Tag: Bulldog Reporter

Paying it Forward with a Small Good

Earlier this year I got a chance to meet Chuck Hester when we presented together at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations 2008 Summit in San Francisco. Chuck’s story is about using LinkedIn for power networking, and he’s organized what he calls LinkedIn Live events to turn his local virtual network into a face-to-face networking opportunity.

I hope to see Chuck again this week at the Ragan Corporate Communications in a Web 2.0 World conference at the SAS headquarters in Cary, NC. I’m unfortunately going to be traveling during his presentation, but will plan to connect with him later in the conference.

Chuck is turning his experience with LinkedIn into a new book that will be released later this year. It’s called Linking In to Pay it Forward: Changing the Value Proposition in Social Media. You can read about it on Chuck’s Pay it Forward blog. So when Chuck asked me for the “Small Good” of giving his book a shout out, I was glad to help.

One of the things I appreciate about the social media world is the “pay it forward” philosophy. Much of what I’m doing with SMUG is experimenting publicly with different tools and techniques. Then, after I’ve worked out the kinks and gotten hands-on experience with the tools, I can confidently recommend the best ways to use them in my work environment. And I figure if I can help others by letting them learn from my experimentation, that’s a worthwhile service.

But I can’t experiment with everything; I personally haven’t used LinkedIn nearly as much as Facebook. So if Chuck would like to write a guest post with some highlights from his new book, I’d be happy to confer Associate Professor status and make him a SMUG faculty member.

Facebook and LinkedIn in Media Relations

This morning I have the pleasure of presenting at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2008 in San Francisco. My co-presenters are Chuck Hester from iContact and Valerie Jennings from Jennings PR. Chuck will be focusing on LinkedIn (here’s his profile, and mine), while I will do the Facebook portion (please feel free to “friend me.”) Valerie will wrap it all up.

If Chuck and Valerie want to upload their presentation to Slideshare.net (a site you should check out), I will be happy to embed here. Meanwhile, here’s mine:


I’m including below links to some of the web sites I will reference in the presentation, so you can see the actual sites (vs. the screen shots in Slideshare) and relive the magic.

I will revise and extend, but here’s the basic presentation. Here are some of my earlier writings that outline some of the potential I see for media relations through Facebook.

Putting the “Relations” in Media Relations

“Cheers” for Medical News

Toward a Medical News Community

I believe that with the long-awaited granular privacy settings Facebook has implemented, this will become much more practical. People will use Facebook increasingly for business when they are able to more effectively segregate what information is available to their professional contacts and what is more personal. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

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.

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

Continue reading “Katie Paine on Social Media Measurement”

Charlie Rose at Media Relations 2008

Charlie Rose

Howard Rubenstein of Rubenstein and Associates interviewed Charlie Rose as the opening keynote. Kind of an interesting way of doing a keynote address. It was a conversation, which is fitting given the theme of the conference, which is “The Power of Story: New Media, New Technologies, A New Narrative for PR.”

Here are some points/quotes from Charlie:

“I think of our show as a global conversation.” He thinks he’s probably quoted more than any other media personality because he does five hours of conversations a week.

Sophia Loren was way more interesting to interview than Henry Kissinger…”She’s everything I dream about.” Rupert Murdoch is also one of Charlie’s favorites. Others are Ted Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Warren Buffet

His show uses robotic cameras, so there is nobody there to distract his guests.

Advice for placing a guest on Charlie Rose: remember it’s long form. Understand the show, and Charlie’s curiosity. He wants it to be about ideas, biography, lessons. Don’t try to sell a product. Sell authenticity and “realness.”

His show doesn’t do pre-interviews at all. That keeps it fresher. He just tries to be curious. He doesn’t speak to the guest in advance, but his staff does lots of research in advance.

Charlie sees digital media as extremely imporant: His mission is to make his show more widely available around the internet. He has 17 years of interviews with the most interesting people in the world. The arrival of the digital world means he can make all of his content available free in the archives. He has done 20,000 interviews, and has interviewed all of the remaining presidential candidates at least two or three times.

He said he was surprised at Bill Clinton’s reaction to Sen. Obama in an interview just before the Iowa caucuses.

Charlie thinks Sen. Clinton staying in the race isn’t hurting the Democratic party, and that there is too much talk about her getting out. She believes she should be president, and it’s her decision.

I think he said he wants to make his videos available in Facebook. One of the downsides of the wide-ranging conversation is that it’s easy to ramble. Still much better than a prepared speech, though.

I took some video of this session and may be posting some of it later.