HOME OBSESSIONS - Media/Comm - Writing - Education - Music FAQ HEROES CAREER BLOG - RSS CONTACT This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. arch emisou panton
	Phil's Blogservations Wednesday, August 31, 2005 Posted by philgomes 5:58 PM R.I.P. Kepler's Sad news. It was one of my favorite bookstores. Met James Watson there of "Watson and Crick" fame. Story by Geoff Goodfellow of Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere. | Monday, August 29, 2005 Posted by philgomes 1:11 PM Off To NYC Jetlag and a series of meetings at Edelman's New York offices will mean that blogging will be light this week. On the Annenberg front, I practically devoured this study on Usenet use (PDF). Fascinating stuff. | Posted by philgomes 1:38 AM Mom... If You're Reading This... ...just know that, according to the latest research, I'm eating quite well. Coffee is likely to contribute far more health-giving anti-oxidants to the British diet than fruit and vegetables, new research suggests. The evidence comes from the United States, where scientists measured the antioxidant content of more than 100 items, including vegetables, fruits, nuts, spices, oils and beverages. | Sunday, August 28, 2005 Posted by philgomes 10:15 PM No More Rio? It's true. And guess what brand of MP3 player this blogger uses? | Friday, August 26, 2005 Posted by philgomes 11:57 PM The Effects Of Regulation On The Blogosphere I've been yelling for a while now that companies, their employees, and especially agencies need to wake up to the regulatory ramifications of corporate blogging. But, of course, no amount of yelling I could do could possibly match what's going to happen with a gajillion PR pros forward this Reuters article around over the weekend. But lawyers see possible legal pitfalls for companies looking to join the blogging phenomenon. What, for instance, would happen if someone at a publicly traded company unwittingly divulged confidential financial information or a trademark secret on one of these Web diaries? We need to think about this. Hard. Like I wrote a while back (when I was of my since reformed, strongly anti-comment bent): Can you imagine using "But we were just trying to be open and approachable" as your excuse to the SEC when your company's blog postings, comments, and regulatory filings just don't seem to jibe? I hate to harsh your mellow, but that's what could be at stake. Update: Moving from regulation to litigation, the folks at Calblog — in two posts today — have a great set of links to get everyone up-to-speed on the SEObook/TrafficPower lawsuit. | Thursday, August 25, 2005 Posted by philgomes 8:16 PM Duck! The PR Flaggelation Meme Returns! "The evolutionary path is better and better content." - Dave Taylor, Blog Business Summit, San Francisco, Aug. 17, 2005 I had actually put this quote into a presentation an hour before I came across the latest "PR is dead" round-robin, first by way of Kevin Dugan. I'm not exactly sure how resurrecting this tired, quarterly-to-semi-annual PR-flaggelation meme necessarily moves the ball ten yards closer to the goal implied in the statement above, but it sure got a lot of attention, didn't it? The fact is, when I read the PR blogs from veterans and newcomers alike, I see that the best in the profession are changing and adapting to new technologies and forms of communications. Sure, there have been missteps along the way — which are easy and sometimes even fun to ridicule — but I really feel like the industry has owned up to them and moved on. This recurring meme is a distraction and this post will be the last time I bring it up. Team... Let's concentrate on elevating the profession — learning chess while others might be satisfied to master checkers. | Wednesday, August 24, 2005 Posted by philgomes 12:36 PM Trying Out Google Talk Don't know how long it'll stay on my system, but readers can add phil.gomes [at] gmail [dot] com if they want to kick the tires on Google Talk. | Monday, August 22, 2005 Posted by philgomes 5:07 PM Congratulations To Tom Murphy I wanted to be among the first to extend a heartfelt congratulations to Tom Murphy, who leaves Cape Clear after four years of groundbreaking PR work to take a position at Microsoft's Ireland office. Tom, by my reckoning, was among the very first to offer RSS feeds in a corporate newsroom. Steve Rubel once said that Tom and I had been blogging since "dinosaurs were walking the earth." While I wish that were true — "Urgh... Me say new club seamlessly integrates with Stegosaurus skull..." — what I do know is that Tom most certainly elevated the online conversation of our profession with his singular voice and approach, posting thoughtful musings and insights back when I was still writing about pretty much anything and everything that crossed my vision. Congrats again, Tom. As one of my friends back in the East Bay would say, "A homie shall rise." | Saturday, August 20, 2005 Posted by philgomes 4:43 PM Phil's Blogservations: PR Policy I just got a pitch that said: I understand you are the Blogger for Phil's Blogservations... How did that get around?! Yes... Guilty as charged. Actually, I've been getting a number of pitches lately — more in the past month than I've seen in a year. So, taking my cue from Mobhappy, I'm posting the PR pitch policy on this blog. I've adopted their "Amber Alert" symbol. This is especially useful at this time since I'm working on some blog-related projects at-and-for Edelman, which may or may not affect my interests here. I'm interested in hearing your pitch for this blog if: The email you send is clearly sent to me and not to a list. You yourself (or members of the company you represent) actively and thoughtfully blog. You want to open a dialogue about new, interesting, novel, unusual, and most of all ethical PR or communications techniques and practices. You are a blogger or member of the media and you've written/posted something interesting that might have missed my watchful gaze You are a music group that's doing innovative work in metal, rock, jazz, gothic, indie, or experimental. (Bonus points if you're willing to donate a sample of your work for "bumper music" in my to-be-developed podcast in exchange for promotional consideration at the end of the show.) You are a fan of the types of music described above. You are mentioned on my Heroes pages You are promoting blog-, media-, or communications-related events. That doesn't narrow things very much but, for those of you who haven't started reading this site until recently, the above list pretty much wraps up what consumes this online representation of my lashed-together braincells. Keep watching this space for updates. | Posted by philgomes 3:42 PM Blog Business Summit: Final Thoughts I'm starting this post in SFO at 6:30pm as I'm waiting for my plane back to El Lay. My irrational WiFi Entitlement Syndrome(TM) prevents me from paying for the pay-as-you-go service here, so I'll be posting this once my thirst for free connectivity has been sated. In any case, I felt I got a lot out of the summit. Maybe a lot of the