulterates the information the audience is given.

The Traditional Method Has Merit

The media and public relations landscape is changing. Bloggers are essentially the first publishing channel and media outlet which play both paid and earned media roles. Newspapers, magazines, television and radio outlets have journalists to produce the content and sales teams to solicit or handle advertising. The division of these roles is an important protection for the audience to help them trust a media outlet’s content is not unduly biased. It’s kind of like the separation of church and state. Bloggers dissolve that separation which public relations has yet to figure out appropriate reaction to. I worry that if bloggers continue to fail to see the importance of that separation and PR’s evolution is to being regularly paying for coverage, then the notion of an unbiased, fair and accurate media could be lost forever.

Bloggers Are Bloggers, Not Marketing Consultants

I researched the aforementioned mommy blogger who wanted to charge my client $125 per hour to pitch her and discovered some interesting facts. She had no work experience or formal training in marketing, public relations or advertising. She had a blog with a nice sized audience, but had worked in a non-marketing service industry field until she had children and opted to stay at home. While plenty smart, she was unqualified to consult with a company on how to market or promote their products. Sadly, there are thousands of bloggers (and social news site vote-getters) out there just like her who think (or are being taught by conferences like Bloggy Bootcamp) that being a successful blogger makes them qualified to consult with companies on marketing. When she told me she would “work with” my client for $125 an hour, I replied, “Ummm. I’m the consultant. You are either interested in telling your audience about the products or you’re not. We won’t be paying you to pitch you.”

Sadly, some companies apparently do. It’s not a slight against the blogger, but against the companies. Brands should not pay for media coverage. You either make a compelling pitch that wins the interest of the blogger or you don’t get covered. If that blog’s audience means that much to you, add them to your media buying plan and see if you can purchase advertising there, or come up with a better pitch.

Why The Current Environment Is Fuzzy

Bloggers don’t have an obligation to be fair and balanced. They don’t need public relations contacts the way traditional media outlets do. While bloggers are often not trained journalists, they also aren’t normally skilled at positioning their work for advertising sales and monetization. Bloggers want to make money doing what they do, and deserve to do so. Brands want their products and services represented well in traditional and new media content, and they deserve that, too. What a blogger has that brands want is editorial content which is not something you can buy in traditional media channels. Bloggers want to sell it. Companies are being asked to play by new rules that cross established ethical boundaries. The environment is evolving, but there are no hard, fast rules for what’s right and wrong here.

Yes, consumers are smart enough to find content they trust on their own. No, there isn’t just one way, or even a right way, to monetize a blog or even prescribe content for an audience. But bloggers should understand the issues at hand, the environment in which they’ve thrust themselves by becoming a publishing agent and how the world of advertising and public relations work to be most successful at what they do. It’s not that PR doesn’t have to change, too, but that bloggers should understand the context of the marketplace.

Romero was quoted in the New York Times article as telling the crowd they were there to be seen, “as a professional.” If you want them to be seen as professionals, then you should teach them about the profession (communications) they are now a part of, not how to show their ignorance of it.

As in need of evolution as that profession may be.

For more great thoughts on how bloggers should handle, PR, see my pal Tamar Weinberg’s Blogger Etiquette post.

Image: Cash register by Lisa F. Young on Shutterstock.com

Let’s get one thing straight about press releases: They are not the primary driver for good public relations. Words on paper does not a relationship make. They are, however, an important component to delivering information to those who wish to cover your organization, event or company. For most, local press releases — those sent to media outlets in a specific geographic boundary or target — are the lifeblood of publicity. The PR 2.0 world kinda forgot about that. Thankfully, readMedia has a solution that serves the local press release target, serves up web and social media-friendly release tools and helps clients appear in online news aggregators like Google News, all for a reasonable price.

In a nutshell, a readMedia customer signs up for a low subscription price (more in a moment), selects the geographic region they are targeting, calls out the media offered from a readMedia-curated database, adds any they see fit to add, enters the press release in the system and the distribution is done. Releases are emailed (or faxed based on the media outlet’s preference … yes, some people apparently still fax) posted to the online news aggregation services and placed in an online newsroom. From there, media can embed the releases using an iFrame mechanism (see below for an example) and grab multimedia or other assets the customer makes available.

The client can then grab a widget of their own release headlines to use on their Facebook page, blog or website, embed the releases wherever they like or share across several social networks. The service is not yet set up to, nor meant to, replace your own website or even media page/news room, but gives you the tools to dress your website up with a newsroom feed and share mechanisms.

Now, I’m sure a few of you who are all social media’d up are saying, “Well, isn’t that what PitchEngine is?” No. PitchEngine doesn’t have a media database attached to it. (Although I caught wind they were announcing one today.) As of Friday on PitchEngine, you build a social media press release. Driving people to it is up to you (though they certainly have a community of readers and social tools baked in as well.) And even if PitchEngine adds a media database back-end to their offering, it won’t likely be built to be hyper-local in focus.

readMedia’s front page sells the service as good for State Agencies, Local Governments or Schools. But it’s as appropriate for local or regional businesses as it is for these type organizations. Still, as a former college public relations director, I can see how this can be mighty useful. (And that’s without the hometown press release program they have … more in a moment.)

