Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: PR (Page 1 of 2)

The Book That Rules in Marketing & PR, Now In Its 2nd Edition

February 7, 2010 / / 3 Comments

NewRules-Mktg+PR-2ndEd Without a doubt, David Meerman Scott is one of the people I most respect in this business. He's also my favorite author and speaker, and a great friend. (Heck, he's even a surfer, and sends me cool pix of some of the beaches he visits in his world travels!)  David is the guy that inspired me to finally realize that what I am is a "content marketer" and "brand journalist." He's the ultimate champion of people like me — and my hero, for sure.

I was lucky enough to get David to speak at the October 2008 meeting of our Social Media Breakfast-Twin Cities (which, by the way, has grown to be the largest SMB group in the country). We offered a free copy of the first edition of his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR to all those attending, thanks to a generous sponsor.  David packed the house, was a huge hit, and the Twin Cities became an even hipper PR and social media town than it already was… 🙂

So, I was delighted to hear that the Second Edition of the book is now available. "It's gone through an extensive rewrite," said David. "Of course, I've checked every fact, figure, and URL. DavidMeermanScott But I've also listened. In the past two years, I've met thousands of people like you who have shared stories with me, so I've drawn from those experiences and included many new examples of success." 

He said these new stories and examples are even more valuable and timely than the original ones. Thus, even if you've read the first edition, he promises you'll find many fresh ideas in the second edition.

"When I was writing the first edition of the book back in 2006," said David, "Facebook was only available to those with a .edu email address (students and educators), so I didn’t feature Facebook. And Twitter didn’t even exist at the time I was researching the first edition. So I have added extensive new information and examples on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites." Since the term social media has become so strong in the past few years, it's not surprising to now see it in the book's subtitle.

The power of the ideas David talks about in The New Rules of Marketing & PR propelled the book to the BusinessWeek bestseller list and kept it there for six months. Another stat that blew me away is that it's been the number one public relations book on Amazon for approximately 910 days. My gosh, that's more than two and a half years!  David still says he's stunned.

(A few links: David's blog, Web Ink Now, is ranked in the AdAge Power 150 as one of the top marketing blogs. Also, here's the direct link on Amazon to the Second Edition of "Rules"… and a page with links to all the online bookstores where David's books are available.)

When David launched the first edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR (via Wiley), he pioneered a tactic that attracted the attention of hundreds of bloggers, typically overlooked by marketers at the time. Since then, the book has garnered numerous awards, been adapted at universities and in politics, has been translated into 24 languages, and even sparked the idea for a series, "The New Rules of Social Media." More importantly, as his Wiley publicist points out, the book has provided a hands-on manual for new marketing. "Marketing campaigns have never been the same, and a new decade brings new opportunity to connect online with buyers and communities."

The New Rules of Marketing & PR explains how to harness the power of the Internet, how to identify the right audience, create compelling messages, and get those messages directly to your targeted community — with powerful new tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more.

David says the underlying message of the book remains the same: "The tools of the marketing and PR trade have changed. The skills that worked offline to help you buy or beg or bug your way in are the skills of interruption and coercion. Online success comes from thinking like a journalist and engaging as a thought leader."

Right on, David!  I can't wait to dive into my copy of the second edition.

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Why I Haven’t Been Blogging Much Lately: Micro-Blogging!

August 28, 2008 / / 1 Comment

So, here’s a chart that shows what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging here.  Yep, micro-blogging on Twitter. There’s a free service for us twitterers (or, as some call us, "tweeple") — it’s called TweetRush, and it lets us graph our recent Twitter activity. Pretty cool. Graemetwitterusage_2

So, for you blog readers out there that may have been wondering why I’m so quiet, I’m really not!  🙂  Heck, 232 tweets since July 19th is pretty darn active, wouldn’t you say?  And virtually none of these tweets is about what I’m eating for breakfast, or some lame thing like that, which is what a lot of Twitter detractors think people do there. Darn near all my tweets or "micro-posts" are news items or insights that I think my "followers" — approaching 400 now — would be interested in. Occasionally, some are replies to certain followers, too — though I prefer to do a lot of that privately via what Twitter calls "Direct Message" or DM.  Some people go nuts with Twitter replies, though — almost using it like group email or IM. Letting everyone sort of be voyeurs into their personal, one-on-one conversations. But I find that quite silly, actually, for the most part. I much prefer to use Twitter to publish useful tidbits and, especially, links that open people up to even more connected knowledge out there — and create conversations on the back channel, whether via DM or email. Twitter is having huge implications in marketing and PR. Game changing, as a matter of fact. I even have a friend — a reporter — who’s about to publish a book called "Twitter Means Business," which gets into a lot of that. (He interviewed me and people from about three dozen other companies.)