presentations and discussions were a little too "one-oh-one" for many members of the audience but, generally, presenters did a good job of ensuring that everyone was brought into parallel frames of reference. A long time ago, I had a really hardline opinion against turning on the comments in a corporate blog. As regular readers know, my stance here has softened somewhat. (I now encourage it quite strongly if resources permit, but I don't necessarily damn a blogger for choosing not to have them.) But this was actually the first conference I really bothered to blog from, though. The act of chronicling the conference in (sort-of) real-time, reading other people's posts, getting comments on my initial post, and so on demonstrated to me how wrong that early stance was. It's kind of like that scene in Hellraiser II when the doctor, transformed into a superpowered Cenobite, gushed "And to think I hesitated. *crickets chirping* (Yeah, whatever... If you're reading this blog or have looked at other parts of the site, you'll know that the pop-culture references are as frequent as they are nearly impenetrable.) And don't even bring up how I would have otherwise written my April 2003 article on RSS. I met a lot of interesting folks for the first time, too. Steve Gillmor, Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, Dean Hachamovich, Evelyn Rodriguez, Steve Gershik, Rebecca Blood, and a host more. In many cases, I've corresponded with these people and/or have read their work for some time. Even met Sam Perry, formerly of Reuters. If memory serves, he was one of the first journalists I met face-to-face in my PR career, lo those years ago when I was the account coordinator on Simply Interactive. One thing that was surreal was that some speakers in the marketing/PR trades or executive ranks were discussing the importance of corporate-blog-enabled transparency, openness, participation, and so forth... using the language, intonation, metaphor-set, and style that was learned in the boardroom! Is blogging growing up? Or is it another indication of the need for even the most Cluetrained practitioners to continually adapt? (At times, it was almost like saying "I'm going to be spontaneous. At 2:54pm tomorrow, I will be spontaneous.") That said, I will say that — even after the PR and marketing industries' respective early missteps in the blogosphere — people generally starting to think the right way and are doing great work. That much is clear. Finally, check out Tom Foremski's wrap-up over at Silicon Valley Watcher. Regularly scheduled programming follows. | Friday, August 19, 2005 Posted by philgomes 3:57 PM Blog Business Summit: Six Apart Launches Moveable Type v3.2 Anil Dash of Six Apart introduced Moveable Type v3.2 after lunch. (For the record, I started this post before the promised feebie.) There appears to be a pretty easy migration path: one-click upgrade. But the coolest thing is their response to comment/trackback spam. There's a new junk folder automatically filters potential spam, such that you can retrieve falsely flagged contributions from your online community. (As an entertaining example, Mr. Dash pointed out that a comment with the word "specialist" would otherwise be killed-on-sight because the system would see that the word "cialis" is in the middle.) The remaining items left in the folder are deleted after a certain period. This feature drew applause from some of the attendees. The user manual "learns" from the MT community's comments and even prints on demand. Thanks to a partnership with Qoop, you can order a manual and it will incorporate the very latest MT community learning up until that point. Nice touch. Congrats to the Six Apart team! | Posted by philgomes 12:05 PM Blog Business Summit: New Microsoft Internet Explorer And RSS I'm IM'ing with John Sun. Microsoft's Robert Scoble, Dean Hachamovich, and Sean Lyndersay are showing off some new features in Internet Explorer v7.0. Phil Gomes: MSFT is going to debut MSIE v7 John Sun: exciting John Sun: built in adware protection? Phil Gomes: Here it comes... Phil Gomes: Offers feed preview and subscribe buttons. Phil Gomes: Text box offers drilldown filter capability. The demonstration was quite slick. (They're giving out a copy of MSIE v7b1!) Mr. Hachamovich is talking about subscribing to calendar feeds, contact feeds, playlist feeds, and so on. Personally, I'd be thrilled to subscribe to feeds of technology, media, music, and business events and have it automatically show up in my Outlook calendar. (Maybe if Steve Koepke's venerable "The List" email newsletter was instead a feed or, specifically, a feed that only pulls out events with the "recommended shows" tag.) Mr. Hachamovich denies the conference's intermittently floated notion that "blogs mean the end of PR". Mr. Scoble follows with the notion that a corporate blogger needs to be a little bit of a PR person, legal expert, support tech, salesperson, and essentially a broad evangelist for the company. When asked about what to do organizationally with corporate legal resistance to setting up a blog, the group said that their guiding principle in that regard is common sense. Call me an optimist, but most people have a pretty good sense of right and wrong. And, hopefully, the bloggers (or team thereof) know when to seek counsel from their legal folks, PR folks, IR folks, and other experts both inside and outside the organization. Mr. Hachamovich also said that he'd be interested in subscribing to a feed from a server logfile. Good idea. I think this would make Tim Tuck's life easier, since I know his inbox is sometimes overrun with system messages. Another interesting point: Mr. Hachamovich drew a parallel between RSS and the TCP/IP spec. Sure, TCP/IP is low-level protocol stuff, but a company puts it into the operating system, leaves it there, others build on top of it, and then you get IM, email, Skype, etc. RSS, similarly, can be the basis for a ton of services. This certainly maps with Microsoft's strategy to integrate RSS pervasively into the OS, and my claim that RSS will melt into the computer ecosystem to the point where you don't notice it anymore. Excellent start to the last day of the conference. I know you don't hear this that often on this blog, but bravo to the Microsoft team. | Posted by philgomes 10:45 AM Blog Business Summit: Posts Of Note Wanted to share some blogosphere reactions from Blog Business Summit, which wraps up today. Janet Johnson of Marqui has been blogging this fairly consistently InfoWorld's Cathleen Moore shares her thoughts about the Taylor/Scoble panel about driving traffic This looks like it would've been interesting And I clearly missed this one! That's not to say that I didn't have my fun. I had a highly enjoyable conversation with Tom Foremski and Jennifer McClure at Maxfield's. | Posted by philgomes 2:16 AM Blog Business Summit: Thursday Notes Was fortunate enough to run into Mike Manuel during the Blog Business Summit. He mentioned my lengthy post in response to Dave Taylor's talk. "So," he said. "I read your Magna