I logged in to test the service and picked the Lexington, Ky. metro area, my former primary market when PR director at Georgetown College many moons ago. Turns out to use the readMedia service for that market, I only have to pay $29.00 per month for up to 50 contacts. The maximum fee would be $49.00 per month for 250 contacts and five user accounts. The per DMA, volume pricing automatically makes a cool, Web 2.0 PR service affordable for smaller market businesses.

When I reviewed the media list, I was impressed. They had all the main players, many hometown weeklies in outlying towns like Nicholasville and Winchester and even several local radio stations with news departments. For a company that doesn’t use a large media database company but rather builds and curates the lists themselves (with the help of client feedback, of course) readMedia impressed me.

I got hold of a client’s newsroom as well. The Nathan Littauer Hostpital “news room” is really just a list of release headlines. They have more graphically-driven information positioned on their website and use readMedia as a media utility. All readMedia “news rooms” are like this now, but they tell me a more designed, customizable presentation is on the way soon. Littauer’s most recent news, a story of a citation as being a progressive facility for energy conservation from Thursday, came up (as of Friday) as the top Google News result for “hospital energy conservation,” so the news postings are working well.

The embed-offering of the release is even strong because it’s branded, but in subtle fashion, making it easy to use on any website or blog with little awkwardness in design.

And since everything is digitally-driven, they deliver a nice analytics report that tells you how many folks view, embed and share  your news, plus where your stats rank against other releases in their system, etc.

So for local-based media relations efforts, readMedia is the real deal. Smart, easy to use, reliable database service that can be customized to your liking as well, all with smart Web 2.0 tools.

And then I looked at their offering for schools. Sure, this type of approach isn’t going to resonate with everyone, but not only are there tens of thousands of education public relations professionals in the U.S. alone, but in certain instances, this could apply beyond education.

readMedia’s pricing for schools is based on your student enrollment and geared toward hometown releases, a program that allows colleges to send press releases to the local newspapers of all their students (for Dean’s List announcements, etc.) regardless of geographic centricity to the institution. A college with a class size of 2,500 can run a hometown release program using readMedia for just $39.00 per month. I would have paid 10 times that amount when I was having to send 800 hometown press releases out each semester at Georgetown.

As you can tell, I really dig readMedia and what they offer. For the price and the service, I don’t know of anyone offering something comparable. The service’s focus on local press release distribution sets them apart. As one readMedia client told Amy Mengel, readMedia’s new inbound marketing director, using the big media database companies for local press release services is like using a 747 to cross the street. readMedia is a targeted service for people who need it. And well worth checking out.

Now, it would be remiss of me to not disclaim the hell out of this review. Press releases are a piece of your public relations arsenal. They should never be sent to media members who do not ask for them, in my opinion. Releases are tools for more information after the reporter has said, “Yes, I’m interested.” Blasting releases to your list should only happen when you have culled that list to ensure the media members on it write about the topic your release covers, their audience is potentially interested in the subject and they know and approve of you putting them on a distribution list.

(I’ll pause while some PR people curse me a few times.)

A press release is not a pitching mechanism. Your personal outreach to the media outlet is. Pitch first. Release if requested. Follow that framework and you’ll see better results.

And if you’re focused on local press release distribution, readMedia can help you get them, too.

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide is hiring a public relations account director in their Seattle office. They reached out to me with an offer to post an ad for it over there in the sidebar. As we’ve discussed before, I only accept advertising from companies whose product or service is relevant to many of you and I insist those advertisers provide me with some subject for editorial content to accompany the ad as well.

The requirements gave them pause since the folks helping them with the advertising offer weren’t used to this editorial-advertising hybrid, so I decided to help them a bit with the post. It’s part of trying a new model, I guess.

The job description says they are looking for a senior leader for both clients, team and the agency as a whole. It reads like a senior account position and they say relocation funds are available. It seems the position is pointed toward a client or clients in the technology industry as well. If you are a senior level public relations person, you should click the ad here and check it out. Waggener Edstrom is a well-established, reputable agency with a nice roster of clients.

My only concern about the posting is there’s no mention of social media. Either they’re folding the requirements into their talk of strategic planning and, “creative tactical ideas,” or it’s still not something a senior level account director at Waggener Edstrom has primary responsibility for.

Not that this is a reason not to seek the job. It appears to be a very nice opportunity. But, as I’ve said before, social media most appropriately fits into the purview of public relations. At a minimum, PR professionals should be charged with integrating social media tactics and strategies with traditional communications methods.

Perhaps this is a chance for the public relations folks in all of us us to review our job descriptions and see if they fit the new media world.

Is public relations responsible for social media in your organization? Are senior-level managers expected to know and participate in social media strategy and tactics or is it something left to the junior staff members?

Tell us your story. The comments are yours.