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Blog World Expo Notes: New Media and Public Relations

by Kevin on November 14th, 2007

This session is probably the one I had the most problems with. This session covered a lot of topics that I cover right in here, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. First of all I wanted to hear more about how and why to use PR on the web, what should we be doing with PR and new media? This however was more of a “get noticed” in media type of presentation. Don Crowther is an old school PR guy moving into the new media field and I really didn’t agree with a lot of what he had to say. He came off as someone that had cursory knowledge of the social web, maybe it was due to the time constraints of the presentation but I honestly felt I knew a lot more than he did.

God I need to open a consulting company soon… These are notes from the presentation he gave and some are directly from his powerpoint. My personal notes and commentary are in italics.

New Media and Public Relations
Don Crowtherthe importance of the back fence- word of mouth conversations are now not local but worldwide, the social web is the best tool for word of mouth

-web 2.0- democratizes the purchasing process
-core of public relations- managing public perception
-by not participating on the social web you are letting other people defend you and promote you, you are not in control of your image

The social web has huge potential
-traffic
-positioning
-creating long term relationships
-resolving issues
-can create additional income

Cores of Web 2.0
1) participation
2) contributing: adding value

Being involved creates social capital, two things can hurt your social capital
1) pitching
2) being a pain
these can lead to you getting red lined including being banned, negative word of mouth, snake oils salesman reputation

Mindset you should have
1) You have got give if you want to get (the more you give the more you get)
2) What goes around comes around (be careful how you spend your social capitial)
3) Don’t view as a quick way to get instant publicity or instant money or instant links, you will fail
4) It is work but is worth it

Foundational elements
1) Myspace and Facebook page (Issue One: MySpace and Facebook are not the end all and be all. In fact from a promotional aspect Facebook can be a rather large waste of time because of the culture on there and how closed off it is. From an international marketing perspective there is so much more available social networks for people than just these two.)

a. Objective: introduce yourself
b. Add valuable content
c. Think carefully about using friend gatherers (Issue Two: I think I have demonstrated the power of these programs on more than one occasion in this blog.)

2) Myspace/Facebook Groups
a. Objective: contribute build expert status
b. Find you niche
c. Don’t sell!

(Issue Three: This is the absolute wrong way to use MySpace. Creating a profile and just answering questions in groups is going to gain you maybe a few dozen friends but that is it. You aren’t building numbers for the long tail where you can have a consistent base of people to directly market to because you know they are interested in your business. This is such a horrible approach to MySpace and social networking that I am actually typing in an angered fashion.)

3) LinkedIn
a. Rebuild old networks
b. Build new contacts
c. Reach people who are uncreachable via normal means
d. Tactic: answer questions

4) Video
a. Video is/will be the killer publicity tool for the web
b. Objective: build traffic, expert status
c. Post on youtube
5) use web pr traffic tools
a. use tools designed to generate publicity
b. expert click- write an article attribute yourself
c. prweb.com
d. prleads.com

The structure of your PR Leads Posts:

i. here is who I am and why I am an expert
ii. 2nd paragraph give information
iii. tell story
iv. contact info

6) Social bookmarking services
a. Use social bookmarking to get your word out
b. Objective: attention, incoming links
c. Automatically ping
d. Manually submit

(Issue Four: Simply submitting to social bookmarking services is a waste. You need to build a network on mosts of these sites to really get value from them. Also just blanketing them is a total waste of time, some networks work better for some people.)

7) Create Squido Lenses (This was actually a positive, I don’t hear enough about Squido.)

a. Objective: build expert status, incoming traffic links
8) Use stumbleupon
a. Use stumbleupon to drive traffic

(Issue five: Again, nothing about building a reputation or a base on this site. It isn’t as easy as setting up an account and just hitting stumble a few times.)

9) use other tools: ie flickr

10) Tie it all together
a. Video>blog>dig>social bookmarking

As you can see there were things that I find rather basic on here or really lacking in the details that need to be presented. While I don’t disagree that a lot of these sites are helpful in a marketing platform (I have written about most of them), how they are being used is where my main issue lies. I don’t think he displays an expert opinion on the social web by any means, just more of an informed web user than an expert.

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