Carta from last night..." Ugh... You're right, man... I did go kinda long. So, I attended about five times as many sessions today. I'll try to be merciful. Those of you presenters who aren't on this round-up, fret not. I enjoyed today immensely. However, tonight I'm prone to compression. Jay Stockwell of Blogpulse touched upon something that I've typically referred to in seminars/lectures as "cheating Dr. Heisenberg". In physics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle basically states that you can't really "measure" something because to measure something it to disturb it. When I first came up with the idea, though, I was talking about BBSs and ListServs. Mr. Stockwell said: "Blog research is unsolicited and naturally occurring. It's a lot more real than solicited forms of research." It amazes me that more PR pratitioners don't take advantage of this — listening to their markets as a matter of day-to-day practice, rather than leveraging infrequent and blunt tools like audits and such. (These tools aren't entirely without their merits, of course, but you get the idea.) In other news...Dave Taylor and Robert Scoble disagree on the whole partial-and-full-feed debate. Mr. Scoble, a frequent traveler, will only take a full feed unless the source is one he considers highly valuable (e.g., The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNET). Dave sees instances where either could work and serve a need or purpose. For my part, I switched to a full feed because, well, I can. Clickthroughs to my site don't matter to me, but making it as easy as possible for folks to read my content does matter. (And, since I often catch my feeds through Bloglines' mobile format, full-text feeds don't go unappreciated by yours truly.) In terms of driving traffic to one's blog, DL Byron suggested "Blog with a soul. Blog with creativity, and good stuff will come." And I remember when I was told that blogging with my own voice would be a career-limiting move of jump-the-shark proportions. From Buzz Bruggeman: "Bloggers are your intelligent agents." On a panel that we once shared, Jon Udell used the metaphor of bloggers as an information processing network. To tell you the truth, trusted bloggers — as well as IM — enabled me to be more effective in my former work-at-home situation. Agent technology has yet to catch up. Janet Johnson of Marqui outlined "Marquiism" incident, whereby they paid bloggers to blog anything they wanted about the company, on the condition that they regularly link to the firm. That's brave to admit that kind of thing, but I'm glad they did. Everyone learned a lesson from it. To wrap up "The blogosphere is self-cleansing and will right itself within moments." Mr. Scoble was asked the infamous "How do you pitch a blogger?" question. His answer, though, was more charitable and open than most bloggers allow: "Send me cool information that is not about your company. Build a relationship." The thing is, Mr. Scoble appears to be an unusually pleasant fellow, which is particularly admirable considering the credibility and power he wields in the blogosphere. Generally, though, I default to my standard position that companies should think about participation (read: blogging) before worrying about pitching. People want to pitch first, thinking that blogging is perhaps just a hair out-of-reach, and that's a somewhat ass-backward approach — thoughtful and consistent blogosphere participation lends great credibility. At the very least, companies should develop an appreciation for how the mainstream media informs and drives conversation in the blogosphere, irrespective of whether "pitching" is applied. Mr. Scoble's take on crisis communications takes the standard get-in-front-of-the-story-first tack, but is accelerated through the blog model. "First thing: I link to the bad news and I acknowledge it. It gives me a few hours to meet with execs and the PR team to find out what the story is" in order to give a credible response. That response, though, is in his voice, not in marketroid-speak. With regard to high-profile blogger firings, Mr. Scoble shared the creative simile of corporate culture as like a membrane. Sometimes that membrane is pliable, sometimes it's as tight as a drumhead. And, sometimes, employees strain or pierce that membrane with their blogs or other conduct. As a general note... It was pretty clear based on the first few presentations that, while it doesn't amount to a wholesale rejection, there is a strong resistance to bloggerati who say "If you don't follow my narrowly drawn rules, you don't have a blog and I will say so as loudly as possible." There seems to be a recognition that asking a company and its employees to blog — or properly understanding the ones that already are — is already a significant step. Looking forward to Friday. | Posted by philgomes 12:20 AM Blog Business Summit: Opening Panel Remarks Evelyn Rodriguez opened the very first panel at the Blog Business Summit. Here is an extended version of her remarks. | Thursday, August 18, 2005 Posted by philgomes 6:09 PM Blog Business Summit: My Exploding Aggregator I'm listening to (and meeting) so many wonderful folks who I'm gladly adding to my information-processing network of very smart people (aka, my uber-blogger directory in Bloglines). Time well-spent. | Posted by philgomes 1:42 PM Blog Business Summit: Download The Presentations Many of them are available on the site. | Wednesday, August 17, 2005 Posted by philgomes 7:57 PM Notes from Dave Taylor's Talk At Blog Business Summit Here are some choice bits from the first part of today's talk by Dave Taylor at Blog Business Summit. Unfortunately, the authentication for the wireless Internet access kept booting me off, so real-time blogging wasn't possible. Some of his talk is in this post, and the rest will be addressed in other one. (I eventually defaulted to Windows Notepad.) "A blog is something that separates the content from the presentation." - 13:18pm I felt that this is an important distinction that few recognize. Also, Taylor did a good job of reiterating that blogging is a tool, first and foremost, and was careful not to ascribe any philosophical baggage to it. "How many of you know what a phenomenal disaster these [SEO companies] can be?" (Audience response: "Amen!") - 13:23pm Ironically, Dave can't reliably find SEO companies' sites using search engines. Hilarious! When he presses the SEO companies as to why they don't show up higher, the response is "Well... It's a crowded space." Seems to me that would be true of any SEO firm's customers as well. "First aggressive statement of the day: Your homepage is absolete. Why? Because people don't come to your homepage anymore." - 13:28 Spot on. My blog homepage and its full-text RSS feed are a third of the traffic to my site. The second-third comprises blog archives and permalinks. "Flash sucks. Don't use it on your website." (Light applause.) - 13:30 Reminded me of Tom Murphy's Flash Hall Of Shame. "RSS is crippled with terrible terminology. If you don't like 'RSS' you can use 'RDF'. If you don't like 'RDF' you can use 'XML'." - 13:36 Now, really, those terms aren't nearly as interchangeable as I heard Mr. Taylor describe them, but my position is that it won't matter what you call it. "RSS and blogs are only coincidentally related." - 13:40 Another important point. After all, he points out, The New York Times is probably the furthest thing from a blog and yet it offers its content as RSS feeds. It amazes me that many people don't get this distinction. To tell you the truth, I think I might have missed it early on several years ago. "Why do I have four weblogs? Because I can write about parenting without it getting in the way of [my business] site." - 13:45 I keep a perso-professional blog because those two parts of my life are so intertwined. For some, like Amy Gahran, the issue isn't so cut-and-dry. Mr. Taylor's life is such that he maintains four just to avoid confusing his audience(s). "RSS feeds are like Marimba seven years later." 