Bloggers Beat the Press on Big Yahoo! Story
July 09, 2004
The practice of public relations is adapting as journalism changes and amateurs join the party - a trend called participatory journalism. Bloggers, which number three million strong according to some estimates, now have all the tools they need to break and spread news well before the pros do. Tonight, as we get ready to launch our event with an examination of this important trend, I present Exhibit A...
As I write this post, word is quickly spreading throughout the blogosphere that Yahoo! has quietly acquired Oddpost, a popular email provider. So far, none of the major news outlets have covered this story. This will probably change over the weekend. I will keep an eye on Google News to see when and how the press pick up on this story and will keep you posted.
Author: Steve Rubel | Jul 9, 04 | Permalink
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Category: @ Steve Rubel
Steve Rubel
Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with more than 10 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as Vice President, Client Services at CooperKatz & Company, a mid-size PR firm in midtown New York City.
Rubel evangelizes the application of Weblogs and RSS in traditional public relations campaigns. He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.
During his career, Rubel has managed PR campaigns across a range of industries for B2B and consumer clients, including CMP Media, the Carrier Corporation, WeatherBug, Invest Northern Ireland, Canon, IDC, the Association of National Advertisers, France Telecom, internet.com, Powerade and Otis Elevator, among others. While with CooperKatz, he developed the Ziff Davis Internet/ExtremeTech America’s Fastest Geek campaign, which took home a Silver Sabre Award.
Rubel can be reached at 212-455-8085 or via email at srubel (at) cooperkatz.com.
Author: Steve Rubel | Jul 9, 04 | Permalink
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Category: @ Steve Rubel | Participants' bio
Telling Stories (behind our backs)
I’ve been dissatisfied with marketing (and the outdated model of the 4Ps) for as long as I can remember. It worked fairly well in the command and control culture, where the Coca Colas of this world produced their ‘one-sight, one sound, one sell’ communications, and where readers, listeners and viewers had to put up or shut up --except, for moments such as the New Coke fiasco. Every industry probably has its own equivalent of consumer ‘rebellions’ where those at the center were caught off guard; where communicators were busy ‘telling’ and not listening, and the customers were talking behind their backs.
Blogs attracted me because they were being used by, and defined by people on the periphery. They seemed to have more interesting stories to tell, better angles, and certainly more down to earth. Unlike the ‘people at the center’ (sometimes this includes you and me when we sit at our desks!) who have mission statements to protect, hierarchies to satisfy, and editors to serve, bloggers have a direct connection to their audience. That’s what marketing has always needed –a talkback button for the customer/end user/audience/congregation/whatever. It’s no different with every profession.
If you have read The Cluetrain Manifesto, you’ll know that much of this was being written about several years before blogging came on the radar, but few could do anything about it. Blogging is certainly going to rapidly change a lot of the taken-for-granted formats and trappings of communications. That, essentially is what my topic will be on, on Wednesday July 14th, 2004.
I was (and still am) a proponent of ‘branding’ but I’ve rearranged my molecules, to borrow an expression from Tom Peters, to accommodate the hard reality that branding isn’t a secret sauce that comes in one flavor, and in one bottle locked in the corporate office vault. I was writing about this before Proctor and Gamble issued it’s own shocking manifesto of sorts about advertising this year, or McDonald’s had the guts to declare the end of mass marketing last month (and introduce the world to something that suspiciously sounded very blog-like: ‘brand journalism.’) The subtitle to my Blog, Hoi Polloi, (at http://hoipolloi.typepad.com) is “Marketing Communications, Media, and PR in a post-Cluetrain world.”
Don’t get me wrong. I am not joining the ‘advertising is dead’ or ‘the end of marketing as we know it’ bandwagon. Nor do I believe that blogs are the answer to everything. A blog is a new tech tool, and tools get replaced and upgraded. New tech is often the rediscovery of older techniques. Email, instant messaging, and SMS serve one simple need: the need to invent and spread stories. Blogs seem to give this ‘gossip’ and story telling phenomenon a structure. People who have a story to tell, can now do so. The microphone is in their hands. I can see how the concept of blogging will someday be a euphemism for frank, un-hyped speech, and unmanaged conversations. I am struck by a comment made by Arthur C. Clarke, who observed that “the human race greeted the new millennium by transforming itself into one huge gossiping family.” Indeed, we are not just one huge gossiping family, but one huge connected, gossiping family.
Author: Angelo Fernando | Jul 9, 04 | Permalink
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Category: @ Angelo Fernando
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- The Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.
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