Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Scoble Media Relations 2008 Keynote

I’m blogging from the front row of Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations 2008 Summit, as Robert Scoble begins his keynote. I like how Robert starts his presentations by gauging the experience of the audience, so he can speak at a level that will be meaningful to them.

Robert says Web 3.0 is “the death of the page.” An example is Twittervision. He’s giving the group (more than half of whom haven’t been in Twitter) a tour of his life. Most of them haven’t seen FriendFeed either. Robert is on 20 different services in what he calls “the social media starfish” and Friendfeed brings them together. Here is his FriendFeed and here is mine.

Robert is using Sliderocket for his presentation, which is an online version of Powerpoint. It allows collaborative editing. It’s like a wiki for presentations.

Scoble uses Google Reader for reading his RSS feeds to create “a river of news.” Techmeme tells him the big stories. The thing that just changed in Google Reader a few months ago is the addition of friends, which lets people share news.

He talked about “the friend divide” which means that people who are new to a service aren’t going to get as much value out of it because they don’t have a lot of friends yet. The solution: Get friends.

Upcoming.org is another site for seeing what is…you guessed it…upcoming.

Robert closed with a demonstration of Qik, which live streams video from his cell phone. It’s a TV station in your pocket. The minute he turns off his cell phone it becomes a recorded archive on the Qik site. It only works with Nokia phones right now, I think.

Robert’s take-away: The word-of-mouth network is hyper-efficient. Even in the 1980s when he worked at a camera store, 80 percent of his sales came from word-of-mouth. With the web today, it’s a world-wide network for word-of-mouth. That’s what I’ll be talking about at my presentation.

Go to the Bulldog Media Relations group to see more of the pictures from Robert’s presentation.

Blogger Relations

Jon Greer is moderating this session. He is Jon (at) jongreer (dot) com.

Craig Newmark is the founder of Craigslist. He says most of his role is customer service. He has a sense of mission, speaking up on behalf of the lobbyist industry and PR, who are just trying to get a fair shake for their clients. His personal blog is cnewmark.com. He says he is a libertarian moderate, not a socialist, despite those who think that his site has undermined for-profit media. In response to a question about people fraudulently posting ads that lead to houses being looted, he says they’re not very smart, because IP addresses can be traced.

Tom Foremski writes Silicon Valley Watcher, reporting on the business of technology and media. He mainly considers himself a reporter. He did an experiment, “Pitch me only through Facebook” and recently discontinued it mainly because Facebook’s email management isn’t good. Basically he recommends that people should connect by following on Twitter. He was the person who basically kicked off the social media release with this post. Don’t call and ask: “What have you been writing about?” Tom says: “I don’t have time to read my latest posts to you.” Exclusives or access to a CEO are interesting to him. He doesn’t want to just add to the white noise by writing what everyone else is doing.

Carolyn Pritchard is from GigaOm. (They are on wordpress.com, too.) She is the editor for six blogs. They are all niche sites, and PR people should be pitching to those sites individually instead of her. Following the conversation is key; sometimes knowing what people have said in the comments on recent posts would help engage. The principles of media relations hold for blogger relations, too. Do your homework.

Tom says media professionals will be increasingly moving into blogging where they will do journalism, but with a different cost structure. They are now “always on” and don’t have the high cost structure of massive skyscrapers. When he left the Financial Times, he decided he didn’t want to be on the sharp pointy end of the disruption.

Tom thinks a social media release is a better way of distributing information because it’s more modular. Fundamentally, though, all he was asking for was more links in press releases, and tag things, and organize the information better. Check out socialmediarelease.org. Businesswire says there is no additional charge for this, but getting the buy-in from PR people is limited.

Another great session. I had read Tom’s blog (it’s even part of my presentation tomorrow), and everyone knows Craig. It was great to get to see and hear them in person.

Social Media Strategy

Our presenters for the session on “How to Craft a Powerful, Cost-Effective Social Media Strategy” are Sally Falkow from Expansion Plus and Brian Solis from Future Works PR. This is a standing-room-only session.

I had seen this quote before, but apparently it came from Jay Rosen: “We are the people formerly known as the audience.”

Social Media Marketing is the use of the social tools to interact with people, but it is not about technology. It is sociology. It’s about being able to create content and interact with people.

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PR in Today’s New Marketing Milieu

I’m in the afternoon sessions at Media Relations 2008, for a presentation by Dr. Georg Kolb (formerly of Text 100) and Frank Shaw from Waggener Edstrom Worldwide.

Update: Here is Georg’s presentation from Slideshare.net:

Georg sees three major trends contributing to creation of what he calls “New Publics.”

Individualism – on the societal level, we today don’t believe as much in institutions as our ancestors did. Instead of the stability of family and extended families, he says, “we’re a mess.” Living all over the place. Patchwork families. Today we build trust by talking to people like ourselves. Instead of just taking the word of our personal physician as our grandparents would, we may also get second and third opinions, and also opinions of other patients.
P2P Networks – Peer-to-peer networks exist now through technology to make it practical for us to find and connect with people like us.
Niche Markets – A super-fragmented marketplace of groups of peer networks.

Georg talked about how much discussion is happening outside the mainstream media dialogue. For example, you may have an employee group organized within Facebook. This is a sphere of influence you need to learn to navigate. Georg says four basic principles should help:

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Katie Paine on Social Media Measurement

Katie Paine is giving a whirlwind tour of the measurement landscape. I suggest you check out her blog (previous link) and her company site to dig in deeper. She says her slides are in the attendee packet (although I’m not seeing them.) I may need to follow up with a more in-depth post. She says they are or will be here. I just went there and signed up for a free account and downloaded a previous talk. I’m looking forward to downloading this one.

Katie’s 10 Signs that this is end of the world as we know it

10. I spent more time on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr yesterday than I did on email. (Here is Katie’s Twitter account and here is mine.)

9. Gatekeepers? What’s a gate keeper? Deadline? What’s a deadline? News is instant.

8. A start up company got 100 great marketing ideas for free from Twitter

7. It’s easier to put my message on M&Ms than it is to get it into an A-list blog

6. $0 budget YouTube videos about Barack Obama were seen by 120 times the audience of Clinton’s largest town hall meeting in US history that cost millions

5. IBM gets more leads, sales and exposure from a $500 podcast than it does from an ad

… (Katie’s moving too fast now…I will ask Katie for the rest of her top-10 list)

1. Measurement is a whole lot easier

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