13:47 Comparisons to "push" vendors like Marimba, Pointcast, and BackWeb kind of disintegrate after scrutiny (something I did early on as well), but it does seem to switch on some lightbulbs among the syndication-uninitiated. "You don't have to timestamp your articles. It's just a tool. You can subvert it however you want. There are no rules. There are no blog police, though there might be those in this room..." 13:51 Corporations that are blogging are already making very big leaps. It doesn't help that sometimes they're met with gripes like "if you don't do these [x] things, you don't have a blog." Like, for example, people get dinged if their blog is anything less than the unfiltered, extemporaneous musings of the blogger. These same people even go so far as to say that typos are encouraged because they're supposed to demonstrate a degree of authenticity. I'm not saying that corporate blogs should have labrynthine layers of PR/IR/legal red-tape between the blogger and his/her post but, sorry, some of us like to think and go over what we write before sharing it with the world. Phil sidenote: I noticed that the Israel/Scoble book Naked Conversations is available for pre-order on Amazon.Com. I'm trying to order mine, but Amazon is fighting me. - 14:01 Now back to the regularly scheduled programming... "I work out of my basement and I get quoted in BusinessWeek about stuff." - 14:02 This pre-saged a predictable, praeteritio-laced, "I'm-not-saying-fire-your-PR- team-but-PR-is-now-useless" train of thought that continued after the connection became unreliable. Fear not, because I captured a lot of it in my text editor and will address that part of the talk in another post. The gist of it, though, it that Mr. Taylor clearly felt that "public relations" and "an entity that generates press releases" are completely interchangeable terms. As you know, I'm pretty unapologetic about what I do for a living because I believe I do it ethically and that it serves a role in the business ecosystem. Does PR need to adapt to current technologies, methods, standards, and expectations of public conduct? Yes. Will it? Of course. Taking cheap shots at the PR profession, though, is not only less-than-helpful but it's about as original and rhetorically interesting as a lawyer joke. A conference called "Blogs For Business" shouldn't try to marginalize the functional group within organizations that will most likely be charged with crafting the policies that govern corporate blogging. (And Mr. Taylor does advocate putting such policies in place.) "Trackbacks are an interesting concept, poorly implemented, and don't have a lot of value." - 14:12 Mr. Taylor's argument against trackbacks is that he likes to see all of the relevant comments about a post or item all on the same page, instead of dispersed across a number of sites. This is a usability issue on which reasonable people might of course disagree. I take the view that trackbacks enhance the discussion ecosystem. Frankly, I think most people would want to spend more time writing their posts than commenting on those of others. Trackbacks allow for a comment-like mechanism that satisfies that group. Mr. Taylor admits that he's in the minority on this point. UPDATE: 12:40 a.m., Aug. 18, 2005 Mr. Taylor weighed in, clarifying my notes on the homepage issue. "home pages are obsolete EXCEPT for those people who get a business card or see an advert" True that. In fact, I think that it was Dell's global Internet programs manager who was among the first to say that it was considered imperative that "dell.com" appear on everything — business cards, letterhead, and so on. Answering a posted question: "Praeteritio" is a rhetorical device wherein the orator says "I'm not going to bring up [x], but...". (Look for it during election season. "I don't mean to keep talking about my war record, but...") Mr. Taylor said that he wasn't advocating firing the marketing/PR guy at your company but, especially to the uninitiated, PR people later started to sound like parasitic elements in your org chart. And... Of course, more of my thoughts about the PR-related comments are below, as promised. Now... Back to my conference notes... "Just as someone shouldn't be picking up a brush and taking it to a canvas, not everyone should blog." I'll tellya... He's right. That BusinessWeek cover story about blogs from earlier this year both helped and hurt the cause. It helped in that the Dilbertian pointy-haired boss now knows that "blogs" aren't something his teenage son was diagnosed with at the school clinic. It hurt in that we now have a bunch of folks that read the story, maybe listened to a webcast or two and are now "experts" — not because they've had their hand in it for an appreciable period of time, but because they read it in their favorite business publication. "BusinessWeek told me to 'catch up, or catch you later'", you'll hear. "I guess we need a... What did they call it? A...'blog', now. Dave? Make it so." Here, an agency's role is to put billings-beyond-the- dreams-of-avarice aside and ask "Is a blog really a tool that this client should have in its toolbox at this time?" So, when you find blogs from exactly the folks Mr. Taylor is talking about, now you'll know at least one possible backstory. Which brings up the question... If properly preparing a company for business media is somewhat akin to pursuing a date with Salma Hayek, what kind of ridiculous simile can I cook up for preparing a company for full-frontal blogosphere participation? Actually, I'm going to leave that well enough alone, since ya'll gave me so much crap for the Hayek post. Salma... If you're reading this... I did move to Los Angeles and... Anyway... Blogs aren't for everyone at every company, but ya'll knew that. "Press releases are dead. PR is dead." People do seem to like saying this. Steve Rubel started on this fairly recently and clarified his position somewhat in his podcast. It's not enough for some folks that a new technology, method, or skill be novel and noteworthy. No... It must destroy the previous method. Why is this? As of this