Follow me on Twitter

Given the slowish rate of posts here (roughly four a year), I want to make sure that anyone who visits knows to follow me on Twitter, where I’m much more active.

Of course, there are a lot of things I’d like to write about here, but 99% of my time is spent on clients, so I don’t do it that often.  You’ll hopefully find the Twitter stream valuable.

Links for January 9, 2009

MacWorld vs. CES: The Battle for Twitter Buzz

[I'd been wondering what the difference in traffic was and hadn't had time to run a hashtag first.  Luckily, Mashable figured it out for all of us.]

Blogging and Social Media Tools to Declutter Your Life

[Scott Hepburn's thoughts on several useful tool.  Disclosure: includes ShareThis, an OutCast client]

How to Stop Twitter Becoming a Waste of Time

[Great stuff as usual from the TwiTip blog.]

Dell Social Media Guides

[A series of well-done video tutorials.]

Phish Summer Tour Announcement

[Yes, I'm a fan - but their announcement today was a great example of how to use video, sharing tools, and - of all thinks - skywriting to spread the word virally.]  

Poll on BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange

[My effort to measure the PR community's awareness of the BusinessExchange network.]

Social media is not a shotgun

I first remember PR people being publicly flogged when Josh McHugh, Dan Roth, and Scott Woolley (later joined by Caroline Waxler) started The Buzz Saw in 1999.  Similar observations about the quality and frequency of PR pitches have been made in newsrooms and on bar stools since long before my time.

Twitter has become today’s Buzz Saw.  It’s not just a back channel for people to bitch about SXSW and Gnomedex – it’s frequented by frustrated journalists, analysts, and bloggers.  If you work in PR, these Tweets should disturb you:

• “and the JavaOne PR takes its toll: if i don’t answer a morning voicemail, that doesn’t mean “please call me four more times”"
• “PR People… if I didn’t reply to your email, what makes you think I will reply to you on Facebook?”
• “this PR freak who spammed me on facebook won’t leave me alone now. he keeps msging me. had to block him. any wonder why i’m so down on PR?”
• “Bloggers keep putting pitching guidelines on their blog, & keep getting bad pitches cause mst PR firms pitching never read blog”
• “NOTE TO PR PEOPLE AND ENTREPRENEURS: I am far less likely to talk about you or do what you want if you DM me than if you just beg in public.”

Why the hate?  One reason is that too many – WAY too many – PR people are looking at social media as the ultimate shotgun approach.  If an email or a phone call goes unreturned it’s tempting to message someone on Facebook, dm them on Twitter, send an IM or two, call and email them again, etc.  Saying that you exhausted all those options might placate a boss or client for a little while, but in all likelihood you’re seriously hurting your chances for future dialogue with the person you’re trying to reach.

In the PR industry’s rush to show how social media-savvy it’s become, too many people are focusing on distribution rather than consumption.  Hitting someone on every number, address, and social media account they have isn’t “reaching out” to them.  It’s annoying them.  The proof is in the links above.

Social media has changed many of the rules for PR, but not the most important rule: You can’t effectively pitch someone unless you’re reading what they’re writing.  What leading influencers are writing isn’t limited to news, opinions, and trends.  Often they’re telling us exactly how and where they do and don’t want to be pitched.  This is the kind of information that’s never going to be found in Cision or MediaMap:

• Robert Scoble:  “I hate Facebook and Twitter direct messages.  I can’t answer those, so don’t even try.”
• Sarah Lacy:  “facebook is for friends, not press releases”
• Rafe Needleman:  “Twitter pitch? Ok, but direct only, and provide link and reply email in the Tweet.”
• Rafe Needleman:  “A pitch on IM? Ugh. A least make sure I want to hear it before you start. Better yet: EMail”
• Stowe Boyd:  “I am shifting permanently to twitpitching as the sole medium for companies to pitch me.”
• Stephen Baker:  “Our common love of the Rolling Stones does not a relationship make.” [OK, that's a paraphrase I took some liberties with.]

Similar sentiments can be found from practically every blogger I’ve pitched in the past six months.  These folks are generous in providing PR rules of engagement, and it’s just silly not to be aware of them.  Even sillier not to follow them.

Following a blogger’s rules of engagement is no guarantee that you’ll get their attention.  However, when paired with awareness of what they’re following and participation in the discussions they’re driving, it’s an important way to build a relationship.

Bombarding people with a social media shotgun is the quickest way to make sure a relationship never develops.

1st OutCast Book Club: Mike Arrington interviews Sarah Lacy tonight

Update: TechCrunch is now streaming this from a feed with a much better view of Mike and Sarah.  It’s great stuff.

Sarah Lacy’s new book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, comes out tomorrow.

This evening, my colleagues at OutCast San Francisco will host Mike Arrington and Sarah as he interviews her and gives us a sneak preview of the book.

Since I’ll be here on the East coast, I’ll be watching it on this Qik stream, and hope you’ll do the same. It begins at 5:30 PT.

BusinessWeek’s Twitter Experiment (or, Twitter has left the echo chamber)

Update: Steve just posted the lede: “#bwstory Go ahead and laugh at Twitter. Plenty of trivia. But businesses are coming up with all kinds of ways to harness microblogging…”

As I type this, BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker is about to launch a compelling experiment. He’s writing a story on Twitter – using Twitter. Once per hour, starting with the lede at 2:30 PM ET, he’ll post a 140 character Tweet. For the next hour, everyone who follows him (he’s @stevebaker) can suggest edits to his post, or suggest a new 140 character string of their own. Posts tagged with #bwstory will be aggregated at twemes.com so that we can follow his progress in real-time.

His premise?

“The theme of the story is that Twitter is growing as a business tool and is gaining popularity. But it has growth issues. The questions: Will we be Twittering a year or two from now? If so, as I’ve asked here before, will it be on Twitter? Does the community gathered, both users and developers, tie us to that platform? Or will we be “twittering” on other services?”

This is important for several reasons:

• Twitter coverage in BusinessWeek takes it out of the echo chamber and into the mainstream. The fact that he’s apparently focusing on its business uses emphasizes just how many more people will take interest as this story develops. The finished product should allow many early adopters to finally explain Twitter to their colleagues/bosses/SO’s in English.
• This experiment will illustrate the sheer speed by which ideas take shape and turn into editorial on Twitter. It reminds me of Wired’s editorial wiki experiment from September 2006 (which ultimately frustrated Wired’s Ryan Singel), but this should move at a much faster pace and with greater community involvement.
• How many times in your career can you remember BusinessWeek putting out an open call for content, and then propose that you edit that content? It’s an opportunity for all of us to highlight how Twitter has become an invaluable tool for our clients, our companies, and ourselves.

This will be a lot of fun to follow. The PR community is definitely helping at the start – Justin Kistner gave some helpful points on hashtags when the story was in its infancy and makes some good points here.