Do you use Twitter?  Are you following me there?  If not, please set up your own free account, and then click "follow" here: www.twitter.com/graemethickins. If you’ve already been using it, what do you think of it?  Is it changing your online life, as it is mine?

Bloggers Break ‘Best Buy Capital’ Story; Company Goes Mum

March 29, 2008 / / 6 Comments

In yet another example of how blogging is changing the news business and the PR business, it’s interesting to go back and look at what happened over the past 10 days or so with a story relating to Best Buy — a company I know well, headquartered right here in suburban Minneapolis. Bestbuylogo
This little tale is instructive to those involved in communications and journalism.

First of all, I think the underlying news story here is a positive one for Best Buy, and for its employees and shareholders. (Full disclosure: I like the company, I have friends there, and I did a little interim gig there myself back in 1999/2000. It is an amazing outfit.) But it’s still interesting to watch big companies like this try to deal (or fail to deal) with the realities of new media.

Here’s the story as it broke locally here in the Twin Cities yesterday (Friday), by our very good Business Journal: Best Buy builds VC unit to find next big things. (More disclosure: I was contacted early in the week by one of the writers of this story to provide reaction to the news, and was quoted in it.) But what’s more interesting to me, even than the news itself, is the fact that it wasn’t first discovered by a traditional media outlet: a blogger had actually broken this story the week before. If you’re in the journalism or PR business and have any sense of the changes being wrought by new media, you of course know such occurrences are becoming more and more common.Bestbuyhq

The Fuse Is Lit
A consumer electronics blogger by the name of Lee Distad in Edmonton blogged this piece of news first on March 18 with this post: Best Buy Capital to Invest in Tech Innovations. He had more to say about it on a weekly recap he did the same day on another blog: Best Buy Opens Their Own Venture Fund. Soon, another blogger, who happens to be a VC (and also a Canuck) — that being Paul Kedrosky of the blog Infectious Greed — had picked up on Distad’s breaking news and posted a link in his own post: Return of Corporate Venture Investors. (A little aside: what he fails to realize, and the others as well, is that Best Buy is not a new corporate venture investor; they’ve been at this game for many years. The new entity appears to signal simply an expansion or formalization of their practice of making minority investments in promising new companies from time to time that are strategic to their business.  The name Best Buy Capital just appears to perhaps be a new name for this entity — though it should not be confused with an old entity called "Best Buy Capital LP," which the company formed in 1994 to raise expansion capital, as this old SEC filing details.)

Then (within minutes, I suspect), the blog TechConfidential (from TheDeal.com) was running a post with an even better headline — With Best Buy Capital, corporate VC goes big box. (Disclosure: I have been invited to be a member of the TechConfidential blogger network, though I did not see their story on Best Buy till this week.) You can see in their post that they included, like good little bloggers, links to the earlier posters, dutifully paying them homage. TheDeal.com exists to serve investors, so you can be sure plenty of people who follow BBY stock got early wind of this story, actually well ahead of the general market. (Did it cause a blip in the share price?  Maybe not all by itself, but I see the stock did trade up that day.  Investors hunger for every little piece of news about the companies whose stocks they hold.)Bbychart0308

Okay, so what’s so interesting about a bunch of bloggers who sniff out a story for their relatively small audiences, which is then broken as a piece of hard news later in Best Buy’s hometown by a large, traditional media weekly that reaches many tens of thousands more people? Nothing so much, since it’s happening a lot these days. What’s interesting to me is that, as Distad reports in his original post, not only could he not get any information or a comment from the company’s PR people — they didn’t even seem to _know_ anything about this particular development within their company! And, as you can see, our local Business Journal was also unable to get a comment from a Best Buy source for their story, a full 11 days after the original blog post.

The Disconnect
If you haven’t picked up yet from one of the links above, here’s how the original blogger discovered the story…are you ready?  From a job posting. That’s right, a little known but valuable source of news that smart people looking for insights about a particular company can often find — right on the company’s own web site! (Or on any of a number of other job boards.) This isn’t news about what’s happening now, mind you. It’s better than that: it’s about what’s coming. Hiring plans definitely qualify as a bellweather of things to come.