writing, a blog post is not "disclosure" in the eyes of regulatory bodies. I would go further to say that most journalists still consider a press release as a form of official communications and would not ascribe the same to a blog posting. This is changing, certainly — I know at least one Wall Street Journal reporter who scans blogs regularly — but saying "the press release is dead" is a bit strong. Press releases have a well-defined role. Blogs have an emerging role. And both instruments, much like the handgun, have the potential for misuse. Properly, ethically, and judiciously applied, however, PR is the marketing discipline most commensurate with the blogosphere, if any marketing discipline is to be applied at all. This is because both hold credibility as the highest-order variable. "The purpose of public relations is to increase your 'findability.'" I'm sorry, man. I really gotta call you on this one. Actually, this comes from the specious notion that "there's no such thing as bad PR." I mean... Enron was pretty "findable." Job well-done, boys! Again... credibility. Thankfully, Mr. Taylor says that he runs into a number of PR people who are thrilled that the conversation is opening up and there are new models and methods. This is good to hear. Frankly, we as a profession should've blown past the whole field-NDAs- then-brief-analysts- then-brief-long-leads- then-brief-short-leads- then-distribute-press-release pothole ten or twenty miles back. A well-heeled rollout strategy in some instances, but not in all of them. (And I argue the number of instances is declining.) The companies that want to be written about need to do things worth writing about. I maintain that's only part of the story. Arguably, a lot of companies do things that are worth writing about. Unfortunately, far too many PR programs try to rise above the noise by turning up the volume. Now: In a world where there are so many companies doing so many innovative things, I'm willing to bet that a company's audiences (press, investors, analysts, customers, prospects, and the general public) want a level of transparency at the day-to-day and philosophical levels. Right now, blogs and other web-based technologies are emerging as the best tool for that job. "Rethink how you're spending your marketing PR budget." These tend to be remarkably unexamined, really, both in fat and lean times. To the degree that companies focus on press releases, tradeshows, and stunts, I'm sure that some of them can be made to divert attention to online-community-related efforts, especially these days. One audience member asked a question about the risks and rewards (mostly the former) about "Letting employees 'play' in the blogosphere." Since the conference is called "Blog Business Summit", Mr. Taylor pounced and I agree with him — why must it be described as "play"? Reminds me of the episode from early in my career, described in Dan Gillmor's book, when my monitoring of a customer-run listserv was charitably considered kind of... well... cute. "Companies need blogging policies." Most importantly, though, Mr. Taylor rightly pointed out that a lot of company-handbook rules that should govern an employee's blog also apply to, well, everywhere else. (Here's my litmus test.) One can't really argue that, say, distributing leaflets printed with company secrets isn't a termination-worthy offense. The best blogging policies, really, are medium-neutral to a very large extent, with refinements as required. "You should allow comments. If you do, it's very important to have a stated policy on what kind of comments that you will approve. It is imperative in the business blogging space to moderate the comments." I only changed my mind on allowing comments on this blog when I got a position where the word "blog" showed up in a job description. Some people treated my decision with a PC-versus-Mac fervor, but they misunderstood my intentions. When I started this thing in 2001, it was a resource issue — I couldn't afford to spend a lot of time on this. Now, it's more commensurate with what I do, so I've opened up the dialogue. That said, I'm definitely not as quick as most to jump on bloggers who don't have their comments turned on. Rather than a stated policy on deleting comments, I've just been satisfied using common sense and ethics, though recognizing that I would demand more of an organization. I deleted my first comment earlier this week, in fact, where the comment stood the risk of identifying a private person. (And you know how I feel about that.) Mr. Taylor is definitely down on linkblogs. "Tell me why you think I should read this." True, but I tend to think that linkblogs are more for the bloggers who write them. A public form of bookmarking, really. Tagging is not constrained enough to be of any value. Think about it: Eventually, it will self-organize the way wikis seem to, but Mr. Taylor rightly warns that people can toe-may-toe/tom-ah-toe the concept to death. It reminds me of the ID3 tags on my MP3s. Some songs are genre-listed as "metal", and some "heavy metal". Here's the money-quote of the talk — and a warning to those who will attempt to get ahead by trying to game the system: "The evolutionary path is better and better content." Search algorithms change, but your content is hopefully some measure of "good" and getting better. Thanks very much for the talk. Looking forward to the rest of the conference. | Posted by philgomes 1:55 PM Greetings From The Blog Business Summit Thanks to a WiFi connection thoughtfully provided by AnchorFree, I'm posting from the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco. I'll try to post live for as long as the battery lasts, and later transcribe-and-upload any chickenscratch thereafter. | Tuesday, August 16, 2005 Posted by philgomes 7:56 PM Bricklin On Podcasting Journalists Dan Bricklin has some observations on new podcasters who, while aces in their core fields, have a ways to go in the audio medium. With the rush to podcasting by just about every "content" provider, we're now seeing "journalists" who are "professionals" in one medium (usually print reporters or bloggers) trying to publish in another (audio) and they often sound like total newbies. I like the new outlet for information that podcasting provides. I like it that newspaper and other "text-based" reporters are now filing stories in audio form with actual interviews where you can hear the interviewee squirming. But, as I hear the sometimes poor audio quality and blog-like "I'm doing it myself" character of these podcasts I'm reminded of how "professional" journalists just a little while ago were deriding us bloggers as something of poor quality. As I hear them learning-by-doing in the audio sphere, just as we bloggers-turned-podcasters are, I hope they are getting a greater understanding of us and how the rough quality of our blog writing may not reflect on the quality of our thoughts and messages. Inspired by my buddy Aaron "Papa Smurf" Grant, I've been kicking the tires in terms of maybe starting up my own podcast. I ran a college radio station back in the day, so I hope I haven't forgotten anything. We'll have to see. I have so many pet projects rattling around, that I'll have to pick one or four. | Monday, August 15, 2005 Posted by philgomes 6:31 PM Registration Was Today, Classes Start In A Week I spent today at USC Annenberg, getting things ready for the upcoming semester. During orientation, it was clear that this Master's program attracts people from all walks of life, with equally diverse goals. I'm definitely looking forward to this and, more interestingly, applying these courses to my job. I plan on blogging some of my impressions from class, so watch this space for more detail. | Saturday, August 13, 2005 Posted by philgomes 12:39 PM RSS And PR: The Discussion Continues Over across the pond, Stuart Bruce talks about how publishers are taking to RSS, while PR folks continue to lag. He also points to some helpful services. I've always referred to RSS's strength as being "incorruptibly opt-in", that is, no one can force an RSS feed down one's throat. If a feed starts to suck, folks can unsubscribe. Simple. Elegant. When I originally wrote "Using RSS For Corporate Communications" for MediaMap's ExpertPR letter back in April 2003, I remember it was intro'ed by the editors with something like "Don't worry. We didn't know what it was either." Granted there are folks like Tom Murphy who got multi-channel feeds going in the Cape Clear newsroom early on, but I'm wondering if the PR industry's attitude toward RSS has changed substantially in the two years since. Of course, we PR-blogger folks (or, in my case, "PR-people-who-blog"... big difference) have been singing RSS's praises for years now. Truly widespread use of RSS in PR is going to happen quietly and, one day, you'll log on to your computer and see that it's all over the place and has been for some time. In fact, I predict that people won't even be conscious of (or particularly care about) the fact that they are consuming RSS or some other syndication form. Once the new Windows ships — which is supposed to support RSS right out-of-the-box — subscribing to web content (from journalistic, corporate, personal, or other sources) will be viewed in much the same way that you operate other functions that have been just kind of absorbed into the OS. Of course, it's our job as PR folks to understand the inner workings of such things now, which is what I believe Mr. Bruce is rightly challenging the industry to do. | Thursday, August 11, 2005 Posted by philgomes 12:38 PM Demographic Information On Blog Visitors Six Apart and Gawker Media sponsored a ComScore study based on a two-million-user sample of net-heads. The result? Blog visitors are 11% more likely than the average internet user to have incomes of US$75,000 or more, and are 30% more likely to live in households headed by someone between the ages of 18 and 34, the study found. Not surprisingly, the study shows that Gawker (and, even less surprisingly, Gawker property Fleshbot) are among the most visited. This is the same demographic that advertisers would kill for, sometimes resulting in some pretty airwave-blighting TV programming. Let's hope the blogosphere — which has demonstrated a remarkably self-regulating capability — resists similar temptations. | Posted by philgomes 8:55 AM A Quick Post From The Windy City "Um... What's wrong with outside?", I thought to myself. I'm booked in the Fairmont here during my visit to Edelman HQ. As Rick's assistant Loni went over my travel plans before I left, she mentioned that the cool thing about staying at the Fairmont was that there's a connecting underground tunnel that goes right into the Aon Center lobby, where the company's offices are located. "That way," I was told, "you won't have to go outside." Kind of a scary thing to hear when you're someone with a native Californian's characteristically narrow tolerances for temperature extremes. (The heat and humidity can get a bit oppressive, I guess, but I hear that's nothing compared to the winters here. I've been warned!) Turns out it was meant as a suggestion of convenience rather than comfort or saftey — cuts plenty of time out of the walk not having to go outside. Second-shortest commute I've ever had next to the time when I worked from home. I'd write more about what-all is going on, but the Cliff's notes version reads: Giving a series of presentations. Meeting boatloads of incredibly smart folks. HALO-jumping into various teams and projects. Listening. Learning. In short, a great first week. Meanwhile, Steve Rubel points me to Donald Trump's blog, Hobson and Holtz interview Constantin Basturea, and Tom Murphy continues to be pestered by ill-conceived agency pitches. (Seriously, man. They're after you!) And thanks to all of my PR-blogging brethren and site visitors who have wished me luck in my new job. Posts to the blogosphere are, among a great many other things, now also the new report-card-magnetized-to-the-refrigerator-door. Mama and Papa Gomes are probably printing out your wonderfully supportive posts now. Off to our annual HQ event. Back at'cha later. | Tuesday, August 09, 2005 Posted by philgomes 10:52 AM Off To Chicago I'm heading off to Chicago for a series of meetings at Edelman HQ. I'll do my best to deliver updates from there. Gotta make sure my toys are charged up. | Monday, August 08, 2005 Posted by philgomes 11:19 AM Thoughts On Peter Jennings Half-listening to talk radio while cleaning up around the house last night, I started to get that uneasy feeling that you get when you tune in mid-broadcast and the host is clearly talking about a very important public person in the past tense. One commercial break later, I got the news. Did I know Mr. Jennings personally? No. In my PR career, and especially during my agency-side tenure with SRI some years ago, I did get to interface with some members of his staff. (And I seem to remember one or two producers in particular.) Upon recollection, one thing that struck me at the time was that Mr. Jennings' vision for the evening news was so strongly imbued in the staff, and I suspected this was more so than any other TV news staff I had worked with up through that time. "This is great," one might say after hearing, say, a public-policy-research-related SRI story idea. "Now... How do I take this to Peter Jennings? What will Peter think? Would Peter do this?" This, in my experience, was a little unusual. Typically, when I got quite that far into the discussion of a client's news or potential contribution to a story, mention of the anchor almost never came into play until I flipped on the TV at the time of the broadcast. Something was clearly different. In this case, it appeared that Mr. Jennings had not only provided a clear framework for ABC's definition of news, but it was wrapped in a value set that he communicated to the staff — "how to satisfy Peter's (not ABC's, but Peter's) rigorous requirements?" was the question. Policies and checkbox-lists are one thing, but the personality and values behind them are what make an organization work. Critics may argue that this flies in the face of "objectivity", to which I might respond with a speech that starts with "I hate to tell you there's no Easter Bunny, but..." If you're a thoughtful media consumer, you consider the values and attitudes of the source and make your analysis accordingly. So, of Mr. Jennings I can only say this: The measure of a person is, in large part, rooted in the values and attitudes that he or she inspires in friends, colleagues, and family. Mr. Jennings has been described as "rigorous" and "devoted" as well as "demanding and exacting". To Mr. Jennings' credit, these are values that are extremely likely to survive whatever rite of anchordesk succession ABC has planned. | Sunday, August 07, 2005 Posted by philgomes 5:32 PM Regarding School And, Yes, A New Job A couple of things came together during my early-July room-hunting in Los Angeles. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the local Craig's List was of immense help in finding a place. I set up various appointments the weekend before and promised myself that I would not leave Los Angeles until I found a shared living situation that I knew I could make work. In a town where I maybe know two or three people personally, I figured a shared situation would get me acclimated to my new environs quickly. In the last hour or so of my trip, I finally found such a situation. I now have a great roommate and we share a nice townhouse that's maybe two miles from Venice Beach. There are also two cats. One is highly affectionate and is owned by my roommate. The other is a hissing, scratching, white-and-fluffy demon-spawn and was left behind by the previous tenant. I've since put holy water and Bactine on my shopping list. Anyway... As my trip wound up, something else happened. An inbound email (subject heading: "Call Me...Pronto!") and subsequent phone call with a company representative yielded an extremely compelling opportunity — and a major decision for yours truly by the time we hung up. The annual family trip to Kennedy Meadows gave me some time to think about it and, by the end of the month, a decision was made. I've been teasing you, oh my gentle readers, about this for a few days now, so here it is: In addition to school, I now work out of Edelman's Los Angeles office in the so-called "Miracle Mile" district. My title and role is "Senior Counsel, Online Communications." One doesn't want to say too much at this time, but it's safe to say based on the title that whatever I'll be doing will have something to do with blogs, syndication, wikis, and so on, as well as their intersection with corporate communications. I'll be reporting to Rick Murray, GM Of Diversified Services, who is based in Chicago. And, of course, you may see me occasionally chiming in on Richard Edelman's future postings. I'll be spending a couple of days in Chicago this week and blogging from there. The following week, I'll be attending the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco. Rick will be a panelist on "When Worlds Collide: Traditional Public Relations and the Blogosphere", along with Steve Broback, Lynann Bradbury, and Laurie Mayers (August 19th, 2-3pm). Between my work at Edelman and the studies at Annenberg (starting August 22; lots more on that later), there's certainly going to be enough to inform a blog. Maybe even two. Stay tuned. | Saturday, August 06, 2005 Posted by philgomes 1:48 PM The Blog Wayback Machine Constantin Basturea asks: I was wondering if you have any plans of adding the G2Blog and Tapeout's archives to your website. It would appear that Constantin has a pretty long memory. For the sake of the uninitiated, the G2Blog and its predecessor, the Tapeout email newsletter, were outbound communication instruments of G2B Group. I was pretty much the initiator/author of G2Blog, whereas Tapeout was more of a formal group effort between the firm's principals. To tell you the truth, I'm kind of torn about the idea of putting all of the old posts back up. Every so often, though, I'll see something out in the blogosphere that touches upon something I wrote during that period in 2003. I guess in those situations, it makes sense to put up the referenced post and link to it. G2Blog had over 110 posts in its six-month-ish run, some of which I'm particularly proud of and even reference in lectures and seminars to this day. If there's significant demand for putting them back up, though, I can be convinced. Readers can comment below with their thoughts. (See? I can say that now.) What about a full-text RSS feed? I actually switched to a full-text feed earlier that same afternoon. Enjoy! | Friday, August 05, 2005 Posted by philgomes 8:00 PM Google Takes PR Ball, Goes Home Mike Masnick at Techdirt says: A well known reporter recently told me that Google refuses to grant him interviews with their executive staff because they don't see any benefit to the company at all. The company is doing great, rolling in money and everyone knows all about them already. So why should they grant interviews? Why? Two things: No amount of success, no matter how phenomenal, is sustainable. Now, before you flame me, know that I'm not about to engage in the folly of betting against Google. That's foolish. But, for all we know, there are grad students holed up in Santa Clara, Boston, Austin, Beijing, Hyderabad, or any number of cities that, five years from now, will create some smarter-than-Ben-Stein, quantum-based, search engine that will find postings you haven't written yet. That's a competitive threat. If Google's fortune's dip for this or another reason, even just a little bit, they might regret irritating these reporters. These reporters have famously long memories. I know. It was years after the fact before a longtime contact of mine stopped reminding me of the time when I gave him directions to a Hobee's restaurant and he ended up in south bay suburban hell. Oh, but I'm not done. Neither is Mike: Especially if the reporter might (gasp!) ask tough questions? Honestly... When is the PR profession going to get past the fallacy that "success" is defined as the PR pro's ability to turn a smart, critically minded reporter into a typist? True, while PR can't necessarily offer guarantees, it does seek to at least influence an outcome. However, there are ways to accomplish this that both serve the client's communications needs and demonstrate proper respect to the Fourth Estate. At least the rather heavy-handed threat of removing ad dollars isn't involved here. Off to go have a weekend. Catch ya'll later. | Posted by philgomes 4:01 PM Comments And Trackbacks Enabled Okay... When I change my mind on an issue, I'll admit it. This blog now offers comments and trackbacks via HaloScan. I've been resistant to do this in the past because of time issues. This blog is a labor of love and, in terms of my day-to-day work, perhaps more traditional activities took precedence. Therefore, no time to squash trolls and such. But blogs and blogging promise to take up a lot more of my time for the forseeable future. (More on this