So then, what does Best Buy do (ostensibly on a call from the PR people to the HR people) — they take the job posting down! There, that will fix those pesky, nosey outsiders!  Now, those links in the above original blog posts go to a dead page. Not to worry, however — it took me less than a minute to find the job description had been copied and posted to another job listing site here. That’s the thing about the web: once something’s out there, it’s impossible to fully take it back. (This is the posting for a "Principal," whereas another job had been originally posted by Best Buy for the position of "Associate," which I did not search further for. A source of mine within Best Buy told me this week that three people would be hired for Best Buy Capital; I would guess that to be one Principal and two Associates.)

Now, it could be said that this was just a coincidence — that the job postings were removed because the company had suddenly filled all three positions. Hardly likely, since the original posting appears to have only gone up on March 11. (And I know how long things take at Best Buy.) It seems much more likely the company was spooked by a blogger breaking a story that, for some strange reason, they did not want known. Or did not go through "normal channels." (Hint to Best Buy: the world is changing, and, like it or not…channels aren’t normal anymore.)

But what I find the most interesting of all is that the HR people, through their job-posting system (they use the very common Taleo platform), are putting out news that they apparently don’t realize. That is, no one seems to have explained this to them. I’m surmising they don’t tell the PR people when they do post something like this — witness the original blogger running into complete ignorance of the news when he called PR. By the same token, the PR people aren’t trolling the postings regularly themselves, either, it would seem, to become aware of "news" the company may be putting out in ways other than the limited supply they dish out themselves. And limited it is. They, like most big companies of old (and so many overly regulated public firms, I suppose), seem to spend more time keeping the news in than letting it out.

Two things I would ask: (1) Shouldn’t Best Buy (and other companies of their size) start figuring out how to deal with the notion of transparency in our new world of New Media?  And, (2) Doesn’t it seem to you that somebody should get the HR people and the PR talking?

 

 

Some of the Great People I Met at DEMOfall ’07

October 1, 2007 / / 3 Comments

Well, once again — who’d have guessed? — I made a whole bunch of new contacts at DEMO! 🙂  Once I get home from these events and go through my cards, I’ve made it a tradition to do a post and say-hey to these folks. So, here ya go, friends!

Demofallstagebanner

The names below are just new people I actually got a card from. My apologies to all the others I met but didn’t have time to exchange cards with — that’s why cards are good: they help us remember!  Regardless, it was great meeting all of you!  And I hope to see you again soon in my travels, or at a  future conference. And to all those old friends and acquaintances I ran into again, it was awesome to see you, too!  I just wish I could have had a chance to talk more with all of you… Things are so rushed at these conferences, especially when you’re blogging like mad as well.  [That’s why the coming new DEMO.com community site will be so great!]

Here are those from whom I got a card (in alphabetical order by last name):
-Sean Ammirati, VP Business Development, mSpoke (FeedHub), Pittsburgh, PA
-Matt Biscuiti, VP, The Lippin Group, NYC (for PeopleJam)
-Alistair Campbell, CTO, TruPhone, London, UK
-Scott Chou, Chairman, iForem, Redwood Shores, CA (and Gabriel Venture Partners)
-Allison Clark, Ink Tank PR (for ideablob), Highland Park, IL
-Adam Darowski, UE Designer, BatchBlue Software, Providence, RI
-Chris DeMarche, Director, MotionDSP (FixMyMovie.com), San Mateo, CA
-Mike Garity, VP Marketing & Business Development, DEMO
-Thor Harris, President, Percepture, Lake Hiawatha, NJ
-Jonathan Hirshon, Principal, Horizon PR, Santa Clara, CA
-J. Johnson, Chairman, Global Communications, Houston, TX
-Ami Kassar, Chief Innovation Officer, Advanta (ideablob), Spring House, PA
-Zhenya Kirueshkin-Stepanoff, VP Sales, iForem, Redwood Shores, CA
-Joanne Kisling, PR, Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park, CA
-Colin Kurth, Events Manager, PR Newswire, Chicago, IL
-Rene Lacerte, CEO, CashView, Palo Alto, CA
-Dave Mawhinney, CEO, mSpoke (FeedHub), Pittsburgh, PA
-Macario Namie, Sr Director, Product Marketing, Jasper Wireless, Sunnyvale, CA
-Alex Olson, Cofounder, FilmCrave.com, Kansas City, MO
-Stephen Pieraldi, CEO, iForem, Redwood Shores, CA
-Trish Ridgway, Sr Account Executive, Ignite PR, Belmont, CA
-Michelle Riggen-Ransom, Communications Director, BatchBlue Software, Providence, RI
-Ori Soen, CEO, MuseStorm, Yahud, Israel, and Sunnyvale, CA
-Cathy Sperrazzo, EyeToEye Communications, San Diego, CA
-Oliver Starr, Senior Analyst, Guidewire Group, San Francisco, CA
-Sean Varah, CEO, MotionDSP (FixMyMovie.com), San Mateo, CA
-Rob Vickery, Clarinova, Del Mar, CA
-Amanda Wheatcroft, Principal, Beta PR, San Diego, CA