later.) Thus, it made sense to make this change now. Do I think that allowing comments and trackbacks are for every blogger and every company? No. Getting me to agree to that will take a lot more convincing. But for me, it was just time to do it. Please don't feed the trolls. | Posted by philgomes 12:09 PM Dan Bricklin's ListGarden... ...now includes support for podcasts/enclosures (Link). | Posted by philgomes 10:46 AM PR Pitches Porn, Produces Posts As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortence: "To be smut it must be utterly without redeeming social importance." Dan Gillmor points to Dwight Silverman, who shares a somewhat "blue" PR pitch he received for... Ummm... How do I put this euphemistically? Let's just say that it's an end-to-end, feature-rich, world-class... Oh, hell... It's an Internet-enabled sex toy. There. I said it. I couldn't even begin to imagine what my first reaction would be upon receiving such a pitch. More than likely, though, the torrent of double entendres wouldn't let up for at least the first hour. Kind of like this pitch that then-Red-Herring writer Julie (Landry) Petersen received back in the day. | Posted by philgomes 10:35 AM John Sun's Mobile Analyst Watch I've had the pleasure of knowing John Sun since my days at The Weber Group in the mid-'90s, and working with him during my last ten months at Dryden Marketing Group. After hearing me blather on and on about blog-this and blog-that, I'm very happy to see that he's started his own blog, Mobile Analyst Watch. After going through numerous cell phones, handheld gaming devices, PDAs and smartphones, my gadget geek existence has once again converged with my professional life, and I set up this blog to track the analysts covering the mobile devices, content and services markets. John offers genuine insight in this field, so I recommend you add the feed. | Thursday, August 04, 2005 Posted by philgomes 6:55 PM Personal, Professional, Perso-Professional Amy Gahran, hostess of the "Contentious" blog, reached a bit of an impasse when it came to integrating her personal and professional lives on the same blog. She now has two: The original Contentious and, now, the more personally focused "Mass Of Contradictions." Ms. Gahran writes: I’m surprised how controversial it was when I announced my intention to briefly note some personal interests and aspects of my life on their own page on my business site (which I’m in the process of overhauling). Some of the people who advised against this move I respect greatly – others frankly appear ignorant, fearful, or mean-spirited. Also says: As an independent professional, I need to assess such risks carefully. And: I don’t begrudge other people their comfort zones. But I do see myself, my work, and my interests as an integrated whole. I've run into similar criticisms of my own blog, which I've termed "perso-professional" for a good, obvious reason. Since starting this blog in 2001, I've heard incredibly specious (and demonstrably wrong) arguments that current, potential, and wished-for clients might not want to be represented by a someone who is a metal fan, quotes obscure goth bands, posts about his friends, or compares media relations strategies to dating Salma Hayek. (And boy did I ever catch a mountain of stercoraceous goo for that last one!) In my case, the facts are these: Honestly, I'd rather be confident that people know exactly who they're dealing with. To-date, absolutely no one has told me that they chose not to hire me or work with any agency I belonged to because of something on this blog. Actually, the opposite has been more likely to occur. My career speaks for itself, really. People who want to assess me professionally have ample opportunity to do so on this site and through Google. The subject of what I like to do in my off-hours is going to come up anyway, so I've chosen to front-load that inevitability. Granted, my lifestyle doesn't necessarily have any truly controversial elements, whereas Ms. Gahran's blog openly and courageously reveals the fact that she's polyamorous. This introduces a host of complications that, well, I couldn't really begin to address. I believe that a while second, personal blog accomplishes a symbolic division between her personal and professional lives, it's not a terribly practical one. Sure, the personal stuff on the professional blog will get buried over time under months and years worth of posts, but the connection is always going to be there. If a real personal/professional separation ever was the goal, the move is basically fourth-down-and-inches. A symbolic move, however, seems to be enough for now. Here's some final insight from Ms. Gahran: On the bright side, I do think having a personal blog...offers a way for me to preserve my personal coherence. Agreed. For my part, I feel that this blog has helped me immensely in my personal and professional lives. As to the former, it's a kind of release. My PR career means that there's plenty about my professional life on the web, and this blog helps to achieve some kind of perceptual balance. Also: When people only see final decisions or finished products, they may marvel and applaud – but they probably won’t learn very much. Well... To paraphrase Holmes, "A mind stretched by a new idea never returns to its original dimension." Update: Amy responds and offers additional insight and context. | Posted by philgomes 11:44 AM A... Ummm... "Contrarian View" So, I'm finally getting back into the information slipstream after a move-induced hiatus. (And boy do I have an update for you, oh my gentle readers.) This was further complicated by the fact that my unwitting WiFi benefactor evidently found me out. Drat. My WiFi Entitlement Syndrome has been foiled again. Anyway... I've always thought that blogs inspire some rather extreme opinions, both pro and con. This writer, though, definitely had issues in 2002. And spare time. Not for those with an aversion to profanity. Or incoherence. | HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil's demented imagination. Hell, to be perfectly honest, even Phil disagrees with what he thinks sometimes. This site has virtually no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Clicking on a link doesn't automatically send a 1/2-cent donation to UNICEF. You can't buy, sell, auction, swap, find a date, win friends, influence people, cross the chasm, or decode the human genome using this site. You won't get free email. You won't win a free video game console. This site will not end world hunger, foster peace in the Middle East, help you smell better, teach you how to swing dance, or move the global economy from petroleum to hydrogen fuels. You'll learn a lot about this site's master, though, which amounts to a haphazard collection of strange and useless facts that pretty much won't help you at all.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This is the blog of Phil Gomes, SVP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes.com View my page on PROpenMic SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.