I’m gonna have to try getting onto BatchBlue’s free site for DEMOfall attendees (see my previous post on that company) so I can reconnect with people — both these and the ones I didn’t get cards from. There are so many conversations I wanted to have, so many great new companies and technologies I wanted to learn more about, so many old contacts I wanted to reconnect with, but (sigh) just not enough time. These two-day events are such a whirlwind!

Time for “Life 3.0” in the Valley?

May 23, 2007 / / 2 Comments

Back in late 2002, in the doldrum years after the Tech Crash, my friend Rich Karlgaard (the Publisher of FORBES) became compelled to start writing a book about a phenomenon he’d been observing in Silicon Valley. People were leaving in droves — entrepreneurs and other business people, tech workers of every stripe. Good people, successful people, and so many of them disallusioned. Life20cover They’d had it with the expensive living and the rat race up and down the 101, and they were determined to find a better life elsewhere. It’s a great book — called “Life 2.0” — and it’s on my recommended reading list in the right sidebar. He came to Minnesota to interview me when he first began writing it.

Well, hold on, but another book could be in the offing here, from somebody, based on what we read yesterday from two leading Valley-based technology bloggers. First, Michael Arrington launched this bomb on Tech Crunch: Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now…the most telling sentence of which was this: “Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks.” Here’s another excerpt, his concluding paragraph:

I left Silicon Valley at the peak of the insanity last time around, and I was pleasantly surprised when I returned in 2005 to see so much goodwill and community surrounding innovation. Now, it’s just like the old days again, and Silicon Valley is no longer any fun. In fact, it’s turned downright nasty. It may be time for some of us to leave for a while and watch the craziness from the outside again. In a few years, things will be beautiful again. The big money will be slumbering away, and the marketing departments will be a distant memory. We can focus, once again, on the technology. And the burgers and beer.

The post had 210 comments(!) at last count, so it’s obviously hitting a nerve. But, as if that wasn’t enough, Robert Scoble then chimes in essentially seconding the motion. I like Robert — he’s one of the nicest, most likeable, down-to-earth guys you will ever meet in this business. (And his wife, Maryam, is a real sweetheart, too.) So, when Robert talks, I listen. I respect what he says. Well, yesterday, he further enlightened all us unwashed masses of Valley outsiders with what it’s really like to be an insider there these days. And it does not sound particularly pleasant. His post was titled Why I’m in a malaise…, and here’s an excerpt:

I too look wistfully back at the days when we had almost the entire Social Software industry in one little coffee shop back in 2002 — none of whom were talking about making billions of dollars. Back then it was more like the Homebrew Computer Society, where geeks came to show off their stuff (and everyone was pretty much not getting paid anyway so of course we were doing it just for the love of it).

It seems to me that both Robert and Michael are tired of the grind — the relentless parade of me-too companies and legions of PR people and VCs trying to get their attention, and the hellish treadmill they’re on producing content day after day, night after night. You can only do that for so long before you get burned out — and it seems both of them have reached that point.

Then again, who knows, maybe they just need a vacation? What I do know is that I wouldn’t want either of their jobs. Sure, I’m a blogger, but these guys are hardly your typical bloggers anymore. They’re both part of serious, money-making publishing businesses (Robert also being a VP at PodTech), and both inextricably caught up in the big-money world of tech VC. Now it seems they’re both wondering, “Is this all there is?” And it begs the question: is this crazy Web 2.0 startup world getting closer and closer to a bubble burst?

Makes me glad I live in Minnesota, where things are a great deal more sane. And I know Rich Karlgaard would be the first to agree with me.

UPDATE: To add book link.

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